I listened to this song on my iPhone today whilst doing my run. Somehow, I feel the lyrics were rather meaningful, and hence I thought I should post it here. The text in bold is the lyrics that I find meaningful.

Can’t seem to access youtube so I cannot put their video here.

I tried another route today, one that I always used to run. It’s the park by the lake at Lakeside. I always thought the distance was about 5 kilometres, but I guess I was wrong.

Here’s the route and analysis of my run today. I doubt the thing is accurate as the start and stop points are different, but I knew I started and ended at the exact same location. So maybe there was about 200 metres more, making my run about 4.7km. It would make my average speed about 9.9kmh. It would be an improvement over the last run, and I know I ran a little faster.

Well, since I know the distance of the route, I guess I am in better position to know how many laps to achieve the desired effect!

My friend today mentioned that it was stupid to run the standard chartered marathon just to feel good about it and get the Tee shirt. He thinks it is a waste of money. He says he can drive and I can run and then provide the same support. -_-”

Although he is probably not talking about me, but I don’t really like it too. The reasons for me wanting to run 42.195km is because I wanted to do it. That is all. I wanted to run it, and hence I chose to do it at Standard Chartered, where they provide water points and medical support. I wanted to feel proud of myself. Call it personal glory or what, but I’m not running just to get a tee shirt I could boast to everyone. I hope everyone will respect this.

I still think 45 dollars is worthwhile. The feeling of running through Singapore, knowing that the roads are closed and you can run uninterrupted; the comfort in knowing that there will be water points, and that there will be proper medical support; knowing that you are indeed running 42.195km instead of having to rely on a GPS to track your run and then make sure you really did 42.195km. And the feeling of running with everyone else who are running for their own personal reasons. I guess it is an experience that cannot be gotten by running on our own. I’m not running for shallow reasons. I’m running because I wanted to show myself that I can do it. I’m running because I promised myself I would, and hence I have to. I’m running because this is a challenge to myself, and I wanted to do the mind over body thing again.

I wanted to run the 42.195km and feel good about it, before I become too old to start running.

I guess, as long as I 问心无愧, it’s fine. No matter how others perceive me in my aim to run this, I am going to run it for myself. Remember the video where the man ran a marathon pushing his disabled son in a wheelchair? He didn’t run it because he wanted the world to know. He didn’t run it because of a tee shirt.

He ran it because his son would never know the feeling of finishing a marathon, and he didn’t want to deprive his son of that satisfaction. God might have taken his son’s ability to run, but God cannot vanquish a determined man’s heart to give his son this pride and joy. He ran it because he could. He ran it because it was a challenge. He ran it because he could feel the joy and satisfaction doing it with his son. And we can only stand at the side and be glad that he did it.

And I am going to run it. No matter what anyone say.

I would just like to say that I have signed up for this year’s Standard Chartered marathon. It’s going to be held on the 5th of December 2010, and I would be running the full marathon, which is 42.195km long. Perhaps it might seem surprising since I was never the really sporty type, and I only engage in the occasional badminton sessions which recently became less occasional.

In reality, I had been thinking about running the Standard Chartered marathon for quite some time now. It would have to be at least a year, since I was thinking about doing the marathon last year, but I ended up not doing it due to school being too busy. Or actually it might just be an excuse. Nonetheless, as of last year, I had already told myself to finish the marathon before I graduate, since I doubt I would have much time to train and prepare for a full marathon once I find employment.

Since I would be a year 4 student in about 2 more months time, this would be the last December of my undergraduate life. Hence I would have to clear the 42.195km this year, if not I would have to do it whilst I work.

Clearing the 42.195km is probably just a challenge I set for myself, having once cleared 22km (slightly more than a half marathon) in SISPEC. In SISPEC, they made us run 22km because they wanted to tell us that we can run a half marathon. In fact, they wanted us to know we could run further than a half marathon, so the symbolic addition of about a km more to the route.

Perhaps I needed some motivation in life, or some form of challenge that make me feel committed. A sense of purpose? I guess to physically run this 42.195km and clearing this huge hurdle of mind over body would be something I would feel proud of myself about. And a sense of devotion to this mission, to start training and keeping myself fit at the same time. When I put on my finisher T shirt at the end of the entire run, I guess, I would feel the sense of pride and excitement.

This time I am going for the run no matter if anyone else is joining me in this 42.195km. I guess in our circle of friends, everyone will have their own interests and priorities, and I would not push them to join because I am joining. I am thankful that people do respect my own wishes too. This is something I have to do for myself too, because I promised myself I would do it, and hence I have to. And I guess I have to be independent about it. Furthermore, everyone runs at a different speed anyway, so it might not be good if the group ends up splitting anyway.

As part of preparations, I downloaded an iPhone app called RunKeeper, which tracks where I run via GPS. Hence I can see my route that I took, as well as the distance, time and speed at every portion of the run. I liked the average speed that the app calculated for me, since speed at every portion is something I had no use for. But when they plot the graph of speed vs time, I could see that my speed was reduced from the beginning and never recovered. I still managed a decent 9.5km per hour, which was slow. I did 10km/ hour during my Guards days, and I would have to catch up soon. And if I can, I would like to eventually meet the 10km in 50 minutes timing that I couldn’t do whilst I was in Guards.

Just to show you my route. I went out of my condo’s side gate, turned right and ran 2 loops. Which would explain why the numbers of the km I ran would appear not to be in sequence. Each round is 2.6km as I found out today. No wonder I couldn’t run my 2.4 properly using this route. The distance is already greater. The red line is the route I took. The blue one is the one I drew for the purpose of grouping similar runs and comparing the data in the future.

This is a great start of my journey towards finishing the 42.195km, and I would need to get a water bag or something for my subsequent trainings of longer distances.

There has been so much discussion on the recent education debate on the weightage of the mother tongue examination in primary school level. Indeed, mother tongue may have been hard for us to learn, and not everyone is able to cope with two languages. But sometimes I feel that the arguments used against mother tongue is really weird.

I remember someone once wrote to the forum and argued that there are people who are good in all subjects other than the mother tongue, and so mother tongue should be reduced to have lesser impact on scores. That’s retarded. There are people who are good in all subjects other than english too! So that’s not a logical argument!

But what I think is that there is some truth with respect to mother tongue being too difficult. But I also agree that reducing the weightage would result in people allocating less importance and time to the language. So perhaps what we should all look into is to change the way we conduct the lesson? Make mother tongue fun so that it would be interesting. Language doesn’t have to be boring.

But I guess we’re in a national crisis now. You need good teachers to bring out the fun in any subject and adopt innovative ways that make it easier to learn. But yet, after having decades of using the wrong method to teach (hey this is what our MM said ok), we have perhaps produced very few people genuinely interested in the language. And from the small pool of people who end up pursuing mother tongue as a major, we would not have much choice of selection. And from that, it would mean we won’t have the best talents teaching the language.

And this is a vicious cycle. The teacher isn’t good, and hence the student won’t be great either. Mother tongue continues to be boring and difficult. Students continue to shun it, and they become the teachers and the cycle continues. It doesn’t help when people see teaching as a tough job. Plenty of people do not want to become a teacher. Tough time, long working hours, CCAs on top of making homework. Having to organize school activities on top of the already heavy workload. And not so high pay. We can’t attract true talents to pursue a career in teaching. And this contributes to the problem.

So maybe we should tackle all these issues first. Having advertisements on “If you said both, you should be a teacher” or “Leave no child behind” simply does not make me feel like being a teacher. After tackling the issues and making mother tongue fun, then can we consider the rest. We should exhaust all means before reducing the importance of mother tongue. Other people are learning Mandarin already. Why should we forsake the things we have built? My generation has gone through it and survived, so we should all try to continue trying to be bilingual. And bilingual might not mean being good at both language. I just feel that knowing the language and being able to use it in normal everyday conversation is also good enough. It would be sad to have our future generation only care about english and what is practical. The beauty of other languages must not be eroded. We must protect the culture behind the languages.

It has been a long time since I blogged about stuff. Most of the time, I just didn’t bother to blog. I guess I forgot how it was like to have an opinion, and to share that opinion. Life gives us many lessons as we go about doing what we do everyday. We learn many things from different sources, from experiences, from stories of others, from dramas and so on.

Sometimes we cannot always get what we ask for. Or to be more specific, we cannot get the best of all worlds in a single package, for that package may not exist. At this moment in life, it is time to take the next step and ponder about possible job opportunities. For next year at this month, I should be embarking on my new phase in life. There are many possible jobs in this world, and all offer various benefits. I had been trapped between a few things. I always wonder, is it better to go overseas and get a unique experience, or is it better to work for money? These two may not have any logical relation, as going overseas need not mean lesser money. But hear me out. Toshiba has this global recruitment program where they hire people from all over the world to work in Japan. At the current exchange rate, it is S$3,084.94. Whilst this may sound like a great deal, in fact, it is just an average engineer’s pay in Singapore. And we don’t get CPF, which means once you come back to Singapore, you have to use cash to buy your house. Whereas if you work at another company, you may have a higher pay, and you still get CPF. Plus in Singapore I need not worry about paying for accomodation. So which is better? Working overseas or being practical? Sometimes we can’t get everything we want in life. Even the emperors of the past are bounded when the power of certain individuals are too huge to control. Perhaps practicality would prevail in the end.

Another thing the drama has given me something to think about is the way we treat other people. Perhaps the most fundamental criteria every leader should have is integrity. To have 问心无愧. And a genuinely hardworking and kind attitude. To treat everyone equally based on meritocracy, which is also the fundamental of what Singapore is.

Recently I had a theory. That is, most people are not evil. They just do not have the same set of information as we do, and as a result, by putting their self interests first, put everyone into disagreements. However when we put in effort to untangle the web, we would realize that we can solve the problem and still meet our self interests. Plenty of things arise because of miscommunication, or perhaps a lack of communication. One example would be during my Industrial Attachment. The interns were tasked to prepare for our internship farewell programme. I would not comment on the absurdity of this whole thing, because it feels like a wayang, and that no other company has that. But the problem arise due to HR telling us that we have a $3,500 budget to work on. As such, when we proceeded to source for hotels, we were careful not to break the budget, but seek to meet it at most. But HR has other views. They probably felt like we wanted to spend the money. And they had the final say. I believe they selected a hotel that wasn’t sourced by the interns. In fact, after the whole issue, I realized there is no such thing as a budget of $3,500. As I work in a company that has to be accountable to the use of the funds, they have a gauge for how expensive every item could be. I believe the best way was to have told us such limitations right at the beginning. We would have saved the discussion time and the time we took to source for hotels and door gifts. Perhaps this whole thing was not transparent enough. There is simply a lack of communication. The interns wanted to know information that HR didn’t give. Even when we asked.

So lessons are aplenty everywhere. We have to learn from life lessons and improve. And try not to make the same mistake that other people made. I’ll have you with this thing from the drama: 说好话，做好事，存好心.

Ok. I was bored so I went to click on this dating site that offer’s a personality profile. So I just did it for fun. Here it is:

Your Personality Profile:
The results of your personality test determine your personality profile. They show where you stand on scales linking various personality characteristics (e.g. rational vs. emotional, tradition vs. innovation). And, they allow us to describe what these positionings mean, so you are better able to appreciate the seven dimensions which comprise a happy relationship. See for yourself!

rationality vs. emotionality

Rational people mainly draw on facts for decisions and are particularly quiet, able to analyze and argue logically. Emotional people are more likely to incorporate emotions into their decisions – the solution has to be a “good fit”. Sensitivity, empathy and an ability to sense moods mark out their personality.

Your personal profile:balanced, with a tendency towards emotionality

You often make decisions instinctively. Feelings play a greater part in your decision making than rational deliberations.

tradition vs. innovation

People with a strong inclination towards innovation are open to change and welcome it. People who tend towards tradition desire stability and are wary of change.

Your personal profile:moderate, tending towards high, inclination to innovate

You strive for change and excitement more than most people. Nevertheless, you do occasionally value the comfort that routine brings.

distance vs. attachment

Attachment describes the extent emotions are evoked by exterior stimuli in a person. People with a high need for attachment react more sensitively to stimuli than distanced people.

Your personal profile:moderate, tending towards high, desire for attachment

Your first reaction to an emotional situation is often very intense, but you deal with stress in a balanced fashion. Occasionally, you may be overwhelmed by feelings.

observation vs. feeling

People with a strong inclination towards cognitive perception take in the facts and details of the surrounding world, the way reality presents them. A feeling person prefers to deal with correlations, ideas and associations, which are intuitive rather than obvious.

Your personal profile:balanced, with a tendency towards feeling

You like drawing conjectures and looking for hidden crossover effects between information and facts. To restrict yourself only to hard facts is too boring for you.

structure vs. integration

People who tend toward structure like their surroundings to be organized and predictable: this puts them in control. Their behavior is dominated by the left, logically structuring, side of the brain. Integrating personalities like to be open to experiences and encounter new opportunities. Their behavior is dominated by the right, interlinking, side of the brain.

Your personal profile:balanced, with a tendency towards integration

Multiple possibilities motivate you. You enjoy an open perspective. Too much rigidity constricts you.

What do you all think? Is it right?