the trick is to chip at it

It's been so long since I've written here. It's kinda like if you stop writing for a while, you have so much you feel you should write, so more and more you feel less capable of doing so.

I'll begin with the mundane and the recent, then perhaps move to the more important stuff that sticks out and that's further in the past. Meeting Jasper tomorrow for dinner. After seeing my granny in hospital. She had a stroke two days before my birthday, so it's been about 5 weeks now. She's much better now, in the general ward, after being in the ICU for 3 weeks, if memory serves. She underwent brain surgery the day she went to Tan Tock Seng, though not immediately. When she first went in she was still conscious, so they didn't actually think she had a stroke until her condition deteriorated.

Met with gz last Sunday. He's doing quite well in OCS, seems like his company is not that crazy, and things are better now for them now that they're more "senior". Boon Tat is in Brunei now. gz is commisioning in April, and says he can play tennis with me when he comes out.

Life at work is still good, been doing some upgrades to my program recently. Discovered a revolutionary new algorithm for moving rows around. Looks promising. Am still working on it, taking some time because it's somewhat complicated.

My dad and I were watching the National Geographic Channel yesterday. It was a feature on the sea; specifically, the deep sea and this creature, the "vampire squid from hell". It's way cool, and simply amazing. It lives very deep where there are few creatures because the oxygen concentration is so low there. It's like the ancestor of the octopus (8 tentacles) and the squid (10 tentacles). It has some fins that move slowly and rhythmically, propelling it forward, and has huge eyes.

But the coolest thing about this Vampyroteuthis is that it has these light-producing "eyes" that are normally hidden, but when there's a predator about, it drastically morphs like Transformers. You see, the thing is like this dark red squid, about the size of a soccer ball, and the tentacles are somewhat webbed together. When it transforms, the tentacles invert like an umbrella in the wind and the webbing covers the body, and its eyes. The underside of the webbing is now exposed, and this has a whitish color. Then it switches on the light-producing "eyes" on the other end of its body, which give off an eerie bright blue glow. It doesn't see through those "eyes", but damn, they look scary! Then it can shrink the glow to tiny spots to give the illusion that it's gone far away.

Speaking of appearances, I've developed this shaving system that shaves approximately 50% of the time I spend shaving. It's a simple concept: just shave the chin area and forget about the area above the lips, which supposedly the SAF doesn't mind. But the SAF minds if you have hair on your chin. I try to get by with shaving once a week, but I'm usually forced to go to twice or thrice.

Bought a red bandanna in the US, when I was in LA hanging out with my lovey, who is the sweetest to me. We watched some movies in theaters (Finding Neverland, Sideways) and rented some movies on videotape (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Before Sunset, Master and Commander). I also caught several movies on my flights. Alas, it was all too short. Her reaction to the magic trick I performed for her was most wonderful.

Will be doing some more interviews for Princeton applicants. Did I already say that one of the candidates I interviewed has got into Princeton? So far there's a total of about 4 early decision candidates from Singapore who've gotten in. Globally, about half the Princeton Class of 2009 has been accepted through early decision.

They were showing American Idol on TV. There was this woman, who got rejected, who might seriously have schizophrenia. I mean, I'm certainly not a mental health professional, but she was saying that she heard voices, and even said that the judges wouldn't want to hear those voices.

And did I tell you that I totalled my linux installation? I trashed it when I was doing an upgrade and in the thick of the action my laptop crashed. Lots of files got corrupted, but thankfully I managed to get into my system. That took some effort because the password file was corrupted, so I couldn't log in, plus before that fsck (filesystem check, like "scandisk") kept quitting and rebooting my system. Fixed all that, but X Windows (GUI) won't start.

So it's like I've got a super-advanced version of DOS installed. Took the opportunity to see the web through Lynx, a "text browser". I can see websites, but they look like text files with color. Links are text colored blue, and to "click" a link, move the cursor onto the text and press enter. I had also installed Amaya some time back, before X died. That's the reference browser by the W3C. Supposed to kinda set the "standard" for the web, and it allows you to easily edit the html of any website.

I'm going to back up my stuff on CDs and squeeze my Windows partitions as much as possible to expand the space available for linux, then do a re-install of Debian. Probably going to try to install the "testing" distribution. Tried to find CD vendors in Sim Lim Square, but no one sells them there. I could either buy the CDs online or burn them from a download. Or go online and see if there's some place in Singapore I could go to buy the CDs.

In the "mind your body" supplement of the Straits Times today, the editorial by Sharon Loh is about body image. I quote:
"Children will absorb the attitudes of their parents. It's not what you say, it's what you do. If you keep complaining about your weight and feel pressured to be thin, kids will learn that these are important concerns.
"If you go from one fad diet to another, they will think these are preferable to sensible nutritional choices. And if you tell your daughter she would be prettier if she lost some weight, well, you know the message she's going to pick up."

Seriously, parents who get slimming pills for their kids (if they aren't excessively overweight) are simply passing poison to them. Poison, poison everywhere. Poison we let seep under our skin, the culture of "garang" poisoning our ability to decide what is reasonable. The commandos that went through shit in their time put others through shit now and someone died tragically as a result, and the trainers got jail time.

If you stay tuned to this space, you might get a poem tangentially related to the tsunami disaster. But that's not written, so more likely than not it's not going to get written.