IHSAN KHAIRIR

This is my youngest brother Abu. He is currently six years old.

It seems that he shares my interest in photography. I remember the day the above photo was taken. It was at a family gathering, and I was happily snapping pictures of the family younglings before I realized that Abu was doing the exact same thing using my sister Kim’s camera. I guess we are more alike than I previously thought.

He has his mood swings when it comes to being photographed though. There’d be times when he absolutely refuses to have his picture taken and would make a scene if he discovers that somebody just snapped a picture of him without his consent. Other times he’d be super excited to be photographed and would do funny and interesting poses and demand to see the photos immediately after they were snapped. And during such times I would take the chance of exploring photography with Abu as my subject; the most recent results of which can be see in the following pictures.

It was one fine Sunday morning at the pavilion in Putrajaya Wetlands that I saw Abu climbing up and jumping down some terraces. I noticed that the bright morning sun in the sky has caused my eyes to adjust to the brightness, thus rendering everything into dark silhouettes. I immediately took out my camera and snapped up some silhouette photos of my brother.

He saw that I was taking photos of him and alhamdulillah, he’s in the mood for pictures. So I had him jump a few more times…

… and let him strike a few poses of his own.

I love it when he uses his own creativity to pose. It makes the photo more honest and sincere and more reflective of his own identity. When I look at the photos, I would remember his energy and excitement and the innocence of his youth. And it’s the sincerity and frankness in these photos that make them all the more memorable and priceless.

I would surely miss moments like these when Abu grows up…

They are pure, untainted, and clear. And if we look carefully, we can actually see ourselves in their eyes. We see what they see. And maybe if we learn to look at ourselves through children’s eyes, life wouldn’t be as complicated as it has been.

I wish I have a child’s pure and untainted eyes.

Am I a MATLAB geek? Let’s look at the list and see…

1. Most of what I do at work involve some amount of MATLAB programming. This is because the nature of what I do revolves around mathematical problems that require repetitive calculations, sometimes even tens thousands of repetitions. So I need to program functions just to produce these thousands of results without having me meticulously do the same thing over and over again thousands of times.

2. I get excited over optimization problems. When given such problems, I like to explore the possible parameters for optimization and then use some programming to find the optimal solution. Programs used so far are AMPL and MATLAB. Methods used so far are multiobjective goal programming, k-means, linear regression, and genetic algorithm.

3. My officemates turn to me for their MATLAB problems, and I get excited over solving those problems. I’d obsess over finding the solutions (I usually do) and would be most happy when the problems are solved.

4. Most of my MATLAB knowledge were self-taught. I read the MATLAB documentation articles like my life depended on it (actually my work depends on it, not that life == work anyways).

5. I sometimes think about mathematical problems and their solution steps in MATLAB code. I feel like Cypher from the Matrix.

6. I update my Twitter and Facebook with what I currently do in MATLAB. Below is a chronological list of the latest status updates:

-Fatigue damage analysis on peak-valley segmented SAE data

-Tweaking my genetic algorithm clustering matlab codes

-Optimization of genetic operator parameter for GA clustering of SAE data

-Still doing genetic operator parameter optimization analysis

-Adding a population limit feature to the GA clustering algorithm to increase analysis speed and also convergence speed

-Gah, matlab processes eating up too much memory space

-Finally! My GA clustering algorithm has been improved! Runtime before: 30 mins. Runtime after: 5 seconds! That’s 36000% Improvement!!!

So, what do you think? Am I a MATLAB geek?