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.

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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.

NaNoWriMo 2011?

November is coming, and I'm still debating with myself whether I should take part in this year's NaNoWriMo, considering everything. I mean, I have Eiko with me now, and should serve as an incentive to help push things forward, but somehow I am scared that I might just run out of time to get all things that need to be done while doing NaNoWriMo.

Oh choices, choices.

I do have a story to tell for NaNoWriMo, but the caveat is that I have at least 2 to 3 other ``big'' writing assignments that need attention. So putting aside that one hour per day to write my 2000 words to hit the magical 50k words within the month sounds a little... painful. Anyway, I have around 5 to 6 days to make a decision. We'll see how this goes.

Imperial March

It's March! A month befitting its name in many ways. It's a march uphill towards the Promised Land [of project completion]; it's also a march uphill towards the Liberation of The Engineer and the Hailing of The Scientist, hopefully.

But that aside, things have been really in the doldrums lately, due to the large amounts of work that is coming together from all directions. At the very least, the whole Chinese New Year thing is done and over, and life has more or less gone back to what it was prior to the influx of activity from the single largest event within the Chinese lunar calendar.

In other news, my Neo has finally arrived. If you've not heard of the Neo, then let me expound on its usefulness---it has a whopping 700 hours of projected battery life just from 3 AA batteries; try beating that with any laptop that you have today! Needless to say, my Neo has a name now: Eiko. It's the first time I'm using a Japanese name, and this one means ``long-lived child'', which is an apt description of her battery life and her general ``indestructibility''. The sole purpose of Eiko Neo is to provide a distraction-free mode of typing things up, be they papers, program code, or more likely, novels/novella. Eiko is much more comfortable to type on than Edythe-EEE, since Eiko's keyboard is actually full-sized while Edythe-EEE's is kinda on the small side, with really nasty contact responses and awkwardly placed shift keys. Oh, even with the extended battery pack, Edythe-EEE cannot last as long as Eiko in terms of staying power.

So enough of my new tool. Things are moving along at a frenetic yet paradoxically slow rate. Eventually things will start to make more sense, and perhaps I can finally say things in ways that I actually want to, as opposed to speaking in such loopy logic.

And that's the blurb for now. Onward to the Imperial March.