Late-Night Auto-Writing

Okay, so it's finally dark out, the night is fast progressing into the deepest form of darkness, and I'm sort of floating around in that semi-happy state of being mildly sedated from the cool winds and quiet atmosphere. Sounds like a good time for yet another rare blog entry.

Funny how life works out sometimes. Just when you think all hope is lost, an opportunity yields itself to be within your grasp, only if you choose to take it up, of course. I don't really mean this in any metaphorical sense---such subtleties are fast lost upon me as I dig deeper into the factual world that is science. If you have been paying attention (or not, considering I do not know who is actually reading this and who isn't), you would have realised that I have been rather lost and directionless with regards to many things. But of course, by now, most of these issues have been dealt with, and I feel that familiar surge of energy that drives and pushes me forward for all the past few years that I have lived.

So what has changed in life?

Lots of things, really. New job, new life, new love, new goals, new friends, new acquaintances---it is in many ways a break from the old life that I had started to loath ever since the world crashed on me figuratively speaking. Such a break is most welcome of course, since it truly marks a new beginning for me. Now I don't have to worry about how the people of the past have treated me since I have the present to look at and the future to look forward to; odious varieties of people from #cslounge for example are but a thing of the past, and odious people from my other parts of life have been silenced like vermin crushed under the heels of a juggernaut. Surely, the clearing of such filth can be important as a means of detoxifying the soul, or at the very least, that of the psyche.

But such sweeping changes made require more than a fair share of guts and willingness to leap into the unknown---the remaking process of the self is one that is fraught with false starts and early failures, and not to mention the sheer uncertainty of the interpretations that one can take with reagards to particular facets of the issue at hand. I have dallied a little in working that bit out, but today, I finally took the plunge and cleared away the last vestiges of all that made me so unhappy for so long.

Enough of the sombre thoughts---a new beginning needs a new outlook on everything that happens. Those who have known me for long would be mildly surprised to discover that I have more or less become a person that they would never have guessed: I am more physically active these days than I ever was in the past. Part of this comes from the tacit acknowledgement that I'm no spring chicken any more, and that my metabolism is already on the decline, which meant that the ``legendary'' helpings of old cannot be performed again in this current time and age should I wish to maintain the veneer of healthiness that is innately axiomatic for people within my age group. But it is not true that I once hated to be physically active; it's all because of my hypersensitive skin towards the elements coupled with the disciplined nature of organised physical education/training that made physical activity the chore that it once was. Put simply, I was unable to be physically active because I lost all control on what I can and cannot do to prevent flare ups of my skin. Now, many years from before, I'm an Aikido-ka, a martial artist undergoing fairly rigorous training twice a week of two-hour sessions. Of course my skin is the same, but with a few more years of self-control under my belt, plus a couple of daring innovations, I have managed to keep the situation mostly in check, which gives me ample opportunities to pursue my martial arts training, and more importantly, boost my self-confidence and self-image---it is hard to feel sexy with broken skin everywhere, to put it in the most blunt way possible.

But for now though, it would seem that I'm just prattling on without aim---it is not too far from the truth, but yet among the bewildering agglomeration of words lies some truth that is only thinly veiled from view by the veneer of flowery prose. I mentioned before that updates to the blog are far and few due to the reduction in the fantastic adventures that one can get in a working world, but I suppose there are still other ways of reaching these phantasms of interest. As a researcher-in-training, I suppose that my powers of imagination are still fairly robust, as seen by the fact that I am, after all, in a field where imagination and logic have to work together harmoniously to produce something that is truly magical and worthy of praise for its utility. Then of course, it is just a matter of time before I begin to relearn once more how to harness that imagination of mind to probe the nature of the world and universe at large.

The question to ask of course is how much different is that direction compared to whatever was done before on this blog? In some ways, it is more different. While I dare not claim that my posts would be more mature (maturity is something other people say, not something to be self-declared), they are more likely to be even more introspective in nature, sometimes with a hint of philosophical and moral underpinnings. In short, the posts here might just become more dry, which will of course make my already dismal readership fall into true dereliction. But to write about the goings-on in a place where one needs to be hush-hush is in many ways a logic contradiction---the really interesting things about me are probably about my life and what goes on in there, yet I am more content with sharing my head space than my comings and goings in meat space. Ergo, my work has too many NDAs waving around that it is a minefield to even talk about anything that happens in the office, work-related or not.

Alright, I can feel the need for sleep increasing. Time to knock out for the night and to dream about the possibilities of the future.

Half-hearted Rant...

If I fail at my career of being a researcher, I should probably go be a counsellor or psychic. My preternatural ability to intuitively sense the well-being of a person is starting to get more and more powerful, and in some ways, it does scare me a little here and there. There's one thing about realising that one has a certain ``power'', and there's the other thing of actually realising that the ``power'' also means that I actually gain knowledge that I might not really want to possess---knowing a person's inner state can have all sorts of strange contradictions that one needs to deal with because on the one hand, one wants to interact normally but on the other hand, the a priori knowledge would often suggest that one requires just a little more tact in the interaction, something that many might find to be annoying to keep track of.

I shall stop here---lost interest with what I was writing...

The Matter with /var

In spite of what is suggests, /var actually contains much system-critical data and should never sit on its own [small] partition. All kinds of hell gets unleashed when doing major system upgrades that involve populating /var/cache/apt/archive when the logs in /var start encroaching onto precious file space.

Remounting for read-write

To remount / as read-write from the console, apply

mount -n -o remount,rw /

as root.

Exaile and mp3

Modern Ubuntu distributions use Exaile as the music player. The catch is that it doesn't support the mp3 format out of the box. To deal with that, apply

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

or

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

to resolve the problem.

Balmer's Peak

Okay, so a couple of days ago I was mumbling something about not updating this place so much due to the general lack of publishable events from the fact that most of the things occur during office hours in the office and are thus under the ambit of the whole non-disclosure component that is a part of my contract. Yet here I am once more, talking more about random things that are occurring.

It has been a while since I imbibed hard liquor in the form of vodka. To be fair, vodka is not really my first choice of hard liquor (my first choice is bourbon whiskey in the form of Jack Daniels, but no one is counting so whatever), but seeing that it is the drink that we have left over since the last time that we went drinking, it was the only thing that I could drink with the rest of the folks.

The thing about me and hard liquor is this: I will generally refuse to drink a mixed drink that involves the hard liquor, preferring to drink the hard liquor neat and enjoying its innate flavour and kick, as opposed to watching the flavour of the hard liquor being adulterated by the various mixers and the dilution of the melting ice from the ``rocks''. So of course to many who are more used to drinking vodka with mixers for example, I will appear to be in dangerous territory as I drink shot after shot of hard liquor.

To be completely honest, I can hold my liquor very well. The only side effect that I know from drinking too much too fast is the tendency to tune out the crowd and erupt into the whole non-social mode, being completely lost in my own world where the math and other thoughts are all that matters. Obviously I do not claim that this is the most normal thing to do when one is drinking and ends up being a little tipsy/drunk, but it does seem to be the case for me. Think about it this way; my use of alcohol back in the US was to understand the complicated interconnections that existed among various parts of the rather complicated code API, in a certain sense I have been conditioned to associate alcohol use with critical thinking of hard-to-understand complex systems. So that's why once I'm beyond a certain state of tipsiness/drunkeness, I end up working on some math/programming problem.

That said, I just got home from a drinking session in celebration of a friend/colleague's birthday. Go figure.

Bag Of Happenings

Feels like I've not really written anything here in ages. Oh well, life happened and things are always in a state of flux, which is probably a thing that I cannot run away from. Anyway, some random blurbs.

• There's this traffic light for pedestrians that has faulty programming, because once it hits the 15-second mark, it starts to glitch. Kinda looks as though the Matrix is glitching or something each time I cross that road.
• My work has suddenly increased in complexity by three-fold as I start to wrestle even more projects and even more new things. I'm not sure how long my brain will last, given that I have not really taken any long breaks to recuperate/recover in a long time.
• I know that Lucid Lynx is out, but I'm too lazy to install/try it on any of the machines under my charge. Currently, the Ibex and the Jackalope are doing fine, and I'm really lazy/apprehensive in rocking the boat too much. But then again, it is an LTS, so when I finally get some time off to do stuff, I might slowly update all the machines to Lynx.
• Salad lunches can be really fun with judicious choice of vegetables and other stuff to go with the salad. They can also be rather filling if you know what you are doing.
• I probably use more paper and ink as a researcher than as a student or systems developer. Go figure.
• Silent Hill 4: The Room is a rather interesting game, albeit a little scary to play when the sky is rather dark outside and the earphones are the only things that one hears.
• MUDs can be very addictive without one actually realising it.
• V nz zvffvat zl tveysevraq n jubyr ohapu jura V qba'g trg gb frr ure rirel bapr va n juvyr. V jbaqre vs V'z orvat bofrffvir, va ybir be cynva vafrpher. Guvf bar arrqf cbaqrevat.
• Sometimes I wonder if I'm in the right place at the right time, but after a while, I think to myself: I can always make it the right place and right time.

Phew, that's a lot of random blurbs that I wanted to say but didn't really have the effort to generate a large post of.

The weather these days have been rather atrocious, especially when one spends time outside---it appears that the midday temperature is hovering around the 34°C mark, not the best kind of weather to be frolicking about in. But then again, I'm indoors most of the time, so perhaps it doesn't affect me all that much.

That said, on yet another tangent, there's a concert coming up and I have tickets to sell. The location is at the Salvation Army Central Corps near Bishan, and the concert is occurring on July 10, 2010 from 1930hrs onwards. Ticket prices are at SGD10---free seating. Message me or email me for reservations on the tickets.

Okay, now I'm spent from writing all these. Goes to show how long my day has been---can't even write a decently lengthed rant without stopping so abruptly.

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:

Down Under

Each time I hear this on the radio, a smile breaks out on my face---it is just that fun! That said, Men At Work were sued successfully for plagiarising ``Kookaburra''. Without looking at the associated article, can you find where the plagiarising seemingly occurred? (Vg'f va gur syhgr evss. Gurl gbbx gur svefg gjb yvarf bs gur fbat ``Xbbxnoheen''.)

[PROTOTYPE]

So not too long ago (less than three or four days back, actually) I finally convinced myself to put up the cash to purchase [PROTOTYPE] off Steam after hearing from Mo that it was an interesting game that was kinda like DMC4 but with differing mechanics. Apart from a small snafu involving DirectX 9.0c on Elysie's Windows XP 64-bit edition, the installation wasn't too bad, and soon enough I had the game up and running.

What I wasn't prepared for was the epic levels of win the game entailed. Imagine GTA III, but with epic attack powers (kicking a flying helicopter to destruction), epic moves (wall-sprinting up the skyscraper to glide across Central Park), and epic battles (slamming the ground with a hard enough force that makes everything surrounding the protagonist fly up and take damage). In short, it is GTA III on steroids, and I'm not even sure if steroids are strong enough to produce the effect that I am seeing through the game. The sand-box feature of the game suits the purposes well, as it allows one to sometimes forget about the story missions and just roam around the city finding things to do, like infiltrating enemy bases, perform crazy stunts, or just go round killing things. Unlike GTA III, the only penalty for being overly violent is to have the military and/or mutants hunt you down, which is only a mild trifle if you have sufficient skill and powers to fight back or even dodge away. And the vehicles you can ride are insane---no civilian vehicles are ridable, but all manner of military hardware is available for your consumption.

Heh. Consumption---it is a key thing to do in the game itself, as many will say. In short, [PROTOTYPE] is an action fanatic's dream come true, with superhuman powers set in a pseudo-dystopian storyline with great cinematics to back the story up. This is probably among the best purchases I have ever made when it comes to games.

Theremin

Okay, new instrument to figure out: Theremin.

Left irc.freenode.net

I have officially dropped my thelaptop moniker on irc.freenode.net. Henceforth any appearances of that character has got nothing to do with me anymore.

It has gotten to the point where things were out of hand---the trolls were getting fat, and the people more pretentious than before. It's about time to move on anyway; #cslounge was a crutch anyway, and now that I'm so far away from the place, it matters not whether I'm there or not. Sure, there're probably some fond memories, but it's past the time for memories---I am living in the now. And presently, I'm not there, and I had never been there, so perhaps I needn't be there at all.

No one there will miss me anyway.

Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy

Mmm... ethereal. That's all I can say.

Sinatramania

I think I should try learning how to sound like Sinatra:His voice has a certain masculine yet magnetic quality in it that is the epitome of the Classical Cool. Must... learn... how... to... sing... like... that...

February Musings

Hmm. February, a traditional month for pain and anguish. Heh. Maybe not this February---things have changed. Probably. Who knows? So many things have happened over the last week that at times, I'm still a little giddy from the excitement.

I've finally got around to doing yet another round of upgrading of the software components that are running on Elyse. I got rid of the propriety SSH/SFTP tool that was licensed to CMU and installed WinSCP instead. Much cleaner interface, and less monstrosities to deal with, I suppose. I've updated my FL Studio to the latest version while updating Audacity to the beta which is much more recent than the last stable (works fine as far as I can tell). The good thing about this is that now FL Studio can double up as a VSTi plug-in from within Audacity, which further allows the use of Nyquist (the LISP-like programming language in Audacity) to be further combined with the plethora of tools that FL Studio has to offer.

I originally thought of upgrading the Xubuntu install on Elysie to Karmic Koala, but after reading the many problems that occur with machines that sport the nVidia graphics cards after that upgrade, I've decided to give the Koala a miss. Besides, things are working relatively well now and I don't see a need to rock the boat, as compared to my high portable and mostly experimental rig on Edythe-EEE. I might consider upgrading the home computer to Koala since it is using an integrated graphics card, which reduces the issues that can occur with the propriety binary blobs that are needed for the higher end cards. Speaking of which, I probably need to run an update on the Windows XP 64-bit edition partition of Elysie---the last time I ran anything on that was... a very long time ago.

Life. That's right, I was mumbling something about that before I got hopelessly side tracked. February is a month of confusion many times, and this year, it's probably not going to be that bad. Most of the things that are causing me severe anguish are at least undergoing some form of amelioration, either through efforts of mine or not. There are things that I have already done, and there are also things where I have little control over, so I suppose there is little need to worry about them. After all, life is short, for how long can we be worrying about things anyway?

I remember that I used to think that I would be a detective when I grew up. That's right, a hard-boiled detective, one who went around looking for clues, sleuthing for ideas on how to solve a crime, learning the art of cryptography to foil the bad spies and other detectives who are trying to muscle in on my jobs. Or a spy, one of those two; it didn't really matter which. There was a certain romantic feel to that line of work, always living on the edge, always doing things that people have little idea is going on, walking about in the shadows, seeing things that people don't see, and best of all, achieving successes that the normal folks would never have thought originated from one. Of course, as time went on, it made less and less sense to be working as a detective nor spy (something about level of danger and the need to be realistic on what my body can and cannot do), but many of the job traits that I loved seemed to manifest themselves as part of my personality. For instance, while I used to like the limelight a lot when I was younger, I tend to shun it in favour of working deep within the shadows and making magic happen. Even today, I still have a tendency to walk in the shadows, avoiding light (both literally and metaphorically), and preferring muchly to work hard in a secluded location than to draw attention to myself for no rhyme nor reason.

Alright, I have no idea what my direction of thought is... it is getting rather late, and I ought to go get some sleep. Till next time, I suppose.

Word

I think I'm in love.

Tough Enough

Tough Enough------Vanilla Ninja

Baby only the strong will survive
All the mysteries of life
Only fantasy keeps you away
In the lonely fields of those broken shields

So keep on kicking
The bomb is ticking
Don't stop, don't be a runaway
Go for the fire
Baby are you tough enough
Just keep on living
And don't start giving
The devil good reason
To get you in the seasons of heartbreak
Baby are you tough enough

Baby are you tough enough

Yeah my skin is a dangerous place
Never trust my smiling face
With a touch I can change all your dreams
And my kiss can wake
Feelings you can't take

Baby are you tough enough
Baby are you tough enough

I will meet you there
Coz I need you there
Oh tonight

Baby are you tough enough
Baby are you tough enough

I'm tough enough!

Lyrics courtesy www.lyricstime.com.

Regurgitation

The night has finally fallen, and after a couple of poems later, I feel as though I am ready to say a few things again. Words come quickly these days; none of that plodding prose that I have been rather fond of not too long ago, but more of those fast worded poems that I once frequently do.

It has been almost a week since I turned twenty-five officially, and to be honest, it doesn't feel much from being twenty-four so far. Perhaps this is a sign that the times have indeed changed, and that there is only the timeless middle age aeon that awaits me as opposed to the youthful exuberance of aging by yet another year---within this epoch, time seems to slow down a whole lot more, and each year just feels like the previous, with nothing fanciful nor different in the making. Many things have happened within the week, much to my surprise, considering that I did not really plan to have any surprises of that sort in the first place. But not all things are bad either, to have a word fairness thrown in for good mixture.

I suppose that at the end of the day, I am still a passionate person, no matter how much I might want to deny that by taking on that whole ``I'm The_Laptop'' persona and living out the geek dream/life---it is unnatural to my being/existence. The truth is, I probably feel more at home being myself than trying to be another type of myself---if the semantic of this sentence hasn't confused you utterly yet. How should I put this in a way that expresses its delicate nature... there is a me that is not the me that most people tend to see, a separation of the public from the private I suppose.

I have tried melding the two together, but of course the results of that, we can easily see from all that has occurred since the past. I've tried keeping one and not the other, but nothing good came of that either. I guess I just need to learn to live with the fact that I do have different personalities that I show people, and maybe one day the folks who matter care about it.

The recent romp through Facebook ``stalking'' on my friends back from CMU gave me a rude awakening of some sort; they remind me the tenuous threads of human relationships. One moment two people can be so madly in love, the next they are broken up and each has found another [hopefully], and that there is little contact with the one whom they were once with. It kind of jarred me back to reality, considering that I was a part of the cycle before. I still cannot understand why people can do this so easily---aren't human relationships meaningful enough that such arbitrary breakages are not really that necessary?

Maybe to many people, I am just a passing dream. Perhaps it is not too far from the truth---I do like blending into the background nowadays, a stark contrast to the glamour showman of my past. Somehow my philosophy on life has changed a lot when I realised that I am just one of nearly seven billion people on the planet, competing with many of them to obtain the living space and living necessities to lead a decently comfortable life. Maybe the people whom I once called friends are no longer that friendly after all, due to one reason or another. Or maybe there is truth in the phrase ``people change'', and that I, even though I thought otherwise, was also changing a lot since the last time I stopped to meditate upon the issues at hand.

*sigh*

This is fast turning into a long and aimless rant, but I think that I earned the opportunity to do this, for it has been a while since I wrote anything of substantial length here. People, they interest me, yet they hurt me ever so often; I am at a quandary on how best to deal with that. Is it really too much to ask for a serious relationship? Or could it be that I have been barking up the wrong tree all the while? Perhaps my ideas on what consitutes a ``proper human relationship'' is antiquated to the point that it is unsustainable in the current world climate.

But at the back of my mind, I'm always a little hopeful. Maybe one day someone will see through me, and love me wholeheartedly, through my strong points and through my faults. Maybe that day will come soon. Who knows? Fate has a strange way of communicating ideas anyway.

------

In less harrowing rants, my recent weighing of my mass under the Earth's gravitational field has yielded an approximate mass of 75kg. This is a whopping 10kg less than the 85kg that I started with nearly eight months ago. I suppose my overall strategy of eating less and working out more did have some positive effect towards my weight control. I think that I have another 7kg or so left to reduce in order to get to the upper bound of what is considered an acceptable body mass.

We'll Meet Again

Some time back I watched Dr Strangelove, and this song came to mind:

67×30

Some things that I plan to do this year:

• Get into grad school
• Eat lighter, blander meals
• Write another novel (part of a series of novels)
• 100 short stories in 100 consecutive days
• Perform in one major concert
• Submit at least one paper
• Read Lovecraft [completely]
• Read Edgar Allan Poe [completely]
• Read one Jane Austen book
• Get a drivers' license
• Live each day befitting of the fleeting moment

I suppose that's a sufficiently challenging list.

I Am Calm

I am calm. Everything is under control. Life is not too bad. Amid the cyclone of activity surrounding me, I, alone, stand in the eye of the storm, contemplating and maintaining euthymia. The chaos spreads, ebbing and flowing, but I stay stolid betwixt the differing tides of fortune.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2009:

1. 136 poems posted here
2. 138 essays/rants posted here
3. 11 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 286 articles, down from the 331 articles in 2008.

That's an average of about 0.78 pieces of writing a day, compared to the 0.91 last year. Once again, I can't say that I have written any less than last year, because that NaNoWriMo entry consumed what is equivalent to roughly 76 essays/rants due to its length (and that the mean length of an essay/rant that I post here is about 800 words or so). I don't seem to write that much often these days, either from writer's fatigue or just from the general discomfort about life in general. Of particular note is the closing of the blog that Ida and I co-authored; it occurred at roughly the same time that she broke up with me last year. Nevertheless, the twothree stories that were there have been transplanted to my own prose/stories blog as republished entries, in case anyone wants to read them.

To date, I have written about 1385 pieces of writing over the last 5 years. 5 years! I can't believe that I have been writing on such a public platform for such an amount of time. And all I could remember then was that I started my first blog to record some of the poems that I was writing which I used to emote and talk about the parts of life that seemed to be going all wrong for me. 2009 has been simultaneously the most eventful and the most heart-breaking of all the years that I have lived through thus far. It is almost exactly half-a-year ago that Ida broke up with me, leaving me without a soul for a few good months, which inadvertently led to my first and ever binge drinking with my colleagues almost a month after that, which caused my first and last drunken hangover. Of course, prior to that, happiness was all abound, when I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and was looking forward to a decent future.

And now, after that event six months prior, it seems that time and luck has both run out for me. All things that could go wrong, went wrong indeed, and I'm not even sure how I am holding on together right now. Needless to say, the past is catching up with me, and once more the future is clouded with doubt as I attempt to figure the best way to navigate through the obstacles that keep getting thrown in my way. Not an auspicious start to a new year, but we take what we can get.

So, goals! I think I've awakened something even deeper inside me after NaNoWriMo; I seem to have a stronger interest in literature once more, and am starting to have grandiose ideas that need to be put down on the metaphorical paper so that I can express the ideas that I have. And so, here's to more writing ahead.

And may 2010 be a much better year than 2009 ever was.

(I Just) Died in your Arms

(I Just) Died In Your Arms------Cutting Crew

Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must have been something you said
I just died in your arms tonight

I keep looking for something I can't get
Broken hearts lie all around me
And I don't see an easy way to get out of this
Her diary it sits on the bedside table
The curtains are closed, the cats in the cradle
Who would've thought that a boy like me could come to this

Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been something you said
I just died in your arms tonight
Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been some kind of kiss
I should've walked away

Is there any just cause for feeling like this?
On the surface I'm a name on a list
I try to be discreet, but then blow it again
I've lost and found, it's my final mistake
She's loving by proxy, no give and all take
'Cos I've been thrilled to fantasy one too many times

Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been something you said
I just died in your arms tonight
Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been some kind of kiss
I should've walked away

It was a long hot night
She made it easy, she made it feel right
But now it's over the moment has gone
I followed my hands not my head, i know i was wrong

Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been something you said
I just died in your arms tonight
Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been some kind of kiss
I should've walked away

Upgrade Day?

Today seems to be a day of system updates. Edythe-EEE has Xubuntu Karmic Koala running sweetly, and she is still continuing in her task of performing trial factoring for Mersenne prime numbers during the [long] hours that I have nothing to run on her. Elyse just had her 64-bit edition of Xubuntu Jaunty Jackalope updated to the 64-bit edition of Karmic Koala, and things seem to be dandy for her also, though I probably need to muck around with getting the PPA version of Pidgin working so that Pidgin is always updated each time a new release comes out---there are just too many wonky things that happen that require an update to ensure that things are working, something about having to deal with the legions of people who are still on propriety networks whose protocols are not very intuitive nor reasonable.

Apart from the various Xubuntu upgrades, Elyse also has her cygwin environment upgraded. There's no real compelling reason for that to occur, except that it's something shiny, and since I'm already in the mood of updating systems, I might as well do it too. In other news, I have also gotten SDL and MinGW in the guise of Dev-C++ up and running. I need SDL to muck around with preparing an emulated version of this, which is a rather cute little small-pixel system. MinGW is so that I can actually compile the code across a whole slew of platforms to run them on, which is always awesome.

Alright, I need to go for a run; I think I'm addicted to endorphins. Till next time.

The Koala Moves

After about a day or so of arm-wrestling, I've managed to get Xubuntu Karmic Koala running on Edythe-EEE. Things are surprisingly smooth, with everything seemingly working out of the box. However, I take offense at the default colour scheme and layout, and had to change it back to something that I preferred on the rather small pixel estate. I've even tested the external monitor VGA socket, and it appears to work flawlessly. Hurray, I suppose.

In the Driver's Seat

Now that I'm back in the driver's seat once more, I find that I missed being in control of things in general. For too long I have relinquished the power of control to others, simply because I was not exactly in the right state of mind to handle myself, but I suppose that it is time for me to figure out things that will better benefit me, considering that the worst is just about to be over.

Remember how I think that life sucks completely? Well, it still does, in my book, but I think that at the end of the day, the amount of suckage is highly dependent on the amount of crap that you are willing to put up with. If you are willing to put up with a lot of crap, then suckage will increase correspondingly, but if you take your life seriously enough, you may reduce the amount of suckage that you need to actually take in. Long story short, we have some control on our lives, and no one and nothing should make us relinquish this control easily.

That said, here's a pet peeve: the word ``utilise'' or ``utilize'' for those of you who think that the `z' spelling is cooler (it isn't, and it requires me to move my left pinky down on the QWERTY keyboard). I cannot understand why anyone would keep using that word instead of the semantically equivalent (and much easier on the eyes/brain!) word ``use''. So, instead of saying things like ``he used the computer to do something'', many people will write ``the computer is utilised to do something'' or ``he utilised the computer to do something''. To me, these sound worse than some of the scrawlings that I have written; somehow people seem to think that the word ``utilise'' is more sophisticated and aristocratic than plain old ``use'', but I beg to differ. Actually, I take offense to people who keep throwing around bombast for the sake of appearing intelligent, without actually using the word in the correct context to provide the necessary nuance, which incidentally is the only reason that I condone the use of words that do not appear in common conversation. What's the purpose of a language for communication when the people keep trying to obfuscate meanings with long and hard-to-understand words?

December is fast reaching a close, and the year of 2009 is wrapping up quickly. Soon, 2010 will arrive, and with a new year comes new resolutions and new viewpoints on life. Maybe by then I will discover even more about myself that I never knew before.

Imagine

Ever felt an itch before? You know, the kind you feel immediately after being stung by some insect that you didn't realise existed? Remember that itch yet? Yes?

Now imagine that itch is all over your body, from your face, to your neck to your torso, to your upper and lower arms, to the back of your knee, to your calves to the tops of your feet---everywhere where there might be skin, it itches. Feeling it yet?

Now imagine further that you try to relieve that itch. How would you do that? By scratching at it, right? Imagine how you might relieve an itch that is all over the body at once. Imagine that the itching is intense, and that you need to relieve it at all costs, because it is highly annoying right?

Normal scratching doesn't seem to work, does it, since the more you scratch at it, the itchier it becomes. You'll keep scratching until your nail inadvertently breaks the fragile skin from over scratching. Now there's something new: you have a small skin wound that hurts like hell when water is run over it. Worse, since the itch is extensive and you had to scratch everywhere, you are covered with many of these micro wounds throughout your skin.

Imagine taking a shower in that. Imagine taking a shower using antiseptic bath lotions with that. Now imagine leaving the shower. The skin will slowly dry itself up and suddenly you find yourself in this rather uncomfortable and stiff situation. What do you do now? The itch returns; it always does. You put moisturiser and hope for the best. But the itch will never go away.

Imagined all that yet? Welcome to my world of living hell.

December Look-Back

It's a Sunday now, not something that I am annoyed at, but I just have a general sense of laziness that comes from this rather traditional day of rest. Life is chugging along, and bullets are being bitten, and at times I just keep wondering about what is just beyond the horizon of my view on life. It's also December, which is usually a good time to start wrapping up the year that was 2009 and to wonder and plan for the year that is to come, namely 2010.

So many things have happened throughout this year, and yet the saga hasn't quite ended yet because there are more epic struggles to come. It's a struggle always from one end of life to the other, but eventually, things will work out right, as long as I keep on living and thinking. I'm keeping few contacts these days, preferring to just sit down and hide behind my persona and computer, to do quite a bit of introspection and to ``sort things out'' in my head. It's a new-found feeling, when the ancient ``curse'' of wanting someone to love has reduced in its strength to the point that I am just uncaring about that particular aspect of life. I've loved once, maybe that's enough for this lifetime. If I continue to do things that can help myself as well as others, perhaps it will be more rewarding that seeking out that ``other for me''.

Time has taught me a lot. The past year alone has taught me so much about myself that even I get a little scared at what I learnt. In the past, I longed to return to the work place and do things, but somehow now that I am in there, I long for the academic life where I could just study, eat and drink with little care in the world except for the work that I needed to do. But these feelings are not of regret, but of nostalgia---truth is, it is still more fulfilling to work than do just do homework upon homework all the time.

My perpetual job of keeping myself sane has taken a new twist in events: I am branching out in the things that I am doing other than work. A while back, I started taking Aikido lessons, and now I'm part of the department's ``gym-team''. NaNoWriMo set my writing fire ablaze into a conflagaration of pure desire, and I suddenly have an insatiable need to write as opposed to merely a voracious one. Soon, when time permits, I will return to sketching, and to master a few more tricks with juggling balls; these things are the other random stuff that I do to keep sane in this very messed up and very hurried world.

I think I'm starting to ``sink down'' more comfortably into myself now, ever since I decided that going around trying to woo anyone is a fruitless exercise on my part---if a girl is interested in me, she should also bear an equal amount of effort in convincing me that she's the ``right one''. Time is a strange mistress, but I think I'll slowly learn her moves and figure things out.

Okay, enough of procrastination---the weather is comfortable, and I still have graduate school applications to clear. Time to haul it.

Inspiration for NaNoWriMo 2009

In a previous post, I promised to write about the inspiration for the entry, and so here it is. Since there's a lot of potentially spoiler material, things are kept in code as usual. [Ed: I removed the code, since it really isn't necessary I suppose.]

If you happen to have crossed paths with me in life before, you would find that the source material in this novel to be strangely familiar. You are not too far from the truth; a large part of the story draws parallels that have gone one in one aspect of my life. The chief difference of course is that the characters are all fictional, and so are the events that are presented. The locations and mannerisms of some of the cast are based on some of the places that I have been to and the people that I have interacted, with heavy fictionalisation of course. Actually, let's just introduce the full cast and talk more about them here. All these information comes from my idea file, which, as you might recall, is my master planning document.

Heng Kar

This guy is the protagonist's protagonist. I planned my story to have two inter-weaving story lines, one in first person perspective, the other in third person perspective. Heng Kar is the one that I chose to write in first person. His name is a play on the word ``hacker'', which is basically what he is: an aspiring programmer within the computer club of the school. I chose Heng Kar to be the first person perspective due to the ease in conveying his thoughts and ideas to the reader; it's hard to go wrong with talking about what a geek is thinking, particularly on rather objective things like computer programs, and even remarking on the behaviours of people around him/her. I gave him a few ``typical'' roles that he might play in school life, like being a subject representative for Mathematics, and liking soya bean milk. Initially, I had wanted Heng Kar to ``merge'' with Kah Hao later on as two conflicting parts of the same person, but decided somewhere during the middle of the writing to avoid doing so to avoid the cliché ``multiple personality syndrome'' trope that will most likely occur. Due to that rather last minute change, I made it such that Heng Kar used to be in Chinese Orchestra as a dizi (笛子) player, which made the eventual merging easier.

Kah Hao

This guy is the other protagonist, but due to his third person style of presentation, he seems a little more distant to the reader than Heng Kar. The choice of name was sort of random; only sort of because the initials of Kah Hao were deliberately chosen to be the reverse of Heng Kar, which plays upon my earlier concept of them being a part of the same person, a concept that I ditched midway due to the implausibility of the matter. Kah Hao's choice of musical instrument is the dizi (笛子), which is coincidentally the one that I play in real life. Actually, it's not coincidental; the details of his instrument bag are exactly like that of the one that I own, and Kah Hao is a strong reflection of the younger musician in me back in the day. I chose to keep him far away from school to show his penchant of sleeping on buses, which made his three-thousand-ish-word-long dream sequence more relevant when he slept on the bus on the way back from the rehearsal at the orchestra. Again, since I wanted him to ``merge'' with Heng Kar in the end, I didn't make him a part of the school orchestra till much later, which made it easier for them to meet and lead to the final conclusion that I wrote for the novel.

Siew Wah

Siew Wah is a joke, literally. His name sounds like 笑话 in Cantonese, which means literally ``a joke''. He's kinda the smart sidekick of Heng Kar, and I liked to use him as a general geekier-than-thou-art character, which is useful when I need to graft in the reasons as to why Heng Kar could transfer out of the robotics division into a hard core programming division. I also wanted a sounding board for Heng Kar, in the sense that I find it nice for Heng Kar to actually talk to someone as opposed to thinking deeply about things in his head without verbalising, which makes him sound neurotic more than anything else.

Ms Tan

She's a Scary Teacher, but one who is reasonable. She is based on an old teacher I once had, but I made Ms Tan a little milder than the one I had for class (sorry), otherwise Siew Wah would not get away with the things that he has done, and the story will probably be stuck where they are trying to get out of trouble from her.

Tiffany

She's a real mystery. I don't really know much about her, but she seems to have some kind of liking for Kah Hao, or at least, I tried to insinuate that she had some kind of liking of Kah Hao. It was hard to work in a romance angle, and I didn't really try to force the issue---two thirteen-year-olds dating while I'm trying to weave the two story lines of Heng Kar and Kah Hao together? No thanks... too much work. I just kept her as a good yangqin (扬琴) player who accompanies Kah Hao. Tiffany is an amalgamation of two girls that I know who also played the yangqin (扬琴), and I'm not telling if the crush that Kah Hao had on Tiffany is reflective of what I might have felt.

Mr Ang

I had some fun writing Mr Ang, the retired professional musician who is trying to keep the orchestra together while maintaining an element of fun while he looks like a scary being. The observations that he made of the music that they played are based on the words that I have heard a few of my music directors said before, and I liberally used what they said while tailoring them to the pieces that were played. Oh, the music are real, so are the titles and the nuances that I highlighted through the commentary---it is as real as it gets.

Zhang Jie

I basically needed a reason for Kah Hao to be running up the stairs and colliding with Heng Kar for that initial meeting and the first step for the merge of the two storylines. It would sound a bit weird if the main conductor (Mr Tew) were doing the conducting and then they all disappeared half-way---the timing also meant that it was probably more believable if a student conductor were present, which was based on what I had observed from some of the school-based orchestras that I have seen.

Tian Kun

I needed a character to have more prowess in dizi playing than Kah Hao, both to show that Kah Hao had external training, and to provide a natural means of ``unearthing'' Heng Kar's hidden talent at dizi playing. Remember that at the time of the novel, Kah Hao had to rehearse with Tiffany for a concert, so having him ``vet'' Heng Kar was unrealistic. Besides, I needed an oxymoron character (muscular guy playing dizi? hahahaha) who has more purchasing power than the thirteen-year-olds to supply the dizi for Heng Kar to play.

Mr Cheong

He was an excuse for me to write that whole excursion to Sum Lum Mall. It's my play on the shopping habits of the über-geeks.

So that's the cast of ``A Slice of Life with a Twist of Lemon''. The locations where all the action takes place are also inspired in part by real life and my reawakened imagination. They are further described below.

Hilltop High School

Ah hahahahaha! This one is quite fun; it's a play on my old secondary school (can you guess how?). In fact, the old campus of my old secondary school features prominently in the story, particularly that spiral staircase where I spent many hundreds of words describing as people walked up and down, ran up and down and crashing into each other. That old campus is probably gone by now, since the said school has since moved away to a bigger campus to accommodate the increasing number of students from a slew of new programmes that they have come up with over the years.

Chinese Orchestra of the Community Club

This one keeps remaining unnamed in the story, but the location and the orchestra itself is loosely based on the Chinese Orchestra that I play with at Teck Ghee Community Club. That said, the people involved are not wholly based on the people who are in the orchestra; specifically Mr Ang is really a figment of my imagination. Honest! The description of the room is vaguely similar to the actual layout in the actual room where the inspiration was drawn from.

Computer Laboratory at Hilltop High School

Like all the sub-locations in the Hilltop High campus, this one is based on a real computer laboratory that I spent many afternoons in. Most of the descriptions are about the computer lab circa 2000, when they revamped the old layout of computers into the new one. But I was bummed enough to not write a definite year in the story, who knows when it occurred?

Sum Lum Mall

Hahahahaha... my personal favourite. This is really a weakly disguised version of ``Sim Lim Square'', the biggest computer parts selling complex in Singapore. I just tried to mangle one aspect of the name, which gave me that weird sounding one of ``Sum Lum Mall''.

Alright, so that's the [main] cast and the [main] locations. Bus rides and excruciating waiting times at the pedestrian crossings are just a fairly cheap way of keeping the word count moving as I stalled for some self-thinking processes to occur in the characters, especially for Kah Hao and Heng Kar.

Initially, I started off with the idea of writing two seemingly divergent story lines, with one told from a first person perspective, and the other with the third person perspective, and to unify them towards the end. It was originally meant to be an ``inner struggle'' story, with two competing ideologies within the head of the protagonist manifesting themselves as two completely different people, but as noted earlier, I found that a bit risky and not worth the careful segregation that was needed to make the story believable. So I modified it such that two real people were involved, and then the rest of the story concept was still the same.

Was I satisfied with the work? Well, sort of, since there are so many sub-plots that I didn't have the chance to flesh out, from Kah Hao's relationship with his parents, Kah Hao's seeming crush on Tiffany, Heng Kar's rise towards programming eliteness, Kah Hao and Heng Kar's frienship with each other, Ms Tan's views on the ``meteoric'' rise of Heng Kar, more computer algorithms lessons from Mr Kang, geeky jokes---well you get the idea. So much to write, so little to write them; I had to make sure I actually ended the story by November in order to ``count'' for NaNoWriMo.

So there you have it. The ``spoilers'' and inspirations on how I got to writing ``A Slice of Life with a Twist of Lemon''. What are you waiting for? Download the original draft of the novel here and start reading! (=

A Rant

Now that I am sufficiently recovered from the month of literary abandon, I think that I can probably write a few more things here.

Time does fly rather quickly when one is not paying too much attention to it, either through the flow of time itself, or through pure procrastination. So many things have occurred within the month of November, and sometimes I just wonder if I truly knew what was going on or more importantly, what had happened. The month of literary abandon; it's probably an escapism for me, to run away from the issues that have been troubling me all these while, to hide from my worries in the hope that when I'm finally ready to meet them, I would be strong enough to face them one by one in a controlled manner, as opposed to being completely lost in my senses in dealing with them all in one go.

I'm making lots of changes in life. November is a month of change, in many ways. The sadness that plagued me in the past still exists, but is even more carefully wrapped up among the layers of time and shielding and protective shell that I have constructed around myself. Time will come again when these layers are once more removed to expose the rather vulnerable self that is the ``real'' me. Meanwhile, more and more changes are coming in place. One novel done, a few revisions of an aimless personal statement for graduate school applications have been written and discarded; I'm finally ready to start writing personal statements that actually concretely answers the questions that are asked in each of the seven different applications. Yes, there is large amounts of change alright.

I've decided to grow out a moustache. I'm still deciding whether to wear my hair long or short, but given the circumstance in which I am in (hot and humid weather that is Singapore), I'm probably just going to go for the short hair as per usual. Maybe when I'm in graduate school, I will just keep my hair long and tie it in a pony tail or something, just to separate the me from the past from the me in the present who is going towards the future. Oh, a moustache, `why?' one might ask. It's a characteristic change; facial hair has always been deemed ``masculine'', and moustaches have a way of keeping women away, something that I am most inclined to do for this upcoming two years---I swore an oath to myself to not be involved in petty relationship-related things during the upcoming two years, starting from August this year. I just don't want to be hurt again; it is hard on myself because I need to actually recover from the blow, and the recovery process tends to be nearly twice as long as a relationship truly took. Recovery is not fun nor easy; it doesn't help when one's surroundings are full of peers who have married/are getting married, since it just keeps opening up the wounds that were just barely freshly healing.

Wounds. Deep, deep wounds of the heart, things that cannot be easily fixed, as far as I know. There's no known cure for healing the heart; the best that we have to date is to let time do the healing. Yet time itself is a double-edged sword; it heals alright, but it also causes a lot of discomfort along the way, with all the yearnings that need to be controlled, the musings of what-if that needs to be reduced, and the sudden pangs of sadness that strike when one suddenly feels the absence of one who was once so close to the self. These are feelings that are hard to put precisely in words; maybe only those who have fallen in and out of love can truly comprehend what I am saying here.

Weirdness. Till now, I am still as weird/odd as ever. Few people see me beyond that veneer of happiness that I show around, with my wacky ways and somewhat relaxed outlook. But that is just a façade that I put up for the world---I've said many times that it is easier to just project one particular personality to certain groups of people so that it makes it easier for them to process the [limited] complexity that governs my personality and behaviour.

Occult calculations and other pseudo-scientific methods of divination have predicted that it is my life path to be loved by everyone than by an other, and as time goes by, I am starting to become a believer of that prophecy myself, given all that I have been through and all else that I think I will be going through. But like all skeptics, I still have my reservations in believing completely in something that is not well reasoned from first principles, but that nagging sensation is getting harder and harder to ignore. Maybe there is a higher purpose in my life that transcends getting closer to a special someone to love; maybe the assimilation of knowledge is the purpose of my life, instead of love. But how would I know?

Past and present, juxtapositions of different temporal zones. Sometimes I feel as though I'm trapped in some kind of time trap, with no easy way to escape. There is always this feeling of a higher dimension that I am vaguely aware of, yet cannot fully attain---it is puzzling indeed. But why would I care anyway? I'm a fatalist in many ways, believing to a large degree that there's a limit on what we can do under the ambit of free will; all that we think to be free will can most likely be a false feeling of being in control, for is it not true that we all do die in the end, no matter what choices we make? Seeing life as an end of the means is just the most ridiculous way of looking at things---it is the most depressing. Life is about the journey, not the destination. Screw higher purpose, screw meaning; we make things up as we go along with life: the things that make more sense, we keep them and for those that don't make any sense, we can just dump them and move on. What's the point of dogma or the idea that there exists one true idea that all must conform to?

Okay, I'm getting off tangent. That's the problem of splitting up a post into multiple writing sessions, since it gets increasingly hard to keep the line of thought more or less consistent, particularly also when the afternoon heat is getting to the mind and keeping it sufficiently sedated that sleep seems to be the most welcoming thing now.

Maybe something less incoherent the next time.

NaNoWriMo 2009! Official Winner!

After churning 61,907 words, I think I don't need to say more about this. Do visit my personal domain to download the manuscript for the first draft. (=

还是会寂寞

I like the riff on this piece, very catchy:

《还是会寂寞》——陈绮贞

早已忘了想你的滋味是什么
因为每分每秒都被你占据在心中
你的一举一动牵扯在我生活的隙缝
谁能告诉我离开你的我会有多自由

也曾想过躲进别人温暖的怀中
可是这么一来就一点意义也没有
我的高尚情操一直不断提醒着我
离开你的我不论过多久 还是会寂寞

别对我小心翼翼 别让我看轻你
跟着我 勇敢的走下去
别劝我回心转意 这不是廉价的爱情
看着我 对我说着爱我

Lyrics courtesy of www.inkui.com.

Technical Aspect of NaNoWriMo 2009

Now that I have completed the main task of NaNoWriMo to hit 50k words (up to now, I even have a 2k word buffer), I suppose it might be interesting to talk a little about the set up that I used to work on the novel this month.

For starters, I used vim as my workhorse text editor. I kept a running skeleton/outline of my story thus far, including cast, locations and other relevant information in a file aptly known as idea. It was a very basic set up using a semi-hierarchy system, without any other plugins or things that provided better outlining support. As for the actual novel, I ran two different tools, vim when I was working on Edythe-EEE, and Q10, a minimalistic full screen text editor with live word count and word count target setting, and a clock when I was working on Elyse. I made some modifications for vim on Edythe-EEE though; I remapped j and k to gj and gk respectively, and made sure to unset the textwidth variable. The cumulation of these changes made vim much easier to use to edit ``single-line paragraphs'', since the gj and gk commands allow screen-based movements across the line, instead of just skipping lines (and thus paragraphs!).

I also had a LaTeX source file set up which included the various text files that comprise my chapters. The LaTeX file was set up for A5 paper and would be the means in which I would be typesetting my text. I could have done everything in one file, but the tagging from LaTeX would interfere with the word count, and that it would start to get very unwieldy when all the text of the novel were in one place: the huge quantities of text just makes things unnecessary fatiguing. These were supplemented by a simple bash script that ran pdflatex and wc to get the PDF file of the novel and the word count of the text respectively.

To top everything up, all the files were version controlled using subversion on a space that I had on Assembla, which made synchronising between Edythe-EEE and Elyse an easy task to do.

Maybe I will talk about my inspiration for this piece of writing some other time.

I Has 50,019 Words!

Greetings and salutations and all forms of well wishes from me! I am half-back from NaNoWriMo, having hit the 50k barrier today. As of now, my word count stands at 50,019 words, and to be honest, I'm not quite down with the story yet---there's still a bunch of things to tie up and conclude.

What does this mean?

I am continuing to write the story despite ``winning'' NaNoWriMo in the conventional sense. The aim this time, of course, is to end the story, and so we'll see how far that goes.

Meanwhile, I think I deserve a drink for a job well done.

I Love the Whole World and All Its Messed Up Folks

In reference to this:

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

First Slack from NaNoWriMo

M3h. I'm a bad person---I took a day off from NaNoWriMo yesterday to work on my personal statement, which still needs to be reworked. Grr...

Some times I wish I were smarter. Or dead... one of those two.

Just means I don't have to deal with the messes of life. Or something like that.

Crash out time.

More Mumblings...

Things must always be... complicated. Or so it seems. I really don't know. I'm running out of words, having used up nearly 2,000 of them each day for NaNoWriMo. To date, I have reached about 34,014 words, and am fast on my way to the next big milestone before the 50,000---the 35,000 mark. It's a psychological thing; things seem to look really far and impossible until at least half the distance (be it by count or time or anything for that matter) has occurred, and then the magic barrier of three-quarters is reached, everything suddenly seems to be tractable, and even pleasurable at times.

Anyway, I have gone all off-tangent again, such a common occurrence. Right, things are always complicated in my world, it seems. It is as though it has been ordained in the heavens that whatever I do must be plagued with all kinds of nasties, so that the eventual outcome will always be tainted by a bittersweet flavour.

Weak in the Presence of Beauty

Mulling

Well, I'm still alive and well, I suppose, considering that I have not really said much here for quite a while. It has been quite a ride for the last few days in this month of November, suffice to say, there is a lot to be done, and I hope that I can catch up with everything eventually without killing myself out or tiring myself to the point that I cannot do anything productive.

I think I might be slipping into a mild depression of sorts, if cycles are of any indication. At the very least, I am still in good company, with family and a few remaining friends around to quietly support me. Sometimes I just like throwing in the towel and giving up on everything, but then some survival instinct kicks in and I can't just quit quite so, and I end up being a fighter all over again. Such is my life, I suppose.

I wonder sometimes if the path of the ronin is indeed the one that I am destined to walk. It seems that each time I start to look at the people around me, I find that they are drifting further and further away, making things just a little more sad and depressing. The great pillars of support that I used to have can be seen as basically being non-existent---I'm not sure if I can just survive based on myself alone without these support.

*sighs*

Life is so complicated; sometimes I envy those who decided to take matters into their own hands and just end it---at least they end based on their own terms and conditions, unbeholden to the other people that are around them. Perhaps that's why I keep feeling sorry for myself, since I never seem to have the guts necessary to make a break from the past and to go on my own vision of my future. Or maybe my values are strong enough to disallow me to just cut loose and run from life, since responsibilities weigh me down and making me unable to just make a break for it in the most irresponsible manner.

Maybe I will post more in the near future about what is troubling me; or maybe not. Who really knows?

NaNoWriMo 2009!

NaNoWriMo 2009 in progress... I'm currently writing my butt off, in addition to doing all the graduate school applications.

If you are interested in keeping track of my word count progress, you can track it here.