Affection...

I guess it is that time once more... the need for some affection I suppose.I don't want to say more.

Walking on CoalsAsphalt

It's that time of the year again, summer for the northern hemisphere, and graduation season for North American colleges and universities.

Pretty nostalgic really, reminds me of my own graduation just a few years back. Now I'm starting to feel a little bit old heh. But then again, life goes on.

Graduation is an interesting social mechanic if one stops to think about it. It is largely symbolic---after putting effort for n years and taking k courses, the power invested by the board of directors of the institution confers upon you the degree that you had worked towards. Since we are talking about undergraduate degrees, of course we mean things like Bachelor's. But as I was saying, it's largely symbolic---has your journey in learning truly ended? Definitely not, since things are always in flux; this is the real world after all. But it does mark the soft ending of one chapter in one's life and the beginning of the nebulous part that is also known as ``adult life''.

Symbolism... that's something that the world, as a whole, seems to partake in. Symbolism is probably the very epitome of human consciousness, as it is a compact way of transmitting a whole host of related information without actually exhaustively enumerating them all. So far, machines cannot do that properly yet---the concept of auto-inference is not fully operational partly because most machines do not have the equivalent of a life-time of experiences that a human has. But as always, I digress.

Graduation. I look at the folks I knew from CMU and see that they have graduated. It's funny how when I first knew them, they were only froshlings straight out of high school, with idealism and enthusiasm infectious. And now they've all grown up. Hahahaha... I am starting to sound like an old man. Some of the friends I made over here in UIUC are also graduating, and being the rather sentimental person I am (an irony, I know), I do feel a little sad that they have finally graduated and are leaving. Happy that they have finally begun their life journey in the never-ending stream of the ``adult world'', sad that someone I know will be less close from now on, only because.

Yesterday was pretty nasty for weather. The temperature hit around 33 degrees Celsius, and the humidity was fairly low for most of the day, except in the evening/night, where it rained something fierce. I think I drank almost 4 litres of water yesterday just to cool down---and it was the first time that I felt that going barechested was actually necessary. Of course, as I am writing this now, the weather is something much cooler, probably under 25 degrees Celsius or something, I'm not too sure. Strangely though, even when it was getting hot, I didn't really find that my skin was exploding into anything weird, partly because the humidity was just that low. It would be interesting to see how I fare when I return home for a visit some time in the near future.

On Saturday, I did a crazy experiment, where I tried walking barefoot from my house to the ARC where my jujitsu training was held. Holy cow, it was the afternoon and I swear that the aspalt roads where bloody hot. I could only sustain a distance of around 0.7 miles before giving up and putting on my VFFs. Feet were sore as hell, and when I got home to check on the damage, a small number of blisters were already forming. The hot spots were terrible---it seemed as though I was sustaining some burn damage underneath the epidermis due to all the redness. Ice treatment was done, and I had to lance the four blisters because the fluid pressure was making it harder to walk than necessary. Of course, some anti-bacterial ointment was used around the incisions to prevent infection, and as at today, my feet feel rested, comfortable and blister-free.

Anyway, that's all the crazy updates I am willing to write for now. Till next time.

To Sir, With Love

T'is the season for graduation, and so this song seems quite apt:Old, quaint, but still apt. I miss this film.

Elyse in Precise

So, the last time that I wrote here, I talked about showing how Elyse looks like with Precise Pangolin. Here is a screen shot of her:

Lovely, isn't it?

Of course what you are seeing is not the ``stock'' installation---there were some things that I had to tweak to make sure that things worked out the way I want them to be. Now that I am a little more cognitively associated (wasn't so on Saturday due to the massive amounts of crashing that I had to do due to my horrendous sleep habits from the previous week), let me try to catalogue some of the changes that I did with the stock installation of Xubuntu 12.04.

• The installation uses 3 partitions---Ext2 for the O/S itself, Ext4 for /home/*, and one swap partition that is 2GiB, about half the amount of RAM Elyse has.
• The usual stuff that I like to have (i.e. C/C++, python, LaTeX, vim) are also installed. One new addition: explicit installation of numpy and scipy.
• Altered ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to undo the fubared colour scheme that came on default for the console---I like my default ANSI colours thankyouverymuch. If I remember correctly, all I did was just to delete the lines containing the special palette colours that were set up.
• Added the PPA for Skype(Enable the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and use that one instead since the PPA for Skype is broken) and Chrome and possibly Dropbox.
• Oh, remap the keyboard's caps lock key by editing /etc/default/keyboardto read as

  XKBMODEL="pc105"
  XKBLAYOUT="us"
  XKBVARIANT=""
  XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"

  Yes, it does a little more than remapping the caps lock key to control, but sure.
• Oh, if it is not obvious enough, set the terminal font to GNU unifont. I used to like really tiny fonts to see more, but then I realise that having a wider variety of viewable glyphs was more useful than reading too many things on screen. In fact, this is partly the reason why I update Eileen to the newest version of PuTTy---it allows the use of ``proportional width'' fonts for the terminal. This means that a pan-unicode font like GNU Unifont that has both single and double-width characters is usable.

So yeah, those were the ``special'' things that I did on the default installation to make it less annoying, but other than that, there were half a dozen other small tweaks that aren't really worth mentioning, so I won't.

Alright, till the next post.

[Ed: Since the post I realised that the PPA for Skype was unnecessary. Enabling the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and then doing sudo apt-get install skype works as expected.]

Precise Pangolin

This has been a rather long week, what with all the double-time that I have been taking just to keep on top of things. I think that have been pretty uncomfortably drained this semester, and now that the classes are over, I will be able to get back into doing what I like best, which is actually solving problems.

Kinda sad how things are huh...

Anyway, on to less sobering news. Now that Xubuntu 12.04 LTS ``Precise Pangolin'' is out, it is time to take it out on a spin. After discussing with myself for quite a while, I've decided that Elyse should be wiped out and reinstalled with a full partition of Xubuntu. Really, I don't use the XP partition that much anymore, not since I have Eileen with all her bells and whistles. Keeping the components on the XP partition up to date was starting to be too much of chore, and seeing that I actually use the Linux environment more these days just made it the right choice to switch over the Xubuntu completely.

So, first impressions on the Precise Pangolin on Elyse. For one, the theme is too damn dark for my liking. I'm going to stick with it for a while, but if I don't like what I see, it's going to go back to the light coloured theme that I had used earlier. What irked me the most was the fscking of the terminal colour template, like, seriously. None of the ``standard'' 16 colours, all kinds of random shades... how it it usable?

I will try to put up some screen shots when I feel more cognitively alert. I need to catch up on some sleep for now. Till next time.

Still Alive...

It's kinda funny how one's perception of time changes when one has only slept around 5 in the last 48 hours. Each day feels as though it were twice as long when in fact nothing much has changed. The mind feels more awake for some reason, and the body loyally soldiers on, its fatigue of being sedentary alleviated through the many body conditioning exercises like the push-up, the squat and the crunches that comprise the breaks that I take in between sprints.

I hate this semester. Really really hate it. It's like freshman year in CMU all over again---overloading on the second semester and taking all kinds of flak for it. The pain is real, and as I get older, I was starting to think that I cannot actually take such brutality any more.

Oh how wrong was I!

It turns out that the training that I had been doing for months prior had conditioned my body to be just that little bit more resilient, and as long as I take cat naps at times when by mind is wavering, I'm pretty good to go without having to go for a good night's sleep. To feel young once more! It feels as though I had forgotten this aspect of my life. Actually, come to think of it, I never really had to deal with this aspect of my life because for the most part, I was ahead on things. It was only at times of duress that I started to falter and had all kinds of problems.

Anyway, I will expound more about this when I have completed... some things. till the next update.

Bunch of Stuff...

Today feels dastardly different, partly because the temperature is now rising into the 28 degrees Celsius zone. Couple this with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough for the last few days just makes me feel a little woozy in the head. I'm on so many different kinds of self-medication that I'm starting to wonder if I am already down with something.

But anyway, just something cute: ``online'' vi. Not vim, but venerable vi. Pretty cute---I'm tempted to load it on my domain just to make things interesting.

In some other less cutesy news, the multiprocessing module in Python is a quick and dirty way of using the multiple cores that are present in many modern day machines. Dumbly parallelisable algorithms will never be the same again.

Another cool library in Python is the difflib. It contains some rather standard string-edit distance computations, which can save more programmer time when trying to implement those things---I mean seriously, why should we keep reinventing the wheel whenever we program?

Finally, just a tip for using sqlite3 in Python: cache into memory look up structures as much as possible. If things are still slow, consider using PRAGMA cache_size = 10000, where you replace 10000 with some bigger number. That should allow better use of main memory to support those joins and buffers that are oh-so-important for fast execution of queries.

I still haven't figured out if sqlite3 for Python has provisions for prepared statements, and honestly, I don't have the time to figure that out just yet. Maybe next time.

Orthodox File Managers

You know, I'm starting to suspect that I favour the command line a little too much, sometimes at the detriment of my own sanity. While the command line is awesome for doing things like running complex programs, or even to use a barebones-esque no-nonsense text editor, there are some limitations that even I have to start to admit that are causing severe productivity issues.

File management is one problem that I think the command line is really nasty for. Put simply, it becomes quite nasty to have to retype very long paths that come from very strict hierarchical management of the underlying file system. Couple this with the need to transfer files remotely, some form of location persistence would have been very useful.

Recently, in a bid to deal with that problem, I've started to dabble in the notion of the orthodox file manager. Orthodox file managers are a very mature technology---even in the days of DOS, there was the DOSSHELL that made navigating the file system easy. It wasn't that necessary then though due to the 8.3 file limitation. Part of the reason of my annoyance with modern systems comes from the need to escape various characters in the file names. Aaanyway, as I was saying, orthodox file managers. The old standby that I'm using for Linux and Unix-y systems is Midnight Commander. It's simple and gets the job done---it supports file type highlighting too, check it out at this site for some ideas.

For Windows, MC is a little strange to work with. For that, I actually go with FAR manager, a product originally from the creator of WinRAR. FAR manager works like MC, except that it is in Windows of course. But unlike MC, FAR manager can be extended with various plug-ins, and the one that is most useful is the FarNetBox, which allows one to connect to servers via SSL to perform transparent file copies. (Note: I'm using FAR 2.x, so I will need that plug-in. This site shows more plug-ins for FAR 3.x, which is still undergoing development.)

Well, that's all I wanted to talk about regarding orthodox file managers. Till the next time.

Trial By Fire

``The journey of a thousand miles begin with one step.'' It sounds a little cliché, but it is still one of the more useful mantra that one can have. It's just a way of reminding oneself that no matter how hard the road appears ahead, a small step in the positive direction is all it takes to get going.

This is roughly how I am feeling now about things. It's a really long and arduous journey ahead, and I had barely even scratched the surface on how deep the rabbit hole goes. It doesn't help much that I feel... mostly isolated with little support. Not a good sign---I wonder if I can hold on to my sanity this way. It's a hard life, but no one said that life was ever easy.

Anyway, enough of this mediocre spiel. Back to the proverbial grindstone.

Almost There... I Wish...

Well the left eye is feeling better, but I need to watch myself a bit more. This fortnight of hell is starting to take its toll on me as I beat myself black and blue to get everything that needs to be done, done. I really cannot wait to put check marks (or tick marks) on that list that chronicles my death march to finally show that things are done and giving me a sense of achievement and purpose.

But the pain, the sleep deprivation, the mental anguish, the physical inaction---all these need to be faced first.

Once more I question my judgement on what I now term as the ``second semester syndrome'', where I inevitably overload my second semester of college/grad school. Saw that happen once, and it scarred me, and now, it seems like it is happening again. I really need to be more careful on my choices like this.

Mild [Undiagnosed] Left Corneal Abrasion

Great, just great. About a week after my ``new'' right corneal abrasion has healed over, my left eye seems to have gotten one this time. Why am I so susceptible to corneal abrasions at this point? Is it because I've been using my eyes too much to the point where they get too dry, and then one accidental rubbing is enough to scrape at that old corneal wound from LASIK?

I think for safety reasons I should really use more eye drops, regardless of whether I feel the need to or not. I think that the more tired my eyes get, the more I feel like rubbing them, and the higher the chance of causing more damage due to the friction and the dryness.

Not a good way to be trudging through hell fortnight.

Keep pushin'

It's a Sunday over here. Dreary looking morning, but things are still going fine.

I feel a little humbled and sad that people don't really care about my poetry blog. Am I really that bad a poet, or is it just people not knowing of its existence? Maybe I should avoid doing so much free verse and should really tihnk about writing according to the various poetry rules---perhaps by doing so, the technical merits of the poems will override the rather whimisical nature of its contents.

But anyway, I am going to be so glad when this semester is over. So many things to do; I am hating myself for taking two project-heavy courses. They are driving me nuts, especially for the final course projects, since those eat into whatever time I have to think about things in general. And of course, the mismanaged expectations of what am I doing here---am I here to clear ``course requirements'' or to do all-out research? Such confusion over roles are probably things that many of the first year PhD students probably don't have to worry about, since their trajectory is less challenging than the one I had chosen.

The one that I had chosen. I must remind myself that being here is a personal choice, no one told me to come here, no one said that I had to get a PhD. I made the choice on my own volition, and so I should live up to my choice. My plans, my dreams... I only took up Computer Science as my speciality because I wanted to be a researcher. If I couldn't be a researcher, I would have taken EEE and gone on to be an electrical engineer or something just to make enough money to live on. In fact, too many circumstances have been actively discouraging me to be on this programme---the fact that I am still here is testament to what I truly want. But I have a flaw. I keep taking things that happen around me as ``signs''. People come, and they have left---I take it as a ``sign'' that perhaps it is not my karmic destiny to be here. I face roadblocks of all sorts when trying to get here---I took it as a ``sign'' again that it wasn't meant to be and that I'm going against the order of things.

So much irrational superstition from a ``hard'' scientist, eh? Hell, I'm ashamed of myself for even thinking like that at times. But I digress.

Just gotta keep pushing.

Running...

T'is gonna be yet another busy day, considering everything. I've been seeing an athletic trainer in the past month or two to learn exercises to strengthen the stabilising muscles in my legs so improve my running form. For some reason, I'm starting to actually like the idea of running now, even though I was always of the opinion that running was the most boring things that I could do with my time.

I suppose that my perception on running is altered by three big reasons. First, I now have a buddy to run with. Running alone can be rather boring, considering everything, since really, one is just literally moving at the slowest possible non-walking pace (there are much faster ways to get about), and in spite of what everyone says, running is a high impact exercise after all. And no, I do not ``jog''---I cannot run at a speed lower than 6 mph (thats roughly 9.6 km/h) without killing myself. Second, running is a good anti-depressant---it helps make me feel better about myself and life in general, what with that runner's high from the running, the feeling of ``being alive'' while running itself. Finally, the general locale of Champaign-Urbana makes it rather nice to run. The streets are quite orthogonal to each other, there are few traffic lights to slow things down, and more importantly, the place is generally ``flat'' enough without too many tall buildings to obstruct the flow of fresh air and other earthy flavours that make the running experience enjoyable.

I think that one of the things that I should do before I die is to run at least one marathon, and/or do a triathlon. The former, I can probably achieve in the next five to ten years, the latter, well, I'm not so sure. I've been learning a lot of how my body functions over the last few years, and that is making me prioritise improving my body over many things to ensure that I have the infrastructure to support my over-sized thinking brain (or so I hope). The end goal is that even when I'm seventy years old, I am still able to sit straight, walk straight, be quick on my feet, and can still throw healthy and athletic twenty-year-olds all over the training mat without having random fractures and other structural deficiencies.

I think that such a healthy lifestyle is achievable by me, and I will make sure that I get there.

Anyway, enough of a random rant. Work beckons. Till the next update.

Loneliness...

For some reason, a strong sense of loneliness hit me quite unexpectedly. I'm not sure if it is because I have been watching K-On!, an anime that has the main theme about friendships or if it's just the end of the semester woes. In either case, I just feel like I'm in the doldrums, and have resorted to listening to Tristania and Therion to keep my mood up (strange set, I know).

Anyway, back to K-On!. That's an anime series that my other sister has been recommending me to watch for a very long time, and I finally took the time to actually watch it. I like the story line---it is literally a slice-of-life type comedy, just the genre that I like a lot. The five friends interacting, making music, having fun, and then having to part due to graduation sort of reminded me of a past life that I thought I had at some point. There are only a few groups that I feel quite close with, but somehow their absence now is accentuated after watching the anime. Maybe I'm getting softer/older, and am more sentimental than I would believe.

Or it could be due to my lack of ``runner's high'' because I didn't run yesterday. I don't really know. I'm in a rather strange mood these days though... and am not really sure what to make of it except to gently push it aside to keep on working on what needs to be done. I figure I will deal with these things bit by bit as I try to overcome the end-of-semester workload.

Now I'm starting to wonder if my plans will go awry... maybe this is the existential crisis that everyone goes through when they are in between phases in their lives. Being in grad school has a way of stopping time in one sense and accelerating in another---might be a little hard to understand unless you too are a grad student. The general idea is that the progression of life, as a whole, has stopped, while the large amount of things that remains to be done makes whatever actual time left feel inadequate. This is probably something that one does not feel that much when one is a full-fledged worker in society. Who knows when will I be there once more?

Work, life. Can't have one without the other, but how should we balance them? No one seems to know.

On ``Baked Beans''

So upon some reflection, I think that I will start a new tag series on this blog. Considering that I am now cooking much more often than before (not only because I want to save some money, but that cooking is an interesting and enjoyable experience in its own right), I think it is a good thing to start tracking some of the observations that I found, as well as some advice that I had heard from people.

Anyway, today's first cooking-based post is about beans. Apparently, the ``baked beans'' that we generally get in cans can be made from m3h into woah with a couple of interesting ingredients. First, instead of just cooking the beans on a stove with whatever tomato puree was used, some brown sugar and ketchup are added to thicken the sauce. Chopped bacon can also be added, as is other types of sauces for flavour. Second, the mixture is baked instead of steaming, so that the brown sugar will caramelise and create that really nice thick sweet flavour that gets checked by the tanginess of the ketchup. It sounds like a lot of effort, but the end result is really awesome.

Mild [Undiagnosed] Right Corneal Abrasion

Alright, so the end of the week is drawing near, and I am in the midst of moving all the crazy end-of-semester projects to their hopefully joyful conclusion. I have no idea what is wrong with this ``new'' blogger interface---the entire interface feels quite lethargic. I can't tell if it is Firefox acting up due to the random AJAX-y things that this user interface is using, or if the whole machine is slowed down because I'm running one rather CPU-intensive computation in the background while not running the discrete graphics card.

Anyway, the last time I wrote was on how Sunday was passing me by. What I didn't say was that I think I had yet another corneal abrasion from Saturday. No, it's not from training that's for sure---I have those protective goggles, and no thumb ever went into my eye. What I think happened was that my eyes were too dry, and then I rubbed them, inadvertently causing yet another abrasion. Talk about bad things occurring more than once.

The difference this time of course is that it's probably pretty small. I only had very mild photophobia when I was looking out of my window into the environment outside on Sunday, and there was mild inflammation all about the sclera, but that was it. It wasn't unbearable---I still went out and did the stuff I had to do, even doing an interval-based run on Sunday itself. My vision was a bit wonky, but as at today, things have returned to normal. After that last incident, I think I know what to expect with regards to such an injury, and really, since this is so small, waiting it out was the best thing I could do. I just cannot afford to lose time for yet another meaningless set of daily trips to the local hospital that required me to make a trip to the next city for a second opinion at the end of it all.

This week and the next are going to be rather hellish, and I hope that things will turn out alright for me. Meanwhile, sleep beckons---I need it just to stay functional.

Till the next update.

Sunday Passes By...

With a blink of an eye, another weekend has passed my by once more.

Somehow being confined in the house, I feel quite differently. It has been a month or so since my buddy left the PhD programme, and I have more or less started to figure out different coping mechanisms for myself. I've been running more, reading more, and generally speaking, talking to myself a whole lot more.

I suppose I really don't dig into the ``solitary person'' thing all that well.

The end-of-semester crunch is upon me, and already I am looking at a rather long list of things that needs to be done. I have no idea how I am going to manage it, but I suppose that everything will be done somehow. No, I'm not interested in scoring all As for my classes---I just want to do enough to meet the department requirement so that I have time to look at other more relevant things related to my research. The three classes of this semester are killer, each with their own major projects. Sometimes I just feel like throwing in the towel. But of course, I often catch myself early enough to tell my depressing brain to shut-it and take active steps to move things along.

I'm starting to understand the feelings that some of my other friends who have left the PhD programme. It wasn't so much that the research is boring, it's the drudgery to fill up the paperwork and work on one's research that makes one develop a distaste of it all. Studies already take at least 40 hours a week, on a full course load, while research takes another 44+ hours a week. In short, it's like doing two full-time jobs at once (no, a full-time job is not 80 hours---do not believe the words of employers who are trying to undercut the labour to squeeze every ounce of ``productivity''). It's pretty easy to do it when one's young, but as age catches up and the real world's effects start to manifest themselves (translation: watching other people doing ``normal'' things and seem successful/happy), there will be a growing sense of self-doubt about whether all these additional hard work over and above the Bachelor's degree is ever worth it.

I know it is worthed it, in my case. But classes are just so... annoying. They get in the way. But they need to be done anyway...

Well, enough belly-aching for now. Till the next update.

Pompous Buffoon?

Am I a pompous buffoon? Sometimes I ask myself that question, particularly at times where I sit quietly and do a little introspection (so hard to find time to do that nowadays). I find that I know quite a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately, that rigour aspect of things are a little lacking, for really, research is not a measure of what or how much you know, but the lineage of the information that you've got. That's the whole onus behind ``the chain of proof/evidence'' that is prevalent in Science.

But anyway, why the question of a pompous buffoon? Pomposity is that know-it-all attitude that one can display, and a buffoon is mostly a stupid person. Maybe I am a pompous buffoon at times, secure in my knowledge and wanting to demonstrate to people that they are wrong at one point or another. Or perhaps I am, as always, being rather existential about things once again. But do these matter? Not to anyone no---no one really cares about what my internal state is. Actually, that's not quite true. Most people will not really care about what my internal state is, only my closest family and friends are interested in that. For that, I am thankful; I suppose that's what it means to be a human. To have the support and care of those who love you, to those who are related to you by choice or by blood. Maybe that's the purest kind of love that one can ever hope for in this life.

But yes, pompous buffoons. I can't really stand them. Especially when they are patently wrong, and refuse to see reason. The cocky way that they push their perspective, thinking that they are always right, without actually realising that they may, in fact, be wrong, even when those said parts are pointed out by many time and time again. Very annoying bunch of people. I hope to never be like a pompous buffoon, for the sake of others and more importantly, for the sake of myself.

Well, that's enough of a rant. Gotta think more, and wonder about how to survive this semester with little lasting psychological damage. Till the next update.

I'm A Comin' Home [In June]

I'm comin' home for a visit in the middle of June! I'm so excited for some reason---I'm not sure if it's just relief that I can finally see familiar faces and share time with people I know and love more, or is it just a desperate need for a change of pace [again].

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to post details here---folks who follow my blog(s) should email me (or drop a comment on this post) to let me know when you guys want to meet up. I'm sure we can arrange something! =)

Anyway, among the two-ish semesters I have been here, this semester is proving to be the more gruelling of the two. I can handle ridiculous amounts of homework, but what I cannot handle are the need to write 3 survey papers, deal with 5 projects all within the same time frame. They sap time in very different ways, and this can be pretty darn annoying, to say the least. It requires my brain to be split into 5 different ways, and frankly, I am doubting my ability to do it, in spite of the faith and confidence that many have for me (thank you). I am, of course, trying my best to adapt, but who knows really what the outcome will be.

Just keep on doing until this semester is over and then I have renewed energy for my research once more, instead of getting bogged down by the thousand-and-one different things.

On another note, I ran 9.31km in around 57:35 yesterday by going around the Champaign side of campus and including parts of the Urbana residences. I didn't realise that I had the capacity to run that distance---the longest that I had run till then was about 6km or so, already a wonderous feat as far as I'm concerned, considering that I never did run all that often. I think I'm starting to like running a lot, and the completion of that 9.31km route was partly because I had a good hydration plan. Remember that Energy Belt I talked about in an earlier post? Yep, I used that and made sure that as I ran, I kept topping up my fluids to stay hydrated and maintain sufficient levels of sodium ions.

Alright, the day has just begun for me, and there are a few things I am adamant of completing before the day is done to make progress. Till the next update.

What Have I Missed? Nothing

It has been a week since I disabled my Facebook account [temporarily]. Much to my surprise, I didn't really miss much. Life moved on, at a frantic pace of course for I am still a graduate student, and I still had contact with the people who mattered (that'd be my friends). I talk to people in the flesh, converse with them via email and IM, basically doing the things that I did prior to 2006 just when Facebook was starting to take over the world by storm.

Frankly, I think I can live this lifestyle. One without the interference of some odd social network thing like Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Or any of the hundreds of Friendster knock-offs (does anyone still remember Friendster?).

I'm not a technological Luddite---far from it considering everything. It's just that this ``always on, always connected'' lifestyle is really starting to burn into time that I once had to do things I liked, be it reading new material, sampling new games, writing or just going out for a meal. Sure, it seems harmless at first, but being a computer scientist also means that there is this obsession streak present. It is mild of course, almost all computer scientists or intellectuals have an obsession streak about them, but when these obsessions are effected as unproductive compulsions like using Facebook, it disrupts our general ability to do things. I mean, I'd rather have a compulsion of reading than to follow all the 500 or so Facebook ``friends''. At least all that reading will pay off in the end when I have the time to left my brain sort out what I have read and to distill the important parts while discarding the useless.

That's the problem. The lack of down-time, the lack of ``me'' time. That's what's different now when I compare it to the past. I don't realise how much I miss these times of introspection till I have decided to kill off all these useless compulsions one by one. No wonder I always feel drained.

One invaluable lesson that I am starting to learn is to take things in stride. Taking things in stride doesn't mean slackness---it means to take what it is dished out with a good measure of perspective. It means to not get so caught up with one part of life that I neglect the others. One potentially apocryphal quote by the Dalai Lama sums it up the best. When asked what surprised him the most, the Dalai Lama purported replied

``Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.''

It probably doesn't matter if the holy man actually said this, but I think that it summarises the perspective of life quite well. Referring back to Regina Brett's 45 (or 50) life lessons, it's really about asking oneself this: ``Will it matter in five years?''

But enough of arm chair philosophizing---I'm sure people are more interested in some of the ``juicier'' aspects of my life. (=

I've gotten one of those Energy Belt thingies that give you a small pouch for the important stuff, and small bottles that can store electrolyte drinks (poor man's version: tap water + half teaspoon of salt), all hanging snuggly around the waist. Why one of these thingies? Well, I hate having to carry keys or anything in the pockets of my bermudas for running because getting ass-slapped by the damn thing is just annoying. Plus, as I start to increase my overall running distance, I will have to start taking hydration seriously, especially since summer is about to arrive. I got mine from Meijer for about ten dollars cheaper, which is awesome if you ask me.

Recently, I made a self-inking rubber stamp of my emblem. That profile picture that is available on the side bar of this blog, or that icon on the address bar? Yes, that's my emblem. I got it done at Simon's Stamps. All I had to do was to upload the image file and they sorted it all out. Workmanship is wonderful and it arrived fairly quickly too.

I've been seeing an athletic trainer these days with regards to the ginky deep muscle on the outer left side of my left calve muscle (I'm not going to use precise anatomical-speak here because I don't really know how to call it, but I think it might actually be the Fibularis Brevis, some stabiliser muscle that controls eversion of the foot). The exercises that she prescribed were rather weird, but they do help with the overall condition. The next session is going to be interesting, because she will be checking out my [nearly] barefoot running gait and seeing if it can be fixed to reduce all these weird lower limb problems.

Alright, enough babble for now. Need to have an early night. I've been rather sleep-deprived for the week. Till the next update.