Inspiring.

There’s nothing more beautiful than a well-written chest-thumping pep speech such as the infamous “I have a dream” by Martin Luther King Jr. and “We shall fight on the beaches” by Churchill. I’ve only recently come across this one even though I’ve seen it in in parts but never in its complete form. Yes, I’m probably a spaz for not having seen this one before.


Anyway, an excerpt from Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic”:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."


Apparently, it has appeared before in another guise as follows:

"Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger."


Basically the 1900s version of “Fuck off, haters!”

This new recent dose..

 

.. of pop-economics literature has really made me wish I’d done economics as my bachelor degree. It just feels right for me, and something I found myself to have a keen interest in. Looking at my bookshelf now, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m an economist rather than an engineer! I suppose the giveaway would be that all the books right now are light-reading stuff and nothing overly heavy.


Then again, I suppose if you dress a subject up the way these books do, any subject would seem interesting. Maybe if a book was done on how chemistry’s at play everywhere around us (I suppose there is one), chemistry would have been an easier sell to me back when I hated the subject in high school.



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Seeing how my dog always greets me happily when I come back home has led me to conclude that there is no animal on earth more deserving of the title “Man’s best friend” then our canine buddies. He just goes into this crazy ecstatic run around the house and sprints towards me when he sees me at the front gate. Kinda like Dino and Fred Flinstone without the licking.


Dogs >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Cats.

John Mayer..

.. is the freaking bomb. His songs are just so soothing and he doesn’t get enough credit for his lyrical abilities. Just heard this song off his first album, Room For Squares – “St. Patrick’s Day”. Beautiful lyrics.

Champions League Final

So Manchester United, my second team in England after Nottingham Forest, has reached the Champions League final. Strangely though, I’m completely non-fussed about it. I think it’s because I know that there’s absolutely no way this team would beat Barcelona.



Also, I’d be delighted if United did the league/European cup double but not ecstatic like I was in 2007/2008. I no longer have the urge to wear or buy Man United replica kits like I did. In fact, I find the practice kinda tacky these days. Opposition wind-ups no longer bother me. So that’s it, the transformation’s complete. I was so hardcore and into the culture of supporting Manchester United that I actually convinced myself that I’m nothing but a foreign plastic.



Good thing then: those jerseys + numberings really were quite expensive.

A lesson learned today

Well, not really learned as I already knew this; more like lesson reinforced:

“Friends in need are friends indeed”


Friends who would drop whatever work they have and go out of their way to come to your aid when you desperately need it should really be treasured.


I love my friends.

The importance of being humble.

So I was involved in an internal research poster competition last week. When I found out that my participation was compulsory, I thought about just pulling up one of my old posters to submit. As I gave it more thought, however, I thought this was a good opportunity to get something on the CV. Yes, I noticed that I’ve become a little CV-obsessed lately but that’s a story for another day.


With that in mind, I set out to design the best poster I could. I trawled through dozens of articles offering tips on designing a good poster and coupled them with my experience to produce, I must say, a poster that I was fucking well proud of. I spent hours tweaking the spacings, editing images and making sure it was as easily digestible as possible and the end result brought a little tear to my eye.


Even though I put up a front about not taking it seriously, I wanted to win quite badly. On the day, when I looked at the competition, I felt that there were only 2 who were genuine contenders. The rest were basically manuscripts on a wall, badly edited amalgation of charts and poorly thought-out layouts. Which was why when the Director of Studies came by and jotted down my poster number into his mark sheet, I was encouraged about my winning prospects. He looked and me and he said “What? It’s good!”


Well, it didn’t matter in the end because I lost. The particpants were judged by general visitors including those who don’t necessarily know what makes a good poster, further strengthening my beliefs that (a) “one man, one vote” doesn’t work when the voters are “uneducated” (b) sport is great because it’s the only competition where victory is always fair.


At the risk of this being read by anyone from work, all I’ll say is that I genuinely felt that only one of the winners was even decent. The rest, one in particular, were such utter turds that I felt nauseous upon the announcement. They weren’t even the best of that bad bunch!


The disappointment lingered for a while and quickly turned into frustration as I puzzled over what exactly went wrong. I pondered over the idea that maybe I was wrong about what made a “good” poster. Maybe I was a little too arrogant in deciding that my poster was the best. I thought in the end that that wasn’t likely; my conclusion was just to blame the scoring and judging system, and decide that the praise from someone knowledgeable ,i.e. the DoS, was reward enough for me.


There are times in life when you have to hold your hands up and admit the better entry won or risk being labelled a sore loser. That was not one of those times. I sucked it in though because it seemed unnecessary to kick up a fuss over an admittedly minor competition. I just hated losing, is all.


I have bigger fish to fry.


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I knew the bad academic results from my years of being lazy during pre-U would come back to haunt me. I can only hope that more recent academic achievements will gloss over it a little. I want those jobs so bad it hurts.

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I’ve been reading up a lot on subjects outside of my field of research lately. The main reason for this is that I became convinced last year that I wasn’t going to be staying in academia if/after I complete my doctorate degree. I knew then what I wanted to do and that getting in would be a long shot at my current state so I started to work on my shortcomings. I’m not going to repeat what field I want to get into because frankly, I’m sick of talking about wanting to do it like the others. From now, I just want to focus on getting myself to that level where I’d be comfortable in that sort of environment.


With that in mind, I’ve been stocking and reading up a lot on books that are outside my field of expertise; mainly on economics and critical thinking. I’ve also been paying a lot of attention to my body language and the way I structure my thoughts and present them. I noticed when I spoke to the people during the corporate high-tea session, that right away from the way someone chooses his words and carries himself, you can separate the genuine from the bull-shitters. The ones that are truly intelligent have this sort of air about them and when you speak to them, you can almost see them dissecting and judging your points such that you feel you best know what you’re talking about.


I have to admit these “intellectuals” are on a higher level than where I am right now but I’m not going to put them on a pedestal and worship them. I think Alex said the ones that usually fail to “make it” are the ones who try too hard to impress and I’m inclined to agree. And so, for now, I’m working on all these things not for the sake of landing the job per se but for true self-improvement. I think that if I can get the fundamentals right, my career goals will come naturally to me. After all, who’s to say I’ll actually like the job, but whatever I pick up en route to getting there or not will stand me in good stead for anything else I plan to do in the future.


Here’s to hoping that unlike the poster competition, the hard work here pays off.