Yet Another NaNoWriMo Win.

After 29 days of gruelling writing, I have finally finished this year's NaNoWriMo entry entitled ``disturbed''. The long and short of it is this---it is bad, very bad, exceedingly bad, superlatively bad. The inspiration for this story began in mid-October, where I was feeling somewhat homicidal for some reason, and thought, `hey, wouldn't it be a great idea to try something different and write a disturbing piece of fiction instead of the relatively PG stuff that I had been writing?' I was all ready to go and what have you, but since it was mid-October, I couldn't start on it. But when November rolled in, I realised to my horror that I didn't feel the same kind of... feeling that I had then. And so the entire premise of a disturbing piece of fiction started sizzling out before it got really hot. But I've tried my best and have written 50051 words on it. It's horrible---easily among the worst things I have written.

But I had a streak going. Can't just break it like that, right? Already I didn't finish one thing this year (that whole PhD mess), so I should try to climb out of the rut and finish something that I had initiated after all.

And yes, now, I have the manuscript, that I promptly will burn up and refuse to acknowledge its existence. It is that bad. It is so bad even for a first draft that I'm not ever going to release it for consumption. I've given myself a little leeway in suggesting folks to ask me privately for the work, but frankly, after writing the last twenty thousand words, I'm not really that comfortable letting people into this particular aspect of my headspace.

Good riddance for this year's NaNoWriMo. D=

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Side note 1: Shostakobvich's Ballet Suite 2 (Romance) is a strangely fun piece.

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Side note 2: I think I realise why I don't blog that much any more. Partly it is because I lead a slightly more mundane life, partly because I am keeping most of my thoughts in a paper diary, but partly because Blogger is now getting more and more dysfunctional for use. First they made the HTML editing mode so darn painful to use (why is the custom width of the fixed-width text removed?). Next, the whole layout-with-widgets concept is full of bugs---I added the new NaNoWriMo win badge to my Scribbling blog and it took me a good ten minutes to get it into place. Some of the problems that I was facing include duplicated image elements (what), the new demand of a title for the image (What), and the really terrible saving of the template (WHAT). I know it is more WYSIWYG like now, but its operation is terrible. Is this the way to encourage people to switch over to using Google+? That I'm not so sure. I'm starting to wonder if it is more cost effective to just host my own blogs on one of my servers, and no, it will not be based on Wordpress. It'll probably be a nice Pylons based thing that I write, because apparently that's what I'm doing a lot of these days.

Whelp, that's most of it. Time to get back to reading more books and to stay away from writing for a while. I have this feeling of re-writing that fantasy piece I started on last year for next year's NaNoWriMo, but I think I'm one year too early to be planning for that.

Till next time.

Shadow Warrior

The worst thing that can happen to anyone who actually has to think for a living is to have a massive headache. It is true --- it is actually ridiculously hard to think when you are suffering from some kind of internal pounding that you and the doctor have no real explanation why it is there, except that it shouldn't even be there in the first place. Let me begin a little on what happened.

So about three weeks or so ago I started to have headaches. It started off relatively mild, but it slowly got to the point where it was disruptive. In many previous occurrences, I had mild throbbing sensations at various parts of my left hemisphere, but that throbbing had always been mild and easily ignored. Moreoever, it had a tendency to resolve itself after a day or two. But what happened three days ago was anything like the original discomfort that I was used to dealing with. The pain was throbbing still, but it was holistic and spread all about the head. It was unbearable in the sort of ``I need to think'' sort of way, which really sucked. Seeing the doctor, the diagnosis that I was given was ``tension headache'', which was a fancy term for an idiopathic sort of pain, which was a fancier term for ``we have no idea why you are having headaches so here's a small stack of painkillers to help with the pain''. At least the doctor was diligent enough to let me know of the symptoms I had to look out for in case it was more than just a mere tension headache (any form of dizziness with vomitting was a sign that something more serious was afoot and would require an immediate scan of the brain).

While that tension headache was raging on, I had to keep thinking and coding for a demo that was coming up for the system that I was working on for work. That didn't end well for me because I had to either try thinking with a headache and without painkillers, or try thinking without a headache with the painkillers, but be woozy from the painkillers themselves. It wasn't much of a choice, and somehow I managed to pull through, and the demo was successful.

Ntnva juvyr gur grafvba urnqnpur jnf entvat ba, EK naq V unq n snyyvat bhg. Vg jnf fghcvq --- ur jnagrq gb erag/obeebj zl fnkbcubar, naq V jnf hajvyyvat gb. Vg jbhyq unir raqrq gurer ohg V jnfa'g yvxvat gur snpg gung ur jnf npgviryl gelvat gb fbyvpvg fnyrf bs zl fghss sebz zr naq V envfrq vg gb uvz gung V qvqa'g yvxr vg, naq gura ur whfg qrpvqrq gb rkcybqr naq tb nyy ``qvr zbgureshpxre qvr'' ba zr. Vg jnf n fghcvq snyyvat bhg, ohg V qba'g ernyyl pner nobhg vg nal zber --- rirelbar unf gb zbir ba jvgu yvsr ng bar cbvag be nabgure, naq guvf jnf whfg bar bs gubfr gheavat cbvagf va bar'f yvsr gung bar unf gb qrny jvgu. V'z abg natel jvgu uvz ng nyy, naq V qba'g guvax V npghnyyl unir nal zber pner gb tvir gb fbzrbar yvxr gung. V hfrq gb jbeel nobhg uvz naq jnf jvyyvat gb tvir uvz n unaq be gjb gb trg ol jvgu guvatf, ohg jryy, gvzrf punatr. Fvapr ur qbrfa'g jnag gb gnyx jvgu zr, fb or vg. Fbzr eryngvbafuvcf unir ab arrq sbe fnyingvba nsgre nyy.

Ntnva ba fbzr guvatf, V'z abg fher vs V'z whfg snagnfvmvat/cebwrpgvat be zreryl qvttvat n tenir sbe zl shgher frys gb whzc va jvgu cher uheg. Ohg V xabj bar guvat sbe pregnva --- fur naq V ner vaqrrq gnyxvat gb rnpu bgure, fybjyl ohg fheryl. Gvzr mbarf ner bar bs gur irel fgenatr ohg erny guvatf gung jr arrq gb qrny jvgu nf ybat nf jr yvir ba guvf cynarg naq ner ba yvgreny bccbfvgr raqf, ohg gurer ner fgvyy znal guvatf gung jr pna qb gb oevat gur pbaarpgvba n yvggyr pybfre. Ovg ol ovg V yrnea n yvggyr zber nobhg ure, naq fpnevyl, V'z fgnegvat gb cyna zl shgher jvgu ure va zvaq, gubhtu V'z abg fher vs fur vf qbvat gur fnzr, pbafvqrevat ubj gung jubyr fhowrpg znggre vf pheeragyl va gur inthryl qrsvarq mbarq, cnegyl orpnhfr V qba'g unir rabhtu pbhentr gb pynevsl vg pbzcyrgryl naq cnegyl orpnhfr vg vf abg gur evtug gvzr gb bognva n gehr nafjre. Ohg bar pna ubcr naq cyna, naq vs guvatf ghea bhg terng, vg jbhyq or bar bs gur zbfg jbaqreshy guvatf gb unccra va zl yvsr.

Vs vg snvyf, ng yrnfg V pna gryy zlfrys V unq gevrq.

Ohg gurer ner fbzr guvatf jurer zrrgvat snpr gb snpr vf n zhfg, naq V guvax gur nafjre gb zl pbahaqehz snyyf vagb guvf pngrtbel. Zrnajuvyr V jvyy whfg yvir va iveghny gbezrag ba zl rgreany fbhy jbaqrevat vs fur ybirf zr be vs fur ybirf zr abg. V whfg ubcr gung fur xabjf V qba'g hfr gung sbhe-yrggre jbeq yvtugyl, naq va znal pvephzfgnaprf, gung sbhe-yrggre jbeq jba'g rira nccrne sebz zl yvcf, gubhtu creuncf fbzr bs zl npgvbaf pna fcrnx sbe zlfrys.

On slightly less mushy news, I've finally had a chance to try out the new Shadow Warrior reboot. It has a very different feel to it as compared to the original Shadow Warrior released by 3D Realms --- it was one of the games that I had bought and played from the first Pentium III computer that I had access to at home. Compared to the original, it feels more like an RPG, but compared to many modern FPS, it feels more old school with the large number of battles with the mooks. However, the one thing that makes it different from the other FPSes is the ridiculously overpowered melee attacks that you can pull off with the katana --- it's even more insane than the original Shadow Warrior. There's a lot of twiddling involved with the katana attacks, but those are used mostly to generate semi-mystical ki-powered attacks that augment the katana in various ways. There are also three main trees of upgrades, each running on a different currency, so it doesn't follow the more ``traditional'' type of RPG advancement. I'm enjoying the game so far, but we'll see if it holds out toward the end-game content.

This year's NaNoWriMo entry is turning out to be harder than expected. I was ready to write a completely disturbing piece of fiction, but when November arrived, I suddenly realised to my horror that I had lost the disturbing nature that I had cultivated for this event. So I'm just going to wing it more than usual. Due to the nature of the writing, it's likely that I will not be releasing this for public consumption --- it will be available only on request.

That's all I have for now. Oh right, nearly forgot. I'm not on facebook again, and this time, I'm not sure if I'll ever be back on it. We'll just have to see how things go before I make a decision. Till the next update.

Workarounds...

Some notes to myself for Elysie-II since the update of the BIOS from release 5 to release 7:

• Xubuntu: For Hyper-Threading to work, ACPI needs to be enabled at the BIOS.
• Xubuntu: To not cause a device driver crash, disable integrated VGA support in the BIOS.
• Windows 7: In total contrast to Xubuntu, to not cause a device driver crash, enable the integrated VGA support in the BIOS.

I have no idea why this is the case---enabling the Intel integrated graphics causes an IRQ conflict in the Linux kernel, which basically locks up the system without the ability to be dropped down to a shell. In contrast, not enabling the Intel integrated graphics causes the Windows display device driver to scream bloody murder after an indeterminate amount of time, even though I disabled that device in the device manager.

Very very curious.

It's probably only a slight annoyance for now, considering that the Windows set up is used only for gaming.

Feed Not the Troll, but Ban it Instead

It has been a while since I last wrote here. The lack of updates isn't really because of a lack of want to update, but really because there is just so little to update. But, to keep things interesting, allow me to spew some vitriol on something controversal first, before expounding on more... mundane things. I mean at the end of the day, what's the point of a blog if not to rant?

``Victim blaming'' is a phrase I keep hearing time and time again, and often times, this is associated with the loaded word ``rape''. ``Rape'' is a loaded word because in many cases it ends up becoming a case of circumstantial evidence, a case of ``he said, she said'', and only because the conditions in which it is set up is based around the notion of consent, yet without the formality that is provided by usual contractual law. But that's not what I'm going to rant about -- I am ranting about the notion of ``victim blaming''. One common defense that rapists make is that the victim ``had it coming by dressing in a way that is sexually provocative''. Is that a valid defense? No, definitely not; in a liberal society, everyone is allowed to wear whatever the hell they want and walk wherever the hell they want. However, and this is a really big however, we should all be aware of how certain seemingly innocent factors can cumulate towards increasing the risk in which someone can become a victim.

Here's a slightly less controversial example. Suppose that there is a step ladder leaned against the wall, with someone on top of it painting. You are walking and you see this ladder. Will you walk below the ladder or around the ladder? Here, I am creating a scenario where there are two obvious courses of actions, one that is obviously less risky and one that is obviously more risky. A rational agent assumption would suppose that a rational agent would be slightly more risk averse, and therefore choose the course of action that is least risky, and in this case, walking around the ladder. Will anyone stop you from walking below the ladder? No, not really -- you can always do that, though if the ladder falls on top of you, you have no one to blame except for your own judgement.

Accusing someone of ``victim blaming'' is jarring to me only because it pre-supposes that the consequences of all possible actions taken are solely dependent on the environment, and that the victim is an innocent party. I disagree. While the victim ought to be empathised for his/her plight, he/she should also be taken to task for having poor judgement on his/her choice of actions given that the world is not an ideal non-hostile environment. I have to emphasize that last point because it is crucial -- just because you can dress skimpily (for example) doesn't mean that you have to. Should you be raped if you dress skimpily? Definitely not! But by doing so, you've already shifted the odds against you -- so while you shouldn't be sexually assaulted at all no matter what you wear, by dressing skimpily, you are already sending the wrong signals out. And I find that yelling at people who point out this at-risk behaviour as ``victim blaming'' is not only unfair, but highly irrational.

But try to get this past the general population. Good luck.

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In other news, the eye infection that I was fighting for the past three weeks has finally been fully healed over. It was stupid -- I thought it was yet another one of those corneal abrasions that I seemed to be prone to getting, but it turned out to be a viral infection. The opthalmologist suspected that it was a Herpes Simplex (HSV-1) infection; the infection managed to clear up from a sustained dose of topical Acyclovir. Having one blurry eye and one good eye made it really hard to see things and get stuff done, and more often than not I was just feeling rather irritated.

After nearly 4 years of service, Elysie finally kicked the bucket. I ended up making Elysie Mk II with a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H mother board with Intel Core i7 4770 Haswell processor and 32GiB RAM, housed in a Coolmaster HAF 912 chassis. I cannibalised the relatively new ASUS Nvidia GTX 680 and PSU from Elysie Mk I for Elysie Mk II, and moved the 1TB hard drive over to join with the 2TB hard drive. I had originally planned to rebuild Elysie next year, probably when Broadwell is released, but due to the sudden death of the old motherboard, I had to bring forward the upgrade plans. I ditched the Windows XP 64-bit Professional edition ``gaming'' operating system and installed a Windows 7 64-bit Professional edtiion one instead. I tried to get Xubuntu 12.04 LTS to work, but the Intel GbE ethernet interface was completely unrecognised -- had to use Xubuntu 13.04 instead.

I find the Elysie Mk II (or Elysie-II from now on) is not very stable for some reason. On Xubuntu 13.04, I started to get random kernel panics from kswapd, so I disabled the swap partition -- that seemed to do the trick. But then after nearly 24 hours of running the prime95 (version 27) program, she suddenly had a black screen and seemed to be turned off, and I have no bloody clue what was going on. On Windows 7, I had slightly different problems -- some of the graphics when playing Poker Night 2 were jittery, and there were a few random crashes for almost no reason. Thinking that the virtual/physical memory map was the issue, I have disabled the page file, and so far, that seemed to do the trick also.

I'm starting to suspect that perhaps 32GiB of RAM is starting to encroach upon other reserved memory locations that I was previously unaware of from running everything with memory of at most 8GiB. I have run memtest86+ on the RAM chips, and they seemed to be good. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out on things from now on.

Finally, my Bose QC20 In-ear Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones finally arrived last Friday. I test run the device on over the weekend and damn was I impressed. The comfort was like the usual IE2 that I use regularly (audiophiles can take a hike -- I value comfort over ``audiophilic quality playback'' from the headphones since I wear the damn thing for at least 8 hours a day), but it was damn good at blocking out the mundane noise that one would expect from living in a non-air-conditioned HDB flat on a low floor. Earlier today, I used the QC20 on the bus, and in the office before finally using it on the train, and I have the same comment as before -- the damn thing does a really good job at blocking out the unwanted noise, whether it was a consistent hum or human speech. I might have over-paid for this (it is Bose after all), but I'm not regretting it at all. I have tried many types of in-ear headphones, but of the lot, I still like the comfort that the basic Bose IE2 design has, where the speakers sit in the bowl of the pinna instead of digging deeper into the ear canal to find a hold there. The sound reproduction of the QC20 is not fantastic, but for what it is supposed to do (cut back on ambient noise), it does it really well in a form factor that lends itself to a much longer use time.

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Man, this is fast turning into one of those über-long and ranty posts. And I'm still not quite done yet. The last thing I want to rant about is the incident that occurred in my previous post. Let me put things into a little perspective. I write entries on this blog mostly as a way of airing my views on issues big or small, as well as to highlight some observations that I have made about the world around me. I love comments, because it is one of the ways to have some light interaction here. But I maintain an iron-grip on what comment gets published and what doesn't -- this is just prudence at work, and not really about censorship.

Recently, there have been two instances of trolls who have decided to make use of the anonymous commenting capability of my blog to slam me with rather negative and useless comments. One basically accused me of ``wasting my advisor's money'' (false: I was funded directly by the Organisation) and the other was goading me into thinking that I was a loser. I could have easily refused to publish those comments, but I chose to do so, as well as to rebut their allegations. Immediately after the appearance of the second troll, I promptly disabled anonymous commenting on my blog.

In all the years that this blog has existed, I have rarely had a troll situation like this. Yet in the short span of less than six months, I see two instances of such abuse of the anonymous comment system. I can shrug it off and get on with life, but I suspect this is likely to escalate over time -- I doubt that these comments happened ``by chance''. I don't have to deal with this crap -- and so, the anonymous commenting capability is removed.

Those who care will still know how to get hold of me, so nothing of value was truly lost. =)

And with that, I'm done with this post. Till the next entry then.

Funerals and Servers

The past fortnight had been a rather dreary affair, in many cases. Like most corporate salaryman, there was a large number of meetings mostly crammed within the past week, and the week before that I was again down with some kind of combination of a head-cold.

While I acknowledge that meetings are necessary as a means of communication for the different organs of the organisation to synchronise their actions towards a higher goal (often known as the corporate goal), but the downside of such meetings of course is that those of us who are quite low on the corporate ladder will need to find some other means of getting what we need to do done. But I'm mumbling again.

Two significant events occurred last week, and I will write a little on each here. The first is that I attended the wake of a colleague's parent, and the other was the handling of the servers that were finally in.

I'll be blunt. I'm not a fan of attending funerals, particularly of people that I don't really know that well. It is not that I find funerals morbid -- they are actually interesting, but more on that later -- but it's just that it is one of those many situations in life where one gets thrust into a crowd of strangers that are related by some rather obscure relationship that no one really knows about beforehand. I don't really like being in a group of strangers, especially if there is no real goal other than to mingle and ``network'', execu-speak for making tenuous connections in the hope that one day the connection may prove to be useful for business. This is of no difference; I felt a little discomfort not because there was a dead person in the room, but that I had to sit there and act interested among a group of people that I have little to no understanding of, even though many of them are my colleagues.

But the social discomfort aside, the funeral was an eye-opener of sorts. It had, in some sense, confirmed what I had earlier thought about funerary rites in general -- they were made for the living more than they were made for the dead; really, would you actually care what was being said and done given that you're already dead? The colleague whose parent the wake was for spent some time recalling about the parent's life, and how the last stages of the journey were like. We just sat there and listened politely, with little to no questions being asked -- what was there to ask about, really, on a person that we hardly knew ever? But it was obvious that as my colleague went on with the description, there was a certain sense of detachment -- there was awe in the voice, and little to none of that depressive feel that one would commonly associate with anything funereal.

Maybe I do find a little more solace among the dead than among the living.

On a less morbid sounding note, I had my first taste of the steps in deploying real servers in a real data centre. It was, to say the least, fascinating. Thankfully I didn't have to physically do the set up -- we had vendors to do that kind of thing. I was, however, exposed to the whole bureaucracy that was involved just to help get things into place, and that alone was worth a lesson or two. I am contemplating if I should get certification for specific server products as a means of building a set of standard skills that I can easily demonstrate to others, as opposed to relying on pure bravado and hackery to achieve. But all these certification things cost money, and I'm not sure if it is something that I can easily get sponsorship for... it's something to think about anyway.

And that's all I care to write for the moment. Till next time I suppose.

Brute in a Suit

``You can put a brute in a suit, but he will never be a gentleman---he just looks like a brute, in a suit.''

That's the kind of feeling I get each time I put on my work clothes and head out to the office for yet another day of helping towards building a cool system. I was never a part of the gentry; I was not of the high-born, even if it is actually to be possible to be a part of the modern nobility in a young nation like Singapore. If I had to choose the role in society that I have been bred for, I would go as far as saying being that of a Knight, with some notions of what a high-born ought to do, but being of a more practical temperament and pragmatic attitude towards life.

Not to mention also the general need to have to always ``fight'', and the whole code of behaviour that I somehow manage to keep stowed away at some part of my mind, which makes it neigh impossible for me to attempt truly reprehensible actions even unconsciously.

At work, I had to wonder about how to deploy something on a CentOS system, used as a proxy to RHEL. It felt like a throwback to an earlier period of GNU/Linux system use, almost like the time when I was running Slackware, where I had to basically grab and build most of the packages that I needed. Thankfully, there was still the presence of yum which helped reduce much of the problems of dependencies. However, the CentOS/RHEL universe of packaged binaries is significantly smaller than the multiverse that is Debian/Ubuntu, and having worked with the latter architecture for so long, I have been fat from the ease of using apt-get to get me whatever I want from the multiverse.

So it took me a while to figure out how to get the things that I need for deployment. It really didn't help that I had been running a rather nasty head cold for nearly a week and a half; it was almost impossible to read the mountains of documentation that were necessary for the understanding of what was going on and extract the salient points that helped with the undertaking. I was on the verge of delirium, but still managed to pull enough sanity together to get some things done. That easily cost me around two to three days of good work.

After writing so much here, one question remains. What's the theme of this update? That, I will leave it for now and walk away from the keyboard to get some much needed sleep.

Vexations

It is, once again, the evening, and I find myself sitting around, mulling about life as I await the opportune moment to head out for training. I find that I feel a strong sense of ennui more than anything else, as though there are very few things left in the world that are really worth any effort to look into or something. That blocking feeling that I felt in my head when I was still in the US on that fateful trip for my PhD is returning, but this time I think I can attribute it to the general lack of sleep as I struggle to balance the time spent on physical training and work.

Time really flies.

I hadn't realised that it was almost the end of the month until I suddenly decided to take a slightly closer look at the calendar. Within the month itself, I simultaneously feel as though I had done a lot and done nothing at the same time. Paradoxical feelings seem to be the rule of the day and that kind of double-think is something that I am unwittingly beginning to accept.

Why write now?

That's a question that always plague my mind. It is not as though I write blog entries on a regular basis any more---it feels more like a journal than a diary. I have no incentive nor the time to be writing every day, so each time that I do end up contributing an article to my own blog I always think of it as a specific event that has some form of significance.

I think I might be in love. Or at least, having a strong sensation of crushing on someone.

It is that sense of having a crush on someone that is probably the cause of my latest vexations. I want to be close, yet we are not really close. I want to be cool, but I'm not really that cool. I want to break out of a single mold that I might be in to be the real me, but I fear the rejection of that real me. I cannot tell what I am doing right now. Perhaps I should really cool off and let this crush work itself out---stop thinking of her for a moment and let everything settle down.

I have the funny feeling that I have been too aggressive for almost no reason, and with that, pushing my chances to ever be with her just a little further, even without considering the implausibility of its success due to all the various mitigating factors. Or maybe I'm just a worry-wart, and she's just feeling annoyed at her discomfort from training that evening, and surprised at another facet of myself that she hasn't seen and is therefore trying to process all that.

I don't know.

Self-Identifying Categorisation

Time to rant.

In spite of doing lots of machine learning/data mining stuff, I really dislike having to categorise things. Especially people. Actually, I hate categorising people. The mere act of categorising people is exactly the act of discrimination, which from the perspective of the liberal is a term that is taboo. It is also a term that has been drilled into my head as being ``not good'' for a multi-racial society, but of course I am alluding to the ``bullshit'' notion of what race is. But I digress.

We are wired for handle ``simple'' knowledge. Part of the power of being a human is the ability to abstract, generalise and then specialise the abstraction to specific instances. For instance, Science is the systematic study of phenomena in the attempt at understanding the underlying principles (generalisation), link up similar principles (generalise) and then try to apply the principles when a similar phenomenon in a completely different domain is observed (specialisation). Lucky for us though, Science, as a whole, is generally quite good at doing this.

The problem comes when we start applying such concepts to people. Especially when we are talking about various abstractions with respect to the way we think and react to the world.

Why would this be a problem, one might ask. There are two reasons that I can think of: first, the abstraction or thus category of the person's thought and reaction patterns is somewhat self-propagating, and second, this categorisation process is often used as the bulwark against any form of criticism. Allow me to elaborate before jumping on my case.

A self-propagating categorisation is as it describes -- one may demonstrate the qualities that might be thought of to be in a specific category X, and when told of the categorisation, it acts as a form of suggestion. Most people are quite suggestible, related to the fact that most people are unwilling to use their reasoning powers if they can do so, and this suggestibility is what causes that categorisation to be perpetuated throughout the life time of the person involved. And this in term helps propagate silly stereotypes -- ``once a thief, always a thief'', ``all X people have the Y behaviour''. This is one reason we have idiots.

Using a categorisation as a bulwark is more subtle and definitely more insidious than the first reason that I proposed. The subtlety comes from the empathetic factor that the self-identification of the categorisation is supposed to elicit -- telling someone that ``I am introverted''/``I am autistic'' evokes certain senses of emotions in most people. It is subtle because short of doing a diagnosis, no one can truly verify if the categorisation is true. The insidious aspect of this is when people learn from the empathetic responses and leverage on it to just be an overall jerk. ``I am introverted'' gets translated to ``well pardon me for treating you with the cold shoulder -- you know I don't like to use up my energy to communicate with people'', while ``I am autistic'' gets translated to ``sorry for being an overall jerk who speaks loud, speaks using my own lingo, and have a general lack of common sense''. A less petty example would be the use of the ``insanity defense'' for people who actually have pre-meditation.

Why rant about this? Annoyance. Just because you self-identify that you are of category X is no excuse that the rest of the world has to figure out how to deal with you. I've seen a few of those ``info-graphics'' where they write about ``How to live with X''. In the entire info-graphic, all I am hearing is basically me, me and me -- how to do things that will please me and only me. It sounds as though being in category X provides the mandate for stagnation, that one who is in category X will not find the middle ground, and anyone who wants to deal needs to do it on one's terms.

I call bullshit on that.

This is the exact same reason why there are many times when I get mad at the whole institution of marriage and the way some women carry themselves. But that is reserved for a special rant some other time. I think I have written enough on what I wanted. Till the next update.

La Loca

So, something a little different. Remember 《傻女》? Apparently it is a re-work of another piece, La Loca by María Conchita in Spanish. Here's the original version:The feel is so much more different. Now if only I know what the lyrics mean.

That Bubble of Isolation

It's extremely late now, considering that it is a work week, so I shall make this fast. Also, it has been a while since I wrote an entry at the ``traditional'' witching hour -- bear a little with me.

As I was hopping on the Circle line and the NEL home today, I came to a startling realisation that I am living in a bubble.

Yes a bubble. There is no mistake. A bubble of social isolation, a bubble of indifference to the legions of people who may be surrounding me at the time. It is not wholly intentional that it turned out that way. I was talking briefly with a friend recently on how when I travel on the MRT system (or bus too, but that wasn't really brought up during the discussion), I basically ``turn off'' my central vision and just operate wholly on the peripheral vision that I have the luxury of cultivating over the past decade of my life. It wasn't because I didn't want to see -- it was more of the fact that everyone was standing so damn close to me that if I tried to take in everyone, my myopia would be worse. We are talking about staring at a person's head that is no more than four inches away from one's nose; it is not a distance to be using the focal power of the eye.

And people wonder why Singapore has the highest ratio of myopes in the population in the world.

But the visual separation aside, that I am ``plugged in'' heightens the sense of the bubble. And no, it is not just me. Almost everyone else who is on the MRT are ``plugged in'' in one way or another. My choice of vice is a pair of in-ear self-sealing headphones to reduce the external noise, but there are others who keep in their little bubbles of drama videos loaded on their phones, or the latest mobile game fad, again on the same phones. Each of us are living in our own little bubbles, where we get completely oblivious to the world around us.

In some sense, it sounds like a utopia, the triumph of the individual over the conformities of society. But really it is far from the truth. While the individual freedom seems obvious, we have really traded in true freedom for a temporary reprieve that is really our bane in the future. I am lucky in a sense -- I am still old school enough to actually have friends who are willing to physically talk about things with me. But I suspect that the same situation is not true given this time and age, and with that, I feel sorry for our generation.

I am nearing thirty. The realisation that I am living in a bubble is horrifying to me in another way. I find to my horror that given the current situation of isolationism of the individual, it becomes even more statistically improbable that I can meet up with women, let alone meet up with potential spouses. It is rather disturbing to me at this point, but it hasn't gotten to the level where I start to get anxiety attacks and panic attacks.

I don't really want to do something completely out of character just to impress a girl. I find it superfluous and untruthful. Yet it seems that everyone seems to be more interested in the charade of romance than actually dealing with the true nature of ther person who is pursuing them. I'm not sure how this will turn out.

The feeling of isolation while travelling is probably quite normal, considering everything, but I feel the same even in the work place. I²R isn't the same as before -- the management and thus direction has changed, and the people make-up have also changed a lot. Friends that I had made from my two years of attachment there have mostly moved on in their lives, and I am now working all out and all in to rush a project whose delay I wasn't the cause of.

It is not that there is no one to talk to at work. If I gave that impression in my previous tirade, I apologise as it wasn't really what I was going for. I just find rather sombrely that I am merely a small cog in the machine that is the research institute, especially since I am a ``failed'' scholar who came back with only a course-based Masters degree. No PhD, but not even a thesis-ed Masters -- I'm only a smidgen higher than dirt in the pecking order. Maybe the sense of inferiority and the failure to meet up with expectation holds me back from joining the main lunch crowd to idly pass an hour with conversation, or it could be that the group dynamics have changed to the point that I have regressed back to my usual role of the outsider looking in. Who really knows?

I have been thinking about my life for quite a while, well specifically, what I am doing with my life and what I need to do with my life. I think all this while, I have been thinking too small. I have been too altruistic and neglected the more mercenary pragmatism that the world runs on. Perhaps it is time to go along such a path to maximise my ``true'' potential, or whatever excess/hidden capacity that I have given the disastrous attempt at the PhD. But this is something that requires the next two to four years to work out. Compared with some of my peers, I am actually doing alright, but compared to what this society is demanding, I think I can definitely do better, much much better. If mediocrity can earn undeserved credit, imagine what excellence can earn when done correctly!

Ah life. I'm always bitching about it. And now, something a little more hush-hush.

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But I digress. Back to the whole sense of isolation. While I acknowledge it, I am still uncertain if I am wholly comfortable with it at this point -- the associated peace and quiet that I get is at times comforting. Since I am more free-spirited than those around me, I still can derive my own sort of pleasure in spite of all this. So maybe this isn't so bad after all.

Anyway, it is now apparent that I have reached stupid o'clock. I need to crash out now before I completely lose it. Till the next update then.

Humidity Slows Me Down Dramatically

When I wrote the last post, I wasn't really expecting to be writing another for quite a while. And yet here I am once again bashing out yet another pile of words for your edification.

It really isn't so much that I have this sudden urge to write---it's more that time spent idley spent at home awaiting for the start of work has made me somewhat more restless than usual. Compound this with the 7-day ``chill out'' time from the theatrics of Facebook, I think that I would like to write more as a means of expression.

Anyway, just wasted two paragraphs on a silly start; time for the point of the post. I have been running on and off over the last four years, tracking statistics of the ``significant'' runs (basically runs that are somewhat serious in the sense that actual time an distance are recorded). I have some revelations on the state of my running that I would like to put down on paper so that I can remind myself in the future when I look at the numbers and charts again.

My running speed changes quite dramatically when I'm here in Singapore as compared to that of the US. For the same running distance, I run a good 12.5% faster when I'm in the US as compared to here. This difference goes up more dramatically when comparing to running indoors in the US versus running outdoors here---a whopping 25% difference. I suspect it has something to do with the humidity content more than anything else. Yes, the heat can be contributory to the overall discomfort felt when running, but considering that I was running in the early morning when the sun hasn't had the chance to heat things up yet, the only factor that is different is the level of humidity.

I signed up for another ten-kilometre race to occur in September. Based on the time left, I am starting to think that perhaps I'm a little optimistic in thinking that I can actually reach the 10km distance with a decent timing under such weather conditions. We'll just have to see how it goes. Instead of trying to run by distance, I'm re-starting with the whole run-by-duration scheme as a way for forcing my body to acclimatise to the humidity. I'll probably do that for about a month, running nearly five times a week, before I switch back to the race-training mode of going by distance.

Home Again

Well well, once again we are here, with me wondering what I should be writing for yet another entry in my blog. The answer is pretty obvious really, and it is more of an exercise of pseudo-intellectual rhetoric than anything actually remotely useful.

I've been back in Singapore for at least a fortnight by now, and like all things that occur in my life, things got a little interesting along the way. I think that to give enough perspective, it is important to start writing things in a chronological order.

So I took a rather long flight from Champaign-Urbana back to Singapore. In the bid to avoid having to take any of the long haul buses up to Chicago, the originating flight for it all was from CMI (Champaign-Urbana). The trip from CMI to ORD was relatively uneventful. However, it was at ORD where things started to get... interesting.

First off, my two pieces of checked in luggage required re-tagging to be kept checked in all the way from ORD through AUH to SIN. That took a while, but it was eventually done. Second, I had to have my boarding pass reprinted at ORD because there was no direct transfer from the domestic terminal to the international one---I had to leave the secure area and re-enter, which explained the need for the reprinting of the boarding pass.

The flight from ORD to AUH was relatively uneventful too. AUH (Abu Dhabi) was an interesting airport to spend the night at; it was located in the UAE, and thus the dominant landscape was that of sand. The food places at the airport were as expected; mostly ``international'' fare in the sense of the fast food. I had a lot of coffee there, but still managed to sleep on the eventual plane ride back. The transit to the aircraft was something of an eye-opener as well, since we had to take a bus out from the departing gate towards the plane that was parked a little ways off from where the gate was. It felt like the old days of air-travel for some reason, where one would get to climb up the stairs to board the plane, kind of like the depictions in the many Tintin comics.

The nightmare began the moment I arrived back in Singapore. The airline lost my luggage, both of them. To make matters worse, the re-tagging step at ORD was done incorrectly---only one of the two pieces was re-tagged, and even then, it didn't seem that it made its way back to Singapore either. It would take the airline and the Lost & Found department of Changi Airport roughly a week to find everything back, and even then, the hard shell luggage was damaged beyond economic repair and I had to claim damage fees. During that time, I just made do with whatever clothes that I had left lying around at home, as well as the stuff that I had shipped back via FedEx. Since I was missing my key going-out clothes, I was also mostly confined indoors, which was a blessing in disguise because I could acclimatise with relative ease.

------

In general, I think that the way in which I had been relying to beat jet lag was to use my ginormous brain to solve some problems that crop up, and this time was probably no different. I took apart Elysie and cleaned her out as best as I can, going as far as to take apart the heat sink and fan of the CPU to clean out the dust and to re-apply thermal grease, seeing an immediate improvement in the overall core temperatures. While Elysie was still incapable of handling a four-core full load while maintaining a relatively low temperature in this non-air-conditioned environment, it took much longer for the warning sensors to report reaching 90 degrees Celsius than before the thermal grease update. That's of course a good thing.

I also switched out the PSU to something of a higher wattage (from 480W to 600W), and switched out her Nvidia 9600 GT for an Nvidia GTX 680 made by ASUS. Man, that new graphics card is a real beast. It was just long enough that I had to shift the hard drive to a higher position in the mounting rack, nearly missing the ventilation that the fan could provide. It was also thick enough that I had to remove the external eSata card connected to one of the PCI slots just to give it enough room for the heat sinks and fans. It consumed enough power that it required effectively three PCI-e power sockets; two multiplexed with a given cable plus another one. Thankfully, the new PSU was a modular one, and it was possible to stitch together something that worked. The other problems that the new card posed were the position of the cables---Windows XP, being the weird system it was, didn't like it when the hard drive was not in the SATA #0 or #1 slot, and it promptly kept crashing ever so often. But I was afraid of connecting the hard drive to the SATA #1 slot because it was directly under the massive card; I was afraid there wasn't enough clearance, something that I soon discovered to be false.

So after rejigging things for quite a bit and suffering one too many BSODs from Windows XP (no kernel panics from Xubuntu, even after the rather harrowing re-partitioning process and re-install), the card was successfully installed and tested. Benchmarks from DMC4 and Torchlight II showed a ridiculous improvement to the point that I am extremely satisfied at the small fortune I spent in the upgrade.

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I think I will stop here for now and write more some other time.

Graduation Again

As I write this today, I note that it has been two days since I have officially graduated [once again] from school. The experience was anything but satisfactory, and I think that now that things are effectively over, it is time to be a little more reflective of what had happened throughout the time that I had spent out here in UIUC.

I started the journey with a steely resolve to work hard, and to achieve what I sought to do. However, things started going downhill as time went on, and I could only attribute this to an impedence mismatch between idealism and reality. I could have pushed on through as hard as I could and be completely and absolutely defeated before pulling out, but I chose to bail early. I had done some soul searching and realised that the price to pay for that stubbornness of completing what I started was something that I was unwilling to pay.

For you see, during the time period that I was here, I had effectively lost a lot of whatever humanity I managed to cobble together during my years back at CMU and then I²R. I decided that losing all of my humanity was really too high a price for a dream of obtaining a PhD, which, as I keep on thinking now, is a mismatch with what is essentially me.

I am a generalist. This has been established since forever ago---I was never particularly good in one thing, but am competent in multiple sometimes unrelated domains. My strength lies in the ability to grasp things from multiple different perspectives, and not to be a highly narrow focus the way a PhD programme is supposed to train you to become. In spite of all the idealism of how insights and inspirations are cross-disciplinary, my little foray into the world of the PhD has shown me that any form of cross-disciplinary notion is at best a superficial acceptance of the inter-dimensional linkages of the various fields of science---the truth is that each field has its own dogma that needs to be implicitly satisfied before anything can even be considered legitimate. This is the limitation that comes from the peer-review process that scientific research is based on. A ground-breaking idea or anything that challenges widely accepted beliefs is less readily accepted than one that is an incremental build-up, yet for a PhD thesis the incremental build-up has to be sufficiently large that it can be ``considered'' to be a new piece of knowledge. The problem then is the subjectivity of what it means to be of a sufficiently large delta, and this problem is akin to that of defining pornography---no one can give a precise definition, and yet, when given an instance of something that satisfies the requirements (of either pornography or a large enough delta of work), a majority can declare the correct classification.

Heh. That last paragraph feels almost as though I were resentful of my experience. In many ways, I am. I resented the daily deconstruction of my psyche, I resented the lack of progress of my research. I resented trying to go against nature, an ongoing war that I thought I could win given my previous successes at the other skirmishes.

But the humanity, or rather, the loss of my humanity. As the days went on, I grew increasingly withdrawn from interacting with people. I only interacted with people superficially, only wanting to know them from the activities that I partook with them, and not wanting to develop anything more than being an acquaintance. I didn't have the time to do music, couldn't join a band because all the bands here were actually ``serious'' and not like the Kiltie Band whose purpose was to allow amateurs to play and enjoy music. Jujitsu helped in letting me forget about the loss of humanity as I channelled my angst towards physical exertion, but redirection was merely a temporary diversion and not a solution.

So I came here with dreams and resolve, and leave with a general disdain for my own field, and an increasingly low impression on people. It is with that sort of emotion that I have graduated with. The last semester was slightly better, I met with a few people who I can call friends, and have part of my humanity slightly restored. But the damage to my psyche during this period of life is more or less permanent, just like all the little bruises and cracks that I had sustained over the years.

Who knows what the working world will bring.

``I'll give you my love...''

Something that a friend of mine posted on Facebook that I thought was cute:Yes, it is morbid and disturbing, but really funny!

Don't watch it if you can't stomach mildly visceral humour.

Again on Helping Others...

T'is funny you know, when someone does something for you when you are one of those people who are used to doing things for others. Especially if you are used to not being appreciated by those whom you help, those who think that it is somehow your duty to help them. It's a weird feeling indeed.

I used to like helping people. I think that I probably have visited this perspective a long time ago here, but to date, I cannot really remember if that was true. I said ``used to'' because these days I find that it is almost never in my interest to be helping anyone. It has gotten to the point where the whole affair can only be described as being rather sordid and meaningless, and at times, a complete waste of my time.

``Why the sudden bitterness?'' one might ask. It isn't so much of bitterness but a re-realisation that the world is still operating on a selfish principle, where everyone will do anything and everything under the motivations of self-interest, and if it so happens that it can benefit others as well, it just a little bit better and somewhat more morally justifiable. Sometimes I wonder just how naive I am, in spite of living for more than a quarter of a century by this point, that I keep forgetting all these little insights I glean about the sick underbelly of society.

The Radio...

Something absolutely random:I heard this song back in... 2001 I think when a group of Girl Guides were training some mass dance thing near where I was working on some homework. The hook of the chorus was too strong to forget, and now, 12+ years later I managed to find it.

Funny how memory works huh.

On Failures

Why is it that people like writing about success stories? What does one actually learn from a success story when it is a statistical anomaly than anything else, since each success is characterised by hundreds if not thousands of failures prior to it happening? Maybe it is because there is a certain sense of an ego, that talking about successes hides the fact that one had failed many more times than that one success would show. Maybe it is because of the notion of ``reputation'', where one's worth is only measured by the successes that one has as opposed to the number of lessons learnt from the failures that one made.

I think that for a long while now, I have been writing here from the perspective of the failure. I rarely write about successes---as I had said, they are too few statistically to be worth any useful information, and even in the cases where the success stories are well-written, tend to be ego-inflating pieces than anything that is actually lesson worthy. Why should I write about my success? Why should I read about so-and-so's success when I cannot learn anything useful from it? All I can learn from their success story is a particular configuration of factors that led to their success, factors that may be hard to replicate, or in the worst case, factors that become clichéd that one can no longer repeat the success for oneself. Think about the last time you've read about a success story; I'll just pick a random one, the rise of Facebook as an illustrative example. So okay, you learn about the formula of a ``social network'' that Facebook propounds, and then what happens? You see many people trying to copy and use the same formula as a way of creating their own social network, in a bid to mimic the success that Facebook had. Some will be successful, of course, but many will fail. But none will ever outshine that of the initial proponent---none will ever outdo the success that Facebook has.

What has this got to do with anything?

Think about how Science works. I used to have a romantic view on how Science was all about the advancement of human knowledge, and how scientists were working relentlessly towards new discoveries that can benefit all of us in one way or another. Then I got exposed to an aspect of the real process and didn't like what I find. It might be that the scientists are still conforming to my initial views on development and advancement, but what they have been publishing appears contrary to the principles of the scientific method. Again we find that only success stories are published; few if any of the failures actually make it into a journal or conference paper. It is quite sad [and hypocritical] really, since there is a lot of wasted work as everyone keeps repeating the same damn mistakes and failures only because those who had initially made them did not document them for the rest of the community to learn of. I think that this is what gets me more than anything else while I was still apprenticing to be a researcher, that so much time and effort is wasted on this. I value efficiency over many things, and to have to spend so much time failing is just too much to bear on my conscience. And that is one of the reasons why I gave up.

But back to something less heavy. Why all the talk about writing about failures then? Because I can write more here. I doubt anyone who is still reading my blog wants to hear of my successes only---for one there are few of those, and for two it makes me sounds like a much larger egomaniac than I really am (I'm not really an egomaniac). So I will write about failures and accept that I am still human, in spite of my chosen handle and other things. Maybe someone out there who chances upon my blog(s) can learn from my failures and be successful in their own right---it'll be nice to know if that has happened.

Rant out.

More Cool Gifts

So last evening I hung out with Corbin and Alisa because I was getting rather tired/bored of eating alone at home for dinner. They lived near to Siebel Centre, so it wasn't all that inconvenient to drop by and hang out. What amused/amazed me was that they actually got a surprise present for me for my birth anniversary. Check it out:

There are two pairs of Injinji toe-socks to go with my Five-Fingers (and huaraches, but really it is too bloody cold to be wearing those), and a long-sleeved technical shirt. I am positively delighted at this---this is going to make winter training less annoying and scary. Alisa made Japanese-styled fried chicken with spices and a nice tofu dish to go with rice, and we washed it all down with Guinness. I think that these days I'm starting to do less of Jack Daniels and more of Guinness; no idea why though. Maybe hard liquor isn't the thing for me any more?

But yeah, I don't really have much to update except for the shout-out to Corbin and Alisa for the wonderful birthday gift.

I'm a little behind in terms of training because of the weather conditions. For some reason, the weather for the past few days tended to be... awkward, to say the least. There were a few uncharacteristically warm [but windy] days which were followed by sub-zero temperatures with winds up to 5 m/s. In short, horrible weather. But with the gift, maybe I can do better for this week.

Till the next update.

Curry!

So, the first thing is that for some reason, Blogger fubared the width of the text area used to enter the blog entry, so I have no sense of how much I'm writing any more. I don't really like writing in a space where I cannot actually visually store the entire paragraph or extent of the paragraph in one place---it makes it really hard to see just what the heck I am writing. Feedback has been sent, but I suspect nothing will be done. But this unscheduled rant is not what I want to talk about today.

So some time back, I wrote that YT sent me a stack of instant curry mixes. A few days ago, I finally broke open one pack to make a pot of tasty chicken curry to share with my house mate John. We had got a pack of chicken thighs and russet potatoes during the weekend grocery run and I just followed the instruction and put the food together. There was a small snafu involving thick chicken thighs that are not so well-cooked, but it was easily rectified through some additional cooking time massaged with additional slits made into the meat of the thighs. And the end result was this:

It's one nice big pot of delicious curry! I ladled out a bowl of it for myself (John did the same for himself too), and here's how that looks like in bowl form.

Man, even as I am writing this, I'm starting to get hungry just looking at the pictures.

Anyway, notice the fork and spoon on the empty plate? Those are actually foldable cutlery that I got from the Mammoth Cave souvenir shop. Unlike my titanium spork, the foldable cutlety separates into combinations of more regular silverware, except for chopsticks. I usually eat stuff with my spork, but since I'm lazy when it comes to eating chicken thighs, I needed the fork and spoon combination to be wielded separately, which explains the change of choice of cutlery.

Alright, I'm going to grab an apple to satiate that hunger and then sleep. Till the next update.

Birth Anniversary Aftermath Report

It has been roughly a week since the anniversary of my birth and there is of course much rejoicing at a most private level. I suppose I should write a little about what happened and what-not because I promised it earlier in my thank-you note to all the people who had an impact on my life.

Prior to everything happening, I had decided to get myself a gift as per tradition. People who have known me for at least the last couple of years would realise that I'm a big fan of the e-ink readers, preferably something that is bigger than the puny 6-inch form factor. Eirian II was a recent replacement for Eirian who had aged over the course of the years. In general, I'm not a big fan of tablet form-factors that are not e-ink for several reasons: discomfort in reading under either bright or dark conditions, low battery life and most importantly, lousy resolution. So when I realised that the Nexus 10 existed with a whopping 2560×1600 resolution, I knew it was time to plonk some hard-earned money down to get a tablet for myself, not to replace Eirian II but to support her with a coloured high resolution sibling for things that are not as readable on e-ink displays. An example of such files are comics or graphic novels---the colour that is used doesn't look that good when we strip out the hue and saturation information. Here's a quick picture of the Nexus 10:

Lovely isn't she? The character that is gracing the wallpaper of my Nexus 10 is Death of the Endless, one the loveliest and pragmatic personifications of Death I've ever seen, prompting the joke of ``Yeah, I stare at Death every day on my screens''.

While I have named almost every device I own, somehow I can't bring myself to naming the Nexus 10 (or even my Google Nexus phone either). I'm not sure why---maybe I see these devices as tools more than friends per se, which is weird. Maybe I need to devise a new naming scheme for such tools, I mean, even my Neo has a name (Eiko). I can't call the Nexus 10 ``Eirian III'' simply because it's not a replacement but a sibling. This will prove tricky...

I can't remember how many years it has been since I've kept my birth date hidden on the Facebook. One thing is for certain though: only those who truly care truly remember. Folks like RX, Cui, Victor, JW and YT (and my mother of course) who gave me their best wishes on this day of rememberance. This gives me a fuzzier feeling than having half of the people on my Facebook ``friend list'' spamming my wall with two-word and three-word posts. YT even sent me a nice box of Singapore-styled curry spices, which gives me a strong incentive to actually get potatoes and chicken from the supermarket the next time I go grocery shopping---curry in the US tends to be watery and lacking in the right kind of ``kick''.

It's not that the curry here sucks, it's just that it is dominated by the Thai-styled and American-styled curries. It's hard to find something more of a cross between South East Asian and Chinese cooking that is so predominant in Singapore.

But those are of course the physical gifts that I received. There are other more interesting things that happened. John treated me to a dinner at Tang Dynasty restaurant in Urbana without knowing which day my birthday was (he only knew the month, which was of course my intention overall). The food there was decent but not fantastic, and we both agreed that it was definitely one of those places that we should just try once to have said that we have been there and then find cheaper places for food. =P

On the actual day itself, I had actually arranged with Janet to have dinner at Alexander's Steakhouse, a family-style restaurant-grill-bar north east of campus in Champaign. Ever since Cedar brought me there to eat about a year or so back, I've fallen in love with the thick slabs of steak that they had to offer, and wanted to go there to eat once again. Janet had a car and so it was an easy enough appointment to set up. Well, of course I neglected to inform her that it was my birthday; I don't reveal things like that because it generally makes people feel all uncomfortable and compelled to do strange things like agonising about gifts and what-not---I'm more interested in the company than what gift they are getting. Anyway, we had an enjoyable dinner at Alexander's, and Janet was amazed/confused/shocked that it was my birthday, and that I could finish up the 20 oz steak and that she could finish her 16 oz steak and still walk after the fact. Easily the best dinner I've had in a while. =)

For some reason, I just enjoy food. For the rest of the week, I ended up eating sashimi and sushi at different places (oh my poor poor wallet) and had an enjoyable extended celebration of my birthday, without drawing too much attention from people. Life is good that way.

And now, a new week begins, and we are back to the regular schedule of life. Till the next update.

Thanks

On this day of my birth, I give thanks to the people who have made an impact in my life, be they positive or negative. I would say that I will not be the same without the different forces that pull and push me in various directions to shape me into who I am today.

This is a perfect age, perfect in the way the Greeks define that of numbers. The future is forever mutable and hopefully bright, and as I stand among the rubble that was last year, I see myself being a happier person in time to come. May this year be better than all the years I had.

As I near my third decade of existence, I cannot help but look back at the road that I had taken. I do not believe in destiny, thinking that perhaps in some small way I am always able to shape my future. This, I have believed for quite a while, but as one gets older, the confines of society start to demonstrate their power and cast doubts as to whether one could truly be as free as the wind and choose a life that they want.

No one lives forever, and I know I definitely won't. While young, I might have been destined for greatness or so they say, at this point in my life, I am seeing that greatness is no longer within grasp, for I have long since strayed from the so-called optimal path towards such an achievement. I wonder how people remain functional amidst such woeful realisations, and then discovered that their functionality comes from a self-imposed resignation that they are but a cog in the machinery that is humanity. And soon, I will be just another part of the Machine itself.

Maybe in the upcoming years I will lose much of my cynicism and return to a much happier state, but these are things that I do not know fully, since time is long and the fog of the future is still there. One does not make a decision that one does not understand---that is the order of things.

Perhaps I will write less cryptically when this day has passed on the things that I had done, as opposed to the aspirations that I have mumbled about here. Till the next update then.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2012:

1. 57 poems posted here
2. 66 essays/rants posted here
3. 3 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 127 articles, down from the 156 articles in 2011.

That's an average of 0.34 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.43 last year. Again, we see a general downward trend in the amount of leisurely writing I do, partly because I have been writing so much daily for my work/studies. Every day I write anything from 400 to 1000 words about the research work that I am doing, and really, at the end of it all, I just don't feel the need nor energy to write even more things.

Last year was quite a major turning point in my life---I started struggling even harder through my PhD programme in UIUC. It dominated most of my life to the point that I just had to give it up. Doing so meant that I had to deal with the aftermath of that. Will I regret this in the future? Perhaps not, but only time will tell if this is the best decision to make.

Other than that, 2012 was really quite uneventful. I wrote a fantasy story for my NaNoWriMo entry, something that I had never done before. I'm not particularly pleased with the ending as it felt rushed, so perhaps I might actually fix that during this year before November comes by again.

Well, that's all I have. Onward to a better tomorrow, I suppose.