Chronicles of Those who have not Time left

2007-09-03T01:14:00.000+08:00

This blog has been transferred over to another address. Please kindly update your links/memory as necessary. thank you!

visit me at jhender.ignisaqua.net

webhosts.

2007-08-18T22:26:00.000+08:00

so i finally got tired of blogger, and want to switch to a proper web host. (or rather i am planning to, whether it comes through is another matter)

finds out that Movable Type has a free version, so does Expression Engine. Wordpress is free. Typepad isn't. anyhow MT and EE have great looking interfaces and WP has a theme i like alot.

so does that mean WP wins the day. hai i dislike their ugly interface and website though

Bluehost and Dreamhost recommended by WP look cheap, but i wonder about their reliability.

Self-hosting has been somewhat successful on xp. I wonder how to port it over to Ubuntu.

which reminds, is anyone interested in sharing webhost? =]

Photo Blogging Time

2007-08-18T00:03:00.000+08:00

i apparently forgot to post a lot of pictures while i was obsessed with Lotro, haha

my old room, at the end of Sem2. actually i was packing stuff

my notice board of photos

sometime during the year

NDP07 floating ghosts on the river

nah this wasnt one of those things

havent seen any nice fireworks this year

Today! i got a new bag. my deuter ac lite 25. surprisingly/unsurprisingly it's also orange/silver/grey

my 2-3 week old shoes. i finally got shoes from Pedro, been eyeing that shop for the entire year. liking it more and more

Blog Hosting and Modern Prince

2007-08-13T00:51:00.000+08:00

Spent the greater part of the day checking out blog programs and server programs, and trying to install Apache webserver and Movable Type, and MySQL, and Perl. to no avail. and IIS7 too. it only works abit. sigh.
does anyone have any recommendation on whether Movable Type or Wordpress is better? =]
or does anyone know how to host =p

anyway today's Sunday Times had this decent article on LKY. quoted out from the book The Modern Prince, by Carnes Lord.
i like this para

"A final lesson, however, is that the autocratic temptation is difficult to resist, even - indeed, particularly - for leaders of the stature of de Gaulle and Lee. It is easy enough to understand why. Both men were far from ordinary politicians; and their greatness threw into relief the littleness of the political competition.

Aristotle observes that in a situation where the virtue and political capacity of a single individual is so great that is is no longer commensurate with that of others, there are only two choices: to exile such a person, or 'for everyone to obey(him) gladly, so that persons of this sort will be permanent kings in their cities'. "

Struck me as a nice thought. Sounds rather true too. Extremities are always unbalancers, and can never be properly accepted into society.
There was also another point that "autocratic temptation is difficult to resist". I like this book for it's indepth and causal analysis of LKY and his government's actions and decisions, the situations and conditions which prompted them to react and decide Singapore's future the way they did. In some ways, we can see that certain parts of his background and Singapore's state influenced decisions. When we look back in history, and analyse everything to bits, we find that in all ingenuity lies a certain obvious decision which we were not aware of.
An old man's memories are never perfect.

Singapore Marathon 2007

2007-08-11T15:17:00.000+08:00

anybody else going for Singapore Marathon? finally decided on 21km half marathon.

link to site

but something is wrong with their registration link, so here's the correct one
www.singaporemarathon.com/en/regs

2007-08-11T10:21:00.000+08:00

i just can't get the tune for the "I, wannabe" song out of my head. or rather, the "there's no place i'd rather be"

not good. i can't forget the wannabe thing. would we, 10-20 years into the future, say that we are true-blue singaporeans, like true new yorkers, haha.

I am the absence

2007-07-30T21:28:00.000+08:00

ages ago there was this piece of writing:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

I do not know if it is still familiar to you. Another thought came to me today, the thought that I would rather be missed/noticed when I am missing, than to be noticed when I am present.

It is easy to notice what is right in front of you, it is far more difficult to notice what is missing.

just one of the little different ways in which I live, in which I see things, in which I am me.

do you live?

Beng

2007-07-30T21:21:00.000+08:00

was at Bugis Street, shopping for a bag, had an odd feeling, of "Ah Beng" salespersons being very polite and attentive. there was one rather commendable shop attendant, i was rather surprised. he wasn't that skillful at sweet-talking or recommending items, but the effort was laudable.
i was rather put off by the noise-blasting shops and the smokers, almost made me decide not to buy anything there because the place wasn't my style.

there was another shop at wiwocity, i walked in and the staff were talking. i overheard one of them who was speaking rather loudly "i think butch and lesbians no fun. ... i mean, they can only finger. ..." dah.

I, Wannabe

2007-07-30T20:56:00.000+08:00

after weeks of hearing the NDP song "There's No Place I'd Rather Be", i finally caught on today to the pun of "I, Wannabe". It's in the lyrics. It fits, doesn't it. This song, talking about all the top cities of planet earth, comparing them to singapore, trying to link us to them in one sentence(song).
it comes across to me as pretentious, narcissistic, wannabe.

such has National Education evolved over the years.

by chance, or not, recently a minister was encouraging ppl to study overseas but return to work in singapore. and some blah-blah nonsense. and then it was also mentioned this person who went overseas to study and returned to realise that singapore had become a land of opportunities. granted our economy is doing fine, but, as the cynic in my horribly realises, all these are but a figment of our imagination. all these one-sided views, one-sided reports, one-faceted conclusions. it is oh so easy to forget that there will be many other silent ones, who to say whether they prefer to "return" overseas.
the media is but a little limited resource, driven to publish, and no matter what they do, cannot tell the whole story about anything, cannot properly explain somebody's life. it is rather sad, extremely sad, that we live in a world so heavily influenced by so limited a resource.

what do i wannabe

2007-07-28T23:31:00.000+08:00

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; wisdom and instruction fools despise. Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and reject not your mother's teaching. For the self-will of the simple kills them, the smugness of fools destroys them." - Proverbs 1: 7,8,32

am i a fool, am i simple?

LOTRO referral program

2007-07-25T10:42:00.000+08:00

omg now they introduce this referral program. why only now!!? dahz. well whoever wants me to refer them, just tell me =]

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=78285

We’re proud to announce the Turbine Referral Program, a great way to earn free game time by introducing your family and friends to The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™! It's so easy an orc can do it!

The Turbine Referral Program lets paying subscribers of The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ refer friends to play the game and receive free game time for successful referrals, subject to certain terms and conditions (see myaccount.turbine.com/referral/rules). Each of your referred friends will be sent a Guest Key to try the game for free for ten (10) consecutive days!

For every friend that buys the retail edition of the game, registers a retail product key at myaccount.turbine.com, and subscribes to the game, you'll get a referral credit that can be redeemed for 30 days of FREE game time to be added to your subscription for the game! If you're already a Lifetime Member we'll issue you a 30 day game card key to give to a friend who is a game subscriber.

If you have Founder's pricing, you can also offer Founder's pricing to your friends! The first 10 friends you invite can take advantage of the special Founder's pricing plans offered through the Founder's Program. See www.lotro.com/founder for more details on the Founder's pricing terms.

Finally, to celebrate the launch of this new referral program we're proud to announce a special offer: For a limited time (ending on September 30, 2007), you will receive a referral credit for every retail product key activation! That's right, you don't even need to wait for your friend to subscribe before collecting your free game time! So get started today by visiting myaccount.turbine.com!

2007-07-24T01:54:00.000+08:00

driving, to me, is like being trapped. being obliged to stay at the wheel, having to pay attention to the road, the traffic, the other cars, the traffic lights.

it's like having to stay in the lane, having to follow the rules, having to watch out for other people, moving at the same speed (or slower) than other fat old people who cannot walk as fast as me

it's about having no freedom from the lanes and kerbs. it's about forever being on tar, and never being able to get off. (perhaps it's a city thing)

above all, what i've come to realise, i can't do an Crazy Ivan, if you know what i'm talking about. i've always loved the twist of the ankle, the long second of time where i hang in the mid-air and glance back, and the next twist back forward. lovely. the elegance and exquisiteness.

At what temperature does water freeze?

2007-07-22T23:29:00.000+08:00

zero degrees celsius, is it?

Scenario:

A quantity of water, perhaps in a glass. It's inside one of those imaginary environments, zero energy transfer with the outside world, isolated. The environment has an atmosphere, at exactly zero degrees celsius. [side question: is all the water in the air gone? condensed? just to check. but it's not important to me]

So this glass of water is at zero degrees too. yeah. But it's a glass of water, in liquid form. Everything is at exactly zero degrees.

Question:
Will the water freeze?

[I'm serious]

2007-07-19T10:47:00.001+08:00

i think i would miss the lovely thunderstorms in singapore

2007-07-15T14:06:00.000+08:00

如果．爱

每个人都想明白
谁是自己生命不该错过的真爱

i guess Mr. Jacky Cheung really likes this theme. I recall there was another song along the same lines or title. someday when we are old enough we will understand

Le 14 Juillet

2007-07-14T23:59:00.000+08:00

still don't have the energy to think deep thoughts. haha.

it's been a difficult and also a nice week. ah well, at least some things are over.

nice things:

wednesday. nice jap food dinner. i like the noodles at waraku. at least i actually had interesting things to choose between instead of standard boring "fast-food" jap outlets. it's like western-food = chicken cutlet, chicken chop... jap-food = normal boring food. so unlike what real western (european) food should be, and what real jap food should be.
it's rather silly that european food is commonly referred to as western food. each individual country should be classified separately.
ok so nice jap food. The Central has nice shops. I shall go explore it when it's fully up.

friday. nice class gathering. although half of it was discussing medical stuff. goshness. seems like this class will never get away with bio stuff. it's obsessive. but it was a nice grown-up stay-home round-table dinner-talk loungey-home setting. very nice.

saturday. 14 July. Bastille Day. ze french national day. haha went for little celebration at The Pichon restaurant at Boat Quay. free flow wine and pastis(zis alcoholic apertif) and orangina and perrier. and also some nice sausages and other tarts. nice!! the restaurant is on my hit list.

Question

2007-07-11T23:56:00.000+08:00

Phrase: "the sun makes the shade cool"

Question: do you agree, and why?

Question

2007-07-11T23:53:00.000+08:00

imagine this as part of a larger ficticious conversation

Phrase: "I assume that my assumption is correct"

Question: How many assumptions were made in the above phrase, and why?

Question

2007-07-11T23:43:00.000+08:00

Scenario:

We have a Cup, a normal cup, filled to the brim with ice cubes. Square ice cubes, let's say 3 cm long on each side, for details sake. The ice cubes do not protrude out of the top of the cup, but are fully packed in. The ice cubes are frozen from distilled water, with no air bubbles in them.

Next we pour in distilled water at zero degrees Celsius, such that total volume of ice-cubes + total volume of added water = total capacity of the cup. Which means (and also does not mean) fill the cup with water.

The Question is: What will you observe upon the end of adding in the water?

-
i hope you can give me some answers

-
Remark: "Square ice-cubes" is such a stupid phrase. I shall blame it upon those manufacturers who produce rounded ice 'cubes'.

many LOTRO screenies

2007-07-06T16:43:00.001+08:00

biggest boss i've seen so far. still many levels to go before i get to come here properly...

Summer Festival drinking game. starts off with a sober mind, 6 beers per station

getting fuzzy

48 beers later...the screen shifts around, i can't see nothing, i can't walk straight

smoking time. this pipeweed gives 2 smoke rings. each kind a different animation. so fun

discovered that i can lie down underwater. blub blub. i can also set campfires in shallow water and whatnot. tsk.

Summer Festival fireworks. what a way to waste our coins

now u can see the smoking pipe

and more

somebody already playing with the chickens, maybe that's where they got the idea for the new chicken roleplaying feature

dead ghost. this one loses it's head. hm.

highlight of last night. a surprise encounter with a tortoise. ridiculously big. but so easy to kill

2007-07-04T14:24:00.001+08:00

nus stuff is driving me crazy. i hate anything to do with modules. .

TF

2007-07-03T23:54:00.000+08:00

woo i like transformers. great pace of action, bewildering battles, cool transformations, rather realistic stuff. and i like Industrial Light and Magic. yupz.

i still don't see what's the point in a Simpson movie.

i still can't get over the insane transformations and the funky camera angles and the non stop 2+ hrs. wowz.

oh and nobody kissed, no romantic hugs, no soppy moments, nobody declared their love for anybody. and the guy and the girl din really get into it. finally someone realises that any decent testosterone-filled guy watching such a movie would be more interested in the slug-pumping than irksome romance side-stories.

watch the movie on DVD, in Slow-Motion.

some movie info:

Bay: "The Generation One robots were very blocky which would have been like using the unarticulated marshmallow man from ‘Ghostbusters.’ Our Optimus Prime® has 10,108 parts, each of which move." (Rep, love the G1 but have to agree).

Bay: "These robots are the most complex modules ILM has ever made. We couldn’t have accomplished this two years ago.

Script secret during shoot with actors only receiving pages for own scenes.

Hardware "borrowed" included CV-22 (combo helicopter and airplane), F-117, C-130 cargo planes, C-17 (Bay: "spooky gun ship"), and F-22 Raptor (Starscream I think).

- It takes ILM 38 hours to render one frame of movement. Generally I think it takes 24 frames for one second of footage. Usually there are render farms (basically a building full of servers) for this so not sure if it means that value is X computers times taking Y minutes = 38 hours per frame or if it means one huge render farm working took 38 hours.

http://transformerslive.blogspot.com/2007/06/eni-transformers-articles.html

2007-06-30T23:59:00.000+08:00

astounded by the number of orchids in the botanic gardens. and student price is only $1!

and squirrel!, which are always so cute

and nice carnivorous Venus fly-traps and pitcher plants

and jx showed me tadpoles

*gwinz*

joyeux anniversaire

2007-06-11T17:01:00.000+08:00

it feels nice to use my laptop! it looks nice, the interface looks nice, i like my black black windows theme. i like my black background. i like the black laptop. i like having a touchpad and thinkpad red button (whatever it's called), i like not having to shift my hand to the mouse. i like the way Office 2007 in black looks right here. It looks better in blue on the desktop. i like being able to use nus vpn to use Outlook to access emails. web email is so unwieldy. i like having all the programs already installed. because im too lazy to reinstall everything on the vista. it does take me months to do everything. and i found out that nus vpn would not likely be implemented on 64bit vista. drats, should just have stuck to 32bit, itchy fingers. not of nus' fault, but cisco's. and now i gotta figure out if WinSSHD's SSH server runs on vista x64

Lvl 34 Vindyamiriel, Pie-Eating Champion

2007-06-11T16:42:00.000+08:00

Lord of the Rings Online
Book 9: Shores of Evedim
2 more days to go

*gwinz*
more stuff to play! not that i have much time to play these few days.
whopping 500mb to download.
i pity those poor satellite internet users in US who have a cap on maximum traffic and who will take forever to download. i am very impressed with their resolve to play on such a connection. and also to those ppl running on really old computers, i mean, older than my laptop. wowz.

i can't wait to start farming, or cooking

and the europe LoTRO has introduced more lifetime subscription for !150pounds. i am so glad i decided to get it early.

i suppose it makes up for my sis not being able to buy/play Battle for Middle Earth 2 coz the old computer wasn't really up to it.

i think i have supported enough games recently, financially.
but there's GTA San Adreas and The Sims 2 + all expansions and Rainbow Six dunno what version, and alot of other things that i feel bad for not installing. dah.
nothing much to torrent these days.

UPMC

2007-06-11T16:34:00.000+08:00

i finally got to the right person at UPMC after trying out 4 email addresses and obtaining this one from someone else who went there for SEP.
incidentally he/she didn't mention that this person was the magic door, who can produce the Application Form for exchange students. somehow i couldn't find the exchange section on the website. but this fantastic form is in English, hm.

2007-06-05T02:30:00.001+08:00

sigh

2007-06-04T22:15:00.000+08:00

this was amusing. talking about women and SAF, and how technological advances allow them to play a greater role.

"There are privileges to being a woman in the SAF. I think one of the things you see is that the way people respond to women in the SAF.

"I have been told many a times that the culture on board the ship changes for the better when the woman comes on board. The ship becomes neater, the men are more polite. You know, things like that".

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/280201/1/.html

.Net Framework 1.1 + service pack 1

2007-06-04T15:49:00.000+08:00

after many encounters with the problem of installing .Net framework 1.1 + SP1 on Vista, finally a workable solution, although i have no idea how it works. i suspect it just runs a different installation procedure. hell it works great.

Vista + Lord of the Rings Online installation = trouble.
if you are already aware of this problem, try to download .NET framework 1.1 and 1.1 SP1, install them first before even attempting lotro installation. might avoid complications and wasted time.

else:
1) download .net framework 1.1 redistribution package and 1.1 sp1 as usual
2) renamed them to be dotnetfx.exe (if different) and dotnetfxsp1.exe
3) go to command prompt (I escalated to administrative)
4) from the folder where you put the two exe files above,
do: dotnetfx.exe /c:"msiexec.exe /a netfx.msi TARGETDIR=c:\dotnet"
5) do: dotnetfxsp1.exe /Xp:c:\dotnet\netfxsp.msp
6) do: msiexec.exe /a c:\dotnet\netfx.msi /p c:\dotnet\netfxsp.msp
7) then just install using the netfx.msi

got it off lotro forum, which was from some website, i can't remember which coz i saved it as text file. just be sure to type it all correctly. involves Administrator command prompt in vista which needs to be specially opened.

2007-05-30T23:24:00.001+08:00

all i did was take an afternoon nap, and i had more nightmares than the whole of this year so far.
dah
and they were very real
and i woke up many times
pah.

2007-05-27T20:26:00.001+08:00

night out under the stars
i like my campfire! it's fantastic. it helps so much in battles

2007-05-23T03:02:00.000+08:00

2007-05-20T21:37:00.001+08:00

one day the heroic Vindy was trudging along the cobbled ways of Bree-town when she came upon a poor girl collapsed on the street. Quelle horreur!

but anyway i am rather surprised at the lengths to which gamers go to inorder to create a very friendly and cooperative atmosphere in the game. perhaps it helps lots that there are restricted PvP areas. but i find that ppl go out of the way to be polite and helpful to others, much as if it was a real-world, or an ideal-world, where we all want to avoid the bad pts of real life. considering the demographics of the gamers, i think it's really nice. tho there are always some who dont care. like this fool named "Similan Jiao", anyway i reported him. if i ever see him again im gonna write an even longer note to the GMs.

2007-05-20T21:30:00.000+08:00

I believe there's a hero in all of us that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble and finally allows us die with pride. Even though sometimes we have to be steady and give up the thing we want the most - even our dreams.
~ Aunt May ~ Spiderman 2

nice

more pics

2007-05-17T16:22:00.000+08:00

Thelithil and a pretty hat

a night, out in the wild, where the skies are clear and you can see far away. pretty.

oddly i didn't know their top-down view was this pretty. but i'm still wowed by graphics. and the story and soul of the game, like how "life-like" character names are, and the role-playing, the other day someone said naamarie. i think that's how he/she spelt it.

Lotro

2007-05-08T19:47:00.000+08:00

inside an Instance, where the big boss was this fiery red dunno-what. seeing more and more Elite monsters around, which are raather scary
and then there are colorful buttons for fellowship combo attacks, dunno how to use yet. they only appear in the middle of a big fight and there isn't much time to read

lovely sunbeams in a house

and my character sitting down so prettily

and my latest helmet/hat/mask. cool right! wowz

Lotro

2007-05-07T00:33:00.000+08:00

come play Lord of The Rings Online!! it's very pretty, and fun!

here's me crossing a stream. only after i used my home computer did i realise how beautiful everything is. unworldly so. the water ripples and reflections, and bears wadding in the water

angry bear attacks me.

by level 11 you're forced to join in a fellowship with others to continue the main quest line. which ensures that you experience some fun social play

sometimes it's best to fight together with other ppl, coz it's not always possible to fend off two attackers at the same time. so i spent quite some time unofficially partying with others

exploring. pretty bridge and waterfall. road to shire.

portal to shire. with a hobbit

nice stable! i want a horse. but it's expensive to rent, and i can't buy one till level 35. goshness.

cutesy hobbit homes. but i thought they were supposed to be in the hillside

can see the riverbed! and ripples. you should open it up to actual size and look at it

the toad looks nice too

Quantum Cryptography

2007-05-02T01:16:00.000+08:00

can't believe they are progressing on cracking this thing. disgusting, it's like so insanely hard to crack. ugh..
i guess they're not MIT for nothing

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/01/quantum-cryptography-kinda-sorta-hacked/

2007-04-21T23:12:00.000+08:00

Métro. Boulot. Dodo. (Metro, Work, Sleep)

C'est Paris :)

2007-04-12T14:40:00.000+08:00

walking down the road, with the cool fresh rainy wind billowing my long sleeves, with the light drops of rain sprinkling on me, with a jaunt in my step and no bag to restrict me, with my brain still half in french after studying for the tests, it delighted me to smile a real happy light-hearted smile, at a time when so many people are so stressed and busy.

l a - v i e - e s t - b e l l e

C&C3

2007-04-12T14:24:00.000+08:00

here's a low detail screenshot of a nuclear missile. it did lag my laptop considerably.

as you can see, it obliterated almost all of the buildings, which is more impressive than previous nuclear missiles. but the construction yard is still standing, as can be expected. one nuke doesn't end everything. it does leave behind this lovely scar on the ground.
one thing odd about Easy AI is that it didn't repair the construction yard, bizarre. it did rebuild many buildings though. and i was harassed by its planes. what a bother.

anyway Waypoint mode is now so user-friendly, i love it.

and BlackHands are really cool at shooting flames out of buildings, very very funky.
use of flame is very tricky though, it leads to a considerable amount of collateral damage and friendly-fire (pun not intended).

2007-04-11T10:34:00.000+08:00

if u didn't know, they're going to introduce vanity car number plates 'soon', those where you can put words and such.

anyway so it comes to my mind, i have absolutely no idea why i thought of it, that there will have to be someone in charge of approving the number plates, weeding out the vulgarities and obscenities and political incorrectness or anything. so it means someone is going to sit in the office, all day looking at number plate names! perhaps i exaggerate and he doesn't spend all day doing it, but he will be obliged to spend a great part of his time doing that. which equals to laughing at silly number plates and having a ball of a time. so isn't that a great job? and it must be a person of decent caliber to decipher all the ridiculous names and acronyms, which means decent qualifications and remuneration

anyway there was a nice article in Straits Times on Sunday:

First, some definitions: Abbreviation refers to any shortening of a word or phrase. For example, 'flu' is an abbreviation for 'influenza', 'plane' for 'aeroplane' and 'maths' for 'mathematics'.

Portmanteau words - derived from combining the meaning and sounds of two words - are special cases of abbreviations. For example, 'Oxbridge' blends 'Oxford' and 'Cambridge', 'motel' combines 'motor' and 'hotel', and Singapore's own 'Mindef' melds 'ministry' and 'defence'.

The most famous examples of portmanteau words in literature are in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass. When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain ''Twas brillig, and the slithy toves...', Humpty Dumpty tells her: 'brillig' means 'four o'clock in the afternoon - the time when you begin broiling things for dinner', 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy', and so on. 'You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.' It is likely that Singapore's Ministry of Defence is known as Mindef - not, thank goodness, MOD - because a highly literate man, Dr Goh Keng Swee, was the minister when it acquired its abbreviation.

Initialism or alphabetism is yet another special case of abbreviation, formed from the initial letters of names or expressions, each letter being pronounced separately: for example, PIE, CTE, AYE, CPF, HDB and EDB.

And acronym is a special case of initialism, where the abbreviation formed from the initial letters can be pronounced as a unit: for example, Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) and radar (radio detection and ranging) - the last being an example of an acronym containing non-initial letters.

i am determined to try to make everyone get it right

2007-04-11T10:26:00.000+08:00

seen this? really odd trail that they've got there. i would estimate the dotted line to be 10km long, since running to haw par villa is alr 7km. i wonder who will actually walk this trail.

2007-04-11T10:24:00.000+08:00

one of the RVR residents
saw Mr. Squirrel the other day too.

L'Arc

2007-04-11T10:19:00.000+08:00

one of those days when it's really sunny, really hot. as you can see the shadow was rather sharp. from the exact angle you can even calculate the time of the day, since sg is so close to equator.

need a proper photoshoot one day

2007-04-10T10:45:00.000+08:00

i am irritated with the army who keeps calling me back. pah.

C&C3

2007-04-08T00:59:00.000+08:00

perhaps i've been playing too many missions at Normal difficulty but they're getting rather boring. one or two retries to get the hang of the mission and where to defend and then it's just a mass build order to get tons and tons of powerful units. shielded annihilators and warships are just too powerful.

then again, there's this mission using the Scrin Mastermind, which was very frustrating until i discovered the trick to it. i did waste alot of time and patience though. you'll understand when you get to the mission. shall refrain from spoilers.

C&C3

2007-04-06T01:20:00.000+08:00

yeah im still mad on it. doesnt make it better than jx keeps playing it on my laptop and i have to watch
so here's a lovely picture of High Detail, with terrain textures and tyre tracks and sunbeams and smoke and whatnot. yeah i had time to admire the scenery coz it was becoming a relaxed mission. found out a way to just sit back defend the base and collect Tripods cheaply.

an hr later. many tripods and avatars of mine walking all over the map. and i finally got hold of energy shields for the tripods, u can see the oval fields

oh here's a brighter picture. the brightness comes and goes

and i've got lovely powerful Scrin ships, coz i captured their buildings, bleh

and they've got this Stasis Shield power to temp protect units. tho they cant shoot or move. but useful in a battle, or before a nuclear missile

Scrin mothership is insanely slow and powerful, and it comes with a big shadow on the ground, the circle on the left. the shadow moves nicely over ridges and such, very pretty

Scrin Rift Generator. evil superweapon. it's like a blackhole

2007-04-05T01:31:00.000+08:00

omg i looked at the new blogger templates (to try to see if i can grab the code to RSS comments), and i realise it's all in XML, freaking unreadable to me. time to do a core code revamp of this blog. dratz, so outdated. which also means that blog layout is going to change, more or less.

Start-Off Assistant

2007-04-05T00:38:00.000+08:00

i want steering wheel gear shift paddles

Brake Standby reacts when the driver suddenly lifts off the accelerator, anticipating hard braking, and snugs the brake pads against the rotors. Start-Off Assistant automatically engages the brakes on an incline to prevent the car from rolling back when the driver lifts off the brake pedal to depress the accelerator.

nice features. very useful. especially the Start-Off Assistant. one of the bugs of manual transmissions. it's nice to have the couple seconds of extra brake when it's at the correct time. apparently there are mechanisms to detect if the car is starting off on an incline. it's not that new, can't understand why other manufacturers don't incorporate it. it's a strong enticement to get manual. but i think i would prefer assisted advanced automatic transmission that works so inhumanly fast. apparently it's easy to get the auto to shift up gears, but the cool part is getting it to downshift at the correct times so that you get the extra power when you want to accelerate. hm

guess what brand does this come in. bleh.

link

2007-04-04T14:38:00.000+08:00

*gwinz*

2007-04-03T03:17:00.000+08:00

I did not, she started it.

2007-04-02T02:21:00.000+08:00

hey Blogger now has RSS feed for blog post comments! cool, just what i've been wishing to have for a long time. i think i need to upgrade alot of my blog code after exams.

and all the blogged pictures are available on picasa albums. and and...

C&C3

2007-04-02T01:20:00.000+08:00

disaster mission that has occupied me for the past 1.5hrs. this is actually my 2nd round!, so you can see my insane base defences comprising a money-guzzling power-guzzling and utterly ridiculous row of 8 Obelisks (they're really powerful), and many SAMs (Scrin warships are disgustingly powerful), and >20 Avatars (which is Alot), >20 Stealth Tanks, and 20,000 credits in reserve. and the reason why i had this pile of metal is that the previous time i tried to attack those 3 yellow triangles on the mini-map, all my forces were utterly decimated and i was subsequently overrun by the overzealous AI. in any normal game, it would not be financially viable to build these things, not to mention time needed.

so i tried, so as you can see this is not in the base yet, but just outside the entrance. smart AI likes to overrun me, again. notice that the entire map is filled with their units, many many many Annihilator Tripods. argh. ARGH. so i watched as my Avatars, which were upgraded with a beam cannon, got wiped out. i din get to see much of my stealth tanks nor raider buggies, never noticed them disappear

as the battlefield cleared, it was disappointing to see that there were so many alien tripods left standing, sigh. notice the buttons on the left side, i used my tiberium missile too! i doubt it destroyed much, seeing as the scrin love tiberium that much

oh guess what, i tried flanking too, i attacked the base from two sides, i didn't have any screenshots of the other bunch. they did survive a little longer, but suffered under the ion storms and whatever other base defences, and then truly died when the leftover units here went back in.

sigh. it got rather hopeless, i was too lazy to attempt to build up an even bigger force, so the next time i just went straight for the objectives and didn't bother to have any strategy to get my units back alive. i suppose there might be a proper way of completing this mission. heck, the next time i feel like massing a huge force i'll replay this mission.
anyway this is the Sydney mission, where NOD collaborates with GDI for the first time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
part2.
i decided to replay it after all, loaded my savegame before i suicided all my units just now, built another 24 Avatars+24 beam cannons, 12 stealth tanks, 6 buggies, And positioned them for attack from 3 sides.

that's the main firefight. the order goes: the suicide bombers went first, died, the stealth tanks and buggies went next, all died. then i realised, hey the avatars din move, shucks, so click. and then this standoff ensues. it's fantastic, two masses of heavy units zapping the most powerful beam weapons in the game at each other. scrin were the blue beams and avatars' were red. i didn't manage to decipher the green beam in there.

but i won the battles this time, finally overwhelmed them.
survivors:
31 avatars, out of about 50
1 stealth tank out of about 40
0 raider buggy out of about 12
0 suicide bombers out of about 10
0 out of 4 Vertigo bombers (planes)
0 flame tanks

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

everyone who has are itching to play C&C3, =p, but hey i don't play Dota

bmw

2007-04-01T23:49:00.000+08:00

did you know that if you live in USA, you can buy a BMW (and some other car brands) through a European Delivery Program, where you collect the car in Germany. it's cheaper than if you get it from a US dealer, you get to fly to Europe, you get to take the car for a spin on the AutoBahn, you get 30 days of insurance and whatnot to do a tour, and then the car is shipped back to US. darn why can't that be done in Sg. blah.

C&C3

2007-04-01T23:42:00.000+08:00

screenshots taken during a NOD campaign mission. well so this is after getting home and playing it on the ultra fast home computer, i finally get to turn all the settings up to near maximum (except for Anti-Aliasing, which i din dare to put to full, but i think i prob can, maybe during the hols when i oc the graphics card). actually the program by default din put to max settings, but what the heck, i did it and it runs perfectly, i can even Alt-Tab with mimimal delays, the game used up 700+mb of ram btw.

so in it's glory, it's got lovely glowing tiberium crystals, and reflective wet roads. gosh those reflections were pretty.

and you can see the exhaust of the Flame Tanks, couldn't get a proper screenshot that does credit to it

ooh and the flames, beautiful the way it fades out. flame tanks are really nice units, but they do lots of collateral damage, which sucks. i still am not used to the NOD style of playing, ack.

2007-03-31T14:54:00.000+08:00

went to search for a no-cd crack for C&C3, coz i wonder if i can play it on my home computer together with my laptop, rather mad to buy 2 original copies to do that. so some b* was seeding this keygen which was fake coz it's actually a trojan (computer virus, for the not so geeky). such unfriendly people. so do remember to read comments of other users before downloading anything.

C&C3

2007-03-29T12:59:00.000+08:00

argh i died another 2 times. the record is going downhill. interestingly the game profile keeps a record of total career statistics, which means every single game. hm. so that's 5 failures in missions so far.

darn engineers keep getting killed. darn urban warefare with so many buildings and swarm of ceaseless assaults. tho i find that it's really useful if you fortify and hold a position, and let your units upgrade to Heroic veterancy, thereafter they are so powerful you can just let them massacre the enemy, and the best thing is that they autoheal. APCs have never been better. tho i dislike the pitbulls and predator tanks. and unbelievably i actually gave up trying to fulfill all the mission secondary objectives, partly because i lost one engineer out of 3 so i couldn't, and partly because it's so tiresome. i think missions are good for killing tons and tons of units coz it's rigged such that they keep sending tons and tons of units with seemingly inexhaustible resources.

C&C3

2007-03-29T00:41:00.000+08:00

argh, why is the mission so hard. the C&C3-GDI-Cairo mission is such a torture. I died Twice!

anyway there's a commando mission that's very very fun to play. easy and fun.

C&C3

2007-03-27T00:16:00.000+08:00

whoopee, tho i queued up for a total of near 2hrs for it. lousy queue was so slow. anyways i am very surprised that the Razer Mantis - Speed mousepad is That Huge. so much bigger than the desktop. and the 'tiny' mousepad, which is actually a Normal size, is the other free gift. i tried it for a moment, and it's like so Hard compared to the cloth Mantis mousepad. found out that the Mantis costs US$20, so it's a really good deal to buy the Kane edition of C&C 3. but now i don't have much space to do work, oops

Tiberium Wars

2007-03-26T00:02:00.000+08:00

that was as close i dared to go to zero. was wondering what would happen, but it simply disappeared that's all. chey.

so it begins

Fête de la francophonie

2007-03-25T00:40:00.000+08:00

mignon
plaisante

quelle bonne fête. j'étais absolument heureux. C'était spéciale, mémorable, 'frenchy', avec bonne musique, avec des enfants très très très mignon, avec la plage, avec la sable, la mer, le vent.

organisé par Associations des Professeurs de Français de Singapour (APFS)

hai, je n'avais pas été heureux comme ça depuis longtemps.

*gwinz*

-
argh my foot is swollen after getting bitten by ants. so swollen! sigh

for personal reference

2007-03-25T00:37:00.000+08:00

nothing much, just some comment i posted somewhere else, but which i like very much, and would like to remember.

i wish we would fall in silent agreement together into the unimaginable vastness disappearing into the lost folds of time leaving behind a world forgotten into a non existing future but the empty wind persists

link

to say Hello

2007-03-16T00:24:00.000+08:00

And if chance ever were to be
I would approach, slowly, black umbrella
in the hand taut against the wispy drizzle,
shiny black leather glistening with rain
treading on overgrown grass.
And with the raindrops covering the land
in this bleak whiteness, or some would say
heavenly bliss, which I agree neither to
but whence I shall come to rest in the midst
of it all pausing at a fresh green field,
an old stone newly chiseled, old soil freshly
dug and filled, an old soul newly interred.
At the end of the rain's journey, is there anything left
to say. Of the way it hit and splashed?
of the blades of grass sticking out at the edges
straining in the wind, laden by the rain
of memories, of time, of life, of past,
of you, of existence, of a certain
unmistakable presence that lives on in a
name, of a belief that somewhere over
there, yes there, that an apparition
stands slouching on one leg, and flicks
his hand in the gesture that we both know.
of course i fling it back to you and
we smile at each other, or rather simply
the vague indication of recognition that usually
follows, another evil flightpath already hatching in the mind.
Then in all futility and lameness which we know to be inconsequential,
we say Hello.
Tragically in that one word we have greeted and also said goodbye,
for it has irrevocably signaled the absence before
and fatalistically the separation that must follow.

[perhaps it would be more apparent in French, where 'salut' can mean both hi and bye]

Bimmer madness

2007-03-14T21:21:00.000+08:00

i love those rims. seriously, crazily. and the orange against the black. [only just realised it's my favorite orange-black combi] yeah so i like the wheels, much, and so i dont have money to get the car.
sigh.

wheels that i like:
1. Y-spoke [like above]
2. Y spoke 149
3. Radial spoke 187 / 160
4. Star spoke 241
5. Double spoke 135M
6. V-spoke 188

2007-03-13T14:08:00.000+08:00

被风吹过的夏天

歌手:林俊杰&金莎

还记得昨天那个夏天
微风吹过的一瞬间
似乎吹翻一切
只剩寂寞更沉淀
如今风依旧在吹
秋天的雨跟随心中的热却不退
仿佛即使闭着双眼
熟悉的脸又会浮现在眼前
蓝色的思念
突然演变成了阳光的夏天
空气中的温暖
不会更遥远
冬天已仿佛不在留恋
绿色的思念
回首对我说一声四季不变
不过一季的时间
又再回到从前
那个被风吹过的夏天

x2

蓝色的思念
突然演变成了阳光的夏天
空气中的温暖
不会更遥远
冬天已仿佛不在留恋
绿色的思念
回首对我说一声四季不变
不过一季的时间
又再回到从前
那个被风吹过的夏天

那一风吹过的夏天

-----
if only the fillers were not so silly, if only there wasn't a need for the guy to be singing

Moi.

2007-03-06T17:15:00.000+08:00

you know why there's a grim reaper on my msn? no i don't know why.

Question: What goes boing?
other than boobs, butts, cellulite, rubber balls, tigger, what else?

i think overstress is causing me to scatter hypertop words all over the magnetic field. \\

Question: At which point does a New Year become an Old Year? Is it just before midnight 31st December XXXX, if so, does it mean that the Old Year lasts an imperceptible fraction of (some unit of time)?

no i don't have amnesia, yeah right, it was you who told me.

Question: If you told an anterograde amnesiac a lie before he lost his memory, would it be possible for you to correct him by telling him the truth now?
[P.S. ok i know by definition it's not possible, but i mean something else, i dunno, i shall leave it as it is, if you can hazard a guess as to why i wrote what i wrote. i think it's easier to comprehend without me trying to explain myself by precising it]

argh ok quit. i shall get out of here before i churn out more oddifying impromptu thoughts.

2007-03-01T01:29:00.000+08:00

il ne reste plus rien qu'à être heureux

i must remember this. it is so magical. to reach a state where all remains is just for us to feel the happiness.

2007-02-28T02:18:00.000+08:00

hey i managed to shoot decently, i haven't had that Feeling since a long long time ago. it actually felt so much more stable. yay. and i could shoot 50m, albeit the grouping was bad, and i accidentally released one arrow when i wanted to put it down, and it hit the ground halfway, ouch ouch, but it's magically still in usable condition. amazing considering i didn't shoot for an entire week and it was crappy at that time.

buying new phones is fun. buying new laptop is fun too. buying ram is fun too. i think im getting obsessed with opening up the CPU casing. one day, i am going to check if i put the processor heatsink on properly, i half suspect it's not optimal.

C&C3 is fun! even though i'm obsessed and biased and fanatic, it's still fun.

2007-02-27T01:20:00.000+08:00

pleasantly surprised at jax's running capability. but she's always been quite good at it. perhaps next time we can go further and faster.
i think running at night is wonderful, none of that lousy heat and humidity here. running in the day is like impossible to breathe. somebody make me run faster though.

maybe it's the shoes, bleh.

2007-02-26T23:59:00.000+08:00

i still remember so clearly the days of preparation for last semester's exams. the days in the library, in engin, walking all over the place, the downloading, the games, the minesweeper, the battle for middle earth 2, the oblivion, being sick, and all 3 months ago. ouch. =]

2007-02-25T01:38:00.000+08:00

perhaps i've really lost it. i wonder if im biased, or im tired, or it's just really this way, or i'm tired, or it's the same towards everyone.
but it's always like that. perhaps sorry in advance.
no, of course no one will understand this, i know.

i often also wonder what i'm doing with my life

if there were three, and then there were four
it's not some silly riddle, nor does it mean anything at all.

if there was black, and after there was blue
black which sped past the blue, even beyond blue
into white it did. and from white it fell, plummeting,
until a greenish blue it was
and yet still it fell, furthermore
further past green, past brown, past black, past red, past yellow
only to turn itself a purplish red, fading, swirling
slowly but nevertheless turning yellowish like all that was around it
enticing it would be to be otherwise, but no
yellow it stayed and yellow it will be.

Me

2007-02-23T03:39:00.000+08:00

actually this was brought to mind by the previous post, but i decided to keep it separate to not confuse people.

when i was walking home just now, it being around midnight, the roads are very empty, so i crossed the traffic junction diagonally again. i've been doing this for a long time, but why. is it because the roads are empty, is it because i know i won't get knocked down, is it because i'm lazy to walk the longer way.

but perhaps it is some little small meaningless thing that i do to rebel, to maintain my individuality in the midst of all this conformism. perhaps i do it be remain sane, to remain myself, to stay out of the system, out of the matrix, to be aware that the system does not control me totally.

this sounds like something Mr. Smith would say, i think it would sound nice in his voice.

and so i do it to be me.

that said, i think the Giordano 'Me' series of shirts are really boring, they lack style, lack class, lack individuality, lack meaning. just plain square prints on boring shirts with basic meaningless tessellations. cmi.

"Paris Je t'aime"

2007-02-23T03:20:00.001+08:00

wow. i mean, wow they actually dare to make such a movie with such big names. i wonder if they can earn money. it's such an Say-Everything-Yet-Say-Nothing kinda artsy Film where you either love it or hate it.
i was thinking, it could be titled "the unbearable lightness of being Paris", i just love that title. all those funky ridiculous jaw-dropping bewildering scenes. it's like cutscenes of parisian's lives, a lifetime of experiences condensed into 2 hours. but there's so much to say, to see, to hear, to notice. and there are few things that you could ever see as a tourist. these are the sort of things that are instinctively associated with the Dream that paris is, as zerá put it, the dream that makes paris what it is, the dream that paris in turn creates in you.

i am so particularly intrigued by the american woman's textbook french in simple sentences badly pronounced. and she was using such advanced tenses that it feels like the mispronunciation was overly enhanced. i suppose some people in class do speak that bad, even after 2 years.
you know what, the lack of liasons was just so jarring. once upon a time, everyone wonders why in the world is it so important. now it feels like this love between the words, that forms music without pauses.

and blah i can't follow what they say, too fast too fast. just like i can't catch 80% of what these two people were saying on the train. i was rather surprised they spoke all french all the way to hougang station. would you imagine these two foreign young adults speaking french in the middle of hougang, i wonder where they are staying.

do watch the film if you can, it's something which, in this age of penguin cartoons, screeching tyres and submachine guns, will truly stand alone and be remembered for being itself.

i m possible

2007-02-23T03:10:00.000+08:00

she said thank you for coming out, she says thank you for helping with the phone, she says now she knows that there's always ways to get what she wants. i suppose, that was always what she needed to learn. that was worth it all.
but im happy that i managed to do it.
sometimes impossible is just a shortform for the lengthy explanations that would never end, sometimes impossible is just impossible, sometimes impossible is just a matter of how much effort the result is worth, sometimes adidas says that impossible is nothing, sometimes they say that nothing is impossible, sometimes someone should tell them that it's impossible for impossible to be nothing. but we border on the insane conflicting ideas that only geniuses can hold in their minds without going crazy. [really im surprised by the things i come up with]
'in conclusion', one must be able to distinguish when something is really impossible, and when one is unwilling to put in that much effort, and acknowledge likewise.

for all their hyped marketing and runaway fame, adidas and nike at least preaches good stuff to the public, not like twisted iffy companies.

2007-02-23T03:03:00.000+08:00

oops i need to do work. i should not wait till everyone has borrowed all the books in the library before starting to go looking. but it's too late.

whee im depressed. yeah, if you're slightly versed with psychology perhaps you might understand why that sentence is written that way. can you really tell what's going on in my little mind if i do not tell you? guess?

the night before, i was sad, i read Metamorphosis, by dear Franz Kafka, from Gutenburg website. what a frightening story. though i wished it was longer.

last night, or rather throughout the day but mostly at night, i speed-read through Shadow Puppets, by dear Orson Scott Card. feels like only the third time i read it. but it's just so nicely familiar and comforting after Kafka's words.

help.. blub blub...

anyway the recent spate of scuba diving incidents have dented my enthusiasm for it. how sad. not my dream death to die like that, not very glam.

2007-02-22T00:40:00.000+08:00

wow GV is really such a *beep*, they're showing "Paris, Je t'aime" at GV Vivo Europa for S$10. are they really such idiots or what. premium price indeed. all timings. Cathay is showing it for only $9.
oh the other hand, safra members get to watch "standard" GV movies at $8 on weekends. but well this is a preemiumm film. [sidetrack, as much as some people keep going on and on about our authoritarian government, the number of people out there who cannot think for themselves seems to justify it]

it looks like a really really nice show. 'got standard one'. opening film of Cannes 2006. wowz. wonder they watch such stuff.

and i am also very entertained by today's papers take on the Academy Awards, not that i really understand all their awards nor care much about them. nominated and award winning films have higher viewership, oh please, gullible folks, think for yourself with your own brain.
and this journalist was blasting that new golden Chinese film for being uselessly pompous, thinking that it will win them awards. i can't agree more that their films are pathetic IMHO, director and actors included.

and i dont just like french films because they're in french. it's coz they have a wonderful style and content. Hollywood is just Hollywood, the Americans have never learned to live and understand life as the Europeans do.

hard disk failure

2007-02-21T02:08:00.000+08:00

"[hard disk drive] failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age"

engadget link
half-surprisingly, half-unsurprisingly, Google did hard drive failure analysis on their hundreds of thousands of hard drives. yup they have that many disk drives. wow. you would almost think they should own a stake in one of the companies. and they have churned up useful statistics on how hard drives fail. which agrees completely with me that S.M.A.R.T., this process which is supposed to detect hard drive failure, is useless and inaccurate.

experienced uni students can read the Google Labs paper titled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population", it even contains 20 references, link on the webpage.

Marseille 24-Jun-06

2007-02-20T00:37:00.000+08:00

yes it's not Lyon! isnt that fantastic. an somewhat absurd weekend trip brings us to Marseille. because it was hard to get tickets to anywhere. and actually it was also an insane idea to buy the tickets, because they were exceptionally expensive. very. because we got the discount tickets for first class TGV. like $150 total for return trip or something. and only one direction was first class. ah well. in the end it was worth it. lots of stories in this trip.

after skipping some boring photos, ok they have these really pretty bus stops. i like, the frosted glass is so fun.

then we pop into the first big church we saw. and voila a wedding, and it's a black couple at that. only realised later that Marseille has many immigrants from the continent down south. but this is quite a cool thing to see. the photo's blurry, din want to disturb their wedding. wanted to wait to see them kiss, as part of the kissing photos collection, but we din have time. cool anyway.

this city, is in an absolute mess. it's an amazing mess. there's the construction works for the new tramline, there's trash all over the city. and it looks like some suburb.
though amusingly we discovered when we were leaving marseille that there was strike going on. guess what, trash disposal service was on strike. wowz. which ends up with all that rubbish on all the streets.
bizarre. we encounter strikes so often. but oddly i learned somewhere that they don't actually strike that often. shrug. so yeah trash.

see when you don't really know what to do, you grab some map, you sortof think that you want to see this this and this. and then you walk, very important, you walk, then you see people, the you follow people, into alleys if you must, and then you end up at nice places. so here's one of their weekend markets. in some dirty street. i thought it was quite shady, but i guess it was that trash un-disposal's fault.

in there was much much food. i guess they were expensive? since it was like middle of the city. but darn their fresh apricots are so cheap. bought a paper bag of them. coz lunch was packed food. and i think we had peaches too. i miss soft fresh sweet apricots. ack.
and why are singaporean bakers so stingy with strawberries

roadside cafe, don't you think that's a cute way of arranging the glasses. pretty!

titled: gulls in various stages of flight

if you don't understand the timetable, you're like dead, coz you might not get back home from the island. boat trip out to an ex-prison on an island. now what was the name. this boat trip was very very important and fateful.

we decided to walk first, for reasons i cannot remember but which made sense at that time. we went on a 10 church spree. roughly that number of churches in marseille, i think abit more. yes they're mad. so we stumble upon more outdoor performances. to my further amazement, there are performances that night. wow. more music outdoors. festival. i cant remember the name, i only know we didn't attend.

i like this building. coz of that thing. and there are words on it. it reads "SENEGAL -something- MERCI"

building on other side of entrance to the harbour. something from long ago to defend against sailing boats. ah well. and then see that cliff there, it looks decently pretty, but there are actually vagrants living in the cracks. yes there are, saw them when our boat went past. marseille is a rather unruly place actually. gangster city

we went walking in the streets. and this is one of the artistic photos. very nice setting. they've got these narrow winding sloping backstreets. very nice

decorated for their festival. and since it's so narrow, they can do nice things.

cute?

paper decorations, and other recycled materials. done by a primary school. very pretty.

the entire setting is lovely, absolutely fantastic. the alley, the colors... priceless view

ok this was from some church. i took very long and got this nice photo finally, so im proud of it. we spent a great deal of time resting in churches coz it was sooo hot out there. argh. i think it was 30 deg. or more.

more decorations. very simple and handmade and pretty and village-like

peculiar. ohyes it's very tiring to walk up and down, up and down... the middle portion is for draining water. that's yanghan on the left, waiting for me to take odd photos

see, more weddings! so many. but it's such a pretty summer day. and then after that can go for honeymoon

see that, MS-DOS 5.0 manual! *gasp* must've been more primary school era.

i think this is the wrong order, but nvm. Lapin! i want to try rabbit. but i think pecilius will not be happy with me

trimarans in the harbour. do you know how pretty they are. the sleek lines, the emptiness. the bare skeleton and magnificent sail. this one is named Skywalker. apparently some competition going on i think.

so this was on the fateful boat trip to the prison-ex. where the wind was very strong and view was very good. and here, this china-man started chatting with us. coz we spoke chinese and we had two prc ppl with us. so chat chat. this lonely single guy somehow likes to talk to us so much, he stuck with us during the entire boat trip, and also during the entire time we toured the prison-ex!! and also after that! and after that and after that!! for the entire time.

something nice on the island

just to show u what the day was like

and that guy. no he's not crazy, he was just insanely game to try anything and we were in the midst of a period of taking jumping photos coz Mr. Lumiere did them, and they made him famous. so he's prc, working with IBM, attached in marseille at that time, does not speak french.

view of the city. very pretty. such a pretty city.

havent yet mentioned why that guy is so impt, but here's another nice view of the city. setting sun color. the magic hour before dark, superb lighting.

another pretty photo. look at the kid's eyes.

just to show u. and that's one of the nice places. nice design.

then we got back to land.. er. and we walked somewhere, which wasn't great, except for it's height and the view. so we took nice photos instead.

then we decided to eat properly for dinner, at a cheap restaurant, or rather cheap by their standards, but we are not very rich to eat $50 bouillabasee, equivalent of non-spicy seafood curry. i was very happy because i was very hungry.

walked past interesting vehicles. and dangerous dark lonely streets where we were afraid of being robbed coz that guy, what'shisname got pickpocketed or robbed in marseille. but he sounded quite cool about it. odd. hm.

ok so i gotta tell story now. we are in marseille for two days, saturday and sunday. we did not book any accomodation. we were either going to find someplace to stay, or stay out. as in really stay out somewhere. which was a very crazy plan. yeah. heh.
then that guy finds out about our crazy plan, coz in the end we din get to go find any rooms and yeah. and he apparently thinks we're very fun and happening, and really likes us alot. and invites us to stay with him in his hotel room!! what the. yeah madness ok. hotel. so we were really suspicious for the entire day. coz this stranger comes and chats with us and follows us around and invites 4 complete strangers to stay in his hotel room. HMMM. somehow in the end we decided to go. yeah it was rather worrying. rather rather rather. tall story huh. so that's the room we were in.

of course there isn't space for so many thing to be placed neatly. but we did get to bathe and sleep in nice hotel. goodness.

then there's one big bed. well. so guess what happens. we had one girl, 3 guys, and him. so? so he graciously let's yanghan sleep on the bed. his hotel bed, his hotel room. and then the 4 guys sleep on the floor, on bedsheet. the story gets more fantastic huh. yeah it's just madness larh. mad mad mad. and we never gave him a single cent. nor lose any. nor did we get kidnapped or robbed or murdered in the middle of the night. fantastic. and the next morning he wanted to go to the calanques with us. and we planned on leaving at 7am, coz we din plan on sleeping much. so that's also another reason why he wanted to stay with us. he's mad lah. we went to sleep like 3am or something i think. 2am maybe. we din even plan on bathing. well it's a crazy weekend trip. then in the morning, he and yanghan went to eat the hotel breakfast. also another deliberation coz we din know whether it was safe for yanghan to go with him alone. but well nothing happens. and tmr is another day for another post. it's just utter madness that we met such a person and had such a trip. we din dare to tell the INSA teachers and our hosts what we did, for fear that they would go crazy over our safety. but it was truly risky. though it did balance out the expensive train tickets. received a CNY email from him too. really nice guy.

CNY

2007-02-20T00:34:00.000+08:00

i can't believe i ate so much good food today. or rather supposedly good food like abalone, sharkfin, yadda. and for some moments i was actually glad to be part of the CNY traditions. you can't possibly marry into a chinese family and experience it all, coz you'll be giving angpaos, not receiving them. and there are so many things involved in this somewhat elaborate festival.

yeah for awhile i was actually glad to be chinese. wow. quelle surprise.

then somehow, i dunno how, i realised that many CNY things are about money. all the greetings, the symbolisms, the rituals, the 'traditions', so many of the involve bringing good luck, fortune, prosperity, wealth, success... and all that. why is CNY so money-minded. is it just Singapore? or did it come from China.

it is commonly referred to that the chinese are 'smart' or 'good' at doing business, at succeeding. but WHY. why why why why why. why are the chinese so good at doing this. i believe it is because to them wealth and face and image and name and money and money are so important. so important that they are willing to spend their lives on it, that they have nothing better than to go all out to get all the money. what's the chinese community like, what is it founded on, what are their core values. even the U.S. of A., which is always being blasted, believes in liberty and all that. isnt that considerably than the chinese society's all-for-oneself, all-for-money kinda belief. i can't believe i think that america is better. gosh. why, why are the chinese like that. does it make them great that they can get rich easily and quickly, at the expense of lax laws and corrupt officials and tramping on the lower rungs.

i wish CNY wasn't about money. i wish it was about peace and love and nice things. like what the other festivals are about. i wish i wish i wish

how much did you earn this year?

liberté égalité fraternité

2007-02-16T01:42:00.000+08:00

Quand une femme me paraît belle, je n'ai rien à en dire. Je la vois sourire, tout simplement. Les intellectuels démontent le visage, pour l'expliquer par les morceaux, mais ils ne voient plus le sourire.

- Antoine Saint-Exuéry. Pilote de Guerre. 1942 -

searched this up in french for the tutorial. they're just such fascinatingly pretty lines. what a dear pity that the author died in the war. pity pity. anyway he wrote Little Prince.

in english it goes:
"Of what I see, I shall perhaps have nothing to say. When a woman seems beautiful to me, I have nothing to say about it. I see her smile, and that is all. Intellectuals may dismantle her face to explain its every part, but they no longer see the smile."

too bad vday is over.
these things come from the JC times. which i suppose could be considered my personal literary renaissance period. what happened to me who read and read and read and spent money on nice books. where have all the books gone. i wish something would happen which would make me start reading again. perhaps one day i shall be crazy and read Dante Aligheri's Divinia Comedia again, perhaps one day i shall actually start reading Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. guess i should go and scan Kino's bookshelves again, and run my fingers over the lovely spines. i still want to read Garth Nix's Abhorsen. and there's always the reading list lying at home.

2007-02-16T01:40:00.000+08:00

The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of - Pascal

this came to mind recently, from all the weird things that i do, without fully understanding why, without really agreeing, with the tinge of regret that is grey in color

2007-02-16T01:36:00.000+08:00

in the hearts of the writers lay
the threads of stories never told
never to be expressed in writing
to be conveyed as it is

in the dreams of the stories hide
emotions so intense and intertwined
the heart cannot differentiate
nor fully comprehend

in us the soul waits for the day we
learn to speak impatiently wanting
to be understood sometimes never succeeding
never realizing that within us we have a voice unknown

in the nights of the dreamers
lie the reality of tomorrow

. Jhender
in reply to Zerá

and because i have such a philosophical french tutor this semester, he goes on and on about how to learn a language. and now, he says, we have to understand the text "avec vos âmes", with our souls. we start off only understanding words, and then it becomes more than words, and then mere words aren't enough, the meaning and implications have to be exactly what it is supposed to be. sometimes it's so hard to learn those things that doesn't have a straightforward direct translation.

2007-02-12T23:46:00.000+08:00

forgot to mention something about one of the nights in Lyon. it wasn't recorded on photo so I missed it. night of 17th June 06, after we got back from Annecy, 4 of us guys decided to go to one of the pubs. just to see. decided not to go to the Fish, coz you gotta pay for that place, and we weren't planning to stay the night, but Fish is on a boat!. so we went to something i dunno what.

then we met somewhere. and at night it's so deserted, prob 9-10pm. but you see they don't function at night see. so it's deserted and then we came to this traffic light. so let me describe the scene. at one side there was this police car, and then from another direction these two cars arrived and stopped at the junction. and we just standing at one corner. and then the green man came on and we started crossing. then in those two cars were many guys. and from one car, someone starting firing fireworks at the other car! absolutely jaw-dropping. and we were just crossing in front of them. freaky, two cars side by side and then sparks start flying. we almost got hit by some of those fireworks. unfortunately i don't have any footage of it. so the police obviously saw it all, and then they drove over and stopped them and whatever else after that. it was just somewhat more happening than we expected.

so then we had to walk further, and we were rather wary of what else will happen. then ppl in cars will be like yelling or something. wellz. so we got to a pub place, and then we were actually speaking english to the bouncers, who looked like americans. there was one really friendly one, who helped us quite a bit. he was encouraging us to stay, coz apparently pretty girls would arrive. had some problem coz someone wasn't wearing long pants, but it was impossible to change coz 'home' is far away and hard to get to. but we got in anyway, since we were 4 poor underaged-looking helpless tourists.
then i was really tired and there was a considerable journey home after that so i didn't want to drink, then i only ordered coke while the other guys had assorted dilute alcohol. and then the friendly bouncer, who helped us order coz we dont speak french very well and they wanted some dunno what drink, he was either amused/surprised/tickled by me ordering coke that he actually treated me for it. news of this started spreading in sch thereafter, but it was really funny. i can remember it as the time i was treated to coke by the bouncer. sheesh.

then we left early coz we didn't want to pay alot of euros to take cab home. it was a rather crazy weekend coz we went Annecy on saturday daytime, went out again at night, and then sunday spent the entire day out to Geneva. it's very tiring to have to take 2 hr train trips and waking up early to go to the train station. zz

23 June 2006

2007-02-11T16:32:00.000+08:00

this guy picked up a metro ticket from the ground, examined it for a short while, then promptly threw it back down onto the ground and walked away. gosh they go around trying to reuse tickets. coz there are 2 hr tickets, and various other kinds.

that evening i went to a synchronised-diving ?show. mainly for the parents of the kids. i believe they had some competition recently. Laure, the elder daughter is in one of the teams. some of them are like ultra young, little kids. ok it's called Aqua Synchro Lyon. there are like all ages, even some national team women. funny thing: some ppl's noseplugs drop out, then you can see them trying to stuff it back in halfway through their routine. but little kids just started out learning only larh.

breaktime. got to see close-ups of their hair. see the kids being very fascinated with their friends' 'superglued' hairstyles. funky.

that's actually the little place selling food. it's very informal, like families selling stuff, but they sell Perrier and cakes. and that TV there is showing World Cup, France vs someone. and of course France won.

that's Laure. and Mdm Jaillard is taking video.

i like this shirt, i think it's a Jennyfer

22 July 2006 Lyon

2007-02-11T00:08:00.001+08:00

this looks rather morbid, but actually it was at a museum for the Lumiere brothers, who invented many of the early cameras and video cameras. decent museum, if you really want to find something to do in Lyon.

just outside the museum, we have amazing tree-climbing kids. wow. i didn't expect to see this in the city, and she climbed rather high up, i've got a video of it

another of my indulgences. i think if the managers at the self-proclaimed bread shops in Singapore saw this, they'll have a heart attack over the ingredients.

oh this was from the previous night actually. just that it was taken past midnight so it ended up in a different folder. the camera splits up the days. so after the music festival we took the really late bus home, and that group near the door were singing drunkenly. i just wanna mention that there was this day when after we got off the bus (daytime, normal stop), some youths threw out a glass bottle from the rear door. almost hit this pastor guy. wonder if it was deliberately aimed at him. kowz.
but i miss being able to get up the bus from any door. and having 3 sets of doors. and having timings. but not having any aircon.

2007-02-11T00:08:00.000+08:00

i want a better blogging program!! i want to be able to know when there are new comments posted at some obscure post halfway down the page!!

2007-02-10T23:19:00.001+08:00

glazed eyes staring far out into the distance
with the faraway look that signifies deep thoughts within
and the familiar silence of one who is not there
with that imperceptible awareness that it is falling
the little circular links one by one flowing through my palm
vainly resisting the plummeting locket wildly spinning
well-worn clasp letting loose a scarred shell
stubbornly preserving within a slice of a past reunion
have I simply let it fall uninhibited through my fingers
contemplating the milliseconds as each cold link slid past
is it that hard to just catch it before it falls through
if it escapes will it smash into the ground in a million pieces
will it thus be a death sentence for lack of trying

it is something hard to explain, something i would not wish to explain, something which, perhaps if you could understand it...

2007-02-08T23:24:00.001+08:00

Official estimates say 100,000 die on China's roads every year but the WHO says the road toll is double this figure.

link

makes me wonder what's the hooha over the few thousand who die in 9-11, over the tsunamis and earthquakes. 200,000 per year is 547 per day. 22 per hour. does it even begin to matter. in a country like that, what matters, what is significant. such a different perspective of life.

oh the bells of the necromancer.
i want to hear Astarael, the high pitched and peaceful "The Sorrowful" or "The Weeper", to hear it and be thrown beyond the Ninth Gate of Death

2007-02-08T21:51:00.001+08:00

of Mice and Men

2007-02-07T22:53:00.000+08:00

Today

ok that was really funny. Dr Lee Wei Ling feels that Singapore should focus on Hepatitis B, auto-immune diseases and head injuries??? That sounds absolutely weird to me. I mean, why in the world you want A*Star to be researching on such stuff. Hep B already has a vaccine, so what's the fantastic thing about it. Head injuries doesn't sound like much of a disease to me.

there are so many worse things to waste money on, like IMF meetings (which didn't bring any spin-off benefits at all), like the IRs (which maybe can make money, but doesn't do humankind any good), like digital media industry (which is also frivolous entertainment).

I'm glad Mr Philip Yeo has no qualms going at odds in the public with somebody's was it daughter or granddaughter. i wonder if the old man is having more heart attacks at the current state of the garmen.

2007-02-04T10:45:00.000+08:00

Je suis heureux.

i want to participate in a strike
i want to write a message on a wall in the streets where the world passes everyday
i want to write "la vie est belle" because in singapore who would understand the Dream
i want to catch a tennis ball bouncing off a car
i want to watch balloons fall down from the sky
i want to play hopskotch as a kid, because i never did
i want to let my fish go, in the sea, because it is one of those imcomprehensible things that humans do
i want to build such a great building so massive on the moon that it would alter the timing of the phases of the moon cycles.

--
Céline Dion + Garou - Sous le vent
Et si tu crois que j'ai eu peur
C'est faux
Je donne des vacances à mon coeur
Un peu de repos
Et si tu crois que j'ai eu tort
Attends
Respire un peu le souffle d'or
Qui me pousse en avant
Et

Fais comme si j'avais pris la mer
J'ai sorti la grand'voile
Et j'ai glissé sous le vent
Fais comme si je quittais la terre
J'ai trouvé mon étoile
Je l'ai suivie un instant
Sous le vent

Et si tu crois que c'est fini
Jamais
C'est juste une pause un répit
Après les dangers
Et si tu crois que je t'oublie
Écoute
Ouvre ton corps aux vents de la nuit
Ferme les yeux
Et

Est-ce que tu seras près de moi
Sous le vent
--
sadly, some things, when translated into english, just lose their special meaning, but do it if you must. a very cheem song, with very simple words.

2007-02-04T10:38:00.000+08:00

L'attroupement-éclair, un étrange rituel urbain...

"Dans une société hyperrationnelle, faire quelque chose qui ne sert à rien, c'est un luxe."

"Dimanche 17h à vivo. cheveux multicolore."

2007-02-04T07:53:00.000+08:00

loves the grey
adores the black
hearts the red
flies the orange light
bright the silver
soothing orange dark
shocking the pink
in all the loveliness of the colors of the visible world
in all that streams from the velvet darkness of this page
floats a Mind in a General Systems Vehicle wandering in play

2007-02-03T23:35:00.001+08:00

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/256477/1/.html

"The Vice-Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Cooperation, la Francophonie and Regional Integration of the Gabonese Republic will visit Singapore from February 4 to 8. "

that's such a cool title isnt it.. wow..

2007-02-02T01:31:00.001+08:00

on ne sais pas on n'a pas su on ne savais pas on n'avais pas su on ne saura pas on ne aura pas su on ne sut pas on ne eut pas su on ne saurait pas on n'aurait pas su on ne sache pas

in France, the celebrity farmer Jose Bove runs for presidency. but he's got quite a history. interestingly, 20 people are running for presidency. how nice.

moi, je serai mort le moi prochain, ne me demande pas pourquoi, je ne sais pas.

sigh

2007-02-01T22:43:00.000+08:00

the good thing, and bad thing, about having a big big campus
is that you can hide somewhere and be almost alone in the midst of strangers

but sometimes it's just sad to be lost alone

qui est-ce?

2007-01-31T23:49:00.000+08:00

i probably have mentioned this song before. but i just like. i like the music, i like the feeling, i like the meaning. just let me leave a record of its lyrics.

a sad song, for a loud sad moment. perhaps i shall add it to the funeral playlist, depending on mood.
Richard Wagner's Trauermusik (WWV73) should go on the list too.

梁静茹 - 如果有一天

现在也只能欣赏唯一的合照一张
淡忘了的是那个街角想念的是当时的微笑
生活中交错失望越想念就越孤单
若再被寂寞迎头赶上多感伤原来只是正常
你是不是也在品尝一个人的咖啡和天光
是不是也忽然察觉到多出时间看天色的变换
如果有一天我们再见面时间会不会倒退一点
也许我们都忽略互相伤害之外的感觉
如果哪一天我们都发现好聚好散不过是种遮掩

如果我们没发现就给彼此多一点时间
生活中交错失望越想念就越孤单
若再被寂寞迎头赶上多感伤原来只是正常
你是不是也在品尝一个人的咖啡和天光
是不是也忽然察觉到多出时间看天色的变换
如果有一天我们再见面时间会不会倒退一点
也许我们都忽略互相伤害之外的感觉
如果哪一天我们都发现好聚好散不过是种遮掩

如果我们没发现就给彼此多一点时间
如果有一天我们再见面时间会不会倒退一点
也许我们都忽略互相伤害之外的感觉
如果哪一天我们都发现好聚好散不过是种遮掩

如果我们没发现就给彼此多一点时间

Unison

2007-01-29T16:58:00.000+08:00

if there's anyone who knows how to use Unison over an SSH connection, please help me. it's a great program for synchronising folders, but i dont know how to get it to work through SSH. preferably through plink/putty.

tuition fee non increase

2007-01-26T00:43:00.000+08:00

as jx exclaimed, it's news that the tuition fees are not going up for the next AY. WOWz. i mean, come on, shall we have annoucements weekly that oh i am not going to increase the price of wanton noodles next week. flabbergasted.

it's like those SILLY advertisements by SILLY advertising companies thinking that the populace is as SILLY as them "GST absorbed", 'non-expletive'. what the heck, we're in an u-n-i-v-e-r-s-i-t-y, even though i have to admit that not every student i see around here is highly intelligent, but we are at least sufficiently educated ( /cynical/critical/anti-establishment), or so i like to think, that we are above silly ploys.

why are the tuition fee reviews taken in consideration of the proposed (/declared) GST hikes, as opposed to normal running costs. so does that mean that they have zilch problems balancing their budget without increasing tuition fees. so why do they need to think so hard about whether they need to increase it. or are they running at a deficit so that next year they can increase more to compensate.

by the way, we still need to pay more than last year. coz the GST did rise.
and 3% of $6k is like close to $200.

let's go live somewhere with higher taxes And higher returns per tax dollar paid.