Death and Idolisation

I am unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I finally have material to write a post here.

Leonard ``Spock'' Nimoy just passed away recently, while a certain old school strongman is hanging in the balance between life and death. A friend posted a note on my Facebook Wall (yes I'm still using that... for now) commenting about how as time went by it was starting to be a little weird to see the pillars of one's youth dying one by one.

I remember talking about the second death before, the idea that one truly dies when everyone forgets the essence of what one was.

So, in some sense, when one is physically dead, one doesn't truly die when one's essence is still remembered. Leonard Nimoy will be remembered as the man who brought us Spock of Star Trek, and he will also be remembered less so as the poet/musician/director he was, while his relatives will remember him as a part of family. He may no longer be among the living having died the first death, but he has not died the second death, and therefore he is still alive in that sense. So, I don't feel the need to feel sad.

Same for the certain old school strongman, should the time comes where he ends up on the other side of the balance.

I suppose I'm odd in the sense that I don't attach too much to the physical embodiment of any particular person. No, I'm not cold. What I mean is, unless I know the person well personally and have interacted with the person on an emotionally more intimate level, if they are a public figure of some sort, I will only know them for their work, and not them as who they are. So, even if they did pass on, I do not see them as a loss, not in the way that is most emotionally jarring. Sure, they're not going to have anything new from them (they're dead), but the body of work that captures their essence isn't gone, and therefore they still live. After all, that is what we know them for, and in some sense it is more real to live in their works than in what we believe we know about their lives.

Because of that, I don't feel too bad or feel that things are crumbling when important people from my childhood age and eventually pass away now, some twenty odd years later. Death is part of life---there can be no distinction of life if death didn't exist. It may sound cold, but I think this is the right type of attitude to face the world.

Idolise the work, idolise the values, but do not idolise the mortal. Mortals die, works and values are eternal.

Luni-Solar New Year

So it's day 2 of the Chinese New Year thingy. Not that big a fan of it all, considering that the people that we hardly ever talk to for the rest of the year suddenly feel compelled for one reason or another to meet up and keep up with the pretense of interest and concern. Farcical to the core, but since it is beyond my direct control considering that we are talking about my elders here [respect of elders is relatively inviolable, short of having the said elder doing something so heinous that it will cause the heavens themselves to revulse in horror], there's nothing else to do except to keep my cool and wait out the timer till everything returns to normalcy.

It's funny though. It seems that as each year passes, I find it less and less enticing to keep up with the whole charade that comes with the whole ``Chinese New Year'' experience. House visiting is a chore, and given the swelling numbers of people in general, even visiting the festivals of the according theme is a lacklustre proposition. Or it could just be a sign of the innate dysfunction, but I am really in no mood to over-analyse this whole thing.

It really doesn't help that this year we have the equivalent of four days of wasted time. I'm not sitting around to waste the time though---I'm heading back to the office tomorrow and the day after to get some work done, things that I could probably do at home since I mirror the code I need to work on via my own private code repository. That said, getting that done at home is impossible due to the whole need of humouring those who decide to visit, hence the excuse to make the excursion back to the office, braving the slow circulation of air and lack of air-conditioning to get the uninterrupted time needed to get the work done. I have discharged my duties well for the first two days of the lunar new year, so I don't feel guilty for doing the ``ditching'' thing.

Life has clearly evolved to a new phase. Some time back I was thinking a lot about how to steel and gird myself against the world, to eke out some kind of living on my own and dealing with the ramifications from that choice. A change occurred and soon that single-minded craze started to evolve into something a little warmer and more encompassing, and now I daresay that my perspectives and targets have changed again. I was never really ambitious to begin with, preferring to do live a life akin to the older days where work was just something to do to pay the bills and keep the roof over one's head, and the new choices that were made are further reinforcing this when the limited resource of time is taken into consideration. New things to think about, more worldly things, but not necessarily a bad thing.

I'm being deliberately obtuse because things aren't fully ripe for the telling just yet. Patience.

In a couple of weeks or so I'll be heading off to the US once again for my annual long break, a necessity to ensure that I don't go completely insane given the work load that I have. I'm looking forward to it, but probably with less enthusiasm than what I had started with nearly a year ago when I was mooting the idea.

As I said, a new phase of life.

And now, I should stop, because I'm rambling again. I'm not sure if I want to do that and provide material for people to over-analyse. Till the next update then.

4k

So some time back while I was waiting for the time to pass before I meet up with Ivan and consort, I walked into one of the electronics store and checked out one of those new-fangled 4k displays that are on the laptop. I must say that I'm... impressed in one way and completely baffled in another.

See, at 4k resolutions (I think it just means that one of the dimensions is within delta of 4000 as opposed to having only 4000 pixels), there is only one way to use it---scaled mode. Running the screen at the ``smallest'' text setting a la Windows 8.1 scaling yields a text size so small that even I cannot read, which is ridiculous considering that I actually can read the teeny tiny fonts on Edythe-II, which are at a more modest 2.5k (over 13.3 inches diagonal).

I don't think that I'm going to consider getting a 4k resolution laptop in the future---what Edythe-II has currently is fantastic. However, if I'm intending to use that machine as a dumb client to some servers to run command-line programs only, then perhaps the ridiculous resolution will work much better with the GNU Unifont with its fixed 8×16 character cell size. Already on Edythe-II I can have 4 vertical screens of text/code---maybe on a larger screen I can eke out 8? As far as I know though, what Edythe-II has at the moment is sufficient, even with the GUI heavy stuff.

I... don't really have anything else to say. Work is still ongoing, life is getting better, and I'm... missing someone. That's about it I suppose.