On Xenophobia

There is something that has been irking me for quite a while, and up until this point I had not really figured out what exactly was the cause of the said irksomeness. But before I launch into a tirade over the mess, let me just simplify the issue to just one word.

Xenophobia.

That seems to be a really hot topic these days, what with the massive global-scale machinations of the labour market, where anyone anywhere can be part of the supply of both skilled and unskilled labour. Sounds lovely, isn't it, free market principles at work, correcting the imbalances that exist in each of the domestic markets to ensure maximal economic output. But as almost every developed nation has discovered, this fluidity of the global labour market has created the rather uncomfortable position of xenophobia, a word that hasn't seen the light of day since the end of World War II a good fifty odd years ago.

But why xenophobia? Aren't we all humans at heart? Haven't we learn from the mistakes of our forebears that discrimination was one really good way of ensuring that we will never have true peace? I think that it is not the case for some people to actually fear foreigners, but the circumstances that surround it are causing such reactions to occur with startling frequency. It is not so much as the numbers that is causing the xenophobia, but the general perception of clustering that is causing the rift.

As a guest in a foreign land, I will not talk much about what I observe here. Instead, I shall use my own country as an example to explain the model that I have regarding the current state of affairs. In Singapore, almost everyone was an immigrant or a descendent of an immigrant---the natural numbers of native Singaporeans who have already lived on the island prior to Sir Stamford Raffles' 1819 establishment of the island as a major port are known to be small. A sense of community was eventually forged during the public housing expansion phase of the HDB, which basically broke up the many kampong communities that were centred roughly along ethnic or cultural lines.

Why the building of a sense of community regardless of ethnicity? I think it appeals to the social nature of humans in general; when forced to be in a new situation surrounded by strangers, one will end up trying to make a few friends here and there, willing to forgo some of one's inhibitions and biases just to maintain the veneer of sanity through building social ties. This is the fundamental way in which the modern Singaporean identity/society is formed. We are united not along ethnic or cultural lines, but by our common experiences, grouses and other generic/ethnically neutral issues.

But of course, that is just a nostalgic history lesson. There are two things that I would like to point out from my anecdote. First, when allowed to develop naturally, people tend to want to cluster with people whom they know, or are at least similar to them in some sense due to the comfort derived from familiarity---this is the formation principle of the kampong in yonder year. Second, it is only when an external force is applied to break up these clusters do you see an effort to take a bold step out of one's comfort zone to adapt to the new surroundings.

The problem with xenophobia in Singapore lies in the fact that the more recent foreigners who are entering the country are still in the ``kampong formation'' phase, where what they do, who they see and where they stay have large amounts of freedom. If we choose to view this from a more utilitarian perspective, there is no incentive for them to step out of their comfort zone and adapt to the new culture that they are currently embedded in, since they have easy access to whatever it is they were bringing in to the country. This is not a bad thing---when one is in a different land, having familiar faces to hang out with is one very good way of ensuring sanity. The problem comes, however, when the group starts to take a life on its own and literally enforces exclusion, either via a superiority complex, or via a cannot-care-less perspective. It is these transformations that end up generating the friction necessary to develop xenophobia.

Do I have a solution for this? Quotas are not going to solve the problem---they will only delay it for another time. Telling locals to be more tolerant is just missing the problem altogether. I think that the important thing that needs to be done is to remind the foreigners who end up being in a country for the long term that they are guests of their host country, and that they have a social incentive of not being a clique. That last bit will prove to be the hard part in any solution involving population integration.

Friday Night Mumblings

It has been a while since I last sat down just to... listen to music. That's right, actually playing the music at a level that is beyond the threshold of ignorance so that I can listen to the lyrics and feel the song. I don't really know when was it that I started to switch over to non-verbal music (like soundtracks or classical instrumentals) to provide background ambience to keep my mind together as I work on things; it occurred some time within the last year, that's for sure.

I'm definitely no audiophile, but my go-to headphones for listening to stuff is the Bose IE2. Surprisingly, music that passes through it sounds pleasant---it might not have the response that self-proclaimed audiophiles demand, but as a set of headphones used with few if any equaliser tweaks, it works pretty well for me. But this time, when I really want to listen to what is going on, I pull out my over-ear headphones---the ATH-M50 from Audio-Technica. It is roughly the same price as the Bose IE2 (might be cheaper), but due to the larger drivers present, provides a much fuller sound than the IE2. This means that at moderate loudness, the timbre of the music is just so full and rich. The only caveat is that I need to enable the on-board SRS signal processor to push the low frequencies enough such that the driver of the ATH-M50 is sufficiently exercised---I don't have that problem with the IE2.

But anyway, I talked about the latest Cherry Boom album that I got recently. I spent a whole day listening it as ambient, but when I listened to it with my over-ear cans, mmm, they just sound lovely, as always. Compared to the first two albums, the whimsicality of the music is less pronounced, a playful tone but with an air of maturity of the band as a whole. A really nice addition that I'm sure I will listen to again and again over time.

This might have been brought up before, but there is something magical about Faye Wong's ``Eyes On Me''. I, for one, can never get the lyrics right from listening, but the tonal quality of it is that of a lovestruck female, and Faye Wong actually does it in a sufficiently haunting/wistful voice that it is just plain enticing.

But ballads and alt-rock music aside, these days the non-verbal music that I've been listening to are a mix of the ``old staple'' and new stuff. The ``old staple'' I'm referring to here is the soundtrack of タイヨウのうた, featuring the ``surfer beat'' hybrid with strings of 澤野 弘之, the composer of the soundtrack. As for the new stuff, I'm referring to the ``Smooth Jazz'' internet radio station hosted on Sky.fm. Previously, I would listen to the ``Piano Solo'' channel, but for some reason the saxophone seems to have a stronger calling on me.

Alright, I have no idea what I'm writing any more. It feels almost alien yet somewhat familiar to be writing out a blog entry in the middle of the night, alone, with my desk lamp providing the only source of illumination. Somewhat familiar...

Oh on a final note before ending this, I've decided that I am skipping NaNoWriMo this year. Two reasons: I don't really have a story to tell and more importantly, I will be in the deepest of the deepest piles of shit if I actually went ahead to do it, considering that I just have so many things to do this semester. Totally not worth it.

Okay, I'm done here. Till next time.

Orienteering

So apart from the functionality of the kitchen, there were a couple of other interesting things that had happened since the last update.

First off, I finally tried out orienteering, the sport that I had read about a very very long time ago in a Hardy Boys Casefiles book (yes, I knew about orienteering since I was around 14 years old or so). John and I went with a friend of his out to Robinson Park in Peoria. I think that it is a very interesting civilian NAVEX that requires both the physical ability of dealing with the varied terrain and the mental ability to decide how best to run the course from control point to control point given the terrain and individual constraints. It really reminds me of my secondary school days where I would spend hours reading an atlas to study the geographical features via the topographical maps, and the map reading section of the `O'-level geography exam. A pity that orienteering only makes sense outside of Singapore---the terrain in Singapore is sufficiently boring and small with few non-urban areas left. I suppose I should try to enjoy it more while I am still here.

Next up, I finally got the new Cherry Boom (樱桃帮) album ``Only''. It was released in 2010, but it was only recently that I managed to get my hands on it. As always, they have that nice alt-rock pop sound that is addictive and whimsical. Probably not as good as their first album, but still a nice piece of work. Now, if Lesley Roy had another album out, I would be much happier.

Finally, I have decided to spend some money to get yet another Lamy Safari pen, this time for red ink. I think that I need more colours for annotation, and really, I cannot stand using non-fountain pens these days. Something about the amount of surface pressure needed.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Till next time.

Kitchen---Cleaned!

Ah, time for a quick blurb again. The kitchen is finally dealt with, with the cabinets cleaned out and the utensils/cooking implements in place. Food has been sorted out and now we are more confident with the stock that we have for cooking and consumption. The floor has been mopped, and everything is spick and span. Now we are left with giving away/selling some of the old stuff to folks and then the apartment would be inspection ready.

After doing all that cycling for moving a while back, I decided to sit down and compute just how much cycling I do on average. Here are my results:

Activity	Distance/mi
Home to office and back	2×2.3×4 days
Home to office to ARC and back	2.3+1.5+2.2
Home to ARC and back	2×2.3
Office to lunch and back	2×0.8×5 days
Total approximated distance	37

And that does not include any miscellaneous cycling that I need to do for various tasks like geocaching or grocery shopping.

No wonder I feel that my legs are tired sometimes.

Moved

So as at yesterday, I have finally moved out of my old apartment at Orchard Downs. It is a mixed bag of feelings though---having lived in the same place for a year, I have developed some light attachment to its oddities and general feel. But let's face it---I was having problems with that place. I don't know the neighbours well (they are mostly families who kept to their... social group centred around ethnicities), and I was forever talking to the walls that surround me. So when John suggested that we rent a place together by taking over an apartment of his friend, I was game to do so.

The moving was tricky, but finally done. The cleaning though, was a little exhausting. Sweeping the floor of dust, then mopping it with a wet mop, cleaning up the entire kitchen (including the refrigerator), disinfecting the entire toilet---those took about 3 hours from start to finish. By the time I was done, I didn't really feel like doing anything else.

But now, I'm safely at my new place. The neighbourhood is quieter, there is air-conditioning if we need it, and there's a room mate to talk to and do crazy shit with. Oh, and the rent is lower too. I think that this is an overall plus.

Moving

This week is sort of a crapshoot. I'm busy packing the few (but scattered) items I have to move to my new place with John, my roomie. The relative distance to campus is roughly the same, with slightly worse public transport access, but the overall lower rent and the company is very much welcomed. I think that it is time that I start acknowledging that I am, in spite of all appearances, biased towards the extraverted side.

On a more awkward and personal note, I've started to replace my bikini briefs with boxer briefs. Yes, to those who don't know what kind of underwear I wear (that's like almost everyone), I used to wear bikini briefs. But now, for a change of pace, I've switched to the boxer briefs. Initial impressions on this style of underwear are quite good---they don't give you wedgies like briefs do, and unlike boxers, they don't really ride up your leg and get caught in a thousand and one different bunches that make things rather uncomfortable. One more test that I need to subject these to would be to go for Jujitsu training with an athletic cup + jock strap; we'll see if the boxer briefs provide better support for the entire protection system as compared to my bikini briefs from before. And yes, it is high time to change my entire stash of underwear---the current set has followed me for the last uhh 6 years and are quite worn. And yes again, this falls in the ``too much information'' category, but it's just that little sauciness that I think my blog is lacking, right? ;-)

[PROTOTYPE2] finally came out for the PC via Steam. From initial impressions, this feels like a much improved version of the original [PROTOTYPE]. But considering that I'm at most 20% through the game content, it remains to be seen if the game is really that good. Things that I like about this compared to the old [PROTOTYPE] is the ``controlled'' evolution mechanism, which promotes exploration but hinders grinding as a means of advancing the character's ability. In some sense, this makes the story flow a little smoother. But as noted before, it will be a while before I can come to a final conclusion of the game.

Alright, enough chatter. I need to triage my belongings for the massive move detail tomorrow. Till next time.

Home Trip: A Hasty Report

*stretches fingers*

I promised to talk about my home trip, and so here it is. Note that the text might be a bit strange in style because I started on this much earlier, and am trying to finish it up now. Anyway, here we go.

First off, the main purpose of the home trip was really to deal with the fact that I was going a little nuts from too much social isolation. Yes, that's right, too much social isolation---the loss of any semblence of a support network. It is probably one of my biggest weaknesses, possibly a karmic lesson that I will need to learn during this life time. Since this is going to be a long post, I'm going to try something a little different and make use of fourth-level header tags to create sub-sections. They are unlikely to be well formatted as compared to the rest of the text, but I suppose it is more palatable than just a great wall of text.

And so, we begin.

Massive Travels

Travelling out from the C-U area to get back to Singapore is pretty non-trivial. The closest airport is CMI (Williard Airport), but it's hard to find/coordinate connection flights from there to other international airport hubs like say ORD (Chicago O'Hare). So my trip back consisted of getting to ORD, hopping on a plane from there to HKG (Hong Kong), and then from there straight to SIN (Singapore). The hard part was figuring out how to get to ORD in the first place, since it is a good 3-hour drive up north. I couldn't really ask friends to drive me up there, mostly because it is going to be a 6-hour drive for them (3 out and 3 back), but also because that meant that I needed to coordinate the schedule of yet another person, which makes things ridiculously complicated. That left with taking the bus from the Lincoln Express (LEX).

There was some mild drama for the LEX. The original timing that I booked was cancelled for some reason, and I had to choose between an earlier time slot or a later one. Being someone who would rather be checked in early especially for an international flight, I opted for the early morning one, which was a good 2 hours earliear. As a result, I ended up camping out in the office overnight to ensure that I could get on the bus in time---it was too early that the city buses were not running yet.

The trip up to ORD was fairly uneventful, except that there were short detours here and there to pick up other passengers along the route. Check-in at the airport did not happen as early as I wanted because the counter just wasn't opened that early. That was settled soon enough and before I knew it, I was already on the plane and en route home.

I'll spare the details of the long flight and just fast forward to touching down on Sunday (SGT).

Day 0

Reaching SIN made me feel a little delirious from happiness, well that and the fact that my sleep schedule was horribly messed up at that point, having to ``steal'' sleep from waiting and being onboard the planes. It was nice to see my mum and dad at the airport to pick me up, and we wasted no time to head off to Jalan Kayu to grab some prata---one of the foods that I have been craving for quite a long while. While at Jalan Kayu, I picked up one of the newer traditional caches there and checked up on the puzzle cache that YT and I placed in Seletar. It surprised me to no end that the cache was still there, pretty much in shape and well hidden from the muggles around. That was a good sign.

When I got home, the first thing that I did was to take a shower. At that point, I had probably passed 2--3 days without actually having taken a shower. I felt yucky from the stickiness that came from the clinging prespiration from the high humidity. After the shower, I started on some machine upkeep before heading out to get some of my running gear before meeting up with RX for some sushi/sashimi at our usual sushi place in AMK Hub (Ichiban Sushi).

Day 1

I had a meeting coming up, so I spent most of the day working on my research, with a breakfast session some time in between. I had to nap here and there to cope with the drastic time zone differences. In the evening, I went back to Buona Vista CC to train with the gang on Aikido.

I realised that after training in HDR JJT for about a year, my Aikido is a little ``hard''---not as yielding/cooperative as we ought to be. I think I'm still not at the stage where I can switch between philosophies that quickly. I met up with Tommy Senpai, Sam and Ejin. It was fun to train with them, even though I was a little rusty on my techniques. Ejin looked as lovely as ever, and Sam was definitely more skilled than before after getting his Shodan.

Day 2

Nothing else other than work was done, though I caught up with Jo in the evening. We had a simple dinner and watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a British comedy-drama film that had a cast consisting of quite a few old-time British actors/actresses. I will not go through the plot (see the link for details), but suffice to say, it was a really enjoyable film. It is not often that I went out for films like this, but this one was nice, just like the other films. Originally I was supposed to meet up with Kishore and Becky to watch Prometheus, but Kishore couldn't make it as his cold was still in progress and the medication was making him too woozy to drive. The late night was spent on working, of course.

Day 3

I was basically running on pure caffeine on this day. I had a meeting in the morning regarding my research, and had to make my way to SMU. Thinking that it might be a good idea to take the Circle Line (it wasn't complete the time I left), I hopped onto the NEL from Hougang and got off at the interchange at Serangoon to transfer to the Circle Line. What I saw/heard scared the hell out of me.

First, it was silent at that time of the day. No one was talking---no one was making an effort to talk. One could not hear anything that sounded ``human''---no chatter, no machinery sound, nothing.

Second, while I said that there was nothing that sounded ``human'', there was this uniform and synchronised footstep sound as the huge throng of people marched from the NEL section to the Circle Line section. It was a terrifying thing to hear at that time of the day. To me, it sounded like a whole army of zombies walking through the tunnels. I was sufficiently unnerved by it that I ended up running through the tunnel just to create some dissonance and retain whatever was left of my sanity.

The meeting came and went, and I left it feeling worse than I had going in. Fear gripped me like no other, and I felt even more guilty for deciding to take the home trip. Shaking my fears aside in as much as I could, I went on for my dental appointment before heading home for a nap. In the evening, I met up with my friend Chara, and we spent an enjoyable evening chatting about what was going on with our lives and things in general. Though she and I were not super close, it was still very heart-warming to talk to a friend, something that I have been finding trouble getting over here, more so than ever.

Day 4

Thursday. Originally, I planned to go for Aikido training again to meet with Freddy Sensei, but then I realised that I had basically spent the last 24--48 hours awake, and additional physical exertion was something that I thought was not a good idea. Besides, I had a meeting on Friday morning with my advisors for research---more work needed to be done, as well as the catching up on my sleep. So the day was spent napping/recovering, while the night was spent working on more concepts for my research.

Day 5

I made my way to ADSC and had my meeting before meeting up with Victor to go geocaching in the afternoon. We decided to tackle some of the new caches in the city area like Fort Canning Hill, and as we were traipsing along the river side, I found YT trailing us, to my surprise. I knew that she was due in Singapore for some exigencies, but I didn't realise that she had chosen the earlier of the two options. The three of us, reunited after a year, went along our geocaching ways before parting at the west side of Singapore. YT and Victor had different events to attend to, and so I went home from there on my own, without having a chance to have a meal with them to chat.

Day 6

Saturday. It was a day filled with events, and for this day, I borrowed my father's car to go about my ways. I miss driving the manual transmission car, and found to my amazement that despite not driving for a year, my driving skills did not deteriorate at all. The morning was spent at a CITO event at the newly opened Bishan Park. The event was organised by onehappy and Just1Gal, with me being the instigator and swag transporter. It drew a healthy number of geocachers, most of them local, but a couple of foreign visitors also turned up for the fun. We picked up the trash, found the geocache, and had a nice chat about all things geocaching related. YT made it in the end; she had told me on Friday that her family was having something related to 端午节 in the morning and thus might have some timing collisions.

After the CITO event, I began my own solo geocaching trip for the day. The first stop was to the Sembawang Hot Spring for the only Earthcache in Singapore. I took a fellow geocacher there too (he's from Portugal), and drove there fairly safely. That geocache done, I drove all over the Punggol/Sengkang area to pick up the geocaches that were out-of-the-way before heading down to Kovan. I tried to do the multi-cache there, but it didn't turn out well and so I ended up eating a Yoshinoya (yay beef bowl!) before heading off to Teck Ghee CC for Chinese Orchestra practice.

The Chinese Orchestra group was... quite small. Only a few of the old-timers were still around, and even the children's group was not super fancy. It's quite sad actually, and made me wonder if things would be different if I were around.

I managed to meet up with Kishore finallly during the late night, where we ate Prata at Jalan Kayu. It was a good meet up, and we talked about what happened to us in between.

Day 7

Quick packing in the morning and by afternoon, I was at the airport ready to go back to C-U. I was supposed to meet Cui in the morning for breakfast, but she couldn't make it on her schedule (by some coincidence, Cui was also in town at that point).

The trip back to C-U was fairly uneventful, except for the excessive 11-hour stop over in Hong Kong International Airport. By the time I got back to my domicile, it was beyond 2000hrs.

So, what about the trip? I think it served its purpose well---I didn't feel as nuts as compared to the time period before I went home, but also I felt like I was some kind of prisoner, never really having the opportunity to relish the fact that I was home. It raised quite a few questions in my mind that I don't know how to answer even now as I am writing this.

Maybe time will tell what the implications are.

Heat Wave

It's the weekend once more, but like any self-loathingrespecting PhD student, I find myself in the office working on my little contribution to what is hopefully the body of useful knowledge for the human race. The week that was just past was rather eventful in several strange ways, partly due to the federal holiday known as Independence Day, and partly because of a rather extensive heat wave.

Parts of the US was hit by a rather unfortunate heat wave that saw the maximum temperature rising to around 37--40°C, with minimum temperatures staying mostly above the 30°C mark. If it were only the heat, I couldn't really care less, since cooling off is as easy as drinking more water and letter perspiration/peeing do their work. But the humidity was relatively high too, which meant that the perspiration just clung on to the skin like a thin sticky film, which made doing anything rather uncomfortable. I opted to work from my apartment instead of hunkering down to the office where air conditioning was available, under the belief that the 2-mile cycle out in the ridiculous heat was not worth as much as being mostly naked at home and having access to my stock of food/refreshments and shower.

Surprisingly, my skin didn't flare up as badly as one would expect. Yes, there was some mild inflammation, but it wasn't as bad as the ``heat rash'' that I sustained when I got back home. I ran two experiments: involved just cleaning up the perspiration with a soaked towel, and the other involving showering every four to five hours with soap and water. It turns out that the soap and water combination was much more useful than the cleaning with the soaked towel. For one, the soap actually did much in removing the film of perspiration, which I think is the cause of the inflammation due to the ample growth medium for the bacteria. For two, a shower is generally better at removing extraneous thermal energy from the body, if one calibrates the temperature of the water properly.

I survived well throughout the week until Thursday night, where the still air made sleep almost impossible. I woke up at 0300hrs (Friday), finding myself drenched in perspiration. I ended up having to transfer my tiny table fan into the bedroom to blow myself just to get a couple more hours of sleep.

Independence Day was just as hot and humid as any of the other days in the week. I found my will to concentrate falling under the dual influence of the heat and the general holiday spirit, and when John IM-ed me suggesting to go geocaching as a way of escaping the heat via the air-conditioning in his car, I readily agreed. We had arranged earlier to attend the fireworks display held at Parkland College (north-west of Champaign-Urbana), but we ended up extending the plan to include an afternoon of geocaching. That ended well as we drove out around 15 miles westwards and proceeded to hunt down those pesky ``park-n-grab'' caches located along the intersections of the country roads. All in all, the cache haul for the day was 27, a new record, and one that helped push my total cache find beyond 400.

The evening was spent at one of John's dancing friend's Independence Day grill event, where we hung out with different people who were there for the [free] food, before capping the day with the viewing of the fireworks display.

The one thing that I can say about the fireworks was: wow. I know, it's not doing it much justice, but you just had to be there to see what I had seen. Unlike most of the fireworks display that I had attended, for this one, I was literally ``in front of'' the launch platform, having the front seats of the show, so to speak. This meant that the grandeur of the display was just magnificent.

Anyway, I ended up camping out in the office on Saturday evening and today to avoid more of the heat and to actually get some work done through the use of the large screen that I have available in the office. Oh, that and the printer and large table where I can just place strew all my material about.

I know I owe a trip description for my home trip---patience, young grasshopper. It will come up soon.

Back in C-U

Just a quick blurb.

I recently went home for a week to visit my family and to meet up with friends who happen to be in town, as well as to sample the excellent food that is present. It was a nice trip home, marred slightly by the fact that I couldn't actually go home ``guilt-free'' and not do any work. Nevertheless, the home trip was much welcomed and refreshing for my psyche, in fact.

I would spend some time to write more about the trip back and what I have done, just as a means of chronicling what I believe to be one of the more important aspects of my life this year. No, I don't think that I am predicting anything bad to come, but it is rather important that I go hom for a visit, however short it might be. Maybe over this weekend, when I can tear myself off work and do some ``recreational'' writing.

Anyway, I am safely back in the US, continuing my ever struggle towards understanding the craft that I had chosen as my career path.

Till updates to come.

...

Something a little more classic:I don't know why I am suddenly craving for this piece of music. Perhaps it's the realisation that I'm heading home for a visit soon enough that is making me thinking about such things.

*shrugs*

The Scribbles gets some updates

And so it begins again, yet another week. I'm wondering if I'm really ``suffering'' from some kind of mental disturbance, but really I think that it is much easier to dismiss that thought and focus on more pressing issues.

So far, the most active blogs that I have are this one and the poetry one. I do have one more blog, and it generally contains various fictional prose. That one has a rather low update frequency because of the time investment needed to write anything like that, but that's of course due to the fact that I wasn't trying to make use of my favourite blitz writing tool---WriteThis. The premise of that tool is simple: pick some parameters, set a time limit, click the generate button and start writing!

But anyway, what I wanted to say before I digressed is that I have spruced up the prose blog a little, shifting all my NaNoWriMo win banners from the main blog to the prose one (you'll notice immediately that the ``NaNoWriMo 2011 winner!'' image is now gone from this blog). Previously, I set the banners to point to the user tracking tool on the NaNoWriMo website, but now, I have altered them to link directly to the draft manuscripts for the entries instead. I think that this is a little more streamline than before and conveys more information too.

Alright, enough blathering in the morning. Back to work I go.

Marmite Soup Base FTW

So the thing about instant noodles is that underlying MSG-laden ``soup packet'' is often not very nice, particularly if you are getting your instant noodles in the US. But instant noodles are a cheap and plentiful source of carbohydrates, not necessarily a good source, but a source nonetheless.

The way that I sometimes make my noodles is to capitalise on two things: my Marmite and the ground pork that I buy from the store and keep in the freezer till needed. Let me first talk about the ground pork.

The ground pork that I get from the store is not necessarily the highest quality money can buy (that's just plain expensive), but at the very least, it doesn't look too old or too artificial in colour. Once I bring the pork home, I split it into 3 portions that I store in plastic containers. I used to not do anything else with them, but I realised that by massaging in some light soy sauce and pepper, I can enhance their flavour. I learnt the hard lesson of splitting them before putting them into the freezer, because really, the thing is rock hard when completely frozen and makes it neigh impossible to split up. Since I don't cook often enough to justify a large stash of meat in the fridge in general, the meats generally stay in the deep freeze compartment until I so decide to use them, and under those circumstances, I will take one container and place it outside to thaw. I would use a microwave for convenience and potential hygiene purposes (microwave thawing is faster and thus reduces the amount of time for bacteria to multiply), but I currently do not have such an implement.

So when making the noodles, I like to use a quarter teaspoon of Marmite to act as the broth base, with a little bit of ground black pepper, some crushed red chilli peppers and parsley bits for flavour. I find that the Marmite base provides enough savoury flavour worthy of soup while at the same time providing the vitamin B complexes that I am generally missing in my diet. The meat always goes in first when the liquid mixture is at a boil, and then I toss in the instant noodles to top it up. Stirring it around for a bit makes sure that nothing boils over and overflows the pot. A few short minutes later, food is served.

It's a nice combination that provides me with the protein that I need. I don't really worry much about fibre in general because I eat out often enough that I do get enough roughage.

[Ed: This article started a while back, but it is only now that I have some time to finish it up.]

Lamentations

I think that it is starting again. That sinking, empty feeling within me. The kind of feeling that one gets when one feels... alone.

I have my friends, I have my running, my jujitsu, and perhaps my writing. I have people I can talk to, to chat with over instant messaging tools, to summon over IRC for a talk or a beer, to video chat if I have to.

I have stuffed toys to mumble to, research papers to keep me thinking and wondering about my problem, news magazines to keep me abreast of world developments, comics to tickle my funny bone, horror stories to keep me on end.

But these are all... not enough.

I crave the touch, the deep understanding and care that only a family or a lover can give. I crave the fussing and adoration that accompanies that care, to feel loved and important, as opposed to this generally ignoble existence I seem to have gotten myself into. I crave the warmth of an embrace, the intimacy of the cuddle, the familiarity through proximity.

I miss being human.

June

Ah June. The month of supposed carefreeness, the month of freedom, the month of Summer and all its associated greatness and dullness. For me, it's just another month in the calendar, something to sort of look forward to, but not really to relish.

I am really looking forward to my home trip this month. Partly because I miss the people back at home, and partly because well I'm just so damn lonely here. Yes, I have some friends here, but somehow, it just feels different. I suppose as one gets older, one realises that one's old friends are just irreplaceable; they've been through too much to be the same as any other new friend that one makes. It's something that is a little hard to explain, but easy to feel.

Anyway, I don't really have much to say except that June is upon us. Till the next update.

Affection...

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

Walking on CoalsAsphalt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Sir, With Love

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

Elyse in Precise

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

Lovely, isn't it?

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

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

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

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

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

Alright, till the next post.

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

Precise Pangolin

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

Kinda sad how things are huh...

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

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

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

Still Alive...

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

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

Oh how wrong was I!

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

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