Ultimate Goal in This Life

The last few weeks have changed my perspective on things in general. For one, I'm no longer at looking at things in a purely technical way—I find that I'm also rather interested in the human side of things too. As much as coding is concerned, it would appear to be the case that I try to write less code as oppposed to before, where I actually liked writing more.

One might say that perhaps I have turned into a different kind of me. The me that has probably been lying latent for so long, suppressed due to the environment and even perhaps the people. The me that is essentially a human, not some silly machine that can only spew code and pure geek talk all over the place.

Of course, like all things that I say, I always maintain some sense of a skepticism. Maybe all these are but dreams, and that all these new-found interests in life in general are mere manifestations that do not have any long term effects. I will probably not know about this, but in the meantime, I'm just happy being the way I am.

Life is getting more interesting, probably due to the fact that I'm not taking that many technical courses this semester (I still need to clear all the general education stuff like philosophy-like, psyhology-like and sociology-like classes) and that I'm being exposed to a whole new dimension of things. Suddenly, my world does not consist of just computer programs and more computer programs—there are economic models, theories of ethics and process consulting helping real people solving real problems.

That's where my interest lies—helping real people solve real problems. I knew from the onset that I didn't really like purely theoretical stuff that has no application whatsoever; let's just call it the engineering blood in me talking. I like solving problems; I am a creative thinker. And to top it all off, I have enough charisma and varied experience to be able to pull things off. Does this mean that I no longer like doing research? No, on the contrary, it gives me even more interest in research. Prior to this semester, I've always been in a rather nebulous state of what kind of field that I should be doing research in. I envy my colleagues who have seemingly clear senses of what they would like to research upon, be it theoretical physics, immunology, or even astrophysics. Yet, whenever I ask myself the [rather] simple question of "what is my research focus", I cannot seem to come up with a coherent enough answer that satisfies myself.

I love computer science—that's something that almost everyone who has ever met me will automatically realise. But computer science is too vast a field; and the world being the way it is, there is a need for me to just narrow down my specialty to a single part of computer science. I surveyed the field; I read the literature. I looked at myself, and reflected upon my abilities and short-comings. And I realised that being a pure theoretician is not the way that I should be pursuing what I love. I hereby choose machine learning.

Machine learning is awesome. It gives the computer or computing machinery a rather potent way of being able to come up with its own judgements of things, based literally on what it has seen before. It doesn't require the programmer to sit down and design a program that steps through all possibilities, neither does it require someone to sit there and literally train the computing machinery what is "right" and what is "wrong" for a given situation. At my very heart, I'm a knowledge gatherer—I am addicted to knowing things, which explains why I read all kinds of arcane (read: non-specialty related) texts like pathology, metallurgy, romance and even history just for fun. And after a while, I realise that my mortal mind isn't really capable of retaining all that I might have seen in my lifetime. I assume that among all the other mortals like me, they all have similar problems. If machine learning can be improved to the point that it can make the machines become powerful-enough data classifiers, it will relieve scientists in all fields of the need to memorise voluminous facts, and instead allow them to do what scientists do best—designing creative solutions.

Maybe I'm not smart enough to make a really ground-breaking discovery that will revolutionise the world, but I guess I'm smart enough to be able to apply what I have learnt from such diverse fields and of machine learning to do something that people can actually use to help themselves in life in general. If that can be done, then I guess that I should be rather happy about things, and my job in my professional life will be done.

Force of personality—I think I have neglected that aspect of mine for quite a while ever since I became an official scholar. For too long I have felt threatened by the glamourous fields that my colleagues are involved in, like neuroscience and cancer-research. But now, I just feel somewhat content with my lot. I have a strange talent that even I don't really have a full grasp of, and perhaps this is that extra special something that sets me as being different from the rest of the folks. Comparatively, I'm probably not as smart as many of them, but then again, I'm not as dumb as I seem. An extravert on the outside; an introvert on the inside. There is perhaps more to me that I know little about, and as time goes by and I age ever so frequently, the hidden sides of me are starting to reveal themselves to me in time.

I was not born into a family of great repute nor wealth, nor was my family ever gaining great repute and wealth. I have nothing more to upkeep other than my own ethos; and that has been building itself up rather steadily as time goes by and I slowly seek myself. To be bound in reality, yet free in the mind; a seemingly paradoxical goal, but one that I seem to be striving towards. Reality and abstraction seem one and the same, and I am slowly feeling more at ease at both. Perhaps when I return for the summer, I'd appear to be a much different person than before—I'm not surprised. My world used to be full of shadows of blacks and grays, but today as I stand here and look out of the window, soft pastel colours dominate the landscape.

If I were to die some day, I want to be able to say in my dying breath, that I had, indeed, lived a good life. That is perhaps the ultimate goal in this life.

I'm Obviously Not Writing Here That Often Now

It is perhaps noteworthy that I am currently not writing that often in here. Maybe it is because I have started to run out of things to gripe about, or that there are much more things in the real world that I need to deal with instead of making all kinds of silly noises here. All in all, I suspsect that this might be a good thing.

So, yes, there was a rather interesting anonymous comment made in my previous post. And the answer to that is carefully constructed and placed in the comments section therein. And no, I did not ambush myself with a question like that to generate traffic—on the contrary, I was actively trying to reduce unnecessary traffic due to a rather silly google mis-classification of my blog as providing some manner of download in the form of some wallpaper image.

I don't need that search engine giant propogating my life throughout the world—hardly necessary I suppose. Speaking of which, this semester is just about to start to get rather interesting, as things are starting to rev-up rather quickly. Already I have 6 pieces of homework due on the same day (i.e. tomorrow), and thankfully I'm down to about my last 3, one of which involves drawing some diagram (hopefully not taking too long to do), and another on proving some interesting properties of series convergence (I should be able to do that without killing myself too much I guess). Thank goodness for the invention of LaTeX, otherwise I cannot foresee what I would be doing running around with random scraps of paper and trying to put solutions and proofs together in a linear fashion.

Computer-based work is rather interesting, in the sense that we can do many things in a non-linear way. This is rather useful, since it allows us to better re-allocate our time with regards to what we are doing—literally allowing us to attempt (and solve) the parts of the homework sets that we are confident of solving, and not waste precious time getting rather stalled at the ones that we don't know.

That said, I am contemplating over several issues. One would be whether to obtain Office 2007, and the other is a choice between an ultra-portable computation system or a small-form factor server with which I can use Edythe to talk to. None of these are of particular significance at the moment, and so they currently belong in the "good-to-have" category of expenditure—I've more things to worried about now.

That said, it is back to the grindstone. I just want to finish all my business I have with Windows XP so that I can switch over to Slackware and work on my math proofs.

Till next time.

Almost Done From Hiding

*yawn* Alright, I'm done for the day.

So I grew older by one day officially. No big deal, I guess. I tried to stay away from huge crowds for the last 2 days, and it kinda worked out well. The card and cake got through, but I didn't want to be in such awkward situations.

Call it a tradition I guess.

And no, by now, folks should have realised that I don't really like huge parties—it's just not my style, particularly parties that are being held in my honour. That just doesn't work out. Not being anti-social here, but that huge crowd of people doing something for me just makes me feel rather uncomfortable, considering the fact that I'm more used to doing stuff with/for people than having stuff done for me.

Now that most of the world has passed on into the next day, I think that things are going to get back to normal. Time to get on with life and figure out how to factor in a huge New York-styled cheese-cake as a part of my meals.

Now, if the SSA is going to hold some silly cake-cutting thing on Friday, I'd be bloody uncomfortable and will just bolt off. I mean, seriously, I think I'm probably never going to get used to this, and so yeah, leave me out of this. Ugh.

And no. There wasn't any huge parties, there wasn't a single cake-cutting session, and there weren't anything of that form whatsoever because I didn't want it. A birthday is like any other day, no big deal... hence there's nothing of this sort.

I know, I'm a boring person, but too bad. M3h.

On The Run

On the run, can't speak too much... maybe later.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is Over

And today, I end the story of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Vernes. It is a most remarkable story, though the ending seems to be a tad too dreary and rushed.

On the whole, I rather like this book. Now, the next in my series of leisure reading will be something of a completely different nature—Emma by Jane Austen.

Let's see how many of those literary classics I can read for my leisure time...

Python and SAGE

Honestly, I've always been a rather staunch C/C++ programmer, ever since they gave up supporting QBasic and the rise of GNU/Linux as the "new" hacker-friendly operating system. But after two days of programming with python and SAGE, I must say that python (and its math-oriented superset, SAGE) now rank among my favourite languages.

Python programming is in some ways like the best of C/C++ and Standard ML; python has a decent object oriented programming interface, a decent imperative programming interface, and a decent functional programming interface. The ability to use these three interfaces interchangeably in a single source file is something that I appreciate a lot. For example, some things are more intuitively done with a functional programming interface than through an imperative one, not that C/C++ cannot do it, but the way it is done in python is rather straightforward (just pass the name of the function) as opposed to that done by C/C++ (you pass the name of the function, except that when you write code that uses the passed function, you need to deal with a rather peculiar syntax for function pointers). Also, some things (like mapping over a list of items) are more intuitively done with functional-styled programming than imperative.

Some peculiarities of python need some getting used to. Functions and lists are literally first class citizens in the language, which means that most of the operations that are available off the compiler/interpreter often take lists/functions as parameters. Not that this is bad/inefficient, but it sure takes a little getting used to as opposed to the usual for-loop in C/C++ with counters and stuff—python supports a for-loop whose style is more for iterating through items in a list. Strangely, that doesn't impair me a single bit, since I don't usually use complicated for-loops to start with.

Overall, it is a rather interesting experience in writing code in python. The only reason why it took me so long before I actually started on it was the fact that in its earlier life, python wasn't stable enough for use—the language seemed to be rather ad hoc and have no real structure, and there wasn't a standardised distribution nor a standardised language feature list. Now that python is in a more stable state, it seems rather apt that I play around with it and increase my programming language repertoire once more.

——

In other news, I really want a flute with a B-foot. Not that the C-flute is bad, but that I'm really interested in taking my flute playing skills to a new level. Currently, I'm rather competent with notes that are within the staff, but notes on the upper ledger lines are still killing me on a regular basis. Considering the fact that I now own some practice books, it'll probably be much easier in getting the hang of those pesky upper ledger line notes. That all said and done, it is back to the grindstone for me in finishing more of my homework that is going to be due rather soon.

Till next time.

A Semester Full of Writing and Reading

Ah, a nice text box which actually supports unicoded text and a [relatively] frills-free way of writing thoughts and other stuff. Yes, I miss the simpler days where writing meant picking up one's pen/pencil and writing away on paper, with each stroke a conscious effort made in order to present an idea to the reader.

This semester seems to promise a lot of writing, which can be both good and bad. It is great that there is a lot of writing envolved, as I realised that perhaps it is time for me to actually partake in a different kind of writing; the one that is more akin to the style that humanities scholars are used to, as opposed to the kind that I have been doing. With the writing comes the reading of course. There's just so many articles to read that I'm both happy and worried at the same time.

Also, for the Technical Consulting in the Community course, I actually get to participate in a consulting process and help create a technical consultant report on how to best aid a non-profit organisation in harnessing technology to better improve upon their business processes. That's right, all that skills and experience that I had learnt from my Army days are going to be very useful for this class, and I can't wait to learn even more on how to be a consultant. I mean, let's face it. Even though I keep telling everyone that the computer scientists are the ones who hold the infrastructural power, it is [sadly] still the business people who are the true wielders of power, by virtue of the fact that they are the one who obtain the necessary cash to fund the infrastructure to further their business needs.

What better way to get involved by being a consultant of sorts? I mean, looking at the long term, I can't possibly be doing research forever, leastways, not in Singapore, so there should be some other venue where my inquisitive nature and multi-disciplinary approach can be put to good use. Enhancing business processes can be seen as an optimisation-type problem, with the constraint that we need to pay particular attention to more than just what technology can or cannot do. The thing that I seem to be learning from the class is that there is a difference in being a consulatant and a hired worker; a consultant uses experiences and assists the organisation in setting up upgraded business processes on a strategic level, while the hired worker is just the one who implements the system that has been set forth by the management.

All these while, I've been thinking of myself as some kind of "trench-level" worker; literally fighting the front in the trenches of the war zone. Yet, sometimes deep inside me thare is this little voice that tells me that I could be something more, and that there is much more to me than just doing pure research and basically dealing with project after project without any other contribution to the world at large. Again, in some of those moments of self-doubt, I seem to think that I'm a weakling, and am unable to converse with people, as well as work with them, but the fact of the matter is indeed far from the truth—I am not of that sort. Everyone has their down points, and when I was thinking of things like that, it was most likely when I was at my down point; now I'm not there, and am riding high from waves of support and understanding from the people who care. I feel empowered, literally, to take on tasks which are of a different nature.

Let's face it. I'm not a genius, granted, but I am still rather smart. I'm not saying this in a "I-am-holier-than-thou-art" way, but rather in a matter-of-fact one. People look up to me or try to exploit me simply because there is something for them to look up to or exploit. Becky said something today that struck me in a way that I found rather empowering: "that's because you are good at what you do". So what is it that I am good at doing? Maybe I don't know the exact answer to that, but it is also very likely that I know a good enough approximation of that latent feeling and ability that I have.

Yes, it does make me warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe I have matured a little over the trials that I had for the last few years of my life, or maybe I didn't but circumstances seem to show that it is indeed this way. I am not gifted by any system devised by humankind, but I am blessed with some decent enough abilities. Less whining and more action should be the motto that I live by now.

Points of Note

Some quick points of note:

1. Primary lithium-ion battery died from over-discharge—replacement has arrived
2. Need more cheap coffee for day—stainless steel thermos flask has arrived to handle situation
3. sage required for a course—downloaded source and compiled for slackware
4. Needed colour-coded schedule—printed with colour laser printer at CFA cluster
5. Birthday arriving—planning secret getaway to avoid the rather awkward situations that people will have on me

Guess that should be enough for things [for now].

Random Rant

Check out what I scribbled in cursive today:Yeah, I know that it is very incoherent, but whatever.

Maybe later.

Hit'em Where It Hurts

It's rather interesting that the most powerfully written public policy statements are those that literally hits the people where it hurts the most. It makes sense really; considering the fact that people are most interested in something that they have a serious vested interest in. Think of it this way, a student will probably not worry about taxes as much as a person who is working in the industry; a healthy person will probably not worry too much about rises in costs of health care as compared to someone who has been suffering from a chronic illness.

Public policies seem to have a similar feel as a computer program—there are specifications to be met, and there are results which need to be evaluated in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Maybe I should branch into governance after my computer science career, and help set public policies…

Me

After living for two decades, I still don't understand people. That's all. I just can't simply understand them enough—I don't understand them enough to help them, I don't understand enough to get close to them, I don't understand enough to be with them.

Ech, such a loser at life.

But then again, maybe being detached and not worrying too much about things of that nature can work out well. I'm not saying that it is the best way of doing things, but perhaps I should just be whoever I am, and not worry too much about helping others. Yes, I am fully aware that the urge to help someone in need is overwhelming in me most of the time, but then again I must realise that not everyone wants help, and then again among those that want help, they might not want my kind of help. I'm only a human, not some super-hero who can go out to solve the city's problem—I should just do what I can, which includes not offering to help people unless they come seeking me for it, and even then, only when they have a specific type of need in mind.

Is that being selfish? No, I'm being pragmatic here. Often I appear to be standoffish when in actual fact I'm not, or, put in another way, I try a little too hard to help people. That, in retrospect, is probably my chief error in life thus far. Some things I should work hard towards, like setting up my professional standing amongst my peers in the field, while others I shouldn't work too hard on, like extending my personal social circle.

Being an all-rounded individual is something that I'd love to achieve, but I must face reality—I can never be equally great in all the fields simultaneously because of the nature of moderation and balance. For every trait that I increase in prowess, there will be several that will suffer penalties; such is the law of nature. The trick then, is to just ensure that the traits and qualities that I have which suffer penalties do not suffer too much of them to the point that I become handicapped, and with that in mind, I think that I'm doing a pretty decent job.

In short, I think I'm great in my own little way, and I should learn to appreciate myself a bit more. I mean, it took many miracles and hard work to get to where I am today; it will take more miracles and even more hard work to take me to where I want to go to tomorrow. Miracles come only because I realised opportunities and took them, often with the help and support of those who truly care; that care mayn't be one that encompasses all aspects of me (heck, only parents + siblings + significant other can do that), but the range of that care might just be sufficient to push me on into the right direction.

I owe no one a living, but I owe many people their tacit concern and help. Without those who are always behind me in whatever I do, I can get nowhere. That is the nature of life. Maybe one might say that then I owe them a living; but I say that I owe them something that is different from the economic undertones of the term "living". I might not grow up and become a person whom people love, but at least I am growing up and becoming a person whom people respect.

I guess I shouldn't be asking for more.

*nods*

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I'm currently reading an electronic version of an unabridged copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, found for free at WOWIO.

It's amazing... both the story and the site I mean. The story is wonderful so far, and the site has served me really well in terms of providing high quality ready-to-send-to-publisher text. I stumbled on WOWIO by accident—I was foraging through my usual list of webcomics when I came across a link to this rather interesting comic called Lullaby. The artwork is credible, and the characters have so much potential; I simply love mash-ups between characters from different stories—the potentials are almost endless as the various abilities and idiosyncracies of the characters can multiply among themselves and present even more interesting scenarios. I highly recommend book-lovers to utilise WOWIO to search for some of the good quality stuff.

If quality typeset isn't your thing, there's still the venerable Project Gutenberg. This site contains many classic works which were released of their copyright, and were painstakingly converted into machine-readable form (aka plain text). If raw text is what you need, then this site will be the better of the two options.

If you're like me, and prefer nicely typeset works, then WOWIO is the way to go.

Alright, I need to actually catch up on some sleep... there's so many things that I need to do over the next three days. Am actually wondering what to do about obtaining cheap coffee... the best solution that I have so far is to make the coffee in my room, store it in a thermos flask, and then use that flask of coffee to last the whole day. So, yeah, that'll probably how I will be doing for this semester, considering that my schedule is rather unbalanced.

Self-reference

Ho ho ho... self-references are always fun. Check this one out:And yes, this is one of those rare gems from the crazy cesspool of the internets. Enjoy this really interesting self-reference picture.

テレサ・テン: あなたと生きろ

So my somewhat early gift to myself for my birthday this year is an album from テレサ・テン. Now, you might be wondering who the heck is テレサ・テン. Here's a hint: the katakana reads as "teresa ten".

Yes, it is indeed the Japanese transliteration of one of my favourite singers. I've long knew that she sang in Japanese in addition to Mandarin (including dialects like Cantonese) and English. Strange enough, she has a different style for each language that she sings in—for Mandarin, her early works were more girl-ish and ideal, while her later ones tended to have a certain matured sophistication about it; for Cantonese, she seems rather sagacious, and at times can be rather campy in terms of choice of lyrics or presentation; for English, she sounds fairly okay, because the tunes that she sang were of the more evocative kind (which suites her well)—but the commonality among the styles are that her voice tends to be on the 温柔 or soothing side.

Now, when she starts singing in Japanese, there is something strange that occurs. For one, her tone and register seems to be altered, and the music is noticeably more contemporary; resembling somewhat to a big band without too much support from the brass sections. The music structure itself is also rather modern; it actually makes really pleasant listening. And for some reason, Teresa's voice and the Japanese language seem to work rather well together; it could be because of the fact that the Japanese language is vowel intensive while Teresa is great at holding vowel sounds in a soothing way that make the combination nothing short of spectacular.

One huge problem that I realised was that it was almost impossible to find the correct taggings for the entire album; as a result, I spent the better part of the morning trying to figure this one out. Here's the list for completeness (and hopefully, ease of referral for any other poor soul who is stuck with the same problem):

Track	Romaji	Japanese
1	anata to ikiru	あなたと生きろ
2	ichiya dake no suingu	一夜だけのスウィング
3	yoru no hatoba de	夜の波止場で
4	muunraito.danshingu	ムーンライト・ダンシング
5	au toki ha itsumo tanin	逢う時はいつも他人
6	yukigeshou	雪化粧
7	bojou	慕情
8	kuroi shiyooru	黒いシヨール
9	yoru no joukyaku	夜の乗客
10	umibe no hoteru	海辺のホテル
11	yoru no fuerii.pooto	夜のフエリー・ポート
12	haru o matsu hana	春を待つ花

And yeah, if there are any romaji transliteration errors, I disclaim all of them; I used this Kanji converter to help me.

It is only much later that I realised that this tool would serve my needs aptly. Grrr...

——

In other news, check out this rather familiar tune. Hilarious.

Also, This. Is. Completely. Reprehensible. Like... the hell?! How the heck does one "misspeak" under oath at a trial? That makes no sense whatsoever. That said, it would be really sad if such a situation occurs back in all the other countries who were persuaded to take stronger steps to be inline with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which is inline with provisions and guidelines from World Intellectual Propery Organisation (WIPO). Please, read the articles and draw some conclusions on your own about the whole issue.

Honestly, this is the one reason why I'm not going into cryptography, even though it has always been my pet field. I mean, most of the cryptographic research these days are around enforcing stronger Digital Rights Management (DRM), something which I do not believe in. I can never see myself working in a field on something that I personally don't have a conviction to believe in, and thus would rather do other kinds of research and keep cryptography on a wide berth. Sure, I believe in protecting one's intellectual property, but to protect it to the point where things become draconian—now that is something that I don't approve of. I can go on and on about this, but perhaps now's not the time nor the place to do so.

Just a parting note: this and this should make really good food for thought.

That is all for now.

Rabble

It is rather interesting/sad to realise that I am drifting ever so much further away from the people who are soon to be my colleagues. Really sad/interesting. I've long since known this, but today it struck me in a rather odd way. I guess that I'm seriously not considered to be "among my peers". For one, I don't really like drinking that much, and for two, I don't like parties/bars per se, and for three, I'm not some pure idealistic person who challenges everything just because I can, and for four, I'm not rich.

Damn the innate class system. Mildly infuriating? Perhaps, especially when I look around and realise that the folks whom I will have to call colleagues eventually are all nicely mingling together, while I am still the same old extremely geeky person who does things that everyone else thinks is completely useless. I hate it when folks diss/bash/ignore Computer Science.

But after a while, once these things have strike me enough, I grow numb to them. At this point, I honestly don't care about them anymore—they can go ahead and enjoy their youthful paradise and leave me out of it; leave me alone then, as they always do. No one bothers to try to talk to me most of the time, and I don't bother to try to talk to them either; no sense forcing the issue.

Call it a clash of the alpha folks. Besides, my life revolves around computers, machines, technology and other creative endeavours, while theirs revolve around parties, fun stuff and other money-burning exercises. If I couldn't gel with them before, then I cannot gel with them now because the circumstances have not changed much. And will I be able to gel with them in the future? That is a question that I don't want to answer right now, because the future is still rather uncertain.

And do not patronise me. There's absolutely no need to—I know I'm only seen as someone vaguely resembling a human in most of their minds, only to be summoned as and when they think that they can handle my rather idiosyncratic ways. And just because my chosen field is not one of the "glorified" ones like biology or physics, doesn't mean that I'm not "cool", "hip" or even "interesting". So, to hell with that; I walk my own road, much like what I've been doing before. There isn't a rule that demands that I must be friends with everyone from my batch, and so I won't care about it much.

So, hahaha, go ahead and leave me out of things; I'm used to being ignored anyway. Besides, I'm such a serious person that most of those trivialities don't really excite me.

——

In other news, I've finished optimising exp(), E(), PI() and sqrt() of that BigDecimalMath library that I am working on. The Maclaurin expansion of the exponential function was used with great success when combined with a decomposition technique which allows us to compute the expansion closer to the centre of the interval of convergence, thus reducing the number of terms that we need to compute from the series. The square root function uses Newton's method to obtain, and performs reasonably well, taking about O(log n) time where n is the precision of the output required. The computation for π is extremely fast—most computations take less than 10 iterations to obtain the designated accuracy/precision. The algorithm used is the Brent-Salamin algorithm, which is based off the results of Gauss and Legendre.

My goal for this project is to get the main math functions up and running before trying to further optimise them.

Java Programming Once More

Alright, here's a project that I'm trying to complete over the course of 5 days. I will hack up a math library in Java that uses Java's BigDecimal class and compute all those "standard" math functions. In a way, it will be like MPFR, except that it will be an exercise in Java.

Why Java? Why not good old C/C++? Well, honestly, I'm rather rusty at this rather infernal language, so it is time to brush up my skills once again. Also, I'm taking a rather interesting course this semester, Numerical Methods. If this class were in C/C++, I'd be more than delighted, but from the looks of things, it is highly likely that it will need Java instead.

So, time to brush up my Java skills once more. And to think that the very first time that I touched Java was a good 10 years ago...

The Universe is a Virtual Reality?

This is rather interesting. Remember this article that I wrote on reality in July last year? Now, check out the paper that can be found here. Whitworth actually took a much deeper look into this whole "is our reality the reality" issue, and has even proposed [daringly] that our reality isn't truly objective but virtual. I will probably not do much justice to this rather thought-provoking paper, so I shall not attempt to comment on it.

Read the paper. Now.

Monkey Business

So, for some reason, I ended up looking up on things related to monkeys today. Some of the more interesting artlcles include:

• Monkey's fist (knot)
• 猴拳 (Monkey Kung Fu)
• Chan Sau Chung (猴拳 grand master)
• 孙悟空 (Sun Wukong)
• हनुमान (Hanuman)

Alright, enough of all the monkey business. I think I should actually try to get some sleep right now to force myself to get back to normal sleeping hours.

Till next time...

View from Cathedral of Learning

And this is my current wallpaper:Isn't it a rather pretty sight? This picture was taken at the 36th floor of the Cathedral of Learning.

Nothing much to say, except that I'm feeling too darn lackadaisical today. I think I need sleep and more caffeine after that.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written for 2007:

1. 256 poems written & published here
2. 191 rants/prose written & published here

And thus, the grand total of writing is about 447 articles, up from the 152 from 2006.

That is an average of about 1.2 pieces of writing a day. I think that if I don't actually have any improvements in writing, then something must have gone really wrong somewhere. 2007 was definitely one year where I had many issues which required me to vent out on via writing.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to further stream the writing that is occurring in this particular blog. Originally conceived as both a prose-and-rant type of blog, I am now going to specialise this blog to a rant-only blog, while this will serve as the new prose-only blog.

Other modifications include the shifting of the flagship from the poetry one to rant one. Honestly, I've done my book-keeping, and I realise that most folks are still as gossipy as before and would rather spend time reading rants than pieces of poetry, hence the shift. Other notable changes include the consolidation of friends' links to one place instead of maintaining one on each blog.

A rather minor fix was to edit the setting of the archive of old poems on the old forums to better gel in with the rest of the blogs, as well as to put in some links to the more modern incarnations of the blogs in case folks [accidentally] stumble upon it and actually want to see what I've been up to recently.

Most of the fixes are internal, so everything should be going well. Meanwhile, my target for this year will be to spend more time writing fictional episodes, spend less time on rants, and spend roughly the same amount of time on my poems.

Who knows? Maybe I can start compiling what I've written into a more tangible form. Meanwhile, this bears repeating:

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this blog are #1 mine and mine alone unless otherwise indicated and #2 are consistent only at the time of publication of the particular entry. Specifically, do not take my views as the views of the general populace, and do not attempt to chastise me for taking a different stance from before.

Again, what I'm trying to say is that all views are temporal in nature, and should be taken in context.

Alright, it's already 6 am in the morning, and I am still awake. Damn I need to get some sleep, otherwise I'm probably not going to be getting any at all.

Until next time.

Countdown!

So it's finally 2008 over here in Pittsburgh. No, seriously, I mean it, it is finally 2008 in Pittsburgh. And I spent the last few hours of 2007 in downtown Pittsburgh for the First Night in Pittsburgh 2008 event. The throng of people was amazing, check it out:It's a pretty massive number of people.

So we managed to reach there in time for the parade down Penn Avenue, and most of the parade folks were carrying their own hand-made props which are more rustic than the rather polished ones that we see in the Chingay Parade. Hand-made props never seemed more fun than this:And oh, there's a stilt walker representing Father Time:By now you should realise that the pictures are rather grainy—can't be helped since folks don't stand there to get their pictures taken, so I had to set my camera to run at a higher ISO setting in order to avoid all the streaky blurs that occurs when folks move faster than the shutter speed for normal (cleaner) images.

The most interesting event of the night was the
Balmoral Highlanders Pipe Band & Dancers who performed at the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. Really cool stuff. First, a picture of them in the church:And a close-up of this rather cute chick:Turns out she's only 15, but that doesn't mean I can't say that she is cute, right? I mean, she is cute, and yeah, I'll stop there.

Now they're about to march down the aisle:And here's pictures of them as they stepped out of the main hall. First, the pipers:Next, the tenor drum players (yes, it is that chick, and her name is Anna; go figure that one out):Followed by the snares:And finally the bass drum:Actually, behind the bass drum, there were three lovely highland dancers, unfortunately I don't really have a decent enough picture of them without blur streaks or graininess. So, just know that there were three rather lovely female highland dancers. Speaking of the highland dancers, did you know that each of the highland dances that they were doing were full of hops? It was... tiring even to see them do all that hopping around while dancing. It's an amazing workout I might say, and they must have been rather well-trained, for they didn't even pant after being done with them. Amazing stuff.

And by the time we were done with the band, it was about 45 minutes before the actual countdown. We headed to the main stage and were greeted by the music of The Clarks. Man, those folks are a really good rock band; I suddenly realise that I actually like rock music. But then again, I'm also used to metal, so heheh... Here's a rather screwy picture of them, taken from a good 30 metres away:And behind them was the building where the amazing "ball" was. Here's how it looked like prior to 2008:Unfortunately, I was too busy messing around with my stadium horn to actually take pictures of the rising ball, the new backdrop, and of course, the fireworks.

That said, it was a rather interesting evening. Alright, I think I'm done with writing for the night. Hope that folks actually have a chance to read this, and have a happy new year to all.

Ta-ta for now.

New Year?

On another note, am I doing something wrong with my life? Am I just deluding myself that what I am doing is really the thing that I should be doing? And no, I'm not referring to my [rather dismal] personal life, but more for my professional life. Sometimes I feel this helplessness and this strange fear deep within my being. And it doesn't help that everywhere I turn, I keep getting bad vibes.

The hell... I don't like the feeling of this at all. It makes absolutely no sense, like why do I feel all these random feelings every now and then? Is there still something fundamentally wrong with me, or are these bouts of self-doubt absolutely normal for someone who is under much stress from many sources?

So many questions, and yet so few answers. This is getting annoying even for myself; I have long since acknowledged that I no longer know what is the "right" path for myself, or have I? Could all these self-doubt stem from my own inability to acknowledge the basic facts of life, or rather, the basic facts of my current being?

Not a good start to a new year I think, if there's so much to worry about in my mind...

"Misanthropy"

The rather unfortunate thing about me is that massive crushes are the most that I can ever feel for a girl. For some reason, I don't seem to be able to break out of that persona of mine to really want to get into a long term relationship with anyone; for a while I thought that being with someone exclusive was probably a really good thing to look forward to.

Now, I just feel that with the amount of technology and knowledge in my hands, why do I want to end up in a relationship in the first place?

I mean, let's be realistic. I'm pretty much the same old geeky person that I have always been—nothing is ever going to change that fact. Absolutely nothing. Sure, I might like to flirt a little, I guess, and maybe end up with massive crushes on some girls. But I know that I cannot proceed any further than that. Is this despair? Perhaps, but for sure I know that a self-existent world is still a world nonetheless.

Throughout this break, I tried thinking about how it is like to be with someone for the rest of my life. Sadly, they don't seem to work out well; I just cannot see myself in that light as a person who is actually loved by another person. My world is that of computers and abstraction, not the world where humans inhabit. Misanthropic behaviour? I'm not discounting that possibility.

I just don't feel ready enough for things like that. Period. That's all I can say at this point in time.

Can anyone actually imagine me with a person for a long term relationship? That very notion doesn't make any sense at all! Maybe all I am good for is just basic friendship, someone that one can rely on when one needs help of some sort. But I'm probably not good enough to be that special someone who lights up other's days.

It's really ridiculous, but hey, if this is the way things are supposed to be, they will be. Besides, considering the fact that my next 13 years of my life are going to be dictated by work anyway, it probably doesn't matter that much.

My tune might change in the future, but who really knows what lies ahead in the future? I'm just going to ride the waves and see where the tide takes me—there's really no point worrying about things like this right now. Especially now, since I'm technically a foreigner in a foreign land, the more that the "hooking up" concept will just not work out well.

In other [less depressing] news, I've found something rather interesting. I remembered that about 10 years ago (oh god I'm old), I had this amazing English teacher who made us do all kinds of writing assignments which honed our writing prowess. Now, I feel that my fiction writing skills are rusty, and then on a random stumbling about day, I found WriteThis 2, a creative writing utility that generates writing exercises to be completed. It is rather useful, and I might just put up a new blog with some of the stuff that I wrote while doing the exercises.

Keep your eyes peeled!