Tag: obituary

Categories
Sports

[2492] The unfairness of it all; goodbye JoePa

Saturday football was always fun during college days. Every morning I would listen to the radio, watched television in the common room, visited a friend’s room to watch football (sometimes, I would take the bus all the way to North Compus or even sleepover the night before) or during my senior year, watched the game at the stadium in full school colors. Michigan was at the top of the world and it was easy for my friends and I to laugh at other god-awful teams. One of the teams was Penn State and Joe Paterno was the coach there, as he was for the longest time until recently. Paterno was Penn State.

The Littany Lions were doing so bad that fans were calling for his head. I remember this so clearly. On TV, a fan held up a poster, urging the Penn State to fire him. At that time, I stopped cracking jokes about Paterno, and starting to feel pity for him. For all he had done for Penn State, I felt it was unfair to ask so, so unceremoniously. He survived the tough time, unlike Michigan’s Rich Rodriguez, and went on to reinstate some respectability in the football program at Happy Valley.

For that and more, he deserved respect. This was the winningest coach in college football history. That fact alone demands respect.

It is obvious that not everybody agrees with that. Amid a sex abuse scandal involving his staff (not Paterno himself), Penn State fired Paterno. The administration fired him because the university thought he had not done enough.

Maybe there was an ethical error on his behalf. He should have reported it to the police, instead of informing what he knew of merely to his superiors.

Regardless, I thought it was unfair the way he was fired. Somehow, I thought he was the scapegoat.

It must have been hard on him. When you coach at the same place for 40 uninterrupted years, the place just stops being the place where you work. It will be your life. Imagine how Paterno felt when he was fired. Already suffering from cancer, the firing must have made it all worse.

Paterno died today. The knife that drove through his heart was not cancer. It could not have been. It must have been unfairness.

Categories
Science & technology Society

[2437] Thanks Steve

I am not an Apple fanboy. I was anti-Apple even.

I remember the first Apple computer I used long ago. Wikipedia tells me that it was Macintosh Classic. Its screen had only two colors: green and black. I was happy of playing Karate-Ka on it, and other games that for the life of me, I cannot remember. It was my first vivid recollection of a computer. This was the time when large diskettes were used, not a flash drive, not even a CD.

My next encounter with Apple would come 8 or 9 years later when the University of Michigan had iMacs littering its computer labs. I spotted the largest collection of iMacs in Angell Hall’s Fishbowl. I had thought Apple was dead, but no. I was wrong.

These Macs were not these modern days slick-looking Macs. It was an odd one piece machine with the CPU and the monitor wedded together. The G3, Wikipedia says. The weirdest of all was the one-button mouse. Who would use that?
 
I was decidedly anti-Apple then.

But Apple progressed tremendously after the odd-looking bright-colored Macs. Its notebooks were becoming extremely slick and I remember spotting a 23” Powerbook, probably the first of its kind, in an Apple Store in Novi, Michigan, somewhere outside of Ann Arbor. Despite being impressed, I remember blogging my somewhat negative sentiment against Apple.

From there on, it was all up for Apple.
 
First, it was the iPod.
 
I had always wanted an mp3 player as an undergraduate but I decided against buying an iPod back in 2004. I bought a Creative Zen instead, all because I believed the iPod was overpriced, and all hype. Five years later, I am the owner of a fifth-generation iPod Nano. I did not buy it. I got it as a gift.
 
And I love it.
 
I remember bragging about having a Nano to my ex-girlfriend through Skype. She was unimpressed, showing to me that she had a Nano too. Purple. Mine was blue. There she was, a cute French girl smiling with her purple iPod.

There are of course the revolutionary iPhone and the even more revolutionary iPad. To say these gadgets were revolutionary on its own rights is an understatement. Apple not only revolutionized consumer goods. It revolutionized the global culture.

That was because of one human legend, Steve Jobs. At least, as far as I am concerned.

So, when he died today, the world has just lost one of its biggest culture icons. We are living in an exciting time, partly thanks to Steve Jobs. I do not think anybody can deny that.

You do not have to be a tech-writer to know that. You do not have to be part of the tech or creative industry to know that. You just need to live to know that.

Apple wrote on its website, it “has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.” Aye to that.

Categories
Personal

[2141] Of alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio

It was an email produced after a sequence ”guided by pure randomness.” He said he might need a place to stay for a day or two, or maybe more in Australia. I think I just woke up from a nap because I found myself unclear when he planned to come exactly . Apparently, he must have slept through writing the email as well. He wrote ”[s]o I booked really cheap tickets to Melbourne and will be there at and occasionally in between 19 June and 12 July 2009.” But it was already August. In the following email, he wrote, ”2010, rather.”

I thought to myself, and later wrote back telling him to email me again next year because with a commitment so far away into the future, anything could happen. I keep a conservative outlook with odds. I was thinking of myself because there were a number of uncertainties that I needed to negotiate throughout the year.

Little did I realize that anything also included death.

Friend Rajan Rishyakaran died earlier today in a road crash. I do not know the details, and I do not want to know the details. But I knew something else about him. Something that gives his existence a huge significance to me.

I knew Rajan first by reputation before becoming a friend of his. I think, many of those early bloggers, especially those whom used to patronize Project Petaling Street portal in its heydays knew him by his frequent saber rattling with another blogger over religion. I followed the argument between the two with interest, even if it was for pleasure. I later fought the same battle he had fought. Rajan was a libertarian. It was not a surprise that we disagreed (I still disagree) deeply with that blogger whom clearly despised the liberties libertarians cherish.

We take the defense of liberty seriously. It is no hobby.

He was, in fact, one of two early self-proclaimed libertarians in Malaysia that I know. It is for this reason that I appreciate his friendship. Weirdly enough, with the three of us, there was a Malay, a Chinese and an Indian libertarians. It is a coincidence resulting in a tiresome cliché.

For the life of me, I cannot remember when I first personally met him. I do however know that I only met him in person years after we knew each other online. The last time I met him was at a crazy summer party in Petaling Jaya with a bunch of other new friends that colored my dull life.

When we first knew each other, I was in the United States and he was preparing for his STPM, a Malaysian version of A-Level. He went on to do economics in Singapore.

Death comes to us all, but somehow, there is a painful sense of injustice here. He was too young to go. He had so many to offer to the libertarian movement in Malaysia, especially with his interest in debating and developing knowledge in economics. Many times when he wrote at his blog, I found myself in agreement with him. The loss of him is a loss to Malaysian libertarian movement. His death is a loss to me because I now have one less libertarian perspective to listen to, amid limited libertarian circle that exists at the moment in Malaysia.

But that makes him as if he was a tool for some political development. He was not. A man is the end, and not a mere mean.

Alas, he is no more.

His family is having a service for him tomorrow in Shah Alam. I wish I could be there. I really do. The suddenness of this all left me with little option but to give my last respect from here in Sydney.

Goodbye, dear friend.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

p/s — I shall post links of other obituary that I found over the blogosphere here:

  1. For Rajan Risyakaran, an obituary. Yvonne Foong. December 30 2009.
  2. How do you know… Like a magpie, I live for glitter. December 30 2009.
  3. Chapter 22-08: Cherish Life. Fern Yit. December 30 2009.
  4. In memoriam. December 30 2009.
  5. Remembering Rajan Rishyakaran. John Lee. December 30 2009.
  6. Rest in Peace, Rajan Rishyakaran. Nathaniel Tan. December 31 2009.
  7. Conversations with Rajan Rishyakaran (1986 — 2009). Zareth Lim. January 1 2010.
Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

pp/s — for those interested, there is service for Rajan on December 31 in Shah Alam. Kindly refer to this particular forum post at usj.com.my.

Categories
Economics

[2129] Of dedication to Paul Samuelson

One of the greatest economists of this century, and perhaps of all times too, died yesterday.

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics.

In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity. [Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94. Michael M. Weinstein. New York Times. December 13 2009]

I would say, his contributions to economics are as great as Leon and Walras’, who, back in the 19th century, together with other marginalists, first used mathematics in a big way to advance the field of economics.

Categories
Pop culture

[2019] Of thanks MJ