Damn Illness... Get Away from Me DAMNNIT...

Being half-sick is no fun. I seem to have lost almost 50% of my brain power, and am suffering from loss of weekend time specially set aside for doing homework. Oh geez... what am I to do? I guess I just need to bite bullet and fight the whole battle with willpower, caffeine, and more determination than ever before.

Bah. Stupid weather... note to self: don't be a hero and move lumber in the freezing cold. No one cares if you freeze and cough to death... everyone will only care about the Booth and not you. So, don't be such a hero.

I am beholden to myself.

Grak.

Firefox Logo

The Firefox logo is so sweet that it makes a wonderful desktop wall paper. :-)



Oh, if you want the vector versions or ginormous png versions, they can be found here.

In other news, I've upgraded firefox to version 2.0, and have switched from liquifox (breaks in version 2.0, but works very well in 1.5) to miniFoxFlat. That helped me reclaim even more screen space. mwahahahahaha...

Edythe's Face

And yes, I've managed to shrink all the text and other stuff on Edythe down again. Everything is so much more compact than before, and it's becoming more and more like my style. More pixel estate dudes~!



The colour scheme used is Royale, which is essentially a face lift of the standard Luna theme that comes with Windows XP. I first saw this theme on a Windows Media Center edition desktop somewhere in some computer store some time last year, and have fallen in love with the cool shades of blue that it has. Compared with the solid (and dull) Luna, this is certainly a vast improvement.

Unlike most people, I love to keep my start menu and task bar above the screen, set to two lines, and kept hidden unless I move my mouse there. Well, for one, this increases the amount of screen space that I have to see my applications (90+ pixel space is roughly 10+ lines of code). For two, the top location makes it less obtrusive, since the title bar of the windows do not usually show anything worthed reading, while the status bars of most windows are below (and thus show more useful information). So, in the case where the start menu refuses to cooperate, no loss of productivity will be expected.

Notice the little command prompt window on the lower left? That's a bash shell straight out of cygwin, an excellent POSIX compatible interface for Windows machines. I've augmented it with several enhancements, including adding a date/time mechanism, and an in-house built battery indicator (the one in the picture shows that I'm running on AC and so there's no battery meter to show). Needless to say, this prompt packs a punch, and I can and do lots of system management straight from the bash shell. This includes controlling foobar2000, which is easily the most powerful and versatile music player available on the Windows platform.

By the way, the bash shell here is only for system management. Most of my code hacking is done with a much bigger bash shell that sits comfortably on the left side of the screen (always on the left, never shifted anywhere):



And if you thought this was big, wait till you see the next screen shot:



This is the badass way in which I do hard core hacking. It's actually 6 bash shells running in 6 xterms on an X-server, configured as shown in the picture above. It's a pretty powerful combination, allowing me to do lots of stuff at the same time without ever having to run to and fro the main windows interface. It's still Windows XP, but it is really a cygwin innovation.

And no, the 6 windows do not all reside at the same time on the screen; they are partitioned into 2x2 virtual screens. That makes it even more powerful than ever.

So much for a geeky post on Edythe's face. hahahaha...

Chinese New Year... what?

A Chinese New Year away from home, a Chinese New Year away from Singapore. How interesting a concept. Unsurprisingly, the whole mood here in Pittsburgh is nothing short of mundane; no one seems to be really interested in this whole festive season thing. It could just be that everyone's so overworked from all the stuff that they are lobbing at us in college that no one really cares that much anymore.

Or could it be because most people here identify themselves first as Americans, and then next as of being Chinese descent? Guess this question will be unanswered for quite a fair bit.

So the Singapore Students' Association (SSA) organised this Chinese New Year Reunion Dinner. It was a wonderful night. The whole event was organised simply, but it evoked the sense of belonging that appears to be the whole point of the reunion dinner. Food was much different from what we usually have, and since it was steam boat, everyone had a ball of a time trying to boil all the food stuff without causing too much problems (heheheh).

Earlier in the day, I had a teleconferencing with my family back in Singapore over a cross of MSN and Skype. It was quite dumb... MSN couldn't send sound across, while Skype couldn't send video, so we had to hybrid the two. Unfortunately, the house machine is underpowered to be able to perform and so in the end it was mainly a skype-based teleconversation. Not that it was bad, but at least it's good to be able to hear the voices of my family again. And, haha, my mum was surprised at my long-ish hair (it's gonna be so much longer by the time I return, that's for sure).

I gave RX a call too, via Skype, and managed to channel the songs "White and Nerdy" and "I bought on EBay" via the VoIP to him. He literally rofl'ed his way. I feel kinda bad that I couldn't play Diablo II with him over the Internet (had to do homework and stuff like that), and hope that I will be able to do so soon.

I gave Nicole and Yongji a call each to wish them happy new year, and they were kinda pleased too. =)

And so, another Chinese New Year, and another year added to my bludgeoning age. What the heck man... by the time I reach March, I feel as though I've aged by at least 2 years, with my birthday and Chinese New Year and all (yes, if you actually look up my lunar calendar age, I'm a whopping year older than the other 1985 babies).

Gak,

So, what's in for the year of the pig? Well, 3.8 is always hovering about (and will probably do so for the next few years heheheh). There's also other stuff to look into, like setting the ViCOMP question set (yes, I've ideas on the problem set, just need to sit down and type the damn thing out together with all the sample solutions in all the three languages), moving on with some personal life stuff, and going back to general hacking (boy do I miss writing programs).

That's about it, I guess.

新年快乐 to all who read this or the other blog.

Half dead, barely awake, half alive

V-day came... and passed once more. A day unlike any other, a day full of last minute programming, a day of theorem proving. And a day of mistakes.

*walks away, can't bear to say more*

:-(

24 hours of fasting later...

argh. After almost a day full of non-eating later, I've emerged weaker, and with whatever was plaguing my body removed. And now, off to handling a ginormous load of homework. Gark.

I'm so glad. I'm once again setting the programming round questions to ViCOMP 2007, hosted by the new VJC Infocomm Club, which is an incarnation of the iCOMP club.

How evil should I be?


*evil glint in eye*

Sick.... again??

Damn... I think that I'm sick now. Have a weird stomachache and am thinking of Transfinite Induction all the way through.

"Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! Zero Case! Successor Case! Limit Case! ..."

Trying to purge the poison inside. Could it be that the mushrooms that I used to make the spaghetti last night have turned bad, and that my awfully blocked nose didn't realise it? Or is it the compound effect of epoxy glue (having to fix all my 笛子 since they all have fissures from the dry weather)?

Damn damn damn... have so much homework to do some more.... Grawk~ :-(

Now I remember...

In reference to this old post, I remember why I switched over the MSN Live! Messenger.

I could still type messages while appearing offline. Ugh.

Why can't they write the program properly and not let it crash as much?

It's 3:31am here, and...

It's 3:31am here, and I haven't the foggiest clue why I'm still awake. It's so ridiculous that I don't even want to venture a guess. Okay, back to main point.

It's been a long long long ... long week. Homework due almost every other day, bad program specifications (thus making me waste time debugging ugh), weird boolean algebra (why is the homework assigned from chapter 9 when we've scarcely covered chapter 3?), combinatorial game analysis (Hackenbush in "bamboo pole" form is just Nim), combinatorics (at least some thing that is easier, despite it being a level 300 course), paper writing (1 English essay draft to be ready next week, 1 math paper due next week), epoxying my broken watch and my 箫.

Damn, my room smells weird from the fumes of the epoxy. :-(

So, yeah. I've also been half-sick for the most part, which is another ridiculous thing that occurred. *yawnz* Blogging when one is half spaced out is really not a good idea... dunno if I'm coherent or not.

So after so long, I've decided to cut down all the insulation for Winter. That's right, I've started to do jogging. Not out in the cold, but on a treadmill in the gym that is just so close to where I live. I don't really have a choice there... am running out of jeans that I can wear, so I must do something about it. Actually, the main reason was the sad discovery that my legs aren't moving as fast as before; all the fat simply gets in the way and slows down my gait. If there's one thing that I don't really like, it is to be walking slowly when I'm supposed to be able to go further with my "trademark" large gait.

I'm behind in filing stuff now. Will probably spend the rest of the day doing that.

Maybe, if I still have energy, I'll do some work on a new blog that I've wanted to bring out, but have been tardying over...

Guess that's a wrap for now.

Me a Romantic? Wow...

In reference to my previous post, it turns out that I'm more of a romantic than I thought myself out to be. Most of my written works are heavily emotional pieces, juxtaposed with descriptions of the surrounding world.

This revelation came while having my Interpretation and Argument class. After doing sooo much math and science, I've forgot how much I actually enjoyed argumentation and writing in general. :-)