Ookay, so it is once more 4am in the morning, and I have absolutely no idea why I am still awake. Anyhow, being this late in the night means that it is a really good time to be thinking about things that are a little more philosophical in nature.
I've been to America and back, and if things go smoothly, I'll probably be heading back for yet another spell. If I have to narrow down the things that I have learnt from being in the US to just one thing in human relations, it would be that people tend to be very forgetful. As time goes by, everyone's memories fade a little, and under certain circumstances, the memories fade ever so quickly as compared to others. For example, it is a known fact that I have graduated one year early due to a whole variety of reasons, and after having done so, I have this feeling that only a small handful of people actually remember who I am, let alone continuing to keep in contact with me. It is of course not a real lesson that is newly learnt per se, but it is most striking when comparing the position that I am in with the folks that I knew from America---apart from the separation by time, there is also a separation of pure geographical distance. Relativity aside, it really does evoke the meaning of the proverbial ``out of sight, out of mind''.
Yet things are not always the case---there is still another saying that goes ``absence makes the heart fonder''. In many ways, this can be seen as the pure antithesis of the previous folk saying, but I choose to view things from a slightly more holistic perspective; absence and emotions have a dependency on each other, but there is no single prescribed method with which one can predict with great accuracy that it will always be true. So both proverbs under my interpretation are completely wrong since they are designating a maxim as opposed to a less rigorous guideline. Of course there is a little nit-picking involved here since I am applying the extrema principle of taking sentences as literally as possible, consistent with a cold rational reading, as opposed to the more moderate perspective prevalent in everyday conversations.
But how does this fit into what I am going to say? Perhaps a next post might be in order (I'm getting sleepy and should probably get some rest).
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Late-Night Auto-Writing
Okay, so it's finally dark out, the night is fast progressing into the deepest form of darkness, and I'm sort of floating around in that semi-happy state of being mildly sedated from the cool winds and quiet atmosphere. Sounds like a good time for yet another rare blog entry.
Funny how life works out sometimes. Just when you think all hope is lost, an opportunity yields itself to be within your grasp, only if you choose to take it up, of course. I don't really mean this in any metaphorical sense---such subtleties are fast lost upon me as I dig deeper into the factual world that is science. If you have been paying attention (or not, considering I do not know who is actually reading this and who isn't), you would have realised that I have been rather lost and directionless with regards to many things. But of course, by now, most of these issues have been dealt with, and I feel that familiar surge of energy that drives and pushes me forward for all the past few years that I have lived.
So what has changed in life?
Lots of things, really. New job, new life, new love, new goals, new friends, new acquaintances---it is in many ways a break from the old life that I had started to loath ever since the world crashed on me figuratively speaking. Such a break is most welcome of course, since it truly marks a new beginning for me. Now I don't have to worry about how the people of the past have treated me since I have the present to look at and the future to look forward to; odious varieties of people from #cslounge for example are but a thing of the past, and odious people from my other parts of life have been silenced like vermin crushed under the heels of a juggernaut. Surely, the clearing of such filth can be important as a means of detoxifying the soul, or at the very least, that of the psyche.
But such sweeping changes made require more than a fair share of guts and willingness to leap into the unknown---the remaking process of the self is one that is fraught with false starts and early failures, and not to mention the sheer uncertainty of the interpretations that one can take with reagards to particular facets of the issue at hand. I have dallied a little in working that bit out, but today, I finally took the plunge and cleared away the last vestiges of all that made me so unhappy for so long.
Enough of the sombre thoughts---a new beginning needs a new outlook on everything that happens. Those who have known me for long would be mildly surprised to discover that I have more or less become a person that they would never have guessed: I am more physically active these days than I ever was in the past. Part of this comes from the tacit acknowledgement that I'm no spring chicken any more, and that my metabolism is already on the decline, which meant that the ``legendary'' helpings of old cannot be performed again in this current time and age should I wish to maintain the veneer of healthiness that is innately axiomatic for people within my age group. But it is not true that I once hated to be physically active; it's all because of my hypersensitive skin towards the elements coupled with the disciplined nature of organised physical education/training that made physical activity the chore that it once was. Put simply, I was unable to be physically active because I lost all control on what I can and cannot do to prevent flare ups of my skin. Now, many years from before, I'm an Aikido-ka, a martial artist undergoing fairly rigorous training twice a week of two-hour sessions. Of course my skin is the same, but with a few more years of self-control under my belt, plus a couple of daring innovations, I have managed to keep the situation mostly in check, which gives me ample opportunities to pursue my martial arts training, and more importantly, boost my self-confidence and self-image---it is hard to feel sexy with broken skin everywhere, to put it in the most blunt way possible.
But for now though, it would seem that I'm just prattling on without aim---it is not too far from the truth, but yet among the bewildering agglomeration of words lies some truth that is only thinly veiled from view by the veneer of flowery prose. I mentioned before that updates to the blog are far and few due to the reduction in the fantastic adventures that one can get in a working world, but I suppose there are still other ways of reaching these phantasms of interest. As a researcher-in-training, I suppose that my powers of imagination are still fairly robust, as seen by the fact that I am, after all, in a field where imagination and logic have to work together harmoniously to produce something that is truly magical and worthy of praise for its utility. Then of course, it is just a matter of time before I begin to relearn once more how to harness that imagination of mind to probe the nature of the world and universe at large.
The question to ask of course is how much different is that direction compared to whatever was done before on this blog? In some ways, it is more different. While I dare not claim that my posts would be more mature (maturity is something other people say, not something to be self-declared), they are more likely to be even more introspective in nature, sometimes with a hint of philosophical and moral underpinnings. In short, the posts here might just become more dry, which will of course make my already dismal readership fall into true dereliction. But to write about the goings-on in a place where one needs to be hush-hush is in many ways a logic contradiction---the really interesting things about me are probably about my life and what goes on in there, yet I am more content with sharing my head space than my comings and goings in meat space. Ergo, my work has too many NDAs waving around that it is a minefield to even talk about anything that happens in the office, work-related or not.
Alright, I can feel the need for sleep increasing. Time to knock out for the night and to dream about the possibilities of the future.
Funny how life works out sometimes. Just when you think all hope is lost, an opportunity yields itself to be within your grasp, only if you choose to take it up, of course. I don't really mean this in any metaphorical sense---such subtleties are fast lost upon me as I dig deeper into the factual world that is science. If you have been paying attention (or not, considering I do not know who is actually reading this and who isn't), you would have realised that I have been rather lost and directionless with regards to many things. But of course, by now, most of these issues have been dealt with, and I feel that familiar surge of energy that drives and pushes me forward for all the past few years that I have lived.
So what has changed in life?
Lots of things, really. New job, new life, new love, new goals, new friends, new acquaintances---it is in many ways a break from the old life that I had started to loath ever since the world crashed on me figuratively speaking. Such a break is most welcome of course, since it truly marks a new beginning for me. Now I don't have to worry about how the people of the past have treated me since I have the present to look at and the future to look forward to; odious varieties of people from #cslounge for example are but a thing of the past, and odious people from my other parts of life have been silenced like vermin crushed under the heels of a juggernaut. Surely, the clearing of such filth can be important as a means of detoxifying the soul, or at the very least, that of the psyche.
But such sweeping changes made require more than a fair share of guts and willingness to leap into the unknown---the remaking process of the self is one that is fraught with false starts and early failures, and not to mention the sheer uncertainty of the interpretations that one can take with reagards to particular facets of the issue at hand. I have dallied a little in working that bit out, but today, I finally took the plunge and cleared away the last vestiges of all that made me so unhappy for so long.
Enough of the sombre thoughts---a new beginning needs a new outlook on everything that happens. Those who have known me for long would be mildly surprised to discover that I have more or less become a person that they would never have guessed: I am more physically active these days than I ever was in the past. Part of this comes from the tacit acknowledgement that I'm no spring chicken any more, and that my metabolism is already on the decline, which meant that the ``legendary'' helpings of old cannot be performed again in this current time and age should I wish to maintain the veneer of healthiness that is innately axiomatic for people within my age group. But it is not true that I once hated to be physically active; it's all because of my hypersensitive skin towards the elements coupled with the disciplined nature of organised physical education/training that made physical activity the chore that it once was. Put simply, I was unable to be physically active because I lost all control on what I can and cannot do to prevent flare ups of my skin. Now, many years from before, I'm an Aikido-ka, a martial artist undergoing fairly rigorous training twice a week of two-hour sessions. Of course my skin is the same, but with a few more years of self-control under my belt, plus a couple of daring innovations, I have managed to keep the situation mostly in check, which gives me ample opportunities to pursue my martial arts training, and more importantly, boost my self-confidence and self-image---it is hard to feel sexy with broken skin everywhere, to put it in the most blunt way possible.
But for now though, it would seem that I'm just prattling on without aim---it is not too far from the truth, but yet among the bewildering agglomeration of words lies some truth that is only thinly veiled from view by the veneer of flowery prose. I mentioned before that updates to the blog are far and few due to the reduction in the fantastic adventures that one can get in a working world, but I suppose there are still other ways of reaching these phantasms of interest. As a researcher-in-training, I suppose that my powers of imagination are still fairly robust, as seen by the fact that I am, after all, in a field where imagination and logic have to work together harmoniously to produce something that is truly magical and worthy of praise for its utility. Then of course, it is just a matter of time before I begin to relearn once more how to harness that imagination of mind to probe the nature of the world and universe at large.
The question to ask of course is how much different is that direction compared to whatever was done before on this blog? In some ways, it is more different. While I dare not claim that my posts would be more mature (maturity is something other people say, not something to be self-declared), they are more likely to be even more introspective in nature, sometimes with a hint of philosophical and moral underpinnings. In short, the posts here might just become more dry, which will of course make my already dismal readership fall into true dereliction. But to write about the goings-on in a place where one needs to be hush-hush is in many ways a logic contradiction---the really interesting things about me are probably about my life and what goes on in there, yet I am more content with sharing my head space than my comings and goings in meat space. Ergo, my work has too many NDAs waving around that it is a minefield to even talk about anything that happens in the office, work-related or not.
Alright, I can feel the need for sleep increasing. Time to knock out for the night and to dream about the possibilities of the future.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Half-hearted Rant...
If I fail at my career of being a researcher, I should probably go be a counsellor or psychic. My preternatural ability to intuitively sense the well-being of a person is starting to get more and more powerful, and in some ways, it does scare me a little here and there. There's one thing about realising that one has a certain ``power'', and there's the other thing of actually realising that the ``power'' also means that I actually gain knowledge that I might not really want to possess---knowing a person's inner state can have all sorts of strange contradictions that one needs to deal with because on the one hand, one wants to interact normally but on the other hand, the a priori knowledge would often suggest that one requires just a little more tact in the interaction, something that many might find to be annoying to keep track of.
I shall stop here---lost interest with what I was writing...
I shall stop here---lost interest with what I was writing...
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Matter with /var
In spite of what is suggests, /var actually contains much system-critical data and should never sit on its own [small] partition. All kinds of hell gets unleashed when doing major system upgrades that involve populating /var/cache/apt/archive when the logs in /var start encroaching onto precious file space.
Remounting for read-write
To remount / as read-write from the console, apply
mount -n -o remount,rw /as root.
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Exaile and mp3
Modern Ubuntu distributions use Exaile as the music player. The catch is that it doesn't support the mp3 format out of the box. To deal with that, apply
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extrasor
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-uglyto resolve the problem.
Balmer's Peak
Okay, so a couple of days ago I was mumbling something about not updating this place so much due to the general lack of publishable events from the fact that most of the things occur during office hours in the office and are thus under the ambit of the whole non-disclosure component that is a part of my contract. Yet here I am once more, talking more about random things that are occurring.
It has been a while since I imbibed hard liquor in the form of vodka. To be fair, vodka is not really my first choice of hard liquor (my first choice is bourbon whiskey in the form of Jack Daniels, but no one is counting so whatever), but seeing that it is the drink that we have left over since the last time that we went drinking, it was the only thing that I could drink with the rest of the folks.
The thing about me and hard liquor is this: I will generally refuse to drink a mixed drink that involves the hard liquor, preferring to drink the hard liquor neat and enjoying its innate flavour and kick, as opposed to watching the flavour of the hard liquor being adulterated by the various mixers and the dilution of the melting ice from the ``rocks''. So of course to many who are more used to drinking vodka with mixers for example, I will appear to be in dangerous territory as I drink shot after shot of hard liquor.
To be completely honest, I can hold my liquor very well. The only side effect that I know from drinking too much too fast is the tendency to tune out the crowd and erupt into the whole non-social mode, being completely lost in my own world where the math and other thoughts are all that matters. Obviously I do not claim that this is the most normal thing to do when one is drinking and ends up being a little tipsy/drunk, but it does seem to be the case for me. Think about it this way; my use of alcohol back in the US was to understand the complicated interconnections that existed among various parts of the rather complicated code API, in a certain sense I have been conditioned to associate alcohol use with critical thinking of hard-to-understand complex systems. So that's why once I'm beyond a certain state of tipsiness/drunkeness, I end up working on some math/programming problem.
That said, I just got home from a drinking session in celebration of a friend/colleague's birthday. Go figure.
It has been a while since I imbibed hard liquor in the form of vodka. To be fair, vodka is not really my first choice of hard liquor (my first choice is bourbon whiskey in the form of Jack Daniels, but no one is counting so whatever), but seeing that it is the drink that we have left over since the last time that we went drinking, it was the only thing that I could drink with the rest of the folks.
The thing about me and hard liquor is this: I will generally refuse to drink a mixed drink that involves the hard liquor, preferring to drink the hard liquor neat and enjoying its innate flavour and kick, as opposed to watching the flavour of the hard liquor being adulterated by the various mixers and the dilution of the melting ice from the ``rocks''. So of course to many who are more used to drinking vodka with mixers for example, I will appear to be in dangerous territory as I drink shot after shot of hard liquor.
To be completely honest, I can hold my liquor very well. The only side effect that I know from drinking too much too fast is the tendency to tune out the crowd and erupt into the whole non-social mode, being completely lost in my own world where the math and other thoughts are all that matters. Obviously I do not claim that this is the most normal thing to do when one is drinking and ends up being a little tipsy/drunk, but it does seem to be the case for me. Think about it this way; my use of alcohol back in the US was to understand the complicated interconnections that existed among various parts of the rather complicated code API, in a certain sense I have been conditioned to associate alcohol use with critical thinking of hard-to-understand complex systems. So that's why once I'm beyond a certain state of tipsiness/drunkeness, I end up working on some math/programming problem.
That said, I just got home from a drinking session in celebration of a friend/colleague's birthday. Go figure.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Bag Of Happenings
Feels like I've not really written anything here in ages. Oh well, life happened and things are always in a state of flux, which is probably a thing that I cannot run away from. Anyway, some random blurbs.
The weather these days have been rather atrocious, especially when one spends time outside---it appears that the midday temperature is hovering around the 34°C mark, not the best kind of weather to be frolicking about in. But then again, I'm indoors most of the time, so perhaps it doesn't affect me all that much.
That said, on yet another tangent, there's a concert coming up and I have tickets to sell. The location is at the Salvation Army Central Corps near Bishan, and the concert is occurring on July 10, 2010 from 1930hrs onwards. Ticket prices are at SGD10---free seating. Message me or email me for reservations on the tickets.
Okay, now I'm spent from writing all these. Goes to show how long my day has been---can't even write a decently lengthed rant without stopping so abruptly.
- There's this traffic light for pedestrians that has faulty programming, because once it hits the 15-second mark, it starts to glitch. Kinda looks as though the Matrix is glitching or something each time I cross that road.
- My work has suddenly increased in complexity by three-fold as I start to wrestle even more projects and even more new things. I'm not sure how long my brain will last, given that I have not really taken any long breaks to recuperate/recover in a long time.
- I know that Lucid Lynx is out, but I'm too lazy to install/try it on any of the machines under my charge. Currently, the Ibex and the Jackalope are doing fine, and I'm really lazy/apprehensive in rocking the boat too much. But then again, it is an LTS, so when I finally get some time off to do stuff, I might slowly update all the machines to Lynx.
- Salad lunches can be really fun with judicious choice of vegetables and other stuff to go with the salad. They can also be rather filling if you know what you are doing.
- I probably use more paper and ink as a researcher than as a student or systems developer. Go figure.
- Silent Hill 4: The Room is a rather interesting game, albeit a little scary to play when the sky is rather dark outside and the earphones are the only things that one hears.
- MUDs can be very addictive without one actually realising it.
- V nz zvffvat zl tveysevraq n jubyr ohapu jura V qba'g trg gb frr ure rirel bapr va n juvyr. V jbaqre vs V'z orvat bofrffvir, va ybir be cynva vafrpher. Guvf bar arrqf cbaqrevat.
- Sometimes I wonder if I'm in the right place at the right time, but after a while, I think to myself: I can always make it the right place and right time.
The weather these days have been rather atrocious, especially when one spends time outside---it appears that the midday temperature is hovering around the 34°C mark, not the best kind of weather to be frolicking about in. But then again, I'm indoors most of the time, so perhaps it doesn't affect me all that much.
That said, on yet another tangent, there's a concert coming up and I have tickets to sell. The location is at the Salvation Army Central Corps near Bishan, and the concert is occurring on July 10, 2010 from 1930hrs onwards. Ticket prices are at SGD10---free seating. Message me or email me for reservations on the tickets.
Okay, now I'm spent from writing all these. Goes to show how long my day has been---can't even write a decently lengthed rant without stopping so abruptly.
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