BINTULU 7

Bintulu 7 – February 19th to March 23rd 2005.

Bintulu March 8, 2005.

I ponder. Another day goes by. Apart from the routine of sending Babang to school daily, and keeping the kids occupied, distracting them from annoying their baby sister and everybody else in the house, I had to spend quite a bit of time trying to configure the settings of security system in my laptop. The two little boys hovering over me and persuading me to play with them, in short trying always to draw my attention to them, did not help in my sorting out the security system configuration. They insisted that I play ball with them this evening. I did. Amidst the running around, jumping, kicking and catching the ball, mostly catching the ball, Babang disappeared into the house for a while and came out at the door shouting at us, “Hey you guys! want to drink water?”. First time I hear him using that term. Must have learnt it from one of the cartoon programmes no doubt. Dedek of course jumped at the suggestion and insisted that he gets juice and not just water!! Ha ha. He got his way too. Another occasion, while everybody was running around, Dedek, all of a sudden shouted, “Hey, stop, quiet, quiet”. So we all stopped and looked at him. Putting his right hand halfway upwards, palm in a fist and forefinger pointing upwards, he continued, “Now everybody listen, we all go to the airport, we see the fire engines there ok?” Babang just looked at me and shrugged!! Dedek must have been tired then and that was a diversion to allow him to catch his breadth, ha ha ha!!

I ponder. Two days ago I got a reminder to renew my laptop Virus Protection with an offer to upgrade it to a more sophisticated one. I did so and got them all downloaded, registered, installed accordingly and activated. However, when I switched on the laptop this morning and went on line there were some applications that refused to respond. Spent the whole morning trying to figure out what went wrong and was flustered most of the time at my inadequate knowledge of the system. Finally found out, in the afternoon, that the new and upgraded Virus Protection programme had a personal firewall system running and had prevented the programmes from responding. I have to open the firewall programme, go through a list and identify what I can allow and what to prevent or walled. I did that, and then only the applications responded as normal. I am no computer expert, am still a novice. An expert would have found the problem and solve it at a blink of an eye!! So, there you go. Technology. Technology needs to be mastered or you will end up being mastered.

I ponder and I wonder. My sister told me yesterday that one of her students obtained 17 A1s in the recent SPM examinations (Final examinations in the upper-secondary school and a passport to further education). That’s a record!! We have heard of 9 A1s and 10 A1s but 17 …… that’s way too many. And it’s also not from one of those premier school, where all the best facilities are made available and normally without a fuss, but a school in the suburbs, a small town (that is growing very fast though) about 30 kilometers from the big city. My sister is the Headmistress of the school, so she is naturally very proud of the achievement. It seems the student, a girl named Amalina I think, took subjects related to both the Arts and the Science streams, hence the 17 subjects that she took for the examinations. There will be a big do very soon with the Minister coming to the school to make the announcement. It is very clear that this girl has and uses her mental capacity to the full. She is able to apply all spectrum of the thinking process. She manages her time well too I presume. But the question is, what next? I wonder.

I ponder, and wonder and hope. This week will be a week many families and couples will be either overjoyed at the success of their off-springs or dismayed at their performance in the SPM examinations. The successes will naturally be proud of their achievement. The not so successful and the failures will be brooding or wondering what happened. There will be a lot of hooha over it for a while. Then, there will be a scramble to obtain places in a higher education institution and face the next step, the next hurdle, in this race of life achievement. It is clearly an exam orientated system. The learning process is with the objective of passing exams. I only hope that all these successes realize that knowledge and skills are the key tools required to be successful in the real world later in life, after leaving higher studies.

MKI Ramblings Unlimited
Bintulu