My Support People...

I'm sure most of us are not complete loners. By this I mean that there is a group of friends who are like your safety net—by being there to provide an ear to listen to, a shoulder to cry on, and maybe a brain to help think of solutions.

It seems to be prevalent among the female populace though, since it seems to be bad form for the machismo males.

Balls.

I was contemplating about this issue when I suddenly realised that my "support" group is made up largely of females!

Or was it totally made up of females?

There's Cui, Jess, MW, YT (occasionally), and maybe LL (occasionally, no rarely). Not to mention my mum, sometimes my dad. Uh-oh... I don't think that there is anyone else providing support.

Ugh. Something wrong with me then?

I hope not. But as it seems, the old adage that girls mature faster than guys in general appears to be quite tru—

I interrupt this prose with some urgent updates.

I went on a wild rampage across my contacts on MSN messenger today... I apologise. I was an absolute beast, but you are not the object of the fury and I hope that I have not offended you too much. すみません...

Sorry...

I will not be talking about the object of my fury... until much later.

Okay, now, carrying on where I left off... oh yes.

But as it seems, the old adage that girls mature faster than guys in general appears to be quite true. The girls that I discuss my problems with are largely among my age group, well maybe not YT and MW (one's younger, the other's much older [Ed: and with a child too]), but it is amazing. I'm not trying to demean the guy friends that I have, but they don't seem to do as good a job at illuminating the problem with the right light than the girls. Sometimes, the solutions given by the guys are sketchy, and the viewpoints are, at best, mediocre and pretty much too gung-ho, with little situation/emotion awareness.

[Ed: I don't believe I'm saying all this, considering the fact that not too long ago I felt as though I was way ahead of my peers. I guess the 2.5+ years in the university vs 2.5+ years in the armed forces really make a difference.]

Do I need to add that the company of girls that I keep are much better at organising stuff than the guys? But I digress...

I guess that a key reason why my support people are of the opposite sex lies in the way I have been carrying myself. I am a person with a very complex personality, and for the better part of it I'm in my most egomaniacal persona. I function very well in technical environments, but am a little hesitant with matters pertaining to the emotional aspects. Truth is, I've rarely had the chance to experience the feeling of loving and being loved, or at least, the feeling that someone is really there caring for your emotional needs. My parents have done a fine job in raising me to be a righteous and analytical person, but I think that they might have missed out a little on developing my feeling side.

Most of the time, I handle problems on my own, but ever so often when I get hit in my soft spot of emotions, things get hairy. And when things get hairy, I find myself turning to my support people for aid and advice. Thus, I think that it is no surprise that they happen to be all females. Males are traditionally weak in the regard of discussing emotion-related issues (SNAGs notwithstanding), and so... yeah.

I think I've revealed a little too much of my psyche this time.

Metta School

And today started off with a marathon rush of almost 8 hours to complete the digitisation of the ticket design by HM for the performance on 29 July. Initially, I was trying to touch up the scanned picture that HM scanned and sent to me. Then I realised that it was almost impossible... Suddenly, an inspiration hit me—use the lasso tool with the paint bucket tool together! And the job was done... by 0830hrs this morning...

There was a carnival held at the Metta School. Originally, I was not involved in the whole affair, but my good friend RX said last night that he could not go because of some project that he was working on, so I volunteered to attend in place of him to chaperone the other kids from the Orchestra that were going to the carnival too. However, that champion suddenly appeared at the MRT station and declared that he felt bad for thrusting the responsibility to me and so decided to go also. (Actually, it was partially because he didn't do his project last night, but I digress).

After walking along Simei St 1, we arrived at Metta School. And we were greeted with the banner with a most cute looking elephant.That was a nice start.

After taking about 30 minutes to view all the exhibits, my eyes started to glaze when the entourage decided to do this:Did not help matters that there was this group of people playing on the gongs just next to us throughout the whole period. Needless to say, I was dying slowly... giving new evidence to the accuracy of "killing me softly with his song"...Ugh.

I'm too stoned out to continue...

*stoned*

Who/what is Edythe?

If you've read this, I guess that you can come to one of two possible conclusions.

• I'm a pervert lusting for a girl called Edythe, or
• I'm a depraved individual lusting for Edythe.

Seems like the confusion was quite deep, as Cui asked what Edythe was. Well, I'd say that at least she managed to figure out that Edythe was not a human (otherwise, where did the what come from?).

I may want to love and be loved by a woman, but for the record, I'm not that desperate to jump on anything with a skirt on...

Before anyone gets any more weird ideas about me, here's a picture of Edythe:


And yes, Edythe is my Fujitsu S-series Lifebook. Man, what were you thinking?

Okay, now I guess that you must be wondering why in the blazes do I call my laptop by a name, and a female name at that. Well, a chief reason is that giving a computer a nice human sounding name is much easier to remember than if you call the computer by a atring of unrelated alphanumeric characters e.g. N0705ACM1234.

Of course, as a self-respecting geek/hacker, it is natural to call the computer by a name, and in my case, referring the computer as a her. This is wholly consistent with the practice of car buffs calling their cars "ladies" and sailors referring to their ships as "her".

But why the name Edythe of all things?

This is starting to get complicated... According to this, Edythe has three possible lineages (and thus meanings). The meanings and lineages include:

1. Anglo-Saxon

   Form of Edith - Rich Gift

2. English

   Spoils of War

3. Teutonic

   Rich Gift, Happy

Among the three, I was looking at the Anglo-Saxon meaning. Edythe is a gift by myself for myself, for all the pain and suffering I put up in order to be worthy of owning my own machine. And Edythe does not come cheap—even with some contacts from GiSC, she still weighs in at a hefty 3000 dollars (okay, maybe it's because of the 2GB RAM and the DVD-everything-writeable). Does "rich" qualify then?

[Ed: On hindsight, she can be considered the spoils of the war between me and some of the oppressive entities stifling my creative freedom in writing computer programs]

Even then, I could have just used Edith, which looks a little more contemporary. But I like the name Edythe for its über quality—it looks darn Old English like. Yah, it's more unique to use an Old English like name than one that is so plain Jane.

Until next time...

And people wonder why I wear boots...

If you had seen me out on the streets on a weekday recently, you'd have realised that I was wearing boots. That's right, the very boots that was issued out to us a coupla years ago.



Ugh. Don't laugh at me or start saying that I'm garang. Here's a sad fact: my daily commute all the way to I²R is one helluva painful exercise, especially so considering the following two irritations.


Irritation #1

See the grass field? Now look nearer the centre, in the background. That's the Hougang NEL station. (Wait, you mean you can't see it? All you see is the field?) That is the Number 1 Irritation that demands that I put on my boots. That field is so big, and every day, it starts off with being muddy all over the place. I had tried to wear my "normal" shoes, but they just couldn't make the cut under the torment of the muddy grass field. Everytime I made it to office, I realised that my socks were soaked through. Hence, no normal shoes.

Ugh.

Irritation #2

This is something that I found particularly painful... I had to climb all kinds of stairs just to move from place to place. Yeah yah, there are escalators around, but there are usually so many people rushing on them, and trust me, getting squashed on a hectic morning is much worse than running up the stairs...




Unfortunately, not all stairs have escalators. Take a look at this flight of steps leading to I²R.

Do I even dare to think about climbing those stairs with the [in]famous New Balance shoes?

And people wonder why I wear boots...

Opening Rhetoric

Aargh. Sometimes, I must admit that writing poetry can be at times too darn limiting... I mean, how much information can you cram into a heavily nuanced piece of writing? As such, I didn't have much choice but to leave things in a most cryptic state, with the sad knowledge that I alone possess the key information to decipher the inner meaning. And due to the way my social circles are starting to overlap, sometimes the same poem can have parallel meanings which are under very different circumstances. The aftermath can sometimes be very ugly.

Not that that is a good thing.

I mean, hey! not that I don't like to write poems now, but that I've written so much that the writer instinct in me is now just clamouring to get out of the silly über-programmer shell that I've erected outside my very frail inner persona, the one thing that is fuelling my desire in the quest of knowledge. Also, I feel that if I train my energies of writing to churn out poems, it makes very boring reads as suddenly there'll be like a few hundred short lines to digest, which don't really come across as being easily digestible due to the questionable nuances in the poem.

Time to write more, in another form.

Amazingly, I can still find the words to write after so much inactivity in terms of prose writing... Perhaps this good trend will continue into the future. Or then again, it might just back fire on me. ;-)

Oh yes, I think that it is good practice to thank the blogder (term from xiaxue) for paying a visit to this humble abode of the_laptop.

And no, I don't have a photoshop-enhanced picture of me reclining among the un*x and window$ servers. I figure that's the last thing that you'll want to see me...

It seems appropriate to state this for the record:

All material written within this space represents only my viewpoint on the issues at hand at that point of time; they are not binding in the sense that if I make a statement/stand on an issue, it is the only stand that I'll be taking on the issue.

So please, please, no strange lawsuits/rantings/whachamacallits regarding this.

It seems that sometimes, people forget about the temporal effect of things.

Final note: If you somehow hate my prose, why not partake in my other works, like the recent poems, old collected poems from the forums, or the get-a-grip(e) blogs.