**Cycling Hacking GeekDom ** ALL ABOUT ALEXANDER LING **Cycling Hacking GeekDom** ...the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Those with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists... Schmidt-Nielsen, The Camel's Nose: Memoirs of a curious scientist.

Taiwanese by birth, Bruneian by breeding and Singaporean by choice, and married to a real Singapore gal. Father a Taiwanese, mother Chinese-Bruneian,having a Filipina grandmother further back down the family tree. Given such a background, I dont really know what to call myself. Asian? World Citizen? I spent 20 years in Brunei Darussalam, a sleepy little sultanate on the island of Borneo. There I was educated in the Catholic Mission School of St. George's. All those years spent there, learning English and Malay and an assortment of other subjects deemed essential by the authorities. Bruneian schools are not noted for their encouragement of sports. And since I lived out in the kampung areas, I had to rely on indigenious modes of distraction. After 20 years of suffering under the yoke of boredom, I finally won a scholarship to study physics in NUS.It was a Goh Keng Swee Scholarship awarded by the Association of Banks of Singapore and I am grateful to those folks for giving me the chance to come to such a nice place. Why physics? With my A level grades I could have made it quite easily into engineering or law. But I'm a bit of an idealist. I love to try to explain things to myself. Why leaves tumble over and the sky is blue and all other such trivial nonsense that I find so amusing. Why do we need water to iron our clothes? What makes a welding rod weld? After 4 years in NUS, I can safely say that alot of my childhood questions have been answered. It was only after I came to Singapore that I began to learn how to play most sports with proper rules and regulations - perhaps I found all those rules tiresome and became more interested in hiking and more solo activities like canoeing. Times change. I don't do much hiking and canoeing anymore. My friends Michael and Serene introduced me to cycling in June 2000 and I've been pushing the pedals ever since. Started out with a 2nd hand, titanium mtn bike and found that what I really enjoyed was going fast on the road. So I graduated to a Litespeed Vortex bike that I well and truly love. I used to work as an Educational Technologist for the IT Unit in the Faculty of Science for 4 years. Then I enrolled as a Graduate Student in the Department of Physics. I now work for the Quantum Information Technology Lab in the department as a Research Assistant while studying towards the higher degree. Its cool stuff; laboratory work is definitely something I can enjoy. After almost five years of slaving away, I just handed in the first draft of my PhD thesis. This phase is going to be over very soon!