Magic 500

By now you must be wondering why I am staving off writing this entry, despite having quite a few days of delay between the last entry and this one. Well, to be honest, it is partly due to the fact that this is the magically 500-th entry and that I am also kind of unable to use the computer for quite a few days post surgery.

What surgery you might say. Well, refractive correction---'nuff said. My vision is sufficiently improved now, and even as I am typing this, I am not wearing any glasses (have not been doing do for the last 3 days). It feels kinda odd to be doing work like that without the use of glasses---it feels as though something has been missing in my life. Eh, no matter---at the very least I get to re-experience the feeling of sight before my good vision was robbed from me forever by the persistent myopic condition that affects everyone within the family.

My ability to see has been intertwined with two main forms of vision, namely that of actual refractive capability of my eyes, and the other being the psychological image processing that is done post signal-getting, i.e. with the use of imagination and combination of images. With these two techniques, I can often obtain much higher resolution than what the physical system dictates, and has allowed me to operate at times when I didn't have my glasses on, even prior to the surgery.

Now that the surgery has reduced the refractive errors in my eyes, the technique that I use has given me the ability of near-perfect vision, which is of course a good thing.

So, what about the 500-th post huh? There's really nothing special planned for it---I can't think of anything spectacular that I would really want to talk about during the 500-th post. So, this event will probably pass without any fuss of any sort, with the counter still incrementing. One thing that is interesting though, is the fact that I am still here writing on, despite facing so many problems in the past, from depressed moods to general discomforts in life/irritations at the inanity of some of my fellow earthicans. I still write on.

Writing... this is one of those solitary pursuit activities that I truly treasure a lot. I used to not like keeping diaries nor journals, preferring to bottle up everything within myself. But as time grew on, I realise that I cannot keep on living that way, since there was a practical limit to how much I can safely keep within me without killing myself from thinking/brooding too much. And then of course the blog happened, at a time where its use was on the wane, I picked up my figurative brush and started to write here. I wrote about my life, my life at-large, other people's life, the world and anything that I was interested to think about at that time. Some of these things are personal, but not to the point that I do not even want to discuss about it in public. Many of the stances/points that I talk about here are the same ones that I frequently use in conversation; they are literally public knowledge, and so I am not afriad to talk about them.

Alright... I am losing my train of thought now. I think I will just stop writing for now.

Ramble Bramble

So I've been back in Singapore for the better part of two weeks, and the one thing that I can truly attest to the city is that it is bloody hot. Thankfully though, I have more or less acclimatised to the ridiculous weather conditions, and is slowly getting more and more comfortable with the formerly excruciating heat.

I must say though, that I am starting to like the idea that I have decently good skin now. It is really nice to be able to live through the day and do things without having to feel uncomfortably itchy and dealing with cracked skin from the lack of sebum/thickness of the skin plaque itself. Sure, it is not as dry as in the US (there is this perpetual stickiness from the humidity), but at least I don't feel as uncomfortable as before. The stickiness from the perspiration and humidity is something that one can sort of get used to (taking some showers when the feeling borders upon that of pure discomfort).

That aside, the temperature here is truly abhorrent. The last time I checked my thermometer, it was registering highs of about 35 degrees Celsius, something that was never the case about 6 to 7 years ago. Many people would take this as an indicator that the world is indeed warming up due to the effects of global-warming, but to be really honest about it, the entire mechanism of global warming is not something that just came about recently---it is an action that has been in place for more than fifty years now. To say that the world has only been recently affected by global warming is like saying to an 18-year-old that he/she has just recently grown up.

But as usual, I digress.

Sitting around, waiting for work to begin, can be at times both interesting and infuriating. Interesting because I get to do things that I wanted to do but never quite seem to have the time to do so, like working on one of my multitude of personal projects. Infuriating because what I am doing doesn't pay the bills---one needs a job in order to make enough money to pay off stuff. I'm not saying that I have a ton of bills to pay now, but it is nice to be making some cash to squirrel away so that when I need to use it next time, I will have some at hand.

I've built myself a new machine. She's an Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q9550 with 8GiB of RAM, 1TB hard disk, NVidia Geforce N9600GT graphics card on a Gigabyte motherboard with a 21.5" Samsung LCD display. Her name is Elysie---kind of related to Elyse (differs by one letter!) but sufficiently different. Everything about Elysie is excellent---she runs on Windows XP x64 edition for gaming and the standard Xubuntu 9.04 distro for the main operating system. The only thing that I need to figure out now is how to ssh to Elysie from outside the LAN; this is an issue that is compounded by the rather strange and draconian way in which the ISP implements the IP address mapping; hopefully I can figure this out soon enough.

Well, that's all for now, I suppose.