The Dodgy DVDs

I tweeted this afternoon that I was heading to Sungai Wang to get some ‘dodgy’ DVDs. The impression that I created to everybody was I was looking for porn! Far from it, especially there were torrents for those. I was looking for movies and TV series actually. Which bring me to the reason why I did that.

I wish that I was able to download these series legally in Malaysia. Unfortunately, there are a couple of snags to that, and I do not mean the problem with censorship. Yorais have to earn his living for that obviously, so I will just let him worry about that. The couples of problem I meant was the fact that legal outlets such as iTunes, Netflix and Hulu will never see the light of day in Malaysia. If you were resourceful, and many of us in Malaysia were, we can use a US credit card and have an IP proxy, and iTunes will be in your lap. Unfortunately, the second issue was more complicated. We have yet to have extensive really high quality fast broadband available. Without such service, these streaming and downloading services would be meaningless. Time Broadband sounded promising with the fibreoptics connections it offer - purported to carry data at up to 50 Mb/s. YES 4G was still not extensive, and once it has reached a bigger coverage area, the speed might start to suffer as well. Unifi seemed promising, but judging fromTM’s past performance with Streamyx, I would want to watch the space first before believing it to be the best thing since sliced bread as the service claimed to be.

Heavy traffic leading to Sungai Wang todayTreat for the boysIn the meantime, I could still download and stream some torrents down on my 1 Mb/s P1 Wimax connection. It had its moment, but lately, with the increased coverage in Lembah Kelang, the speed suffered as well. Alternatively, would be a quick trip to Sungai Wang to visit my friendly pirated DVD vendor to get my fix. Don’t get me wrong, the operating system and softwares in my computer were all original, even the games. Why did I buy them at such price? Because they were available to be bought. The vendor was kind today, and I managed to get hold of the latest seasons of Madmen, Entourage and Fringe! Puan Anita got her wish as well - Glee and Tru Blood.

Thank you and see you next week

As I mentioned earlier, next week will be exam week in Kelang and with the Xmas break coming up, it was understandable that once the exam was done, everybody would start to shut down. Some have even made plans to return to Mum and Dad - the one from Cameron Highlands, you know who you are! Since I will not be taking any formal classes next week, the students asked me to join them for some afternoon tea. We did so at the nearby Pizza Hut - apparently at the only shopping mall in Kelang as they admitted so grudgingly.

I left my wallet at home, so I was not able to fork out any park of the bill. I did offer to clean the plates and mop the floor however. It was nice to chat with them in matters outside medicine for a change. They tried hard however to pry out any clues from next week exam, but I managed to resist it. So, to all of you, good luck and please calm down and not get too excited during the clinical short case. If you just follow the steps, all of you will be fine. I shall see you next week!

It was raining outside

It looked like it would be raining outside. I just had lunch and was about to leave for Friday Prayers. But with the rain, I may have to give it a rest.

Today would mark the third week that I would be in Kelang teaching my Medical Students. I have another week to go, but it would be the exam week then. So, the students were understandably anxious - Malaysian education system is exam-driven, right from kindergarten to Medical School. We finished our clinical session just now and after another tutorial this afternoon, that would be it for the week. They had another pair of lecturers before me for four weeks, so all together they would have a total 7 weeks of teaching. For the exam next week, I prepared an essay question, as well as organising the clinical examination short cases for each one of them. All 44 of them.

When I first started coming to Kelang back in 2004, there were only 32 students in my class. All of them have graduated, and some of them still kept in touch. It was easy as I enjoy teaching, but 44 students to one lecturer was just way too much. There were too many compromises being made, and in the three weeks I had so far with them, I was sure not all of the students were happy. They had to understand however that I can;t please everyone, not it was my job to please them.

I kept on stressing to the department and the students that my role here in Kelang would be to facilitate teaching. Facilitating does not mean spoon-feeding them with information. As Medicine was such a wide and varied subject, I was not capable, or should be expected to be able to know everything. The pace of the development in Medicine was also very rapid. I read journals just to keep up and it was not easy to stay at the cutting edge of things. But at least the UM Medical Students should be grateful. They have dedicated lecturers who came and taught, them, not only from my department, but from Surgical, Gynaecology and Paediatrics as well. I can name a few other medical schools who struggle to keep up. They may have far too many medical students to cope with and were not able to supervise all of them. Here, at UM, even though we had to struggle at times, we tried our best to keep up and were successful most of the time. But I was not sure how long we can keep up with the 44 to 1 ratio. It was starting to break my back ….. I was worried that we give too much emphasis on quantity rather than quality.

The students complained that they did not have enough teaching. The lecturers complained that it was too much work to do going about teaching these large group. The Management were under pressure to produce more doctors by the powers that be. And I understood that Malaysia needed more doctors in general. The solution here may be very obvious. We need more lecturers. We need more people on the ground. We need to recruit more people. We need to bring the 44:1 ratio down. But there were not too many people to take up the task of being medical lecturers as it took time and commitment to do it well. There were many more easier path to take on to progress in medical career compared to being a lecturer. It was a vicious cycle. But we have to start somewhere and we have to make the job of being a lecturer more attractive.We have to start paying the medical lecturers better salary. Certainly there were move in that direction, but would be enough to make the carrer choice more attractive would it be able to make the career choice more attractive , than say, a chronic MO in Kementerian Kesihatan. I bet some of them were paid more than me doing half the amount of work.

It was raining heavily outside. It looked like that I will be missing my Friday prayers. 

Teluk Kemang

After our day at the Legend, we decided to wind down before returning to KL by visiting Teluk Kemang. There have been some changes to the place since we last visited there. They have cleared the beach by quite a bit, new facilities with seats and toilets were built and the whole seemed a bit greener. There were more shops there now - maybe due to school holidays - but the problem with parking was still there.

There were throng of people there that afternoon when we visited and the shops were full. Since Puan Anita was busy shopping, the boys and I spend some time clowning around. They got themselves some bubbles to keep them amused for a little while. We topped off the afternoon by having lunch at the PD Golf Club. The journey home took about 2 hours, which was OK considering that it was the start of the school holiday season.

Playground

I had some extra teaching session this afternoon after I was finished in Kelang. As soon as I reached home, Puan Anita asked me to take her out for some groceries. The boys wanted to go to IKANO to play at the indoor playground and have dinner there. Since Idlan had hardly had any lunch, we decided to do dinner first. So we went to Italiannes at The Curve.

I blogged about the Xmas decor at The Curve before, so there were nothing new to report. Dinner was nice, until I realised that Italiannes is more adept at starters and small snacks rather than main courses. The pizza and bruchetta were glorious, but alas, the main - I ordered salmon with pasta and Anita had some seafood pasta aglio olio. Forgettable.

The front door of ItalianniesThe starter - deliciousThe main course - not soAfter dinner, we went across to IKANO. Anita did her shopping while I took the kids to the playground. It was located on the top - second - floor, right next to the pet store. Over the years, the place have evolved. It used to only have a single inflatable giant slide. It has a couple now and it has been changed, so the boys won't get bored. There were also Playstation console is you feel like it. It wasn't that full late in the evening, so the boys got the place to themselves.

All spent after half an hour in the playgroundLooking forward to more activities this weekend, though I will be occupied with a few lectures and essays to do. I'll also likely to be busy updating the hematologiPPUM.com site. I might take them out on one of the afternoons as well but not sure where to yet.