Blech. Today is Christmas Day. Merry Christmas!
Already I had trashed two possible blog entries because I couldn't put together a coherent argument for something that I felt like talking about. So let's just forget about those things for the moment and enjoy the holiday that it is today.
And soon, 2016 will arrive, a new year begins, and another revolution around the sun would be complete.
Till the next update.
Friday, December 25, 2015
Sunday, December 13, 2015
A Rant of Music
Here we are again, at the end of yet another week and the start of the next. Sometimes I wonder to myself how many people actually are still reading this; of the lot that I know, there is at least two whom I think are still reading what I write, but even then, I am only sure of at most one of them being a somewhat avid reader of what I have to say.
Anyway, enough of digressions, let's talk about what transpired throughout the week.
My mind had been in a fog for the past couple of months regarding the way I handle myself with regard to my music, and specifically my dizi. I had been blissfully unaware of the developments outside of the cosy little Chinese orchestra I am now a co-leader of until the increased activities associated with the year-long marketing scheme known as the ``SG50''. I started to hear stories about how other orchestras were becoming much larger in numbers, how their pieces follow the Western tradition of only showing the parts that the instrument is supposed to play (complete with numbered rest bars with no melody written in them), how music is now annotated using staff notation (and especially for dizi, having at least two different ways of annotating the same thing due to lack of reification of the concert pitch and the dizi pitch)), how the pieces were becoming technically challenging the way Western music has been for the past century, how people were trying to play more ``pop'' sounding pieces (originally written for a 5-man band but rescored to be played with traditional Chinese instruments), and lastly, how everyone was going about with their ``Grade 8'' certifications of their particular [Chinese] instrument.
I think that saying that my mind had been in a fog is probably a vast understatement. I was positively depressed.
Music wasn't supposed to be like that, leastways not us amateurs who play them for fun. It's supposed to be a means of expression, a way of socialising through the use of a common love of how sound interacts with each other in consonant ways, a blending of spirits and natures if one deviates into abstract mumbo-jumbo explanations. Why did it all come to yet another race to zero where everyone was more interested in showing how good they are and what certificates they have and in some cases bragging about who they know/work with?
Why can't a music piece be played because it sounds beautiful and not because it is technically demanding?
I had a sort of identity crisis. I knew that I was definitely not the best in dizi by any regard, but I've always felt that my skill in my instrument has always been sufficient in handling whatever [fun] music thrown into my lap. I've felt that way since a while back, when sifu sort of went into semi-retirement from the orchestra so that he can look after his kids. But the SG50 activities threw a wrench into my sort of blissful state of being. Left and right, I suddenly started noticing that people were all showing off their graded certifications, and there was talk about measuring people's musicianship by the grade they got in these standardised examinations, or that how people who never played the instrument and was suddenly thrust into the limelight are termed ``talented'' and heaped tons of praise.
Maybe I'm just a sourpuss. If so, I am angry at myself for feeling that way, for not being true to myself that music is to be enjoyed in the making of and the receiving of. Instead of feeling inadequate, perhaps I should've felt happy that there are more people who are interested in picking up a folk music instrument that is not any of the mainstream classical western ones to make music, any sort of music, knowing that even if they had the equivalent of a Grade 8 technical handling, they still don't have the twenty-two years of experiencing music from the performer's perspective.
Superiority complex much huh?
It's a very human emotion. After all, I had enjoyed a rather interesting childhood on the stage, having done pretty much the whole gamut of what can be done on the stage. And after that, I had told myself that I would avoid that kind of glamorous lifestyle---it was easy to get sucked into it and ``enjoy'' the fruits of labour [together with whatever side perks there were] but it was definitely not sustainable. And sustainability is a big value for me. Doing something for a long period of time that is unsustainable just does not make any sort of economic sense, especially since the object we are budgeting here is time, which is irreplaceable, and not money, which is.
Digressions aside, I went to Mr Lee's art exhibition recently and had a good chat with him about things. He's doing much better now ever since he stepped down from being the leader of our little Chinese orchestra out in the community club. By ``much better'', I mean his overall happiness and outlook on life. We talked about many things, and after the talk, I feel much better. Turns out, what I had observed was not wrong, and that there was a deeper reason why it was happening. However, for what I am doing (i.e. amateur musicianship as opposed to trying to do this professionally for pay and what-not), it shouldn't matter much to me at all. His advice boiled down to the line of ``stay the course and fear not the external changes'', of course with a lot of explanations on why that was the case.
In short, I shouldn't have second-guessed my own thoughts and feelings about this.
I feel so much better after that talk. Actually, I feel different in a good sort of way. That weird stress and depression from feeling inadequate sort of passed over me. I think that it came about in the first place because I allowed myself to be swayed by the whole need of certification among those who have decided for one reason or another to follow music as a profession. It is also possible that some of those who went for the certifications in the first place are unsure of their own standing and want to have some kind of assurance that their short foray into the music world is producing some kind of measurable outcome. After all, they didn't just twenty-two plus years of their lives learning music the old-fashioned way.
Sustainability. I have made that the cornerstone of my philosophy---now it is time to live it. And I shouldn't waver---my instincts are good, and I often act upon them only after I had thought through them.
Anyway, enough of digressions, let's talk about what transpired throughout the week.
My mind had been in a fog for the past couple of months regarding the way I handle myself with regard to my music, and specifically my dizi. I had been blissfully unaware of the developments outside of the cosy little Chinese orchestra I am now a co-leader of until the increased activities associated with the year-long marketing scheme known as the ``SG50''. I started to hear stories about how other orchestras were becoming much larger in numbers, how their pieces follow the Western tradition of only showing the parts that the instrument is supposed to play (complete with numbered rest bars with no melody written in them), how music is now annotated using staff notation (and especially for dizi, having at least two different ways of annotating the same thing due to lack of reification of the concert pitch and the dizi pitch)), how the pieces were becoming technically challenging the way Western music has been for the past century, how people were trying to play more ``pop'' sounding pieces (originally written for a 5-man band but rescored to be played with traditional Chinese instruments), and lastly, how everyone was going about with their ``Grade 8'' certifications of their particular [Chinese] instrument.
I think that saying that my mind had been in a fog is probably a vast understatement. I was positively depressed.
Music wasn't supposed to be like that, leastways not us amateurs who play them for fun. It's supposed to be a means of expression, a way of socialising through the use of a common love of how sound interacts with each other in consonant ways, a blending of spirits and natures if one deviates into abstract mumbo-jumbo explanations. Why did it all come to yet another race to zero where everyone was more interested in showing how good they are and what certificates they have and in some cases bragging about who they know/work with?
Why can't a music piece be played because it sounds beautiful and not because it is technically demanding?
I had a sort of identity crisis. I knew that I was definitely not the best in dizi by any regard, but I've always felt that my skill in my instrument has always been sufficient in handling whatever [fun] music thrown into my lap. I've felt that way since a while back, when sifu sort of went into semi-retirement from the orchestra so that he can look after his kids. But the SG50 activities threw a wrench into my sort of blissful state of being. Left and right, I suddenly started noticing that people were all showing off their graded certifications, and there was talk about measuring people's musicianship by the grade they got in these standardised examinations, or that how people who never played the instrument and was suddenly thrust into the limelight are termed ``talented'' and heaped tons of praise.
Maybe I'm just a sourpuss. If so, I am angry at myself for feeling that way, for not being true to myself that music is to be enjoyed in the making of and the receiving of. Instead of feeling inadequate, perhaps I should've felt happy that there are more people who are interested in picking up a folk music instrument that is not any of the mainstream classical western ones to make music, any sort of music, knowing that even if they had the equivalent of a Grade 8 technical handling, they still don't have the twenty-two years of experiencing music from the performer's perspective.
Superiority complex much huh?
It's a very human emotion. After all, I had enjoyed a rather interesting childhood on the stage, having done pretty much the whole gamut of what can be done on the stage. And after that, I had told myself that I would avoid that kind of glamorous lifestyle---it was easy to get sucked into it and ``enjoy'' the fruits of labour [together with whatever side perks there were] but it was definitely not sustainable. And sustainability is a big value for me. Doing something for a long period of time that is unsustainable just does not make any sort of economic sense, especially since the object we are budgeting here is time, which is irreplaceable, and not money, which is.
Digressions aside, I went to Mr Lee's art exhibition recently and had a good chat with him about things. He's doing much better now ever since he stepped down from being the leader of our little Chinese orchestra out in the community club. By ``much better'', I mean his overall happiness and outlook on life. We talked about many things, and after the talk, I feel much better. Turns out, what I had observed was not wrong, and that there was a deeper reason why it was happening. However, for what I am doing (i.e. amateur musicianship as opposed to trying to do this professionally for pay and what-not), it shouldn't matter much to me at all. His advice boiled down to the line of ``stay the course and fear not the external changes'', of course with a lot of explanations on why that was the case.
In short, I shouldn't have second-guessed my own thoughts and feelings about this.
I feel so much better after that talk. Actually, I feel different in a good sort of way. That weird stress and depression from feeling inadequate sort of passed over me. I think that it came about in the first place because I allowed myself to be swayed by the whole need of certification among those who have decided for one reason or another to follow music as a profession. It is also possible that some of those who went for the certifications in the first place are unsure of their own standing and want to have some kind of assurance that their short foray into the music world is producing some kind of measurable outcome. After all, they didn't just twenty-two plus years of their lives learning music the old-fashioned way.
Sustainability. I have made that the cornerstone of my philosophy---now it is time to live it. And I shouldn't waver---my instincts are good, and I often act upon them only after I had thought through them.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Ping and Observations
Ah. The end of November is upon us again, and soon December will arise. Already there are noticeably fewer people on the roads, which of course grants me the opportunity to sleep in just a little bit more since the incidence of slowing traffic jams is just that much reduced.
It's very early a week since I've returned to the usual apartment, having bivouacked at my sister's place for nearly three weeks while they were doing some government mandated/subsidised block-level renovation programme. Things have finally started to become more normal, and as such, my mood has been steadily improving. Elysie-II has been hooked up again, and is currently undergoing various software updates as I am writing here. I had to borrow a power cable because I left the original one in the office when I was moving her there to be out of the dusts' way.
Of course, I've brought my dizi back as well. Cannot do without them, especially since I really need to practise more because I have stupidly decided to take part in a dizi choir. The dizi choir isn't stupid---I am the stupid one here because it is obvious that they are operating at a much higher level than I care to be. Most of them have performance degrees or related certification/awards for dizi playing, while I'm just that guy who plays in a neighbourhood (literally!) Chinese orchestra who hasn't had a proper lesson for a very very long time.
Come to think of it, I think I haven't had a proper lesson from sifu for nearly a decade. A very sobering thought.
But we'll see how it goes. If they want me, hooray! If not, well, no loss. I can still make music no matter where I am.
It's kind of funny. Here I am, at the near perfect witching hour for writing a blog entry and what do I have to gripe about in my mind? Almost nothing. Perhaps it is a sign of good things to come.
Or I'm just too damn tired to do any more writing. Work throughout the week has been quite interesting but draining. I'm not complaining though, just observing---in this economy, finding a job can be considered much harder than it was before (was it ever easy?), and in some ways it is nice that I have a job doing what I like that pays me so I can pay the bills.
Of course the pay isn't fantastic---that's what one gets from a quasi-government outfit. Quasi-government statuses generally imply that we get the worst of the possible pool of accessible private/public traits. Like many things, it's a trade-off---quasi-government status usually implies company longevity, and potentially enough research in the pipeline that they are a little more willing than the government proper to take calculated risks. In that sense, there is some job security.
Alright, till the next reply then.
It's very early a week since I've returned to the usual apartment, having bivouacked at my sister's place for nearly three weeks while they were doing some government mandated/subsidised block-level renovation programme. Things have finally started to become more normal, and as such, my mood has been steadily improving. Elysie-II has been hooked up again, and is currently undergoing various software updates as I am writing here. I had to borrow a power cable because I left the original one in the office when I was moving her there to be out of the dusts' way.
Of course, I've brought my dizi back as well. Cannot do without them, especially since I really need to practise more because I have stupidly decided to take part in a dizi choir. The dizi choir isn't stupid---I am the stupid one here because it is obvious that they are operating at a much higher level than I care to be. Most of them have performance degrees or related certification/awards for dizi playing, while I'm just that guy who plays in a neighbourhood (literally!) Chinese orchestra who hasn't had a proper lesson for a very very long time.
Come to think of it, I think I haven't had a proper lesson from sifu for nearly a decade. A very sobering thought.
But we'll see how it goes. If they want me, hooray! If not, well, no loss. I can still make music no matter where I am.
It's kind of funny. Here I am, at the near perfect witching hour for writing a blog entry and what do I have to gripe about in my mind? Almost nothing. Perhaps it is a sign of good things to come.
Or I'm just too damn tired to do any more writing. Work throughout the week has been quite interesting but draining. I'm not complaining though, just observing---in this economy, finding a job can be considered much harder than it was before (was it ever easy?), and in some ways it is nice that I have a job doing what I like that pays me so I can pay the bills.
Of course the pay isn't fantastic---that's what one gets from a quasi-government outfit. Quasi-government statuses generally imply that we get the worst of the possible pool of accessible private/public traits. Like many things, it's a trade-off---quasi-government status usually implies company longevity, and potentially enough research in the pipeline that they are a little more willing than the government proper to take calculated risks. In that sense, there is some job security.
Alright, till the next reply then.
Select→Move Idiom in GIMP
GIMP is extremely powerful for a cross-platform free image manipulation software, but it has some... oddities. The most fundamental oddity is the lack of the select→move image in selected region idiom that comes from most primitive raster tools.
The best way to do this (i.e. least of all hacky ways) is to do the following:
I find myself needing this more when I start to adjust scores by scanning them as high quality (600 dpi) grayscale images before manipulating them, often to generate a more compact copy (e.g. from 3 pages to 2).
The best way to do this (i.e. least of all hacky ways) is to do the following:
- Press r and select a rectangular region.
- Then, apply C-S-l. This causes the selection to be a floating layer.
- Move at will. Ensure that your mouse cursor is actually on a part of the image that is in the floating layer, i.e. don't click on the transparent ``no pixels'' part.
- Click anywhere outside the image to stop moving that layer
I find myself needing this more when I start to adjust scores by scanning them as high quality (600 dpi) grayscale images before manipulating them, often to generate a more compact copy (e.g. from 3 pages to 2).
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Post Oblivion Rant
Double post much? There's of course a good reason for that: this is the traditional post-NaNoWriMo rant. And I don't really want to have it conflated with that other thing that I was talking about earlier.
This year's NaNoWriMo concept had been vague. I was reading H. P. Lovecraft's works earlier in the year, and his eldritch happenings gave me the idea to rethink of them as some kind of five-dimensional creatures. The Illuminatus! trilogy did little to turn me away from that idea, and so that was how the concept was born.
Initially, it was supposed to be a series of short stories based on a five-dimensional prankster---let's just call him F for short. F was supposed to be the unseen protagonist, and each short story would involve some poor soul (different across stories) who was afflicted by a particular five-dimensional nonsense from F and how that fella lived through his life.
Naturally, that's not what happened in the final execution.
``A series of short stories'' requires more planning than I care to, and the number of five-dimensional gimmicks I could come up with was insufficient to carry through the 50k words needed. So I switched it a bit, and made it into some kind of α versus β story. You can of course view the result from here.
That last bit shall remain a mystery for now. Kudos to those who can read and understand it.
I'm not as proud of this as some of the older entries I have, but I'm not complaining. A win is a win---50k words were reached in around 14 days(!) and I am satisfied with the story. And that marks my seventh NaNoWriMo win. I'm not sure about the eighth NaNoWriMo, but I'm sure whatever I'm reading in between should give me inspiration on what to write next.
------
I'm not really a fan of using fan fiction as a source for NaNoWriMo; it feels a little... cheap. The taking of characters that had more than twenty thousand prior words to characterise them and clobbering them together to compose a series of hijinks feels hackish. Of course I do not disparage the use of fan fiction for NaNoWriMo; it's just that I will try my best to avoid doing that myself. Part of the fun of writing up new characters is to allow the said characters to grow, to become what circumstances have made them to become. In some ways, fan fiction limits the character's growth because such work often emphasizes the ``canonical'' traits and behaviours of the character, unless there is an actual attempt to revisit the character's traits and behaviours from a completely new environment and do an interpretation there. That latter is excellent for writers because it forces one to make evaluations and decisions on directions that can be exciting, instead of the long drawn out bore that an in-universe styled fan fiction tends to end up becoming.
Anyway, rant over. Head over and download that first draft of Oblivion.
This year's NaNoWriMo concept had been vague. I was reading H. P. Lovecraft's works earlier in the year, and his eldritch happenings gave me the idea to rethink of them as some kind of five-dimensional creatures. The Illuminatus! trilogy did little to turn me away from that idea, and so that was how the concept was born.
Initially, it was supposed to be a series of short stories based on a five-dimensional prankster---let's just call him F for short. F was supposed to be the unseen protagonist, and each short story would involve some poor soul (different across stories) who was afflicted by a particular five-dimensional nonsense from F and how that fella lived through his life.
Naturally, that's not what happened in the final execution.
``A series of short stories'' requires more planning than I care to, and the number of five-dimensional gimmicks I could come up with was insufficient to carry through the 50k words needed. So I switched it a bit, and made it into some kind of α versus β story. You can of course view the result from here.
That last bit shall remain a mystery for now. Kudos to those who can read and understand it.
I'm not as proud of this as some of the older entries I have, but I'm not complaining. A win is a win---50k words were reached in around 14 days(!) and I am satisfied with the story. And that marks my seventh NaNoWriMo win. I'm not sure about the eighth NaNoWriMo, but I'm sure whatever I'm reading in between should give me inspiration on what to write next.
------
I'm not really a fan of using fan fiction as a source for NaNoWriMo; it feels a little... cheap. The taking of characters that had more than twenty thousand prior words to characterise them and clobbering them together to compose a series of hijinks feels hackish. Of course I do not disparage the use of fan fiction for NaNoWriMo; it's just that I will try my best to avoid doing that myself. Part of the fun of writing up new characters is to allow the said characters to grow, to become what circumstances have made them to become. In some ways, fan fiction limits the character's growth because such work often emphasizes the ``canonical'' traits and behaviours of the character, unless there is an actual attempt to revisit the character's traits and behaviours from a completely new environment and do an interpretation there. That latter is excellent for writers because it forces one to make evaluations and decisions on directions that can be exciting, instead of the long drawn out bore that an in-universe styled fan fiction tends to end up becoming.
Anyway, rant over. Head over and download that first draft of Oblivion.
Past Is Past
I don't usually like to talk about or even think about the past, not because there are things from there that have hurt me before that I do not wish to remember, but that the past is there for a reason.
It has passed.
People and places from the past tend to remain there for me because they rarely have any relevance to the present and the future. Those who are still relevant and are meaningful and dear have followed me from the past and into the present, while those who were merely contextual friends would remain as they were within that context, until and unless attempts are made to update their relevance to where things are now.
I bring this up because I have learnt recently that my old secondary school is about to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary of founding. And I'm not even apologetic in not wanting to go back there to visit them.
They have become irrelevant to my present and future.
When I went back about a year or so after graduating from it, all they could remember of me was the fact that I had bad skin. None of what I had done mattered---they could not identify me as anything else other than ``the kid with the bad skin'' despite all the crazy [awesome] things I had done.
That was when I threw my hands up metaphorically and gave up attempting to keep in contact with them.
Now, as the days pass on by and the number of people I meet up as a part of my job increases, some of these people from the past are slowly catching up to me. But they don't bother me much, a quick but vague acknowledgement with sufficient delay is enough to dissuade anyone from pursuing the past any more than it is necessary.
After all, shouldn't it be more important to understand what a person is now than what the person was before?
It has passed.
People and places from the past tend to remain there for me because they rarely have any relevance to the present and the future. Those who are still relevant and are meaningful and dear have followed me from the past and into the present, while those who were merely contextual friends would remain as they were within that context, until and unless attempts are made to update their relevance to where things are now.
I bring this up because I have learnt recently that my old secondary school is about to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary of founding. And I'm not even apologetic in not wanting to go back there to visit them.
They have become irrelevant to my present and future.
When I went back about a year or so after graduating from it, all they could remember of me was the fact that I had bad skin. None of what I had done mattered---they could not identify me as anything else other than ``the kid with the bad skin'' despite all the crazy [awesome] things I had done.
That was when I threw my hands up metaphorically and gave up attempting to keep in contact with them.
Now, as the days pass on by and the number of people I meet up as a part of my job increases, some of these people from the past are slowly catching up to me. But they don't bother me much, a quick but vague acknowledgement with sufficient delay is enough to dissuade anyone from pursuing the past any more than it is necessary.
After all, shouldn't it be more important to understand what a person is now than what the person was before?
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Les Novembre Bleues
I shouldn't be writing this now. No, really, I mean it.
I'm at work. I have around 14k+ words left to go for NaNoWriMo.
And I have a letter to reply to.
I really shouldn't be writing this now, but I already am. What can I do about it?
This month is passing by quickly. My sister has kindly lent her spare room for mother and I to stay in while the apartment toilets are undergoing some government-funded renovation project to upgrade after nearly thirty years. It is a kind gesture from her.
But I feel trapped, like a bird in a gilded cage.
I'm used to crashing out on folk's couches, or in many cases, floors with my trusty sleeping back from 1998. But on those occasions, I'm not on a schedule --- it's mostly for fun stuff, like vacations or visiting conferences.
This time, I need to keep to my work schedule. Waking up early to get to work, work, then going to my surrogate home to rest.
Harrowing.
I do get my sleep for sure --- I am too used to sleeping in a thin sleeping back on a hard-ish ground. But I'm missing lots of other amenities in life, mostly ways to vent and relax.
Elysie-II is not available because it is not nice to lug her all the way to the apartment to be set up. I left my dizis in the CC because it's much more convenient. I do have my concert flute and piccolo, but I dare not play them for fear of annoying my temporary neighbours and incurring bad karma for not me.
And NaNoWriMo demands every word I have for it each day as a sacrifice to appease its greedy nature.
To be had, it isn't all as bad as I make it sound, but I do miss the things I get to do back at home. Particularly the access to better laundry facilities. I was raring to return to Aikido training after having to miss two months of it thanks to the haze/smog.
Now I have to miss another month more because there is no way to wash my gi and have it dried in time. I'm not going to go to an out-of-the-way laundromat and spend an hour sitting there watching my gi wash and dry just so I can train.
And now I've made myself sad.
I'm at work. I have around 14k+ words left to go for NaNoWriMo.
And I have a letter to reply to.
I really shouldn't be writing this now, but I already am. What can I do about it?
This month is passing by quickly. My sister has kindly lent her spare room for mother and I to stay in while the apartment toilets are undergoing some government-funded renovation project to upgrade after nearly thirty years. It is a kind gesture from her.
But I feel trapped, like a bird in a gilded cage.
I'm used to crashing out on folk's couches, or in many cases, floors with my trusty sleeping back from 1998. But on those occasions, I'm not on a schedule --- it's mostly for fun stuff, like vacations or visiting conferences.
This time, I need to keep to my work schedule. Waking up early to get to work, work, then going to my surrogate home to rest.
Harrowing.
I do get my sleep for sure --- I am too used to sleeping in a thin sleeping back on a hard-ish ground. But I'm missing lots of other amenities in life, mostly ways to vent and relax.
Elysie-II is not available because it is not nice to lug her all the way to the apartment to be set up. I left my dizis in the CC because it's much more convenient. I do have my concert flute and piccolo, but I dare not play them for fear of annoying my temporary neighbours and incurring bad karma for not me.
And NaNoWriMo demands every word I have for it each day as a sacrifice to appease its greedy nature.
To be had, it isn't all as bad as I make it sound, but I do miss the things I get to do back at home. Particularly the access to better laundry facilities. I was raring to return to Aikido training after having to miss two months of it thanks to the haze/smog.
Now I have to miss another month more because there is no way to wash my gi and have it dried in time. I'm not going to go to an out-of-the-way laundromat and spend an hour sitting there watching my gi wash and dry just so I can train.
And now I've made myself sad.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
October-End
So one of my younger sisters got married recently. I'm happy for her, and wish her all the best.
The day itself had been rather tiring for me, and I am still feeling its effects today. A long day was spent with my relatives. I had expected the worst of it, but everyone turned out to behave rather well, which was a relief. A cousin-in-law of mine termed my role being there as a ``bouncer'', and I think it suits what I was doing to a tee and will use that term from there on instead of ``enforcer'', the term I had been using whenever I had to be present at a family event. The reasons for that will be left unsaid here -- send me a message or something to find out more, if you care to.
I wish I could write more, but I'm really out of material for now. Maybe next update.
Also, did I mention that NaNoWriMo is coming soon?
The day itself had been rather tiring for me, and I am still feeling its effects today. A long day was spent with my relatives. I had expected the worst of it, but everyone turned out to behave rather well, which was a relief. A cousin-in-law of mine termed my role being there as a ``bouncer'', and I think it suits what I was doing to a tee and will use that term from there on instead of ``enforcer'', the term I had been using whenever I had to be present at a family event. The reasons for that will be left unsaid here -- send me a message or something to find out more, if you care to.
I wish I could write more, but I'm really out of material for now. Maybe next update.
Also, did I mention that NaNoWriMo is coming soon?
Friday, October 09, 2015
The Blind Owl
It's a Friday again, and I'm glad for a variety of reasons. The primary of which is the coming of a hard-earned rest over the weekend.
Anyway, mundane issues of light joy aside, there are other more interesting things to talk about first. I have recently completed the reading of the famous Feynman lecture series. They are a very interesting bunch of text---apart from helping me refresh my physics knowledge (`A'-Levels and then some), it also provided more interesting insights to some of the mathematical concepts that I had seen but hadn't got a good intuition for. Like the interpretation of the divergence, the curl, the notion of flux and circulation, as well as the [basic] quantum mechanical calculus in the form of amplitudes and bra-ket notations. Feynman writes in a relatively easy to understand manner, and I am still kicking myself for not having read his works any earlier than today. It also gives me an interesting perspective towards the modern trends in optimisation of objective functions (think argmax or argmin) often seen in machine learning algorithms: that quantum mechanics with the associated amplitude functions are an equivalence with the goal of obtaining some optimised set of parameters for a particular learning system.
Theoretical physics aside, I have also recently completed Sadeq Hedayat's ``The Blind Owl'' as translated by Iraj Bashiri. On the surface, the story is macabre, even to the point of pandering to what one would normally call a ``psychological thriller''. Scratching that surface, one reveals the transcendental nature in which the story (in two parts) takes on, appealling heavily to the death customs of Tibetans. Scratching that surface reveals a frustrated exhortation against the people in the repressed society of his time to stand up for their individual freedoms and to seek them out on their own, free of distraction, as a means of ultimately liberating their entire society through sheer numbers. The story and the deep analyses by Bashiri really made me stop to think about things that I had once thought of for a period of time, that is, the notion of mortality and the concept of attachment/desire. Thinking about it in perspective, I realised that it was probably easier to not fear mortality when one was truly alone---being along means roughly that one was only as attached to the material world as one is attached to one's corporeal body. But when one starts to have relationships with various people, be it friends or family, then the notion of attachment comes into play and it becomes increasingly hard to face mortality as the strength of one's relationships grow.
In my case, I suspect there will come a day where my innate stoicism and pragmatism will give way to something less intense as my relationships with a select group of people get stronger over time.
But karmic relief hasn't really been my goal in life. Of course, this is under the assumption that this life is all that I am getting. It's hard to believe in something that cannot be falsified and thus be subjected to the rigours of the scientific method. But this is merely my own observations---since I have no evidence to the contrary, I cannot make a meaningful answer.
For is it not the case that there are questions whose very nature make them unanswerable?
Anyway, mundane issues of light joy aside, there are other more interesting things to talk about first. I have recently completed the reading of the famous Feynman lecture series. They are a very interesting bunch of text---apart from helping me refresh my physics knowledge (`A'-Levels and then some), it also provided more interesting insights to some of the mathematical concepts that I had seen but hadn't got a good intuition for. Like the interpretation of the divergence, the curl, the notion of flux and circulation, as well as the [basic] quantum mechanical calculus in the form of amplitudes and bra-ket notations. Feynman writes in a relatively easy to understand manner, and I am still kicking myself for not having read his works any earlier than today. It also gives me an interesting perspective towards the modern trends in optimisation of objective functions (think argmax or argmin) often seen in machine learning algorithms: that quantum mechanics with the associated amplitude functions are an equivalence with the goal of obtaining some optimised set of parameters for a particular learning system.
Theoretical physics aside, I have also recently completed Sadeq Hedayat's ``The Blind Owl'' as translated by Iraj Bashiri. On the surface, the story is macabre, even to the point of pandering to what one would normally call a ``psychological thriller''. Scratching that surface, one reveals the transcendental nature in which the story (in two parts) takes on, appealling heavily to the death customs of Tibetans. Scratching that surface reveals a frustrated exhortation against the people in the repressed society of his time to stand up for their individual freedoms and to seek them out on their own, free of distraction, as a means of ultimately liberating their entire society through sheer numbers. The story and the deep analyses by Bashiri really made me stop to think about things that I had once thought of for a period of time, that is, the notion of mortality and the concept of attachment/desire. Thinking about it in perspective, I realised that it was probably easier to not fear mortality when one was truly alone---being along means roughly that one was only as attached to the material world as one is attached to one's corporeal body. But when one starts to have relationships with various people, be it friends or family, then the notion of attachment comes into play and it becomes increasingly hard to face mortality as the strength of one's relationships grow.
In my case, I suspect there will come a day where my innate stoicism and pragmatism will give way to something less intense as my relationships with a select group of people get stronger over time.
But karmic relief hasn't really been my goal in life. Of course, this is under the assumption that this life is all that I am getting. It's hard to believe in something that cannot be falsified and thus be subjected to the rigours of the scientific method. But this is merely my own observations---since I have no evidence to the contrary, I cannot make a meaningful answer.
For is it not the case that there are questions whose very nature make them unanswerable?
Monday, September 28, 2015
Unintentional Snobbery
It is of no news that I have cut back on my use of Facebook. Part of the reason was that I found it dull from the many reposts, as well as the falsely positive projections that people provide regarding their way of life.
What I didn't mention was also the annoyance I had from people bragging about their various achievements, like their first solo performance, their first car, their first child and what-not.
For a long while, I found such posts banal at best and distasteful at worst, especially those with regards to some kind of talent-based performance. Actually that's a lie, what I really found lacking in originality are the replies to it. Superlative posts of ``You are so talented!'' or ``Wow!'' or ``You look gorgeous!'' make me cringe a lot. I mean, okay, so someone managed to get their first solo performance. Whoop-de-do. What's the big deal about that?
Then I stepped back and looked deeper into my own thought process and realised that I was projecting my own experiences upon them and immediately learnt of my error. Thing is, most people lead very mundane lives. Specifically, many people in SIN city are happy to follow the herd and do what the majority/mainstream is doing, without ever stepping out of their comfort zones. I'm lucky because I was different, and had been different for a loooong time. So things like performing on stage (singing, dancing, acting, playing musical instruments, story-telling, poetry reading) are novel to most people but are ``normal'' for me, having done them myself already, vastly predating any of the other things that I am more well-known for.
In short, I was being a snob without intentionally trying to be one.
That realisation made me feel bad. Not bad enough to apologise to the people whose replies/posts I found banal/annoying (no harm was done since I didn't actually take any action from my own feelings), but bad enough to force a rethink on my views of the world with respect to its other denizens.
And that concludes today's lesson of the day: one's experiences are no excuse for disdaining another's achievements.
What I didn't mention was also the annoyance I had from people bragging about their various achievements, like their first solo performance, their first car, their first child and what-not.
For a long while, I found such posts banal at best and distasteful at worst, especially those with regards to some kind of talent-based performance. Actually that's a lie, what I really found lacking in originality are the replies to it. Superlative posts of ``You are so talented!'' or ``Wow!'' or ``You look gorgeous!'' make me cringe a lot. I mean, okay, so someone managed to get their first solo performance. Whoop-de-do. What's the big deal about that?
Then I stepped back and looked deeper into my own thought process and realised that I was projecting my own experiences upon them and immediately learnt of my error. Thing is, most people lead very mundane lives. Specifically, many people in SIN city are happy to follow the herd and do what the majority/mainstream is doing, without ever stepping out of their comfort zones. I'm lucky because I was different, and had been different for a loooong time. So things like performing on stage (singing, dancing, acting, playing musical instruments, story-telling, poetry reading) are novel to most people but are ``normal'' for me, having done them myself already, vastly predating any of the other things that I am more well-known for.
In short, I was being a snob without intentionally trying to be one.
That realisation made me feel bad. Not bad enough to apologise to the people whose replies/posts I found banal/annoying (no harm was done since I didn't actually take any action from my own feelings), but bad enough to force a rethink on my views of the world with respect to its other denizens.
And that concludes today's lesson of the day: one's experiences are no excuse for disdaining another's achievements.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Beat, But Alive.
*flops down onto the imaginary couch*
The past 9 days were rather hectic, to say the least. There was a medium-scale performance (for us at least) with the orchestra in a musical item last Saturday, then a whole bunch of work-related document wrangling for the week up to Hari Raya Haji, then today's Di-capella Goes 50-50 event.
In short, I'm beat. Tired, but contented. Still one more bed of coals to go over for this month before we segue into October, where different types of hectic things will be coming in.
I think for now, I will put down my dizi and play some flute repertoire stuff.
Actually, knowing me, I'd just play even more dizi in addition to playing more flute repertoire stuff. I'm masochistic that way, I suppose.
Not much to write here. Well, I started with the intention of writing a lot, but then I got distracted and the ennui is starting to set in again. It's like that, not a problem per se.
Till the next update. Perhaps.
The past 9 days were rather hectic, to say the least. There was a medium-scale performance (for us at least) with the orchestra in a musical item last Saturday, then a whole bunch of work-related document wrangling for the week up to Hari Raya Haji, then today's Di-capella Goes 50-50 event.
In short, I'm beat. Tired, but contented. Still one more bed of coals to go over for this month before we segue into October, where different types of hectic things will be coming in.
I think for now, I will put down my dizi and play some flute repertoire stuff.
Actually, knowing me, I'd just play even more dizi in addition to playing more flute repertoire stuff. I'm masochistic that way, I suppose.
Not much to write here. Well, I started with the intention of writing a lot, but then I got distracted and the ennui is starting to set in again. It's like that, not a problem per se.
Till the next update. Perhaps.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
September
It's a Saturday once again, and we are now nearing the midpoint of September.
There were at least two other occasions where I felt the urge to write an update of some kind, but didn't, as you can plainly see. It wasn't for a lack of updates -- there are plenty to talk about, really -- but that I was feeling a little under the weather.
You see, the haze is back. Not as vengeful as two years ago, but enough to cause an annoyance. I feel generally lethargic, with little to no incentive to actually get up and do anything physical. And that's why I just stay at home, but that is not anything particularly abnormal, to be had.
What's abnormal[ish] is that I haven't actually gamed in a while.
For some reason, I don't feel a strong need to muck around with the pretend worlds that the games provide. Not something as immersive as Skyrim/Minecraft, or something as abstract as DoomRL. Just didn't feel that urge... at all.
Perhaps it's because my attentions are currently occupied elsewhere, like the two upcoming SG50-related performances in this month. They have a way of diverting my attention from playing games to thinking about my handling of my dizi.
I think I spent most of the past month or so thinking really hard about things that I never really bothered before, things like proper intonation on my dizi and other woodwind instruments that I was messing around with (like the fife and piccolo), articulation (when to tongue each note and when to slur -- jianpu doesn't usually make a difference between ties and phrasing ties), and ornamentation (when vibrato is needed, when notes ought to be ``clean'', when leading notes should be applied). I think it is a sign that I'm starting to level-up again, having more or less stayed at a mild plateau of sorts. Stimulation has a way of really aiding in the rewiring of one's perspective on even the familiar, and I think that the exposure to a new group (Di-Capella) with new folks has given me the jolt necessary for me to do all these thinking.
In terms of music, I think I've reached the age where few will say that I'm a neophyte, even when I'm working on an instrument that isn't my main. Seeing and hearing how other folks (professionals and certified amateurs) handle their instruments provides a kind of external benchmark for me to determine how the outside world has evolved, and helped me determine just what I was missing in my own education of the process.
And yes, despite what folks may say about how I play, I know that I'm missing some stuff in the completeness of my skill set. I am sufficiently inspired to actually work on that, though I will still refuse to subject myself to the formal certification process -- I'm happy to be who I am with regards to music.
That said though, it is hard to want to learn more/express while still keeping a low profile. We'll see what I can do there...
------
Software architecting is a very interesting topic, and I find myself working increasingly in that regard instead of just bashing code to get things to work. I have found that over the years, as I work on more and more systems, I tend to write less and less actual code, even to the point that I'm not actually designing new algorithms from scratch the way I used to do maybe some fifteen years ago.
Software architects are the prototypal ``master programmers'' -- they provide the abstract framework of a system, defining the types of component partitioning discipline required to get a system going. There is a strong business aspect to it, as I am starting to learn, because the most efficacious architecture isn't necessarily the one that gets deployed simply because the business resources and decisions do not support it -- cost (time and money) are very important factors towards architecting that the hacker-class programmer will not care too much about.
In some sense, understanding the process behind good software architecting has made me moderate my hacker-sense into something that is more realistic -- I don't feel the kind of invincibility and immortality that I had back when I was fourteen and trouncing my seniors in competitive programming. It's a good thing, since sustainability (maintainability) is a very important aspect of system design that isn't really thought of much by the self-thought hacker-programmer.
Anyway, I think that's all I care to write for now. Here's something mildly related:
There were at least two other occasions where I felt the urge to write an update of some kind, but didn't, as you can plainly see. It wasn't for a lack of updates -- there are plenty to talk about, really -- but that I was feeling a little under the weather.
You see, the haze is back. Not as vengeful as two years ago, but enough to cause an annoyance. I feel generally lethargic, with little to no incentive to actually get up and do anything physical. And that's why I just stay at home, but that is not anything particularly abnormal, to be had.
What's abnormal[ish] is that I haven't actually gamed in a while.
For some reason, I don't feel a strong need to muck around with the pretend worlds that the games provide. Not something as immersive as Skyrim/Minecraft, or something as abstract as DoomRL. Just didn't feel that urge... at all.
Perhaps it's because my attentions are currently occupied elsewhere, like the two upcoming SG50-related performances in this month. They have a way of diverting my attention from playing games to thinking about my handling of my dizi.
I think I spent most of the past month or so thinking really hard about things that I never really bothered before, things like proper intonation on my dizi and other woodwind instruments that I was messing around with (like the fife and piccolo), articulation (when to tongue each note and when to slur -- jianpu doesn't usually make a difference between ties and phrasing ties), and ornamentation (when vibrato is needed, when notes ought to be ``clean'', when leading notes should be applied). I think it is a sign that I'm starting to level-up again, having more or less stayed at a mild plateau of sorts. Stimulation has a way of really aiding in the rewiring of one's perspective on even the familiar, and I think that the exposure to a new group (Di-Capella) with new folks has given me the jolt necessary for me to do all these thinking.
In terms of music, I think I've reached the age where few will say that I'm a neophyte, even when I'm working on an instrument that isn't my main. Seeing and hearing how other folks (professionals and certified amateurs) handle their instruments provides a kind of external benchmark for me to determine how the outside world has evolved, and helped me determine just what I was missing in my own education of the process.
And yes, despite what folks may say about how I play, I know that I'm missing some stuff in the completeness of my skill set. I am sufficiently inspired to actually work on that, though I will still refuse to subject myself to the formal certification process -- I'm happy to be who I am with regards to music.
That said though, it is hard to want to learn more/express while still keeping a low profile. We'll see what I can do there...
------
Software architecting is a very interesting topic, and I find myself working increasingly in that regard instead of just bashing code to get things to work. I have found that over the years, as I work on more and more systems, I tend to write less and less actual code, even to the point that I'm not actually designing new algorithms from scratch the way I used to do maybe some fifteen years ago.
Software architects are the prototypal ``master programmers'' -- they provide the abstract framework of a system, defining the types of component partitioning discipline required to get a system going. There is a strong business aspect to it, as I am starting to learn, because the most efficacious architecture isn't necessarily the one that gets deployed simply because the business resources and decisions do not support it -- cost (time and money) are very important factors towards architecting that the hacker-class programmer will not care too much about.
In some sense, understanding the process behind good software architecting has made me moderate my hacker-sense into something that is more realistic -- I don't feel the kind of invincibility and immortality that I had back when I was fourteen and trouncing my seniors in competitive programming. It's a good thing, since sustainability (maintainability) is a very important aspect of system design that isn't really thought of much by the self-thought hacker-programmer.
Anyway, I think that's all I care to write for now. Here's something mildly related:
Monday, August 31, 2015
Long Overdue Update [Perhaps]
To say that an update is long overdue is to understate it by a whole order of magnitude or so. The past two weeks have been quite... hectic to say the least and is the main reason why I couldn't bring myself to write anything despite having the strong urge to do so.
And so, throughout this day itself, I will take whatever small nuggets of free time in between to compose this entry. It will be fragmentary at best and incoherent at worst, but hey, at least there's an entry here, right?
So, let's begin.
------
To start with, I started out with a false premise, that is, I made the claim that I would have pockets of free time throughout the day. It is clearly a false premise considering that I am typing this up at the not-so-early time of 1845hrs (or so). Work is moving along slowly, due to the rather different types of work load that I am facing now, but I am not complaining.
Chara came for a visit over the weekend, and we spent some time roaming about and just checking things out. Awesome food was had, and an even more awesome time was spent. All in all, it was a good but tiring weekend.
The various rehearsals for the two SG50-related projects are in full-swing. The last sectional rehearsal for the dizi choir occurred the previous weekend, and the latest rehearsal for my regular CO stuff just completed last Saturday, with another one coming up on Thursday. This means that I will need to forfeit yet another Aikido training lesson, but I think that it is a decent trade-off, considering that I'm not going for the latest grading exam for Aikido, while having two performances to deal with. T'is good.
I've started on a mini project of sorts to document the ranges and the notation of various Chinese orchestra instruments, and have started with the western orchestra ones for now as a form of infrastructure test. It is also an exercise in messing around with Javascript for the web browser, something that I have been eschewing for a long time. Why now then? It is always good to keep up-to-date on what is going on in the UI/UX land, even if I disagree with the overall trends (like using Javascript to write server applications).
What else is there to write at this point? Hmmm...
Maybe the bit of successfully completing the Bard's works? If you drop by my reading list, you will find that the entire ``Shakespeare Project'' section is gone. That's because I had finished reading all the works of Shakespeare. At this point, I'm focusing on Larry Niven's Ringworld series, though I am eschewing the Fleet of Worlds series (of which Niven is a co-author of) for now. Ringworld (and Ringworld's Engineers at this point) provide yet another style of ``hard'' sci-fi that is vastly different from say Dune or even the Ender series. Dune read too heavily as a philosophical piece, while Ender ended up being that way also. Perhaps Ringworld might end up that way, since it is actually hard to dissociate science from its effects, of which philosophy on the application of science plays a primary role in the definition.
Okay, I'm officially out of materials to write. Except maybe the observation that this entire entry was written on Eiko, of whom I've not really made much use of. I should really be writing more.
Till the next update then.
And so, throughout this day itself, I will take whatever small nuggets of free time in between to compose this entry. It will be fragmentary at best and incoherent at worst, but hey, at least there's an entry here, right?
So, let's begin.
------
To start with, I started out with a false premise, that is, I made the claim that I would have pockets of free time throughout the day. It is clearly a false premise considering that I am typing this up at the not-so-early time of 1845hrs (or so). Work is moving along slowly, due to the rather different types of work load that I am facing now, but I am not complaining.
Chara came for a visit over the weekend, and we spent some time roaming about and just checking things out. Awesome food was had, and an even more awesome time was spent. All in all, it was a good but tiring weekend.
The various rehearsals for the two SG50-related projects are in full-swing. The last sectional rehearsal for the dizi choir occurred the previous weekend, and the latest rehearsal for my regular CO stuff just completed last Saturday, with another one coming up on Thursday. This means that I will need to forfeit yet another Aikido training lesson, but I think that it is a decent trade-off, considering that I'm not going for the latest grading exam for Aikido, while having two performances to deal with. T'is good.
I've started on a mini project of sorts to document the ranges and the notation of various Chinese orchestra instruments, and have started with the western orchestra ones for now as a form of infrastructure test. It is also an exercise in messing around with Javascript for the web browser, something that I have been eschewing for a long time. Why now then? It is always good to keep up-to-date on what is going on in the UI/UX land, even if I disagree with the overall trends (like using Javascript to write server applications).
What else is there to write at this point? Hmmm...
Maybe the bit of successfully completing the Bard's works? If you drop by my reading list, you will find that the entire ``Shakespeare Project'' section is gone. That's because I had finished reading all the works of Shakespeare. At this point, I'm focusing on Larry Niven's Ringworld series, though I am eschewing the Fleet of Worlds series (of which Niven is a co-author of) for now. Ringworld (and Ringworld's Engineers at this point) provide yet another style of ``hard'' sci-fi that is vastly different from say Dune or even the Ender series. Dune read too heavily as a philosophical piece, while Ender ended up being that way also. Perhaps Ringworld might end up that way, since it is actually hard to dissociate science from its effects, of which philosophy on the application of science plays a primary role in the definition.
Okay, I'm officially out of materials to write. Except maybe the observation that this entire entry was written on Eiko, of whom I've not really made much use of. I should really be writing more.
Till the next update then.
Monday, August 10, 2015
Bloody Long !@#$ Weekend
I probably should be grateful for the long weekend that is SIN city's golden jubilee celebration, but frankly, I feel anything but grateful.
If anything, I feel restless and completely pissed off, that such a long period of procrastination is allowed to manifest itself at all in the city where not working time beyond office hours is termed a sin.
The weekend has been too long, I think. Four whole days. Maybe it's because I have no one to actually go hang out with and do other stuff, or maybe because I am just irritated after barely recovering from a nasty bout of flu. Maybe it's because I'm staying in an apartment that is not air-conditioned, and am still living with my parents when my sister has just moved out completely to her new place with her husband. Or maybe it is the forced realisation of some manner of loneliness from rewatching K-On!, K-On!! and the K-On! movie, an affect that I naturally develop each time I watch anime like that. It reminds me of a kind of nostalgia that I never truly felt completely, having been mostly a sideline character at most of the clubs and societies that I had been a part of.
Camaraderie. I feel that of course, fleetingly at times, but never truly immersed in it. Maybe because there have been few places where I felt as though I truly belong, even from the very beginning. In spite of my seemingly gregarious nature, I'm more of a conflicted hermit.
Aiyah, it's frustrating to articulate just what is bothering the crap out of me.
Maybe it's the phoneyness of the whole jubilee celebration. Engineered, one might say if one were trying to keep in theme with the way how SIN city is run. The hilarious part is that despite being the person who lampoons this whole... PR stunt, I think I can safely say that I have taken part in more of such... activities as a performer than most people have as an audience. Maybe ``irony'' is the better word here, but I'm not in the mood to be pedantic today.
I wrote a micro-story yesterday, entitled Hold On To Your Love. Unsurprisingly, it is named after one of my favourite OSTs from K-On!, that you can hopefully watch here.That guitar... is to die for. A-hem. Anyway, I felt like I needed to vent something from the restlessness last night, and hence that particular micro-story.
I've also made yet another small progress through the William Russo book, by composing something a given pitch restriction. Maybe I'll work on the next exercise later this evening---composition with a rhythm restriction on C-major. Felt too irritated to work on that yesterday.
Today though... so much restlessness. I was tempted to head out to find a café to just sit down, have a cup of coffee and do some reading, work related and otherwise (am working through Othello). When lunch was done though, reality set in: it was nearly two in the afternoon. By the time I headed out, it would be time to return, not to mention the general impossibility to find a quiet place to sit around since most of the kids are taking over cafés and what-not for their studying needs. So I felt more irritation.
I couldn't/shouldn't play on my flutes and/or dizis though---my the lateral side of my thumbs'interphalangeal ligaments were starting to show some form of swelling that seemed consistent with calluses. I suspect it's because I've been playing too much of my 大G dizi---it weighs quite a bit more than what I usually play, and I have been giving it around two to three hours of practice on Friday and Saturday itself. I didn't want to introduce a new range of RSI, so am taking it easier.
That of course helped to add to my restlessness. My usual outlet of letting out such irritation is to wail away on whatever musical instrument I have my hands on. Since that is sort of not available, I just feel all the more annoyed.
At this point, I think I have run out of things to bitch about, and have diverged quite significantly in terms of the content, so I suppose I'll just stop here.
Till the next update.
If anything, I feel restless and completely pissed off, that such a long period of procrastination is allowed to manifest itself at all in the city where not working time beyond office hours is termed a sin.
The weekend has been too long, I think. Four whole days. Maybe it's because I have no one to actually go hang out with and do other stuff, or maybe because I am just irritated after barely recovering from a nasty bout of flu. Maybe it's because I'm staying in an apartment that is not air-conditioned, and am still living with my parents when my sister has just moved out completely to her new place with her husband. Or maybe it is the forced realisation of some manner of loneliness from rewatching K-On!, K-On!! and the K-On! movie, an affect that I naturally develop each time I watch anime like that. It reminds me of a kind of nostalgia that I never truly felt completely, having been mostly a sideline character at most of the clubs and societies that I had been a part of.
Camaraderie. I feel that of course, fleetingly at times, but never truly immersed in it. Maybe because there have been few places where I felt as though I truly belong, even from the very beginning. In spite of my seemingly gregarious nature, I'm more of a conflicted hermit.
Aiyah, it's frustrating to articulate just what is bothering the crap out of me.
Maybe it's the phoneyness of the whole jubilee celebration. Engineered, one might say if one were trying to keep in theme with the way how SIN city is run. The hilarious part is that despite being the person who lampoons this whole... PR stunt, I think I can safely say that I have taken part in more of such... activities as a performer than most people have as an audience. Maybe ``irony'' is the better word here, but I'm not in the mood to be pedantic today.
I wrote a micro-story yesterday, entitled Hold On To Your Love. Unsurprisingly, it is named after one of my favourite OSTs from K-On!, that you can hopefully watch here.That guitar... is to die for. A-hem. Anyway, I felt like I needed to vent something from the restlessness last night, and hence that particular micro-story.
I've also made yet another small progress through the William Russo book, by composing something a given pitch restriction. Maybe I'll work on the next exercise later this evening---composition with a rhythm restriction on C-major. Felt too irritated to work on that yesterday.
Today though... so much restlessness. I was tempted to head out to find a café to just sit down, have a cup of coffee and do some reading, work related and otherwise (am working through Othello). When lunch was done though, reality set in: it was nearly two in the afternoon. By the time I headed out, it would be time to return, not to mention the general impossibility to find a quiet place to sit around since most of the kids are taking over cafés and what-not for their studying needs. So I felt more irritation.
I couldn't/shouldn't play on my flutes and/or dizis though---my the lateral side of my thumbs'interphalangeal ligaments were starting to show some form of swelling that seemed consistent with calluses. I suspect it's because I've been playing too much of my 大G dizi---it weighs quite a bit more than what I usually play, and I have been giving it around two to three hours of practice on Friday and Saturday itself. I didn't want to introduce a new range of RSI, so am taking it easier.
That of course helped to add to my restlessness. My usual outlet of letting out such irritation is to wail away on whatever musical instrument I have my hands on. Since that is sort of not available, I just feel all the more annoyed.
At this point, I think I have run out of things to bitch about, and have diverged quite significantly in terms of the content, so I suppose I'll just stop here.
Till the next update.
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
Sickness and Keys
Let's be upfront -- this has been a trashy week.
I suffered from a horrible tension headache episode last week that escalated into a full-blown flu attack that knocked me off my feet hard enough that I had to take 2 days of sick leave just to sleep it off.
It's dumb. I really don't like falling sick. I'm sure most people feel the same way, except maybe for those who are looking for an excuse to just have an extended holiday of some sort. I'm not of the latter, because work has a way of quickly piling up when one does not move fast enough.
Already I am going to work another half-day more tomorrow just to cover for the time lost over the past couple of days. Looking forward to it in one sense, and not looking forward to it in another since I don't want my body to be further weakened, leading to something that is more chronic.
Anyway, rants aside, the rest had been fitful. The whether is too hot and humid, and as such, sleep came in bursts of no more than an hour. The coughing is just plain annoying, and nearly half the time it is an ``unproductive'' cough, i.e. there is no phlegm that is actually cleared from the throat. In other words, half the time I get this hacking cough that does little more than annoy the crap out of my throat.
Oh well.
Last Saturday was an interesting day. I went for two different rehearsals, one for the upcoming SG50 project that my sister suggested I join in, and the other being my regular CO stuff. The music for the other SG50 project is interesting -- the keys and the rhythms used are a little more contemporary than the concert time that is prevalent. The scores are also written in the prevailing trend of writing in an absolute scale without the melody line, i.e. like what one might expect from say a concert flute score. I can live with the latter though not happily -- since most of the time I'm called upon to cover the melody, and if that's not present it is obvious that there's nothing I can do. But this isn't the more annoying bit.
The writing of the music in an absolute scale is something that I don't really approve of, even though I know that it is definitely easier since one only needs to learn ``one'' set of fingerings. The issue here is not in execution but the overall music sensitivity of the musician -- it makes understanding the intervals of the music that much harder since the music is not written in the scale that the music is played. Here's an example of what I mean: suppose the notes are written in 1=G as 7♭ 1 2♯ 3 or something. Sure, it is easy to execute the notes, but it takes a little while to realise that it is actually in F-major (or D-minor, but we rarely name minor keys in CO music). This means that a certain set of dizi fingerings get ``lost'' in the outcome, and that it makes transposition that much nastier.
But it's just a minor quibble from a curmudgeon huh.
Anyway, it's late. I ought to sleep so I can wake up early and drive to work and clear out some of the stuff that snowballed over the past couple of days. Till the next update then.
I suffered from a horrible tension headache episode last week that escalated into a full-blown flu attack that knocked me off my feet hard enough that I had to take 2 days of sick leave just to sleep it off.
It's dumb. I really don't like falling sick. I'm sure most people feel the same way, except maybe for those who are looking for an excuse to just have an extended holiday of some sort. I'm not of the latter, because work has a way of quickly piling up when one does not move fast enough.
Already I am going to work another half-day more tomorrow just to cover for the time lost over the past couple of days. Looking forward to it in one sense, and not looking forward to it in another since I don't want my body to be further weakened, leading to something that is more chronic.
Anyway, rants aside, the rest had been fitful. The whether is too hot and humid, and as such, sleep came in bursts of no more than an hour. The coughing is just plain annoying, and nearly half the time it is an ``unproductive'' cough, i.e. there is no phlegm that is actually cleared from the throat. In other words, half the time I get this hacking cough that does little more than annoy the crap out of my throat.
Oh well.
Last Saturday was an interesting day. I went for two different rehearsals, one for the upcoming SG50 project that my sister suggested I join in, and the other being my regular CO stuff. The music for the other SG50 project is interesting -- the keys and the rhythms used are a little more contemporary than the concert time that is prevalent. The scores are also written in the prevailing trend of writing in an absolute scale without the melody line, i.e. like what one might expect from say a concert flute score. I can live with the latter though not happily -- since most of the time I'm called upon to cover the melody, and if that's not present it is obvious that there's nothing I can do. But this isn't the more annoying bit.
The writing of the music in an absolute scale is something that I don't really approve of, even though I know that it is definitely easier since one only needs to learn ``one'' set of fingerings. The issue here is not in execution but the overall music sensitivity of the musician -- it makes understanding the intervals of the music that much harder since the music is not written in the scale that the music is played. Here's an example of what I mean: suppose the notes are written in 1=G as 7♭ 1 2♯ 3 or something. Sure, it is easy to execute the notes, but it takes a little while to realise that it is actually in F-major (or D-minor, but we rarely name minor keys in CO music). This means that a certain set of dizi fingerings get ``lost'' in the outcome, and that it makes transposition that much nastier.
But it's just a minor quibble from a curmudgeon huh.
Anyway, it's late. I ought to sleep so I can wake up early and drive to work and clear out some of the stuff that snowballed over the past couple of days. Till the next update then.
Saturday, August 01, 2015
Delusions of... Normalcy
It's late and I should be asleep.
I know that SGDQ is running now, but it is late and I have two different rehearsals/practices tomorrow. Not to mention that I just recently ``recovered'' from my stupid tension headache.
But I had to write this piece. The topic had been floating in my head for the past week or so, and if I don't write about it now, it will become an obsession that will persist and end up with me engaging in weird compulsive behavior. So off I go.
Delusions. I think that as humans, we have a tendency to operate under our own set of delusions. Now, these delusions need not be of the more grandiose kind that one might be used to hearing about, but just random pieces of magical thinking that we tend to have to just allow the day to pass by quicker without having to fall into despair on realisation that in the cosmic scale of things, even human existence is meagre and meaningless.
I have my delusions of course. As do everyone else. Some of these delusions are rather overt -- everyone seems to believe that I have some kind of skill in some of the things I do when at best I'm merely mediocre. Some are covert, for instance the belief that one has power over the elements, or even to control/manipulate luck outside of the RNG.
Delusions are not as abnormal as they sound. I think it is part of the human condition. I thought back about the time when I was much younger, and realised that over time, ``growing up'' meant substituting the more fanciful delusions of my capabilities/worth with other delusions that do not superficially contradict the experience gained from observing the way the universe works. So, for example, instead of thinking that I have the capability of controlling weather, I now think that I have some kind of preternatural control over all things that use software programmable electronic circuits (aka ``computers'').
It's still consistent with the way one views other fellow humans -- delusions are part of the black-box package that comprises the brain and mind, and we don't usually need to care about the specifics of the delusion in order to function with the said people. The only times where it becomes necessary to have some partial understanding of another's delusions are when there is a need to create/maintain a stronger relationship bond other than mere acquaintance, i.e. when one needs to live with a person or when one is with an incompetent individual, with ``incompetent'' taking on the technical/legal meaning that the person is not wholly responsible for his/her actions due to youth or lack of maturity. In these cases, the partial understanding is needed to generate the kind of empathy that is often the bedrock of deep relationships.
Not all delusions are harmless though. Those that involve other people tend to be more harmful than those that live on silently within the person's mind. Projected emotions, assumptions are just two of the many different manifestations of harmful delusions that involve other people; they are harmful because they enforce the deluded individual's perspective on others who do not share the same, therefore leading to a lack of empathy, which leads to conflict. There are other personal delusions that can be termed harmful, but I am not of the opinion that it is in our place to explicitly point out to the person that his/her delusion is harmful to him/her, unless there is an exact situation where the said delusion is a direct contributory cause towards a life and death situation involving the person.
This means that state-mandated committing of people to asylums for acts that do not involve an immediate threat to anyone's life is something that I do not support in principle.
Given then that everyone has delusions and necessarily uses them to make everyday living less stressful, it becomes ludicrous when we start considering the notion of a ``normal'' psychology. As put by my abnormal psychology professor, a ``normal'' psychology (be it be population mode, median, mean metrics) is the most abnormal of all -- everyone is abnormal in some way, and all that matters is the degree of abnormality, and more importantly, how much it affects the quality of life. This means that it is much harder to prove that someone is ``sane'' instead of ``insane'', which provides a reason why I think that state-mandated committing of people to asylums is generally not a good idea.
But the purpose of this rant isn't to argue about what powers the state ought to/ought not to have; it is to point out that the world is delusional in general.
The important part is to know how to pick ``useful'' delusions so that we don't end up harming ourselves or others, while still staving away the void that is the rest of the universe.
In fact, it might be the case that matter itself is the biggest delusion of all, since most of the universe is made up of things that we cannot even start to characterise other than ``it is dark energy''.
I know that SGDQ is running now, but it is late and I have two different rehearsals/practices tomorrow. Not to mention that I just recently ``recovered'' from my stupid tension headache.
But I had to write this piece. The topic had been floating in my head for the past week or so, and if I don't write about it now, it will become an obsession that will persist and end up with me engaging in weird compulsive behavior. So off I go.
Delusions. I think that as humans, we have a tendency to operate under our own set of delusions. Now, these delusions need not be of the more grandiose kind that one might be used to hearing about, but just random pieces of magical thinking that we tend to have to just allow the day to pass by quicker without having to fall into despair on realisation that in the cosmic scale of things, even human existence is meagre and meaningless.
I have my delusions of course. As do everyone else. Some of these delusions are rather overt -- everyone seems to believe that I have some kind of skill in some of the things I do when at best I'm merely mediocre. Some are covert, for instance the belief that one has power over the elements, or even to control/manipulate luck outside of the RNG.
Delusions are not as abnormal as they sound. I think it is part of the human condition. I thought back about the time when I was much younger, and realised that over time, ``growing up'' meant substituting the more fanciful delusions of my capabilities/worth with other delusions that do not superficially contradict the experience gained from observing the way the universe works. So, for example, instead of thinking that I have the capability of controlling weather, I now think that I have some kind of preternatural control over all things that use software programmable electronic circuits (aka ``computers'').
It's still consistent with the way one views other fellow humans -- delusions are part of the black-box package that comprises the brain and mind, and we don't usually need to care about the specifics of the delusion in order to function with the said people. The only times where it becomes necessary to have some partial understanding of another's delusions are when there is a need to create/maintain a stronger relationship bond other than mere acquaintance, i.e. when one needs to live with a person or when one is with an incompetent individual, with ``incompetent'' taking on the technical/legal meaning that the person is not wholly responsible for his/her actions due to youth or lack of maturity. In these cases, the partial understanding is needed to generate the kind of empathy that is often the bedrock of deep relationships.
Not all delusions are harmless though. Those that involve other people tend to be more harmful than those that live on silently within the person's mind. Projected emotions, assumptions are just two of the many different manifestations of harmful delusions that involve other people; they are harmful because they enforce the deluded individual's perspective on others who do not share the same, therefore leading to a lack of empathy, which leads to conflict. There are other personal delusions that can be termed harmful, but I am not of the opinion that it is in our place to explicitly point out to the person that his/her delusion is harmful to him/her, unless there is an exact situation where the said delusion is a direct contributory cause towards a life and death situation involving the person.
This means that state-mandated committing of people to asylums for acts that do not involve an immediate threat to anyone's life is something that I do not support in principle.
Given then that everyone has delusions and necessarily uses them to make everyday living less stressful, it becomes ludicrous when we start considering the notion of a ``normal'' psychology. As put by my abnormal psychology professor, a ``normal'' psychology (be it be population mode, median, mean metrics) is the most abnormal of all -- everyone is abnormal in some way, and all that matters is the degree of abnormality, and more importantly, how much it affects the quality of life. This means that it is much harder to prove that someone is ``sane'' instead of ``insane'', which provides a reason why I think that state-mandated committing of people to asylums is generally not a good idea.
But the purpose of this rant isn't to argue about what powers the state ought to/ought not to have; it is to point out that the world is delusional in general.
The important part is to know how to pick ``useful'' delusions so that we don't end up harming ourselves or others, while still staving away the void that is the rest of the universe.
In fact, it might be the case that matter itself is the biggest delusion of all, since most of the universe is made up of things that we cannot even start to characterise other than ``it is dark energy''.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Singularly Mundane
Being singular in perspective and behaviour can be a very difficult path in a world where there is an increasing amount of ``social connections''. In some senses, it feels a little curmudgeonly in that I do not get with the times and hop on the latest bandwagon the way the many lemmings are.
You would think that having done this for a long time (i.e. all my life), it would be increasingly easier to maintain it. Unfortunately, it is not the case.
Ever since I bailed out on the Facebook, refusing to update ``my content'' on it, my digital social life has gone... mundane. I have more free time, feel less compulsive, and in general, have fewer but deeper communication channels. I used to hang out on IRC, now I'm barely there. I've since retired my MSN messenger and AIM accounts, leaving on the GTalk (or Hangouts, if you'd believe the current branding) one only.
No more drama.
Returning to blogging has heightened the sense of loneliness online, since it has always been a soapbox for me to air my views on to an invisible audience that has a high barrier towards response: blog comments are overtly more public than what the Facebook's ones are, and they need to be vetted by me via the moderation panel before they get published.
As such, hardly anyone ever comments on what I have said here or elsewhere. Hell, I'm pretty sure that my ``usual'' audience numbers no more than ten people to begin with.
Luddite-sounding babblespeak aside, I've started on yet another self-enhancement project: learn how to compose music. I had gotten some books on the subject back in 2009, but there was hardly ever any strong incentive to work through them. This time though, I am using Composing Music: A New Approach by William Russo as the source material and am using Frescobaldi with Lilypond. I was contemplating getting either Finale or even Sibelius, but I have not found anything convincing about their approach towards the composition process that justifies their rather steep price.
At this point, I don't really have anything else to talk about. I've just experienced a week where I met up with an old friend, some old colleagues, and a bunch of external meetings. In short, I feel more drained than my basic sleep deprivation might suggest. I just thought that perhaps I should write something here before I turn in for the night, as some kind of simple gesture in acknowledging that yes, this blog is getting regular updates in lieu of the near-complete silence on the Facebook.
Till the next update then.
You would think that having done this for a long time (i.e. all my life), it would be increasingly easier to maintain it. Unfortunately, it is not the case.
Ever since I bailed out on the Facebook, refusing to update ``my content'' on it, my digital social life has gone... mundane. I have more free time, feel less compulsive, and in general, have fewer but deeper communication channels. I used to hang out on IRC, now I'm barely there. I've since retired my MSN messenger and AIM accounts, leaving on the GTalk (or Hangouts, if you'd believe the current branding) one only.
No more drama.
Returning to blogging has heightened the sense of loneliness online, since it has always been a soapbox for me to air my views on to an invisible audience that has a high barrier towards response: blog comments are overtly more public than what the Facebook's ones are, and they need to be vetted by me via the moderation panel before they get published.
As such, hardly anyone ever comments on what I have said here or elsewhere. Hell, I'm pretty sure that my ``usual'' audience numbers no more than ten people to begin with.
Luddite-sounding babblespeak aside, I've started on yet another self-enhancement project: learn how to compose music. I had gotten some books on the subject back in 2009, but there was hardly ever any strong incentive to work through them. This time though, I am using Composing Music: A New Approach by William Russo as the source material and am using Frescobaldi with Lilypond. I was contemplating getting either Finale or even Sibelius, but I have not found anything convincing about their approach towards the composition process that justifies their rather steep price.
At this point, I don't really have anything else to talk about. I've just experienced a week where I met up with an old friend, some old colleagues, and a bunch of external meetings. In short, I feel more drained than my basic sleep deprivation might suggest. I just thought that perhaps I should write something here before I turn in for the night, as some kind of simple gesture in acknowledging that yes, this blog is getting regular updates in lieu of the near-complete silence on the Facebook.
Till the next update then.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Lollipop
Man, that was a doozy.
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Negative, Positive
Recently I was told that I ``sound too negative on my blog'', or rather, I have a tendency to be all ranty and what-not instead of being thankful for the good things that have happened to me.
Honestly, that observation is correct. I do not have a legitimate reason to be pissy at life, with all things considered. I am gainfully employed, am happily attached with long-term plans of settling down, have interesting hobbies that I haven't really gotten bored with yet, and am generally contented with what life has thrown at me thus far.
But no one wants to read about how great someone else's life is! If anyone wanted to read that kind of drivel, it's probably better to look at Facebook and its ilk, where almost everyone self-selects their positive experiences in life to showcase to others.
That is, for those of you who haven't realised by now, the reason why I don't want to use the Facebook. Too phoney. Life isn't a bed of roses, but Facebook and other ``social media'' stuff skews the representation to the point where the ugly aspects of one-upmanship becomes the dominant factor, even if people aren't actively trying to outdo each other.
Actually, in the early days of the Facebook, people tend to be a bit more candid, showing a bit more of their ``other sides'' in a more personable sort of way, you know, the way a friend in the real world might share with others. Then it got opened up to the general public, and HR professionals start to apply the guilt by association fallacy and scan through all ``public'' information of their candidates, which led to a feedback loop where the whole sanitisation process/self-censorship process takes place, which in turn leads to the current behavior of only showing what is good in one's life.
So... in the bid to encourage people to put more of their information out there, we end up with people putting out only their most positive front. Maybe that's a backfire right there. Heheheheheh...
Anyway, yes, I have a tendency to not talk about the good things that happen to me. There are two reasons why, one more rational, the other more irrational.
The rational way of looking at it comes from a quote from Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:
The irrational way of looking at it is that I don't want to jinx myself.
I'll leave it as that for now. Till the next update.
Honestly, that observation is correct. I do not have a legitimate reason to be pissy at life, with all things considered. I am gainfully employed, am happily attached with long-term plans of settling down, have interesting hobbies that I haven't really gotten bored with yet, and am generally contented with what life has thrown at me thus far.
But no one wants to read about how great someone else's life is! If anyone wanted to read that kind of drivel, it's probably better to look at Facebook and its ilk, where almost everyone self-selects their positive experiences in life to showcase to others.
That is, for those of you who haven't realised by now, the reason why I don't want to use the Facebook. Too phoney. Life isn't a bed of roses, but Facebook and other ``social media'' stuff skews the representation to the point where the ugly aspects of one-upmanship becomes the dominant factor, even if people aren't actively trying to outdo each other.
Actually, in the early days of the Facebook, people tend to be a bit more candid, showing a bit more of their ``other sides'' in a more personable sort of way, you know, the way a friend in the real world might share with others. Then it got opened up to the general public, and HR professionals start to apply the guilt by association fallacy and scan through all ``public'' information of their candidates, which led to a feedback loop where the whole sanitisation process/self-censorship process takes place, which in turn leads to the current behavior of only showing what is good in one's life.
So... in the bid to encourage people to put more of their information out there, we end up with people putting out only their most positive front. Maybe that's a backfire right there. Heheheheheh...
Anyway, yes, I have a tendency to not talk about the good things that happen to me. There are two reasons why, one more rational, the other more irrational.
The rational way of looking at it comes from a quote from Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.No, this isn't an academic blog, so I'm not going to go all out MLA/APA and cite sources. Suffice to say, what this means in context is that talking about good things is just plain boring -- the set of good things that can happen to someone is the same, while that of the not-so-good is very different.
The irrational way of looking at it is that I don't want to jinx myself.
I'll leave it as that for now. Till the next update.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
Hub, Spokes, SLAs
Unless you are living not in SIN city, by now you ought to have heard of the massive MRT failure along the North-South and East-West lines. More interestingly, you ought to have heard on the chaos surrounding the eventual dispersal of all the commuters who were stranded by the failed mass rapid transit.
This post isn't about who's to blame in that incident, nor even about speculations relating to that incident. I will use this incident as an analogy for system architecture design.
There are many different strategies in architecting a system, most of which depends on the nature of the system being developed. For example, if security is of paramount importance, then a hub-spoke strategy is used, with the server (or more often, a cluster of servers) sit in the hub, and everything else (the clients) connect as spokes to the hub. If the ability to ``self-heal'' is more important, then some kind of peer-to-peer based strategy is used.
There are of course more strategies to be used, and I will not go through them. I just want to point out something interesting. The public infrastructure in SIN city is designed around the concept of the hub-spoke strategy, where for the most part people are expected to make use of the mass rapid transits to cross the large distances (it's SIN city, so 40km or 25mi is considered ``far'') before switching to a bus or two for the proverbial last mile. This is the reason why there are many new MRT line constructions over the past fifteen years, political conspiracies aside.
There is a catch that is amply demonstrated through last evening's disruption. If you are using a hub-spoke model for architecting a system, the hub cannot afford to fail at all. Maybe I'm not saying this loud enough: THE HUB CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL AT ALL. It is the innate risk behind this particular means of architecting. Since all traffic passes through the hub at some point, any downtime of the hub means massive damage to the system at large. As shown in last evening's debacle, the failure of the two biggest routes in the network was enough to cause a spillover of commuters that lasted too long for comfort.
Thus, the effective use of a hub-spoke model for system architecting will imply that one has in place a solid proactive maintenance plan for the hub to avoid any downtime whatsoever. This is where we find those triple-9 (< 8.75hr downtime/year) and quad-9 (< 52min downtime/year) service level agreements (SLA).
Now that has got me wondering what the SLA is for the running of the MRT lines in SIN city...
This post isn't about who's to blame in that incident, nor even about speculations relating to that incident. I will use this incident as an analogy for system architecture design.
There are many different strategies in architecting a system, most of which depends on the nature of the system being developed. For example, if security is of paramount importance, then a hub-spoke strategy is used, with the server (or more often, a cluster of servers) sit in the hub, and everything else (the clients) connect as spokes to the hub. If the ability to ``self-heal'' is more important, then some kind of peer-to-peer based strategy is used.
There are of course more strategies to be used, and I will not go through them. I just want to point out something interesting. The public infrastructure in SIN city is designed around the concept of the hub-spoke strategy, where for the most part people are expected to make use of the mass rapid transits to cross the large distances (it's SIN city, so 40km or 25mi is considered ``far'') before switching to a bus or two for the proverbial last mile. This is the reason why there are many new MRT line constructions over the past fifteen years, political conspiracies aside.
There is a catch that is amply demonstrated through last evening's disruption. If you are using a hub-spoke model for architecting a system, the hub cannot afford to fail at all. Maybe I'm not saying this loud enough: THE HUB CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL AT ALL. It is the innate risk behind this particular means of architecting. Since all traffic passes through the hub at some point, any downtime of the hub means massive damage to the system at large. As shown in last evening's debacle, the failure of the two biggest routes in the network was enough to cause a spillover of commuters that lasted too long for comfort.
Thus, the effective use of a hub-spoke model for system architecting will imply that one has in place a solid proactive maintenance plan for the hub to avoid any downtime whatsoever. This is where we find those triple-9 (< 8.75hr downtime/year) and quad-9 (< 52min downtime/year) service level agreements (SLA).
Now that has got me wondering what the SLA is for the running of the MRT lines in SIN city...
Monday, July 06, 2015
Call Me Annoyed
Call me annoyed.
I really dislike waking up and feeling completely out of it, the exact thing that I felt this morning when I rolled out of my metaphorical bed (I don't actually sleep on a bed). My head was woozy, my nose was bunged up, the entire works of an impending cold short of a throat infection of some sort.
The temptation to see the doctor to get instant relief is high, but I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I had been seeing the doctor at a near regular rate of once per week. All for the same stupid thing.
I cannot understand my susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. It's ludicrous actually. I know that I have some allergic rhinitis going on which is controlled with the steroid nasal spray (Nasonex), but ever so often I will get hit with a head cold with an über bunged up nose and a general wooziness in the brain itself.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the vitamin C hypothesis again.
It has been a rather long time since I last took vitamin C supplements consistently. And during this time period of lull, I think that the cold incidence is a tad higher. However, this is merely an anecdotal observation -- I haven't actually tallied up the number of incidences of the cold during any time period. Medically, there is some light evidence that vitamin C can help prevent the cold, but only in the specific situation of active training under stressful conditions. Perhaps the heat stresses on the body from this rather annoyingly warm ``summer'' can be considered the necessary stressful conditions and all the Aikido training (and perhaps even the venerable 5BX that I had been loathing to do) can be considered under the aegis of ``training''. Which, of course, translates to me taking more vitamin C supplements.
Well, what harm can it do, right? As long as I don't overdose myself and keep within the LD50 of vitamin C (~12g/kg body mass using the rat model), there isn't any harm to be had.
Mundane vagaries of this sort aside, I have been reading on and off various threads on Reddit, and the kind the really gets my goat are those that involve the education system (``schools'') and bullies. As a general rule of thumb, Reddit has a predominantly American bias in terms of the user-submitted content, and on the topic of schools and bullies, it holds true as well. The sad thing of the US system is that of ``zero tolerance'' policies, or as I'd like to call it, the ``let's throw out common sense and judgement in favour of enforcing regularity and uniformity on everyone to avoid lawsuits'' policies. It makes me glad that I have no intention of raising my young in the US.
The prototypal story follows this general template: Alice is a student at a school, and Bob is a bully who keeps picking on her. One day, Alice got too pissed off at Bob and snaps, flailing/fighting/hurting Bob. Then, they both get detention and Alice is told to ``take the blows, not defend herself, and to look for a teacher''. Rinse and repeat unless things get nasty enough that someone gets sent to the ER or when a parent gets pissed of enough to have a showdown with the school administrators.
There are so many things wrong with that picture. The most damning is the dictum of never fighting back and appealling to authority. The problem isn't with the instruction, but lies within the context in which the instruction is provided. ``Appealling to authority'' works only if the said authority is just and even-handed, both of which are neigh impossible to get in the context of the school. Teachers and school administrators have, at best, a primitive notion of what being just means. The varying quality of the teachers is the reason why ``zero tolerance'' policies come about -- in the bid to enforce uniformity (aka Standard Operating Procedures or SOP), the judgement abilities of the teachers are taken out of the equation, making the rules rigid and unfair. Much of the action occurs after the damage is done, with everyone attempting to assign blame after the fact -- there is hardly any incentive for any teacher to actively step in to break up an altercation due to the lawsuit-happy environment.
I don't think Singapore has reached that level of stupidity. But then again, we tend not to have such blatant cases of bullying thanks to the full-scale indoctrination of proper social behaviour (or rather, conformity) that we don't find in the US.
Here's what I think. Violence should not be tolerated as a society -- there are always non-violent means of achieving a goal. It is laudable that schools try to inculcate that value into the young. It is also good to hear child psychologists praise the superior method of talking with one's children as the primary means of discipline, to get them to understand that something they have done is wrong.
However, violence cannot be eradicated completely from human society -- it ought to be allowed, with heavy penalties exacted on those who choose to use them. The reasons for this are pragmatic -- non-violent means of achieving goals assumes an innate intelligence and sentience that befits the status of homo, but there are times where the... person one is talking to refuses to use his/her intelligence and understanding to see the point being discussed. It is at such exasperating times that violence ought to be permitted. That said, there has to be a price for the application of violence, and the person needs to make a judgement on whether the objective is worth the price to pay for the violence enacted.
Back to the bully situation. The primary psychology behind a bully is an extrinsic source of superiority to mask the innate inferiority complex -- a sign of an immature mind, to put it in the bluntest terms. While it is possible for the intellectually advanced to bully others, in the context of the school, that is hardly the case. All the appeals to authority in the world will do little for the victim; but one violent outburst at the bully will make it clear that there is a price to pay for the bully to continue bullying. It's a primal way of settling problems, and I do not claim to agree with it completely, but it is a pragmatic solution of desperation.
That's how modern diplomacy works anyway. Heh.
I really dislike waking up and feeling completely out of it, the exact thing that I felt this morning when I rolled out of my metaphorical bed (I don't actually sleep on a bed). My head was woozy, my nose was bunged up, the entire works of an impending cold short of a throat infection of some sort.
The temptation to see the doctor to get instant relief is high, but I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I had been seeing the doctor at a near regular rate of once per week. All for the same stupid thing.
I cannot understand my susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. It's ludicrous actually. I know that I have some allergic rhinitis going on which is controlled with the steroid nasal spray (Nasonex), but ever so often I will get hit with a head cold with an über bunged up nose and a general wooziness in the brain itself.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the vitamin C hypothesis again.
It has been a rather long time since I last took vitamin C supplements consistently. And during this time period of lull, I think that the cold incidence is a tad higher. However, this is merely an anecdotal observation -- I haven't actually tallied up the number of incidences of the cold during any time period. Medically, there is some light evidence that vitamin C can help prevent the cold, but only in the specific situation of active training under stressful conditions. Perhaps the heat stresses on the body from this rather annoyingly warm ``summer'' can be considered the necessary stressful conditions and all the Aikido training (and perhaps even the venerable 5BX that I had been loathing to do) can be considered under the aegis of ``training''. Which, of course, translates to me taking more vitamin C supplements.
Well, what harm can it do, right? As long as I don't overdose myself and keep within the LD50 of vitamin C (~12g/kg body mass using the rat model), there isn't any harm to be had.
Mundane vagaries of this sort aside, I have been reading on and off various threads on Reddit, and the kind the really gets my goat are those that involve the education system (``schools'') and bullies. As a general rule of thumb, Reddit has a predominantly American bias in terms of the user-submitted content, and on the topic of schools and bullies, it holds true as well. The sad thing of the US system is that of ``zero tolerance'' policies, or as I'd like to call it, the ``let's throw out common sense and judgement in favour of enforcing regularity and uniformity on everyone to avoid lawsuits'' policies. It makes me glad that I have no intention of raising my young in the US.
The prototypal story follows this general template: Alice is a student at a school, and Bob is a bully who keeps picking on her. One day, Alice got too pissed off at Bob and snaps, flailing/fighting/hurting Bob. Then, they both get detention and Alice is told to ``take the blows, not defend herself, and to look for a teacher''. Rinse and repeat unless things get nasty enough that someone gets sent to the ER or when a parent gets pissed of enough to have a showdown with the school administrators.
There are so many things wrong with that picture. The most damning is the dictum of never fighting back and appealling to authority. The problem isn't with the instruction, but lies within the context in which the instruction is provided. ``Appealling to authority'' works only if the said authority is just and even-handed, both of which are neigh impossible to get in the context of the school. Teachers and school administrators have, at best, a primitive notion of what being just means. The varying quality of the teachers is the reason why ``zero tolerance'' policies come about -- in the bid to enforce uniformity (aka Standard Operating Procedures or SOP), the judgement abilities of the teachers are taken out of the equation, making the rules rigid and unfair. Much of the action occurs after the damage is done, with everyone attempting to assign blame after the fact -- there is hardly any incentive for any teacher to actively step in to break up an altercation due to the lawsuit-happy environment.
I don't think Singapore has reached that level of stupidity. But then again, we tend not to have such blatant cases of bullying thanks to the full-scale indoctrination of proper social behaviour (or rather, conformity) that we don't find in the US.
Here's what I think. Violence should not be tolerated as a society -- there are always non-violent means of achieving a goal. It is laudable that schools try to inculcate that value into the young. It is also good to hear child psychologists praise the superior method of talking with one's children as the primary means of discipline, to get them to understand that something they have done is wrong.
However, violence cannot be eradicated completely from human society -- it ought to be allowed, with heavy penalties exacted on those who choose to use them. The reasons for this are pragmatic -- non-violent means of achieving goals assumes an innate intelligence and sentience that befits the status of homo, but there are times where the... person one is talking to refuses to use his/her intelligence and understanding to see the point being discussed. It is at such exasperating times that violence ought to be permitted. That said, there has to be a price for the application of violence, and the person needs to make a judgement on whether the objective is worth the price to pay for the violence enacted.
Back to the bully situation. The primary psychology behind a bully is an extrinsic source of superiority to mask the innate inferiority complex -- a sign of an immature mind, to put it in the bluntest terms. While it is possible for the intellectually advanced to bully others, in the context of the school, that is hardly the case. All the appeals to authority in the world will do little for the victim; but one violent outburst at the bully will make it clear that there is a price to pay for the bully to continue bullying. It's a primal way of settling problems, and I do not claim to agree with it completely, but it is a pragmatic solution of desperation.
That's how modern diplomacy works anyway. Heh.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Flutes and 笛子
Some things to consider:
- The 口笛 has no equivalent. I don't even know how to explain this other than: an open pipe either 5 to 6 cm long or 8 to 9 cm long.
- D 小笛 is traditionally the highest pitched 笛子.
- Piccolo (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 梆笛, though it tends to be more mellow. Full metal is the closest to 梆笛 timbre, Grenaditte/wood is furthest, and hybrids are somewhere in between.
- Treble flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to D 曲笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. It also tends to be more mellow.
- Concert flute (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 大笛; this does not change even with a B foot. It is on par with the G 新笛, though it is more nimble to play.
- Flûte d'amour (keyed in A/B♭) is equivalent to the E/F 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes.
- Alto flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to the D 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. The D 大笛 is quite rarely used in Chinese Orchestras.
- C 大笛 is traditionally the lowest pitched 笛子.
- Bass flute (keyed in C) has no equivalent in among the 笛子 family.
SMS Musing #7
Wide awake from perspiring too much:
Never thought I'd write an entry on my phone in an SMS-like setting, let alone at around 1am. June came and went, and it hasn't been a productive month. Lots of diversions coupled with terribly warm and humid weather meant that I was always trying to find something else to do.
Work has been alright -- I've been coasting along on auto-pilot for a while and it's about time to dig the spurs in a little to push things over the current gravity well that comes from being in limbo between funding tranches and a less-than-obvious engagement strategy with potential partners. Frankly, it's not the most ideal situation for my operational efficiency -- reminds me too much of the nebulous direction that I'd experienced in grad school, where the direction that I think I was heading was totally not where I was heading. There will come a day where that traumatic experience will be gone from me, but today is not that day.
I've been taking French lessons on and off on Duolingo, a web site built by Dr Luis von Ahn, an old teacher of mine back when I was still an undergraduate in CMU. No real reason on why, except perhaps the feeling that it is time to expand my understanding of the Romance languages. Incidentally, I've also started on Spanish, and am hoping that the similarities will help rather than hinder progress. Maybe this is my way of preparing for Finnegans Wake, to be read some time in the unknown future.
Ah well. I think I'm sick of lying prone and propping myself on my elbows to type this all out on a tiny phone. Till the next update.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Typewriterisms Part Deux
First, read typewriterisms.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
Friday, June 05, 2015
Pens
Ah June. The month of the hot weather. The month of the start of a really serious case of heat, haze, and humidity. The month where school-going children get their first major reprieve from the academic year. The month that... I could go on, but it's pointless.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Be Professional
Well, I was about to write a ranty piece on how discrimination is innate in human nature, and how we as an advanced society (as compared to the past anyway) just learn how to downplay that natural reaction just so we can get along with each other, but seeing these couple of videos made me decide to write something altogether different. First, watch the videos I have in mind:Notice that they are from the same group. No I have no affiliation with them.
The thing is, it is important to treat everyone with the same basic attitude, and to never be condescending. Just because it's the first time you meet someone doesn't mean that the first impression you get is the actual behaviour of the person. It is much better (some might even say professional) to keep an open mind, a neutral stance, and defer judgement till later. Just because she looks like a cute stereotypical ``nerdy'' girl doesn't mean that she isn't in the top class of her art. While the videos were made largely with pranking in mind, they do convey a much deeper lesson to the instructors involved, and it is exactly what I said earlier. The monkey brain in us will naturally condescend others perceived to be physically unintimidating, but the human brain in us must be disciplined enough to override that sentiment and apply the cold hard truth of logic, that sometimes that unassuming exterior hides something superior and thus more dangerous.
What the videos do not show is the other end of the spectrum, where people get all subservient and obsequious in the face of ``authority''. See this next video, which does:Again, it's the monkey brain at work. ``Oh it's a motorcade with important-looking people; I should be as nice as I can because there's someone important in it and important people do not like to get stopped.'' Again, it's a failure of professionalism, where the trained human brain does not triumph over the monkey brain within. Don't get me wrong, the ability to immediately sense authority and adjust one's role accordingly is a useful skill for survival, but when one has a job to do, that job's requirements overrule any of these instinctual habits, particularly when the instinctual habits contradict what the job requires.
Here's a slightly different example on that concept. Take your regular soldier. After filtering out all the fancy euphemisms, a soldier's roles can be reduced to two principles: to kill on demand, to follow orders even if it means their total annihilation. The first goes against our usual social notions of ``acceptable'' behaviour, and the second goes against our innate monkey brain notion of fight/flight. If you run off without following orders to hold the ground and be overrun, you're a deserter---it's unprofessional, and more importantly, it jeopardises other plans that aid in the larger scheme of things.
The crux of it all is merely this: if you are taking up a job, be it a professional driving instructor, martial arts trainer, security personnel, or a soldier, do your job according to what your profession requires and do not let your monkey brain take over. Modern society has little place for monkey brain thinking under the highly specialised job structure we have, but it is an unfortunate trend that is going on now. Much of the cop problems brought up in the US are due to police officers not being professional on their job.
Before we can evolve to the next phase of human society, I think we need to rethink and relook how to be professional all over again. Otherwise that twentieth century notion of ``division of labour'' is no longer applicable and we'll need to come up with something better.
The thing is, it is important to treat everyone with the same basic attitude, and to never be condescending. Just because it's the first time you meet someone doesn't mean that the first impression you get is the actual behaviour of the person. It is much better (some might even say professional) to keep an open mind, a neutral stance, and defer judgement till later. Just because she looks like a cute stereotypical ``nerdy'' girl doesn't mean that she isn't in the top class of her art. While the videos were made largely with pranking in mind, they do convey a much deeper lesson to the instructors involved, and it is exactly what I said earlier. The monkey brain in us will naturally condescend others perceived to be physically unintimidating, but the human brain in us must be disciplined enough to override that sentiment and apply the cold hard truth of logic, that sometimes that unassuming exterior hides something superior and thus more dangerous.
What the videos do not show is the other end of the spectrum, where people get all subservient and obsequious in the face of ``authority''. See this next video, which does:Again, it's the monkey brain at work. ``Oh it's a motorcade with important-looking people; I should be as nice as I can because there's someone important in it and important people do not like to get stopped.'' Again, it's a failure of professionalism, where the trained human brain does not triumph over the monkey brain within. Don't get me wrong, the ability to immediately sense authority and adjust one's role accordingly is a useful skill for survival, but when one has a job to do, that job's requirements overrule any of these instinctual habits, particularly when the instinctual habits contradict what the job requires.
Here's a slightly different example on that concept. Take your regular soldier. After filtering out all the fancy euphemisms, a soldier's roles can be reduced to two principles: to kill on demand, to follow orders even if it means their total annihilation. The first goes against our usual social notions of ``acceptable'' behaviour, and the second goes against our innate monkey brain notion of fight/flight. If you run off without following orders to hold the ground and be overrun, you're a deserter---it's unprofessional, and more importantly, it jeopardises other plans that aid in the larger scheme of things.
The crux of it all is merely this: if you are taking up a job, be it a professional driving instructor, martial arts trainer, security personnel, or a soldier, do your job according to what your profession requires and do not let your monkey brain take over. Modern society has little place for monkey brain thinking under the highly specialised job structure we have, but it is an unfortunate trend that is going on now. Much of the cop problems brought up in the US are due to police officers not being professional on their job.
Before we can evolve to the next phase of human society, I think we need to rethink and relook how to be professional all over again. Otherwise that twentieth century notion of ``division of labour'' is no longer applicable and we'll need to come up with something better.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Some Music-Related Mumbles
I have an old Nyquist project from my last semester at CMU that I've hosted on my domain for quite a while. Recently, someone emailed me about it to clarify some points of how the library works. Consider me... amused. I suppose it's a good thing that people are actually using stuff that I had put together, right?
On another note, as I was casually looking about dizi resources on the web, I realised that fingering charts are among the most often asked questions. I have probably the most complete fingering charts for the dizi, covering all the basic fingering for all the 5 traditional keys per dizi, and then some. But I suppose it's too complicated for most people, which is funny considering the amount of effort I had put into simplifying the whole shebang. The long and short of it is, the charts make it easy to figure out how to play the dizi chromatically, assuming that one has a decently built dizi to begin with.
I am partial to Ng Teck Seng's (NTS) dizi myself over Dong Xue Hua's (DXH). It's not that DXH makes bad dizi, but that NTS is just more accessible for me, considering that he is a friend of my sifu from back in the day. I prefer dizi that are nimble in response, bright in timbre, and projective in tone, and the NTS ones are excellent for my purposes. I have also spoken with NTS and know that his dizi are crafted with acoustic principles in mind---there is a lot of physics that goes behind each of the bamboo flutes. It makes each instrument very consistent, and that is a very important thing when playing in an orchestra with different genres of pieces to play. A good dizi should consistently be able to reach the equivalent of the high-E note (by concert flute/piccolo fingering---actual pitch is dependent on the native key of the dizi), with the ability to eke out the high-G on occasion as a transient note. All of the NTS dizi that I own have this ability, which goes to say how consistent the workmanship is.
Anyway, that aside, time for more random ranting.
The past week had been quite tiring. I spent a lot time reading up various documentation to gain a deeper insight into the design trade-offs for the various sub-systems that we are intending to put together for the new framework. On the not-work front, I've finished reading Illuminatus!, and am switching over to non-fiction for a while, refreshing my knowledge on economics once again. Once that is done, I think I'll read Hamlet before moving on to some Russian literature (translated of course).
I know that I don't really have much to say, but I suppose it's a good idea to pen some things down here every now and then. After all, should I fall off the net completely (or in a more morbid sense, off this reality), this is one of the few things that are left behind to show that yes I had existed once before.
Till the next update.
On another note, as I was casually looking about dizi resources on the web, I realised that fingering charts are among the most often asked questions. I have probably the most complete fingering charts for the dizi, covering all the basic fingering for all the 5 traditional keys per dizi, and then some. But I suppose it's too complicated for most people, which is funny considering the amount of effort I had put into simplifying the whole shebang. The long and short of it is, the charts make it easy to figure out how to play the dizi chromatically, assuming that one has a decently built dizi to begin with.
I am partial to Ng Teck Seng's (NTS) dizi myself over Dong Xue Hua's (DXH). It's not that DXH makes bad dizi, but that NTS is just more accessible for me, considering that he is a friend of my sifu from back in the day. I prefer dizi that are nimble in response, bright in timbre, and projective in tone, and the NTS ones are excellent for my purposes. I have also spoken with NTS and know that his dizi are crafted with acoustic principles in mind---there is a lot of physics that goes behind each of the bamboo flutes. It makes each instrument very consistent, and that is a very important thing when playing in an orchestra with different genres of pieces to play. A good dizi should consistently be able to reach the equivalent of the high-E note (by concert flute/piccolo fingering---actual pitch is dependent on the native key of the dizi), with the ability to eke out the high-G on occasion as a transient note. All of the NTS dizi that I own have this ability, which goes to say how consistent the workmanship is.
Anyway, that aside, time for more random ranting.
The past week had been quite tiring. I spent a lot time reading up various documentation to gain a deeper insight into the design trade-offs for the various sub-systems that we are intending to put together for the new framework. On the not-work front, I've finished reading Illuminatus!, and am switching over to non-fiction for a while, refreshing my knowledge on economics once again. Once that is done, I think I'll read Hamlet before moving on to some Russian literature (translated of course).
I know that I don't really have much to say, but I suppose it's a good idea to pen some things down here every now and then. After all, should I fall off the net completely (or in a more morbid sense, off this reality), this is one of the few things that are left behind to show that yes I had existed once before.
Till the next update.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Technodiocy and An Irresponsible Parent
Today, I was supposed to write a piece lambasting a group of irresponsible individuals that I have observed. Work was sufficiently engaging and onerous that I had to delay that piece till now. And now, after riding the public transport back, I have found yet another group of irresponsible individuals that I feel I ought to lambast.
And so now you have the dubious honour of two rants for the price of one.
Let's begin with an assertion. I am a techie. Read my posts here from time to time, do a Google-stalk of me, read my personal domain and you ought to come to a similar conclusion soon enough. I like tech---I live tech, breathe tech and work on tech. Tech is my way of life, tech is my livelihood. There is no denying that I am no luddite by any means.
I own a smart phone. I own portable computers, several in fact, and work on powerful desktops and servers. I own some e-readers, and even a tablet. So I'm not exactly completely ignorant of the so-called mobile future.
Yet you don't see me lapsing into becoming a gorram phone zombie. I wasn't fully aware of just how bad the epidemic was until I started to look about me one day and realise that, to my horror, nearly 8 out of 10 people who were standing around me on a train or bus were burying their heads in one mobile device or another. That alone doesn't make them zombies of course---it is the modern day equivalent of say reading a paperback while on a transport.
What's infuriating is when people continue to use their mobile device while they are walking from one point to another that makes them phone zombies. It's ludicrous---a person, head all hunched up, staring at their tiny (or not so tiny) screens, sometimes plugged in with earphones, and justwalkingshuffling through the streets, oblivious of the situation around them. I took to observing just what it was that could make a person thus engrossed, and from my unscientific observations, more than 7 out of 10 of them were on some kind of messaging system.
Messaging system. While walking. How much more ridiculous can it get? I mean, if they were walking and watching some silly video that they had downloaded (or doing comparative shopping, which is on a whole new level of idiocy that I will not rant about today), it's probably less laughable. But on a messenging system? I fail to see just why a conversation cannot be left alone for the [short] time it takes to get from one lousy point in SIN to another on foot.
And if you thought that I was just ranting about adults, think again. I don't really care much about adults---they should, by definition, have the good sense to pay attention to what they are doing after all---but school-going children. Let me emphasize that a bit: school-going children. Not on holiday, not over a weekend out in the streets. Early in the morning while they are getting their collective asses to school. That's how stupid it has gotten.
It's an old saying to be bitching about how the newer generations are never like the old, but in this case, I feel highly justified in thinking so. I mean, wow, just how much interesting things can a sub-eighteen-year-old say particularly when five sevenths of their week is already spent in school? I have friends all over the world (mostly congregated in the North American continent), and am a techie, but I don't even see the need to be staring at the chat screen all the damn time. And lest any one starts saying any nonsense, allow me to point out that my generation was among the first to make use of ``personalised'' messaging systems or IMs (not IRC which predates all these and is an example of the ``group chat'' that the sheeple are rediscovering) on a consistent basis, and yet we don't even see the pressing need to always be staring at the stupid chat screen.
My children will never get a smart phone of that nature while they are in school. I'll get the dumbest phone I can still get my hands on and give them that, and only because payphones have gone the way of the do-do bird while the need to maintain contact between parents and children still exist. I am glad that my consort-candidate is in agreement with this as well.
And that's the first rant point. I feel a little better getting it out of my system, even though I know that this post is going to do absolutely nothing in reversing the rise in technodiocy.
The second rant point is triggered from an incident that occurred no more than an hour ago. I was on a bus heading home, and had secured my usual backward-facing seat. It's my usual because for some reason, no one will willingly choose to sit facing in the opposite direction of travel of the bus, which of course means that I have better than even odds of actually having a place ``reserved'' for the likes of me. Out of so many trips, it is on no more than five occasions that I failed to secure my usual place, but that's a mere diversion of this other point.
The bus stopped at one of the many stops, and a mother (I think) and child came onboard. Said child was probably no more than seven, all puny and what-not, and the mother was carrying a bulky but light looking plastic bag of widgets. They made their way to the back of the bus where there was only one seat left, the centre one that opened directly into the walking aisle with hardly any thing else.
Now, if you've not taken any of SIN's public buses, allow me to make yet another diversion. The centre rear-most seat is a bloody dangerous seat---it's slippery, has no other seats in front of it for bracing against sudden stops, which is a problem because more often than not the bus driver is a maniac that likes to accelerate and decelerate really quickly due to having an automatic transmission. For safety reasons, the centre seat of the buses now have a seat belt to help mitigate some of the risks. Most able-bodied people don't use it because it is often too damn annoying to find and buckle up in.
Now this mother and child pair made their way to the seat, and the mother sat in it and led the child to stand between her legs. I got pissed---it was clearly an at-risk behaviour for the child. I saw that the mother was hugging her child, but let's be realistic here; if something were to happen, the chances of the hugging being strong enough to hold the child such that the latter doesn't fly off to injure itself is just miniscule.
So, I stood up and looked at the mother, offering my seat and telling her, ``please sit here''.
That woman merely looked back at me and said no.
I felt like running up to her, and shouting straight in her face at the stupid risks she was taking with her child. But I remembered an important lesson---one cannot teach another a lesson if the other refuses to learn. Inasmuch as I'd like the child to be safe, that child is of the responsibility of that woman, her mother. There was nothing else that I could have done that would be right while still satisfying society's notion of etiquette.
I didn't go back to my seat. I fumed and stared daggers at the mother before alighting the bus a few stops later, thinking to myself that I need to write this down to expunge it from my mind. That such idiotic adults exist is one thing that I cannot forget.
And so now you have the dubious honour of two rants for the price of one.
Let's begin with an assertion. I am a techie. Read my posts here from time to time, do a Google-stalk of me, read my personal domain and you ought to come to a similar conclusion soon enough. I like tech---I live tech, breathe tech and work on tech. Tech is my way of life, tech is my livelihood. There is no denying that I am no luddite by any means.
I own a smart phone. I own portable computers, several in fact, and work on powerful desktops and servers. I own some e-readers, and even a tablet. So I'm not exactly completely ignorant of the so-called mobile future.
Yet you don't see me lapsing into becoming a gorram phone zombie. I wasn't fully aware of just how bad the epidemic was until I started to look about me one day and realise that, to my horror, nearly 8 out of 10 people who were standing around me on a train or bus were burying their heads in one mobile device or another. That alone doesn't make them zombies of course---it is the modern day equivalent of say reading a paperback while on a transport.
What's infuriating is when people continue to use their mobile device while they are walking from one point to another that makes them phone zombies. It's ludicrous---a person, head all hunched up, staring at their tiny (or not so tiny) screens, sometimes plugged in with earphones, and just
Messaging system. While walking. How much more ridiculous can it get? I mean, if they were walking and watching some silly video that they had downloaded (or doing comparative shopping, which is on a whole new level of idiocy that I will not rant about today), it's probably less laughable. But on a messenging system? I fail to see just why a conversation cannot be left alone for the [short] time it takes to get from one lousy point in SIN to another on foot.
And if you thought that I was just ranting about adults, think again. I don't really care much about adults---they should, by definition, have the good sense to pay attention to what they are doing after all---but school-going children. Let me emphasize that a bit: school-going children. Not on holiday, not over a weekend out in the streets. Early in the morning while they are getting their collective asses to school. That's how stupid it has gotten.
It's an old saying to be bitching about how the newer generations are never like the old, but in this case, I feel highly justified in thinking so. I mean, wow, just how much interesting things can a sub-eighteen-year-old say particularly when five sevenths of their week is already spent in school? I have friends all over the world (mostly congregated in the North American continent), and am a techie, but I don't even see the need to be staring at the chat screen all the damn time. And lest any one starts saying any nonsense, allow me to point out that my generation was among the first to make use of ``personalised'' messaging systems or IMs (not IRC which predates all these and is an example of the ``group chat'' that the sheeple are rediscovering) on a consistent basis, and yet we don't even see the pressing need to always be staring at the stupid chat screen.
My children will never get a smart phone of that nature while they are in school. I'll get the dumbest phone I can still get my hands on and give them that, and only because payphones have gone the way of the do-do bird while the need to maintain contact between parents and children still exist. I am glad that my consort-candidate is in agreement with this as well.
And that's the first rant point. I feel a little better getting it out of my system, even though I know that this post is going to do absolutely nothing in reversing the rise in technodiocy.
The second rant point is triggered from an incident that occurred no more than an hour ago. I was on a bus heading home, and had secured my usual backward-facing seat. It's my usual because for some reason, no one will willingly choose to sit facing in the opposite direction of travel of the bus, which of course means that I have better than even odds of actually having a place ``reserved'' for the likes of me. Out of so many trips, it is on no more than five occasions that I failed to secure my usual place, but that's a mere diversion of this other point.
The bus stopped at one of the many stops, and a mother (I think) and child came onboard. Said child was probably no more than seven, all puny and what-not, and the mother was carrying a bulky but light looking plastic bag of widgets. They made their way to the back of the bus where there was only one seat left, the centre one that opened directly into the walking aisle with hardly any thing else.
Now, if you've not taken any of SIN's public buses, allow me to make yet another diversion. The centre rear-most seat is a bloody dangerous seat---it's slippery, has no other seats in front of it for bracing against sudden stops, which is a problem because more often than not the bus driver is a maniac that likes to accelerate and decelerate really quickly due to having an automatic transmission. For safety reasons, the centre seat of the buses now have a seat belt to help mitigate some of the risks. Most able-bodied people don't use it because it is often too damn annoying to find and buckle up in.
Now this mother and child pair made their way to the seat, and the mother sat in it and led the child to stand between her legs. I got pissed---it was clearly an at-risk behaviour for the child. I saw that the mother was hugging her child, but let's be realistic here; if something were to happen, the chances of the hugging being strong enough to hold the child such that the latter doesn't fly off to injure itself is just miniscule.
So, I stood up and looked at the mother, offering my seat and telling her, ``please sit here''.
That woman merely looked back at me and said no.
I felt like running up to her, and shouting straight in her face at the stupid risks she was taking with her child. But I remembered an important lesson---one cannot teach another a lesson if the other refuses to learn. Inasmuch as I'd like the child to be safe, that child is of the responsibility of that woman, her mother. There was nothing else that I could have done that would be right while still satisfying society's notion of etiquette.
I didn't go back to my seat. I fumed and stared daggers at the mother before alighting the bus a few stops later, thinking to myself that I need to write this down to expunge it from my mind. That such idiotic adults exist is one thing that I cannot forget.
Friday, April 24, 2015
I Sped Up An Already Spartan Website
Recently I was reading about the Mobile Friendly Search Initiative by Google. On a whim, I decided to subject my domain to the test. To my utter horror, it reported that my simple design was not very mobile friendly.
Well, it wasn't exactly old news to me. I have used my own web site every now and then to look up some of the lists that I have online, from my reading list to my shopping list. I've long discovered that the ``auto-reflow'' option that was present in my phone's web browser was breaking my web site, and I never really knew why.
Now that I had a third party tool to demonstrate objectively that yes, my web site was not very mobile friendly, I started to find ways to fix it.
The first and most important thing was to add a new meta tag to my pages so that the page will scale according to the device's actual width as opposed to the raw pixel count. This is important because of higher pixel densities of the mobile devices compared to the usual run-of-the-mill generic monitor, but expect this to change over time as those 4k (and 8k) displays become more mainstream. For the sake of completeness, the tag looks like this:
Before doing the second one, I made a note of the total file size of all the files that are involved (XHTML, CSS and Javascript only)---it was 205640 bytes. To actually do the second one, I wrote a customised script in Python that made use of csscompressor and slimit together with the built-in
The next step is to turn on browser caching. It took me a while, but creating a .htaccess on the root directory of the public-facing web site with the following lines did the trick:
The last step of turning on compression on the payload turned out to be the hardest to pull off. At first, I was trying to use the deflate or gzip mods for Apache 2.2 (the server that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses), but after not noticing any changes by spying on the response headers from HTTP in the client browser, I changed tack by using mod_rewrite instead. This meant that I had to append the following lines to .htaccess:
Even with the overhead though, I find the new set up way more responsive and totally worth it. It does mean that I need to do a little bit more work before I upload an updated file, but it does mean that now, the already spartan web site can be accessed much faster in more places.
Alright, enough of this babble talk. Till next time.
Well, it wasn't exactly old news to me. I have used my own web site every now and then to look up some of the lists that I have online, from my reading list to my shopping list. I've long discovered that the ``auto-reflow'' option that was present in my phone's web browser was breaking my web site, and I never really knew why.
Now that I had a third party tool to demonstrate objectively that yes, my web site was not very mobile friendly, I started to find ways to fix it.
The first and most important thing was to add a new meta tag to my pages so that the page will scale according to the device's actual width as opposed to the raw pixel count. This is important because of higher pixel densities of the mobile devices compared to the usual run-of-the-mill generic monitor, but expect this to change over time as those 4k (and 8k) displays become more mainstream. For the sake of completeness, the tag looks like this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>However, that got me thinking even more, especially after using the Page Speed Insights tool from Google. They highlighted some interesting things to think about, namely:
- Removing blocking Javascript/CSS;
- Minification of HTML/CSS/Javascript;
- Enabling browser caching;
- Enabling server compression.
async="async" keyword to each of my script tags, but it failed the XHTML 1.0 DTD validation, so I had to abandon it. That was a big no-no, so I had to abandon that tip that was suggested.Before doing the second one, I made a note of the total file size of all the files that are involved (XHTML, CSS and Javascript only)---it was 205640 bytes. To actually do the second one, I wrote a customised script in Python that made use of csscompressor and slimit together with the built-in
HTMLParser object to walk through the XHTML tree and perform the minification. I didn't replace the files with the minified forms---I am still editing them by hand with Vim---but created an output directory to dump all these files in. This step alone reduced the file size to 185602 bytes, around 90% of the original set of files. Specifically, prettyprint.js shrunk from 3876 bytes to 1299 bytes, or around 34% of the original file size. This is significant considering that all the pages that I ever author end up pulling that file. This is definitely a drastic saving in the long run even without turning on browser caching.The next step is to turn on browser caching. It took me a while, but creating a .htaccess on the root directory of the public-facing web site with the following lines did the trick:
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript
"access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript
"access plus 216000 seconds"
</ifModule>
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
<filesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(css)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control
"max-age=216000, public, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control
"max-age=300, private, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>
Caching made a nice difference in that the scripts and CSS (like prettyprint.js) need to be loaded only once and everything is nice and dandy.The last step of turning on compression on the payload turned out to be the hardest to pull off. At first, I was trying to use the deflate or gzip mods for Apache 2.2 (the server that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses), but after not noticing any changes by spying on the response headers from HTTP in the client browser, I changed tack by using mod_rewrite instead. This meant that I had to append the following lines to .htaccess:
<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>
Header add Vary accept-encoding
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.gz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule (.*\.(js|css|html)) $1.gz [L]
</ifModule>
AddEncoding x-gzip .gz
<FilesMatch .*\.html.gz>
ForceType text/html
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch .*\.css.gz>
ForceType text/css
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch .*\.js.gz>
ForceType text/javascript
</FilesMatch>
What this does is that it tries to look for a pre-compressed version of the requested file (seen as %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz) and returns that while adjusting the headers to inform the client that a GZIP stream is incoming. It's a form of trickery but it got the job done well. The last part of it was to adjust the minification script I wrote to generate the pre-compressed files as well. This new set of files generated an overhead of 66252 bytes, which meant that now, the total size of files hosted is 251854 bytes, or roughly 122% of the size of my original set of files. Specifically, prettyprint.js is now only 565 bytes, a cool 15% the size of the original file. The original files are needed in the event that the client browser doesn't support a gzip stream.Even with the overhead though, I find the new set up way more responsive and totally worth it. It does mean that I need to do a little bit more work before I upload an updated file, but it does mean that now, the already spartan web site can be accessed much faster in more places.
Alright, enough of this babble talk. Till next time.
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