Link : Changing Minds

This is a great site on human relations. You can find anything from persuasion to assertiveness. Occasionally I check back to this site to brush up on my skills. It’s like the wikipedia of psychology.

Electro English Club

Here in Electrical Engineering, we have a lot of student activities open to anyone who wants to join. There’s sports, music, and of course, language. These are all under the Electrical Engineering Student Association, or KMTE in Indonesian. Now, we have a Division of Foreign Language, who holds classes on foreign languages (duh). French, German, Japanese, and English. The last one is called Electro English Club, and our focus is in helping other students improve their conversation and public speaking skills. Yes, public speaking. Our method is not unlike Toastmasters, and there’s a little story behind this. When I was going to start up EEC, because prior to last year, there weren’t any English clubs, I started searching on the Internet on how this club was going to be organized. I wanted it to be a conversation club, and I found a blog about a group of Toastmasters in Des Moines, USA. After I contacted the admin of the blog, Theresa, we exchanged a few emails that got me started on the basics of the club. Then I combined what Theresa gave me with what I found by myself on the Internet, and started the Electro English Club.

The club is really fun and the members are highly enthusiastic about learning how to speak English. We’ve had about 5 meetings and then stopped it for a while because of the many assignments and exams the students faced. Now in Tuesday May 1, 2007, we’re going to start up again with new vigor.

Qualifying and Justification

I really want to stop qualifying and justifying myself to other people. The next time I catch myself doing this, I will halt my thought pattern and think positively. Should that happen again, I will just freezeout OR improv. Get on it, Satya!

Game Review : Company of Heroes

These days I can’t seem to stop thinking about this game! It’s so addictive. This RTS (Real Time Strategy) game has me thinking about strategies, anti-strategies, command posts, and points of attack all day. Have you guys seen World War II movies like Band of Brothers, or Saving Private Ryan? Well, this is the game version of those movies. I feel that I am literally dropped in the midst of all the WW II action, it’s that good.

Internet Access?

Electrical Engineering has finally implemented the security login for our Internet access. Hooray!! Honestly though, I’m surprised that EE hasn’t gotten this years ago. In American universities, when you want to connect to the Internet, you always have to put in your student ID and password. Of course, this student ID has access to virtually anything academically related, from your inputing classes, to paying your tuition. We’re not there yet, but this is a pretty huge step forwards.

I attended the socialization ’seminar’ yesterday afternoon, just before going to pick up a Linux Ubuntu CD at UPN’s Feisty Party. The seminar was pretty empty, not many people came. Maybe because they didn’t know, or just didn’t care. No idea. Anyways, in the seminar we were told baby steps on how to use the new system, including how the passwords would affect the proxy server. Pretty simplistic in my opinion. I would have liked if they explained the background behind the program, even though I could tell that this was mainly budget oriented. From the lines, it seems that the main goal is to limit the use of bandwidth in EE because in the past, no matter how many times they upgraded it, the bandwidth just couldn’t handle the load. So in this semester, we can still use the bandwidth unlimitedly (hopefully), just that there’s a password involved. Now the problem is, next semester, there’s going to be a limit on the bandwidth of each student using an EE account. Which sucks hard a**. Pardon my french .

Change and Blind Faith

Basically, in changing or in the process of making yourself better, there are two strong fundamental principles that have been taken into account. These points are used and implemented as a sort of mantra so that they can have one hundred percent focus on the task at hand, rather than doubting themselves whether or not this will work. What are these principles?

The first one was popularized by Anthony Robbins. It goes something like this, “If you always keep doing the same things, you will always get the same results.” Now, this principle has been accepted by almost everybody in the self-help community world wide. The reason is that this principle, in its simplicity, is very true. Take two people who want to get in shape and a better, healthier body. One of them just THINKS about exercising, while in his daily routine nothing much has changed. He keeps doing the same stuff without any regard to his goal of a healthier body. Now, the second person, after deciding that he will focus his life on a healthier lifestyle, he incorporates the basic principles of health and fitness into his life. He goes to the gym every two days, he does aerobics every other day, and he eats healthier. See the difference? Can you guess who, in three months time, will be in a better shape than the other? This is the basic of the first principle. When something needs to change, something inside you has to change as well to get to your goal.

The second principle is an old saying. “In changing something, you need to have faith and keep going, no matter how small the improvements may seem. It’s like chipping at a rock. At first, it will seem that nothing has changed. But after a long while, after continuous effort and discipline by keeping at chipping on the rock, the rock will shatter because of the tiny miniscule cracks combined.” Long analogy, I know. A shorter version would be one of an Indonesian saying. “Little by little and in the end you have moved a mountain.” Now, the second principle here focuses on the fact that you must have blind belief in doing something. You may not know the ins and outs of the work at hand, but you just keep doing it and have faith that in the end this will turn out the way you want it. Here is where this principle can go badly. What if someone, who read some method on the internet on how to lose weight by buying a device which jiggles the fat on his stomach. So, for months he keeps doing this, but he’s still fat. Why? Is it because he didn’t have discipline? Or because he didn’t have the motivation? No, it’s because the method and system that he chose was wrong. He should have gone and got a gym membership instead of buying a ridiculous and useless device. So, is this principle flawed then? Absolutely not. This principle is amazing that it helps people to just DO IT instead of wondering around and postponing it. With this principle, people can let go of any self doubt and believe fully that the method will work. To get anywhere, though, somebody has to have a tested and successful method to implement. You can find a million methods on how to lose weight on the internet, but to get anywhere, you have to do your research and find one that others have taken, used, and achieved success with. You’ve also got to have feedback by other people who are sharing the experience with you by doing the same things. In this way, mistakes can be corrected, predictions can be made, and motivation can be given.

Although I’ve made a long and pretty detailed analysis (if I do say so myself) on the two principles, I’ve had trouble implementing these principles into my life. Change is hard, I know, and even more having blind faith in a system. Sometimes I feel that I need to know everything about everything something has to offer before I can dive in. For example, programming. In my first year of Electrical Engineering, I couldn’t even make a simple PHP program due to the fact that I was always reading about PHP, instead of just plunging myself and doing it. Sure I got a ton of knowledge about PHP and its theories, but what good is it if I can’t even make a simple program? Now I’ve learned my mistake, and every time I spend too much time researching on the Internet, and contemplating on doing something, I just take a deep breath and do it. This has been very hard for me to do, as I have always been pretty lazy about change. But I’ve realized, that if I want to get better, then I need to change my habits.

Heinrich Schliemann’s method of language learning

Got this article from here , and it’s about a very hard and challenging way to learn a language. This can be used to learn English. I know from experience that this method WILL work, but it will take a lot of discipline and self motivation. Here is the article :

I have always believed that in order to learn more about how to do something, it can be quite beneficial to study the methods of those who are experts at it. While reading a book on ancient Greece recently, I came across a description of how Heinrich Schliemann went about learning a new language. The famous 19th-century German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), who pursued a life-long dream of excavating the remains of Homeric Troy, no doubt had a genius for language. Within the space of two years, he taught himself fluent Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and later went on to learn seven more, including both modern and ancient Greek.

How could we, who generally consider ourselves lucky if we manage to learn only one or two foreign languages in the course of an entire lifetime, not be curious about the method he used? Let’s hear what Schliemann himself had to say about how he approached the challenge of mastering another tongue:

“In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary,” Schliemann wrote, “I procured a modern Greek translation of “Paul et Virginie”**, and read it through, comparing every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary. Of the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong… I learned ancient Greek as I would have learned a living language.”

He doesn’t say how he learned to pronounce ancient Greek, but since nobody speaks it any more, this probably didn’t really matter to him too much. In any case, one must admire the man’s ingenuity, and above all, his freedom from conventional ideas about how languages “should” be learned. Though we tend to put such people into a category of their own, labelling it “genius”, the truth is that one of the things that separates a so-called genius from ordinary mortals is simply the fact that they don’t limit themselves by doing everything the way most other folks do, or by the way that “authorities” say it must be done: they find their own methods, and do whatever works well for them.

When we begin to learn a foreign language, we usually use a book whose first chapters are filled with “baby stuff”: “Hello, how are you? My name is David.”, or “The cat is in the house. My brother lives in Rome.”, and such things. Of course, that would seem easier to learn than picking up a regular book in your target language and, only with the help of an English translation, working your way through it sentence by sentence, the way Schliemann did. But then, he taught himself to speak ancient Greek in such a way, so who is to say that his method wouldn’t work for us if we wanted to learn French, Italian, or German? We could always take a few classes with a native speaker for the pronunciation, and to take our first steps in conversation.

And the grammar? Well, by comparing the foreign language text to an English translation, we would get a good idea of grammatical structures; and the fact that such structures would repeat themselves quite often during the course of an entire book would mean that we would have ample opportunity to “absorb” them, and to learn to use them properly on our own.

There are really only two reasons why this method might not work for you. First of all, it would take a lot of thought, and a lot of discipline, to work your way through a foreign language book this way. You would have to basically construct your own grammar book as you go along, taking notes comparing structures in both languages, making your own lists of prepositions, pronouns, verb forms, etc., as you encounter them, and so on. Of course, when you buy a standard language-learning book, all the grammar has already been “spelled out” for you, which makes it seem a lot easier. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that if you did do it Schliemann’s way, collecting and organizing such grammatical information on your own might well help you to learn it considerably faster, and to understand it a lot better.

The other reason why this method may appear to be beyond our abilities is merely because it is so unusual: “Nobody does it that way!” may be the way you respond when you read about Schliemann’s procedures. You may feel that if it is so uncommon, it can’t be so great, or maybe that it just couldn’t work for a “normal person” like yourself. This is more of a psychological block than anything else, and overcoming it could be a rather mind-expanding experience. It is true that especially at the beginning, when you don’t have any vocabulary at all, the idea of actually beginning to read a book (albeit with the aid of a translation) in the other language would seem daunting, almost to the point of appearing to be impossible. But I suspect that if you actually tried it this way, after a week or so, it wouldn’t seem so hard at all, and you may well make rapid progress. And if the book you use (or I should say, “books”, since you would have one in your target language, as well as a translation in your native tongue) is about something which greatly interests you, by the time you finish it, you will not only have learned a lot about the new language, but also a good bit of fascinating information.

I myself have not tried this method yet, but at some time in the future, I certainly will. I may not be so ambitious as to want to follow in the archeologist Schliemann’s footsteps, searching out the ruins of ancient Troy, but trying out the linguist Schliemann’s method of language learning holds a definite attraction for me, and could well be rewarding!

State of Mind

 

I’ve been self monitoring the way I think to myself these past couple of weeks. Not continually, I sometimes slip and let my mind doze off for a little while. Most of the time though, I try to keep my mind in check.

What I’ve found is pretty cool. It turns out that the way we talk to ourselves (you know, that little voice inside your head) makes a very big impact on our outlook of things. It’s like the old saying, where somebody sees the glass half empty and somebody else sees it half full. To be happy, you gotta take the positive outlook on life. Now, how does this relate to conversations with yourself? Well, since it’s your head, you can control EVERYTHING that your inner dialogue tells you. If you fail, and that voice says what a stupid loser you are, you can just say “HEY! Wait a minute here. Yes, that was a stupid mistake. Yes, I did fail. But I also learned something from that mistake. And with that new knowledge, I’ll be able to prevent this from happening again. Or at the very least I can learn how to expect it and manage it propely.” See the difference? One is negative, and the other is positive, with a very prospective outlook.

There’s probably a lot of books on this already, and there is. The ones I have read are :

1. Awaken the Giant Within – Anthony Robbins
2. 7 Habits – Stephen Covey

So you have to control that inner voice inside your head. Whenever you think negatively, say STOP and change your thought pattern to something else.

First Post

Everything needs a beginning, and this is mine. This blog is all about me and what I think are cool. If you like it, stick around, tell other people, and comment to let me know that you like it.

About me? I’m a 19 year old college student at Electrical Engineering Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta. I like computers, which is why I chose to go here. I also get excited when I get around food. Delicious food at that. I’m a food enthusiast. So expect to see posts about the hot trends of food .

Anyways, this is basically a place where I can put stuff I have on my mind. To get a better heading on things. Especially on my ‘journey’ towards xyz (which I can’t disclose right now; very hush hush aka top secret). So walk beside me and let’s see where this takes us.