Tommy Peters' Bicycles

The way I demand form and function in the office I work and the home I stay, I ache the same aesthetics in the virtual digital platform I stand upon all day. A poorly lit office with obtrusive partitions is unacceptable in this day and age simply because of the lack of productivity it engenders. Show me a well designed home that blends with the ambience and 'chi' and I will show you an 'emancipated' architect who embraced the whole project. Show me a wedding reception to remember and I will show you a 'colorful' wedding planner who controlled the many facets of the program right down to the bouquets. Computers and smart-phones are no less environments and I demand a single entity who controls the many facets that comprise the environment. At this point my digital life is a mess. My machine is Dell, the OS is Microsoft and applications are piggy-backed from 6 other entities. My back-up is Lacie. My Spyware is McAfee to ward of hackers of who offer a myri...

Nades, I am glad you are back and I hope Terence is well too. I was asked what trumps ‘life’. I said ‘goodness’. Say you witness a girl being violated and before you help her, an accomplice of the rapist warns you not to interfere or he will take your life. You tell the accomplice. ‘Take my life because I am going to help her’. Point is, threat to personal freedom presents itself every time you and Terence write and we do appreciate that at least for some journalists, values trump everything else, not to mention personal freedom. I was also asked why I engage the New Straits Times when I pick up the The Sun free of charge. I said they compliment each other as long as you are able to discern and not totally embrace their opposing sentiments. I said the latter (The Sun) is the technological equivalent of a hospital while the sentiment in the former (New Straits Times) is that you do not use the emergency ward to gauge the overall healthcare of the community but as a reminder of what coul...

Naked aggression describes the Internal Security Act when used against a civilian for any reason other than him being a genuine security threat, but ironically, abolishing it encourages the very aggression it is designed to prevent. In this context it should be re-defined rather than abolished. A plausible scenario. The opposition forms the government and the ISA is abolished. Al-Qaeda takes issue that the new administration has withdrawn logistical support for its separatist brethren in Thailand and Philippines and takes out Suria KLCC with a nail-bomb. Hundreds die. The sophisticated bomb is the handiwork of say, a Malaysian born chemist with known links to the group. The academic is apprehended but he was not at the scene of the crime and therefore charges cannot proffer on existing legislation. Wan Azizah is Prime Minister and Teresa Kok heads the Home Ministry. Not unlike Israel’s Golda Meir in the 70s, the liberalist Malaysian leader is in a dilemma when her Home Minis...

I handed the nascent iPhone 2G (not officially sold in Malaysia) to a friend and asked him for his take. He gave me four points for rejecting it:- 1. It felt like a bar of soap. 2. It did not have a physical keypad as in the Blackberry he was using. 3. Loading emails were slower than on his BB, given that attachments were loaded with text but on his device, only the text was loaded which was what professionals required on the go. The attachments, he said, could be read at his convenience on his desktop, and 4. Touching and swiping to open apps and pinching on text were adolescent behaviour and not natural for adults, as opposed to scrolling and clicking on the BB. I thanked him for his opinion which I stressed I valued but before I left, he asked me for my take, more on his opinion, than on the iPhone itself. I told him given that you don't have to be an old goat to grasp that change is the one constant that allows something to die, when another is born, points he offered ...

Occam's Razor is the principle attributed to William of Hockham, a 14 th century Franciscan, who said "in explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary" It tells us that assumptions, even the political landscape, must be as few as possible. I believe a 'Marcos' of cataclysmic proportions and with a penchant for chess, is behind the simultaneous woes of two personalities who apparently believe they are dealing with a daft fowl when in actuality, their common quarry is draped in swirling knives. My belief is not due to knowledge of the principle but rather founded on it. It is part of my rational that comes from a passion of putting together a simple bicycle and perhaps deciphering body language. For example a 10-minute video of a press conference where he holds court, could take me several hours to detect and decipher a couple of red flags when there may be several. The principle offers a formula that does not...

In the furor surrounding his famous satire, a novelist said ‘Without freedom to offend expression, freedom of expression ceases’. Read with the recent decision to suspend an UMNO division leader from the party, the quotation underscores the promotion of a regressive culture rather than a progressive one. The division chief said - Malaysian Chinese were immigrants, thus they do not deserve equal rights. Simply put, he stated a cold fact and then rendered a blunt opinion. Both points are perfect grounds for a partisan discourse but his adjudicators pandered to an emotive gallery and demanded of the ‘alleged offender’ an apology for re-stating a historical fact and when he refused they ostracized him, thereby dismissing an excellent opportunity to rebut a popular, albeit privately, held sentiment amongst many. A clear distinction between savaging a person’s opinion, expression or approach and savaging the personality should be drawn. His detractors chose to savage the person r...