Inspired to Win

Posted on January 21, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

Growing up, my dad used to give me books to read.

Not the usual chic lits I like to indulge in, but the hard covers with scary balding men on it, asking you things like “Do you want to be a millionaire?”

Like duh, I would answer to their ever-smiling faces.

And thus, I read every last page of the books my dad had.

You name it, I’ve read it; The Google Story, Starbucked, One Minute Manager, Warren Buffet Books, Trump 101, Rich Dad Poor Dad Series, Success Built To Last, The Millionaire Mind.

Now ask me what I learned from those books.

I will answer you…not much.

Now ask me what I remember from those books.

I will answer you….not much.

Not because I didn’t read it. In fact, I read the prologue, the credits, the synopsis on the back, even the year of publication, everything!

Why I didn’t benefit much from those books is because I simply didn’t understand business yet. I was interested, but most of the business deals didn’t apply to me (When will I ever start my own online search engine??) so I was quick to discard it from the memory box in the top of my head. Especially if the books had a lot of analogies with big figures and pie-charts and complicated graphs.

I guess I was just too young to understand what my dad wanted by me reading those books. He wanted me to see how successful business people think, how they analyse deals, how they solved problems, how they managed their staff. He didn’t care much about the figures or the specific line of business these people were in. He just wanted me to be more exposed to the reality of business, in a more general way. To prepare me for this day.

What my dad didn’t realise was that 15 year old girls are still reading Sweet Valley High, and if it didn’t involve boys or make-up, then you can bet the books were better served as mouse pads.

Now, I’ve tasted a sip of working life and the reality of business. A tiny weeny sip. But I’m hungry for knowledge and I don’t want to leave everything to experience. So the only thing to do for a fast track education is READ. I’m starting to re-read the old books my dad has in his library, and am beginning to understand better what these balding men are talking about.

Recently, I read Ivanka Trump’s book.

The book is so inspiring for young women who want to be successful in their line of business. Being a young lady herself, she can better relate to us in terms of emotions so her book reaches out to all young women out there.

A year out of college, she joined the Trump organisation as the Vice President of Real Estate. Fresh, inexperienced, it was all a bit surreal and unfair in other people’s eyes that she didn’t have to climb the career ladder like everybody else. Her answer to all this; Get over it. People come to anything in different ways and shapes and methods, and this just happens to be hers. She knows she’s lucky, but she doesn’t want to be seen as an undeserved being.

What struck me as interesting is how similar my dad and Donald Trump are in terms of values. My god the way they raise their kids are soooooo alike I couldn’t believe it. Like Donald Trump, my dad too likes to put me on the spot in front of people, likes to call and check up on me, likes to cut out newspaper clippings for me, likes to introduce me to his contacts and leaves us alone with me having no idea what to say, how he’d get pissed off if he’s talking to me and I have my Blackberry in my hands. The only difference is my dad has a better hairstyle *ahem*.

Although Ivanka Trump seems to be a little more uptight than I would want to be (she doesn’t tolerate emoticons and shorthands like LOL or TTYL…and answering “I want to look for other opportunities out there” during an interview is a deal-breaker for her….and she no longer befriends her old friends who she thinks are lazy and ungrateful), I realise there are many values that Ivanka Trump talks about, which I myself am already practising and believing in.
So I would like to believe that maybe, just maybe, I am on the right track.

I would really recommend this book for ambitious and driven young women.

Week 3.1 Reading – Writing Space by Jay David Bolter

Posted on January 21, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

This week’s reading Writing Space by Jay David Bolter is focused on ‘The Computer, Hypertext and the history of Writing’.

As one would expect, there is an enormous body of literature on the history and development of writing. Bolter starts off by talking about writing as technology and how writing has become the preserver and extender of other technologies, as an advanced culture develops a technical literature.

“Writing is and has always been a sophisticated technology: skill is required to learn and write, and penetrating intelligence is needed to invent or improve some aspect of the technology of literacy”

To summarize some of Bolter’s main points briefly: writing was invented around 3400 b.c.; it was invented independently only twice (or perhaps three times), once in Mesopotamia and once in Mesoamerica (it was possibly also invented in China, although the possibility that writing was transmitted along trade routes from Mesopotamia to China cannot be ruled out); and all alphabets are somehow related to the Greek alphabet.

From the start of the modern means of book production in the fifteenth century through printing press to the introduction of electronic technology. How computers has in turn changed the technology of writing by adding new flexibility to the rapidity and efficiency of printing.

“The computer allows a writer or reader to change a text as easily as he or she duplicates it”

The capacity to adjust the text to each user’s needs is unmechanical, uncharacteristic of the classic industrial machine, and this capacity derives from the unmechanical materials of electronic technology.

“ If the printing press is the classic writing machine, the computer provides us with a technology of writing beyond mechanization”.

Bolter then moves on to elaborate on the economies of writing in different parts of the world. How the techniques, materials and uses have evolved, expand and at times even deteriorated.

At the end of the reading, Bolter explains what hard and soft structure is as well as electronic structure and how to make sense of texts in the visual space.

Autom the talking robot

Posted on January 15, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

A new invention from an MIT graduate.

Autom.

A robot to interact with its owner in order to help him or her lose weight. The dieter will key in important information like weight, exercise regime, diet and goals and the Autom encourages the dieter to not give up and even gives feedback (??!!). Kinda like a food diary, but an actual robot to tell you off when you eat.

There was a trial and they found that people who used Autom stuck with the diet regiment longer than the people who just recorded on a piece of paper.

I believe this 100%. I mean, I’ve tried the whole food thing and well, if the record is right, I haven’t eaten anything since February.

Kudos to the inventor for being incredibly intelligent to create a talking robot.

But my god. A device telling me I’m fat and I should stop eating?!!

10 bucks says I’m going to turn it off. Or smash it like my previous alarm clock. May it rest in peace.

But then again, it will soon be adapted into other languages besides English. So I might just buy one to learn German or something.

¡ninguna dieta!

No Diet!

Seriously, can you imagine, happily unwrapping a Toblerone chocolate and suddenly, “What. Do. You. Think. You’re. Doing? Put. That. Down,” in some robotic tone.

And worse if it could roll itself towards me!!

I won’t be able to sleep at night with Autom.

Yeah, cute and all with doe-like eyes.

But come on, we’ve all seen Chucky, right?

Weeek 3.1 Workshop- Patch Girl, What?

Posted on January 15, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

In this week’s workshop, Elliot brought up ‘hypertext’ for discussion, which I’m sure is something that everyone has encountered before. Hypertext is electronic text that consists of images and blocks of words that are linked together by many different paths that you yourself as the reader can choose.

You can choose how the story will begin and how it will end, just by what you click on. This forms a relationship between the reader and the text. The text reacts based on what you click and you click what you do based on what the text has given you.

Each thing you click on will lead you to a different lexia, which is the box of text that presents itself to you. Reading hypertext is not like reading anything else. You have to become a “cyborg reader” because of the relationship you create with the texts and the attitude you have to adopt.

When I was doing some research on hypertext, I stumbled upon Patchwork Girl. Patch girl, WHAT? It sounds interesting. Here’s what I found.

Patchwork girl is an electronic literature written in Storyspace by Shelly Jackson.

The plot of Patchwork Girl is about a girl who is “patched” together from different pieces of people, much like Frankenstein, to create a whole structure. It is about her figuring out her identity and her gender identity as well.

It tells the story through illustration of parts of female body that are stitched together through text and image. Like, you must piece together the different textual elements to come out with the full story.

“Not only does hypertext, by its very nature, resist closure and allow play, it also partakes of a condition of mutability, as the product leaves room for changes in the format colour, fonts, cascade, etc.

In this sense also, Patchwork Girl is not simply one more text that reflects the aesthetics of fragmentation and hybridity; it is a hypertext that allows for material and technological possibilities that would be unthinkable in a printed version.” (1)

This explains that you interact with the hypertext, and it allows you to change the story and the elements. There are more possibilities with hypertext than there are when reading a normal book. You can click different things that lead you to different places. You are basically in control of the order in which you read things and what you read.

“We typically come to a mystery novel much as we agree to a meeting with friends for coffee or a sip of wine: familiar images, rehashed tales, and the intimacy of shared experience and knowledge. Much of this, of course, has to do with rules. People love rules, which is one reason for the durability of games in culture. People also love to break rules on their own terms.” (2)

This explains that hypertext offers you something more than a normal story. Something normal would be within “the rules”, but hypertext breaks the rules by letting you interact with it and chose the path that you want the story to go down. A normal book is predictable. You know what to expect, and it is predictable. Hypertext is not, and this allows you to experience something different, something more interesting and unpredictable.

The hypertext, Patchwork Girl, contains many different parts. It starts out with five parts on the title page. They are “a graveyard”, “a journal”, “a quilt”, “a story”, “& broken accents”. You are able to click each of these and they will take you to images of Patchwork Girl and by clicking on the images you are brought to different texts.

You are also brought to webs that contain words that are all connected to each other and you can click on them as well (All of which you can see in the screenshots below). The images and texts all link together and the story can go in many different directions and orders, depending on what you click.

Everything you click on will bring you to something new, whether it is a picture or a new text. The first of the following screenshots shows the title page with the five parts on it that you can click on.

The second screenshot shows a picture of Patchwork Girl that is able to be clicked on to lead to other text.

The third screenshot shows a web of words in boxes that can lead you to different texts, and also a lexia with text in it.

By reading Patchwork Girl, you are supposed to understand Patchwork Girl’s structure and that these pieces that make her up have to be “patched” together to make one whole.

At first when I read Patchwork Girl I was very confused. I realized that the different texts had different authors. They are Shelley Jackson, the author of Patchwork Girl, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the sources of her body parts, Patchwork Girl herself, and Victor Frankenstein.

Also, us, the readers, can be authors by choosing what part of the story to click. So, this was a bit confusing because it was difficult to tell who was saying what. As I spent some time with Patchwork Girl, I came to find that it was a story about a girl who did not find herself to be ideal or normal in any way, which she wasn’t.

She needed to find her place and find herself, which was difficult because there were many different parts of her that came from many different people. By reading this we need to find out how Patchwork Girl comes together as a whole structure.

I believe the best theme of this hypertext is that us as people, need to find ourselves in our own ways, and there are many different parts of us that make up who we are. So, we have to find out how these pieces go together and make us a whole.

Citations:

1. Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. CD-Rom.

2. Jackson, Shelley. My Body – A Wunderkammer. Alt-X Online Network, 1997.

Week 2.2 Reading

Posted on January 15, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

Post a picture, would ya?

Posted on January 15, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

Blogging makes it easy to have your own website and share your thoughts, business and ideas with the world. It even makes it easy to add images. Whether you’re posting photos of your travels, weddings or just photos that you find interesting, you’re allowed to share, and the process remains the same. So, in this post I will demonstrate on how to add, crop and delete images.

How to upload images to your blog

1. On the top left of the page, click “Media”

2. Click the “Add New” button. You’ll then get a window that allows you to select an image or multiple images from your computer.

3. Click the “Select files” button and select the images you want to upload.

4. Tada! An image is uploaded. You can also add caption and description to the uploaded image.

How to crop an image

1. Click Media > Library

2. Select the images you intend to crop and click “Edit Image”.

3. Select the part you want to crop and click the “Crop” icon on the top left of the image.

4. Click “Save” and that’s it, image cropped!

How to delete images from blog

1. Click Media > Library

2. Select the image that you want to delete and click “Delete Permanently”

3. If there is more than one image you would like to delete, select those images and click “Bulk Actions” then click “Delete permanently”.

There you go! Easy steps on how to upload, crop and delete images.

Design Fiction

Posted on January 14, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

Week 2.1 discussion was about Design Fiction.

So what is Design Fiction? As I understand it Design Fiction is a practice that allows each individual to think and work with a set of future expectations while producing ideas. The reading that caught my attention was by Eva Knutz, which talks about Design Fiction within Design, Art & Architechture. In her article Knutz states ‘ever since the advent of modern design, designers have used fiction as a technique for experimenting with alternative models for society or for criticizing existing ones’.

‘This imaginary urban projects of the Futurists proposed a city where machines enables new forms of architecture and infrastructure’.

The one that i find interesting was in one sub criteria that elaborates on Utopian Experiments in Architecture, Art & Design.

Utopias have existed since the beginning of humanity. Utopia is a community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities. The questions spurring the construction of utopias are timeless:

How to make the world better? How can we be living differently, with different economics system, scientific progress, human evolution, different political aspect – and perhaps new values?

Below briefly present a series of Design fiction projects. One example, the highly experimental buildings by Michael Reynolds, build from recycled materials, operating off the formal electricity grid, requiring little money to build.

Nothing like home.

Posted on January 14, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

I was in Kuala Lumpur for a month before returning back to Melbourne. Even tho it’s SO NICE to be on holiday, see my family and eat different yummy food and be disconnected from uni and work, there’s nothing like the feel of your own bedsheets on your skin and full knowledge that the thread count is exactly to your suiting.

Don’t get me wrong, I am from Malaysia and Malaysia is my home but after living in Melbourne for the past 5 years i consider Melbourne to be my current home. All you international students out there, i’m sure you’d understand where i’m coming from.

I have to say being back in Melbourne feels so good. It would be better if i wasn’t experiencing such bad jet lag, so that i could be sleeping peacefully on those bedsheets instead of lying awake in the dark for 2 hours before giving up and watch criminal minds instead .

I even napped for only two hours this afternoon so i’d be robbed of body clock sleep and yet i JUST CAN’T SLEEP. Oh, and i slept real little on the plane too. My sister slept so much more on the plane, took the same nap as me, and feel dead asleep at midnight -_-

Despite thinking i’d pass out upon returning home, the OCD in me couldn’t stop myself from unpacking and doing the laundry. God i’m just looking at all the stuff around me in my tiny apartment. I have so much shit – everything everywhere… 5 years worth of junk. All these furniture, clothes and more clothes.

I really need to start organizing and donating the things i no longer need. Space. It would definitely be my new priority.

Blogging.

Posted on January 14, 2014 by shazlynakamarudin

Adrian Miles’ reading made me have a bit of a lightbulb moment about what this course is about/ aiming to do. The idea is about using a blog to engage in a different style of contemporary learning. It links in nicely with that other confusing reading about different approaches to learning such as double loop learning.

Having a blog allows you to think out your ideas and implement this whole concept of “The Takeaway Idea”. You can easily record your ideas, reflections, thoughts, activities and ramblings and develop your individual online persona. There’s the knowledge that your blog will be read by others and the notion of belonging to a community of other bloggers.

I love writing and the idea of blogging and am hoping this course can make me become a more successful blogger. I’d love to produce more original content for my personal blog rather than simply re-blogging work published on other sites. While I get the occasional comments from members of the blogging world I really want to learn how to maximise this interaction!

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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Inspired to Win

Week 3.1 Reading – Writing Space by Jay David Bolter

Autom the talking robot

Weeek 3.1 Workshop- Patch Girl, What?

Week 2.2 Reading

Post a picture, would ya?

Design Fiction

Nothing like home.

Blogging.