This is a busy month of festivities, first with Hari Raya and then come Christmas. On the personal front, I had been ill and also been busy organising a conference. You can see some reference to it if you visit About Me.

I have been inundated with many mails from different mailings lists, telling me about conferences, about the latest news, about issues under discussion and basically information. I think all of us, including myself, are suffering from overflow of information as net denizens. Heck, I am adding to the wasteland of bits and bytes with my posting here. The Bar Council of Malaysia and HAKAM (a human rights watchdog) have had a seminar on anti-terrorism laws which I was unable to attend. Perhaps I will find out more about that went on there once I could speak to one of the organisers or participants. Prof Orville Schell came to Malaysia to discuss China's issues as well as issues pertaining to media schools. How many of you agree that one should go through journalism school to become a good journalism? A discussion on a mailing list has had many people agreeing and disagreeing on the idea of journalism school. It was rumoured that it is a very American trend. I know that it isn't a very Britishy thing, since my research into 18th century life in England (yes, I preparing for a conference in this area), disproved formal training in journalism. Most of the hack writers and journalists of that period were either trained in other areas or were self-taught. Reading through the journalists' writing in my Penguin's Book of Journalism, most of them had never been through journalism school. Do you think that having something dished out to you can make you a softie? The argument might be that you are better equipped and am able to make less technical mistakes compared to the untrained ones. Go figure and post me your thoughts. You can post it in my guestbook or send me an email.

Talking about the class on appreciation which I was planning to have, I am still planning to have it, but I would need to push it to sometime next year as I am rather busy this year. Once I can plan out next year's schedule in Jan, I will be able to let you all know when. However, I will post up stuff here as often as I could.

Have a nice holiday season and don't overconsume.