Eirian-V Has Arrived!

Feels a bit off sitting in the proverbial saddle, but hey, gotta keep on writing if you know what I mean. Morbidly this blog has a much higher chance of out-living me long after I am dead, and that sort of terrifies me.

Just a little.

To begin with, it is a happy belated birthday to me. Something about the long weekend over Chinese New Year just screams ``don't feel like writing'' to me in a way that was hard to ignore. That long weekend passed on by quite quickly, and I have nothing much to report, other than a delightful long walk with YT on Monday exploring a bit of the western neighbourhood that I had always wondered how it looked like, followed by a reclimbing the old faithful Bukit Timah Hill, and some well-wishers from the few who still remembered when it was the anniversary of my birth.

Moving on, I mentioned some time back about getting the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, and finally did. Eirian-V arrived in the last week of January, and I have been using it for nearly two weeks on the single charge, clocking about 1.5 hours of reading per day.

And it's ``only'' at 55% left, which is pretty cool, considering that I was reading the higher power draw situations of full-page manga spreads generated using kcc on some CBZ/CBR collections I have lying about. That extra 0.8" of screen space (6.0" vs 6.8"), combined with much thinner bevels in general meant a greatly increased view space for very little actual increase in dimensions of the device. In English, this means that I can still hold it single-handed, and wiggle my ring finger to advance the page, albeit with only my left hand since there are no dedicated ``page advance'' tactile buttons that allow ambidextrous use the way Eirian-IV had.

I think that's about it for now. It's just a short entry to show that I'm alive, and to mark the arrival of Eirian-V. Till the next update.

Slow Entry

Okay, we're in the end stretch for 2022. What better thing to do than to write something here now?

It's been one interesting ride for the past two weeks. My team had been a cosy small number of full-timers until our numbers suddenly swelled up by fifty percent due to the new staff finally coming in.

I'm excited at what we can achieve. I'm fearful of the mis-steps I might take being their leader.

Moving on, I've been reading The Science of Nutrition (4th Edition) by Janice L. Thompson, Melinda M. Manore, & Linda A. Vaughan, and a thought came to me.

Just what is the power rating of an ``average'' human?

Using the 2000 kcal per day requirement, that's about 8.368 MJ (1 kcal being equivalent to 4.184 kJ). A day has 86.4 ks, so the average power of a human (assuming no nett change in mass) is around... 96.9 W. Combining this terrible estimate against the around 20% of energy use of brain (as seen from the table in this Wikipedia entry), we're looking at a crude estimate of 19.4 W for thinking, on average.

What does it mean? No idea. Just a random thought.

I have been mulling over getting a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (32 GB) for the next iteration of the Eirian series of e-ink readers, mostly because Eirian-IV has been with me since January 2016, nearly seven years. But Eirian-IV is still generally in good operating form, battery-wise. I'm still running close to the 4 GB space limit, but it is not that big a problem for the most part.

Ah well.

Anyway, it's a short entry. I lost a lot of momentum while writing this---it is getting a bit late, and I really ought to go turn in earlier.

Till the next update then.

First Jab and a Dose of C++

I mentioned previously about having locked in my vaccination slot some time this week. It's the end of Saturday now, and is thus at the end of the week.

Needless to say, I have taken my first dose of Comirnaty, more better known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which is also known as ``tozinameran''. It's sort of like the mess that is N-acetyl-para-aminophenol, also known as ``Paracetamol'', also known as ``Acetaminophen'', also known as ``APAP'', also known as ``Panadol'', and also known as ``Tylenol''. Bloody hell of a mess. I'll just stick with ``Comirnaty'' from here-on, because that's the exact trade-name vaccine that I took.

The slot I had was an afternoon slot nearby, and it progressed smoothly. Registration was quick, information regarding potential side effects dispensed professionally in both a verbal manner and in a booklet published by ye olde MOH. The injection itself was straightforward, a quick intra-muscular jab to the left deltoid muscle, just like any other vaccination injections that I have taken (diphtheria, tetanus, Hepatitis B, just to name the ones taken in the recent decade). A short observation period of 30 min was practised, where I just sat on a chair in the specially cordoned off area reading Digital Filters (3rd Edition) by R. W. Hamming, a dead-tree book, chosen over Eirian-IV deliberately in case I needed to be swooped off to the hospital in an ambulance in case of anaphylaxis---it's easier to stow away a dead-tree book over an e-reader, with less chances of it actually being ``accidentally misplaced'' along the way.

Eh, there was some slight soreness in the muscles more distal than the deltoid muscle (but not the injection site itself), and my resting body temperature was a little raised compared to normal. However, the elevated body temperature was well within the variation I often experienced when the ambient temperature/humidity was worse than normal, so all in all, everything was still within acceptable levels of normal.

The vaccination centre's out-processing station gave an A5 paper print-out indicating the next appointment slot for the second and final dose of Comirnaty, which is a nice redundancy in addition to the SMS confirmation on initial booking and the appearance of both slots in the Health Hub web site. While I'm not usually a fan of being unwillingly co-opted into digital systems, I am quite pleased with this slightly more transparent recording of such vaccination information. It reduces the leverage that some power-hungry citizen-facing civil servants use to bully the less-able citizen just because of the information asymmetry.

Now, if the information that is stored in such governmental databases have a strong protection scheme to keep it only to government matters, and making any retrieval attempts by care-givers be one that is based on explicit consent of the patient per defined set of treatment transactions, that would be peachy. As it stands, I'm not sure if there are strong enough patient protection schemes of data in place (think the HIPAA of the United States), and frankly, am unwilling to do the legal legwork to discover what the current situation is.

Anyway, apart from the print-out, there were also some other freebies that were provided: a box of disposable face masks and more hand sanitisers. Eh, I appreciate the thought, but really, am leery about the hand sanitisers, not because of potential quality issues, but that for most of us, good handwashing habits with old-fashioned soap can work wonders for way less cost and damage to the skin. Antiseptic levels of hand sanitisation are probably much more useful if one is going to potentially work with open wounds, or in related contexts where one is likely to be mixing up with body fluids. Mechanical removal of whatever is mounted on the surface is usually easier and less harsh than trying to chemically kill stuff.

I mean, I should know. I have been battling bullshit staphylococcus aureus bacterial loads on my skin for a long long time. Antiseptics and antibiotics are really not easy to keep applying---plain old washing with a simple soap was good enough to reduce the infection (and associated inflammation) by a stupidly large degree for a fraction of the cost.

Digression aside, it's way past the 48-hour base line check point that I am worried about, and seeing that things are well, I think things are fine. I will not start on some crazy physical activities though, just to lower the exposure from the risk of some other low-likelihood side effects involving the heart. This is probably less important now as compared to the second dose of Comirnaty, since the body's reaction to that booster shot is supposed to be much quicker and more intense relative to the first.

And that's about it. I didn't feel like doing all the ``bragging on Facebook'' stuff that other people have done---just feels weird to be doing so, seeing that it really isn't some kind of achievement of my own merit, since all I did was literally sit around until it was my turn to go get vaccinated from the freely provided once by the government. Doesn't even help with persuading people to go get vaccinated if they haven't done so since I had been bombarded with such ``bragging'' posts for the past months.

Last I checked, still human though, so I thought it would be nice to make a note of it here on my blog, where I paradoxically quietly shout into the public void.

------

Speaking of the public void, I started on a mini-project today, working on a faster-than-Python solver for grid-based tiling problems in C++. The last time I used it for any period was back in 2002--2003 for course work, where the main standard for C++ was C++98 and pre-C++03. Times were different then... using namespace std; was the norm (it shouldn't!); the parse was broken when it tried to make sense of std::vector<std::vector<int>> t; (one had to write it as std::vector<std::vector<int> > t; instead); auto didn't exist (which made iterators a bloody pain in the ass to use); it was still mostly C with classes as opposed to being truly object-oriented; and the STL was clunky to use as it tried to preserve a certain C-ness despite being more object-oriented than C ever could be.

I'm not sure which C++ standard I'm working with now, probably just C++11 at the minimum. g++ --version tells me that it is version 10.2.0, which suggests that some parts of C++20 are implemented. Using some google-fu, I ran

 g++ -dM -E -x c++ /dev/null | grep -F __cplusplus

and it told me that it was #define __cplusplus 201402L. So I suppose we are on C++14 or so by default.

Eh, any version of C++ above C++03 is better.

``But MT, why are you suddenly going back to C++?'' It's not a case of ``suddenly'' going back to C++, it's more of ``better review C++ despite having been programming in Java professionally for the past decade''. One reason is because Java and C++ are the two largest object-oriented languages in existence (while I can still C even in my sleep, it is getting to be rather niched/dated in general for modern computing platforms), and the other is that ever since Sun Microsystems got bought over by Oracle, governance over the Java programming language and its tools have been all over the place, making its future very awkward.

The principles of Java's ``write once, run anywhere'' are excellent in this era of massive computational power and virtualisation, but its different enterprise programming frameworks and associated certification (now mostly only Oracle) combined with a movement towards web-technologies has made it run a strange race against the interpreted language gang led by Javascript/Typescript. C++ is still an important language for infrastructure, not necessarily enterprise, and is still a good language to learn when there is a need to get closer to the metal compared to the other languages like even my favourite Python. C++ also ties to cool hardware more readily than Java, like GPUs, and can thus be more interesting to work with.

So it is still important to keep my toes wet with working with C++ despite not really having done much with it professionally over the past decade.

Well, that's about it for now. Sorry for sneaking in some technical mumbo-jumbo. Till the next update.

Final IE11-Related Fixes

Okay, I mentioned about switching over to DOMParser to handle the conversion of the HTML file into a DOM tree that can be handled in IE11.

Well, that's done.

As always, after I fixed something, I discovered another problem. This time, it's about how the ch unit is garbled by IE11.

*sigh* IE11 is really getting on my nerves.

Anyway, I just set it up using the ideal case (in this case, in Waterfox) and compared the width of 1 ch against 1 em in their pixels as the multiplication factor---this turns out to be 11.0167:17, or 1 ch to 0.64804 em. So I just went ahead and updated all the major references that used the ``ch'' unit to ``em''.

And with that, I think I am done with fixing my website to not appear crappy for IE11.

The next step is to see if there is anything I can do to allow the experimental browser on Eirian-IV to work well.

Okay, that's it for now. Till the next update.

Fun of Emergence, and ``Fun'' of IE11

Deterministic

[Statistics] of or relating to a process or model in which the output is determined solely by the input and initial conditions, thereby always reutrning the same results (opposed to stochastic).

Stochastic

[Statistics] of or relating to a process involving a randomly determined sequence of observations each of which is considered as a sample of one element from a probability distribution.

Emergence

When an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emeerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.

Why these literal dictionary definitions?

Because I think I am seeing why people do the things they do, and like the things they like, and more importantly, dislike the things they do not like. It is not a philosophical triumph by any regard, but a personal epiphany.

Generally, we think that determinism is a great thing---know the initial conditions, know the rules, and the outcome is perfectly predictable. That's the guiding philosophy for early natural philosophy, which explains the formulation of the so-called classical laws [of Physics/Chemistry] and the development of axiomatic Mathematics.

Then we realise that not everything is deterministic in nature, but there exists some good statistical bulk behaviour that can be characterised by stochastic processes, where the outcome of any individual member is not known, but the overall ``average'' behaviour of the system can be characterised by some probability distribution and set of rules. This, of course, leads to the theories of temperature, deeper quantum-related explanations of particle/wave behaviour, probability/statistics, and of course, the fabled statistical machine learning/data mining.

Despite the power that stochastic reasoning has, there is still the problem of the time horizon, where the predictive power of the stochastic reasoning gets increasingly unreliable the longer the time horizon we look at. That is because of emergence, or how the interactions of the parts that comprise the system introduce an exponential increase in the state space to the point that we currently do not have any good language to describe them. This is why the less bio-chemistry forms of biology, psychology, sociology, and even economics remain mostly intractable. A possible issue is that our language is very sequence heavy while such emergent-behaviour centric systems necessitate a certain level of parallelism and concurrent interaction that we have no way of characterising with our current reasoning machinery.

I hypothesise that if we become good at understanding emergence, then we are one step closer to claiming powers that only the gods themselves are said to wield. But I doubt that emergence is the final frontier for knowledge---it is likely that there is some even larger and more complex mechanism that is outside of our ken. I think that... supremum method is likely to be the minimal level of a technical description of God that one can muster, if one truly dares to step that far.

But let's bring everything back to the current reality and put things into perspective.

For most people, whether they are willing to admit it out loud or not, a life that is couched in determinism is boring. There is no fun in doing something whose outcome is already known before one has done it. This explains a lot of the push of automating so-called low value menial work (highly repetitive and simple actions in a controlled environment), and the slow movement towards automating the soon-to-be-called low value forms of intellectual work (highly repetitive and simple actions in a controlled environment). This is also why jobs that are effectively determinism in nature are paid lowly---there is little to no un-understandable risks involved.

Life that is in a stochastic setting is a bit more exciting than determinism, but can be boring for those who can calculate. Quality control processes come to mind, as do gambling in the form of a lottery, or any other games of chance at the casino. To those who don't know the underlying stochastic process (and bounding distributions) well, stochastic processes are always exciting, and their ignorance often causes them to be potentially taken advantage of by someone who has the appropriate knowledge and wherewithal to exploit it. So insurance companies, armed with reams of actuarial data, as well as casinos, armed with complete analysis of the expected values from the games of chance they offer, have a field day plying their trade to the ignorant.

Life in emergence, that's the true and real life. There are many rules that guide our behaviour in society (for different subsets of society), but there are even more interactions and multi-level relationships among the people. As a result, nothing is truly predictable with high confidence as the time horizon increases. War is a brutal example---the different sides in a conflict have their material, their manpower, their training. Often there is some strategic and tactical analysis to estimate the chances of success for a particular war plan. But nothing is really predictable in the deterministic nor the stochastic way, and the only way to find out if one is successful is to actually fight the war.

A less gruesome version of that is that of team sports. I had been wondering for many years why people were so into team sports like football, rugby, American football, baseball and the like. Or why someone would want to grow potted plants, or rear fish in an aquarium. None of these things seem to be ``useful''.

And then I examined myself in terms of watching speedruns. Why do I enjoy watching speedrun videos? Or why do I find those recent YouTube videos that I was talking about over my many posts interesting?

The answer surprised me. Because in all these cases, we are drawn to emergence. Yes, there are fixed rules (game rules for sports, the programming and hardware for the video game being speedrun, laws of Physics for the building videos, social rules for those that involve interaction). But despite these fixed rules, none of the fun stuff that occurs could have been predicted, and that's what make things fun. Because good surprises are fun, and the definition of a surprise is something that was unexpected (good just means that there isn't any danger real or perceived).

In short, the me who likes watching speedrun videos and/or Let's Play/live-stream videos is no different from the football fanatic. We are all junkies for the unexpected that happens from emergence---our only difference is the choice of the system that we want to observe.

It's the same for the potted plant grower and aquarium afficionado as well---they are managing some systems and derive part of their fun from observing emergence, looking for surprises that pique their interest.

I think it's also the same reason why people go on hikes, or develop wanderlust. It's the idea of seeing something unexpected [in a safe way] that provides a type of recreation which makes life less scary than the steady march to death.

Actually, it's also the same reason why people are drawn to religion. The scripture and doctrine are fixed rules, but their application and applicability to one's life is the identification of which rules needed to be applied for a specific [personal] observation of an emergent behaviour.

I never thought that emergence could be a contender for a super-set interpretation over stochastic, my previous favourite paradigm of viewing the world. I think I might want to ponder on this more.

------

In other news, I rearranged my room a little today. One problem I was facing was that I wasn't playing any instrument as often as I should, of which part of the reason was the severe blocking of access to my sheet music due to the original arrangement. In my previous arrangement, the music stands needed to have the two tenor saxophones and a few other instrument stands moved out of the way first before accessing the stands. That was non-trivial because I had to move the obstructions somewhere to retrieve said stands, and then move them out of the way again to have place to play whatever instruments I wanted.

All that contributed to inertia.

So I switched things around, arranging my instrument cases that don't sit on my 笛子 shelf so that they line the space in an `L' configuration, and have the main music stand sit immediately behind me, where I used to squirrel away one soprano saxophone, one alto saxophone, and one bass flute. The rest of the instrument stands now sit in front of the instrument cases that are in the `L' configuration. I think this reduces the inertia, and it is a good thing because I want to start doing more hard stuff for 笛子 and flute again soon.

After doing more stupid tweaks at stupid o'clock, I finally had a chance to test out the updated fonts (and their TrueType fallbacks) on Eirian-IV. It crashed the experimental browser. After some very lazy investigation, it turns out that the experimental browser did download the TrueType fallback fonts, but had trouble rendering the page using them, possibly due to the memory limitations of the device and/or operating system.

On a whim, I tried it on IE11, and promptly regretted it. The bloody thing does not handle any of the special whitespace characters that I use to adjust the formatting---everything gets turned into some oversized quad-space monstrosity. Oh, thank goodness for the TrueType fallback fonts---IE11 does not understand WOFF2. So viewing this blog in IE11 will use the dreaded `Il1|' nonsense that Arial provides (it's not worth it to embed the Base64 encoded version of the TrueType fonts due to the size and the number of browsers that actually need it).

Well, that's IE11 for you. 🤦‍♂️

I fixed the prettyprinter to not use such characters if it detects that it is running in IE11, and that's about it. There are also problems with the way the fuzzified update times are failing on IE11 on the time-out based auto-update, but I'm less concerned about it because even without the auto-update, the demonstrated contents on the first load is still technically correct.

The more astute should suddenly ask this question: ``Why the heck are you dealing with IE11? Isn't it supposed to go the way of the dodo thanks to the existence of Edge?''

If one reads the IE11 Wikipedia article, one should realise that there doesn't seem to be an end-date for IE11's support in Windows 10. Also, I made the mistake of testing my personal domain on IE11, and since it looked much fuglier than I could stand, I just felt this compulsion to fix it.

Oh, and IE11 doesn't handle the reversed ordered lists at all, so it's like I went back to the stone ages, to the time before I updated the entire site to use HTML5.

As for the reading, I've completed page 743/1321 for Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, and Animorphs Series: The Capture.

I think I'm going to head out to my favourite bar to do more reading, beer, and burgers tomorrow.

Till the next update.

(And this time, for God's sake, I should sleep waaaaaaaaaaay before stupid o'clock. Having only about 4 hours of sleep on a sabbatical is downright stupid, not to mention a great way of setting myself up for falling sick in a time period where any form of fever-related illness is looked at with great suspicion of being a case of the COVID-19.)

Hololive: Modern Day Paper Doll Play

Sunday night, some hours before the fabled stupid o'clock. I really hope that I do not end up at stupid o'clock still being awake---it really is a bad habit to develop, all things considered.

I didn't go out of the apartment today, not even to get junk food. There has been a steady non-zero amount of so-called ``community transmission'' cases of COVID-19 out in SIN city, and already the government has increased restrictions. In fact, the more astute readers of a previous entry of mine would find out that among the list of new restrictions published includes the suspension of congressional singing. I'm highlighting these specifically to point out that the government has assessed the situation to be of a sufficiently credible threat before they would implement such restrictions (especially after only recently having further relaxing them), and thus it would be a little foolish to not take a more conservative approach.

So okay, I stayed at home. I am probably going to stay at home also tomorrow, unless the wanderlust kicks in, at which point it's time to hit some random [small-ish] nature park again. That walk around Windsor Nature Park? I really enjoyed that.

I spent much of my time reading and watching a different type of YouTube video. Let's first talk about the reading. I reached page 705/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. The going is tough, since each chapter is basically like an academic paper, similar to the structure of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) that I am also working through, or even The Dinosauria (2nd Edition) edited by David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson, & Halszka Osmólska that I had finished reading last year. But I'll get there in the end.

As for the type of YouTube video, I learnt about Hololive Production, or more specifically, the Hololive English (HoloEN) crew. VLogging aside, the main gimmick of the Hololive set up is the use of digital avatars that are rigged to essentially be marionettes that are voiced and puppeted by the talent who exist in a type of kayfabe as the avatar/character does things on stream that are vlog-friendly. The HoloEN team recently got new outfits for their characters, and they are cute.

But that aside, as I was watching some of their new outfit reveal videos (specifically for Gawr Gura, Amelia Watson, and Ninomae Ina'nis), I cannot help but associate the whole Hololive phenomenon with playing of paper dolls from the days of old. With the technology currently deployed for the HoloEN team, the association is more valid than one might think, since the character and their clothes/accessories are still 2D in nature, despite the 2.5D trickery that comes from clever rigging of the character art model. Now I don't mean to highlight this to cast shade on what is done here but rather to express admiration that what is old is now made new again because of the accessibility of technology.

Paper dolls of old could only do very limited articulation if at all, and all the ``conversations'' that one could have with it are fully in the domain of the player's imagination, not to mention the severely limited ``audience'' (usually it's the poor mum who ends up listening in on the tea party---most dads just disappear from the scene, but there are some who don't mind experiencing a different slice of childhood that they might not have experienced while they were still children). Now, the modern paper dolls have better articulation while retaining the aesthetics of the cute art style, changing clothing and accessories are less cumbersome than the old paper dolls, and more importantly, with modern audio-visual recording, streaming, and communication technologies, can have what is effectively an imagination driven play shared with the rest of the world among the like-minded, generating a collective fan-base over the same kayfabe globally.

So wondrous.

What is old truly is remade anew!

------

In other more technical news, I took the opportunity to update all the fonts that I was using on my personal domain, including the adding of some fall-back font formats that I would have omitted before due to file sizes (and general stinginess in storing those files that are not used 99% of the time). The motivation for that is the ``experimental'' browser's behaviour for my Eirian-IV. It wasn't doing well with the fonts that didn't exist in the system, and I was wondering if it was because the WOFF2 font format was too new for it to handle.

I still haven't tested it on that browser though. Maybe it will work, probably it won't. It's not that big a deal though, since I don't really use that experimental browser much, if at all.

It was just an excuse to tinker. That's as sufficient a statement as it gets.

Anyway, that's about it for today. Till the next update.

Wafu Beef Wazen

Today was a sort of reading day, though it did involve me going out to a different place to do my reading as opposed to doing it at home.

I deliberately eschewed lunch just so that I could have the Wafu Beef Wazen at Ichiban Sushi, or more specifically, the branch that was at Hougang Mall. It's a cosy place, and thanks to the time I chose to reach there (at around three o'clock), there was no line to speak of. I like the Wafu Beef Wazen set meal there---the beef atop the cheesy tofu on a hot wok with tempura and other goodies is just a delightful mix of Japanese-styled cooking.

Usually when I get to Ichiban Sushi at Hougang Mall [during this sabbatical], I would just pull up Eirian-IV and do some reading, usually one of the two periodicals that I often read (The Economist or 2600: The Hacker Quarterly). Naturally, today was no exception.

After the meal and just hanging around reading the periodical of choice for the day (it was last Saturday's issue of The Economist), I just did some window shopping.

Actually, that last bit is not completely correct. I had a few things that I wanted to get, namely:

1. Lubricating eye drops for the next month;
2. Beard trimmer for shaping moustache.

I managed to get them without much effort. The beard trimmer I got was the ER2405 by Panasonic. I liked the design because it was cordless, and had a rather extensive guard that doubled as the comb. Compared to the M90 by Braun that I own, that guard is a plus.

The M90 that I have is mostly for stashing away in the office for those weird last minute ``big meetings'' situation that may require a quick touch up on the shave. It's a good product, but it is not that great a daily driver when I want to use the beard trimmer to tweak my moustache.

And yes, I am intending to grow my moustache back. I know I reported in a previous post that I had taken it away as an experiment in tackling the skin dryness. Part of the other reason was the difficulty in keeping it relatively tame since I had to rely on eyeballing with a pair of short scissors, as compared to using the beard trimmer, or as my barber calls it, ``machining the moustache''.

Now that I have upgraded gear (and a nice tub of non-greasy moisturiser), it's time to try it out again.

The only other interesting thing that I wanted to add was a conversation that I overheard while at one of the shops in Hougang Mall.

FEMALE EMPLOYEE

So she wanted to buy that to surprise her boyfriend, and I know how she feels about it.

MALE EMPLOYEE

How would you know how she feels about it, you don't even have a boyfriend!

FEMALE EMPLOYEE

Hey! I don't have a boyfriend now, but I had boyfriends in the past, okay? So I know how she feels.

MALE EMPLOYEE

Uh huh, if you say so... I mean, it's not like I can verify it, right?

I think that for tomorrow I would just spend time enjoying Cyberpunk 2077, sojourning in Night City.

On one final note, the reason why the game is called the way it is comes from source material of Cyberpunk the pen-and-paper role playing game. That was part of the reason why the hype was so real (the other was all the tentalising trailers and promises that were made but not necessarily kept [yet]).

That's all I have for today. Till the next update then.

``Kitty''

No visit to Night City today---it is mostly a reading sort of day.

I finally finished OpenStax College: Organisational Behaviour, and have started on Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Tools of Titans weighs in at 872 pages, but the going seems to be quite fast---I think I will actually leverage on my large reading screen at home to make some progress on Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) and leave Tools of Titans to be handled on Eirian-IV.

I think I will head out tomorrow for a change of scenery to do some reading on Eirian-IV instead of sitting at home.

------

I am not a follower of The Masked Singer (Wikipedia link in case the project site dies years from now), but Season 3 had caught my eye. It was a (or should it be ``the''?) season that was also broadcast in Singapore as it was unfolding. What caught my eye was ``Kitty''. She had bounce in the trailers, her costume looked so lush and fabulous, and I was intrigued.

Mind you, I never followed the show at all.

It was near the start of this year that I went back to find out more about who ``Kitty'' was. I found a couple of video compilations of all her singing at the show, and oh my, how pleasantly surprised I was at it all! Her voice is amazing! The costume was, of course, captivating, but her pantomiming skills were also on par to bring the mask/costume to live as well.



And yes, I learnt that she was Jackie Evancho. This line in her post-reveal video is the most touching to me.



I agree with her, it's not stupid... I think sometimes we just need to have the chance to shed away the baggages/identities of the past so that whoever/whatever it is within us can be looked at independently of any prior contexts/biases.

That is perhaps what I am seeking out of my sabbatical.

Till the next update.

Eileen-II and Other Stories

To say that the past week-and-a-half is a roller coaster is a bit of a cliché, but it is an unfortunate consequence of my lack of imagination in the use of the English language. Let's see what I can say here today.

I've bought a new 22-inch 16:9 monitor from Dell (P2219H) that can swivel, and is primarily set up to be vertical in nature. No name for this device, though it can technically be called ``Eirian-V'' since its role is similar to the Eirian series of devices---but I'm not going to. The problem I was facing was the reading of certain PDF forms of e-books that had the two-column layout. On a normal screen, no matter what resolution and dimension, if we keep it in the usual landscape format, each column ends up taking up at most one quarter of the screen by width. It is basically unreadable. What I needed was something that had more physical dimension in the height department. I could get a tablet like Eirian-III, but I didn't want to have to lug it around with my hands just to read the document---I have grown used to the smaller form factor. Eirian-IV has superior pitch density, but even then, it can be a challenge to read really tiny text that was supposed to be ``normal sized'' in a more traditional A4/letter sized setting. And so, the monitor was obtained.

Edythe-III is still hale and hearty, but her 3-year warranty is almost up. And if the behaviour of Edythe-II was of any indication, it was clear that I needed to get a replacement soonish. At the same time, Elysie-II was starting to become a little... unstable, partly because of age, partly because of hardware (old school spindle HDD), partly because of software (Windows 7), and partly because of circumstance (it was hard/impossible to head out to the venerable Sim Lim Square to source for parts, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and stores closing left and right). So I decided to spend a little more than what I had originally saved for and get a new iteration of Eileen, now known as Eileen-II.

So, what's Eileen-II?

She's an Alienware m15 R3, with an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB DDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 15.6" (1920×1080) with a refresh rate of 144Hz, and her storage is a 1TB SSD.

Her specs are on par with Elysie-II in many ways, except for a slightly better parallelisation capability with 50% more cores and a faster secondary storage, and a much more portable form factor (laptop vs desktop). She's pretty portable for a stronk person like me, but I think I may actually need to use the provided carrier bag instead of whatever I had---she is a little larger than the 13" laptops that I have.

For a portable machine running the specs like the beast that is Elysie-II, Eileen-II runs surprisingly cool. Let's hope this continues.

------

On more different matters, it had been quite trying for the past week-and-a-half. Work had some extra certification thing that needed to be done to address a tender, and I was tasked to get it with a colleague. The whole process was a little harrowing, partly because the item that we were getting certification on wasn't exactly directly aligned with my interests/area of work/domain of expertise per se, and partly because of the super shortened duration we had to actually prepare for it, even though we managed the expectations of that to have two attempts instead of the one that was originally envisioned. Then there was the need to book a time slot to actually take the certification exam---it had to be online proctored, and the only time slot that fit the original planned schedule was at six in the morning (or any time between three and six in the morning in roughly fifteen-minute intervals). Thankfully it is now over; well it had been over since the Wednesday just passed. I passed by the grace of God---the score I had was exactly the one needed to pass, no more and no less. Just to be clear, this was one of those exams that the passing grade was a ``high'' percentage that was not fifty percent.

The Friday before, I had a near breakdown. I don't know why---suddenly I felt completely useless for some reason. I felt as though I would just fade away if I didn't pay attention to myself. I think I was just overwhelmed with the stress of not willfully failing that certification exam, and the combined stresses of a general lack of coping mechanisms (no Chinese Orchestra rehearsals, no meet ups with friends, no more confidante in general) with additional social stresses (what is the new norm for me now that I am a believer, am without a wife-to-be-candidate, basically having my life rewritten to the past) meant that I just sort of lost sense of where I was. I mean, yes, I'm a believer now, I know God is with me because I've chosen to walk with Him in my life, but I'm still a neophyte in the ways of Christ, and more importantly, I'm still a mortal.

Given all that I felt, I did something pretty uncharacteristic; I posted a plea for reassurance on my ``wall'' in Facebook.

I am really heartened by the responses that came in. Friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances started coming out of the wood work to send me private messages, asking my well-being, and giving me really positive encouragement that I had indeed impacted their lives in a positive way during the times when we were walking closer together than now.

I teared up. I tear up still. I wasn't expecting all that love and concern to come in like that. Don't ask me why---I don't know. I've never really had these kinds of feelings before.

It definitely helped ground me back into reality. That I was, and am here.

------

On yet another note, I've also bought some Oval-8 finger splits by 3-point products. They are for my two pinky fingers---they have a mild form of swan neck deformity. They only show up when I need to be playing the dizi or when I'm going for the pinky-notes of the right hand (instrument C♯, C, B), in which case it is bad. Most of the time I don't have to actually ``stretch'' my fingers, but under those circumstances highlighted, I have to, and it is a problem. The Oval-8 finger splits block the middle joint from bending backwards, which allows me to safely stretch out the pinky without jamming the joint up. It is super useful. I first learnt of them at the Flute Forum on Facebook, and bought mine from Fu Kang, a Singapore company.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update I suppose.

May-Jan

It is now May.

I wanted to write something before, but could never convince myself that there was something substantial enough to warrant the effort needed to write a post like this one.

Long time readers might have realised that I hadn't written the customary rant that occurs whenever the annual ``celebration'' of my birth rolls around. It isn't so much as me deliberately forgetting to write anything, but that I was actually waiting for something to happen before I wrote anything. The said thing happened a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't bring myself to write anything until now.

So, as per normal, I used the birthday celebration as an excuse to buy myself some cool stuff. One of them is a brand-new Kindle Voyage reader with the origami cover, nicknamed ``Eirian-IV''. She's a compact replacement of Eirian-II, whom was actually replaced with Eirian-III, my Nexus 10 tablet. The thing is, I've always liked to do my heaviest text-reading over e-ink, but as noted before, Eirian-II was fast fading away. I had used Eirian-III for a while, but the brightness that comes from staring at an LCD display was starting to annoy me. What convinced me to get the Kindle Voyage was the stupendous resolution. At 300ppi, it rivals that of the Nexus 10 (also around 300ppi), is more than 4× better than the Kindle DX (~150ppi---we're looking at area here), and has an amazing battery life. That high resolution made the 6-inch form factor tolerable, and so I got one. Eirian-IV is thus procured and is now part of my daily carry.

I got Eirian-IV a couple of months or so before my actual birthday, but didn't really write anything about her till now.

The main thing why it took me so long to write this was my Grenaditte bass flute, or Mio. An order for Mio was placed a while back, but due to a variety of reasons (some staff changes, Chinese New Year, probable company restructuring etc) it took GUO nearly 3 months before they delivered it to the shop. And when Mio finally arrived, I was right in the middle of my annual trip to the US to meet up and hang out with friends, as well as to go walk around to find geocaches.

It is of no secret that I am starting to explore the lower extremes of sound generation. I have been quite decent with messing around with the really high-pitched stuff (see also my picc, the new Garklein recorder that I got during my US trip, which superceded the sopranino recorder that I had since my days at UIUC), failing only with the highest of the high notes, i.e. everything from A7 and higher. But there is only that much one can go with the high pitched notes---they tend to get a little too annoying on the ears (anything at around 1kHz does that, and when it gets to 4kHz it gets stupid worse---try listening to the screams of a toddler for an idea on how annoying it gets). It may be super impressive and fun, but as I mentioned, it gets annoying. Now the lower extreme, that's not as well explored as that of the middle and high range. Partly because of the skill and resources required. Small instruments need some level of skill to construct, and a relatively iron will to actually play it. but larger instruments require quite a bit of actual material to build, and a fair bit of physiological conditioning to even make a sound out of it, let alone play it well. They also tend to sound way more pleasing to the ear, and in the grand scale (hur hur) of things, more octaves of them for playing with than the high stuff (around 5 octaves of low notes versus the commonly used 3 for the high ones).

So yes, a bass flute. The cheapest metal bass flute costs nearly USD10k, and weigh practically a ton (more like 2kg or so). Mio is made of Grenaditte, the same material as my picc, and weighs less, nearer 1.5kg. She also costs around half the price of the cheapest metal bass flute, while still sounding pretty solid for the price point. In short, a real steal. Of course she can't beat the well-crafted professional silver bass flute, but she is definitely a cost effective way to explore the beginning of the lower reaches of the flute family. In comparison, the standard ``bass'' dizi is only at the range of an alto flute, not counting the scary weird 巨笛 (or ``giant dizi'') that spans nearly 3m in length.
Waiting for Mio was the reason why I didn't write this post any earlier.

The more astute among you will know why my Grenaditte bass flute is called Mio. I shall end on this note for now. Till the next update.