Cache ≠ Can Throw Away Safely

As tempting as it is to remove /var/cache/ or to shift it to tmpfs, never do it because ``cache'' doesn't equate to ``can throw away safely''.

Case in point: hal balks when it cannot find /var/cache/hald/, and apt cries when it cannot find /var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/, and dpkg might scream when it misses /var/cache/debconf/. All these lead to a non-working machine.

Someone

Man, this song had been stuck in my head for years, and I finally found what it was:

A Mild Explanation

Updates here are getting far and few, and by no means am I ever intending to ditch this blog. But I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I had updates to put up here these days---that's hardly true and for good reason. The sad thing about it all is that the work life is often not as fantastic nor exciting as that of the college life. While many might claim that college life is more hectic than the real world, in my situation, I find the exact opposite to be more correct. I believe that on many levels, I have significantly more stress from work than when I was studying, not because of my inability to deal with the new things, but that I actually do have a heavy work load.

I'm not really complaining much about work (I like working), but it is really hard to find humorous or interesting snippets of information from the workplace to share and think about as compared to the general liberal attitudes that are present within the university. Don't get me wrong---there're lots of things that are happening in and out of the workplace, but issues like non-disclosure agreements and general sense of tactical self-preservation makes any form of discourse involving these material a potential minefield of pain.

Actually, the truth is that I spend more time entering things into my diary than here. Technically, it is just a journal, since I do not enter daily entries in it, but calling it a `journal' sounds a little more serious than what it really is, so I've stuck with calling it a `diary' for simplicity's sake. Why a diary one might ask when I have more than one blog to write things in. The word here is privacy. With a written book, I can control its physical presence (or at least, have a stronger suspension of disbelief that control is impossible), and with that assurance that there is only one such copy around where I am the sole custodian, I can write more in it, putting in as much detail as I care to write, without having to worry if I end up making a faux pas by saying some things that might be a little taboo of the the Internet.

So with all that writing of diaries, which I must reiterate is a most enjoyable activity to do with a good writing instrument, I tend to have fewer things to gripe about in public over here.

Day of the Endless Run

Man... each time a week passes in real life, I feel as though I've aged by ten weeks. So much to do, and so little time to do them all---sometimes I wonder how on earth do I pull it off.

I've been sick on and off for the last four weeks. Yep, that's right, I've been having a cold/flu combination for almost a month. Never really went to see a doctor, because I wasn't unwell enough to warrant a visit to them to collect a day's medical leave; I'm already short on time and having days lost to medical leave will be among the last things on my mind.

Two days ago it was the worst---thick phlegm clogging up my nose completely, and the interior structures of my nose were so swollen they were also actively blocking my passage way completely. But some paracetamol and pseudophredine later, the swelling has subsided to acceptable levels, acceptable in the sense that I can breathe decently through them.

Man... I better catch up on that sleep this Sunday, otherwise it'll be the beginning of week five of being sick.

Architecture Updates

If you manage to find me here, that's great! Because I've modified the links to my blogs.

The_Laptop Writes... and The_Laptop Wrote... now point different places than the past instead. Use ``Save Links'' or whatever tool your browser has to update your bookmarks/feeds.

The old link has a blog that is parked there doing absolutely nothing. I might make it into a general dev blog eventually, or I can just leave it in its current mystifying state of requiring a password to enter.

Why the sudden change, you might wonder? I'm actually trying to right things in a sense as part of my whole scheme of renewal and rebranding. The domain names (or in this case, subdomain names) should actually reflect what they are talking about and not the chronological ordering in which they were created. It is not as though I have a high enough readership volume that the renaming would bring all sorts of hell, so I might as well right things when I can.

If for some reason you want to link to my blog, use this link instead. That way, you'll always get redirected to wherever my blog is currently being hosted, should I choose to move away from Blogger and stuff.

Ronin 2

Time to be Ronin once more. The path ahead is strange and rocky, and the infectious mirth of the successful is suffocating enough that it sickens me.

Everyone has moved on, while I remain. No point thinking about the past---crush the path behind me with stones and boulders and look only forwards.

I've done it once, I can do it again. And if situation demands it, I will not hesitate to do it yet another time.

The world is a massive machination, and all of us are just tiny gears that contribute only a little to the overall scheme of things. What's one less gear among a small congregation of gears?

Perhaps more drastic action is required than what I have done. Was it not one of the 45 that said to get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful? Complete justification---check.

Activate Operation Firestorm Bridge.

Why So Serious?

The transition from college student life into a formal adult working life can be rather disorienting at times, as I soon found out. The most important difference between student life and adult life is the transformation of the meaning of goals.

During the student setting, the goals that needed to be met are easily quantified and even more easily discovered---grades and assignment deadlines (with grading rubrics) are the most useful in determining what needs to be done by when to what degree. A quick look at the working life demonstrates that to a large degree, these concepts of quantifiable goals are no longer as straightforward, since much of the outcome is not just from one's efforts but also from the situation and environment that binds one. For a while, I had been rather disoriented within the system, even reaching levels of mood that one might even term to be depressive, but as time goes on, I start to understand one fundamental fact.

Why so serious?

Lest anyone misconstrues that as a call for an overall disinterested outlook towards work, let me clarify more. Yes, we need committed people to work, we need people to do more work, increase productivity and the like. But we don't need workaholics who sacrifice everything to get the job done. At first, this sounds counter-intuitive: why would anyone claim that it is more productive not to work as hard as possible? But reflect a little on the matter: a person is more than just his/her working life. A person is the sum total of a lot of parts that mayn't overlap---the work life, the personal life, the leisure life, the love life. All these aspects of life combine to make a person who he/she is.

Working too much is detrimental to many of the other aspects of life, which in turn can negate the productivity of a person. We want people who are happy to work, since their happiness allows them to work with more enthusiasm and to have an overall positive benefit, at the supposed expense that their ``peak'' effectiveness is significantly lower than the workaholic. If work done is the function of time spent and effort expended, then one will note that a person who works consistently over time is a much more productive person than one who has one burst of productivity and then slumps down from exhaustion, or even in the worse case where the burst of productivity is sustained over a few days only to crash down when the said person falls ill from fatigue.

Humans are creatures of habit, and they are also creatures of equilibria. Too much of anything is not good for the average person, and in the realm of work and play, that is true also. It is with this philosophy that I am looking at things these days. Yes, I'm a self-proclaimed workaholic, but I think it is time for me to work out a balance so that I can remain as productive as possible, instead of being that shiny star that has one fell-swoop brilliance only to whimper away quietly as time goes on.

Non-Greedy Searching in Vim

So Regexes are very powerful. Until you want a non-greedy matching in Vim, then you'll go ``what?''.

Here's the incantation: \{-}. That's it. That will non-greedily match whatever preceded it.

Juicy Details

A friend asked me over IM for juicy details (without much qualification), to which I replied with the following.

Her succulent flesh glistens under the pale moonlight like the fresh skin of a ripening peach, her soft vellus hair enhancing the longing that I felt deep within my fiery loins. With pure unbridled enthusiasm, I held her in a fierce embrace, smelling the sweet scent within her brown shoulder lengthed hair, caressing her back from shoulder blades down to the small, where her luscious curves evoked more than just a faint interest. She whispered ever so softly within my ear, `I want you', a breathy whisper that titillated all my senses to the extreme. My tumescence was hard to conceal under all these sensual feelings and I held her even closer, squeezing her inwards as I grinded gently on her mons. She seemed to realise what was happening and gently purred into my ear, sending a bolt of electrifying pleasure down my spine.

Now I know that when I'm out of a job, I can probably write smutty romance novels for a living, or not.

Read the snippet above and decide. Oh, if it is not obvious enough, it's fiction.

Blank Mind

I'm starting to find my writing dull, tasteless and generally of a quality that baffles even the most mediocre writers. I don't seem to have new content to write here, and almost every post is some repost of some repost. Or maybe I'm wrong.

These days, my mind is drawing a blank on many things---it feels like a leaky sponge, dripping things all over the place.

V hfrq gb yvxr zl jbex. Abj, V'z univat frpbaq gubhtugf fbzr gvzrf.

Fbzrgvzrf V jbaqre jung'f gur zrnavat oruvaq qbvat gur guvatf V qb, ohg V arire trg n tbbq pbapyhfvba bs nal fbeg.

V guvax V'z oheag bhg.

Snowball

First, a confession. If one were to be following what I have been writing here, there might be an impression that I am one bitter and sorry person who wallows in the deepest of self pity. Well, actually, that's sort of far from the truth---I'm not really a bitter and sorry person who wallows in self pity. Like many things in life, all is not as it seems. This blog is really designed for rants and other social observations that I care to share with the world (where you may be from), so naturally there is a certain element of self-selection in what gets to be displayed and demonstrated here. Obviously then, given my subject matter, things will appear to be rather cynical and pessimistic, more so that who I am in real life. So the confession here is that I am not as cynical and bitter as what the contents here might lead on.

Second, a revelation. While I'm not that cynical nor that bitter, I am still rather aloof about the world as a whole. The strangeness of this statement ought to strike the reader by now, particularly if said reader is one who knows me from real life before stumbling upon this little space of mine that I have carved out of the Internet. I see the world as it is---material, harsh, with everyone just a small part of a larger ecosystem. But by no means am I unwilling to engage with people---that's where the strangeness comes in. Somehow along the way I find that making acquaintances among some groups of people are very easy, while of course there is still that sizable group that I can offend in the just the same amount of ease. But the main point is that I probably have some form of an engaging personality that this blog might not demonstrate, so kindly temper expectations a little.

Thirdly, a premonition. The future is always uncertain---no one truly knows what is going to happen in the near future, let alone those that are still distant from us. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying through their teeth or are just plain lucky in guessing. With that in mind, the impermanence of things will become a large issue for my generation in time to come. Now, more than ever, we find that the material world and the abstract world are colliding in ways that were unforeseen by the elder generation, and we also find that the attitudes towards entities of this generation have laragely changed from the past. Impermanence and the illusion of privacy are going to be the norm in time to come if they haven't been so now, and we will find that whatever memories that we have about anything will undergo revision over time on a larger scale, making the concepts of truth and falsehood under history a harder case to determine. The data explosion has, on the one hand, made some people less ignorant, yet on the other hand its deluge buries the simple minds of the vast majority. Knowledge is power, but a little knowledge is the most dangerous thing of all. The sad thing is that many in my generation do not possess the in-depth knowledge necessary for sound decision making---they are sated from the vast breadth of little knowledge that they scrimp from the multitude of sources whose veracity are not easily determined. We live in dangerous times indeed.

Lastly, an emancipation. There is hope yet for us all. Now, more than ever, we must engage intelligently with the decision process, for it is only through active engagement that we can get our views, perspectives and lines of thought heard. But to engage is not to enter with a destructive mindset---the engagement is an action of showing awareness and proof that we as a generation are maturing to become the worthy successors of the world. No longer can we hide behind the comforts of our homes to await the fates that others have prescribed for us---we need to take charge of our own future. The biggest enemy of this century is not the extremists nor the terrorists---it is the blatant lack of education, the inability to dissect and synthesize as much of the facts of the issue as possible, the inability for us to make our own decisions and to stand by them as long as we have a justifiable cause in the context of a greater good, or at the very least, in a context where it is publicly defensible. Our only salvation from a world towards doom is awareness that it is occurring, and through that awareness, the public-spiritedness that governs the societies will emerge through the courage of its citizens to voice out their beliefs and to support what is right, and not what is rich.

So, is this a call for revolt? No. It is a call for the technologically savvy to realise that the virtual world that they live in is only present because the material world permits it. Lose one's footing in the real world, one will lose his/her footing in the virtual one as well. Do what is right---do what needs to be done.

On Extra-Martial Infidelities

Damn it! I've deleted quite a few rants that I should have completed, but for one reason or another, I could not complete them before I completely lost the thought process that generated that rant. Must be something to do with how life is always moving forward and things like that.

Anyway, I think that I need to arrest this loss of words immediately. By deleting all those half completed rants and writing somethin about them I suppose.

The world today is much stranger than what I could remember. On and off, it seems that infidelity is the ``in'' thing, from Tiger Woods down to local celebrity film maker Jack Neo. I can't understand why they fall to temptations like that---it just doesn't seem right to me that they can make a conscious choice like that. Yes, I chose the phrase ``conscious choice''. It is hard to get involved in a relationship if there is at least one party who is not willing to be in the relationship in the first place. And by hard, I really mean impossible. Think about it this way, sure, there might be one who is taking the active step in trying to cajole the other to get involved in the relationship, but if the other party remains disinterested and more importantly, uninterested, then no amount of cajoling is going to be of any help (taken partially from real world observations and erm personal experience).

So a question remains. Why do people get involved in such infidelities in the first place? Without falling into the cheap argument of how the social mores are degrading over time, I offer a simpler explanation: the need for a thrill, the need for something different yet more of the same. In many cases, I would suspect that the parties involved just wanted more thrill in their relationships, no different from that initial magic they felt in their original marriage (otherwise why would they even marry their spouse in the first place?). But this highlights a more pressing issue: why is it that they need to rely on extra-marital affairs to provide that kick that their original marriages are not providing?

This brings me to my main thesis: the fundamental of any human relationship is good and honest communication. The success and failure of any relationship is dependent on all the parties who are involved---often it is hardly the case that a sole person is ``in the wrong''; there are contributory factors from all the parties who are involved. Good and honest communication is hard to come by, especially by people who are considerably less blunt, but when properly administered, I think that it has a much better success in quickly determining potential problem areas before those escalate into truly sore points that will end up with the whole extra-marital fiasco.

But then again, I'm not married [yet], so take all these words with a certain amount of skepticism---it is just my own philosophy on how things ought to be run.

And on another note, I realised that my typing ability seems to be degraded for some reason---either the keyboard of Elyse sucks, or that I have not been typing long enough sentences for a suitably long period of time that all the coordination of my fingers are no longer in good pace with each other. Until the next time I suppose.

Uselessness?

What's the point of knowing all the classifications of demons from both Eastern and Western mythology and knowing medieval weaponry and knowing all kinds of data structures used in Computer Science when no one wants that kind of information these days? What's the point of knowing so much? Maybe ignorance is a kind of blessing.

Am I really that useless?

Bananarama

So this is Bananarama:I've been listening to their songs on and off and never knew this was them... dang.

我不难过

《我不难过》——孙燕姿

又站在你家的门口 我们重复沉默
这样子单方面的守候　还能多久
终于你开口向我诉说她有多溫柔
虽然你还握著我的手　但我已不在你心中

我真的懂　你不是喜新厌旧
是我没有　陪在你身边 当你寂寞时候
別再看著我　说著你爱过
別太伤痛　我不难过　这不算什么
只是为什么眼泪会流　我也不懂

就让我走　让我开始享受自由
回憶很多　你的影子也会充滿我生活
我並不懦弱　你比谁都懂
虽然寂寞　这会是我
最后的寬容

抱紧我　再抱紧我
这一份感动　请你让我留在胸口
別在说是你的错　爱到了尽头
是非对错　就让它随风
忘了所有　过得比你快活

我真的懂　你不是喜新厌旧
是我没有　陪在你身边　当你寂寞时候
別再看著我　说著你爱过
別太伤痛　我不难过　这不算什么
只是为什么眼泪会流　我也不懂

不要再说　或許这是最好結果
现在分手　总好过你不爱我一拖再拖
松开你的手　离开你左右 我向前走
这会是我 真正的解脱

Catchy riff and meaningful lyrics... what more can I say?

Lyrics courtesy from news.xinhuanet.com.

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.

Run Barefoot

Run barefoot, damnit! Even the mainstream media has got wind of this. Though I must add that the picture they provided of a runner is the wrong way to run.

Singapore Has Easy Coordinates

Random fact: Singapore's official coordinates are roughly (1.283333, 103.833333). Now that's an easy number to remember.

Chinese New Year Apathy?

Some time ago, long long time ago, someone made a comment that as one got older, the feelings that one gets during Chinese New Year will slowly turn towards that of general apathy. At that point in time, I was skeptical about that perspective, thinking that it was just a cynical viewpoint of someone who probably disliked the quasi-friendliness that entailed when one was going around visiting relatives as a part of the tradition.

Little did I know that as I grew older, the sense of apathy is just overwhelming.

It's not like there was something fundamentally wrong with my relatives; it's just that it has been so long since I met them, that all I did when I visited them was to say a few auspicious words, and then vegetate in front of the television while my parents conversed with my aunts and uncles. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing, but it most definitely isn't a good thing either. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, and the child-like naïveté has almost been fully purged out of my system, replacing it with cold laconic wit (except I'm probably more verbose than laconic), causing me to have a general jaded viewpoint on the whole ``visit all my relatives'' thing associated with the traditions of Chinese New Year. But I suppose I digress.

Anyway, sleep beckons. I have been pretty much sleep-deprived and overloaded with caffeine for the last three weeks---having an extended weekend means that I can finally trade in some time to get some wonderful sleep once more. And of course, tomorrow comes once again.

More Oldies...

Here are two pieces by 林慧萍:And my favourite piece by her so far: