[Short] Fiction LaTeX Toolchain Update and Other Stories

Ah... so close to completing The Outer Worlds! If only I didn't actually spend time working on other things... but I believe I am jumping the gun here.

I finally spent some time reading Deep Learning, and have something to admit---the more I read it, the more I am starting to agree with Brian that I am wasting my time. It is not that the concept of deep learning is bad, it is just that, unlike more ``stupid'' algorithms like say decision trees, or even some kind of Bayesian belief network, there seems to be nothing innately interesting about deep learning. I get that they are trying to attack the machine learning problem through the use of function composition as the way of generating complexity out of algorithmically simpler units, but there is almost nothing intuitive about it, just really dry tensor mathematics with a tinge of function optimisation in disguise.

Maybe it's because I'm only [nearly] halfway through the 802-page e-book (387 as at the time of writing). But honestly, it doesn't look like it is going to get any better. I can probably understand what goes into a deep learning system, but it is unlikely to draw me close in the way the other learning architectures would.

Heck, even SVMs are more appealing from the intuitive and theoretical aspect.

I think part of the reason is that a large part of deep learning is not amenable to proper human understanding, at least in the way it is being presented. It's a case of ``here, pick/design some deep learning architecture (equivalent to deciding on the basis functions, and the space of function composition to operate in), chuck enough data and time at it, and we can universally approximate the unknown function to `compress' the data representation for future prediction''.

But I should really be drawing conclusions after finishing the book. As I said though, it really doesn't seem to be getting any more interesting. If this is the kind of work that people are expecting data science to be, wow, it's probably the most hypocritcal thing for me to take up those kinds of jobs.

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Deep Learning aside, I accidentally spent some time doing more fixes on my various toolchains, not necessarily related to the maintenance of my personal domain. I was actually debating on whether to work on Print Me for today when I realised that I still had Elizabeth left to complete.

For those who aren't familiar with my blog-based scribbles, I have a tendency to create nicely typeset versions of such ``serialised'' works after I have completed the story. That I hadn't generated one for Elizabeth was a hint that I haven't completed the story, despite the 25 parts that I have written thus far.

I tried building the PDF from the current writing so as to read the story as a whole to see what is left to write, and found some warnings that were being tossed at me by LaTeX---they had something to do with the weird margins that I was using. I fiddled about before finally realising that I had already fixed the style sheet that I was using for my fiction back in 2015---I just didn't propagate the changes. And so, I spent some time updating the pipelines for each of these standalone stories' typesetting, and regenerated those PDFs to replace the old [and bad] ones. The dates of the stories are still the same as before, but the margins are definitely more consistent.

Naturally, I didn't get to read Elizabeth to determine the amount of work left. I didn't work on Print Me either. Maybe tomorrow.

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On one final note, I had finally bring myself to writing a quick tool to identify duplicate images by visual perception. The situation is this, I have a set of one thousand or so image files that I have been collecting over time to act as desktop background images. They tend to be of high resolution, and come from many sources, and so one of the first things that I did was to write a script that will rename them according to some schema that keeps their order and resolution ``obvious''.

Some images are just too lovely, and after a long enough time, I accidentally have some duplicates from accidentally redownloading them for storage again.

Visually inspecting which ones are similar from Windows Explorer alone was stupidly impossible, and it was obvious that I needed to use automation to help, specifically some kind of similarity comparison.

Armed with Pillow, I wrote a Python3 script that would convert each image into a row-vector of 20 dimensions, with each entry being a number from [-1,+1] representing absolute black and absolute white from a Lanczos-resampled grayscale conversion of the original image.

Similarity was then done using a variation of cosine similarity---I used the cosine-angle in radians and set the angle threshold to 0.01 to claim similarity.

Images that were similar were physically dumped into a directory representing the cluster, while images that had nothing similar to them were just copied wholesale.

From there, I could do the visual inspection (there were 10 clusters of similar images) and weed out what I didn't want, before re-running the renaming script on the unique-ified images.

Was it overkill? Maybe, especially when the images that were similar appeared to be exactly the same---it wasn't even the case that one was a higher resolution version of the same image as another. Since I did not have the wherewithal to actually see which of the similarity cases were there, it was just faster to use a more general algorithm.

The job was done, and I am happy.

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I think that I have been writing a little too much about writing random scripts/updating various toolchains that I use to operate my cyberspace affairs. I suppose it is just the season---it seems that I am currently in the ``hot'' phase of programming useful scripts/fixing old ones.

There is still one more thing that is niggling at the back of my mind that I would want to do before I am ``programmed out'', and that involves music.

I may also want to do some lighter reading instead of Deep Learning, perhaps a short anthology of short stories, or even poems. I don't know which just yet, but I have some decent ideas. And they are likely to be dead-tree versions too, just for variety.

I think that's all I have for today. Maybe after I shower, I will try and finish up one of the endings for The Outer Worlds.

Maybe.

Anyway, till the next update.

Website Tooling In Happiest State

Eh, while I was chasing weird Chromium related font rendering bugs, I fixed a couple of other nonsense as well.

1. Added the ability to stack one Unifont character over another to facilitate in-line cipher notation information in a regular paragraph HTML element;
2. Hunted down the missing mtime modifier for the minified-GZip generator for HTML files;
3. Made the sitemap generator be idempotent for the minified-GZip generator.

My personal website is maintained through hand-coded HTML files that undergo minification via my own Python scripts. These scripts will also generate GZip versions of the various text files as a statically generated server-side support for HTTP Compression---I do this to avoid having to load the server with extra running processes that do the compression on the fly.

The problem with GZip is that it stores the mtime or modified time of the generated file in its content stream as well. This means that even if the byte-stream to be compressed is unchanged, the resulting GZip file will still have changes due to the different mtime field contents. This becomes a problem because I use rsync to ``publish'' the minified+gzipped files onto my web server, and [parts of] files are transferred according to the difference between the file to be sent and the file in existence on the server.

By fixing these bugs and doing the enhancement, I basically reduce the number of bytes that I need to send, since only the HTML files that were edited ought to be updated on the web server, as it should be. I'm glad that this stupid bug is finally laid to rest.

Incidentally, I was also messing around with lars, a Python3 framework for easy parsing of httpd log files, with the intention of setting up some analysis of the visitors that have come to my personal domain over the past decade and change.

So much for completing The Outer Worlds today. Well, there are still two more hours left before I ought to go turn in for the day, and maybe it is time to get into some gaming.

Truly now, till the next update.

Chasing the Combining Diacritical Characters in Chromium Problem

I spent a better part of the morning investigation a weird problem with respect to combining diacritical marks in the Unifont font as implemented in Chrome/Chromium.

Observe this combination of characters: 2̇. It should look like a `2' with a dot on top of it, something like this: .2. Unfortunately, if you are in Chrome/Chromium, you will see something like a `2' with a ``high dot'' to the right of it instead---the COMBINING DOT ABOVE character refuses to be composited upon the character representing the hindu-arabic numeral `2' character.

This is a problem when I have an article collection that requires the high dot to be at the right location to represent the correct pitch of the note in cipher notation. Generating images to replace it was a no-go---it was quite clear to me that Chromium is doing something rather stupid in its choice of how to interpret COMBINING DOT ABOVE.

I will first attach the composite screenshot indicating the solved form (on the left), the original discovered problem (in the centre), and the non-problem (on the right) before explaining what I did to discover the workaround. The first two lines were pure paragraph elements using the default font from my basic CSS file, while the next two lines used classes that forced the use of Unifont.

To be had, this was a problem that I had observed for a while, but had not really made any effort to studying the whys, until today when I was sufficiently annoyed.

The answer was to also provide the TrueType (TTF) font as part of the font-face specifications in the associated CSS file to act as the fallback font. Why the full TTF is required over the split WOFF2 for Chromium when Firefox/Waterfox can do it perfectly well is something I don't understand and don't want to waste time to find out.

Anyway, my first clue on the solution came about through inspecting the rendered font in Chromium's Dev-Tools screen. Instead of telling me that the rendered font was ``Unifont'', it was telling me nonsense like ``Arial'', which happens to be the browser-defined fallback font for Chromium that is subsumed under the ``sans-serif'' font-family. That didn't make any sense to me---Unifont is pan-unicode, and again, I have had no problems with it in Firefox/Waterfox, thus seeing that the browser decided to use a fallback font instead of the pan-Unicode one was patently impossible in my book.

I remembered from the old times of the use of the full Unifont WOFF/WOFF2 file from back in the day, and the problem persisted. So, the issue had nothing to do with the splitting of the WOFF2 file into fragments to facilitate better server response---it was likely something to do with the WOFF2 format that was not well-tolerated/parsed by Chromium.

On a whim, I tossed in the TTF version as a fallback to the split WOFF2 files, and what do you know, it worked. Except instead of a faster download of around 5 to 6 files of around 4 kiB, it was that, and the massive 13 MiB TTF file.

That workaround is just stupid. Either Firefox/Waterfox has a bug in font selection/rendering that is totally in my favour, or Chromium/Chrome has a bug in trying to interpret the proper Unicode code points and dealing with constructed combining diacritics.

The larger TTF file size has been mitigated somewhat through careful use of the GZip compression of the payload at the server side, but we're still talking about an extra overhead of around 15 MiB, which is the same amount of size used by all the rest of my content files.

But I keep telling myself, it is just a fallback, and when cached locally, should not keep downloading repeatedly.

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In other news, I think that I can/will complete The Outer Worlds today. My next immediate goal will be to complete Deep Learning by the end of next week, and in the mean time, probably end up watching some TV series/anime/movies in the upcoming week just to change things up a little. Reading is fun and all, but it's probably cool to do other things as well, otherwise in what way is it considered a break/sabbatical?

Till the next update, I suppose.

Shortened Day

They are right, you know. The days do pass faster when one has something to do, and is not really about whether one is having fun or not. Having something to do is a great way to not pay too close attention to the passage of time, which allows the subjective perception of time to shorten.

Take today for instance. I didn't do much---I read a bit more of Deep Learning, cleared a few more side quests of The Outer Worlds, watched more VODs from ESA Winter 2021, catch the latest video from ElectroBOOM, messed around with Windows registry API access with Python3, fixed some busted URL parsing in the JavaScript that supported the automated navigation generation, and went to church.

To me, it didn't feel as though I had just passed one day---it felt more of a passing of way less.

That's all I would want to write today though. Till the next update.

Video Watching

What a nice and quiet day.

I spent a little bit of time reworking a little on the blurbs that appear at the top and bottom of my blogs to make them less awkward sounding---I hope that I have achieved my goals through the adjustments.

I had also spent a little bit of time watching this introductory video on medieval recorder music, and certain rather interesting thoughts came to me, specifically, the part concerning the use of finger-based articulations over tongue-based articulations. Emily [in the video] pointed out that there were times where she would naturally resort to using finger articulations instead of tongue articulations for instruments that are generally ``always going on'', like the bag pipes (it is impossible to actually use tongue articulations since the purpose of the mouth is to replenish the bag of air via the one-way valve). These finger articulations are a cross between a mini-trill or some kind of mordent, and are most obvious when trying to separate out two notes of the same pitch. She also pointed out that more often than not, she is playing legato/slurred, and thus the finger articulations act as a way of keeping the legato playing while still allowing some distinction of the notes that are played.

In 笛子 technique, the so-called 南派 (southern style) 曲笛 playing uses lots of 打音 and 叠音 to articulate notes (for the gory details, do consider reading this section of my article). Noticeably, there is a severe lack of tongue-based techniques like 吐音, or anything that causes a severe ``break'' for the matter. Prior to the introduction of the G 大笛 (ambitus being roughly the same as the baroque flute), the largest 笛子 were of the 曲笛 range, i.e. about a fourth interval higher than the concert flute. At that ``low'' range, it was stylistically better to keep things in legato due to the less crisp nature of the tone.

I just found it interesting that a similar argument could be made for the restriction of techniques as part of a stylistic choice. Of course, these days under the 新派 concept of using the entire 笛子 family as a unified whole, there is hardly any restrictions of the sort any more. Bear in mind that back in the day, the 笛子 was not taken to be a virtuosic instrument---it was primarily an accompanying instrument for opera, and almost all instruments play about an octave higher [in general] compared to that of the more modern Western music tradition. It is interesting to note that the recorder family is one that is also treated similarly as the 笛子, with their actual pitches one octave higher than what is annotated. To say that there is some relationship between 笛子 and recorder is probably a mild understatement.

Anyway, that was roughly what I was thinking about for quite a bit.

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In other news, European Speedrunner Assembly (ESA) Winter 2021 is currently in session, and I have been taking time here and there in between the [light] reading and The Outer Worlds to watch a run or two here and there. Of note is the runner Juh0rse---he is a fellow Singaporean, and his Minecraft Any % (1.16, Random Seed, Glitchless) run is hilariously painful [for him] and fun [for us] to watch. I've caught him on ESA Marathons before; he was mostly speedrunning horror games, and Bishi Bashi.

Which of course brings me to something fun: speedrunning. The short technical description of speedrunning is the process of getting from the start state of the program (game) to a determined end state of the program (like winning/ending screen) using nothing more than what the program provides (like only providing input from the controller, keyboard, or mouse, without using any external programs to assist), in as short a time as possible. Of course, it is more fun than that because the said program is a game, and there is usually nice graphics, sound/music, and hilarious artefacts to observe as well. But don't let the fun get in the way of what speedrunning is---it is a fun way of defining the type of hacker attitude necessary for software testing. Much of the techniques used in speedrunning can often be translated into some kind of software test technique or attack vector, with an understanding that it is much stricter because the gentlemen rules of speedrunning only allows input from what is normally allowed, i.e. one cannot do hardware re-soldering, or run some kind of ``trainer'' program. The ingenuity of the speedrunners in finding glitches and exploits that can be humanly executed is what makes it a most fun sport for me.

I would say that my introduction to the speedrunning sport is from the Games Done Quick (GDQ) series of charity marathons.

I have been following the GDQ series of marathons from back in 2011 when it was still run by Speed Demos Archive and Speedruns Live, complete with their own IRC channel on Freenode (#sdamarathon). In the early days, when I was still studying in the US, I even donated some money too, and would have Elyse running the live stream while I was working on Eileen. The GDQs then were more informal and friendly, and I loved the Midnight Crew, the unofficial title for all those on the graveyard (relative to the on-site time zone) shift. The graveyard shift then was fun because a more adult-friendly atmosphere was allowed; I don't mean gratuitous sex and violence, but more candid banter than would include some mild swears here and there as needed.

But as the marathons got larger, they got more organised, and from the organisation, corporate structures were put in place, and various things that were normal from the old cosy format was no longer allowed.

It gave GDQs a good polish of professionalism, but in the process, seemed to nullify its grassroots origin a little.

But ESA marathons are still small in comparison and still retain that charm.

In either case, I no longer watch them live that much, partly because I'm getting older and have things that need to be done in between that disallow marathoning, and partly because... well... it's been ten years, or nearly twenty GDQ marathons. I won't say that I've seen them all, but I have seen a lot. As such, I'm a little more discerning on which runs to catch and which to skip, and have found it easier to handle things in a more bite-sized fashion.

Alright, enough of a brain dump for today. Till the next update.

Chomp Chomp & [No] Hyper-threading

I needed some sunlight today, and so, I went out of the apartment to meet up with my friend for a late lunch out at Serangoon Garden Market & Food Centre (SGMFC in this entry). This is the superior food place compared to the [in]famous Chomp Chomp Food Centre that is within walking distance of the previous one.

The superiority of SGMFC against Chomp Chomp comes from three big points:

1. Wider variety of food types for selection;
2. Much more open and airy feel to it;
3. Lack of an ``oppressive'' feel.

For comparison, when my friend and I were at Chomp Chomp, the seating was very claustrophobic, and there was even a police presence---how much more ``oppressive'' can it get? All that seriously undermines the type of good/open food centre that one is more accustomed to in Singapore.

The unfortunate thing is that SGMFC seems to be too much of a mouthful to remember, and is often incorrectly referred to as ``Chomp Chomp'', which was why when my friend suggested that we ``met at Chomp Chomp'', I counter-offered just waiting for him at the bus stop at the circus instead, since all the buses that entered that general region would end up stopping there. As it turned out, it was the right choice, since he really had meant SGMFC instead of Chomp Chomp after all.

We spent some time trying the different foods at SGMFC. I had some kway chap, some beef hor fun, some ming jiang kueh, and some soya bean drink with dessert of grass jelly with attap seeds. We then walked about the roads just seeing what was available, including entering the myVillage mall off Maju Road. The last time that I was at myVillage was nearly ten years ago, when I was much more active in the Singapore Geocaching scene. The place felt much smaller than I had remembered, and I think it was partly due to how the roof-top garden was cordoned off for whatever reason.

All in all, it was a nice couple of hours outside of the apartment.

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In the first month of my sabbatical, I have basically come up with some kind of rough routine for myself to ensure that it is both productive and restful for me. Roughly speaking:

1. No zero days---I need to do something each day.
2. Weekly, attend church services.
3. Daily devotionals from Bible in One Year 2020 with Nicky Gumbel---am already on Day 285
4. Daily reading from my reading list.
5. Daily, either play some music, or play some video game.
6. Daily, try to write something, either a piece of music, a poem, a story, a computer program, or a blog entry.
7. Weekly, get out of the apartment to do something different, or meet up with someone.
8. Keep to OMAD for at least five days each seven-day week.

I think that is a pretty good set of activities to keep me going.

The thing about sabbaticals, I feel, is that there is a need to get some manner of new stimulation back into one's life to ensure that there is actually some thing that can lead to change. As an old programmers' adage goes, insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. If doing the same things were making me happy, then I think there would be no need for a sabbatical in the first place.

Doing new things for new stimulations isn't the same as running away from an old life though. It has all the hallmarks from running away from an old life, but is different in the sense of the intention---it is not about running away from an old life, but discovering how to run towards a new life. For me personally, this is really about how to reshape my new life such that it is more Christ-centric.

``Hol up MT,'' one might begin, ``I thought you weren't the religious sort. Why are you starting to talk about this `Christ-centric' thing like you are one of those fundie-goons? Have you lost your marbles?''

No, I have not lost my marbles. One of the things that I have realised over the past fifteen years or so is that greed is the one big reason why things are the way they are in the world today. But to overcome the basic nonsense that is greed requires a different perspective, a different 座右铭, or motto for those of us who are not so conversant in Mandarin Chinese. There are many different ways of creating/finding/discovering such a motto, but for me, the idea of leading a Christ-centred life-style is the one the makes the most sense.

Am I disdaining other people's beliefs? No, you are free to think what you want. I know what I believe in, but it is not my place to force what I believe in on you, even though I may think that you are wrong. Belief is about faith, and faith is not science---the evidence behind faith is qualified through personal experience and third-party testimonies of experience and not quantified through repeatable and falsifiable hypotheses through the Scientific method. Faith is not something that is debatable, principally because faith defines the axioms from which all other reasoning (via regular logic) stem from.

Thus, to ``debate'' about faith is an impossible and unproductive approach---by definition, we can already have issues with agreeing with what are the basic tenets (axioms) that are innately true, and proceeding from there would just be a terribly angry waste of time by all. But I digress.

The reshaping of my new life through the filling of the emptiness within from the rejection of greed is one of the key reasons behind the need of a sabbatical. Mayhaps all that has happened thus far (the break-up of a five-year long relationship, the strong ``push'' factors out of my previous job) are mere pointers leading to this moment where I start to really think and meditate about what it is I want out of my life.

After all, I have been surviving on ``magical coincidences'' for too long, I think. Eventually, luck can and will run out, and at that point, what happens? But I will leave that discussion for another time.

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In other news, I have decided to turn off hyper-threading on Eileen-II. Recalling the specifications of Eileen-II, she sports an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost). With hyper-threading on, that 6 [physical] cores appear as 12 [logical] cores, which, in theory, improves the overall throughput by reducing the idle time on each of the cores. So in cases where there are a lot of ``light'' threads that need to be run, hyper-threading can be a good way to squeeze out some extra level of performance.

It all sounds great, but I had been carefully monitoring the temperatures of Eileen-II while I was running The Outer Worlds. The GPU temperatures are generally alright (sub 80°C), but the CPU temperatures were ridiculous (staying at 95°C, spiking to 100°C where the turbo-boost from 2.6GHz to 4.7GHz was throttled back to about 3.5GHz sustained). Bear in mind that I am operating Eileen-II in a semi-open air apartment in hot and humid Singapore with no air-conditioning. Excess thermal energy is a big deal---running components that hot for too long is a great way to get the effective life span greatly reduced.

Anyway, I did more reading up, and realised that the hyper-threading model was not the right computation model for the types of loads that I was throwing at Eileen-II. I don't have a tendency to run many small tasks which use many threads---I tend to throw one or two heavy tasks at once instead. And since I actually have six physical cores (as opposed to the two physical cores of Edythe-III, hyper-threading is not a good trade-off.

With hyper-threading turned off, I was getting much lower CPU temperatures (about 80°C now), and not much change in GPU temperatures (still sub 80°C) while running the same The Outer Worlds. That's a big win for me.

I did not notice any slow downs or anything. That's also a big win for me.

And thus, that is my current set up for Eileen-II.

I don't have anything else to add for now, and so that's all for today. Till the next update, I suppose.

Emblem 3

Looking back, I realised that I wrote an entry explaining my first icon, but have not written anything about the change that I did in 2015, and the more recent one in 2020. So I suppose I should rectify this here.

And that's why this is entitled Emblem 3 instead.

Anyway, here is the relevant description from then as reference:

It is sort of the placemarker for me in the digital realm, I suppose. The significance is simple: M, MT are my initials, and the dotted image in the lower right corner is the Glider, a configuration of cells in Conway's Game of Life---a hacker emblem.

This means that I identify with the concept of the ``classical'' hacker (not the media-bastardised version that means breaking into computer systems and such).

Alright, enough of random thingamagigs. That said, it is only an emblem/coat of arms---I do not guarantee that everything that contains that symbol is indeed from me---please be discerning.

The new icon from 2015 is basically this:

The symbology is the same, but this time, we have a new negative space region that takes up half the viewable area. This symbolises the change that I have undergone, moving from a purely overly naïve believe-in-the-good-of-everyone type of person into one who knows of the Dark Side. But notice that the hacker emblem is still in the white---it means that no matter how the Dark Side occurs, I will not sacrifice my hacking ethics to it.

Some time after 2015 was when the whole ``circle cut out'' profile pictures became a thing. Naturally, it screwed up my emblem---it's decidedly square. The ``circle cut out'' damaged my emblem by just chopping random bits off---I find it deeply offensive that with all the talk about inclusion, that the trend of excluding people who don't really like to use their real ``human'' pictures as profile pictures. Eventually annoyed, I started looking for ways to transform my square emblem into something that is more circular, settling for a formula that maps all points of a unit square into points of the largest circle that can be inscribed within the same unit square. Naturally, I wrote a program to do it, and fine-tuned it more carefully so that it can generate the 16×16 favicon image more precisely than I can ever do by pixel art.

The end result in 2020 was this:

It looks a little funky because there isn't a border that circumscribes the circle, but that's usually not a problem---it is only one here because Blogger's manner of inserting images does not encircle things, and I am too lazy to attempt to fix it. Symbolically, it means that while I retain all the characteristics of what I wrote in 2009 and 2015, I am also starting to become more well-rounded as a person on a whole, carefully trying to adjust the sharp corners into rounded ones, becoming a person that is less abrasive than before.

To be fair, that last bit is probably going to be a work in progress. But it's okay!

I think that's all I would want to write for now. Till the next update.

Popping Colours

Hello! It's almost exactly a month since the start of my sabbatical, and what a month it has been. I won't summarise what has happened thus far, mostly because I have written quite a bit of it here already.

Instead, I will just continue with what I normally want to say.

First off, I'd like to make a small shout out to The_Laptop Writes..., my blog that features poems. It is the other blog that I sometimes update in lieu of writing something here. There are a few reasons why I might want to do that, but the main one is simple: sometimes I just don't feel like writing prose of any sort.

With that out of the way, I just want to report that the weird wrist pain that I have been facing with has been alleviated through the use of topical Ketoprofen in the form of a Kefentech-brand plaster. The idea here is less about the pain-killing effect and more on the anti-inflammatory effect. I can tolerate a lot of kinds of pain, and my personal philosophy is that pain is a strong symptom that something is wrong. Usually this something is either a breakage, or an increase in pressure somewhere. In cases where infection isn't suspected (e.g. no breakage of skin, no ``high pressure'' sensation, no obvious discolouration), it is usually the case that it is some kind of swelling from inflammation. Normally I would go for oral Ibuprofen pills, but since the wrist thing is sufficiently superficial as compared to say some deep muscle aches, I decided to make use of the topical approach instead.

Works like a charm.

I think I should be a little more careful with how I type with this new set up where I raised the height of Eileen-II differentially to improve the airflow. I still think that it is a good idea to keep doing so, because while running The Outer Worlds (which is a modern 3D game that burns lots of CPU and GPU), the overall fan speed and generated thermal energy are well tolerated.

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With the Chinese Lunar New Year ``festivities'' weekend out of the way, it is back to something that is more mundane. I have managed to make a little progress through Deep Learning, but have been having lots of fun with watching welding videos, hydraulic press videos, and crazy ``game tester'' videos. It's all good fun.

I fixed my JavaScript text prettifier to take into account the `、' character, treating it like a `/' with the associated association rules, just in case. That text prettifier is really done by now, and these days I'm just identifying various edge cases to update.

All my blogs use it to ensure that the text looks as pretty as I can get away with.

I have also changed up the colours for the read-links on the sidebar. They now pop out of the dark background much better.

I think that's all I have for today; back to The Outer Worlds I go. Till the next update.

The Outer Worlds

It's the second day of 辛丑 year, also the eve of ``Valentine's Day''.

And I realised that I had not written anything for nearly 3 days. What a shocker!

To rectify this, here I am again, writing a short blurb.

This year's Chinese New Year is very uneventful personally, mostly because there is nothing to be done for the Chinese Orchestra (we have not been rehearsing for nearly a whole year), no visiting (as stated before), and uh... no outings of any sort. I spent some time archive bingeing Sam and Fuzzy, which had an absolutely epic story arc that finally concluded and segued into something more piece-meal, over nearly 20 years.

That's a really long time for anything, including web comics. I've also powered through a littlee of the Deep Learning book, but got really tuckered out from reading, no thanks to the thing that I wrote that I will not write about on Wednesday.

Thanks to the 50% Steam sale, I purchased The Outer Worlds---just the base game though, and not the DLC(s)/Season Pass. It is an homage to games like Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4, and BioShock, a first-person shooting RPG with a quasi-open world concept. It's fun, the writing is good, and the gunplay is good enough. I was looking for something of this sort for a while---Borderlands 3 was on my radar for quite a while, but people have been consistent in saying that the only good thing out of it was the gunplay and not the writing. I did mull over it, and frankly, of all the Borderlands games, I loved Borderlands 2 the most because it had good writing. I bought and played Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and it wasn't so good, and people were saying that it had better writing than Borderlands 3!

It plays closer to Fallout: New Vegas, what with similar mechanics, but it is definitely less buggy---I have not gotten Fallout: New Vegas to run nicely. It also looks a little dated these days. Ah well.

The more astute would ask, ``hey, didn't you say you were going to complete Feudal Alloy?'' Yes, yes, I know---I also said I was going to complete Halo 2 of The Master Chief Collection to some other folks. Patience---these are games that will be played.

It's just a matter of time. =)

One last piece of news---I somehow managed to bust up my right wrist. I think that it could be an overuse injury from typing at an odd angle (I have been keeping Eileen-II raised to improve airflow to keep the temperatures from going too high in non-airconditioned hot and humid Singaporean weather) for too long, again relating to the alluded to event-that-will-not-be-written-about on Wednesday. It'll heal.

After all, it's just a matter of time. =)

Okay, that's all I have for today. Till the next update.

One-key Flute Goodness

The end of 庚子 is upon us, and we are about to usher in 辛丑 in less than two days.

I feel older yet again. But that's not new.

I think what is new is that I am starting to seriously enjoy the freedom that I have from not having to be at anyone's beck and call. True, I am getting no income due to not having a paying job, but I am starting to feel fulfilled, an actual level of contentment within.

And to be disrupted from this... made me angry.

Anyway, apart from some things that I cannot write about here, I spent some time doing up a less crazy version of the fingering chart for my A415 one-key Stanesby Junior baroque flute.

It's only less crazy because the chart records what the fingers are doing as opposed to what the holes are doing. This is a subtle point that can drive one nuts.

The more astute may notice that the fingering pattern looks more piccolo than one-key flute, and they would be right since it is based on the piccolo woodwind diagram in Lilypond. Using the piccolo pattern means I can avoid having to write my own drawing pattern, but it is only a matter of time before I have to do that... assuming I want to create charts for the various dadi that I have.

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Till the next update.

OMAD Restart

I think I'm finally back on the bandwagon on my weight loss journey that I started roughly when I started at my last work place, going back to just having one meal a day. I suppose I am starting to be a little bored with snacking, and am otherwise occupied with enough activities that take my mind off that of food.

Is this a sign of improvement of my mental state? Can it last? Only time will tell. Also, 2019 was a life-time ago, given all that had transpired in between.

In other thoughts, I am not really a fan of ordering food to be delivered to the apartment when I am in Singapore, mostly for the reason that I literally live next to the neighbourhood centre where there are at least five different coffee shops [that sell food and are not those frou-frou cafés], making it supremely easy to grab almost whatever I want. When I was studying in the US, there were many reasons to rely on food delivery services, the most important of which was to avoid having to dress up to head out, especially in the winter months. That, coupled with the fact that the nearest food place was usually more than one mile away meant that if I was at home, one main meal would likely to be from a food delivery service.

I cooked at home back in the day, but it took time and effort, things that I was sorely lacking while grinding through what would turn out to be a rather bad post-graduate situation. So often times it was easier to just have something delivered instead. Groceries shopping without a car was tricky but not impossible---just piecewise purchases each time I left the apartment to head out to classes/the office.

However, back in Singapore, one of the few times that I did not mind using some kind of food delivery service was when I was trying to buy meals for more than myself, i.e. for my family. In this case, the convenience of not having to queue at different places and bring the said food back definitely overruled everything else.

That said, I would rather order from places where they fielded their own food delivery service, instead of relying on one of those pesky ``platforms''. Call it laziness from not wanting to create yet another account on something that I use rarely, or call it trying to vote with my wallet against exploitive practices---it doesn't matter.

So, none of that ``Grab Food'', ``Food Panda'', ``Deliveroo'', or ``Uber Eats'' (is that still alive?) for me.

And no, there really isn't much of a point that I am trying to make here. At best, it is just small talk to mark the passing of yet another day.

Till the next update, I suppose.

It's the Head Shave Man...

Welcome to Monday.

It was restful for the most part. I went ahead to get my head shaved at VR Hair Stylish. I like the place because it's cosy, and does an amazing job with the head shave/facial hair shave combination. The first time that I sported the shaved head look was about a year ago, when I was frustrated with the amount of distractions that I was getting while keeping some hair when the going was getting tough. The head shave was a literal symbol of ``go-time'' that meant nothing less than pure righteous anger and forward movement in spite of all obstacles.

It was an evolution of the shorter hair style that I had gotten into past 2015 or so when I started to realise that I was getting all kinds of weird hairline issues. There is the ``M''-shape aspect of it which had got to the point where trying to even keep a side parting would mean a horrible comb-over look, or to have a split up central tuft. It got worse over the recent years when the hairline closest to my temples were actively thinning.

Rather than wait to look ridiculous, I just chose to get started on the completely shaved head look. My skull is apparently round enough for the look to actually be somewhat decent, which is a plus to me of course. During the circuit breaker period last year was when I pulled up my old hair clippers to give myself a close cropping of no more than one-eighth inch---that was a length that I would be comfortable with, but between paying the neighbourhood barber for a quality head shave and the effort to take out the hair clipper to do-it-myself and then perform upkeep on the same clippers, I would rather the former.

I have also stopped growing my moustache. It wasn't that I hated it, but that with the current control regime, the old reason of it providing enough protection against an inflammed skin between the nostrils and the upper lip was no longer valid since my nose was no longer consistently in that bunged up state that necessitated lots of rubbing.

I suppose part of the reason was that I wanted to change my visual identity after the break-up, sort of like how women chop their hair down after they are done. But this is really secondary in nature.

Another different reason for the removal of the moustache [via shaving] is the dryness of some parts of the skin, sort of like dandruff, if it makes any sense. No, it is not diagnosed or anything, but an observation. The couple of months so far with the removed moustache has seemed to abate this particular problem.

I did say that things were restful for the most part, but there were one or two things that came up that made me freak out a little. But after praying for a bit, I feel better. I suppose part of being a believer is the knowing that I can literally cast my worries onto God, mostly because worries are just thoughts that cycle about with no productive outcome. Casting them unto God lets Him know about what is going on in my mind, and praying about them unto God informs Him of what I may actually be looking for deep within myself through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. And thus, in the end, the worries become less so because I am reminded of the love of God, and that it is His will that things will turn out the way they will be---I merely make my own choices out of my own free will.

One last thing before I end this entry is perhaps a little enlightenment of why I seem to be writing more often than before. I think the main reason is to provide a mechanism to mark time. When I am at work, marking time is easy due to the different tasks/phases of the projects, as well as the different [daily] interactions with various colleagues. But when I am camping out at home, every day can become very same-y without any observation; this makes the tracking of time beyond day/night problematic. Writing blog entries is a great way to ensure a certain mindfulness as I go through the day. That said, it is not a must that I will be writing entries every day. I do try to ensure that each day is not a ``zero'' day where nothing happens, but whether it is noteworthy (and safe) enough to be placed on this blog, or if it is private enough to go into the dead-tree journal is just a case of spur-of-the-moment judgement.

I am not going to lie, I do miss the days of being in a relationship where I could literally share my day with someone else, and have her share her day with me too. There is a certain level of intimacy and trust that is much closer than that of say the care group from church, or even my own parents. I miss that a lot, as well as the physicality of actually holding someone.

I can share my day with God, but it is... different. He doesn't share His day with me---the very concept of it is impossible to imagine, and by definition, unfathomable by mortal minds. It is more of a reverent-type of relationship between me and God that is not the same as between me and a significant other.

Does this mean that I am ready to start on another relationship [with a human female]? No, I don't know, but I don't think so. There are some other things to unpack and reshape, and it really isn't the right time now.

Till the next update, I suppose.

Adi Parva Done

After a marathon session today, I have finally completed Adi Parva of The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa. This means I can finally start on the next ``big'' book of some importance: Deep Learning by Goodfellow et al.

I am not sure if I have mentioned this before, but literary style of The Mahabharata is very similar to that of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night---there exists a large framing story that contains the main narrative, followed by sub-narratives that come in as and when obvious unresolved hooks appear. It reads pretty fast for a large work, but it still is a large work.

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Today we had our reunion lunch at my sister's place together with my brother-in-law and nephew. This is not normal, because we usually have my mum cooking and having my sister's family over instead. Thanks to the nonsense that is COVID-19, and my mother's recent medical issues, it was just not worth it to have it done the way we normally did. Instead, we ordered catering from Chilli Api Catering Pte Ltd. Ordering was relatively pain-free, and the delivery was prompt. The food that was delivered was still warm, was delicious, and was of the advertised quantity. Overall, it was a good experience---I think that we can seriously consider them for other such events in the future. Let's see if they can hang around long enough for that to happen again.

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I was supposed to write an entry for yesterday, but I was just so tired at the end of the day. So I suppose I will write about it now then.

I spent much of the early afternoon on Saturday playing my various dizi, working from the 倍大 C and slowly making my way down to the 小 C, playing most pieces from memory. At the 曲笛 range of 大 C, I just played quite a few Chinese New Year pieces, changing keys without using the ``correct'' dizi. The C 曲笛 can comfortably play the keys of C-major (筒音作5), F-major (筒音作2), G-major (筒音作1), D-major (筒音作4), B♭-major (筒音作6), and E♭-major (筒音作3). But these are really nothing new---at this point, all these different fingering patterns are already innately understood and easy to apply by me. What is a little different is the need for the increased compass required when playing some of the Chinese New Year pieces using a different key---there is often times a need to jump to a high-octave tonic. It's not impossible, but it does take good control.

And it took me a while to get back the good control. A good warm up is always necessary before I can get a good tone, and that happens whether or not I have been playing throughout the week.

The late afternoon/early evening was spent at service at Pasir Panjang Christ Church. Main thing that I want to remember in public is the Thaxted tune that was used in the hymn O God Beyond All Praising, and that the hymn book is indeed Hymns of Praise, but is from Christian Nationals' Evangelism Commission (CNEC). No wonder it was this much harder to find it online---it is a very regional thing. What to do with this information, I currently do not know, and will just keep it here for future reference. God will guide the way forward.

Anyway, I subsequently met up with YT at Blk 340 Ang Mo Kio Ave 1 to check out the Deli Kopi Shop. Specifically, we were looking at the Mentaiko Maki from the ``Hot Jap'' stall. The price point of SGD8.90 for a basic Maki is reasonable, considering that the basic Maki itself had 8 pieces, each was larger than what I would normally put into my mouth. While there, YT introduced me to lok lok, which is basically JB-style skewered junk food; the stall in question was ``Loklok 1991's by Daniel & Meng''. The short answer is, it tastes damn bloody good. The way the skewered food items are cooked give them that nice char-feel without actually being so dry that they lose their original texture. The closest analogue I can come up with is, the texture of those so-called vegetable chips but with more ``natural'' flavour.

We did not happen upon them in a vacuum: review of the Maki, and the review of the loklok from Mothership respectively.

It was a good meet up with YT, catching up a little bit more on the goings-on since the call that we had with roticv. She's hanging on, I'm chillaxing, and we sort of co-bitched about the situation around us. But that's life after all, we talk to people, we commiserate with friends. And those of us who are believers will go to God in prayer to seek direction and clarity, knowing that while we have the agency of making our own decisions, that in the end, it is still the sovereign God whose Will determines the outcomes.

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Oh, before I am done with today's entry, I want to add that Ding did send me a belated birthday greeting.

Till the next update I suppose.

Web Comics Crawling

Man, it has been a looooooooong while since I wrote an entry tipsy.

My choice of poison for the evening was the Absolut Oak. I am not usually one who goes about buying ``limited edition'' drinks, but this was bought from a friend a long while back while said friend was trying to off-load some of the things that was obtained when with a spouse-to-be that didn't. It was not something that I would normally get either (not really a vodka person), and the first time that I tried it, it tasted bad compared to the whiskeys that I was trying at the same time.

Funny enough, over time, the flavour profile became more palatable.

Anyway, the purpose of this entry isn't about talking about the spirits that I have been quaffing, but on what I had done for the day.

I updated some of the off-line copies of web comics that I have been following through careful crawling with my own scripts. These scripts had been written in Python2, but since that [version of the Python interpreter] is no longer going to be updated, I have taken the opportunity to update it to Python3 as well. The crawling principle is simple: from a given starting HTML page, find which is the comic image, download it, wait some time, then follow the ``next'' link to the next comic image and continue the process until we reach a loop or no way of proceeding.

I like to create off-line copies of my web comics for the simple reason of making it easier to go through the material at my own leisure. The creation of cbr files means that it is infinitely more portable than relying purely on the online access. I can just view them with any associated readers, like CDisplayEx on the PC or Perfect Viewer for Android.

I'm not linking to CDisplayEx because it allegedly has CandyOpen malware, which I honestly have not seen the effects of. I use MVPS hosts as the last line of defense at the O/S level to prevent connections to sketchy servers via DNS, so that may be a reason why I am not seeing any issues.

Or it could be that they have removed said malware. Who knows, really?

At the same time, I have been reading more of Adi Parva of The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, clocking in at another 98 pages today. The current page count is 472/768 completed, and I seem to be on track to complete this first book by end of next week. Then I can start on something else, while slowly advancing my progress on Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition).

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

Meds and Fingering Charts

I would have written something yesterday, but I got tired. So it will be an entry today instead.

I ran some errands yesterday, and ended up at Five Guys @ Plaza Singapura for a lunch-dinner combination. As usual, I got a Bacon Cheeseburger ``all the way'' (i.e. all the toppings), Cajun fries (large), and a Corona Extra beer. Definitely delicious; I had been craving for some meat for quite a while. I think it is something that happens at least once a week, so I need to take that into consideration when I plan my going-out time.

I also dropped by Essentials Pharmacy to grab some of my standard medicines to deal with the sensitive skin issue. While I am no longer oozing serum from broken skin like a monster like in the bad old days, there is still some maintenance needed as the weather conditions get more and more unpredictable. I have a decent regime set up: basic mometasone furoate for skin inflammation control, use of loratidine and chlorpheniramine as oral anti-histamines for the day time and night time respectively. As for cleansing, Simple soap is used instead. As simple as it sounds, the soap seems to be exceedingly hard to find in Singapore for some reason, at least, if one is using the brick and mortar shops. But I digress.

I was listening to 李镇's 《走西口》 album from 1999 for most of the travel time, and am reminded about the beauty that is the expression of the humble bamboo 笛子. Yes, I play a lot of concert flute, but in the end, the dizi is still the superior expressive instrument, mostly because of how raw it gets when it comes to techniques of expression; it relies on emotive power over music theory to get what it wants across. 李镇's pieces were not highly complex musically, but they have a good sense of melody and feel in them that makes them oh-so-alluring. Good flute music is amazing too, don't get me wrong, but at some fundamental level it still relies heavily on the Western construct of music theory to bring out the beauty within.

Is that bad? No, it's just different, and I wish that more people would understand that and realise that everyone can stand to learn a bit more about how music is interpreted and performed by different peoples and cultures.

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I spent much of today working on adding the new page of fingering charts on my 笛子 materials set of pages. It is, in many ways, pandering to the types of terms that are used by people to search and click into my web site. There are already ample information on fingering charts within, like concert pitch-bangdi mapping and concert pitch-qudi mapping, fingering pattern charts for the different tongyin, and even the most crazy 12-tone fingering pattern chart that provides additional information on how to find the right keys to change, but I suppose people are just fundamentally lazy.

I must admit that the dizi, when looked at from a very high performance level, is a very cerebral type of instrument. I tried my best to capture all these in ways that would make sense, but it seems like it might not be well appreciated.

And so, I pandered by writing up the fingering charts using Lilypond, and more specifically, the woodwind diagrams. The tin-whistle pattern sufficed for the 6-hole dizi, and it was what I ended up using.

If I want to do the same thing for the dadi and/or xiao, I will need to learn how to hack scm/define-woodwind-diagrams.scm and scm/display-woodwind-diagrams.scm. I had a quick glance into them---they are non-trivial to mess about with.

Apart from doing up the 6-hole dizi charts, I took the opportunity to put together a simplified generic saxophone fingering chart, with the original intension of adding in the altissimo stuff. As I worked through with my tenor saxophone, altissimo on the saxophone is hard---I was not even good with playing harmonics with the correct intonation on the horn. Without this strong fundamental, there was no way to tackle the altissimo register at all. So that's something I need to work on.

But that aside, here is the chart as it stands:

I don't really have anything else to say. Till the next update, perhaps.

Web Browser Load Out

Already the second day of February is fast reaching a close.

I am still a little sore in my glutes from the house unpacking exercise with my other sister, and had spent most of the day at home, like always. The final pay cheque from my last two weeks of service at my old job had been confirmed to be in, as was the actual payslip itself.

I spent the morning setting up Chromium as yet another web browser. I already have Google Chrome for the ``trashy'' social-media/email-centric isolating browser (with uBlock Origin), and Waterfox with very strict control of what runs on it in the form of uBlock Origin as above and NoScript. I also have HTTPS Everywhere from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) set up to ensure that URLs will tend to redirect to using HTTPS if available. But I seriously digress.

I set up a new browser in addition to the two because I have found myself having that itch to update my various blogs more frequently. Thanks to both the migration of all Blogger accounts to Google accounts, and how Google Chrome basically gets commandeered by any logged in Google account at any Google web site, it proved stupid annoying to attempt to update the blogs without a new browser.

I needed to either use the in-cognito mode of Google Chrome to bypass that logged in lock in, or use Firefox/Waterfox to do the log in, but needing to remember to log out in case I accidentally feed browsing data unwittingly. It was basically many levels of suck, and so the decision was made to just install another web browser to that remains opened so that I can do any blog entry update at any time. I chose Chromium because I refused to use Edge.

Finding the binaries to actually install Chromium proved to be a confusing exercise. A quick search would lead one to this official-looking version, from which it is ``obvious'' that only unstable versions are available to download. Some more search-fu later yielded the link that I highlighted nearer the beginning. The installation part was quite straightforward, and I was glad that after logging into Blogger, there was no commandeering of the browser itself. There was, however, a severe limitation in that it was not possible to make use of the web store to install any extensions into Chromium directly---to load any extensions would require a manual side-load, a process that was more effort than it was worth for the small thing that I had in mind.

Anyway, it was set up accordingly, and I am glad.

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I finally sat down and concentrated a bit more on Adi Parva of The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, reading some 83 pages. I think there is a chance that I can actually complete this volume before the end of next week, but I am definitely not going to hold my breath.

There was a care group sharing session earlier in the evening, and it was a good session that was spent over teleconference. I felt a little bad that I had little bad things to talk about; it sort of helped to put many things into perspective.

Anyway, it is getting late, and I should turn in for the night. Another day awaits, and there are some errands that need to be run.

Till the next update then.

It Is Now February

With hardly a blink of an eye, we are now in February.

This year's February is going to be a strange month. For one, the Chinese New Year festivities are severely muted thanks to the ongoing pandemic. For two, the usual Single Awareness Day (or Valentine's Day for the masses) are occurring immediately after the first two days of Chinese New Year (gazetted public holidays in Singapore), again, whilst in the middle of the pandemic.

That was merely an observation; I do not actually have any feelings about these two events in either way. For reasons of safety in the pandemic, my immediate family isn't entertaining any notion of visitation (to and fro) and has conveyed the information to the relatives in question. My parents are in the at-risk category for the SARS-CoV-2, and despite them being our relatives, they are not really a group of people whom we hang out often enough to pool the risks together to begin with. Combine that with my niblings being the children they are (children seem to be silent carriers of SARS-CoV-2), it is a high-risk/low-return type of game, which is not worth it.

Hence the decision to be a tad anti-social this year.

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I am not going to lie---I am really drawn in by the new theme that I am using for my blogs, mostly because of the ``pop'' that it gives to them. I am getting somewhat tempted to do something similar for my own personal domain, but it is unlikely to be the case since I would then have to start encasing blocks of text into their own div blocks and setting up various CSS styles... it's basically a lot of effort to set up the current content-centric HTML to be something that is more amenable to such stylings.

It goes against the overall raison d'être of that website.

On one final note, I have finally written Print Me (Part II). I hope to complete this short story serialisation---it has been floating around in my head for quite a few months, and I did not have the wherewithal to commit to paper, until now that is.

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

Sometimes One Really Needs Physical Strength

``One of the greatest things that a Christian can do in his/her life is to serve.''

That's the vibe of the message that I have been getting through the aether; okay not the aether but from the different siblings in Christ that I have met.

The funny thing is that, this isn't really new to me. It is more of a reminder of a me that had been erased out of existence due to the sour taste of being taken for a sucker.

I used to be one of those helper-type people---always happy to help about in any way that I can. It was not because that I was expecting some kind of great cosmic pay-off---it was just a way of passing the time [in some sense] after having completed the responsibilities that I had. There was a certain sense of satisfaction when I just got things done, whether it was for my own things, or for others.

But over time, the sense that I was getting exploited grew. I wasn't expecting remuneration for the things I did (that was strictly for things relating to work only), but a certain sense of appreciation of my often voluntary help, instead of just a general level of indifference, or worse, like demanding that do/redo according to what the person is saying, regardless of the correctness/relevance of what that person is saying.

As they say in the army, what starts off as a favour eventually will become a responsibility.

Perhaps there will be a day where I am more free with whom I help. But today is not this day.

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I spend an enjoyable day helping my other sister unpack her furniture for her new place with her husband. I brought my ``brick'' (the Swiss Champ XLT), ratcheting driver set (including small allen wrench heads), and my rubber mallet down. All the tools were used in one way or another, and the task that she had thought would take days was completed within the day itself, with her father, her husband, and another friend assisting on different aspects.

It was the kind of task that I had missed doing. I was just glad that I could help. It also made me think about the earlier chunk about service in general, which was an associated thought from some words that the pastor had said to me after Saturday's service.

Everything will work out in its time.

And with that, I will stop here. It is a short update for sure, so till the next time.

A New Theme

One more thing to note before I am actually done with today's writing: after an unknown number of years, I have decided to change the theme of my blogs again. I think that I am starting to dislike the skinniness that is the Candara font. Combine that with what is essentially a long roll of white for the main text, it was hard to separate out one entry from another. Additionally, the profile picture ``box'' was looking dated with the circular redo of my personal icon; these two combined meant that it was definitely a time to re-look into this.

With that, I looked for a [default] theme that kept much of the simplicity that I was looking for (no crazy background image that can get screwed up with a screen width that is ``too wide'') that would address the issues that I was facing. I could, in theory, create my own custom theme, but the purpose of using Blogger as the platform is so that I do not have to do things like that---the default themes with minor adjustments ought to be good enough.

With that we have this theme now. Here is a side-by-side comparison between the new theme and the old one:

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

R&R Week

The week that just passed is a strong R&R-type of week.

I finally completed Fez, and Cat Quest II, two games that had been on my Steam library that were half-completed for quite a while. One's a puzzle game that I had mistakenly tried playing like a Metroidvania, while the other is a straightforward action-RPG with cute characters, a simplistic storyline, but amazingly pun-y writing. A sense of achievement, for sure. The key thing about these two games was the almost exclusive use of the gamepad, of which the one I have is the F310 Gamepad from Logitech. I usually play games on the PC with mouse and keyboard, but for some of these types of games where they were originally designed for controller, I am finding it easier to use the controller for them. Except maybe for Megaman-type games---I started on them via the keyboard, and will need quite a bit of getting used to on the controller, especially when I am trying to keep a charge while jumping (requires some interesting right thumb gymnastics). Overall, I like this controller over the one Playstation-esque one (VX2PS3-11) that I got from Gioteck. The Xbox controller feels more comfortable than the PS one, and more importantly, does not have any of the rubberised plastic that literally dies in the hot and humid weather conditions that are present here in Singapore. I had to scrape off all the weird plastic, and have not used the controller yet.

To be fair, that other controller is also much older than this one, and so there will be some major differences. I will probably find the PS controller more useful for games that were ported from the PS to the PC, assuming that the equivalent button commands for the Xbox controller were not a part of the port.

Next game that I would want to reach a clear of any sort is Feudal Alloy. It has been sitting in my library half-started for a while, and seems interesting enough that I should reach some level of completion on it.

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I have also read [translated to English version of] All You Need is Kill, the novel that was the [very vague] inspiration for Edge of Tomorrow. Like always, the book is literally better than the film due to the more realistic premise of the time loop being a step towards an eventual ``final'' confrontation to get the Mimics off planet earth. I have always found ``happy endings'' in dystopian/apocalyptic/end-of-the-world type stories to be incongruent with their subject matter. The author literally (ha-ha) builds a gloomy and doomy world throughout most of the novel/film, and having the last section/act subvert all that gloom and doom is just... wrong.

I know that there is a need for some kind of happy closure for most people, but certain twists are just too awkward to pull off. I get that people want to be entertained, and they are allowed their opinion and thus it is okay for the writers to pander a little with some kind of happy ending, but there are different types of happy endings. I am alright with minor (i.e. not world-level change) happy endings, like how a single character finds his/her happiness at the end, but those that involve a massive change in the way the built-up world changes is usually quite unjustifiable, particularly when the protagonist is portrayed as an everyday-person instead of The Big Damn Hero.

And even then, one single Big Damn Hero usually isn't enough to turn the tide of a large-scale gloom and doom---it requires some level of coordination/social acceptance for things to move that way, which often times books/films do not set it up correctly as something that can be done. This often makes the final twist all the weirder, and can be really off-putting.

Anyway, I think I will strive to at least complete [the translated version of] Adi Parva of the The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, the first of 18 books of the famous Sanskrit epic. I ``only'' have 500+ pages left of 768, and it should take roughly a week of relaxed reading to complete it, if not for the many side tracks that I have been doing.

Till the next update then.

All About the Navigation

The silence was only because I was working on some tweaks on my personal domain.

I have been maintaining my 笛子 Materials set of articles for a long time. I was not happy with the type of navigation that was available---the old navigation mechanism was just a dynamically added ↑ that led from each article page back to the articles content page as linked above.

This meant that if one wanted to read through all the articles, one would have to keep heading back to the articles content page. Talk about super annoyance.

My entire personal domain is run off static pages, and so for a long time I had no good solution to this. That is, until I remembered the XMLHttpRequest object (XHR), and the ability to use DOM traversal on a document-type response object from XHR.

What the combination of techniques here meant was that I could literally make use of XHR to pull the articles content page, parse the links from the navigation tree, and then do whatever I wanted with it, which in this case was to dynamically create a simple in-order traversal navigation block (with a shortcut to the articles content page) to replace the traditional navigation block.

This was significant because I did not have to manually update each article page to set up the navigation blocks by hand. Articles were not written sequentially, and their names are randomly generated, which made manual setting up and updating of the ``previous article'' and ``next article'' links a pain.

The downside is that non-JavaScript enabled browsers do not have that luxury. But it's still alright since the fallback still provides a long-winded but workable manner of navigation.

That was a fun bit of exercise and functionality to add to my personal domain.

One other thing that I did was to redo how I was generating Sitemaps. Specifically, I implemented a new tool that would generate the associated sitemap.xml file complete with last modified date/time to be uploaded into the host. Previously, I was just doing some lousy shell script that listed all files that were hosted, but it was not the right thing to do for the purpose of a Sitemap. In addition, the old Sitemap that I made was only for Google, but this Sitemap that I now generate applies to all who conform to the protocol too. This may mean that my personal domain may get better indexing from the other search providers.

It is definitely a minor thing, but is one of those hidden quality of life things that should prove to be useful in the long run.

I think that's about all the update I would like to put up today. Till the next time.

Infection Control for Instruments

A day has just passed.

Originally, I intended to go for a morning cycle. But the bad skin around my lateral ankles made it a little risky, since cycling required me to wear my Teva sports sandals (I do not own any sneakers/trainers since the end of 2011), and it had a high chance of irritating the already bad skin with abrasion.

So I stayed in and spent time reading Infection Control for Instruments. It is a simple sub-two-hundred-page summary of strategies and associated processes involved in ensuring that musical instruments, their locations, and allied personnel are not a part of the disease transmission process. It was a document that has shown great relevance recently due to the on-going pandemic. It is well thought through and researched, and provides a good framework from which more detailed infection control processes can be enacted.

For those who are too lazy to read the document, the general idea is to ensure good hand hygiene, not share stuff that has ``wet contact'', and ensure that everyone plays a role in shared places to keep it clean, with regular disinfection prescribed within the infection control document. Choices of gadgets, disinfection chemicals, and associated procedures ought to take dressing from the relevant regulatory authorities (CDC, EPA, and FDA within the USA for example), and not be based off anecdotes shared by a friend of a friend. Various management strategies with respect to music instrument handling within ensembles are also suggested---the key idea here is to not overcommit the number of players to avoid sharing of instruments.

I would say that most of the document is full of good common sense, but common sense in a period of uncertainty is definitely lacking. I have heard/seen nonsensical ``measures'' of woodwind players having to wear masks while playing---they achieve the ability to play by cutting holes in the masks so as to allow them to breathe through their [uncovered] noses, and blow through their [uncovered] mouths! The document makes it clear that all parties need to contribute to the conversation to use the best known science to guide the outcome, and not do stupid things like that, mostly based on ``friend-of-a-friend'' anecdote sharing.

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I've taken to replaying Fez again, this time with the full intention of completing it.

I suppose that is all that I would like to write today.

Till the next update, I suppose.

Blogging On

Blogging seems to be an almost forgotten expression form in the age of the social media. Most people seem to be content with either dumping their thoughts in some semi-cryptic Facebook status message (I am also guilty of this), or do up some captioned-in-pictures storybook in Instagram, or do some ``micro'' video in the form of TikTok/douyin, or generate a ``tweet storm'' with Twitter.

I no longer know of people who would use a blog for these things any more.

Has blogging gone out of style? In many ways, it is an unqualified yes. The idea of a blog is an old one, coming from the days when technically inclined people who could afford to find hosting and buy a domain name would set up their own personal website and update it semi-frequently with their own web pages of blog-esque content, i.e. in the form of ``news updates''. There was no such thing as a ``social media platform'' in the early days---people are usually anonymous/pseduonymous, and if there was a need to find someone to read his/her views, it would be either through finding their personal web sites, or through interactions on various bulletin boards/fora. This was part of the reason why web directories (the earliest incarnation of web-search in a static form) existed. Connectivity was weak---that screen name on one forum may be the same as the one used in a blog, but there is no indication that they are really the same person/entity.

The natural evolution of that was to create a blogging platform that streamlined the technical process, allowing people to focus more on the content creation. As part of the streamlining process, this meant that people would be creating their own accounts within the platform itself, which meant that they would start to unwittingly form the start of a social network, except that it was not a term that was in wide use until the arrival of Facebook. Suddenly that screen name that was seen in the comments of one forum represent the same person who was updating his/her blog at a certain domain/location that was a sub-domain of the blog platform. The threads of information that were out there were tangling even as time mercilessly marched on.

The single-platform social network has finally arrived.

But as time on, blogging started to phase out in style. This is not necessarily due to the consolidation of the platforms and the migration of users to the newest and hottest. Instead, it is a sign of the general trend of ever-decreasing attention spans, where it is no longer the case that people would have the endurance to read a multi-hundred-word blog entry as opposed to some 140-character abomination filled with strange emojis and funny pictures. Media consumption had decided to prioritise quantity over quality, and many have followed the trend in one way or another.

Me? I'm an antiquated dinosaur, an exotic end-of-the-line evolution path for a technologist. I like writing out multi-hundred-word long blog entries to capture what I am thinking. Occasionally I write shorter stuff in Facebook, but I think I am at the stage where something more substantial than that is required.

And so, I am still writing here, some fifteen years on.

Till the next update I suppose.

Gifts to Myself

It's just past my birthday for this year. So, it is time for yet another retrospective.

I bought myself a gift for this year---a silver-plated cupronickel alto flute with straight and curved head joints made by 龙口金鸣乐器有限公司. It's the ``last'' representative that would round up the core instruments of the flute family. The original intention was not really to purchase my own alto flute---it was to have a shared high quality alto flute with my then wife-candidate. Well, she is no longer my wife-candidate, and thus that plan is garbage.

I already own a B-foot version of a vertical bass flute made by them, and I love the resonant nature of the sounds, as well as the quick reaction of it. Getting an alto flute from them seems like a no-brainer as well, despite their obvious ``no-name'' nature. My then wife-candidate owns an alto flute from them as well, and it definitely sounds good enough.

And so, I am now an owner of an alto flute, whom I named Eliana because it is a cool name, and it commemorates a new friend I made while spending some evenings at the nearby bar drinking and reading after work, before I had quit from my last job.

For these two low harmony flutes that I have, I can attest to the soundness of the mechanism, the goodness of their reaction, and general accuracy of intonation. I have not tried their other instruments to make any other pronouncements. But what I usually say still holds---the strength of a brand name only suggests that there is a certain low variance in the quality, it is still important for one to physically try out any musical instruments that one might purchase to see if one likes the experience of making music out of it. A ``no name'' brand can still have pearls among them all, but their usual high variance would mean that one may need to try many more instruments before finding that one pearl.

I think that this alto flute is likely to be the last purchase of a musical instrument for myself for quite a while. As seen in the instrument family representation section, I have very good coverage of the different ranges/timbres of instruments within the three instrument families that I care the most about (dizi, flute, recorder, and saxophone). Most of my planned and actual purchases over the years were done according to this principle. The only instruments that I may want to look into the future are a baritone saxophone, a contrabass flute, and maybe a sopranino saxophone.

I may want to get a special piccolo at some point, something that goes down to a low C, or even low B. But that is really not of the highest priority, as are the rest of the instruments that I might want to get to round up the representation. As is, I think my sound palette is good enough, and as many people have pointed out exasperatedly, I only have that one mouth to play these instruments.

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The anniversary of my birth came and went mostly uneventfully. Folks who cared enough to remember did come out of the woodwork to wish me a birthday greeting (shoutouts to CH, RX, YT, Winnie, XL, my other sister, and folks from the care group), and everyone else who didn't have Facebook to remind them did not say anything.

It's okay. It is the consequence of a deliberate choice that I made a few years ago to keep that specific date from being blasted all over the Facebook. On that social networking website, I am largely invisible, as it should be. I can be contacted as needed, but there is usually no need to contact me there.

It is the same strategy that I use for LinkedIn as well.

I did end up having dinner with my other sister and her hubby in the evening though, having north-east Chinese cuisine out next to Lor 27 Geylang. We did a la carte instead of the BBQ/hotpot, because we were just lazy to do our own cooking. Food was great, company was, as always, amazing. The power did trip at some point, but it was quickly rectified; it is still a mystery to me why the power could have tripped then.

Just a point of note though, ``my other sister'' isn't some half-sibling from nowhere---she's my unofficially adopted sister because she and I share the same surname. Our surname is sufficiently rare in Singapore that it is just funnier and easier to think of each other as siblings. Same reason why when I see anyone else with the same surname, I just call them my cousins when I am talking with other people---makes a good conversational piece that makes it more memorable.

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I met up with Harish to go on what can count as a hike in Singapore, along the southern ridges of Singapore. This is a route that I love walking, and had done so on several occasions with folks like Wangki, Roticv, and even XL with her hubby. Of all the times I had taken this route (traditionally beginning with the really stupid stairs of Marang Trail off Marang Road), I had only ended up in Kent Ridge Park maybe twice, including this one with Harish. But this time, the weather held up fine, and the company was right, and we managed to extend the route from Kent Ridge Park to go through NUS, before heading through to the west most end of West Coast Park, a park that I had hitherto not known of its existence before, despite having spent four years studying in that region, and about six months doing internships nearby.

It was a good hike.

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And that's about all I care to write at this point. Till the next update, I suppose.

Playing the Traverso

I have been messing about with the traverso recently, playing on my Stanesby Junior replica flauto traverso tuned in A415. Part of the reason why I have been messing about with it that much is the sheer accessibility of it relative to the other instruments---I have it assembled all the time, and left on the special dizi rack that I have attached to my sturdy Hercules music stand. Since the AF-3 is made of sturdy (and thick!) plastic, it tolerates the ravages of the environment a little better than the other metal instruments that I have.

Having it easily accessible means that I can just pick it up and noodle on it for a bit before putting it back down.

The fingering patterns for the traverso are interesting to say the least. The tone hols of the traverso are much smaller than that of the dizi, which means that the effects of cross-fingering are more pronounced. That it is tuned to A415 also means that the instrument D is closer in pitch to a modern A440 C♯ and with that, means that anything that is played on the traverso has a tendency to sound that much more mellow, even without into account the overall sweetness that the instrument generally sounds.

Prior to 2018 when I got my traverso, I had tried it on a few occasions, but always found it lacking in flavour. One big part of the reason was the misalignment of the embouchure hole with the tone holes, which led to some serious sound production/intonation issues. This was solved by making use of the ``AULOS'' text on each of the parts as markings for alignment---this ensured that the small and circular embouchure hole is correctly angled off the small and circular tone holes. Another part that made me dislike the traverso then was that it seemingly could not speak as well as the other flutes. This was also a mistake on my part---the traverso was not meant to be of a ``big flute'' sound. The play style of the traverso was more akin to that of the recorder than to a modern day concert flute (or even the dizi), but my playing more than five years ago was definitely much worse than my current skills.

Once those two situations were remedied, I started to fall in love with the sweet nonsense that was the traverso.

Being tuned to A415 has another interesting side effect---the tone holes were much farther apart as compared to one that was tuned to A440 due to the natural increase in the length of the air column to support the longer wave length of the fundamental. Comparing the Stanesby Junior with the Grenser (a similar traverso-like instrument but tuned to A440 and with larger tone holes) would show that the Stanesby Junior was a good 17mm longer. 17mm does not sound like much, but when it involves finger stretching, it can mean a lot to someone who has shorter fingers.

Fortunately, I do not have that problem. My fingers aren't exactly very long for my height, but I think they are long enough to not have to feel any strain when holding the A415 traverso using the orthodox method.

I had to relearn listening to the intervals though---I find that as I was playing the different scales using what I have learnt from the fingering patterns of the dizi (modified to use the actual traverso's actual fingering pattern), I can actually hear the difference in the intervals, which makes an interesting ear training exercise.

I've not really brought myself towards playing some hardcore baroque music with the traverso just yet---still trying to develop a good feel for the cross fingering and the tone shading possibilities for now. While the traverso runs counter to what I have been looking for in my instruments (consistency in tone across registers, standard equal temperament intervals that allow shading to fit the actual temperament needed for the music function, large dynamic range), it has its own place.

In a time of the COVID-19, with rehearsals still barred for the TGCC Chinese Orchestra, music making has been relegated to a solo affair. And in this particular circumstance, an instrument with such nuances becomes a much greater friend than the loud stuff that I have.

Till the next update.