HlaMin

Day: February 26, 2026

  • U Soe Paing

    Saya Paing

    One day, the people on the UCC ferry shouted, “Saya Paing”. To their amazement, ICS U Paing (Saya’s father) came out.

    Saya U Soe Paing is the second son of U Paing and Daw Oo Yin (Daughter of Sir Po Tha and Lady Tha).

    Golf Champions

    Saya and his siblings Dr. Myo Paing, U Win Paing (Sayadaw U Wara, ChE70) and U Kyaw Paing (Putra Cup Player) are excellent golfers and Champions at RGC (Rangoon Golf Club) and BGC (Burma Golf Club).

    St. Paul’s High School

    Saya matriculated from SPHS (St. Paul’s High School) in 1956 along with U Ko Ko Lay, U Win Htein, Percy Maung Maung, U Than Se (Richard Khoo), and U Ba Min.

    Saya stood 13th in Matriculation and was awarded Collegiate Scholarship.

    Rangoon University

    Saya won two Gold Medals for excellence in the Intermediate of Science.

    He scored the highest marks in the I.Sc. examinations.

    He scored the highest marks in Mathematics in I.Sc. along with two other students.

    Since the original endowment for the Gold Medals did not cover the rising cost of Gold, Saya’s family had to give K150 for each Gold Medal.

    Saya rowed and coxed at RUBC. Saya won prizes including the Inter-Hall Fours.

    Stanford University

    Saya was selected as a States Scholar to attend Stanford University along with Saya U Ko Ko Lay and Bohmu Percy.

    Saya received his BS and MS in EE (Electrical Engineering).

    Saya did programming for his studies and also worked part-time as computer operator.

    RIT Electrical

    Upon his return to Burma, Saya joined the EE Department as Assistant Lecturer. His sponsor supposedly was UBARI (Union of Burma Applied Research Institute).

    At a research congress held in the Main Campus, Saya presented a paper covering Digital Logic and Circuits,. Dr. Chit Swe was impressed. Through Saya U Nyi Nyi (EE saya, who moved to the UK), Saya Paing gained contact with Saya Chit. The rest is history.

    Saya Paing would help Saya Chit with the UCC Project.

    It would take a few years before the UCC Project got approved by UN and funded by UNDP.

    UCC – RIT Connection

    Saya Paing promised Saya Chit to recruit his top students to join the UCC Project, but the long delay of the Project to get funded made the task difficult.

    Ko Tun Aung Gyaw (EC69), Ko Hla Min (EC69) and Ko Soe Win (EC70) joined UCC as Maintenance Engineers.

    Ko Hla Min (Pauk Si, EP70) joined UCC as Chief Operator.

    Ko Aung Myint transferred from the RIT EE Laboratory to join UCC as Maintenance Technician.

    UCC

    Saya transferred to UCC as Manager of Systems Division. He managed Maintenance Engineers, Maintenance Technicians, System Programmers and Software Librarian (to name a few).

    Saya did another Masters (this time in Computer Science) at Southampton University in UK.

    Saya would later manage the Operations Division as well.

    Saya allowed Ko Aung Zaw and me to co-author Lecture Guides and Training Manuals for use at UCC.

    UN

    Saya served as Project Manager / Advisor for UN projects in several countries.

    For details

    For a detailed story of Saya’s life and work at RIT, UCC and overseas as a UN Advisor, read his articles in English and Burmese. They are available in SCRIB_D.

    Saya wrote “Computer Ah Sa UCC Ga”

    Sayagadaw and Classmate

    Saya U Soe Paing in California
    Saya U Soe Paing in New Jersey (2018)
    Saya U Soe Paing in 2009

    Sayagadaw Daw Saw Yu Tint (Alice, T69) was my classmate at RIT.

    She and Saya Paing have hosted several UCC mini-gatherings at their house.

    At one of the gatherings in 2007, Ko Po (U Htin Kyaw, Peter Wun) not only attended the gathering, but gave me a ride back home. He also briefly mentioned about his four-month detention.

    After retirement

    After retiring from the UN, Saya would visit UK, USA and Singapore to spend time with his children and grandchildren.

    During his trips to New Jersey, there would be several UCC-RIT gatherings.

    Ivan Lee (Khin Maung Oo, M69) has hosted the annual RIT-UCC gatherings for a decade or so. He would invite Saya Dr. Aung Gyi and Ma Ma Emma to stay at his house. The timing is chosen to coincide with Saya Paing’s visit to New Jersey.

    Saya is healthy, but he had two operations :

    • by-pass heart surgery
    • surgery for the back

    Saya meditates and plays golf. Saya stopped both activities when he had a minor ailment (hurting his back and leg). Per advice of Alice’s medical friends (MEHS Alumni), Saya had a surgery in Singapore.

  • Email

    When one is sending e-mail to specified recipients, one is pushing one’s message to others. The intended recipients may (a) welcome your message (b) defer to check your message (c) may ignore your message (d) flag your message as “junk” …

    Some e-mail systems send acknowledgement for important messages. Some may ask you to verify for the first time. E-mail systems may maintain “Black lists” and “White lists”.

    Some have multiple e-mails either with different email providers (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo mail) or even with a single email (e.g. one for private, another for business).

    Some email systems provide encryption.

    In one of my jobs, we could not specify sensitive information in e-mails.

    Do not assume that your deleted e-mail is gone forever. There is logical deletion and physical deletion. Even with physical deletion, copies of the e-mail may still linger in one or more mail servers and backup devices.

    Email providers will scan your e-mail (e.g. using AdSense or a Recommended System) to offer you targeted advertisements.

    U Khin Maung Zaw (KMZ, EC76) wrote :

    (1) One of the surprises we discovered while on an IBM mainframe system is that a small file which keep track of the email system had the heaviest activity. Part of this small checked the flags, like who in your distribution list had seen/viewed your message. We then acquired a SSD, Solid State Device, mainly for passing files and this email network file on SSD, and saw the high improvement in the overall performance.

    Heard from the grapevine that, later email systems attempted as such but it did not scale well as the user population exploded.

    (2) One of my directors at the time proudly let his subordinates know that he had no more than 20 messages in his inbox at any given time. Of course, he spent some time deleting them as they came in,

    (3) In my last company, email system had come very close to abuse, thousand or more messages a day, and people spent hours a day just for going through daily mails, this is even with the files. There are many times that you could even go through messages from immediate manager.

    Many of these messages originated from plethora of monitoring systems, hardware/infrastructural /applications, drove people nuts.

    (4) When we first started in my last company, in late 90s, everyone (not in the executive levels) had the inbox size of 20MB. It became minuscule as soon as we had, notifications came every day to remove/archive the old messages. In the mid-2010s the inbox size was at 250MB, that’s in Office365.