2 Weeks

It's been a pretty draining week. Rushing homework, though of course no huge major deadlines this week, just 6 of them circa 2 weeks from now.

Decided to start reading again, going to read Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. This creates continuity, though I was not really conscious of it when I choose to pick this book out of my collection. The last book I read was Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm, which was structured around Schulz's lost, rumoured novel, The Messiah, acting as a MacGuffin of sorts.

Of course, all this ties in closely with my first semester in Princeton, where I took this Freshman Seminar on Literature and Memory, which was really great, wonderful professor, lots of great books, particularly several works of literature related to the Holocaust. Bruno Schulz was killed by a Nazi.

Anyway, stumbled upon my old Princeton homepage, archived by the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. So, I've uploaded it in its entirety in the state that I had it in when I stopped updating it. Just for fun. Maybe it can get more fully archived this time round.

Playing music on my computer now, which I used to do in Princeton. Those days were pretty nice. Does music help? I was feeling tired and a little down thinking about the work I have to do, but have stayed at the computer and been productive. That is, until I started writing this post, and went to read Wikipedia about MacGuffins and other plot devices.

For me, Wikipedia, and the Internet in general, actually, is like a Supermarket, black holes for my attention and time. So many things to see, so many things to read. One big reason I love Firefox for allowing me to bookmark all tabs. Of course I know as well as you do that a site is forgotten once bookmarked, but that's my security blanket against the terror of information loss and entropy.

I am pretty scared about losing information, though the fact that it's been ages since I've made a backup of my hard disk suggests otherwise. Speaking of which, I just copied and pasted this post into a text file. I've lost too many blog posts in failed uploads and browser crashes.

Was at the library today, trying to find a "scheme of work" in order to do the lesson plan assignment for maths. Didn't quite find what I was looking for, but ended up browsing texts on fun ways to teach maths, and reading several simple childrens' books. There was a Texan version of the Cinderella story, with Cinderella replaced by a cowboy, and the Prince was a rich girl.

I wonder when MOE is going to follow MINDEF and get rid of Microsoft Office. I'm probably the only person in NIE using Linux (other than NIE servers!), and might even be the only person in NIE who doesn't use MS Office, I think even those with MacOS buy MS Office for Mac... I also want Macromedia to support Shockwave for Linux.

For maths, there's The Geometer's Sketchpad, and for physics, there's Crocodile Physics, and both of these don't offer Linux versions... I haven't really looked around for equivalents, but for the time being that's not so critical.

Floorball training is suspended for the time being, and will resume on 6th December. That's good news, more time for me to do work. It's also damn tiring running around. More so yesterday, when I went for training right after 2 hours of tennis at NIE. I played pretty incredible tennis yesterday, was much more consistent that I consistently am. Groundstrokes, especially on the backhand side, were pretty reliable.

There's a floorball game this Saturday with Republic Polytechnic, I'm trying to decide if I should go. I guess since transport to and from RP is provided (from and back to NTU), it's not too much trouble. But still a good 3 hours at least, and more if you consider the recuperation time required (if I actually do play, of course).

Andy, who sprained his ankle while playing tennis with me the Sunday before last, will be joining us at tennis this Sunday. Speaking of which, I've got a new pair of New Balance tennis shoes, which are a size too big, but were on offer at $60 from SportsLink at Jurong Point. The tread pattern of my Wilson shoes was pretty much worn out, and I was slipping and sliding on the floorball court last week.

Got a new pair of frames for my sunglasses too. They're actually for spectacles, so they don't really wrap around, but they should be more hardy, and are cheaper to boot.

Patched up my wallet with red duct tape. Looks pretty cool. Drinking quite a lot of isotonic drinks recently, especially since I started playing tennis more than once a week. NUS vending machines have 100Plus and NIE vending machines have H-Two-O.

Hello, loyal readers! Royal leaders!