I will set a goal for myself, to complete at least 5 poems I'm happy enough sending in for the Golden Point Award.
Eugene wants to get a new computer and wants to install linux on his new computer. Hooray!
It seems there are quite a few loose ends for me to tie up on the programming front, so the weatherman predicts slight showers for the coming week.
Going to run after work tomorrow. Also, the week has been quite kind, today and yesterday managed to catch my transport home!
The Practice is getting pretty weird. I mean, it's hilariously wacky and off-the-wall with that Alan Shore guy, but then with a turn of the wrist it suddenly becomes heavy and serious. And another random comment flips it back to being flippant.
It's pretty good, the human drama is layered and complicated, intertwined in arcane ways. And there are also interesting intellectual issues dealt with from various perspectives.
Tonight was the season finale of CSI, but not to worry, the next season starts up without skipping a beat next Tuesday. So all is well. Except for the poem. Not really getting anywhere =)
I think a dry spell is ahead for coding, so it's time to take preventive measures. Will learn more about MS Access reports and writing macros interfacing with Access Objects. Then I can be nosy and poke into the database management done by Sam and Yinglan, and hopefully simplify and reduce their work.
My US tax return has been mailed. Made an appointment with the dentist, after much procrastination. Haven't installed linux for anyone other than myself yet, though there have been requests. Haven't been working much on tinkering with linux also. Will need to burn a CD soon to backup my documents.
Will try to work on a poem now. Casino-related. In the meantime, you can read these poems by the infinitely more gifted Alfian: The Merlion, Trawlers, and Void Deck.
It's fun to watch golf when the ball is hit from quite a distance and rolls and rolls and goes in. It's one of those things, you try often enough and miracles occur.
In another twist of events, I find out that Eugene took computing in JC. I guess that's not an especially interesting tidbit.
I'm so tired. Good news is that there is more coding to do tomorrow. I guess I should be working on the poems I've previously promised, given the warm response to this latest.
I hate websites/emails that have flashing/moving stuff. It's so darn annoying.
there comes a time
when you start to imagine
that people you know are doing it
at first it's rude
this virtual voyeurism
but you're past the age where
you bury your ears under the blanket
where the sounds from your parents' room
can't penetrate
still, it feels improper
thinking that a girl in your class
is doing it
makes you wonder
if she moans and grabs the sheets
makes you feel
like a parent
with a ear gingerly to the door,
balancing between titillation
and concern
there comes a time
that you're doing it
you're watching yourself
aroused by all those eyes
by what your parents would say
if they knew
Feeling somewhat down today. Not quite sure why. Ate two squares of dark chocolate and still feel the same. More or less. Went to granny's place just now, saw some old photos of her and my cousins.
Feel like I'll feel better going to work tomorrow and coding. Looking forward to doing some housekeeping of the code I hastily patched together on Thursday. Did I let everyone know that we stayed till 1 am on Thursday? Then on Friday I woke up a quarter to 6 pm.
Went running yesterday (Saturday), MacRitchie too packed with cars, so went to Botanic Gardens. The routine would be for everyone else to go there early and run first, then I'll join them on the second leg because I'm so weak.
In related news, bought a new handsfree set for my phone because the old one spoiled, then after that went to look for shorts, but size 34 is slightly tight (I like my clothes baggy, just in case), and the next size was 38.
Oh, and on the issue of handsfree, the Nokia original ($18) is of much better quality than the compatible ($8). The compatible didn't work! Also, the earpiece had a hairline crack, and it also was rather unfinished. A little sharp plastic bit sticking out. And the foam is like crap.
Clarification: "good taste" means taste aligned with respected critics, same as I consider good taste in poetry as taste that is correlated with respected poets.
I feel somewhat better after talking to my lovey. Anyway, I went to check out the new RJC campus on Saturday after the run since I was in the area. And it's fucking nice!
The whole place is damn spacious, the ground floor is like a huge extended void deck, with classrooms and stuff on upper levels. Everything is spread out, luxurious and langourous.
There are TVs hanging from the ceiling here and there, not sure why, a whole lot of them, really. The parade square is in this cool central location on the second floor, above the canteen. From there you can see lots of the school. Can see the tennis courts also elevated condo-style.
Each tutorial room has a projector (plus OHP), the kind you can plug a laptop to. There are "seminar rooms" too, for cosy, free-form discussion groups. There are no less (and possibly more) than 7 computer rooms, each with 20-30+ computers.
There is a central server room whose temperature is to be kept to 23 degrees Celsius. I'm dying to take a look at what is in there. Wonder how many server racks are in that place. Also have several display cabinets of various trophies, the 'A' div boys hockey championship is there.
And there are lifts all over the place, two by two. I saw a GP notice board, which was pretty interesting, describing the general subject areas that they set essay topics on. For example, politics, arts, maths, science, then for each of these they outline the kind of things they might ask, and give sample questions.
I think I saw a theater room, and there was dance studio also (though I don't like dance, I think dance sucks). Eating at the Bishan S11, I saw that there's going to be a new National Library at Bishan between the S11 and J8.
Met my hockey teacher, who was staying there, and was outside his door. He noticed that I was um, how shall I say, not so fit. But I had just gone running!
Did some programming on Thursday, working on a macro that I had written some time before for Yinglan. Eugene was working on the same thing, and my macro was more or less working, just not tweaked, and the data was not in a nice table form.
So Eugene was doing the thing manually, and Sam helped me get the data into a table, and I did some unrelated photocopying, and some copy-and-paste, find-and-replace coding. Mostly because I was lazy to think. Anyway, the code worked, and in a few seconds the macro did about 10 times the work Eugene did in an hour or so.
But, like I said, will have to redeem myself by refactoring the code tomorrow, which is quite a trivial exercise, but much needed. Just need to use an array instead of having the same block of code appear 10 times. Can also definitely modularize it much more.
I'm of the opinion that we don't really have to go "reward" people for their passion. If I have a passion for programming, being able to do programming is reward itself. You only have to "bribe" people to do their work if they don't really enjoy it in the first place.
As long as the job covers my expenses, I would take it up if I have a passion for it, and would certainly be more willing to cut down on expenses than take up another job that pays better but I don't really like.
So really, why are we throwing money at ministers? I guess politics sucks the passion out of people eventually. And also I guess because the "we" throwing the money are ministers themselves...
Played badminton with Eugene on Wednesday, had a good workout. Was telling him as we were walking out about "fatigue-induced gaiety", how things seem funnier when you're really tired. He said he hadn't really experienced it. Then Thursday came and we OT-ed till 1 am.
I've officially told my boss that the website is more or less done. Hope I don't run out of fun things to do. Will have to look around for more projects and get busy, otherwise might get assigned to boring stuff.
Is life better than death? Would you rather die peacefully in your sleep (given a week's notice if desired) or live a few more years then die a horrible death, perhaps get mauled in a car accident and be in agony for an hour or so then bleed to death?
Hope the coming work week isn't so crazy, but it probably will be crazier than it has been. I guess this kind of sentiment isn't interesting for most readers. Will keep it to myself then. Will try to put a poem up soon.
Listening to Avril Lavigne belt out "so much for my happy ending" as I'm on the SIA plane to Brunei. Took off in style, the pilot doing his pilot speak, the flight crew busy with their if-we-crash-demo. We're still not in army fatigues so we don't quite look the part of organized terrorists.
The food was ok, still, not much of a last meal. Touchdown, in many senses, was just the beginning of our departure. The journey to camp took forever, endlessly unfolding like a magician's cloth. Boarded a bus, disembarked at a pier, took a ferry to another horizon, and finally a 3-tonner to our destination.
When we got their my spirits were weary and shrivelled from anticipation. It was not even out first day. Unpacked stores, saddled up, given another run-through of the operation. The air was muggy and the ground muddy.
Watching National Geographic, which is great. There's this amazingly deadly spider, it hunts other spiders. It goes up to a spider on its web, taking advantage of the wind to move closer without being detected, moving quickly when there's wind and very slowly when there isn't.
When it's close by, it starts vibrating the web, mimicking an insect caught in the web, which gets the attention of the other spider. Then it springs and kills. In another strategy, the killer spider goes up to a leaf or some other structure above the spider web, then rappels down commando-style. Get right next to the spider then slips its fangs and its poison into its prey.
How its tiny brain achieves such things is startling. They describe the size of its brain as a salt crystal. Spring hare is a rabbit that jumps like kangaroo!
Lions sleep 20 hours a day! There are these lions that kill elephants, then in the night a big elephant came to the young elephant's carcass and paid its respects. It's brutal, they hunt at night as a huge gang, and bring down the elephant, then kill it by cutting off its breathing.
Elephants move in two kinds of herds, a breeding herd and a bachelor herd. The breeding herd is tightly packed, the young surrounded by adult females, so it's hard for lions to get between the legs. The bachelor herd is all adult males, which are huge.
The lions cubs don't get preferential treatment, they starve if there isn't enough food to go around, since they can only feed when they are able to sneak in. The alpha males scare the others away when they come in to grab a bite.
gz says he got sucked by a leech in Brunei. Meeting Jasper, Say Yang, and Aaron tomorrow morning. My lovey is the sweetest to me!
Back from running with CO and an officer from the other branch. Quite nice running at MacRitchie, we did 4 or 5 km, which is about half of what they usually do. Or they run about 5 km but faster.
Forgot to blog yesterday about the funniest thing that happened yesterday at work.
Attention all personnel, attention all personnel. The server is down. Please do not be alarmed.
It is laudable that the Singapore government is sticking to its stance that homosexual acts are criminal. It is only a depraved psychotic who would enjoy another man sticking private parts up his ass, which should be used for defecation. Such people should be put in jail, because even a mental institution is not safe for them.
It does not matter that they have sex privately, because we don't say murder is ok if it's done in secret, right? Certainly they will do it in secret because they are ashamed and have something to hide. They know it is wrong and yet they still do it, a sure sign that they have no moral values.
We must protect Singaporeans, who have a strong sense of morality. Furthermore, unlike the casino, there is no economic value of de-criminalizing the homosexual act. Well, even if there is, it's worse than gambling. It causes addiction. Maybe not as bad as drugs, for which the death sentence is mandatory, but still pretty serious.
I applaud the hard-line stance of throwing homosexuals in jail, and suggest that the government also consider extra-marital sex a crime. It might want to consider before-marriage sex "extra-marital", but I was thinking more of the case of people who are already married.
Extra-marital sex is also done secretly, and if the government does not try to catch offenders, it is clearly sending out a signal that extra-marital sex is ok. This will not do. Singaporeans have a strong sense of moral values, and extra-marital sex is destroying these values.
We need more babies, and extra-marital sex, while being able to lead to more babies, leads to less families. We need families to have babies, so it's obvious that to have more babies, we need more families, and not more babies.
Anyway, no need to give so many reasons why homosexual acts and extra-marital sex are criminal, since the government knows what it's doing when it says homosexual acts are criminal, and it's pretty clear to me that extra-marital sex is worse.
Alex talks about cookies, and stealing.
The week's finally over. Managed to catch my transport home only once this week, but there was another day I was able to leave more or less on time, but just missed it.
Eugene managed to book the badminton courts so we'll be playing this Wednesday after work. Great! And the office people want to have a movie outing on April Fools'. Miss Congeniality 2, I believe.
Alfian Sa'at is such a great poet. I want to be as good as him. Seems Tharman was once investigated by the ISA. Cool.
It's March now, and soon to be July... when we will be reunited, for good this time. Won't count the days yet, but will count the months!
The Cable Guy was showing on TV, and my mum was saying how she don't like Jim Carrie, but he's quite a thespian. Though I agree way over the top, but still, it's impressive, outlandish acting!
I definitely have some paternalistic instincts, like wanting people not to gamble, wanting people not to waste money, wanting the rich not to throw their money at houses and cars and boats and diamonds and ridiculous stuff, but to donate to the poor, to improve society. Oh well.
Made more progress with the website, might say I'm 1/4 done. I'm giving myself a lot of wiggle room in case I forgot something, because it might be more accurate to say that I'm 1/2 done.
Was way too hasty in telling my boss that can't have it in Excel where you type a number and they automatically append a string like "apples" to it. Meaning you type "2" and it shows "2 apples". Good thing she didn't just say, oh, ok, and countered that you can format the cell such that you type "1" and it appears as "$1". Same concept. So yah, can be done, in the same way.
In a version of the ultimatum game, I pass you $100 and you're supposed to make an offer of some of that money to another person. If the other person accepts your offer, you split the money according to the offer. If other person rejects, I take back the $100 and both get nothing.
How much would you offer? I have tons of Gmail invites to give out, incidentally, if anyone is still interested.
Speaking of weird screensavers, one of the randomly selected screensavers that came on last night was of a cow going up and down. It was probably supposed to be bouncing on a trampoline of sorts that's below the screen.
Bird flu is getting more mobile and deadly. I guess I would have to say watch out for it, but not in the good way that my lovey means, regarding "The Ballad of Jack and Rose".
Found out that if you receive several attachments in Gmail, there is an option to "download all attachments", wherein Gmail packs the attachments into a .zip file on the fly, for your downloading convenience!
By the way, gz is back from Brunei; he's been back since the start of the week, but time flies... He thoroughly hated it, and I'm sure I would have too. In fact, I probably would have hated it worse, if such measures carry any validity at all.
Speaking of measures, Singapore has revised target BMIs (body-mass index) downwards, since Asians supposedly have more fat, so Straits Times merrily reports on the Front Page that "Many more S'poreans are obese".
No one else at home seems to be as big a fan of the lights as I. The setup is that there are two sets of lights in the living room, one with 5 bulbs (on the side nearer the computers), and the other with 3 bulbs. The one with 3 bulbs was on, and my dad was reading the newspapers. I came up to the computer, switched it on, and switched on the other set of lights in the living room and my dad asked me to switch the other one off (the one with 3 bulbs).
Do I take too many words to carry off a simple idea? Maybe I am too detailed. But certainly I am prolix. And I've still got phlegm, still have trouble sleeping because lying down makes me cough. But it's getting better.
Have made quite a bit of progress with the website. Did a SQL double INNER JOIN to combine data from 3 tables, so have a nice RecordSet. The code is able to upload and delete files off the server like nobody's business, which is great.
Regarding the casino issue, I'd just like to say that I am not in favor of it. Actually, I'd like to say more about it, that it will ultimately be a negative sum game. You see, casinos are lavish to seduce gamblers, and the reason why they can be so obscenely, gratuitously ostentatious is that they make a hell of a profit from the odds.
It can become incredibly expensive "entertainment", one would do better pay $10 to watch a movie. At least a movie isn't totally about money, there's some artistry involved. Casinos and gambling are all about the money, unless it's a round of low-stakes poker among friends.
Initially I thought maybe a casino could do good if the government gets to appropriate a huge chunk of the profits, but I doubt that's going to happen; the casino operator is still going to be rolling in serious money. There will still be ostentatious inducements and spectacular wastage.
Agreed to go running at 8:15am on Saturday at MacRitchie... hope I don't die...
Killed another cockroach. I'm getting pretty good at it. The maid must be getting concerned by this spree of vigilante "justice". Squashed roaches under a slipper in the kitchen.
Just watched an episode of CSI in bright lighting. It was disturbing. This mother instigated her daughter and foster son (who were in a relationship, and had a baby) to kill themselves. She let them take her medications, and brought them to the valley to die there. She walked off, drove off with the baby, and didn't flinch when her daughter got up and said she didn't want to die. She just went off.
It's so fucking bright in the living room now. Sweet. It's gives a terrific sense of how it's like coming back home to a new day, it isn't morbidly dark and depressing, it isn't like working in a cellar in the basement watching TV. It's the kind of brightness that screws up diurnal rhythms, that make birds fall from the sky, that imbalances the eco-system. And I like it. Using eco-friendly (long-life), energy-saving (low wattage) fluorescent bulbs.
I can even see little specks of dirt on my keyboard. I guess this probably means that I'll sleep a little later on average, but then again I might be more efficient and sleep earlier. Haha.
Was hacking through the night. Not hacking of the fun or malicious variety, but the body-racking kind. But had a good day hacking today, though I'm somewhat pissed at having spent the whole morning tracking down this bug that I eventually located and squashed in 3 lines of code.
Killed a cockroach in the kitchen last night, by the way. I saw 2 of them...
Anyway, it's really useful that the ASP Request.QueryString and Request.Form collections are distinct and independent. Using a form to upload a file, so need to use the BinaryRead method to transmit that data (actually using some installed 3rd party component to do it, but the principle is that), and the thing is if you use that then you can't extract variables from the Request.Form collection the usual way. There's just one bit of info I needed in order to check what type of upload was being done, so was able to pass that information through Request.QueryString by hard-coding the querystring in the form action.
Oh, and the bug was with uploading a file onto a file that is already present on the server, which didn't completely overwrite it. Rather, if the file was 20k in size, then you upload a 19k file, it was something like you get the 19k file with the 1k from the old file stuck at the end of it. Took me too long to figure out which portion of the code was responsible for it. Spent a lot of time fiddling with the other part of the code where I read in the uploaded contents into a variable, then write in some header information then write in the contents stored in that variable. But the problem was upstream, so deleting the file and respawning it at this point didn't do jack.
The bottom line is that I should have first tried to track the bug instead of fiddling with the code and seeing if another method worked. When I tried tracking the bug, I found it almost immediately. And tracking the bug was as simple as doing a Response.Write of the variable I used to read in the contents of the uploaded file. Because then I found that the uploaded file already had the overflow-from-old-file problem, that the problem was not introduced by my reading and re-writing.
Tomorrow is going to be a big day. Going to start work on programming big, systematic database changes. After today's work, file upload, re-load, unload, changing meta-info all work. Oh, and I just got an email from an "income earning specialist". What a cool job that is. Sheesh.
Wonder if anybody is going to read this, because most people would probably have dumped core upon reading about the programming technicalities.
Just ate a twin banana. Two bananas in one skin. It was huge.
By the way, the next award we're going for with the project comes with a maximum bounty of $4,500.
Also, the apt-get upgrade went perfectly smoothly.
The website is coming along quite well. Today added the functionality to delete papers, halfway done with being able to modify the meta-data for the papers.
Stayed back tonight, had to do the tedious task of preparing printed copies, which involves going through and highlighting stuff... quite dumb since this can be automated, but printing through the color laser printer is supposedly too slow.
Teaching as a career seminar on 19 March... hmm...
Enjoy!
My parents had the same thoughts as me regarding the lights in the living room. Today they came home and announced that they bought new lights, as well as a new fan, for the living room. In addition, they got a lights+fan combo for the dining room, which has a fan with lights attached below. Also got lights for the bathroom upstairs.
I'm feeling better now, hope I'm totally well when I wake up tomorrow morning, and go to work. It's been a sleep-a-lot weekend for me. I did dream of semicolons a few nights ago, it was in connection to JavaScript, where a line of code is terminated by a semicolon (as it is in C and C++).
Haven't been able to exercise this weekend... and IPPT is drawing ever nearer. Wish me luck, I'm going to do an "apt-get upgrade"...
I've lately been dreaming about hockey pretty frequently.
This is the first Tori Amos song I know that she sings with someone else, and it's pretty cool. Certainly brightens up your day when the song begins with "The power of orange knickers".
One thing Tori's voice isn't is angelic. My lovey's voice is angelic, especially when she sings.
These days, I need to exorcise a huge ball of phlegm in the mornings. It seems like Sisyphus himself pushes that gob up the red raw canal that is my throat. Theoretically, the supply should be finite, because it goes into the sink and I doubt there's a direct channel from the sink to my insides.
I think we need to get new lights in the living room. It's getting pretty dark down here...
Spent 3 hours tossing in bed last night, I probably slept too much during the day. Was startled thrice by this insect: the first was a brush against my left foot, I leapt out of bed and threw on the light and saw nothing. Next, insect sounds near my head, again the light revealed naught. Third time was the charm, again I heard it near my head, switched on the light, saw it crawling along the side of my bed, it moved round my room a little, I got an envelope from the floor and got it to jump inside, then I closed it, used a stapler for good measure to seal it up. It was brown and looked like a grasshopper, which made me think that maybe that green carcass I found on my table that day was just its molted skin.
Still somewhat sick, but made it through the day. Unfortunately, the birthday present I seem to have given Eugene is the beginnings of a sore throat. Looked through the Excel macro code I wrote, and a simulated printing shocked me by telling me that it would take 104 pages. Somehow I suspect there's something seriously wrong with that figure.
By the way, you might not know this, but it would be helpful to know this, that Excel does not sort hidden rows. Meaning if say row 5 was hidden, all other rows would be sorted normally, but row 5 would stay in row 5 and stay hidden.
The JavaScript calendar looks good, fixed a bug when Eugene did some alpha testing for me. I think at this stage I would estimate that I am about a fifth done with this web project. Got my work cut out for me if I aim to finish by the end of the month.
By the way, I haven't had to do this for a long time, not since Secondary School probably, but I've got "tickets" to sell. SANA (Singapore Anti-Narcotics Association) is having an "all-cash" donation draw, with 1st prize of $50,000 up till 21st-50th prizes of $200 each. Each ticket costs $2, and comes with a "$1 off Le Classique Meals" Delifrance voucher. Want to buy? I'm not set up for online transactions, though.
I wonder if the plan for restructuring the office is going to unfold. I could use a little moving about of my computers.
Got to sleep in today, bosses super-nice to me, let me take off today, and yesterday had me go down to medical center to get some medication. My temperature yesterday was 37.4 degrees Celsius, which the doctor said isn't a fever, which surprised me. Did some surfing on the web just now, and I guess he's right, need something like 37.8 before it's classified as fever.
Feeling better today, slept much of the whole day. Though I guess I don't feel well enough to play basketball tomorrow. Good thing the weekend is coming, so I can rest more over the weekend.
I think my next linux task would be to get a double display going, to use my laptop screen and an external screen simultaneously, physically doubling my desktop space. I could aim to get printing going too, but I suspect the reason why it's currently not working is that the printer I have is pretty new, Canon i255.
I should be sleeping pretty soon...
Stupid sore throat. Feeling sick.
Was coding JavaScript and then I got up to go to the toilet, and looked at my watch, and it was 5:50pm, so I missed my bus. This has never happened before, that I so lost track of time. But I guess the reason was that everyone else was not leaving yet, so I assumed it was still early. Things are getting really busy in the office.
Anyone else get this message from the TagBoard?
Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to MySQL server on '67.15.84.70' (111) in /home/httpd/tag-board.com/httpdocs/tagboard.msq on line 30
Error 4002: We are experiencing temporary technical difficulties. Please try again later
We won $3000 yesterday for the program I wrote (which is the maximum award, I think). Mdm suggested we split it $1500 each, and maybe I should have taken her more seriously. Could possibly have gotten at least $100? Because if all this money goes to the department also not much use mah, it's wasteful to go to extravagant dinners.
Seems like my NS is turning out to be an exercise in ego-inflation. But I'm quite humble, lah. Just that I'm not so conscious of my supposed "place", and am prone to making mistakes of deciding things that probably aren't up to me to decide. The pathetic state of my fitness is decidedly humbling, I must say.
Started reading the copy of American Scientist I keep in my bag. The article I'm reading now is about using nuclear quadrupole resonance to detect bombs and mines. Uses external electric fields and electrical quadrupoles of nuclei, while nuclear magnetic resonance uses external magnetic fields and magnetic dipole moments of nuclei.
The presentation went pretty well today. Got Eugene to come along with me and the boss of boss (let's just call her "Mdm" in this post), because there was so much equipment to bring. I think Mdm saw the name tag on my bag and so she asked if my girlfriend's name was "Ann-Marie", and she said that was a nice name, and asked how we met, so I told her, and she said "wah, you quite brave ah".
They were pretty impressed with the program, and there were rather tangential questions about how the data is being secured. Related to all the projection of cost savings, which is in stark contrast with my miserly pay of $350 a month, the chairman made some comments about how I shouldn't think that my work is of little worth because I'm getting so little...
The interesting part really was afterwards, because they continued on their meeting, and Mdm and I left the room, thinking that we'd just have to wait until their meeting was over to dismantle and pack up all our stuff. So she started telling Eugene and I her life story.
She grew up in a kampong, and was always running about, and since young fed the chickens in her uncle's chicken farm for pocket money, and would save up to buy textbooks and school materials each year. Even as a small girl, she and her twin brother did stuff like pour huge sacks of feed into a mixer, which sounds pretty dangerous.
She runs very fast, and she's super driven, always telling herself she wants to be first then she runs like crazy. Once she donated blood in the morning then ran later and almost fainted. Once she actually blacked out when running a half marathon. And she was like second or something, first thing she asked when she found herself on a bed was whether she finished the race and what was her position.
She also wanted to do well in studies, transferred to another secondary school in order to do pure science, taught her classmates how to do titration, did Chemistry in university. She described how in JC she would go for classes then run after school then run home to feed the chickens then study after that... and every day was like that. Pretty amazing, she's definitely going to go far.
Getting a sore throat... not sure why...
Oh, and on the way back to office after the presentation, Yinglan called Mdm but she was driving so she got me to answer it, and he asked if he could go off first, and I said yes, and only after that did I realize I probably should have asked Mdm rather than answering "yes" myself!
Something that also confuses me is that sometimes I meet Sam in the morning, like this morning, and I say hi to him, but then he walks ahead as if I'm not there...
So I didn't go running today. Took a nap at my granny's place; was there for a potluck dinner, my sister's birthday is about now. She was with friends, came for the dinner, then went out again, and is still out as I write this.
Had some listen to Tori's new album, but haven't heard it closely and carefully yet, but her voice is as always a crazy and wonderful instrument.
Anyone get this spam too? it includes a poem, titled "The Dog":
The truth I do not stretch or shove
When I state the dog is full of love.
I've also proved, by actual test,
A wet dog is the lovingest.
And also, "Chicago Poet Pt.2"
Ah, this looking-glass man!
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust-
Ah! he will go with me
Down the dark stairway
When nobody else is looking,
When everybody else is gone.
And how about: "The Walrus and the Carpenter Pt.1"
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright.-
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
Which also has another part: "The Walrus and the Carpenter Pt.3"
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead-
There were no birds to fly.
There is a treacherously delicious kueh sold at Bengawan Solo. It's sticky and brown, pillow-shaped, durian flavored. When I bite into it, it attaches to my soul, and it sucks out my spirit from deep within my gut when I swallow it down. It's a strange, out-of-body experience.
Bought an optical mouse (going to try it later, after reboot--now using my Toshiba laptop's "AccuPoint", which actually works quite well: even scrolling works--the PS/2 external mouse I was previously using was buggy, as I might have mentioned before: the scroll wheel was broken, but even worse, the pointer would randomly fly all over the screen and click stuff...), and bought a whole bunch of CD's too.
Felt somewhat lost and deeply troubled after that, after the stores all started to close around 10pm and I was outside Bugis Junction munching on tomato rolls from BreadTalk. I guess today was the first time I've really cried regarding the chain of events that began with my granny falling down the day before my birthday.
The ambulance came to the hospital in the late morning and brought us all to her house. Today was probably the first time I've been to her house since her stroke. Saw all the tiny bottles of perfume/cologne she's collected and displays in a tall glass cupboard in her living room.
Needless to say, it has been really hard for my aunty who stays with her. There was no one waving from the corridor when my parents drove me off. So feeling somewhat sad, I guess I haven't really cried yet.
So yah, bought an optical mouse from Sim Lim; didn't see even a single mouse that affirmed compatibility with Linux. Bought a cheap black $12 one, which should work nonetheless. At Bugis Junction, bought Tori's new "The Beekeeper" CD, which I haven't heard yet, but it's loaded in my CD player already.
Other CDs I bought: Tori's recent compilation, "Tales of a Librarian", Third Eye Blind's old CD (with Semi Charmed Life in it), Princessa (because it was really cheap, only $10), and Linkin' Park (the CD with Breaking the Habit), which was also $10 because it's "imported from China".
And so it was quite a spree. Maybe I'll cut my hair later tonight. Oh, and Monday going to do another presentation on my project, this time not in MINDEF but at CMPB there. I guess the time is nearing for me to package up the program and ready it for distribution to the various units in the SAF, then will have to organize courses to teach them how to use the program...
Oh, and at Sim Lim, there was this shop which is selling this pretty cool system for inkjet printers. You basically have an ink tank outside the printer which feeds to the print head, then you just fill up the tanks with ink (which can even be done as a document is printing) instead of buying a ton of cartridges and replacing them every so often.
Recently there have been people called Darren when I'm out. For example, when I was coming home just now, people were saying "bye Darren" at the bus stop.
Went KTV with some of the guys from work. Mostly Chinese songs, and at least I can still read a bit of it, though much more difficult with fan-ti.
Ran after work yesterday, it was decided that we start off with 2.4, and so we set off, and I was so out of shape. The first round seemed impossibly long, turns out each round is about 800m. Had to start walking on the second round... so it was a wake up call for me to exercise more.
I'm probably going to get another computer at work, a computer dedicated to have an internet connection. Today we discussed restructuring the office, and the approved plan involves giving me more space! And a computer with internet connection on the vacant desk beside me.
My granny is getting discharged tomorrow.
There was a green grasshopper in my room last night. More disturbingly, there was a cockroach in my room, which I tried to trap, but failed. Went to sleep anyway, but was a bit squeamish. Flying insects make me scram.
Trying to navigate through the language of javascript. More confusing is probably the issue of what a "date" is, since I'm thinking of using javascript to generate an interactive calendar.
Going to run after work tomorrow. Fell into a deep sleep when I came home today. So damn tired. My parents are concerned that I'll over-exert myself tomorrow.
Heard from my mum that my sister is going to have her birthday celebrations over a span of like 3 or 4 days, because she's so popular. (and has a set of sets of mutually uninteractive friends)
My granny is going to be discharged this weekend. The hospital doesn't think the therapy they're doing is really getting anywhere. The maid is here, so she'll be taken care by the maid mostly. The tube will still be in her nose, which is the most annoying bit, since she hasn't really been awake enough to learn how to swallow. That might be the biggest problem because she has a tendency to pull it out. A suggestion is to "take away" her opposable thumbs by putting like an adult-sized baby mitt on her hands.
Seems like American Idol voting is toll-free, unlike Singapore Idol. I guess Singapore Idol has to pay royalties? I don't know if there are advantages to having votes tied to money. On the one hand, it adds as a deterrent to indiscriminate voting, but then the rich have a larger say (as they always do).
Minimum wage increases unemployment, PM Lee says, and I think this is true. Also talking about how we shouldn't keep small businesses on life support if they are not totally viable.
I think I shall stop posting for now. This gnome-blog thing is making blogging all too easy...
Fully appreciated how tired I was when I reached my house, got off my bike, pushed my bike a few steps and fell forward, together with my bike.
Just completed the reports I had to write this morning, before going to work, and still managed to catch the bus. So now I have time to do other things.
Been making a lot of progress on the website at work. Because I can basically spend all my time on the project, and also since my understanding of the technologies is getting more complete.
My dad asked me just now regarding machining an odd-shaped part. Basically the way it works is you have this metal piece and you maybe want to drill a hole in it, so you strap the piece to equipment that spins it rapidly about an axis. Then you move a non-rotating bit towards the piece and that drills a hole.
The problem was that this piece is somewhat asymmetrical, so it kinda wobbles quite violently when you spin it. And I did some thinking and basically there is going to be a force on the axle as long as the center of mass is not along the axis of rotation. There will be a net centripetal force pointing away from the center of mass, like if you swing a ball attached to a length of string.
Life is good.
