Riza Hasn't Paid

Riza hasn't paid anything into my account yet. I tried to call him but his phone was not reachable.

Addin called, he would like me to join him in a discussion with the Courts this coming Wednesday. He called again later to inform that the meeting would be in Penang. I will be going in his car on Tuesday and we will be putting up together in a hotel. He needs someone to handle the accounting aspects with the court and will set aside a small fee for me.

However, he hasn't ironed out the exact terms of his engagement with Rishi. He is concerned that Rishi's been giving him an increasing amount of work without any clear engagement. He had been working on these without pay.

Our relationship with Rishi had been good and Rishi's an honest person. The only problem that could arise here is a misunderstanding. Rishi may not understand the amount of work Addin and his team are putting in to help him out. He had probably not been officially engaged by the Courts and in turn, he has not engaged Addin.

Addin will be talking to Rishi before we go to resolve this ambiguity. If all is okay from his talk then we will go.

I am bothered about the difficulty of getting Riza. I wonder if he will ever change. Some day this will get to him, definitely. In the way that one squares off one's account when the end is near.

A friend from Kedah, Othman sent me a lecture, from MIT, and asked for my comments.

A good many years ago, I read this book by Mario Puzo called Fool's Die. It was the beginning of my appreciation of the importance of being paranoid. Over the years, after having read the book, I have seen many great products and businesses die: Visicalc, CP/M, dbase II and Ashton Tate, Wordstar, Word Perfect, Borland stuffs, Lotus 123, Lotus Notes.

But I have also seen a handful survive. For example, this flight simulator that we used to run on a modest IBM PC by the Microsoft label (it was actually built by Sublogic). As at the time of this writing, Microsoft has grown into the largest company in the world and although the Flight Simulator predates all the above-stated products, it is still alive and being upgraded from time to time.

Why?

Because Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and still its owner, is paranoid.

Coming to the video, our lives depend on things working harmoniously. One of these things that need to work for us, and probably the softest and most fragile, is the brain. Everyday, I live constantly with the awareness that my brain can go off any time. It is of utmost urgency that I should put it to good use while it is still working. There is still so much that needs done. I wake up every morning with this awareness and I drop to sleep every night with the same.

The reason why the lady in the video, a brain researcher, did not correlate the symptoms that her friend Bob was having with her research on the brain, to me, is starkly simple. She thought that it only happens to others.

We are others to others too.

Talking about paranoia, something is begging us to be paranoid now. The COP26 conference that is now taking place in Glasgow is highlighting a very important threat. The threat of human extinction, before the end of this century.

In Islam, it is told that when God wanted to create humans, the angels remarked that it was a bad idea. But God replied that He knows best. And so He created humans. 

And God made a show of it after he had created Adam. He taught Adam about the nature things. Then He called all the angels to gather around to listen to Adam recite what he knew. The angels, who had opposed Adam's creation, were humbled. God had vindicated His new creation, and He commanded the angels to prostrate before Adam.

Many religions and belief systems believe that human was created to know God. To adore and worship Him out of this knowledge. The angels worship Him unhaltingly, but they do not know what Adam and his progenies know. So the quality of human knowledge, imbued with knowledge about God, is on a different level than the angels'.

As I ponder upon the prospects of mankind's extinction, I am struck by how little we know. We barely know about matter and anti-matter, which makes up about 5% of the Universe maybe. There is Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and so much more about the Quantum Force Fields, the Non-Local Universe, other universes and the emptiness in between.

God knows it. This is as much as He intended man to know about Himself. Going back to the premise of Adam's creation, there is probably no other creature who has this capability apart from man. 

If this much is true then God, as vast as an endless ocean in every direction, created man to understand a drop of water.

That, it seems, is all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Meeting

Had a meeting with Moy and Nasha last night. Moy brought his wife Lyn along. We've met once before, she said. 

It was a good meeting. Moy had been running a business for the last 20 years and he had been building expertise in integrating data feeds from sensors with other industrial data to produce meaningful information.

Moy has already built up an impressive track record and has many noteworthy customers under his belt. His business is undergoing growing pains and he needs assistance to manage this. Nasha, as usual, is very good with strategies and he quickly saw what Moy needs.

Mehtab came a bit late but when he saw what Moy was involved in, he mentioned that he has some potential businesses that he can introduce us to. He outlined three situations and we saw that these had potential. Mehtab will be introducing me to his new boss and I have a proposal to prepare for a company he knows well.

Moy will be passing me some material to assess.

Plenty of work from the meeting.

When I arrived home, everybody had gone to sleep. I checked on the fund tranfers. DS had remitted enough for Aiman to take his allergen tests tomorrow. Five days had passed since he took his last steroid pills and the doctor had informed him that tomorrow's a good day to take those tests. Thank God for the funds from DS. Aiman had been wanting to have these tests for the longest time. He had an outbreak recently again, which he managed to identify the cause to: almond oil contained in a moisturizer he was using. The moisturizer was introduced by the same doctor. 

Riza, however, had not remitted anything in. He promised to at the end of last week and it is midweek now. Typical of him. Always preoccupied with his own concerns and ignoring the needs of others - until he needs their help. I will have to contact him tomorrow and follow up about it. This in itself is a problem. Getting him to pick up his phone is largely a matter of good fortune. If he picks it up, then it's good luck. If he does not, then it is no luck for the day. One will have to wait for another day.

That is as far as phone calls are concerned. Getting him to remit the funds will be another battle. And he wonders why his business is still struggling after umpteen years and many large projects. He does not see the importance of being more reliable to his customers. It's something no one can help him with. He will have to live and die with how he manages himself.

My father in law is becoming more of a nuisance now. He insists on watching the TV channel that he wants in the midst of others watching theirs. He wanders to and from his room to the living room, back and forth, back and forth. Often he would stop and ask for some small chores to be done, like changing the time on his phone. When he speaks, he asks about who's going to win the next General Elections.

I simply ignore it. He has earned a lot of bad karma during his life, picking up bad vibes, learning hocus pocus stuffs he should not have dabbled with, and now he is nothing but a pale, wraithlike creature. He will have to live and die with the existence that he had created for himself, and bring those who were with him, with him too.

I ponder upon the things that I will have to do. It is too late now to start working on them. There is plenty of homework that I should be starting to do regarding the year-end grants. I need to embark on these soon. 

I have had a proper dinner yet. I have communications to reply. I'll reply to them first, then have dinner, then catch up with the latest proceedings on the climate conference, then go to bed. I wanted to write some specific details on the climate but I have to check on some facts first.

I think I'll do all those tomorrow. Will have to check with Riza tomorrow, what a bother.

Oh yes, Nurul says that the teleconference with his boss will be tomorrow, but he has not set up his time properly. If he misses this again tomorrow, I am thinking of telling his boss to just forget it. 

Anyway, I have written my post:

Here's the gist of it. You won't find some of these in the video, but still, it's a good watch. Because pictures are worth thousands of words.

What we are facing now is the result of increasing the world's surface temperature by 1.5 degrees Celcius since man first started the Industrial Revolution.

Increasing the global surface temperature is not the same as increasing it in a room. Global means chain effects. Around the world.

Our world is tiny by galactic measures. A storm on Jupiter can swallow the Earth whole.

We expect the temperature to increase by 3 degrees by 2100 - gradually. Gradually means slow cooking with the occasional and increasing boiling bubble bursts.

If we do our best, we can reduce the increase to 2 degrees.

The G20 countries, last week in Italy, have pledged to cap it at the present 1.5 degrees, leaving us more buffer.

What will that take?

Trillions of USD. Almost all the money in the world.

Back in Paris 5 years ago, USD 100 billion was pledged. It has not been fully collected. Even if collected, the pledges will only be totally collected in 2023.

But we have no choice.

The G20 countries make 85% of the world total GDP. They produce 75% of the total pollutants and they host only 66% of the world's population.

That does not mean that we can leave it to the G20s.

The rest of the world has to take care of the remaining 35% of the population. And there is something called "local climate".

What is "local climate"?

Water in our reservoirs, for example.

While we cannot do much to fight against the entire global trend, we still live in our own niche, we still influence the coolness of our backyards somewhat, we can still produce or curtail our local rainfall in some ways.

Anyway, those are the short of the long.

The COP21s are now talking about bringing in the technologies and the investments faster.

Let's keep our ears on the ground.

 

#cop21 #climatecrisis #climateaction