This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

When someone talks about technology, our mind tend to draw an immediate association to the latest sleek computing devices released by likes of Apple. But what I’m going to talk about is less shiny, less portable, but more ubiquitous. It’s common to such a point where that many hardly regard it as being ‘technology’. It’s in homes, malls and office spaces. It’s the air-conditioner.

Living in a tropical country where the daily temperature is in the range of 28 to 35 for most the year, along with a humidity level of almost 90% and tightly packing high-rise buildings from one corner of the island to the next negating the wind flow, not having adequate cooling becomes more than just an irritant. The heat engulfs you, drowning you in your own sweat.

It’s easy to dismiss these inventions as mundane and not giving them due credit as deserving a place in the technological innovations of our modern life. You don’t hear about improvements in the field as often as say, mobile phones, but that’s only because they’ve reached a level of maturity where we take their functionality and existence for granted.

This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

One album? Whichever album the track ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ by The Animals belong on. Why? ‘Cause we gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do, and I’ll be singing that over and over again.

Regardless, whichever album I bring, I will eventually get bored of it. My musical preference greatly varies over time, and I can’t name a single song that I’ve loved consistently throughout. During my pre-teens, I thought that Backstreet Boys was god’s gift to man, and when my hormones pumped in, DJ Tiesto took over. At the peak of my raging hormones and manliness, it was Rammstein. After that, the newly cultured gentleman that I were entered into an era of gothic and symphonic metal, and even the novelty of that is starting to wear off.

Wouldn’t I have more things to worry about anyway, if I were truly stranded on a deserted island? Seriously, who the hell came up with questions like this?

This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com. Since I’m feeling pretty good today, I’m doing a second post this week!

I would always rather know the truth, regardless of how shocking or painful it might be. Only when we accept the truth can we embark on the acceptance process, and then choose an appropriate course of action from there on.

Similarly, we shouldn’t deprive others of the truth. Recently, someone I knew became fatally ill, and the decision which those around him chose was to keep him unaware, because they don’t know how he’d react to it. I protested, but I was in no power to affect the decision. In this case, when the decision is being made on behalf of someone else, there’s a tendency to waver, to think that the problem might be more complex than it is. However, there can be no substitute for the truth. Here, the question should not be if the truth should be told, but rather, how the truth should be told.

With regards to WikiLeaks, I believe WikiLeaks is genuine in their intentions of bringing about greater government transparency and accountability. We deserve to know every action of our elected representatives do on behalf on the country. Concerning the cable-gate scandal though, I’m not sure if the entire content should be revealed in full. Cable-gate reads less of a ‘scandal’, but more as a series of chat logs between individuals. However, I deny that any real harm has been done and would argue that the actions again Julian Assange are unwarranted. I’m fairly certain that the information made available through WikiLeaks would already have been known by virtually any country’s own intelligence agency if said agency is worth its salt.

This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

Right now? This week’s post.

Each day, I find a new excuse for myself as to why today’s topic isn’t good enough, or that, in the case of two of this week’s topic dealing with reason and hope, they’re too cliché and have been touched on and argued over umpteen times in history already for me to be able to add value to it, especially the whole deterministic vs. free will argument. I feel that my writing won’t be “good enough” compared to the literature that’s already out there.

However, if you do want my view, I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in karma. It is our own need for some semblance of order in our lives that we connect events which have no correlation to each other together. It gives us the illusion that we’re in control even though events are in reality governed by nothing by a dice roll. Yes, there are certain things we can do to influence the outcome with an event, to weigh probability in our favor, but at the end of the day, the roll of a dice decides.

Regarding hope, I’ve always found it hard to maintain hope. There’s the conventional saying that can be roughly paraphrased as: as long as one never gives up hope, there’s still a chance. That, to me, is wishful thinking. I prefer to take a more pragmatic approach by looking a situation or problem and making a realistic assessment of the possible outcome. A lot of hope revolves around telling one that the impossible or unlikely could happen, and I don’t believe one should give himself, or another person what I believe will ultimately turn out to be false-hope. By doing so, one is only setting a stage for a greater fall.

Remember the scene towards the end of The Dark Knight, where Two-Face points a gun at Gordon’s son and wants Gordon to tell his son that “everything is going to be alright”, before killing his son? That’s exactly what I’m talking about when we tell comforting but improbable words to people and give them a sense of false hope.

Oh look, I’ve actually covered 3 different topics in one post. Important or not, I find myself putting off things because I can’t find confidence in saying what I have on my mind for fear of sounding silly or being ridiculed. However, without taking that leap forward, one might never know the outcome. If there’s one thing I want to change about myself this year, it’s saying what’s on my mind with confidence.

This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com.

The first post on this blog, A Routine World, dates back to 26 August 2006. The post was initially written on blogspot, and although I have maintained a blog at various points before on the same service prior to being acquired by Google, the 2006 post would be the earliest record of my foray into blogging.

On occasions, during the lull in our otherwise hectic lives, some of us have a tendency to ask ourselves why we do what we do. Well, so why did I start blogging?

I’ve never been a good conversationalist. In the face of an impromptu conversation, I forget what I initially wanted to say and my ideas are derailed. It is when I am alone that my thought process functions best. Unfortunately, at the same time, when the eureka moment comes, I have no outlet to share that ingenious to me, but just plain silly to others (who are probably right) idea with. Blogging, then, provides an alternative medium to express my thoughts – a way for me to communicate with the world in a comfortable and asynchronous fashion.

Over time, through blogging, I discovered the joys of writing, and most importantly, it fulfilled the innate need in each and everyone one of us as human beings – to share. Although there’s no guarantee that anyone is listening, it still feels good to have my voice out there.