Okayy I am confused now... In fact I am very confused... What our PM said in that article of The Star contradicts with my knowledge of Malaysian Law!
I still remember back in Form 6 or somewhere while I was studying Pengajian Am, I was taught Basic Malaysian law and in that chapter, I recall that the Federal Constitution of Malaysia states that the PM of Malaysia MUST be a Bumiputera or Muslim or something...
So when our PM said, and i quote ‘Anyone can be PM’ after Barrack Hussien Obama (yes, his middle name IS Hussien) won enough electoral votes to become the 44th President of the US of A, I got kinda confused.... Can or Cannot a non-Muslim, non-Bumiputera Malaysian citizen become a PM? That begs the question!
One thing is for sure, with the current state of Malaysian politics and the mentality of the people of Malaysia, there can never be a non-Muslim, non-Bumiputera PM as the people are too used to the wayang that the exhibitionist BN theatre troop usually exhibits. Cina tak blh ambik top post in PKNS la, bathe keris in Chinese blood la... mcm mcm la....
I am very confused lar... Can or cannot a non-Muslim, non-Bumiputera Malaysia be a PM? Did i remember correctly or did i not rememer my books correctly? If I did remember my books correctly, does this mean that I actually know the Federal Constitution of Malaysia better than the PM himself?
Friday, November 7, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Emergence of New "Religions"
A few weeks ago while I was in my LHP 456 - Spoken English class, my lecturer told us that a "researcher" from UUM will walk in the class and hand out some survey forms to us. She asked us to give her our cooperation in answering the survey form. When the survey form eventually did come to our hands, we realised that the survey was about the tendency of University Under Graduates to become entreprenuers and start their own business. The survey form was standard stuff with intentionally repeated and rephrased questions to make sure that our answers were consistent and accurate by comparing and getting the average score of the answers with a certain confidence level and stuff like that. But the inner workings and calculations for that is not relevant in this blog.....
What is relevant in this blog is on the fourth page of the survey where we were asked to state our "religion".
Religion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice of rites or observances implying this.
Faith is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as the strong belief in God or the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
So when I turned to this particular survey form's fourth page, what I saw was proof of the ignorance of this "social science" researcher to the other races and religions in Malaysia. It is funny.... If a katak di bawah tempurung were to say that "Chinese" and "Indian" are religions, it is fine. If a nerdy engineering lecturer were to mistake that "Chinese" and "Indian" are religions, it is also fine.... But if a SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER mistakes "Chinese" and "Indian" for religions, it is NOT OKAY!
Feeling a little dumbfounded by this, I decided to become a little cheeky and asked my friends in the class to answer it in funny ways. Justin filled in his religion in the "Others" section as Agama Mat Salleh. Patrick decided to do it properly and crossed out the chinese part and turned it to wirte "Christian" beside the "Chinese" selection. Me?
I circled the Cina and India selections like how a teacher would and wrote down some question marks on it. Beside the question marks, I added "Apa Cina Cina? You ingat Cina ini Agama ker? Saya agama Buddhist lah!"
Well I wasn't able to scan my survey form as i passed it up with that page facing the top. Looking puzzeled, the researcher stared at my survey form and walked out of the class, forgetting to collect the remainder few. Hence that is how i got hold of this copy of the survey form and scanned it so that I could blog about it here in all its glory (ignorance more like).....
What is relevant in this blog is on the fourth page of the survey where we were asked to state our "religion".
Religion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice of rites or observances implying this.
Faith is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as the strong belief in God or the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
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So when I turned to this particular survey form's fourth page, what I saw was proof of the ignorance of this "social science" researcher to the other races and religions in Malaysia. It is funny.... If a katak di bawah tempurung were to say that "Chinese" and "Indian" are religions, it is fine. If a nerdy engineering lecturer were to mistake that "Chinese" and "Indian" are religions, it is also fine.... But if a SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER mistakes "Chinese" and "Indian" for religions, it is NOT OKAY!
Feeling a little dumbfounded by this, I decided to become a little cheeky and asked my friends in the class to answer it in funny ways. Justin filled in his religion in the "Others" section as Agama Mat Salleh. Patrick decided to do it properly and crossed out the chinese part and turned it to wirte "Christian" beside the "Chinese" selection. Me?
I circled the Cina and India selections like how a teacher would and wrote down some question marks on it. Beside the question marks, I added "Apa Cina Cina? You ingat Cina ini Agama ker? Saya agama Buddhist lah!"
Well I wasn't able to scan my survey form as i passed it up with that page facing the top. Looking puzzeled, the researcher stared at my survey form and walked out of the class, forgetting to collect the remainder few. Hence that is how i got hold of this copy of the survey form and scanned it so that I could blog about it here in all its glory (ignorance more like).....
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The End of Industrial Training
Okayy... I know it has been a few ice ages ago since I last blogged but heres the thing...
THERE WASNT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT AFTER THE FIRST 4 WEEKS OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING!!! WHAT THE HELL COULD I BLOG ABOUT? e.g. This week was a routine week. I went to the production line and with my trusty stopwatch and clipboard and measured the cycle time.... every day i measure the production lines cycle time.... after work i would key in this data in to Excel spreadsheets blah blah blah.... NOOOOOO I DUWAN TO WRITE A BLOG LIKE TAT!!!
Ahem.... Now that i have cleared my throat a little on that issue, let me try to summarize as much as I can think about the final 7 weeks of my 11 week long industrial training.... Hmmm lemmme see.... Well there was an endless pile of spreadsheets, there was the final presentation in which for the first time in my life, i didnt know what to present in front of the whole line up of engineers on the production floor leaving them with an impression that I SUCK at presenting but the truth is there was nothing to present at all as all I did was collect data by pressing the stopwatch and recording it on paper and transferring the measured data to Excel spreadsheets, wrote my industrial training final report in the final few days there, and the last day of work was spent looking at the engine testing department giving the S80 engines a full power run and approving documents.
Within the final few weeks though, there was this interesting "training" on Volvo's image rebranding which basically sums up why Volvos couldnt sell as well as Mercedes or BMWs. In this "training" we were told that Volvos problem was its brand image as it wants to be a premium car brand but couldnt seem to succeed in doing so. Failing to do so, it is sandwiched in a really unfavourable position where it in the middle of nowhere, not premium but not cheap.... A bit of a more expensive Toyota Camry price range but much cheaper than BMW. As it is not perceived as a premium car brand, it is naturally crossed off the list of cars to consider when buying a new car, as in when you buy a car, even before you think about how big of a car you want, you would first decide on whether or not to buy an expensive car, or just settle for a cheap car right?
So during this decision process making, you would cross out Volvo right after you decided you wanted an expensive car as Volvos arent premium and expensive cars. And if you decide on cheap cars instead, you would still cross out Volvos as they are kind of expensive. Hence being in the middle of both classes would really put a company in a disadvantageous and even possibly dangerous market position where your products would get crossed out of the list of possible choices to consider when buying a car.
For example, lets say you have RM 200,000.00 and you want to buy a car with that money. Which one you would rather have? A Toyota Camry / Honda Accord or a Volvo S40? And if you are in for expensive cars, choose between S80 (Volvos Camry sized sedan) or a BMW 3 series or a Mercedes C class. Which one would you want?
This is clearly a problem for Volvo right now, hence the rebranding of its vehicles to make them more desirable and placing them in the premium car market. Lets hope Volvo succeeds as I would feel that it would be a loss to the industry if they were to lose their leader in vehicle safety innovations right?
Well, here is my honest confession... I stopped taking the production line cycle times for real from the 7th week onwards.... Why? Well my cousin Fred gave me an invaluable piece of advise... "Work smart boy... Give your boss what he wants lah... Learn to work like them la.... Just enjoy your Industrial Training while it lasts". That was indeed a great piece of advise as it gave me an idea. I should make good use of my strengths la! I can visualize and imagine pretty well when it comes to moving parts i think... And I have been observing the vehicle assembly process long enough to actually imagine them assembling the car in real time quite accurately. Combining these traits, I tried measuring the cycle time of the assembly by measuring the time to assemble the car in my imagination and then comparing the imaginary times to the actual measured time.
Those times came to within 10% error and from then on, my cycle time measurement became more of a stand there at the production line, observe carefully how the car is being assembled, go back to the CMM Machine room, sit down comfortably on the table behind, imagine the process and measuring the imaginary times. This method was far more efficient than actually measuring it for real and about 80% of the job was completed within these 3.5 weeks of "imaginary measuring". Dont blame me.... The actual process of cycle time measurement is to video record the operator at work without him knowing and then measuring the time by analyzing the worker's actions from the video. Since no camcorder was available to me, I made do with my eyes and memory and just stood there with out my stopwatch and clipboard, telling the operators that I am just looking... Not cycle time measuring... They were more than happy to see a trainee that seemingly want to learn about car assembly more than just wanting to finish his project and sometimes they even let me try it out by allowing me to assemble a few parts of the car.
So that was the wrap up of my industrial training... Besides learning about cars, I actually learned some KL roads and had quite a blast lepaking in KL larrr... Overall pretty good compared to other companies that pay twice as much as Volvo pays (RM 250/month) and I got to know about Volvos inside out!
THERE WASNT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT AFTER THE FIRST 4 WEEKS OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING!!! WHAT THE HELL COULD I BLOG ABOUT? e.g. This week was a routine week. I went to the production line and with my trusty stopwatch and clipboard and measured the cycle time.... every day i measure the production lines cycle time.... after work i would key in this data in to Excel spreadsheets blah blah blah.... NOOOOOO I DUWAN TO WRITE A BLOG LIKE TAT!!!
Ahem.... Now that i have cleared my throat a little on that issue, let me try to summarize as much as I can think about the final 7 weeks of my 11 week long industrial training.... Hmmm lemmme see.... Well there was an endless pile of spreadsheets, there was the final presentation in which for the first time in my life, i didnt know what to present in front of the whole line up of engineers on the production floor leaving them with an impression that I SUCK at presenting but the truth is there was nothing to present at all as all I did was collect data by pressing the stopwatch and recording it on paper and transferring the measured data to Excel spreadsheets, wrote my industrial training final report in the final few days there, and the last day of work was spent looking at the engine testing department giving the S80 engines a full power run and approving documents.
Within the final few weeks though, there was this interesting "training" on Volvo's image rebranding which basically sums up why Volvos couldnt sell as well as Mercedes or BMWs. In this "training" we were told that Volvos problem was its brand image as it wants to be a premium car brand but couldnt seem to succeed in doing so. Failing to do so, it is sandwiched in a really unfavourable position where it in the middle of nowhere, not premium but not cheap.... A bit of a more expensive Toyota Camry price range but much cheaper than BMW. As it is not perceived as a premium car brand, it is naturally crossed off the list of cars to consider when buying a new car, as in when you buy a car, even before you think about how big of a car you want, you would first decide on whether or not to buy an expensive car, or just settle for a cheap car right?
So during this decision process making, you would cross out Volvo right after you decided you wanted an expensive car as Volvos arent premium and expensive cars. And if you decide on cheap cars instead, you would still cross out Volvos as they are kind of expensive. Hence being in the middle of both classes would really put a company in a disadvantageous and even possibly dangerous market position where your products would get crossed out of the list of possible choices to consider when buying a car.
For example, lets say you have RM 200,000.00 and you want to buy a car with that money. Which one you would rather have? A Toyota Camry / Honda Accord or a Volvo S40? And if you are in for expensive cars, choose between S80 (Volvos Camry sized sedan) or a BMW 3 series or a Mercedes C class. Which one would you want?
This is clearly a problem for Volvo right now, hence the rebranding of its vehicles to make them more desirable and placing them in the premium car market. Lets hope Volvo succeeds as I would feel that it would be a loss to the industry if they were to lose their leader in vehicle safety innovations right?
Well, here is my honest confession... I stopped taking the production line cycle times for real from the 7th week onwards.... Why? Well my cousin Fred gave me an invaluable piece of advise... "Work smart boy... Give your boss what he wants lah... Learn to work like them la.... Just enjoy your Industrial Training while it lasts". That was indeed a great piece of advise as it gave me an idea. I should make good use of my strengths la! I can visualize and imagine pretty well when it comes to moving parts i think... And I have been observing the vehicle assembly process long enough to actually imagine them assembling the car in real time quite accurately. Combining these traits, I tried measuring the cycle time of the assembly by measuring the time to assemble the car in my imagination and then comparing the imaginary times to the actual measured time.
Those times came to within 10% error and from then on, my cycle time measurement became more of a stand there at the production line, observe carefully how the car is being assembled, go back to the CMM Machine room, sit down comfortably on the table behind, imagine the process and measuring the imaginary times. This method was far more efficient than actually measuring it for real and about 80% of the job was completed within these 3.5 weeks of "imaginary measuring". Dont blame me.... The actual process of cycle time measurement is to video record the operator at work without him knowing and then measuring the time by analyzing the worker's actions from the video. Since no camcorder was available to me, I made do with my eyes and memory and just stood there with out my stopwatch and clipboard, telling the operators that I am just looking... Not cycle time measuring... They were more than happy to see a trainee that seemingly want to learn about car assembly more than just wanting to finish his project and sometimes they even let me try it out by allowing me to assemble a few parts of the car.
So that was the wrap up of my industrial training... Besides learning about cars, I actually learned some KL roads and had quite a blast lepaking in KL larrr... Overall pretty good compared to other companies that pay twice as much as Volvo pays (RM 250/month) and I got to know about Volvos inside out!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Latihan Industri Hujung Minggu 4
Week 4, another bland and simple week. More time measurement. More of the hot and humid assembly lines with no engine sub assembly in sight. And more Excel data entry. This week proved to be a very long week as it is the second week I have to endure this ceaseless boredom with out a Friday lay off day. Well, at least there IS an end in sight as my time as a trainee here is quite short indeed.
This week while i was at work at the sub assembly lines where small bits get put together in to bigger pieces of the car e.g Dashboard, Engine, Axle etc etc, I found some really nice people. They were willingly cooperating with me in my attempt to measure the cycle time of the sub assembly lines. For instance there is this uncle at the radiator sub assembly whom is in his late 40's who would tell me his cerita2 lama and do the operations step by step so that i could catch up and note it all down on the list. The mute guy and gals would also do the same and they even paused a while and pointed to me which step in the list they had just done and waited for me to write down the time and then only continuing. I wished the rest of the ppl at the assembly line.
That would help me a great deal and I would've had the complete data by now. But no~ they just did what they pleased and made life so difficult for me on the main assembly line.
To the ones who were of great help to me, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to these nice and helpful people! YAY and now to some of the more humourous things i found during week 4 of industrial training. The following picture is the product of a "dialogue" that i had with one of the mute workers at the sub assembly line called Syafinas. Very helpful person who signalled me when she started a process and signaled me to stop the stopwatch when she is done with it and points out which item in the list was it. She asked me what I was there for and i answered that i was there to take the cycle time for the dashboard sub assembly.
She then told me that she is doing the S80 dashboard sub assembly just in case I didn't know in line 2 and then i asked her whether she is also in charge of the door panel sub assembly in line 3. In line 4 she claims that she not do work. Hmmm.... Is this the confession from a worker that she slacks off during work? Hahaha i hope not...
The following picture is a material requisition form (obviously) that my colleague asked me to send to the stockist to acquire the listed items. What instantly caught my attention was the units for the items in the list.
WD40 for those who have never heard of it or used it, is an aerosol lubricant that is sprayed to loosen rusty metal such as your pad locks, nuts and bolts. So naturally, they come in CANs right? But it seemed that my colleague got it slight wrong by determining that WD40s should be punished and "disebat" 3 kali untuk sex offense against women.
I finished the week with quite some data and am quite pleased with the nice people whom showed their invaluable cooperation to aid my data collection.
This week while i was at work at the sub assembly lines where small bits get put together in to bigger pieces of the car e.g Dashboard, Engine, Axle etc etc, I found some really nice people. They were willingly cooperating with me in my attempt to measure the cycle time of the sub assembly lines. For instance there is this uncle at the radiator sub assembly whom is in his late 40's who would tell me his cerita2 lama and do the operations step by step so that i could catch up and note it all down on the list. The mute guy and gals would also do the same and they even paused a while and pointed to me which step in the list they had just done and waited for me to write down the time and then only continuing. I wished the rest of the ppl at the assembly line.
That would help me a great deal and I would've had the complete data by now. But no~ they just did what they pleased and made life so difficult for me on the main assembly line.
To the ones who were of great help to me, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to these nice and helpful people! YAY and now to some of the more humourous things i found during week 4 of industrial training. The following picture is the product of a "dialogue" that i had with one of the mute workers at the sub assembly line called Syafinas. Very helpful person who signalled me when she started a process and signaled me to stop the stopwatch when she is done with it and points out which item in the list was it. She asked me what I was there for and i answered that i was there to take the cycle time for the dashboard sub assembly.
She then told me that she is doing the S80 dashboard sub assembly just in case I didn't know in line 2 and then i asked her whether she is also in charge of the door panel sub assembly in line 3. In line 4 she claims that she not do work. Hmmm.... Is this the confession from a worker that she slacks off during work? Hahaha i hope not...
The following picture is a material requisition form (obviously) that my colleague asked me to send to the stockist to acquire the listed items. What instantly caught my attention was the units for the items in the list.
WD40 for those who have never heard of it or used it, is an aerosol lubricant that is sprayed to loosen rusty metal such as your pad locks, nuts and bolts. So naturally, they come in CANs right? But it seemed that my colleague got it slight wrong by determining that WD40s should be punished and "disebat" 3 kali untuk sex offense against women.
I finished the week with quite some data and am quite pleased with the nice people whom showed their invaluable cooperation to aid my data collection.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Latihan Industri Hujung Minggu 3
This week is the week where my industrial training got from kinda boring to BBBOOOORRRIIIINNNGGGG.........
Yes its the week of boredom for me in Sweedish Motor Assemblies. On Monday i printed out a 3 inch thick stack of spreadsheets that I have painstakingly prepared throughout the first 2 weeks of my industrial training. It took me a whole damn day to print out these spreadsheets as the printer was acting up, printing only the first column and moves on to the next page to pring the next column and so on.
After wasting the whole morning messing around with the printer settings and getting the print outs right, it is already time for tea break. I went up to the cafeteria to grab some "char bee hoon" and Nescafe (really sleepy waiting for the bublejet printer to get along with its business of printing) and then went to the toilet to take a leak. Out of curiosity, I ventured in to another cubicle and found some more interesting artwork done by grownups which I included in this post below for your viewing pleasure:
The artist seem to have a deep liking for the female body, especially the breasts for that matter which can be seen by the art piece on your left but the poor fellow's artwork got defiled by other busybodies whom think that the picture wasnt complete and added stuff behind the female. On the right are artist impressions on what happens to breasts if they are fondled with too much and the depictions of breasts sagging along with the before and after labels show how much sagging the artist thinks breasts would undergo.
This one is a horizontal view of 2 people having penetrative sex. I am unsure about who this "Zaiton" is but i have a hunch taufik here refers to the senior HR Manager in SMA.
So after spending the rest of the day printing out the spreadsheets and sorting them out, it was time to staple them together. Problem was, some were more than 25 pages thick
too thick for a normal stapler to staple together. The next problem is there aint no big staplers in the whole factory!! OMFG!! We are talking about a factory that prides itself with its ISO 9001 and ISO 14000 certification here and it turns out, they did not have one of those BIG staplers that we usually c in the photocopy shops. This factory has more than 5 photo copy machines and still no sign of BFS (Big F***in Stapler)
I had to resort to brute force. Went to the tool shelf and got the hammer out! Hammered the stapler quite hard to cause successful penetration and then hammer the ends of the staple down to strengthen the tie. This process is repeated 3 times in parallel direction to increase tie strength, hence creating a durable booklet to endure the ravages of the production line.
In one of my trips to the office, I met up wiht my supervisor's boss (my boss oso la) and she asked me to go see her the first thing the next morning. And so i did as she told me right after morning stretching. Sadly the reason she asked me to see her was to make me photocopy the Operational Sequence Summary for 2 trucks that are going to be produced on contract here in SMA.
Hence i spent the half a day by the photocopy machine and the other half of the day at the table stamping the "Controlled Document" stamp on the documents and then filing them up accordingly.
After this rather unamusing day of easy labour, I continued on with the cycle time measurement for the rest of the week feeling rather lost trying to keep up with more than one person at the same station who not only does the assembly a few steps at a time, they seem to even share jobs as well making it a real mess to measure the cycletime.
Yes its the week of boredom for me in Sweedish Motor Assemblies. On Monday i printed out a 3 inch thick stack of spreadsheets that I have painstakingly prepared throughout the first 2 weeks of my industrial training. It took me a whole damn day to print out these spreadsheets as the printer was acting up, printing only the first column and moves on to the next page to pring the next column and so on.
After wasting the whole morning messing around with the printer settings and getting the print outs right, it is already time for tea break. I went up to the cafeteria to grab some "char bee hoon" and Nescafe (really sleepy waiting for the bublejet printer to get along with its business of printing) and then went to the toilet to take a leak. Out of curiosity, I ventured in to another cubicle and found some more interesting artwork done by grownups which I included in this post below for your viewing pleasure:
The artist seem to have a deep liking for the female body, especially the breasts for that matter which can be seen by the art piece on your left but the poor fellow's artwork got defiled by other busybodies whom think that the picture wasnt complete and added stuff behind the female. On the right are artist impressions on what happens to breasts if they are fondled with too much and the depictions of breasts sagging along with the before and after labels show how much sagging the artist thinks breasts would undergo.
This one is a horizontal view of 2 people having penetrative sex. I am unsure about who this "Zaiton" is but i have a hunch taufik here refers to the senior HR Manager in SMA.
So after spending the rest of the day printing out the spreadsheets and sorting them out, it was time to staple them together. Problem was, some were more than 25 pages thick
too thick for a normal stapler to staple together. The next problem is there aint no big staplers in the whole factory!! OMFG!! We are talking about a factory that prides itself with its ISO 9001 and ISO 14000 certification here and it turns out, they did not have one of those BIG staplers that we usually c in the photocopy shops. This factory has more than 5 photo copy machines and still no sign of BFS (Big F***in Stapler)
I had to resort to brute force. Went to the tool shelf and got the hammer out! Hammered the stapler quite hard to cause successful penetration and then hammer the ends of the staple down to strengthen the tie. This process is repeated 3 times in parallel direction to increase tie strength, hence creating a durable booklet to endure the ravages of the production line.
In one of my trips to the office, I met up wiht my supervisor's boss (my boss oso la) and she asked me to go see her the first thing the next morning. And so i did as she told me right after morning stretching. Sadly the reason she asked me to see her was to make me photocopy the Operational Sequence Summary for 2 trucks that are going to be produced on contract here in SMA.
Hence i spent the half a day by the photocopy machine and the other half of the day at the table stamping the "Controlled Document" stamp on the documents and then filing them up accordingly.
After this rather unamusing day of easy labour, I continued on with the cycle time measurement for the rest of the week feeling rather lost trying to keep up with more than one person at the same station who not only does the assembly a few steps at a time, they seem to even share jobs as well making it a real mess to measure the cycletime.
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