Water Supply Almost Back + Microwulf

Water supply is almost fully restored, though the integrity of the water is still being investigated. There has been an advisory telling us to avoid using tap water for potable uses if we do not boil it, since there is no information about the microbial content in the water for having lost pressure for so long.

In other news, I so want to build this supercomputer. It is way within budget, and can do a heckuva lot of stuff. Must find space to put the whole contraption though...

Alright, that's all for now. Ta-ta.

Damn Water Pipe Blew...

Damn water pipe blew... now we are all without water. Thank goodness that I showered immediately after the swim... otherwise I'd be stinking to high heaven now.

Good grief... and I was there only recently, trying to buy some fruits from the Giant Eagle store there...

Why Am I Waking Up At 4am?

Damn, something must be wrong with me. I crash out at 8pm everyday, and then end up waking up at 4am the next day. This doesn't even make any sense; why should I be waking up at such at unearthly hour when everyone is asleep and sleep when everyone is still awake? Bleagh... must be something wrong with my internal clock or something. The good thing is that I get at least 8 hours of sleep this way, and it is sort of useful, in a sense.

With regards to the scores, I originally wanted to encode them using lilypond, thus forcing me to read each and every score, but then I realised that it was quite useless/dumb—it seems that I'm better off getting familiar with the fingerings for the upper ledger lines and then applying them directly to sight-reading than trying to just "blow it up" larger for reading. I've compiled a much simpler list of fingerings which allows a direct 3-octave correspondence between all the notes, which makes it a tad easier to figure it out, since the layout is now more conformant to the usual 笛子 layout that I usually use. By staring hard enough at that table, I hope to be able to better associate the note/sound/fingering together in a more coherent way than before.

Alright, writing stuff at 4am in near darkness + bright LCD light seems to make me sleepy all over again. I guess I should retire to bed, after taking the multivitamins and vitamin C supplements.

Ciao for now, I guess.

Walking all over the place == tired

Yesterday was a strangely fun day. First of all, being the first day of school, the entire atmosphere was considerably relaxed as compared to the usual. Secondly, there were only two classes for me on Mondays, so it was amazingly fun in its own right. Thirdly, the TA for the second class (a recitation) did not arrive and so it was a free period in the end, which meant that I actually left much earlier than I'm supposed to be.

That aside, it was fun because it was the first time that I had entered a marching band—the Kiltie Band. The folks there were an interesting bunch; completely funny and spontaneous, things that I actually missed when I was in the Chinese Orchestra. The music is not hard, but the scores are really tiny in size (it is a marching band after all) and the pace of the rehearsal (not practice) was fairly fast, which resulted in me just sitting there and stoning for the most part, since I could not grasp the pace fast enough. And since most of the notes for the flutes are in the upper ledger lines, I had absolutely no clue what I was playing (I'm bad at the upper ledger line notes) which further enhanced the sit-there-and-stone effect.

The marching part was quite trivial, considering that I had done real marching while I was still doing NS. The only cute part was the halt; we had to do this weird leap-up-kick-your-legs-to-the-right-then-land move (there was a much shorter name for this dance manoeuvre but it slipped my mind). Other than that, the marching was pretty mundane.

Oh, did I add that in the entire flute section, there are only 2 guys, including me? That's right... there seems to be only two guys in the entire flute section. Danielle told me that it was normal to find more females playing the flute, which I think to be kind of strange, considering the fact that the opposite effect is evident among the 笛子 players. I think I should be able to survive well in the band; already talked to the band director about my issues and he says that it is fine, so I think that it should really be fine.

If I still can't read the score, I'll just memorise how it sounds and blitz my way through; no one will know the difference hur hur hur.

Okay, apart from all of that, I've decided to actually start putting together all my poems that I've blogged/written on the forums into one nice anthology. This project should take a while because I am going to take the opportunity to do fine-tuning and editing of some of obvious errors in the poems. This project should take a little while to complete, and I'll probably post a link to where it can be gotten once it is done.

In other news, I am messing around with the sound API for Java to write my own tuner. As ludicrous as it may seem, I never owned a tuner, despite the fact that I actually play so many different types of instruments over so many years. It should prove to be an interesting exercise for my signal processing chops, silly GUI chops and cross-platform stuff. Should prove to be fruitful.

Alright, that's all for now.

Grooks and All Things Poetical

Nothing much to say, except that Grooks are quite interesting. Specifically, check out Piet Hein's Grooks.

It is almost full moon out, and from where I sit in my room, I can actually look out and steal a glance at the moon above. Feels a little weird, since the moon sort of reminds me of many things that happened to me quite a while back (up to the present). Like how it is a reflection of the sun's light, I think that the moon reflects my feelings/thoughts/emotions somewhat.

In other news, I think my poem style has changed yet again. There is this strange darkness in my poems as compared to the past. I mean, the past poems seem to be more light-hearted, and have a rather campy feel at times, but now they sound so serious, and are not as epic-lengthed as before. Also, they usually span a single stanza as opposed to the multi-stanza format that I used before. Could this mean that I have changed yet again?

Touch down!

After being airborne for so long, it feels so good to be back on the ground in a place where I am much more familiar with. The entire day has been pretty uneventful, which is good; I don't really like flight plans with surprises whatsoever. Ended up sleeping for most of the flight(s), but it is okay, I guess.

It feels strange to be back here again; I managed to meet up with some of the folks that I hung out with last time, but this time, everything sort of feels not quite the same as before. Could it be that the summer has altered all of our perceptions on things? Anyway, I think that this is not the time to actually start to worry about these things, because honestly, there is much that I need to do during this semester, from handling the much harder courses (than last semester anyway) to dealing with my new lifestyle (of actually getting more involved in the community). Worrying about whether folks still want to talk to me or not should probably be among the last things that I need to worry about. This semester will be a lonely yet not-so-lonely one; I know better than to give my best to people and not leave anything for myself. The world needs more selfless people, but totally selfless people are just idiots who know not the meaning of self-preservation.

Okay, enough of all that talking. The flight plan was not too bad, though I felt that the transit between Chicago O'Hare and Pittsburgh was a little too rushed, since there was a need to clear immigration and customs procedures before re-checking in my luggage. The other thing that made it really nail-biting was the fact that the two terminals (the international and the domestic one) were on opposite ends of the airport itself. To my delight though, there was a skytrain that could provide a much faster commute between the two terminals. If not for the skytrain, I would have been worrying about booking yet another flight to be able to get to Pittsburgh in time. That coupled with my usual large steps and high pace count walking meant that I could just meet the time needed to arrive at the gate. Talking about a close shave.

And so, after touching down in Pittsburgh and taking the cab back (it was really too late and I didn't want to take a stupid bus, speaking of which, Ricky still owes me 20 bucks for his share on the ride), I lugged my luggage all the way back up to my new room. The next day was spent on moving the whole ton of cartons of stowed away stuff that I left in KK's basement.

It was really tiring, moving everyone's containers (from mine, to Alice's, to Kishore's). My feet are completely sore now, and I owe both Justin and Laura a nice meal each for helping me out with my stuff. I seriously think that I should start sending some of my books back home; I realised that most of the mass of the storage cartons come from that of the books.

Anyway, it is indeed time to move on. I'm going to get on with my life now and hopefully, things will turn out as well as it should be.

On The Way

Okay folks, I'll be on the way towards good old Carnegie Mellon. Radio silence is effectively maintained now. See y'all soon.

(=

Radio Silence in Effect

I'll be on radio silence for at least 2 to 3 days. See y'all then.

Cab Driver Conversations

Interesting things are always available for us to see and learn from, only if we actually take the effort to always be on the alert for the presence of such opportunities. Recently, I've been taking more than a fair share of cabs all over the place (I'm starting to become a little too lazy to leave early to arrive early, since all the folks that I am meeting are always late), and have listened to many tales that the taxi-drivers were telling me about.

So one of them picked me up from outside my house, and asked me whether I was working or not (I said I had a day off; no point telling the whole truth all the time). And he was saying something like, hey young man, then why the heck are you still in Singapore? He suggested that I take a holiday over at one of those resorts in Thailand, where things are exceedingly cheap. And he mentioned some things about renting the services of some girls at the low low price of about 50 dollars for a day. Not being a nasty fellow, I just sort of nodded my way through what he said, wondering how on earth did the conversation ever ended up to me receiving advice on going to some tropical paradise to party. He also started talking about how cheap and easy it is to actually go there, particularly via the budget airlines, as opposed to the usual bus-route. Everything's interesting and such, but I felt more amused than anything; it's quite cute when people start to mistake me for being a young working professional as opposed to the undergrad student that I really am.

In another cab ride, the cab driver was asking me what I was doing at the National University of Singapore. I told him that I was doing some summer work. He asked me if I studied there, and I said no, I was studying overseas (a little truth doesn't do much harm). Then he asked if I was studying in Australia, which I said yes to (no sense trying to explain to folks where Carnegie Mellon was). At this time, I realised my error, but I think that he didn't, since he was more involved in the driving than he would be willing to admit (I can't possibly be studying in Australia if I said that I was doing summer work in the middle of June). So, he asked my field, which I said Computer Science. And then he asked me which university I was studying in. I sort of hemmed and hawed and said that something to the effect of "nah, you don't really want to know" and sounding really sheepish and all, and he made his own conclusion that I was studying at some Informatics group of schools. And then he started talking about his son in the polytechnic doing some IT-related course, and how his son's computer cost a bomb and that they were still trying to pay it off, and that all the son used the machine to do was to play games and not the stuff that he was supposed to do with the computer. I just nodded emphatically.

In yet another cab ride, the cabby and I were discussing about surgery and medicine(!); that's right, surgery and medicine, particularly with regards to cancer and stuff. The conversation started innocent enough; we were talking about how hot the day was, and that how soon it was to rain, and that since the clouds were so dark, it would be a really heavy rain. We then talked about the various rain gear that we used; I said I used some umbrella or the hoodie of my jacket, while he said all he brought along was a small plastic bag to keep his head dry, with me making the comment that keeping the head dry is very important as it would affect the overall comfort of the body and with him agreeing with what I said. Then the topic progressed to the cab driver talking about his sister. Apparently, his sister had a brain tumour, and was at the critical crossroads of whether to operate or not. According to him, his sister decided to not operate on the tumour, because of the potential risk of being in a vegetative state. We then talked about the state of neuroscience, and how some times the neurosurgeons have not reached the stage where they can perform the surgeries flawlessly due to the overall lack of understanding own how the brain works. It progressed to the point where we were talking about the conjoined adult Iranian twins and how their eventual demise was more or less expected, given the circumstance.

As I said, there are often many interesting things that we can learn about the world, if we actually allow ourselves the opportunity to take in things that come by and try to make sense of it. The often strange and fruitful discussions between me and the cab drivers will probably be a reason why despite the apparent cost, I didn't mind taking a cab to some of my meeting places. Most of the cab drivers are pretty world-wise, though they might not have that air of success that most people would like to assume that folks who are successful will have. But being in the business for so long, and being alive for so long, means that they often have some interesting point of view that we probably have not had the chance to look into.

Which is why one of my favourite activities is to just talk to people to listen to the stories that they tell, in the hopes that through their telling, they will be more comfortable with the subject matter, and I will be able to learn something that is not directly available through the books.

Some other observations...

It's almost time to bid adieu to this place once again, and to embark on yet another leg through my undergraduate years. In the short months of summer, I've again experienced much more things as a human than before. So many things have happened, and so many things to happen soon, and all these sometimes weigh in on my mind even under the most unconscious circumstances.

Remember the nightmare I had the last time? Even more recently, I had a nightmare where I was being targetted by everyone as being the one who tries to one-up all the other folks, resulting in me being beaten up all over the place. Folks in that nightmare were folks that I knew before (thankfully), but it was really weird and unsettling at the same time. Shadow-side notwithstanding, I think that maybe it is a sign that I am still a little uncertain in some things that I need to do. So many things that can go wrong are just around the corner, and often it doesn't take much to be able to fall into that death-trap.

I guess that as time goes by, I become ever more resilient to whatever comes my way, perhaps through the easy learnedness that comes with the wisdom of age. I know that ahead of me lies many challenges, and slowly, I am warming up to them in a way that is more sustainable than the multitude of energy bursts that I used to have a long time ago. The energy needed to move on into my chosen field is one that must be released in gradual amounts, and not through that huge burst which, in the long term, will cause an early burn-out, which we all know to be the most suicidal of all techniques that we can use.

In other news, it seems that summer is the season where many folks break-up with their other folks. I have no idea why there is this the case, but it could all be due to coincidence, I guess. Something that I sort of realised about maintaining a good relationship is the need to have spontaneity from both parties. The whole idea of a relationship is not one that doesn't need effort to maintain once a certain level is achieved. A relationship between two people is not the status quo—there has to be some interest that is always being regenerated between the two. I make this comment not from my own perspective (too limited in scope, mon) but through the observation of couples who have been married for a long time. I observed them and tried to understand what made their relationship tick, and I finally dawned on this idea. It makes logical sense too; people get easily bored over things that are unchanging, and thus to maintain their interests, changes need to be introduced into the system. But of course, the said changes that we want to include into the system cannot be detrimental to the overall health of the system (in this case, the relationship), so some care needs to be exercised. This is akin to the Computer Science concept of the Edge of Chaos, where a healthy mix of static and dynamic elements can produce a new system that is dynamic enough to be powerful, yet static enough to not descend into oblivion.

Okay, I think that should do for now. Until next time.

Nightmare + Swimming

I begin:

He could hear their voices, their cries of pure anguish, as he lay there on the bed, unmoving, unflinching. He heard him say "it's okay... just let go, just let go, we have our memories of you burnt onto the vast collection of disks over the years, your laughter, your cries, your successes and your failures; just let go". He felt himself relaxing somewhat, and slowly found his right shoulder and head rising, ever so lightly, like as though they were filled with the lightness of helium and such. He opened his eyes, and found to his horror that he could look down on his body. "No, this cannot be!" he thought "I'm not dead yet!" Closing his eyes, he could see a block of squares, already half-dimmed, and as he stared at it, the lights were dimming off, one square at a time, and he realised to his horror that each time a square dimmed off, he felt one part of himself feeling much lighter than before and floating upwards. "No! I cannot let go! I'm not dead yet!" he screamed in his mind, and blacked out. The next thing he knew, he was awake and looking at the congregation of concerned people surrounding him. Seems like he didn't succumb to the lightness of it all after all.

This story fragment started it's life as a really bad nightmare, with me feeling everything that he does in the story. To make matters worse, when he felt as though he was drifting away, ever floating upwards, I felt as though I was falling into the same trap, slowly drifting off. That was when I felt that I had to draw the line and stop this from happening, and promptly woke myself up in cold sweat.

That's why these days I prefer to work to exhaustion before attempting to fall asleep. Nightmares like this can really mar one's composure for most of the day, especially when they start to deal with one's inner demons or expose the sides of us that we know are our personality's weakest links.

In other news, I've found out some useful stuff on swimming. Total Immersion Swimming is a new look at swimming which tries to make swimming easier by emphasizing on the need to be more slippery in the water, through the proper use of the body's natural buoyancy and streamline-ness. The Freestyle as done using Total Immersion is ridiculously easy; I'm still laughing at how easy it is compared to the really tiring crawl that I was doing before. It has progressed to the point that I actually was swimming with the Freestyle instead of the Breast Stroke for almost all of my laps in the pool; one word: amazing.

More stuff: I'm in the process of putting together my first "real" piece in FL Studio 7, and will probably release it soon. Only catch is that I will probably need to put up a new website to do all these distributions. Am torn between using a friend's server or my college's web space. Will probably be worrying about these kinds of stuff later on when I actually have the music ready for deployment.

Guess that's all for now. Need to start packing up my stuff before flying off on Friday to get my ass back to CMU for another year of hard-core CS nose-grinding work. (=

Affiliation...?

To be without an anchor of sorts, is indeed a torture somewhat. The issue here is that of affliation. It is mildly upsetting when people start to demonstrate the traits that they identify with each other when they are in the presence of other people; it is really a case of the "haves" against the "have-nots". Humans, being the social people that they are, tend to like to demonstrate their level of exclusivity through the enactments of such ritualised affliative behaviours; it shows off their community and related awareness.

I find myself being in the unenviable position of being the guy who has to sit through most of these exclusive exchanges between the folks that I hang out with. It is mildly upsetting because for that short moment in time when folks start talking about other folks that they know (that I don't), I feel left out, much like the times that I spend alone on my own, all left out from the world in a strange sort of way. Mind you, these folks are fine folks, they are also my friends, and it is completely normal that they'd have more to reminisce since they did share a common past before. But then again, it is just a little hard not to be slightly annoyed over that.

So, the journey ahead seems to be a long and lonely one. Sooner or later, it seems that I might need to make a really big decision of sorts, and frankly, I wish I never have to make such a decision at all. In the meantime, I will just try to do my best and forget about the rest; there's still people rooting for me and I cannot let them down on any account.

They are people, my people; we worked together, we shared a past, and they believed in me, and believed in my future. I will believe in what they believe in. If I cannot live for myself, then at least I can still live for the people who care for me.

Sleepiness vs Wakefulness

Another quiet day has passed, and I have accomplished little over the course of the day, at least in terms of tangible successes and benefits. Internally, lots of things are starting to filter themselves out again, from the barriers that I have built up over the last few months. I started this paragraph about two days ago, but realised that I didn't have the heart to actually finish what I wanted to say, so I just copied the few starting lines I had from before and attempt to write on again, probably with a much different focus from what I intended earlier.

As the night draws on, I find that I'm starting to enter the state where my mental faculties are at their sharpest, yet paradoxically where I am at my most tired and sleepy. This strange juxtaposition of wakefulness and sleepiness slowly drives me towards an almost trance-like state of mind, where I can slowly start to look beyond what I usually am, and what I usually do, to something that I usually am not—being conscious of myself.

Letting my fingers do the typing of the words that spring forth directly through my mind, I find that I type even more smoothly than if I had tried to direct my thoughts onto some topic. Touch-typing is of the utmost usefulness, considering the fact that the typing speed can at least match the capabilities of thought.

I think that I'm really losing the battle between wakefulness and sleepiness, and it is now time to just lie down on my mattress and sleep.

What is Friendship...?

The time that is left for me to hang out in Singapore is fast decreasing. Well, in logical truth, that is not quite the fact, but in reality, as the time fast approaches that of departure, it seems as though that the time is indeed passing really quickly.

This summer break has been somewhat restive, but along with the summer break comes breaks of other nature. Sometimes, when it is late at night, with me being the only person awake (just like now), I kind of feel the strange detached sadness that comes with loneliness. Most of the folks that I know have their own little things to do, and thus cannot keep on hanging out with me, so I have to make do with what I have.

To many people, I know that what I do, say or be doesn't mean much to them, but then again, it could just be my whining at fault here. The new semester is fast approaching, and given all the knowns and unknowns, I have no idea what to expect anymore. I find that I am fast losing the spark in me that drives me forward in life; I can still produce, but I find a general lacking of the exuberance that I used to have. Could it be that I have stopped applying those steroidal creams to help contain the massive rashes that I used to have? Or could it be that I am undergoing some kind of metamorphosis that alters more than just physical appearances; it also modifies the way with which I view and comprehend things.

That said, there's always the future to look forward to, whatever it may be. My goals in life are quite different from that of my peers, and my chosen path in life always seems to be the one that involves the most amount of fighting and defence as compared to the ones that others do. I do not regret the path I've chosen, but sometimes self-doubt will appear and keep on questioning me if I had indeed picked the correct path in my life to walk, or whether I had been going with the flow, or whether I was just trying to fit into the preconceived notions of being the "good person" and not really thinking about myself and what I really want to do. All these doubts keep on surfacing every now and then, sometimes in a way that makes me feel really sad to think about; it's like being told that all that one has been doing in one's life is all a waste and that there is no future whatsoever.

But on a more positive note, I think that next semester will be a little more interesting, even though the folks who I've been with will probably not be interested in hanging out again for another year. I'll try to do as many things as possible to keep myself so occupied that I won't end up in the same doldrums that I had during the first year. If there is anything that I can learn from the whole of last year, is to not believe too deeply into the idea of finding really firm friends, or that folks will care you much. The college environment is a strange one, since it will expose radically different behaviours from people. Folks who usually don't care about others can suddenly be someone's best friend, while others who are usually friendly can become cold and aloof in the college setting. The whole environment is just so artificial and contrived that many of these things will occur whether we like it or not. I'd rather like to think of this as "friendship of convenience" rather than the true friendship that we can have.

Which brings up a new question. Does "true" friendship exist? What are the obligations of people who are in a friendship (as opposed to say a relationship)? How much care and concern is required for the people in a friendship to contribute/take in order to keep it into a fair friendship? Does the concept of "fairness" even apply in this context? So many questions, yet the answers keep evading me.

I realise that as I keep on walking on this road of life, I tend to be ever more cynical. People seemed to be much friendlier when I was younger; now they start to become faceless shadows which come at you when you are most vulnerable. They can ignore you perfectly for a long time, till they require you to help then fulfil something, and only then will you suddenly be noticed by them and treated like as though you were a friend to start with (yes, this keeps on happening to me).

Amid the despair though, there are still people who are decent enough as friends, being there for you when you are down, sharing happiness, sadness and woe with you, offering support when you most needed, and never asking for anything in return. They try their best to maintain contact, even though they might be separated by thousands of miles. They bring you smiles, wipe away your tears, give you a hug when you need it, and pat you when you have a good job done. A pity though, such people are so far and few, and I think I'm kind of blessed to be able to have a few of them.

What is the meaning of life then? Or to put it into context, what is the meaning of friendship? I dare not even start talking about love now, considering the fact that even the simplest of human relationships (the friendship) I still cannot comprehend properly, let alone something as complicated as that of love.

Perhaps one day I will be able to understand all of these, and maybe more.

Keyboards Galore

If there's one keyboard that I badly want, it would be the Optimus Maximus keyboard. It looks so cool with all its completely reconfigurable keyboard labels, which makes things really interesting.

Barring which, I'd totally dig for the DAS II Keyboard, though the price is a bit off. I mean, almost eighty bucks for a keyboard with blank labels for keys? The gold contact points are probably the reason for the cost though.

And of course there's always the infinitely configurable DX1 Input System.

Just some random thoughts...

Civic Announcement

Folks, please don't be so naive and accept random files that are sent via email or even MSN/AIM. These are among the fastest ways with which a trojan horse can be installed into the system. The trojan horse can be removed manually, but it takes a heckuva lot of time and effort to do so, so please don't shoot yourself in the foot and let it enter.

In other news, check out what Computer Science means. Note that I only found (and read) this article after writing my previous one.

Some Random Shots from my Cellphone

Seeing as I've been dumping paragraph after paragraph of text (meaningless or not is up to the reader), here's a small dump of some interesting (or not) photographs that I took with my lightweight camera phone.

This is how I set up my work table while I was still doing my attachment at I2R. The machine on the extreme left runs Ubuntu, the centre laptop runs Windows XP, and Edythe is on the extreme right, providing me with music. The main machine that I work with is the Ubuntu desktop; the Windows XP laptop was mainly to test the apps on a Windows platform (yes, I write cross-platform code, so sue me).

Some random evening sky that can be seen when stepping outside of the main building. I like the way the sky is all pink and blue all at once; not extremely breath-taking, but enough to make me want to stop and take a picture of it.

A random shot from the bus stop just outside of Potong Pasir NEL station, a place where I usually get off to be able to catch the bus home. Yes, I'm well aware that the Hougang NEL station is way closer to my house, but I don't like walking too much. Bleagh.

A shot on a pair of mannequin that I'd like to sketch, since I kinda like the way the dress flows around them. It's probably easier to take pictures of mannequin in pretty clothes than taking pictures of real people in pretty clothes (I feel shy and awkward to ask random people on the street to pose so that I can take a picture of them in their clothes to practice sketching with).

That's all that I have for now. One project that I'm actually crazy enough to attempt is to visit all the national monuments of Singapore. The problem is, do I have the stamina and good enough planning to pull this off in less than 2 days? Hmmm...

Is Computer Science Dead?

Is Computer Science dead? Has the coming of biology and bio-related fields supplanted the efficacy of Computer Science? Are all the things that we are doing in Computer Science going to be irrelevant in time to come? And are all my soon-to-come arguments just a delusion that I am giving myself to justify my choice of a course and future career?

It has been a while for Computer Science. Compared to the older fields of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Biology, Computer Science is indeed a fairly young field which had a lot of potential. In a way, Computer Science was born in a time where electronics and mathematics were breeding together, when the first electronic computation device was created. It has remained largely in a state where it couldn't decide completely whether it was a scientific discipline or an engineering one, and as a result ended up making it's own path in life as it's own discipline.

There are many types of computer scientists out there, some are interested in the theory of computer science, while others are interested in the applied aspects of computer science. In its own little way, computer science could cater to a lot of people's wants and needs, from the absolute theoretician to the the absolute applied scientist. All these ease of application is due to the fact that as a fairly young science, the dogmas are not well defined yet, and thus give us the freedom to decide in its direction.

Now, a good 50 years have passed since the inception of the modern field of computer science. The dogmas have already settled in (for instance, the von Neumann architecture for computers), and the initial exponential growth of knowledge in the field have reached the point where many of the fundamental questions are already answered, and what is left is just the filling in of the cracks of knowledge that the initial burst has failed to observe.

The question is: at this point, have we reached the situation that Computer Science is dead as a field for new innovations that do not involve the unnecessary nitty-gritty?

To answer this question, I feel, we need to look back into the roots of Computer Science, where it was at once the hotbed for interaction between mathematics and electronics. Computer Science was a by-product of a healthy interaction between the engineers and the theoreticians. As such, the multi-disciplinary nature of Computer Science is one characteristic that has been around for a very long time. Most of the pioneering computer scientists do not stem from the study of Computer Science itself; they come from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, mathematics and even physics. It is through all these interactions between these fields that the modern field of Computer Science is truly born. And throughout the decades that Computer Science has been in existence, the problems that Computer Science solves are those that have almost direct applications in the fields from which the problems come from, for instance the computation challenges associated with signal processing, and even base matching for genetics.

So the strength of Computer Science lies in the fact that it provides a better "glue" among the sciences than say just mathematics or physics (or even chemistry) alone. But this strength comes at a price: because Computer Science is the active "glue" of the disciplines, we find that it becomes increasingly hard to find things that are truly "Computer Science" in nature. All these just means that Computer Science cannot simply exist as a discipline on its own; its survival is dependent on the existence of problems with which their solution is of use to the community, with the precondition that the problems to be solved have no known closed form and require lots of data/number crunching to be able to get a good-enough approximation (we can only get approximations and rarely perfect answers due to the inherent differences between real mathematics for the real world equations and the rational mathematics that is used by the discrete computer) with which we can draw useful conclusions from or to make useful products with.

Computer Science is thus the discipline of skilled problem solvers; we stop at nothing to help solve the problems from the varying fields that are available in the real world out there. This doesn't mean that that is all the Computer Science has to offer; it is just a more tangible form with which non-computer scientists can better understand us and the things that we do.

There is also another reason why Computer Science cannot die: the ubiquitousness of the Internet and other "abstract" tools that see a real practical use in the real world. The day that the Internet dies, the day that the computer dies, will be the day that Computer Science will be something that is totally different from before. The growth and maturity path of Computer Science seems to be following the "normal" path of any discipline, with the single exception that it is more accelerated. For instance, mathematics have been in growth over the last 400 to 500 years, physics almost 200 years, chemistray also roughly as long, as does biology. But with Computer Science, its development seems to be providing itself with the ability to hasten its own development, to the point that we can build up the whole field from infancy to maturity in a very short span of time. This in its own is a grand achievement; it also makes it easy to predict the demise of the discipline when it seems that it has started to "outgrow" itself.

The trick to survival then, would be to continually seek problems to solve, to harness the ability of the computation machine/device to help in the advancement of the other disciplines. Current development in biology and bio-technology for instance, would have been much slower had we not have the development of faster machines and better computation algorithms to take away the tedious and error-prone computations required in order to test out the hypotheses. The use of computer simulations also help in the reduction of cost of time and money in building physical prototypes to the cost of electricity as we try to compute the effects in the abstract sense to reduce the amount of actual building that we need in order to test out the effects of a design and stuff. Such power is unprecedented in the history of humankind, and it is something that Computer Science will be best known for.

Will Computer Science experience death then? Maybe, but not now. While there might not be much that Computer Science needs to know in order to be able to function well, there will always be problems whose solutions are required, and from these problems and the corresponding [limited] resources, Computer Science will still be relevant in the world. Thus, instead of seeking to understanding deeper, perhaps it would be wiser to understanding broader.

In the Reflection

I begin:

In the reflection on the glass window of the moving bus at night, he saw himself. It was clear that it was him that he was seeing; the dorky looking glasses coupled with a toothy grin, it was as unmistakeable as the inky darkness of a moon-less night. Yet there was something wrong with the picture; superficially, the reflection was flawless—a perfect replica of him through the physics of reflective elements, but upon closer inspection, it seemed that it wasn't really him at all in the reflection. There was a different air about the reflection, as though it were some close approximation to who he was in real life, but made out in a way that re-conveyed itself as him being much more sombre, more dark, yet more knowing. He struggled for a while, trying to come up with the word to best describe what he saw, yet words failed him as he found himself somewhat intimidated by the reflection in the window.

For some reason, I just felt like writing a few lines with regards to reflections in windows and stuff.

Stuff outside Old Dorm Room

Some random pictures of stuff outside my old dorm room:


They make wonderful desktop wallpapers.

To Perl or not to Perl... it is no longer a question

It has been a really long day, and I am feeling really tired from running around like a blue housefly. However, I suddenly have this inspiration of writing this filter program that can help me solve some of the irritating problems that I am facing with parsing/reading/understanding XML. The filter program is really idiotic... it just does a dumb way of indentation. Hopefully I can further expand this idea later on and make something more useful in the long run.

Is this an indicator that I should start learning Perl?

Drift But Who Cares?

I was looking through a bunch of my friends' blogs (yes, sad as I may seem, I actually do have some friends) and realised through the blogs that I have already drifted away from them. Those with a significant other seem to forget about their old friends somewhat, those who are still young are still stuck in the treadmill system which doesn't mean any more than a certain drudgery, and those who happened to join with me for the ride for a moment have suddenly moved on to other matters. It's hard to explain this, but sometimes I feel as though that there's something that I must be doing wrong in my life, to be able to be in such an odd situation. I find myself in a quandary of sorts; a computer geek, a music geek, a writing geek all mished-mashed into one which makes too many people confused. Even though many have said that being multi-facetted is a good thing, I don't seem to be able to see any significant advantage here. It seems to the contrary that if one has too many facets, it makes people confused and unsure of how to deal with one; they feel intimidated by the fact that you have so many abilities, much like how people feel somwhat threatened (but in awe of course) in the presence of a great actress/singer.

Like attracts like, despite what I might have written in the past during one of those Project Work papers. While it may seem that I've been on the active hunt for someone who is for me for quite a while, it is not as true as it really is. I have more or less come to the conclusion that it is much better to concentrate on training myself up to become a competent researcher, and maybe make a few more friends along the way just to keep my sanity. With regards to whether I can eventually find someone to love and be my wife... that is something that I will not be wondering about and I am going to just leave it to Fate. Why worry about the things that I have no power over and leave those that I can change alone to the point that I end up screwing myself over? It doesn't even make any sense for me to do that.

I had a conversation recently with Caleb, and he gave a third option: be an otaku and lead an otaku lifestyle. Apparently, it seems that I can meet the requirements easily: be obsessive enough to want to dig deep into something (I can do that easily for anime/manga/computers), have enough of a disposable income to pull it off (probably do-able, considering that the stereotypical otaku has no real social life to start with), and be interested in girls as nothing more than an extension of the whole fantasy that the culture has (again, this is not beyond the realm of possibility). But I think that I won't want to ever step into that subculture; I am much happier being the person who tries to be a little more learned about the arts/music, and pursue a more thinking based lifestyle than one that is predominantly characterised by active brainwashing from having too much media inundation. Besides, even if I do have a disposable income with time enough to spare, I find it more fulfilling to actually get out there and do something for the neighbourhood folks, just like what I had been doing since young in my community club. No sense trying to use up all these time to try to be an otaku; I only watch an anime or read manga only if the storyline is interesting enough, and not because I feel a pressing need to justify my status with some people.

Caleb brought out several interesting points too, during our conversation; I'm gonna mull over it and maybe talk about it some other time. Meanwhile, check out the interesting articles at Geeks Are Sexy, because honestly, geeks are sexy (they are just a little shy sometimes).

Free Will?

As the days go by and we grow older, it seems that we start to notice things that we didn't seem to have noticed before. Things as mundane as how the grass grows, how the sun shines, and how the children around have fun. Then, from these mundane things that we see with our very eyes, we slowly start to think about things that have happened in our lives, and wonder if there was anything that we could have done better...

But then again, suppose that we had indeed done "better" then; will we be able to arrive at the same conclusion that we have arrived at earlier, that we could have done better? I suppose so, since there is no real "ideal" life where everything is so perfect that there is nothing more that we can ask for, barring any of those metaphysical concepts about the after-life and the other related concepts of a utopian situation where one transcends life etc. Our lives as individuals are marked by the things that we do, and it is often that in the things that we need to do, there is no such thing as the final "correct" answer; there are many different paths with which we can actually take in order to solve any of the problems that come our way.

Introspectively, could I have done better? Perhaps, but I know that all these thoughts on hindsight are just that; thoughts on hindsight. I've more or less lived out this life in a way that leads on to me being the way I am now, and nothing is going to change what I had done in the past. But what I can do is to deal with the things that I do in the present, so as to be able to dictate to a large degree what I will become in the future. People often use the excuse of "leaving it to fate" as a means of justifying the lack of active usage of free will; I think that this is foolhardy. Fate is but a guide to certain near-known results; we cannot really tell what our fate really is, even with the combined powers of all the geomancers/palmists/seers in the world. Why fate is powerful yet not omnipotent lies in the fact that we do possess a tool on our side, our own decision making process, something that we call "free will". Free will is to fate as yin is to yang; they counter and balance each other out.

Some people might argue that the decisions we make are still under the influence of our fate, and I do not claim to dismiss that. What I am claiming is, if we can make a decision that can potentially solve a problem that we have at hand, we should make that decision and not worry at all if there's involvement of fate or not. Put simply, some mistakes we make are necessary, because our decision-making process led us there; it might have been preventable, but the aftermath shows that it was in a way inevitable to a small extent.

The thing is, to live without regrets of any sort.

I'll stop here on the rambling and will probably post up something more interesting a little later.

Suzuka II

Ah! Finally finished watching Suzuka. It is as I said earlier, a nice romance story between Yamato and Suzuka. Among the most interesting lessons to learn from this anime, is the fact that ``love is not a spectator sport''. It seems that one needs to take active steps in the pursuit of one's love, be it of something mundane or that of a romantic connection. Yamato's chief problem, it seems, is to always "go with the flow"; he never seems to be able to figure out what he wants. In fact, for the most part of the anime, he is always trapped in a lot of the problems that his inaction takes him to, till towards the end, when he decided that he wanted to be the top sprinter in Japan, among other things.

Some things can't be forced... relationships don't really work out if at least one of the two parties is having serious doubts about his/her role. Nothing personal, just an observation that I gleaned from this anime.

Next anime series to watch: Chobits. I know I've read the manga, but I think the anime will have a different perspective to it, and I think after watching such a semi-serious anime like Suzuka, I probably need something a little more comical to release all that tense emotions. But first, dinner... then it is off to another marathon round of anime watching!

Suzuka

The ironies of life; when one's busy, one complains about not having enough time to things that they like. When one's too free, one starts wondering about what things one can do to make things less boring.

Suzuka is an interesting anime exploring the nature of human relationships, particularly between the title character and the guy Yamato. While the story is largely centred around Suzuka, the entire narrative is spoken through the eyes of Yamato. What makes this story interesting is the fact that it portrayal of the world is not as stylised as other anime; it is more serious in nature yet funny enough to keep things on the light-hearted side.

I think that I'm learning more life lessons from watching anime and reading manga than all the books that I've ever read so far. Heheh...

In other news, I'm trying to resist the urge of trying to play Pokémon. It's been a long while since I last played that game, and as time is going on, I find that the will to resist is lowering. Soon, I might end up replaying from Red/Blue onwards to the latest Pearl/Diamond. Argh, damn.

High IQ ==> Greater Probability of Virginity?

Check this out. Found the article linked on slashdot.

Heh. Here could be the reason why the developed world is having population problems. Too many smart people inhabiting the place.

Crush, Stalk, Talk, Confess, [Be a] Reject

Come to think of it, I don't think that anyone seems to know how to actually start courting people. The usual pattern that I seem to see seems to fall into the basic pattern of:

• Crush
• Stalk
• Talk
• Confess
• [Be a] Reject

This is kind of sad for a multitude of reasons: it seems that folks nowadays are finding it much harder to find other folks to date seriously (with intent of going further than just being boyfriend/girlfriend).

*chuckles* I know this only through anecdotal evidence and some (limited) personal experience. A quick straw poll among the people that I know seems to suggest that this is true among them. How odd that this is happening, if we suppose that Darwin's theory of evolution is true, since Darwin's ideas include the assumption that species will want to maximise the likelihood of perpetuating the species. In the case of humans (due to way our societal structure), it probably means being able to find someone to settle down as soon as possible.

People in the past seem to have a much simpler time—life was fairly uncomplicated, and thus the concept of settling down is much more tangible and appreciated than anything else. But fast forward to today, where we have a lot of distractions in the world; it makes a lot of people not want to settle down to a couple status early, since it is often perceived that being a couple means losing all the "joys" of being simple. Increasingly, we find that most of the higher educated are pursuing this path, with most of them being ambivalent to the whole issue of "settling down".

Is this a cause for concern? Well, from my personal viewpoint, it is a resounding yes, since it means that I don't have much choice of nice girls to actually date and eventually settle down; I'm part of the "old breed" of people who don't really "date for fun". From a larger perspective, this is very worrying, racial and class issues aside. With the advent of technology, it seems that people are more and more reliant on the use of technology to aid in procreation, which means that couples settle down much later in life, and probably have fewer children, if at all.

If this attitude towards the concept of marriage and "settling down" is going to be persistent in human society, I foresee that we will have lots of problems ahead. Among other things, all the economic infrastructure that we have set up now will be weakened over time as the people who help to contribute are starting to dwindle in number. Sure, we can use automation to help deal with the short flow, but will all these automation of economic tasks really help us in the future as a long term solution?

Okay, enough of the "big picture" perspective; it's back to what I originally wanted to talk about: people not knowing how to court other people. In this time and age, when folks have much less opportunity to actually go out of their homes to meet up with people, it becomes increasingly hard to find interested parties to actually learn more about them. The pattern that I outlined is one that is based more or less on my perspective (aka the "geek/nerd" perspective); mileage differs for individuals. It is sad; most of the time, males who are interested in females will always seem to be overtly so, while the converse doesn't quite hold. And like how most guys are, I don't even want to try to analyse what is going on in a female's head—basic laws of logic break down at this juncture, making any form of analysis completely useless. So I just observe and figure things out one step at a time.

The rejection; this is something that everyone seems to undergo all the time. Males particularly (since I'm male, I will have that bias hahaha). It seems that it is almost always the case that the female will always treat the male as some kind of good friend instead of anything else, even when he is making "his moves" on her. I'm unsure if this is due to the innate naivete of the female (she just doesn't see it) or that of the male (he thinks it is clear, but actually, it isn't). Usual reactions from the female from a "confession" include either a completely shocked look followed by a "I'm sorry"-like statement and possibly perpetually ignoring the male to the [extremely] rare occurrence where she actually concurs.

If only there exist a manual on how females think hahahahaha... It would make the life of most males (and all the geeks/nerds) much easier. What is it in the mind of the female that makes it so much different from the thought processes of that of the male? Why is it that the female seems to think things in a much more complicated fashion than that of the male? These questions never did seem to have any coherent answer, but it seems that at least in the past, there were actual working solutions which could be used to side step the problem and still solve the bigger problem of actually getting people together and just settle down. Nowadays, even with so much more knowledge than before, it seems that we have lost the ability that we used to have some time back. People are fast turning into creatures without good skills in the social context, or rather, at least those folks who are smart but without the riches/good looks yet; no one denies the ease in which people who are rich/famous/good-looking are able to blend into most social contexts.

Okay, I think that I've side-tracked by too much to make any more coherent sense. I guess I'll stop here for now.

Thriller

Have you watched Michael Jackson's Thriller music video? Watch it first, then watch this next one:


I have no clue if the Indian one was designed to spoof like that by giving a faux Indian accent over some English words, or is it just a coincidence.

Anyway, just enjoy. (=