Jenson Press

I received a sms yesterday (27th Sept 2007) from my senior in meditation, an uncle. He urged that all of us, who are willing to supports those brave Burmese and monks for their democratic demonstration, please wear red colour shirts today (28th Sept 2007), and please forward to other people to spread it islandwide.

I did wear red t-shirt today, a red t-shirt that was given by Yishun Secondary, the school I used to work at, a national day red t-shirt. I see some people, wearing red, on my way to office. But the more amazing scenes only appeared after working hour. When I step out of office, I started to see some people wearing in red, and the number increases while I stepped inside the Bus Interchange, I saw a few groups of Burmese (apparently) in red and queuing up for bus to go somewhere together.

I saw even more when I reached outside the Toa Payoh MRT station after coming down from the escalator. I saw groups of them in red, and yes, they are Burmese, their eyesights always fall on those wearing red while chit chatting with their friends. Some couls be the organizer or so, they have lanyard hanging around their necks with some sort of card or document for identification purpose, but it’s in card size.

I felt touched by them, not only this, the news released on local newspaper reporting the Aung San Suu Kyi replying greeting (the standard Buddhist way of greeting each other) to the monks who are chanting outside her house one day, with tears running down her face. Millions of souls has been touched so deeply by the chemical reactions sparked between them. I felt touched by their actions, not because they are Buddhist like me. Likewise, if they are Christian, they will touched me in the same way too, and I, will also wear in red to support them from Singapore here, even though they are not having faith in the same religion as me.

I show supports to those who voice out their needs for a more democratic country, as well as those who demonstrate peacefully and unarmed, but suppressed by their military government. I would choose to boycott a military-run government and call for a democratic one. It’s their rights to choose for the government they like, and not by force. Without the civilians, would a government manage to do anything out of themselves? If it’s like the good old time where there are not clear boundaries between countries and ownerships of lands, civilians may just leave the “kingdom” if they find it totally inhabitable or the King and his kingdom is totally not the one they have wished for.

The world has come to a new order, and most of the countries are on their way towards a peaceful transition to democracy. There’s nothing going to stop this transition, it will have its way there gradually undoubtedly. But be it 100% or less in terms of a democratic country, it really is a lot of difference from country to country. Not a single country in the world will follow 100% democracy, this highly depends on the regions you live in. But at least, we can make sure under democracy, we live more peacefully than any other, and we at least safeguard 80% if not all, of our rights as a citizen. but well, again, like what I mentioned just now, there wouldn’t be a 100% democracy country in the world, even for those very close to 100%, they are no way to there yet.

We are, after all, human beings, we are selfish, stubborn, and arrogant, we only do things beneficial to ourselves, we are totally ignorant of the Mother Nature and other things around the world. We are like a circle of self-centred high intelligent creatures on the Earth. Well, life is short, so whatever a group of us done, would make minor changes to the future of the Mother Earth.

Well, sorry for the digression as I have been reading some books on Black Holes study. It’s interesting and make you think a lot. If you like science, especially Physics, or Astrophysics, you could find out there are actually a lot of books available which requires you to think a lot and have some basic knowledge on Physics and Maths in order to comprehend what the author is trying to say.

Well, we shall see what will happen in Myanmar in the days, weeks, or months to come. Hopefully everything will be under control and I really hope to see a brand new democratic Myanmar in the near future

Recently my company has come out with a new policy, which is to restrict the employees’ time spend on Internet, and playing online games. I have no actual facts to prove the reasons behind the policy, but they are too obvious to be some of them.

Whenever you launch your Internet Explorer or anything that requires Internet connection, a window will pop up and prompt for your windows credentials, and requested that you authenticate yourself, else you would not be able to connect to the Internet.

This is quite “tight” in the sense that it disallow you from connecting to Internet without telling them who are you in the first place. Secondly, they log your Internet activities and your identity, so if they find out that you are surfing the net for the whole day or you are doing nothing but playing Yahoo! Games, then they can take actions against you since they have solid proof to accuse you for doing so. You can’t runaway from them.

But I think what they company did is through proxy server, which is push down to every PC automatically and apply to your Internet Options without your knowledge and permission. So they force you to connect to Internet through proxy server. As long as you are surfing the net with your browser you are trapped down. So, beware of what you did in the company then.

I would feel sorry for those colleagues who will be in deep troubles and sufferings with this new policy. Some of them are programmers like me now, my seniors, they are IT savvy, but not so savvy when come to security and networking. I don’t say I’m any better, just that I feel that I’m a tad better since I’m a networking grad and I constantly update myself with all sorts of developments and technologies out there. I don’t want to be left behind and when suffering from damages, I still do not realize it and still leading my life like a fool.

Well, I do aware of how all these policies work and what they will do to me, what damages or losses I will suffer by getting all these troubles dangling around my body.

Well, I think there are ways I can think of to do something, but I wouldn’t do so. Why? I don’t want to playing tricks with the company, after all, I’m just employee, and it’s not fun to let the bosses know that you are actually the top number one enemy to them, and the first on the list to get fired. Last but not least, you don’t want to leave bad records behind which will make your future job hunts quite any more difficult.

Trust me, you can do something but not to the extreme that provoke someone or alert them of your expertise and always monitor you, and thinking of ways to counterattack. It will become a war between the support and you which in the long run, wouldn’t do you any better, but only more harms.

And there are actually quite a number of tools available out there for you to play around in Windows platform since Windows OS is, after all, not a very secured OS. Not to mention that my company is still using XP, though XP is considered very “secured” and “stable” now. Well, things can always happen to Windows platform, you all should know why.

Ok, I think I really shouldn’t comment too much on that since it’s their freedom to do so and so far no one ever question anyone whether by doing so would invade people’s privacy or breach any law. I feel that it’s not that right to do all these to their employees, all these would results in high turnover rate, poor productivity, demoralized staff, and all sorts of side effects. I think flexibility and freedom is important, but under control, so you would slowly see those high productive employees and self-motivated one working for you in the long run, and for those who never come out with anything or outcome under the flexible environment provided by company, the company, can, by all mean, just invite them out of company and look for a better one since they are not suitable to stay with the company for long. Which I think would be a better one, but I might be wrong, and your mileage might vary too.

What do you think? What’s your view on this?