Monthly Archives: May 2012

Neil Gaiman’s Commencement Address

Since Neil Gai­man often updates his blog in between long inter­ludes of work, I only visit his journal (as he calls it) every few weeks or months. Here’s a gem he pos­ted regard­ing a com­mence­ment speech he gave to the 2012 class of the Uni­ver­sity of the Arts. Good advice for art stu­dents, writers, and con­tent

Jeremy Denk’s Interview on Fresh Air

Jeremy Denk is one of my favour­ite musi­cians not only because he is a blog­ging clas­sical pian­ist, but because his blog makes the most mur­der­ously com­plic­ated clas­sical pieces access­ible to the hoi polloi and non-professional musi­cians. For example, this blog post on Beethoven’s Ham­merklavier (you can grab a free com­plete record­ing while listen­ing to the

Bersih 3.0 Reminder, Attended.

No big deal, I just atten­ded a mini, mini rally to remind the EC to resign and for mean­ing­ful elect­oral reform to be ini­ti­ated instead of more spins on the story than the Black Swan does on a Swan Lake pro­duc­tion. No pic­tures to show, until I retrieve them from the inev­it­able Face­book posts of

My Speeches Did Me In.

With a score of 115 out of 120, I was 4 Speak­ing points and one Listen­ing mis­take away from a per­fect score in TOEFL. I ima­gine the speak­ing test did not reflect my abil­ity to present myself in the best man­ner pos­sible due to the inad­equate time for pre­par­a­tion. Or I just need to engage

Support Good Sci-Fi

I have chipped in to sup­port Space Com­mand, which prom­ises to be a very enjoy­able endeav­our. Sci­ence fic­tion has found itself severely under-represented on tele­vi­sion, with Doc­tor Who as the only show of note that I know of right now. There are no longer any Star Trek epis­odes on tele­vi­sion, and mas­ter­pieces like Fire­fly find them­selves

Online Donations

Finally, after delay­ing and depriving myself for so long, I have set up a debit card which enables me to per­form online pay­ments dir­ectly. Now I can put my money where my mouth is dir­ectly. First up, a dona­tion to the fine folks at Jupiter Broad­cast­ing for their excel­lent pro­duc­tion of the Linux Action Show

TOEFL’s Tomorrow

I need to take an exam to prove my pro­fi­ciency in the Eng­lish lan­guage tomor­row. My pre­par­a­tion time can be sum­mar­ised with the words: “at least I read the dir­ec­tions.” I shall report the res­ult of the lack of pre­par­a­tion in a fort­night when I get back my results.