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.