Damaged Goods

Alright, I promised an update before the usual end-of-the-year rant recounting the major episodes. This might prove to be a little problematic because of the temptation to simply make this the end-of-the-year rant.

School's finally out, and with good cheer too, up to a point. My journey out here in the midwest is as harrowing as running along a metal cable strung across the Grand Canyon. I made some friends [maybe], hurt myself plenty of times both physically and psychologically, and at this point, am pretty much unsure how I am supposed to be feeling internally, and also how to proceed externally. Long time followers of this humble blog are also well aware of my usual end-of-year afflictions with regards to the passage of time. With so much mess to sort out, this post might end up taking a while.

I've always had a mild case of misanthropy. I don't really like people, a learned response that took ten years to create during the ages of six to sixteen when my atopic skin was at its maximal level of nonsense. I tell you, people can be harsh and uncaring, deliberately drawing unnecessary attention to deficiencies as a part of making themselves feel better. More than ten years since then, the same conclusion can be drawn---people still like drawing unnecessary attention to one's deficiencies, as though one were not fully aware of the situation. But something more had developed in between that dark formative period and now; I still haven't figured out what it is. Suffice to say, my interactions with other fellow humans have felt shallow of late, and sometimes, even mildly manipulative. I don't think that I have had an honest heart-to-heart conversation with anyone for the past two to three years, only dragging myself out to say something only because a problem needed solution and there was no where else to run nor anyone else to go to.

``Friends'' is such a strange word. In this time and age where everyone can communicate effortlessly with anyone across long distances, what truly makes up a friendship? Is it a group of people you ``hang out'' with, or a group of people who share a common goal, or is it some other yet talked about definition? I see people, but I'm having a hard time trying to acknowledge them, if such a term exists. I meet many new people each day, but how many can I truly call ``friend''? I'm probably just belly-aching here, but among the rants there might be some truth. I think that as I progress through my life past thirty and beyond, I will have to wrestle with this issue more and more as everyone's life diverges greatly. Heck, I don't even know what my life is like a couple of years from now, let alone predict where the people I used to share a period of my life with will be. The Internet might have brought some people closer, but to me, it did nothing in drawing me closer to anyone.

Hurt. That seems to be a big part of this leg of my journey through this pitiable caricature of a life. I don't even want to count the number of physical injuries that I had taken the last couple of years alone, but psychologically and emotionally, I think there has been lasting damage. I no longer have much self-confidence, am happy to hide away as much as I can even to the point of eschewing an outright indignant defense where needed, and can no longer think properly of things of great importance, distrusting my instinct and my own judgement. Kudos to the process of the PhD... nothing else in life can traumatise oneself so fully psychologically, save being on the front lines in a battlefield. I used to think of myself as an intellectual---now I'm happy if I am smarter than a field potato. I used to see myself as being different from the legions of people out there; now I realise I am just the same, if only a little more rebellious, and therefore in need of getting put down lest I become a danger to myself or to others.

I am damaged goods. I wonder what will become of me.

The end-of-year afflictions are beginning, but strangely enough, I feel more numbed than anything else. The mind seems empty of thought and emotion, and I pass each day in a trance-like state, never really able to think because of a massive sharp pain that occurs in the left hemisphere. Sometimes I wonder if that's because I hit my head one time too many, but it's hard to tell short of a full medical examination, which I don't really have just cause to get (damn thing is expensive and stigma-generating---better to live in ignorance than to have knowledge of the underlying problems). New year's is just another date on the calendar, and my ``birthday'' (technically the birth anniversary) is just drawing a blank in my mind in terms of what I'm going to do on it. Overall, a very muted affair compared to the past.

Well, that's all the update I care to give for now. Maybe next time I will have more to say.

Content-less Bump

Hang on to your hats---I'm alive, just a little pre-occupied. I will write something here before my usual end-of-the-year rant.

God Complex

Ahead of the yearly reflection on my life and writing, I can already say what I feel about what has happened in my life thus far. It can easily be reduced to a single word, really: suckage. Yes it sucks, it sucks beyond what I might be expecting (which wasn't really much to begin with but still), and I have every reason to believe that it will suck more.

I think that in many ways, this year can be classified as the Year Of Amazingly Bad Choices Whose Consequences Are Haunting Me. I've had to make a couple of really hard decisions, most of them done at the breaking point of my personal sanity and rationality, all with dastardly consequences whose ramifications I cannot see completely yet, since they have been lying beyond my horizon of understanding. I had been rendered increasingly miserable over the last year or so being here in the middle of nowhere, realising more than ever that I am a foreigner in a foreign land, surrounded by even more foreign foreigners than before. I've always thought of myself as being fairly immune to the whole racism nonsense, but given my experiences here so far, I think that is no longer true, partly because of the repeated actions of the few who don't seem to realise what they are doing.

But cryptoxenophobia aside, I keep feeling that I have been making rather bad life choices over the last six years of my life. Deciding to try out intimate relationships have left me emotionally broken with a hollow shell, deciding to to take on a PhD has left me intellectually broken with a permanent migraine in my head, deciding to do martial arts has made me more aware of all kinds of new types of injuries that I had never even heard of. But among the three, I've not really given up on my martial arts, not just yet, though I'm currently in a restive period to recover from all the random injuries that had occurred here and there because of stupid circumstances unrelated to martial arts.

Yes, you've heard it here. I've given up on intimate relationships and my PhD. Shouldn't be a surprise, really. I think that it has been pretty obvious considering my general affect over the last year or so. I don't even know how I even manage to be around people given that I find my connections with most of them so superficial I might as well be manipulating them like a true sociopath does, you know, the whole ``process predator'' thing. I like hiding away in my room in front of Eileen or any of my other machines, either hacking away on some code that nobody cares enough about except me, or playing some computer games (in single player mode I might add) that I like. In short, almost like my fourteen-year-old self, except with greater purchasing power, greater general social responsibility and greater empowerment in making my own choices. No silly lab tech/teacher to tell me that I cannot use the computer lab over the school break because I was there most of the time, no one to tell me that I couldn't run Linux on the machines because it wasn't Windows.

Silly me since the early twenties---what made me think I would change my very nature with the whole ``adult'' thing by trying to have deep conversations about society, going out to parties or clubs and drinking or even gasp socialising with people? Life is more than a career; so what if I made a lot of money a month. Will it buy me happiness? I don't think so. Early in life, I was altruistic, thinking that I am fully justified in sacrificing myself ``for the greater good''---now, after being exposed to society, I wonder, why should I? I can do enough to give back to what society has offered me; I don't have to sacrifice myself for the idiots who are out there. And now, as the rise to prominence of social media shows, I am even better off shutting my true self away from the populace. I have been increasingly disgusted by the mis-application of technology, the ``big-sell snake oil'' that idiots have been pushing to other idiots, and how everything is soooo lovey-dovey. This world is made for normal people; I'm dysfunctional, but it's the true me, it is the me that I am most comfortable with. Damn those who don't understand; I can control machines, I am a god of my machines---I can create my own happiness. That's what the general population do not do.

So why am I trying to fit in again?

Kick-off and Freewrite Transcript

Eh, I know this is kind of stupid, considering that I am using words for NaNoWriMo and yet, instead of writing my novel, I'm wasting them on yet another blog entry. Whatever man---over the course of the last 4 days, I had written around 23k+ words, I think I've earned my time to do something else that involves a different kind of writing.

First off, the kick-off party. Yep, the NaNoWriMo kick-off party on Oct 31 was a blast. The whole bunch of us were out in full force at the Illini Union and had a great time talking about writing and other random things in general. Small mishaps though, when Erin (one of the muncipal liaisons) opened up the big bottle of soda, it exploded into a sticky mess from the gas build up, and my shoes got hit by it. It wasn't too bad, just funny. Also, some free writing stuff that I have transcribed to here from that event:

It is the night in which a bunch of crazies decide to lose one month's worth of sleep and time on a ``one-day'' task, the task of fulfilling fifty thousand words in the short span of a mere thirty days, an event that was once thought to be impossible but has been completed by legions for the last ten or so years, with their inner editors removed from the equation, their imagination wanton, their grammar tested, their diction forced, their flow pushed, each of those who have dedicated their time and energies to the endeavour suddenly find a realise at the end of it all, as they settle back to the humdrum of daily life, after a whole month of solid, pain-staking writing, thinking, processing and fighting the inner urge to correct, confound and refine to repurpose their lives from the norm into one filled with fantasy, pomp, desire, hatred and jubilation, the one novel of around fifty thousand words, the end product of yet another iteration of NaNoWriMo---the National Novel Writing Month.

Yes, that was one sentence, a free write... in ink on paper. I'm not going to scan and upload an image of it, because it has one of the worse scrawls that I can produce in modern times (I'm not proud of its penmanship).

Next off, the contents of NaNoWriMo. I know I said before I wasn't joining, then I said I was, and now I am. But what is this year's contents about, really? Like always, I have no clue because I am winging it. But in broad strokes, think fantasy×realistic fiction and you'll have the general idea of what I'm writing. It has been decent progress, and I hope to surge past 25k tomorrow when I continue to write it. 6k per day is probably the maximum rate that I can go without shocking myself into a daze---2k in the morning (1 hour), 2k in the afternoon (1h) and 2k in the evening/night (1h). I find that the more time I dedicate to a stretch of writing, the less writing I actually do, which is interesting but not unexpected.

Anyhow, I originally wanted to write something really sad and depressing here, but somehow writing about NaNoWriMo cheered myself up, so I'll have to defer that sordid sob story some other time.

Cider Season

Not too long ago (Friday really) I attended a Halloween party held at a friend's place. It was made up of a group of folks from the ##uiuc channel of Freenode, as well as other random folks from /r/uiuc of Reddit. Anyway, I found myself there on a Friday evening/night, sipping on homebrewed cider and some beer that was microbrewed (I think) while hiding in the back room and talking to as many random people as I can.

And of course now I find that I like hiding in my apartment and not leaving it unless necessary. There's always something about a large crowd of people that makes me want to hide away and not come out and interact for a good two weeks since the occurrence of the said party.

I don't really know the reason. It is not as though I didn't enjoy myself at the party. Sure, I wasn't about to pick anyone up there (never was the intention anyway), and I had meet up with quite a few interesting/different people that I would otherwise not have the chance to hang out/talk to. Some of them are dicks of some sort, but many of them are cool (too cool really), but overall it wasn't a bad party. Yet after 3 to 4 hours, I start to find myself ever more detached from the mess, becoming even more of an observer rather than a participant.

Well anyway, that's all the junk I have to talk about. I'm still trying to recover from my exposure to so many [gorgeous] people in a [cramped] place, while hallucinating bits and pieces of the storyline for my NaNoWriMo 2012 entry, and wondering when I would stop procrastinating and finishing up the pieces of homework that are due, as well as the grading that I need to do, among the other relatively large life decisions that I need to make.

Till the next update.

Time for NaNoWriMo 2012

Heh. Talk about stuffing my foot into my mouth. Not too long ago, I said something to the effect of not having a story to tell and having a rather complicated semester that is affecting the way in which I could plan and write a story.

Well, things have changed. There are a few rather earth-shaking changes in my life at the moment (no, I'm not getting married or jailed) that those who are closest to me know, and from those changes, I managed to come up with some kind of story line for the upcoming NaNoWriMo. So yes, I am back for NaNoWriMo 2012, as seen via the setting up of the customary word count widget on this blog.

So far, my entries for NaNoWriMo had been some sort of modern-era story line with a very strong ``slice of life'' flavour. Nothing out of the ordinary there, since I am basically following the old adage of ``writing what you know best'', and in my case, writing about my experiences from a different perspective was the easiest way to tackle this. This year, however, I have changed tack. It will be the first time that I am writing a fantasy novel.

Now, if you know me, the first thing that ought to come to mind would be ``no way, him writing fantasy? But he hardly reads anything fantasy to begin with!''. Well, yes, there is a strong ounce of truth there---I have not really read much fantasy in a long while, because really, fantasy is hard to write. I mean, there's a ``new'' term to describe fiction that take place in not-now (speculative fiction), but really, trying to invent a world and write it up such that it does not suck [in content and realism] and yet sucks [the reader in without him/her realising it] is just not that easy. So of course, there is a caveat hidden somewhere.

I cheat, obviously. For the most part there is a strong fantasy component; I blame this on my recent re-reading of Girl Genius and Wapsi Square, together with some rather... odd dreams/nightmares that I have been getting. But that is only part of the story; I will include quite a bit of vignettes of life in a style that is similar to my usual ``slice-of-life'' method of writing. All done with juxtaposition of course---it is hard to convince me to do do otherwise.

So the long and short of it is: I am back for NaNoWriMo 2012, with a slightly different genre from my usual comfort zone. We will see what kind of story I can come up with for my fourth 50k-word novel.

傻女

Something from yesteryear:For some reason, the tune sticks really deep in my mind for this one.

《傻女》——陈慧娴

这夜我又再独对夜半无人的空气
穿起你的毛衣 重演某天的好戏
让毛做长袖不经意地 抱着我静看天地
让唇在无味的衣领上 笑说最爱你的气味

我恨我共你是套现已完场的好戏
只有请你的毛衣 从此每天饰演你
夜来便来伴我坐 默然但仍默许我
将肌肤紧贴你 将身躯交予你
准许我这夜做旧角色 准我快乐地

重饰演某段美丽故事主人
饰演你旧年共寻梦的恋人
再去做没流着情泪的伊人
假装再有从前演过的戏份

重饰演某段美丽故事主人
饰演你旧年共寻梦的恋人
你纵是未明白仍夜深一人
穿起你那无言毛衣当跟你接近

Lyrics courtesy 虾米.com

And yes, it is in cantonese. I'm sure there is a chinese version, but I'm not sure where it might be.

Indiana Hiking/Geocaching

It has been a while since I wrote anything here, hasn't it? Like always, this place feels as though I were merely shouting hoarsely into the void, where the vastness of the Web renders my words to be as effectual as a bucket of water dumped into the ocean. But that suits me fine---this is still just one of the many outlets that I have allowed myself to have in order to ensure some minimal level of sanity.

Alright, enough of the blathering. What's new? Recently, I made a trip out to a state park in Indiana to pick up a cache that was placed there in the year 2000, one of the oldest caches that I have physically logged. The previous old cache was circa 2001 and in Singapore, so it was an interesting find. The cache was rated as 3/4.5, but I think that the terrain is at most 3. Maybe the terrain difficulties in the early days were less extreme than what we have now, which made the 4.5 terrain level justified, or it could very well be the case that I am more or less near the physical prime of my life, which made hiking through the state park a breeze, even though the trails were rated as being ``very rugged''. Of course, John and I speculated that there were some legal reasons to over rate the trails, just in case of an accident.

While on the hiking/geocaching trip, I actually come to realise the truth about combat boots---they are the all-round most mediocre boots to be hiking with, but they still trounce any sneakers that are used for the same activities. Unlike ``proper'' hiking boots, combat boots don't have that much ankle mobility, which makes long term walking tricky, but more importantly, the treads of the combat boots are not that well suited for moss-covered rocks or rocks that are generally slippery from say water. They work extremely well in mud due to the thickness of the tread (the tread pattern is basically islands of quadrilaterals, which work on a similar principle as say caterpillar tracks), but since the end of the treads do not have the smaller ``grips'' that are present in hiking boots, we find that walking over moss and/or wet rocks just does not work that well. Unfortunately, most of the hiking over in North American deals with non-muddy situations, so the combat boots are not the best way to go about. Come to think of it, I actually do own a pair of hiking boots that I wear on days that I choose not to wear my Vibrams---I treat them like sneakers, but they are fairly comfortable to walk in. But I still stick with my combat boots for the single awesome property of being waterproof up to two inches above ankle height, a very useful property when trying to ford streams while simultaneously avoiding being wet. For that purpose, a pair of tightly laced combat boots works wonders.

Strange enough, as I am typing stuff here on Firefox 16.0, I'm not facing any of the slow downs that I was experiencing earlier. Either Google fixed the scripts for the editing box, or Mozilla did something about the way they are running the scripts. In either case, it is a good thing because now, what I type is no longer taking forever to be shown.

Alright, enough updates for now. Till the next one.

NVIDIA Optimus BSOD

If you own an Alienware m11xR2 like Eileen, and are playing Torchlight II with frequent blue screen of deaths after around 20 to 40 minutes of game time, there is a fix for this. According to the pooled sources that I have found, this is related to the shader clocks being on the high side. A working solution is to download MSI Afterburner, enable the ``Legacy GUI'', and shift the clock speed of the shader down by around 50MHz. I usually run this tool after launching Torchlight II to ensure that I am indeed running on the NVIDIA GT 335m graphics card as opposed to the integrated one.

After quitting the game, I always reset the clock rates. No harm doing that, really.

Rue

To thine own self be true

---Polonius, Hamlet, by Shakespeare

A maxim of life, it seems, is to be true to oneself. Being true to the self connotes the notion of actually knowing what one truly wants and then working towards that goal. It suggests the preternatural ability to exercise judgement, preferably good, with respect to one's interest and self-preservation.

Interestingly, I think that I am severely lacking in good judgement these days for some reason. I cannot tell if this is physiological (something fundamentally wrong with my brain from the few blows I have suffered over the last couple of years from taking the breakfalls from some throws really badly) or psychological (something fundamentally wrong with my mind/world view from the increasing levels of cynicism that has developed from the general withdrawal from intimate social contact for one reason or another). In either case, it seems that my last few years of judgements are relatively questionable, and it seems to be time that I started to rectify them, one step at a time.

I have been wondering to myself for quite a while. The aspect that I thought was my major strength (a man with no past) is fast catching up with me in the present, where I realise that since I was a man with no past, my roots are mostly lacking, and the lack of a root was starting to become a liability on my psyche. From which position are my actions stemming from is a question that does not have a ready answer, and it scares me.

Yes, there is something that scares me. When I realised that, I was rather surprised myself. I wasn't known to be that afraid of things, but here I am feeling fear. Pure unadulterated fear.

I keep escaping from it, of course, like what someone said to me, a coward. I still don't know how best to face my fears, considering that I do not have a strong enough base to face them with. I used to rely on my friends a lot, but they all... have problems of their own and are out of reach. The new friends I make just don't know me well enough to be of any use, and in addition to that, they are not that close to me anyway. And my family... I don't really want to trouble them. I feel that they have been through enough for me, and so perhaps I should just suck it up and do it myself.

And so I am sucking it up. And suffering greatly from it. So terribly greatly.

I wake up each morning feeling a sinking feeling deep within my chest, rousing myself somehow to get to the office. I pass the day reading papers, thinking more or less aimlessly, working on homework, running to and fro classes, watching my life fade away. When I go to bed, I would collapse only when the night is deep, and then would suddenly be wide awake at three in the morning.

Fear is a powerful emotion. I don't fear the real---it is the abstract that gets my goat.

There are days I have thought of just sitting there and ending it all somehow, either disappearing from contact forever or well heh just disappearing completely. But they will solve nothing, obviously. I hate myself sometimes for thinking about them in the first place.

Oh well. Life sucks.

Time to suck it down and move on.

Hmm...

V unir orra guvaxvat nobhg guvf sbe n juvyr, ba naq bss. Nf vg gheaf bhg, V jvyy arire or unccl va jungrire V qb. Vg frrzf gung gur gvzrf gung V jnf gehyl unccl jnf jura V jnf qrrcyl vaibyirq va zl zhfvp, or vg yrneavat n arj cvrpr, be npghnyyl cresbezvat ng n pbapreg bs fbzr fbeg. Znlor sbe zr, unccvarff vf nobhg punyyratvat zlfrys jvgu gung xabjvat srryvat gung V pna zrrg gur punyyratr orpnhfr V srry pbzcrgrag rabhtu.

Gung vf, fnqyl, abg jung V nz srryvat gurfr qnlf. Vg vf na rzbgvba gung vf ernyyl uneq gb pbzr gb tevcf jvgu. V nz frevbhfyl jbaqrevat vs guvf vf orpnhfr bs gur raivebazrag, gur glcrf bs crbcyr V nz vagrenpgvat jvgu, be gur fperjl fgngr bs zvaq gung V unir orra va. Gurer vf guvf frafr bs qrfcnve gung vf whfg sybngvat nobhg zl urnq, jung jvgu nyy gur artngvivgl fheebhaqvat vg. Vg vf fhssbpngvat, vg vf greevoyr, vg vf qrovyvgngvat. V dhrfgvba zl fnavgl gvzr naq gvzr ntnva, ohg V xrrc ba zl genwrpgbel.

V qba'g xabj jura jnf vg gung V yrneag gb eha njnl sebz guvatf vafgrnq bs tbvat sbe vg, urnq-ba jvgu thfgb naq synve. Znlor gung snvyrq ybat grez eryngvbafuvc unf fbherq zl vaangr abgvba bs gur tbbq bs uhznavgl, znlor zl plavpvfz unf svanyyl pnhtug hc jvgu zr---V qba'g ernyyl xabj. Ohg V xabj gung guvatf ner abg tbvat avpryl.

V funyy fgbc urer. V qba'g ernyyl xabj jung ryfr gb fnl. Znlor yvfgravat gb cvrprf yvxr ``Ubyq ba gb lbhe ybir'' unir n jnl bs njnxravat zl gehr srryvatf nf pbzcnerq gb rirelguvat ryfr. V nz gheavat vagb n uhfx bs n zna snfgre guna V jbhyq vzntvar.

Jung vf jebat jvgu zr?

Hold On [To] Your Love

I love this piece from the K-On! soundtrack.It is a nostalgic piece, occurring when the adviser of the HTT group Sawako sensei (山中 さわ子) was talking about her past love and role as a former member of the previous Light Music Club band (Death Devil). I love the intro and outro---there's this something wistful in it that is hard to put into words, but you know it is there when it tugs at your heart strings just so. The main guitar solo is very energised, as though one were thinking about the fiery passions that happened in the past. It's not a particularly long piece, but it is really impactful.

It reminds me of myself right now. Like how I'm sitting here, thinking about my glory days from back when I was in school, all the triumphs and setbacks, remembering the major episodes in my life that had just passed. And now, as I sit here, I realise that it was all in the past, and I can never relive it again except in such a vicarious manner.

Music---conveying emotions without words.

On Xenophobia

There is something that has been irking me for quite a while, and up until this point I had not really figured out what exactly was the cause of the said irksomeness. But before I launch into a tirade over the mess, let me just simplify the issue to just one word.

Xenophobia.

That seems to be a really hot topic these days, what with the massive global-scale machinations of the labour market, where anyone anywhere can be part of the supply of both skilled and unskilled labour. Sounds lovely, isn't it, free market principles at work, correcting the imbalances that exist in each of the domestic markets to ensure maximal economic output. But as almost every developed nation has discovered, this fluidity of the global labour market has created the rather uncomfortable position of xenophobia, a word that hasn't seen the light of day since the end of World War II a good fifty odd years ago.

But why xenophobia? Aren't we all humans at heart? Haven't we learn from the mistakes of our forebears that discrimination was one really good way of ensuring that we will never have true peace? I think that it is not the case for some people to actually fear foreigners, but the circumstances that surround it are causing such reactions to occur with startling frequency. It is not so much as the numbers that is causing the xenophobia, but the general perception of clustering that is causing the rift.

As a guest in a foreign land, I will not talk much about what I observe here. Instead, I shall use my own country as an example to explain the model that I have regarding the current state of affairs. In Singapore, almost everyone was an immigrant or a descendent of an immigrant---the natural numbers of native Singaporeans who have already lived on the island prior to Sir Stamford Raffles' 1819 establishment of the island as a major port are known to be small. A sense of community was eventually forged during the public housing expansion phase of the HDB, which basically broke up the many kampong communities that were centred roughly along ethnic or cultural lines.

Why the building of a sense of community regardless of ethnicity? I think it appeals to the social nature of humans in general; when forced to be in a new situation surrounded by strangers, one will end up trying to make a few friends here and there, willing to forgo some of one's inhibitions and biases just to maintain the veneer of sanity through building social ties. This is the fundamental way in which the modern Singaporean identity/society is formed. We are united not along ethnic or cultural lines, but by our common experiences, grouses and other generic/ethnically neutral issues.

But of course, that is just a nostalgic history lesson. There are two things that I would like to point out from my anecdote. First, when allowed to develop naturally, people tend to want to cluster with people whom they know, or are at least similar to them in some sense due to the comfort derived from familiarity---this is the formation principle of the kampong in yonder year. Second, it is only when an external force is applied to break up these clusters do you see an effort to take a bold step out of one's comfort zone to adapt to the new surroundings.

The problem with xenophobia in Singapore lies in the fact that the more recent foreigners who are entering the country are still in the ``kampong formation'' phase, where what they do, who they see and where they stay have large amounts of freedom. If we choose to view this from a more utilitarian perspective, there is no incentive for them to step out of their comfort zone and adapt to the new culture that they are currently embedded in, since they have easy access to whatever it is they were bringing in to the country. This is not a bad thing---when one is in a different land, having familiar faces to hang out with is one very good way of ensuring sanity. The problem comes, however, when the group starts to take a life on its own and literally enforces exclusion, either via a superiority complex, or via a cannot-care-less perspective. It is these transformations that end up generating the friction necessary to develop xenophobia.

Do I have a solution for this? Quotas are not going to solve the problem---they will only delay it for another time. Telling locals to be more tolerant is just missing the problem altogether. I think that the important thing that needs to be done is to remind the foreigners who end up being in a country for the long term that they are guests of their host country, and that they have a social incentive of not being a clique. That last bit will prove to be the hard part in any solution involving population integration.

Friday Night Mumblings

It has been a while since I last sat down just to... listen to music. That's right, actually playing the music at a level that is beyond the threshold of ignorance so that I can listen to the lyrics and feel the song. I don't really know when was it that I started to switch over to non-verbal music (like soundtracks or classical instrumentals) to provide background ambience to keep my mind together as I work on things; it occurred some time within the last year, that's for sure.

I'm definitely no audiophile, but my go-to headphones for listening to stuff is the Bose IE2. Surprisingly, music that passes through it sounds pleasant---it might not have the response that self-proclaimed audiophiles demand, but as a set of headphones used with few if any equaliser tweaks, it works pretty well for me. But this time, when I really want to listen to what is going on, I pull out my over-ear headphones---the ATH-M50 from Audio-Technica. It is roughly the same price as the Bose IE2 (might be cheaper), but due to the larger drivers present, provides a much fuller sound than the IE2. This means that at moderate loudness, the timbre of the music is just so full and rich. The only caveat is that I need to enable the on-board SRS signal processor to push the low frequencies enough such that the driver of the ATH-M50 is sufficiently exercised---I don't have that problem with the IE2.

But anyway, I talked about the latest Cherry Boom album that I got recently. I spent a whole day listening it as ambient, but when I listened to it with my over-ear cans, mmm, they just sound lovely, as always. Compared to the first two albums, the whimsicality of the music is less pronounced, a playful tone but with an air of maturity of the band as a whole. A really nice addition that I'm sure I will listen to again and again over time.

This might have been brought up before, but there is something magical about Faye Wong's ``Eyes On Me''. I, for one, can never get the lyrics right from listening, but the tonal quality of it is that of a lovestruck female, and Faye Wong actually does it in a sufficiently haunting/wistful voice that it is just plain enticing.

But ballads and alt-rock music aside, these days the non-verbal music that I've been listening to are a mix of the ``old staple'' and new stuff. The ``old staple'' I'm referring to here is the soundtrack of タイヨウのうた, featuring the ``surfer beat'' hybrid with strings of 澤野 弘之, the composer of the soundtrack. As for the new stuff, I'm referring to the ``Smooth Jazz'' internet radio station hosted on Sky.fm. Previously, I would listen to the ``Piano Solo'' channel, but for some reason the saxophone seems to have a stronger calling on me.

Alright, I have no idea what I'm writing any more. It feels almost alien yet somewhat familiar to be writing out a blog entry in the middle of the night, alone, with my desk lamp providing the only source of illumination. Somewhat familiar...

Oh on a final note before ending this, I've decided that I am skipping NaNoWriMo this year. Two reasons: I don't really have a story to tell and more importantly, I will be in the deepest of the deepest piles of shit if I actually went ahead to do it, considering that I just have so many things to do this semester. Totally not worth it.

Okay, I'm done here. Till next time.

Orienteering

So apart from the functionality of the kitchen, there were a couple of other interesting things that had happened since the last update.

First off, I finally tried out orienteering, the sport that I had read about a very very long time ago in a Hardy Boys Casefiles book (yes, I knew about orienteering since I was around 14 years old or so). John and I went with a friend of his out to Robinson Park in Peoria. I think that it is a very interesting civilian NAVEX that requires both the physical ability of dealing with the varied terrain and the mental ability to decide how best to run the course from control point to control point given the terrain and individual constraints. It really reminds me of my secondary school days where I would spend hours reading an atlas to study the geographical features via the topographical maps, and the map reading section of the `O'-level geography exam. A pity that orienteering only makes sense outside of Singapore---the terrain in Singapore is sufficiently boring and small with few non-urban areas left. I suppose I should try to enjoy it more while I am still here.

Next up, I finally got the new Cherry Boom (樱桃帮) album ``Only''. It was released in 2010, but it was only recently that I managed to get my hands on it. As always, they have that nice alt-rock pop sound that is addictive and whimsical. Probably not as good as their first album, but still a nice piece of work. Now, if Lesley Roy had another album out, I would be much happier.

Finally, I have decided to spend some money to get yet another Lamy Safari pen, this time for red ink. I think that I need more colours for annotation, and really, I cannot stand using non-fountain pens these days. Something about the amount of surface pressure needed.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Till next time.

Kitchen---Cleaned!

Ah, time for a quick blurb again. The kitchen is finally dealt with, with the cabinets cleaned out and the utensils/cooking implements in place. Food has been sorted out and now we are more confident with the stock that we have for cooking and consumption. The floor has been mopped, and everything is spick and span. Now we are left with giving away/selling some of the old stuff to folks and then the apartment would be inspection ready.

After doing all that cycling for moving a while back, I decided to sit down and compute just how much cycling I do on average. Here are my results:

Activity	Distance/mi
Home to office and back	2×2.3×4 days
Home to office to ARC and back	2.3+1.5+2.2
Home to ARC and back	2×2.3
Office to lunch and back	2×0.8×5 days
Total approximated distance	37

And that does not include any miscellaneous cycling that I need to do for various tasks like geocaching or grocery shopping.

No wonder I feel that my legs are tired sometimes.

Moved

So as at yesterday, I have finally moved out of my old apartment at Orchard Downs. It is a mixed bag of feelings though---having lived in the same place for a year, I have developed some light attachment to its oddities and general feel. But let's face it---I was having problems with that place. I don't know the neighbours well (they are mostly families who kept to their... social group centred around ethnicities), and I was forever talking to the walls that surround me. So when John suggested that we rent a place together by taking over an apartment of his friend, I was game to do so.

The moving was tricky, but finally done. The cleaning though, was a little exhausting. Sweeping the floor of dust, then mopping it with a wet mop, cleaning up the entire kitchen (including the refrigerator), disinfecting the entire toilet---those took about 3 hours from start to finish. By the time I was done, I didn't really feel like doing anything else.

But now, I'm safely at my new place. The neighbourhood is quieter, there is air-conditioning if we need it, and there's a room mate to talk to and do crazy shit with. Oh, and the rent is lower too. I think that this is an overall plus.

Moving

This week is sort of a crapshoot. I'm busy packing the few (but scattered) items I have to move to my new place with John, my roomie. The relative distance to campus is roughly the same, with slightly worse public transport access, but the overall lower rent and the company is very much welcomed. I think that it is time that I start acknowledging that I am, in spite of all appearances, biased towards the extraverted side.

On a more awkward and personal note, I've started to replace my bikini briefs with boxer briefs. Yes, to those who don't know what kind of underwear I wear (that's like almost everyone), I used to wear bikini briefs. But now, for a change of pace, I've switched to the boxer briefs. Initial impressions on this style of underwear are quite good---they don't give you wedgies like briefs do, and unlike boxers, they don't really ride up your leg and get caught in a thousand and one different bunches that make things rather uncomfortable. One more test that I need to subject these to would be to go for Jujitsu training with an athletic cup + jock strap; we'll see if the boxer briefs provide better support for the entire protection system as compared to my bikini briefs from before. And yes, it is high time to change my entire stash of underwear---the current set has followed me for the last uhh 6 years and are quite worn. And yes again, this falls in the ``too much information'' category, but it's just that little sauciness that I think my blog is lacking, right? ;-)

[PROTOTYPE2] finally came out for the PC via Steam. From initial impressions, this feels like a much improved version of the original [PROTOTYPE]. But considering that I'm at most 20% through the game content, it remains to be seen if the game is really that good. Things that I like about this compared to the old [PROTOTYPE] is the ``controlled'' evolution mechanism, which promotes exploration but hinders grinding as a means of advancing the character's ability. In some sense, this makes the story flow a little smoother. But as noted before, it will be a while before I can come to a final conclusion of the game.

Alright, enough chatter. I need to triage my belongings for the massive move detail tomorrow. Till next time.

Home Trip: A Hasty Report

*stretches fingers*

I promised to talk about my home trip, and so here it is. Note that the text might be a bit strange in style because I started on this much earlier, and am trying to finish it up now. Anyway, here we go.

First off, the main purpose of the home trip was really to deal with the fact that I was going a little nuts from too much social isolation. Yes, that's right, too much social isolation---the loss of any semblence of a support network. It is probably one of my biggest weaknesses, possibly a karmic lesson that I will need to learn during this life time. Since this is going to be a long post, I'm going to try something a little different and make use of fourth-level header tags to create sub-sections. They are unlikely to be well formatted as compared to the rest of the text, but I suppose it is more palatable than just a great wall of text.

And so, we begin.

Massive Travels

Travelling out from the C-U area to get back to Singapore is pretty non-trivial. The closest airport is CMI (Williard Airport), but it's hard to find/coordinate connection flights from there to other international airport hubs like say ORD (Chicago O'Hare). So my trip back consisted of getting to ORD, hopping on a plane from there to HKG (Hong Kong), and then from there straight to SIN (Singapore). The hard part was figuring out how to get to ORD in the first place, since it is a good 3-hour drive up north. I couldn't really ask friends to drive me up there, mostly because it is going to be a 6-hour drive for them (3 out and 3 back), but also because that meant that I needed to coordinate the schedule of yet another person, which makes things ridiculously complicated. That left with taking the bus from the Lincoln Express (LEX).

There was some mild drama for the LEX. The original timing that I booked was cancelled for some reason, and I had to choose between an earlier time slot or a later one. Being someone who would rather be checked in early especially for an international flight, I opted for the early morning one, which was a good 2 hours earliear. As a result, I ended up camping out in the office overnight to ensure that I could get on the bus in time---it was too early that the city buses were not running yet.

The trip up to ORD was fairly uneventful, except that there were short detours here and there to pick up other passengers along the route. Check-in at the airport did not happen as early as I wanted because the counter just wasn't opened that early. That was settled soon enough and before I knew it, I was already on the plane and en route home.

I'll spare the details of the long flight and just fast forward to touching down on Sunday (SGT).

Day 0

Reaching SIN made me feel a little delirious from happiness, well that and the fact that my sleep schedule was horribly messed up at that point, having to ``steal'' sleep from waiting and being onboard the planes. It was nice to see my mum and dad at the airport to pick me up, and we wasted no time to head off to Jalan Kayu to grab some prata---one of the foods that I have been craving for quite a long while. While at Jalan Kayu, I picked up one of the newer traditional caches there and checked up on the puzzle cache that YT and I placed in Seletar. It surprised me to no end that the cache was still there, pretty much in shape and well hidden from the muggles around. That was a good sign.

When I got home, the first thing that I did was to take a shower. At that point, I had probably passed 2--3 days without actually having taken a shower. I felt yucky from the stickiness that came from the clinging prespiration from the high humidity. After the shower, I started on some machine upkeep before heading out to get some of my running gear before meeting up with RX for some sushi/sashimi at our usual sushi place in AMK Hub (Ichiban Sushi).

Day 1

I had a meeting coming up, so I spent most of the day working on my research, with a breakfast session some time in between. I had to nap here and there to cope with the drastic time zone differences. In the evening, I went back to Buona Vista CC to train with the gang on Aikido.

I realised that after training in HDR JJT for about a year, my Aikido is a little ``hard''---not as yielding/cooperative as we ought to be. I think I'm still not at the stage where I can switch between philosophies that quickly. I met up with Tommy Senpai, Sam and Ejin. It was fun to train with them, even though I was a little rusty on my techniques. Ejin looked as lovely as ever, and Sam was definitely more skilled than before after getting his Shodan.

Day 2

Nothing else other than work was done, though I caught up with Jo in the evening. We had a simple dinner and watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a British comedy-drama film that had a cast consisting of quite a few old-time British actors/actresses. I will not go through the plot (see the link for details), but suffice to say, it was a really enjoyable film. It is not often that I went out for films like this, but this one was nice, just like the other films. Originally I was supposed to meet up with Kishore and Becky to watch Prometheus, but Kishore couldn't make it as his cold was still in progress and the medication was making him too woozy to drive. The late night was spent on working, of course.

Day 3

I was basically running on pure caffeine on this day. I had a meeting in the morning regarding my research, and had to make my way to SMU. Thinking that it might be a good idea to take the Circle Line (it wasn't complete the time I left), I hopped onto the NEL from Hougang and got off at the interchange at Serangoon to transfer to the Circle Line. What I saw/heard scared the hell out of me.

First, it was silent at that time of the day. No one was talking---no one was making an effort to talk. One could not hear anything that sounded ``human''---no chatter, no machinery sound, nothing.

Second, while I said that there was nothing that sounded ``human'', there was this uniform and synchronised footstep sound as the huge throng of people marched from the NEL section to the Circle Line section. It was a terrifying thing to hear at that time of the day. To me, it sounded like a whole army of zombies walking through the tunnels. I was sufficiently unnerved by it that I ended up running through the tunnel just to create some dissonance and retain whatever was left of my sanity.

The meeting came and went, and I left it feeling worse than I had going in. Fear gripped me like no other, and I felt even more guilty for deciding to take the home trip. Shaking my fears aside in as much as I could, I went on for my dental appointment before heading home for a nap. In the evening, I met up with my friend Chara, and we spent an enjoyable evening chatting about what was going on with our lives and things in general. Though she and I were not super close, it was still very heart-warming to talk to a friend, something that I have been finding trouble getting over here, more so than ever.

Day 4

Thursday. Originally, I planned to go for Aikido training again to meet with Freddy Sensei, but then I realised that I had basically spent the last 24--48 hours awake, and additional physical exertion was something that I thought was not a good idea. Besides, I had a meeting on Friday morning with my advisors for research---more work needed to be done, as well as the catching up on my sleep. So the day was spent napping/recovering, while the night was spent working on more concepts for my research.

Day 5

I made my way to ADSC and had my meeting before meeting up with Victor to go geocaching in the afternoon. We decided to tackle some of the new caches in the city area like Fort Canning Hill, and as we were traipsing along the river side, I found YT trailing us, to my surprise. I knew that she was due in Singapore for some exigencies, but I didn't realise that she had chosen the earlier of the two options. The three of us, reunited after a year, went along our geocaching ways before parting at the west side of Singapore. YT and Victor had different events to attend to, and so I went home from there on my own, without having a chance to have a meal with them to chat.

Day 6

Saturday. It was a day filled with events, and for this day, I borrowed my father's car to go about my ways. I miss driving the manual transmission car, and found to my amazement that despite not driving for a year, my driving skills did not deteriorate at all. The morning was spent at a CITO event at the newly opened Bishan Park. The event was organised by onehappy and Just1Gal, with me being the instigator and swag transporter. It drew a healthy number of geocachers, most of them local, but a couple of foreign visitors also turned up for the fun. We picked up the trash, found the geocache, and had a nice chat about all things geocaching related. YT made it in the end; she had told me on Friday that her family was having something related to 端午节 in the morning and thus might have some timing collisions.

After the CITO event, I began my own solo geocaching trip for the day. The first stop was to the Sembawang Hot Spring for the only Earthcache in Singapore. I took a fellow geocacher there too (he's from Portugal), and drove there fairly safely. That geocache done, I drove all over the Punggol/Sengkang area to pick up the geocaches that were out-of-the-way before heading down to Kovan. I tried to do the multi-cache there, but it didn't turn out well and so I ended up eating a Yoshinoya (yay beef bowl!) before heading off to Teck Ghee CC for Chinese Orchestra practice.

The Chinese Orchestra group was... quite small. Only a few of the old-timers were still around, and even the children's group was not super fancy. It's quite sad actually, and made me wonder if things would be different if I were around.

I managed to meet up with Kishore finallly during the late night, where we ate Prata at Jalan Kayu. It was a good meet up, and we talked about what happened to us in between.

Day 7

Quick packing in the morning and by afternoon, I was at the airport ready to go back to C-U. I was supposed to meet Cui in the morning for breakfast, but she couldn't make it on her schedule (by some coincidence, Cui was also in town at that point).

The trip back to C-U was fairly uneventful, except for the excessive 11-hour stop over in Hong Kong International Airport. By the time I got back to my domicile, it was beyond 2000hrs.

So, what about the trip? I think it served its purpose well---I didn't feel as nuts as compared to the time period before I went home, but also I felt like I was some kind of prisoner, never really having the opportunity to relish the fact that I was home. It raised quite a few questions in my mind that I don't know how to answer even now as I am writing this.

Maybe time will tell what the implications are.

Heat Wave

It's the weekend once more, but like any self-loathingrespecting PhD student, I find myself in the office working on my little contribution to what is hopefully the body of useful knowledge for the human race. The week that was just past was rather eventful in several strange ways, partly due to the federal holiday known as Independence Day, and partly because of a rather extensive heat wave.

Parts of the US was hit by a rather unfortunate heat wave that saw the maximum temperature rising to around 37--40°C, with minimum temperatures staying mostly above the 30°C mark. If it were only the heat, I couldn't really care less, since cooling off is as easy as drinking more water and letter perspiration/peeing do their work. But the humidity was relatively high too, which meant that the perspiration just clung on to the skin like a thin sticky film, which made doing anything rather uncomfortable. I opted to work from my apartment instead of hunkering down to the office where air conditioning was available, under the belief that the 2-mile cycle out in the ridiculous heat was not worth as much as being mostly naked at home and having access to my stock of food/refreshments and shower.

Surprisingly, my skin didn't flare up as badly as one would expect. Yes, there was some mild inflammation, but it wasn't as bad as the ``heat rash'' that I sustained when I got back home. I ran two experiments: involved just cleaning up the perspiration with a soaked towel, and the other involving showering every four to five hours with soap and water. It turns out that the soap and water combination was much more useful than the cleaning with the soaked towel. For one, the soap actually did much in removing the film of perspiration, which I think is the cause of the inflammation due to the ample growth medium for the bacteria. For two, a shower is generally better at removing extraneous thermal energy from the body, if one calibrates the temperature of the water properly.

I survived well throughout the week until Thursday night, where the still air made sleep almost impossible. I woke up at 0300hrs (Friday), finding myself drenched in perspiration. I ended up having to transfer my tiny table fan into the bedroom to blow myself just to get a couple more hours of sleep.

Independence Day was just as hot and humid as any of the other days in the week. I found my will to concentrate falling under the dual influence of the heat and the general holiday spirit, and when John IM-ed me suggesting to go geocaching as a way of escaping the heat via the air-conditioning in his car, I readily agreed. We had arranged earlier to attend the fireworks display held at Parkland College (north-west of Champaign-Urbana), but we ended up extending the plan to include an afternoon of geocaching. That ended well as we drove out around 15 miles westwards and proceeded to hunt down those pesky ``park-n-grab'' caches located along the intersections of the country roads. All in all, the cache haul for the day was 27, a new record, and one that helped push my total cache find beyond 400.

The evening was spent at one of John's dancing friend's Independence Day grill event, where we hung out with different people who were there for the [free] food, before capping the day with the viewing of the fireworks display.

The one thing that I can say about the fireworks was: wow. I know, it's not doing it much justice, but you just had to be there to see what I had seen. Unlike most of the fireworks display that I had attended, for this one, I was literally ``in front of'' the launch platform, having the front seats of the show, so to speak. This meant that the grandeur of the display was just magnificent.

Anyway, I ended up camping out in the office on Saturday evening and today to avoid more of the heat and to actually get some work done through the use of the large screen that I have available in the office. Oh, that and the printer and large table where I can just place strew all my material about.

I know I owe a trip description for my home trip---patience, young grasshopper. It will come up soon.

Back in C-U

Just a quick blurb.

I recently went home for a week to visit my family and to meet up with friends who happen to be in town, as well as to sample the excellent food that is present. It was a nice trip home, marred slightly by the fact that I couldn't actually go home ``guilt-free'' and not do any work. Nevertheless, the home trip was much welcomed and refreshing for my psyche, in fact.

I would spend some time to write more about the trip back and what I have done, just as a means of chronicling what I believe to be one of the more important aspects of my life this year. No, I don't think that I am predicting anything bad to come, but it is rather important that I go hom for a visit, however short it might be. Maybe over this weekend, when I can tear myself off work and do some ``recreational'' writing.

Anyway, I am safely back in the US, continuing my ever struggle towards understanding the craft that I had chosen as my career path.

Till updates to come.

...

Something a little more classic:I don't know why I am suddenly craving for this piece of music. Perhaps it's the realisation that I'm heading home for a visit soon enough that is making me thinking about such things.

*shrugs*

The Scribbles gets some updates

And so it begins again, yet another week. I'm wondering if I'm really ``suffering'' from some kind of mental disturbance, but really I think that it is much easier to dismiss that thought and focus on more pressing issues.

So far, the most active blogs that I have are this one and the poetry one. I do have one more blog, and it generally contains various fictional prose. That one has a rather low update frequency because of the time investment needed to write anything like that, but that's of course due to the fact that I wasn't trying to make use of my favourite blitz writing tool---WriteThis. The premise of that tool is simple: pick some parameters, set a time limit, click the generate button and start writing!

But anyway, what I wanted to say before I digressed is that I have spruced up the prose blog a little, shifting all my NaNoWriMo win banners from the main blog to the prose one (you'll notice immediately that the ``NaNoWriMo 2011 winner!'' image is now gone from this blog). Previously, I set the banners to point to the user tracking tool on the NaNoWriMo website, but now, I have altered them to link directly to the draft manuscripts for the entries instead. I think that this is a little more streamline than before and conveys more information too.

Alright, enough blathering in the morning. Back to work I go.

Marmite Soup Base FTW

So the thing about instant noodles is that underlying MSG-laden ``soup packet'' is often not very nice, particularly if you are getting your instant noodles in the US. But instant noodles are a cheap and plentiful source of carbohydrates, not necessarily a good source, but a source nonetheless.

The way that I sometimes make my noodles is to capitalise on two things: my Marmite and the ground pork that I buy from the store and keep in the freezer till needed. Let me first talk about the ground pork.

The ground pork that I get from the store is not necessarily the highest quality money can buy (that's just plain expensive), but at the very least, it doesn't look too old or too artificial in colour. Once I bring the pork home, I split it into 3 portions that I store in plastic containers. I used to not do anything else with them, but I realised that by massaging in some light soy sauce and pepper, I can enhance their flavour. I learnt the hard lesson of splitting them before putting them into the freezer, because really, the thing is rock hard when completely frozen and makes it neigh impossible to split up. Since I don't cook often enough to justify a large stash of meat in the fridge in general, the meats generally stay in the deep freeze compartment until I so decide to use them, and under those circumstances, I will take one container and place it outside to thaw. I would use a microwave for convenience and potential hygiene purposes (microwave thawing is faster and thus reduces the amount of time for bacteria to multiply), but I currently do not have such an implement.

So when making the noodles, I like to use a quarter teaspoon of Marmite to act as the broth base, with a little bit of ground black pepper, some crushed red chilli peppers and parsley bits for flavour. I find that the Marmite base provides enough savoury flavour worthy of soup while at the same time providing the vitamin B complexes that I am generally missing in my diet. The meat always goes in first when the liquid mixture is at a boil, and then I toss in the instant noodles to top it up. Stirring it around for a bit makes sure that nothing boils over and overflows the pot. A few short minutes later, food is served.

It's a nice combination that provides me with the protein that I need. I don't really worry much about fibre in general because I eat out often enough that I do get enough roughage.

[Ed: This article started a while back, but it is only now that I have some time to finish it up.]

Lamentations

I think that it is starting again. That sinking, empty feeling within me. The kind of feeling that one gets when one feels... alone.

I have my friends, I have my running, my jujitsu, and perhaps my writing. I have people I can talk to, to chat with over instant messaging tools, to summon over IRC for a talk or a beer, to video chat if I have to.

I have stuffed toys to mumble to, research papers to keep me thinking and wondering about my problem, news magazines to keep me abreast of world developments, comics to tickle my funny bone, horror stories to keep me on end.

But these are all... not enough.

I crave the touch, the deep understanding and care that only a family or a lover can give. I crave the fussing and adoration that accompanies that care, to feel loved and important, as opposed to this generally ignoble existence I seem to have gotten myself into. I crave the warmth of an embrace, the intimacy of the cuddle, the familiarity through proximity.

I miss being human.

June

Ah June. The month of supposed carefreeness, the month of freedom, the month of Summer and all its associated greatness and dullness. For me, it's just another month in the calendar, something to sort of look forward to, but not really to relish.

I am really looking forward to my home trip this month. Partly because I miss the people back at home, and partly because well I'm just so damn lonely here. Yes, I have some friends here, but somehow, it just feels different. I suppose as one gets older, one realises that one's old friends are just irreplaceable; they've been through too much to be the same as any other new friend that one makes. It's something that is a little hard to explain, but easy to feel.

Anyway, I don't really have much to say except that June is upon us. Till the next update.

Affection...

I guess it is that time once more... the need for some affection I suppose.I don't want to say more.

Walking on CoalsAsphalt

It's that time of the year again, summer for the northern hemisphere, and graduation season for North American colleges and universities.

Pretty nostalgic really, reminds me of my own graduation just a few years back. Now I'm starting to feel a little bit old heh. But then again, life goes on.

Graduation is an interesting social mechanic if one stops to think about it. It is largely symbolic---after putting effort for n years and taking k courses, the power invested by the board of directors of the institution confers upon you the degree that you had worked towards. Since we are talking about undergraduate degrees, of course we mean things like Bachelor's. But as I was saying, it's largely symbolic---has your journey in learning truly ended? Definitely not, since things are always in flux; this is the real world after all. But it does mark the soft ending of one chapter in one's life and the beginning of the nebulous part that is also known as ``adult life''.

Symbolism... that's something that the world, as a whole, seems to partake in. Symbolism is probably the very epitome of human consciousness, as it is a compact way of transmitting a whole host of related information without actually exhaustively enumerating them all. So far, machines cannot do that properly yet---the concept of auto-inference is not fully operational partly because most machines do not have the equivalent of a life-time of experiences that a human has. But as always, I digress.

Graduation. I look at the folks I knew from CMU and see that they have graduated. It's funny how when I first knew them, they were only froshlings straight out of high school, with idealism and enthusiasm infectious. And now they've all grown up. Hahahaha... I am starting to sound like an old man. Some of the friends I made over here in UIUC are also graduating, and being the rather sentimental person I am (an irony, I know), I do feel a little sad that they have finally graduated and are leaving. Happy that they have finally begun their life journey in the never-ending stream of the ``adult world'', sad that someone I know will be less close from now on, only because.

Yesterday was pretty nasty for weather. The temperature hit around 33 degrees Celsius, and the humidity was fairly low for most of the day, except in the evening/night, where it rained something fierce. I think I drank almost 4 litres of water yesterday just to cool down---and it was the first time that I felt that going barechested was actually necessary. Of course, as I am writing this now, the weather is something much cooler, probably under 25 degrees Celsius or something, I'm not too sure. Strangely though, even when it was getting hot, I didn't really find that my skin was exploding into anything weird, partly because the humidity was just that low. It would be interesting to see how I fare when I return home for a visit some time in the near future.

On Saturday, I did a crazy experiment, where I tried walking barefoot from my house to the ARC where my jujitsu training was held. Holy cow, it was the afternoon and I swear that the aspalt roads where bloody hot. I could only sustain a distance of around 0.7 miles before giving up and putting on my VFFs. Feet were sore as hell, and when I got home to check on the damage, a small number of blisters were already forming. The hot spots were terrible---it seemed as though I was sustaining some burn damage underneath the epidermis due to all the redness. Ice treatment was done, and I had to lance the four blisters because the fluid pressure was making it harder to walk than necessary. Of course, some anti-bacterial ointment was used around the incisions to prevent infection, and as at today, my feet feel rested, comfortable and blister-free.

Anyway, that's all the crazy updates I am willing to write for now. Till next time.

To Sir, With Love

T'is the season for graduation, and so this song seems quite apt:Old, quaint, but still apt. I miss this film.

Elyse in Precise

So, the last time that I wrote here, I talked about showing how Elyse looks like with Precise Pangolin. Here is a screen shot of her:

Lovely, isn't it?

Of course what you are seeing is not the ``stock'' installation---there were some things that I had to tweak to make sure that things worked out the way I want them to be. Now that I am a little more cognitively associated (wasn't so on Saturday due to the massive amounts of crashing that I had to do due to my horrendous sleep habits from the previous week), let me try to catalogue some of the changes that I did with the stock installation of Xubuntu 12.04.

• The installation uses 3 partitions---Ext2 for the O/S itself, Ext4 for /home/*, and one swap partition that is 2GiB, about half the amount of RAM Elyse has.
• The usual stuff that I like to have (i.e. C/C++, python, LaTeX, vim) are also installed. One new addition: explicit installation of numpy and scipy.
• Altered ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to undo the fubared colour scheme that came on default for the console---I like my default ANSI colours thankyouverymuch. If I remember correctly, all I did was just to delete the lines containing the special palette colours that were set up.
• Added the PPA for Skype(Enable the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and use that one instead since the PPA for Skype is broken) and Chrome and possibly Dropbox.
• Oh, remap the keyboard's caps lock key by editing /etc/default/keyboardto read as

  XKBMODEL="pc105"
  XKBLAYOUT="us"
  XKBVARIANT=""
  XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"

  Yes, it does a little more than remapping the caps lock key to control, but sure.
• Oh, if it is not obvious enough, set the terminal font to GNU unifont. I used to like really tiny fonts to see more, but then I realise that having a wider variety of viewable glyphs was more useful than reading too many things on screen. In fact, this is partly the reason why I update Eileen to the newest version of PuTTy---it allows the use of ``proportional width'' fonts for the terminal. This means that a pan-unicode font like GNU Unifont that has both single and double-width characters is usable.

So yeah, those were the ``special'' things that I did on the default installation to make it less annoying, but other than that, there were half a dozen other small tweaks that aren't really worth mentioning, so I won't.

Alright, till the next post.

[Ed: Since the post I realised that the PPA for Skype was unnecessary. Enabling the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and then doing sudo apt-get install skype works as expected.]

Precise Pangolin

This has been a rather long week, what with all the double-time that I have been taking just to keep on top of things. I think that have been pretty uncomfortably drained this semester, and now that the classes are over, I will be able to get back into doing what I like best, which is actually solving problems.

Kinda sad how things are huh...

Anyway, on to less sobering news. Now that Xubuntu 12.04 LTS ``Precise Pangolin'' is out, it is time to take it out on a spin. After discussing with myself for quite a while, I've decided that Elyse should be wiped out and reinstalled with a full partition of Xubuntu. Really, I don't use the XP partition that much anymore, not since I have Eileen with all her bells and whistles. Keeping the components on the XP partition up to date was starting to be too much of chore, and seeing that I actually use the Linux environment more these days just made it the right choice to switch over the Xubuntu completely.

So, first impressions on the Precise Pangolin on Elyse. For one, the theme is too damn dark for my liking. I'm going to stick with it for a while, but if I don't like what I see, it's going to go back to the light coloured theme that I had used earlier. What irked me the most was the fscking of the terminal colour template, like, seriously. None of the ``standard'' 16 colours, all kinds of random shades... how it it usable?

I will try to put up some screen shots when I feel more cognitively alert. I need to catch up on some sleep for now. Till next time.

Still Alive...

It's kinda funny how one's perception of time changes when one has only slept around 5 in the last 48 hours. Each day feels as though it were twice as long when in fact nothing much has changed. The mind feels more awake for some reason, and the body loyally soldiers on, its fatigue of being sedentary alleviated through the many body conditioning exercises like the push-up, the squat and the crunches that comprise the breaks that I take in between sprints.

I hate this semester. Really really hate it. It's like freshman year in CMU all over again---overloading on the second semester and taking all kinds of flak for it. The pain is real, and as I get older, I was starting to think that I cannot actually take such brutality any more.

Oh how wrong was I!

It turns out that the training that I had been doing for months prior had conditioned my body to be just that little bit more resilient, and as long as I take cat naps at times when by mind is wavering, I'm pretty good to go without having to go for a good night's sleep. To feel young once more! It feels as though I had forgotten this aspect of my life. Actually, come to think of it, I never really had to deal with this aspect of my life because for the most part, I was ahead on things. It was only at times of duress that I started to falter and had all kinds of problems.

Anyway, I will expound more about this when I have completed... some things. till the next update.

Bunch of Stuff...

Today feels dastardly different, partly because the temperature is now rising into the 28 degrees Celsius zone. Couple this with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough for the last few days just makes me feel a little woozy in the head. I'm on so many different kinds of self-medication that I'm starting to wonder if I am already down with something.

But anyway, just something cute: ``online'' vi. Not vim, but venerable vi. Pretty cute---I'm tempted to load it on my domain just to make things interesting.

In some other less cutesy news, the multiprocessing module in Python is a quick and dirty way of using the multiple cores that are present in many modern day machines. Dumbly parallelisable algorithms will never be the same again.

Another cool library in Python is the difflib. It contains some rather standard string-edit distance computations, which can save more programmer time when trying to implement those things---I mean seriously, why should we keep reinventing the wheel whenever we program?

Finally, just a tip for using sqlite3 in Python: cache into memory look up structures as much as possible. If things are still slow, consider using PRAGMA cache_size = 10000, where you replace 10000 with some bigger number. That should allow better use of main memory to support those joins and buffers that are oh-so-important for fast execution of queries.

I still haven't figured out if sqlite3 for Python has provisions for prepared statements, and honestly, I don't have the time to figure that out just yet. Maybe next time.

Orthodox File Managers

You know, I'm starting to suspect that I favour the command line a little too much, sometimes at the detriment of my own sanity. While the command line is awesome for doing things like running complex programs, or even to use a barebones-esque no-nonsense text editor, there are some limitations that even I have to start to admit that are causing severe productivity issues.

File management is one problem that I think the command line is really nasty for. Put simply, it becomes quite nasty to have to retype very long paths that come from very strict hierarchical management of the underlying file system. Couple this with the need to transfer files remotely, some form of location persistence would have been very useful.

Recently, in a bid to deal with that problem, I've started to dabble in the notion of the orthodox file manager. Orthodox file managers are a very mature technology---even in the days of DOS, there was the DOSSHELL that made navigating the file system easy. It wasn't that necessary then though due to the 8.3 file limitation. Part of the reason of my annoyance with modern systems comes from the need to escape various characters in the file names. Aaanyway, as I was saying, orthodox file managers. The old standby that I'm using for Linux and Unix-y systems is Midnight Commander. It's simple and gets the job done---it supports file type highlighting too, check it out at this site for some ideas.

For Windows, MC is a little strange to work with. For that, I actually go with FAR manager, a product originally from the creator of WinRAR. FAR manager works like MC, except that it is in Windows of course. But unlike MC, FAR manager can be extended with various plug-ins, and the one that is most useful is the FarNetBox, which allows one to connect to servers via SSL to perform transparent file copies. (Note: I'm using FAR 2.x, so I will need that plug-in. This site shows more plug-ins for FAR 3.x, which is still undergoing development.)

Well, that's all I wanted to talk about regarding orthodox file managers. Till the next time.

Trial By Fire

``The journey of a thousand miles begin with one step.'' It sounds a little cliché, but it is still one of the more useful mantra that one can have. It's just a way of reminding oneself that no matter how hard the road appears ahead, a small step in the positive direction is all it takes to get going.

This is roughly how I am feeling now about things. It's a really long and arduous journey ahead, and I had barely even scratched the surface on how deep the rabbit hole goes. It doesn't help much that I feel... mostly isolated with little support. Not a good sign---I wonder if I can hold on to my sanity this way. It's a hard life, but no one said that life was ever easy.

Anyway, enough of this mediocre spiel. Back to the proverbial grindstone.

Almost There... I Wish...

Well the left eye is feeling better, but I need to watch myself a bit more. This fortnight of hell is starting to take its toll on me as I beat myself black and blue to get everything that needs to be done, done. I really cannot wait to put check marks (or tick marks) on that list that chronicles my death march to finally show that things are done and giving me a sense of achievement and purpose.

But the pain, the sleep deprivation, the mental anguish, the physical inaction---all these need to be faced first.

Once more I question my judgement on what I now term as the ``second semester syndrome'', where I inevitably overload my second semester of college/grad school. Saw that happen once, and it scarred me, and now, it seems like it is happening again. I really need to be more careful on my choices like this.

Mild [Undiagnosed] Left Corneal Abrasion

Great, just great. About a week after my ``new'' right corneal abrasion has healed over, my left eye seems to have gotten one this time. Why am I so susceptible to corneal abrasions at this point? Is it because I've been using my eyes too much to the point where they get too dry, and then one accidental rubbing is enough to scrape at that old corneal wound from LASIK?

I think for safety reasons I should really use more eye drops, regardless of whether I feel the need to or not. I think that the more tired my eyes get, the more I feel like rubbing them, and the higher the chance of causing more damage due to the friction and the dryness.

Not a good way to be trudging through hell fortnight.

Keep pushin'

It's a Sunday over here. Dreary looking morning, but things are still going fine.

I feel a little humbled and sad that people don't really care about my poetry blog. Am I really that bad a poet, or is it just people not knowing of its existence? Maybe I should avoid doing so much free verse and should really tihnk about writing according to the various poetry rules---perhaps by doing so, the technical merits of the poems will override the rather whimisical nature of its contents.

But anyway, I am going to be so glad when this semester is over. So many things to do; I am hating myself for taking two project-heavy courses. They are driving me nuts, especially for the final course projects, since those eat into whatever time I have to think about things in general. And of course, the mismanaged expectations of what am I doing here---am I here to clear ``course requirements'' or to do all-out research? Such confusion over roles are probably things that many of the first year PhD students probably don't have to worry about, since their trajectory is less challenging than the one I had chosen.

The one that I had chosen. I must remind myself that being here is a personal choice, no one told me to come here, no one said that I had to get a PhD. I made the choice on my own volition, and so I should live up to my choice. My plans, my dreams... I only took up Computer Science as my speciality because I wanted to be a researcher. If I couldn't be a researcher, I would have taken EEE and gone on to be an electrical engineer or something just to make enough money to live on. In fact, too many circumstances have been actively discouraging me to be on this programme---the fact that I am still here is testament to what I truly want. But I have a flaw. I keep taking things that happen around me as ``signs''. People come, and they have left---I take it as a ``sign'' that perhaps it is not my karmic destiny to be here. I face roadblocks of all sorts when trying to get here---I took it as a ``sign'' again that it wasn't meant to be and that I'm going against the order of things.

So much irrational superstition from a ``hard'' scientist, eh? Hell, I'm ashamed of myself for even thinking like that at times. But I digress.

Just gotta keep pushing.

Running...

T'is gonna be yet another busy day, considering everything. I've been seeing an athletic trainer in the past month or two to learn exercises to strengthen the stabilising muscles in my legs so improve my running form. For some reason, I'm starting to actually like the idea of running now, even though I was always of the opinion that running was the most boring things that I could do with my time.

I suppose that my perception on running is altered by three big reasons. First, I now have a buddy to run with. Running alone can be rather boring, considering everything, since really, one is just literally moving at the slowest possible non-walking pace (there are much faster ways to get about), and in spite of what everyone says, running is a high impact exercise after all. And no, I do not ``jog''---I cannot run at a speed lower than 6 mph (thats roughly 9.6 km/h) without killing myself. Second, running is a good anti-depressant---it helps make me feel better about myself and life in general, what with that runner's high from the running, the feeling of ``being alive'' while running itself. Finally, the general locale of Champaign-Urbana makes it rather nice to run. The streets are quite orthogonal to each other, there are few traffic lights to slow things down, and more importantly, the place is generally ``flat'' enough without too many tall buildings to obstruct the flow of fresh air and other earthy flavours that make the running experience enjoyable.

I think that one of the things that I should do before I die is to run at least one marathon, and/or do a triathlon. The former, I can probably achieve in the next five to ten years, the latter, well, I'm not so sure. I've been learning a lot of how my body functions over the last few years, and that is making me prioritise improving my body over many things to ensure that I have the infrastructure to support my over-sized thinking brain (or so I hope). The end goal is that even when I'm seventy years old, I am still able to sit straight, walk straight, be quick on my feet, and can still throw healthy and athletic twenty-year-olds all over the training mat without having random fractures and other structural deficiencies.

I think that such a healthy lifestyle is achievable by me, and I will make sure that I get there.

Anyway, enough of a random rant. Work beckons. Till the next update.

Loneliness...

For some reason, a strong sense of loneliness hit me quite unexpectedly. I'm not sure if it is because I have been watching K-On!, an anime that has the main theme about friendships or if it's just the end of the semester woes. In either case, I just feel like I'm in the doldrums, and have resorted to listening to Tristania and Therion to keep my mood up (strange set, I know).

Anyway, back to K-On!. That's an anime series that my other sister has been recommending me to watch for a very long time, and I finally took the time to actually watch it. I like the story line---it is literally a slice-of-life type comedy, just the genre that I like a lot. The five friends interacting, making music, having fun, and then having to part due to graduation sort of reminded me of a past life that I thought I had at some point. There are only a few groups that I feel quite close with, but somehow their absence now is accentuated after watching the anime. Maybe I'm getting softer/older, and am more sentimental than I would believe.

Or it could be due to my lack of ``runner's high'' because I didn't run yesterday. I don't really know. I'm in a rather strange mood these days though... and am not really sure what to make of it except to gently push it aside to keep on working on what needs to be done. I figure I will deal with these things bit by bit as I try to overcome the end-of-semester workload.

Now I'm starting to wonder if my plans will go awry... maybe this is the existential crisis that everyone goes through when they are in between phases in their lives. Being in grad school has a way of stopping time in one sense and accelerating in another---might be a little hard to understand unless you too are a grad student. The general idea is that the progression of life, as a whole, has stopped, while the large amount of things that remains to be done makes whatever actual time left feel inadequate. This is probably something that one does not feel that much when one is a full-fledged worker in society. Who knows when will I be there once more?

Work, life. Can't have one without the other, but how should we balance them? No one seems to know.

On ``Baked Beans''

So upon some reflection, I think that I will start a new tag series on this blog. Considering that I am now cooking much more often than before (not only because I want to save some money, but that cooking is an interesting and enjoyable experience in its own right), I think it is a good thing to start tracking some of the observations that I found, as well as some advice that I had heard from people.

Anyway, today's first cooking-based post is about beans. Apparently, the ``baked beans'' that we generally get in cans can be made from m3h into woah with a couple of interesting ingredients. First, instead of just cooking the beans on a stove with whatever tomato puree was used, some brown sugar and ketchup are added to thicken the sauce. Chopped bacon can also be added, as is other types of sauces for flavour. Second, the mixture is baked instead of steaming, so that the brown sugar will caramelise and create that really nice thick sweet flavour that gets checked by the tanginess of the ketchup. It sounds like a lot of effort, but the end result is really awesome.

Mild [Undiagnosed] Right Corneal Abrasion

Alright, so the end of the week is drawing near, and I am in the midst of moving all the crazy end-of-semester projects to their hopefully joyful conclusion. I have no idea what is wrong with this ``new'' blogger interface---the entire interface feels quite lethargic. I can't tell if it is Firefox acting up due to the random AJAX-y things that this user interface is using, or if the whole machine is slowed down because I'm running one rather CPU-intensive computation in the background while not running the discrete graphics card.

Anyway, the last time I wrote was on how Sunday was passing me by. What I didn't say was that I think I had yet another corneal abrasion from Saturday. No, it's not from training that's for sure---I have those protective goggles, and no thumb ever went into my eye. What I think happened was that my eyes were too dry, and then I rubbed them, inadvertently causing yet another abrasion. Talk about bad things occurring more than once.

The difference this time of course is that it's probably pretty small. I only had very mild photophobia when I was looking out of my window into the environment outside on Sunday, and there was mild inflammation all about the sclera, but that was it. It wasn't unbearable---I still went out and did the stuff I had to do, even doing an interval-based run on Sunday itself. My vision was a bit wonky, but as at today, things have returned to normal. After that last incident, I think I know what to expect with regards to such an injury, and really, since this is so small, waiting it out was the best thing I could do. I just cannot afford to lose time for yet another meaningless set of daily trips to the local hospital that required me to make a trip to the next city for a second opinion at the end of it all.

This week and the next are going to be rather hellish, and I hope that things will turn out alright for me. Meanwhile, sleep beckons---I need it just to stay functional.

Till the next update.

Sunday Passes By...

With a blink of an eye, another weekend has passed my by once more.

Somehow being confined in the house, I feel quite differently. It has been a month or so since my buddy left the PhD programme, and I have more or less started to figure out different coping mechanisms for myself. I've been running more, reading more, and generally speaking, talking to myself a whole lot more.

I suppose I really don't dig into the ``solitary person'' thing all that well.

The end-of-semester crunch is upon me, and already I am looking at a rather long list of things that needs to be done. I have no idea how I am going to manage it, but I suppose that everything will be done somehow. No, I'm not interested in scoring all As for my classes---I just want to do enough to meet the department requirement so that I have time to look at other more relevant things related to my research. The three classes of this semester are killer, each with their own major projects. Sometimes I just feel like throwing in the towel. But of course, I often catch myself early enough to tell my depressing brain to shut-it and take active steps to move things along.

I'm starting to understand the feelings that some of my other friends who have left the PhD programme. It wasn't so much that the research is boring, it's the drudgery to fill up the paperwork and work on one's research that makes one develop a distaste of it all. Studies already take at least 40 hours a week, on a full course load, while research takes another 44+ hours a week. In short, it's like doing two full-time jobs at once (no, a full-time job is not 80 hours---do not believe the words of employers who are trying to undercut the labour to squeeze every ounce of ``productivity''). It's pretty easy to do it when one's young, but as age catches up and the real world's effects start to manifest themselves (translation: watching other people doing ``normal'' things and seem successful/happy), there will be a growing sense of self-doubt about whether all these additional hard work over and above the Bachelor's degree is ever worth it.

I know it is worthed it, in my case. But classes are just so... annoying. They get in the way. But they need to be done anyway...

Well, enough belly-aching for now. Till the next update.

Pompous Buffoon?

Am I a pompous buffoon? Sometimes I ask myself that question, particularly at times where I sit quietly and do a little introspection (so hard to find time to do that nowadays). I find that I know quite a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately, that rigour aspect of things are a little lacking, for really, research is not a measure of what or how much you know, but the lineage of the information that you've got. That's the whole onus behind ``the chain of proof/evidence'' that is prevalent in Science.

But anyway, why the question of a pompous buffoon? Pomposity is that know-it-all attitude that one can display, and a buffoon is mostly a stupid person. Maybe I am a pompous buffoon at times, secure in my knowledge and wanting to demonstrate to people that they are wrong at one point or another. Or perhaps I am, as always, being rather existential about things once again. But do these matter? Not to anyone no---no one really cares about what my internal state is. Actually, that's not quite true. Most people will not really care about what my internal state is, only my closest family and friends are interested in that. For that, I am thankful; I suppose that's what it means to be a human. To have the support and care of those who love you, to those who are related to you by choice or by blood. Maybe that's the purest kind of love that one can ever hope for in this life.

But yes, pompous buffoons. I can't really stand them. Especially when they are patently wrong, and refuse to see reason. The cocky way that they push their perspective, thinking that they are always right, without actually realising that they may, in fact, be wrong, even when those said parts are pointed out by many time and time again. Very annoying bunch of people. I hope to never be like a pompous buffoon, for the sake of others and more importantly, for the sake of myself.

Well, that's enough of a rant. Gotta think more, and wonder about how to survive this semester with little lasting psychological damage. Till the next update.

I'm A Comin' Home [In June]

I'm comin' home for a visit in the middle of June! I'm so excited for some reason---I'm not sure if it's just relief that I can finally see familiar faces and share time with people I know and love more, or is it just a desperate need for a change of pace [again].

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to post details here---folks who follow my blog(s) should email me (or drop a comment on this post) to let me know when you guys want to meet up. I'm sure we can arrange something! =)

Anyway, among the two-ish semesters I have been here, this semester is proving to be the more gruelling of the two. I can handle ridiculous amounts of homework, but what I cannot handle are the need to write 3 survey papers, deal with 5 projects all within the same time frame. They sap time in very different ways, and this can be pretty darn annoying, to say the least. It requires my brain to be split into 5 different ways, and frankly, I am doubting my ability to do it, in spite of the faith and confidence that many have for me (thank you). I am, of course, trying my best to adapt, but who knows really what the outcome will be.

Just keep on doing until this semester is over and then I have renewed energy for my research once more, instead of getting bogged down by the thousand-and-one different things.

On another note, I ran 9.31km in around 57:35 yesterday by going around the Champaign side of campus and including parts of the Urbana residences. I didn't realise that I had the capacity to run that distance---the longest that I had run till then was about 6km or so, already a wonderous feat as far as I'm concerned, considering that I never did run all that often. I think I'm starting to like running a lot, and the completion of that 9.31km route was partly because I had a good hydration plan. Remember that Energy Belt I talked about in an earlier post? Yep, I used that and made sure that as I ran, I kept topping up my fluids to stay hydrated and maintain sufficient levels of sodium ions.

Alright, the day has just begun for me, and there are a few things I am adamant of completing before the day is done to make progress. Till the next update.