Learning Should Be Fun

These days, I would look at who makes that statement.

He’s an app developer promoting his ‘educational’ app aimed at children (or the children’s parents so they would let their children play with said app). “Oh, well. He needs to sell his products,” I’d say.

He’s a kindergartener. Fine, then. He is in that phase in which having fun playing is his primary learning method.

He’s a freshman and I’d scream, “MY. LEFT. FOOT!!! What are you! A kindergartener?”

 

Since when is learning required to be fun? It can be. But should it always?

Learning how to say goodbye is never fun…

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18 and 23

18 Gigabytes download in 23 minutes…

Am I in heaven? Or did somebody at my ISP misquote my bandwidth quota? Or… did magic work? More likely, fewer people hog the internet connection at this time of day or night. But I won’t tell when-and-how, lest people try to capitalise on my finding. Huh!

 

63 and 78

The main tablet is giving me weird battery reading these days. On charging, it jumps from 63% to 8X% and then steadily goes up to 100%. Afterwards, it drops to the point where it prompts for charging in less than three hours on heavy use, ie. youtube-ing while messaging or web browsing using the multi-window feature, and podcast playing at the same time.

The weirdest is getting an extended hour of battery power when the battery is at 78%. I found out by accident when I had to unplug the tablet from the charger while the battery was at 78%. Yet I got almost four hours for similar use. This happens a number of times that I’d like to think this is a “pattern” although getting the battery to 78%, considering the jumping numbers, has been quite tricky.

I know there are plausible explanations for the extended hour on 78%. The news apps and other apps, which often give rigorous notifications, may have gone to sleep or laid low. The tablet’s memory space may have been temporarily at larger capacity and thus allowed a better memory management. Et cetera.

The most likely and simplest explanation is that the tablet’s battery is deteriorating. It charges and loses power way faster than before. I am sad because the tablet has been with me through thick and thin. I am also elated for this may give a valid reason to indulge with a new tablet. Since a voice inside my head keeps nagging, “just get a new battery,” I’ll probably do just that.

 

2 and 10

“I will need to learn and practice,” I said as I raised two fingers when a young cousin asked if I could play a five minute piano cover of an anime opening theme. The cover, almost Lisztian in nature, employs techniques that require muscles I have yet to develop.

“Two days? Two weeks?”

I shook my head. “Two years,” and that was me being overly optimistic, “with at least ten hours of practice every day.”

She sighed in resignation.

And I? I finally managed to do the first one minute without “hiccup” after six months yet at much slower tempo than it should be. Then I sprained my wrist. *sigh…*

AI, Now in Broadcasting, and Next…

I found the article (How AI is remaking Hollywood)‘s date weird, “Dec 25, 2017” (spotted on 25 April 2017), while The NAB 2017 event is currently being held in Las Vegas. Why? What happened, Google Cloud?

Anyway, I’ve finally raised the white flag on AI, as in accepting the reality that it’s going into my daily life sooner than I’d expected, the moment DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Se-Dol 4-1, in March last year. When the last bastion of human brain’s enigmatic working had been cracked, the rest (applications of AI) will come in droves, I suppose.

I am so looking forward to the day AI ‘enhances’ that tedious and tricky business of doing laundry, with and without the machine.

“What’s in it for me?”

For one thing, it had been an act of defiance to get the other party to see IT from my point of view and thus see the ludicrousness of such offer or order. Yet I was taken by surprise to find myself voicing it out loud as I asked myself that question silently at that very moment.

In the past, I would go quite willingly with such offer even if, by calculation, I got shortchanged, so to speak. I would easily list 10 reasons why I shouldn’t take the offer and 11 reasons why I should. This time, even with the reassurance of a win-win outcome, I couldn’t get past this: I don’t like you.

It had been so long since such question had arisen in my life. Have I changed that much? Or has the answer changed?

Or perhaps I should ask that question more frequently from now on? Frankly, I’d rather not. Constructing a list is boring and a list with a rogue pointer will only send me to debugging hell.

So. No, thank you.

Going Rogue #2: Hwarang, Penultimate Week’s Afterthought

One doesn’t usually bother writing about kdramas one finds less than satisfactory. So this must be a lunacy, possibly with a capital L, on one’s part. This drama must have caused one’s wiring to short-circuit. Otherwise, how should one explain the following baffling experience…

At the end of episode 18, Sam Maek Jong walks into the Royal Court, interrupting whatever debate the court is rolling, and introducing himself as the King. Yet, one’s brain played a different game: “7 things Sam Maek Jong might be thinking whilst strutting…”

One came up with these initial possibilities…