Chan's Personal Blog

Last night I gave my presentation and talk on the genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, and it went fairly well. I brought in my computer to do the presentation, because none of the church computers were fast enough to run it. Surprise surprise, during the multimedia presentation, my computer crashes, and I had to reboot. Luckily the presentation crashed right before Act II, and I had programmed a script to allow me to jump directly to Act II, so we didn't have to start from the beginning of the multimedia presentation again. I probably have to do some maintenance on my computer since my computer has been doing a lot of heavy lifting with all the audio and image editing/processing that I had to do for the presentation.

In either case, about two weeks ago, Pastor Geoff was saying that he was preparing a series of talks on human suffering, in particular, the genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. He asked if I could talk a bit about it. I thought, great, I'm not that good of a public speaker at all, and I had a project due, so lets see what happens. During that weekend, I blitzed though my project and finished it early. In addition, I came across an awe-inspiring sound track that I thought would be perfect for a multimedia presentation. So, I'm all in, I'll supplement my talk with a multimedia presentation. Great! The presentation will do most of the talking for me. (If you knew me from high school, you'll know that I share my ideas best through multimedia presentations, while sitting behind the scenes, that is my medium for expression and creativity.)

I think the most difficult part of the whole experience was choosing images for the presentation. I mean, it's about genocide after all. One has to filter through a lot of sad photos before finding the most appropriate material. Audience is also an issue because sometimes on Friday nights we have kids as young as 13 years old probably, so doing a presentation for all ages is somewhat difficult. It's a balancing act between presenting something that is true to what happened, and watering it down too much such that it loses its integrity.

Anyways, my presentation and talk went for about 20 minutes (5 minutes overtime), but it was well received I think. The multimedia worked great on the big screen along with the big sound system that the church has. The sound track sounded awesome in that space as the acoustical properties of the church are excellent. Mental note to self, when giving a talk, have a cup of water on hand.

I'm going to post a summary of my talk some time this coming week. If anyone's interested in seeing the flash presentation that I made, e-mail me or leave a comment, and I'll give you instructions of where to get it. I can't just embed the presentation in my blog because it was never designed for web deployment.

Pastor Geoff's talk afterwards was also very mind provoking, and I'm still digesting issues and thoughts that were brought up. All in all, it was a pretty good night. Thank you Pastor Geoff for giving me this opportunity to share.

P.S. Thanks for coming out to show support Natalie, it means a lot, and it made the task a bit easier .

After the wake of London's terrorist bombings, Canada's top soldier issued a number of bold statement against the terrorists. The most notable statement is that Canada will be deploying JTF2 (Joint Task Force 2) against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. JTF2 is an elite special forces military group within the Canadian military whose existence was secret until the war on terror broke out. The group is considered on par with other special forces of the world such as the British SAS. The wikipedia offers more indepth information about JTF2.

From the CTV article:


I salute our military forces that are leaving to engage the terrorists in Afghanistan. Now if only Canada can bag Bin Laden alive, that would be bragging points right there. That'll show the Americans .

Surrey North Independent MP, Chuck Cadman has died of skin cancer tonight. This last year he had been in the headlines quite a bit as he held the balance of power in parliament. The Liberal Government had a nail biting confidence motion, and if defeated, would have caused the government to collapse. Chuck Cadman hadn't told reporters how he would vote in the confidence motion. The numbers looked like 151 for the Liberal government, 152 against the government, and one undecided, which was Chuck Cadman. He promised that he would listen to his constituents, and vote the way they wanted, rather than to vote for a party giving out favours, or along traditional party lines (Chuck Cadman being an ex-conservative MP).

For a few moments in time, Chuck Cadman was the most powerful politician in the land as his vote determined if the government survived. Ultimately, he sided with the Liberals, and the government emerged victorious.

The CBC outlines some of Chuck Cadman's accomplishments in politics:


I personally admire Cadman for being a working class politician. He bucked the stereotypical image of politicians who are corrupt, rich lawyers. He wore jeans and chewed gum in parliament for crying out loud! I also salute his decision to vote on issues based on his constitutents, rather than trying to get ahead by receiving political favours for his vote. I also admire how he went to Ottawa to vote on important bills even though he was sick, and probably should have been resting at home, or receiving treatment.

This morning, when I got up and saw the news, chills immediately went down my spine, and feelings from the 3/11 terrorist attacks in Madrid resurfaced. This time, the terrorists targeted civilians in the London mass transit system. The story can be read at the BBC, and CNN. I'm not going to quote the articles, as there's too much information to divulge, so I think you should go read all about it. The statistics are quite troubling, 37 people dead, and 700 wounded. The terrorists hit three subway trains, and a double decker bus. The most horrendous report I've read so far was about the attack on the bus which happened at street level during rush hour. They say limbs, flesh, blood, and heads were thrown all over the street. Very disturbing.

Some of my immediate thoughts were, thank God that the terrorist attacks didn't occur during the Live8 concerts in London where thousands of people had gathered. Thank God that it didn't occur yesterday when many people were out celebrating in London over their victorious 2012 Olympic bid. The casualty numbers could have been really bad.

The news reports also say that the telephone system was completely jammed because everyone was flooding the system with phone calls, so important calls couldn't get through. People on cell phones were least likely to get through on phones simply because that's how they designed the phone system. God forbid, if an emergency situation erupted here, please stay off the phone system. I'm curious to know if internet communication mediums such as VoIP would fare better in an emergency situation. I'm thinking it would fare better because the Internet intelligently sends packets around congested paths on the network; thus, bypassing bottlenecks. Remember that the Internet was designed to continue working in the event of a nuclear war, so the system is much more resilient.

Another interesting discussion I read about was someone asking why this terrorist attack was so much smaller compared to say, 9/11 where almost 3,000 people died. A lot of people argue that terrorists would be stupid to try to hijack a plane. In the past, when planes were hijacked, a handful of 4 or 5 terrorists could subdue a plane load of civilians because civilians were taught to not put up a fight, and let the authorities take care of it. Most hijackings usually involved terrorists landing the plane somewhere and making demands (like the movies). Civilians never imagined that terrorists would turn planes into a suicide cruise missile and aim them at buildings. If a group of terrorists tried pulling the same thing now, they'd probably be pummeled to death by a crowd of angry airborne civilians.

While watching CNN, an analyst brought up an interesting point that London and its people were well prepared for terrorist attacks since they've had terrorist attacks by the IRA for quite some time already. Because of past terrorist bombins, most of London has remote security cameras recording what's happening on the streets all the time. They say a person living in London will be recorded by cameras 300 times a day on average. Their subway system also has an extensive surveillence system, so they're pouring through all the footage now to try to find the cowards that did this. There's a pretty good chance that they'll be able to identify the bombers. God speed to the investigators.

I think this attack shows just how hard it is to defend a city against an invisible enemy hiding in a free and democratic nation. It is extremely difficult to root out invisible enemy combatents without infringing on the rights and liberties granted to people in a free society. The trouble is we have to rely on our intelligence services to get it right 100% of the time to be safe. For the terrorists, they only have to get it right once. It'll be interesting to look back 20 years from now to see what tactics we adopted to counter this terrorist threat. The trouble now is that we've trained our military to be very good at blowing up tanks, aircrafts, and such from an enemy nation. These tactics are useless against terrorists as they are invisible, and they don't fly under a nation's flag. The military think tanks never anticipated the next war to be a global war on terror. All this time, our military has been designed to counter the communist threat. We planned for a conventional war, but we're in the middle of an unconvential guerrila war against an enemy that lives amongst us.

Anyways, my prayers go out to the people of London who are standing tall in this tragedy.