another city, another tragedy

got rear-ended slightly while on the way home. some buffoon nicked me with his license plate screws just as i was accelerating away from gate security. yes i was driving without an official license and yes i've added yet another little ding to the trusty family vehicle besides the ten million other ones i'm responsible for.

but it wasn't my fault this time. that buffoon hit me. and he hit me driving a CITY.

oh for pete's sake. why, of all things, a city? this just reaffirms my belief that nobody, NOBODY, under any circumstances should purchase a honda city as their mode of transport. that means even if you're held at gunpoint. death by firing squad is more dignified than actually owning one of those ghastly things, let alone driving around town in it.

there's not a single angle from which a person would have a look and associate it with "beauty" or "elegance". maybe those concepts are a little aloof and snobbish. how about lets try erm... "car-like"? ...nope, doesn't look anything like it.

i very much prefer the rear view of donkey to that of a city. and with that kind of money i could afford half a dozen donkeys and stare at their collective behinds all day. and then i'd have enough dough left over for a chariot, with battle spikes in the wheel hub, ala the gladiator. and i bet this simple setup goes faster than the city too. not to mention the absolutely terrified looks of onlookers and their severed limps that i'd be leaving behind in my bloody wakes.

there's not another car on the face of this planet uglier than a city. well, maybe the pt cruiser. but the pt cruiser is american. all american cars are ugly by default. just like a "fat italian" or a "short german", a "good-looking american car" simply wouldn't make any grammatical sense at all.

and if for any reason you managed to spot a decent looker in one, that's because it's really a major manufacturing mishap: bob or steve at the plant down in alabama probably left the machines on while they went out for a donut and a cup of joe.

so the moral of the story? you're better off with a herd of donkeys than a honda city. and they taste better too on the bbq when the mileage has read somewhere in the 200,000 miles. while it is true that their meat maybe rather tough and no longer juicy, at least they'd be like good cross-trainers for your mouth, something to do when you’re not smoking.

you can't eat your honda city after it's reached the end of its lifespan now can you?


+listening to: something's missing by john mayer trio

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tidbit

did you know the L in JBL stands for Lancing as in Altec Lancing?

look under James B. Lancing on wikipedia.

yea time to stop nerding.


+listening to: mojo pin by jeff buckley

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oh so you think

i was told last night that a certain person thinks i am fat upon our first meeting.

well, the truth is i am. i may have love handles (note the plural) and i may have a slight beer belly that causes my body to lean forward a wee bit too much. but that doesn't imply that i am useless. it's like saying someone is short and therefore he must be rubbish at singing.

i can sneeze with my eyes wide open. i will also wrestle a horse to the ground in 10 seconds flat while reciting the entire english alphabet backwards, all 30 of them. would you still call that useless?

in fact, did you know that 35% of fat people are more intelligent than their skinny counterparts in the same age group? you didn't? well that's because it isn't true. but i bet the stats are even higher.

and all this because i read about getting involved today. and here is step one: stand up to an accusation and make right what isn't.

nah... i'm just kidding.

+listening to: nothing

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well well well

typing this post (the physical act) is a joy. i never thought i'd say that. it's like writing by telepathy. and here for example, this tilde that you see ~, i didn't touch the keyboard at all, i was simply using the power of suggestion.

i should explain myself. i was out at the downtown district where IT is the name of the game. there're just entire malls devoted to all kinds of gadgets. well i was actually looking for a laptop stand to prop my laptop up, my neck had been feeling a little wonky lately. anyways to cut a long story short, somewhere along the way i kind of got side-tracked, and i came home not just with the laptop stand, but also a 2gb ram chip for my laptop.

now imagine to my amazement everything just seemed to start happening at warp speed, on my computer that is. it's as if the thing has suddenly ingested some testes and decided to tear the internet apart. that's like saying i've got a jet-propelled elephant, a turbo-charged donkey. well maybe i do.

after a while the term "lag" simply wasn't in my vocabulary anymore, except maybe when accompanied by the prefix "jet" and then "-ged" at the rear to describe the feeling after about half an hour of surfing around the web. about time i say.

so boys and girls, why not give it a try. 3gb of ram in your computer might just spell lurv for your dusty old machines.


+listening to: get rhythm by johnny cash

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strangely at peace

woke up today feeling less anxious than yesterday, less anxious than the day before. actually come to think of it, i haven't felt this tranquil for a long time. it's like the stone that i've been crawling under has been lifted off my shoulder.

+listening to: hollow years by dream theater

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nothing but pictures

capturing the eclipse using a filter:

before and after:

and a taste of the old china:

+listening to: in the wee small hours of the morning by frank sinatra

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not for the faint hearted

met jing lin and her cousin today. i'd just like to say that shopping with women takes a certain amount of nerve and patience. and i fully admire their ability to just shop and shop and shop and shop, then shop some more. there is no power greater than their will power to shop, and there's no strength tougher than their mental strength to carry on.

oh and here's something interesting i saw:

+listening to: nothing

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empire of the sun

on a moving train.

as the afternoon sun sets and i sit by the window listening to jeff buckley's hallelujah, a sort of surreal sate of mind came over me. the closest word i can think of is suspended animation. it's as though time had stopped and i was trapped. in a strange yet unexplainable way it felt serene and peaceful and as the train slowly chugged on, i kept counting the signposts till i forgot the count.

all i could wish for was some wind blowing against my cheeks. always the idealist.

i've gotten some time to myself this summer. i guess always being the dreamer that i am, thinking and reflecting is my special way of keeping my mind refreshed. balancing the checkbooks if you will. in school everything just happens at break-neck speed that i barely get a chance to stop and check in on myself.

on this short trip, i've seen some things that made me feel insignificant, other things that made me feel guilty. why does everyone but me seem so good? what can i do?


+listening to: hallelujah by jeff buckley

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sunshine

i'm setting off tomorrow to witness a total solar eclipse. it's only going to be visible from a few locations, and from where i' at now, i would only be able see a partial eclipse. but hey, if i was going to see it, might as well see the whole thing.

it's one of the few things on my "bucket list" that i thought would take me a while. because total solar eclipses are extremely location specific. and it's hard for everything to come together perfectly: the planetary alignment, phase of the moon, the time of day, the location, etc. now i just need a clear sky, and going by the weather forecast it seems i might finally get my wish.

it has already been dubbed the most perfect solar eclipses of this century. for the short 6 and a half minute, i would be able to experience the sky go completely dark in the middle of the day. i'm hoping it would be as exciting as i think it would be.


+listening to: some day by john legend

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the colors

how i wish i could see the things in different shades other than grey;


hear the notes as if they all represent an endless palette;


and dream the dreams in technicolor.


+listening to: detroit rock city by kiss

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american idol

i don't usually watch american idol. i find it... a bit uninteresting with all the hype and all. but somehow yesterday i came across a clip of the runner-up adam lambert's performance with kiss, and i was shell shocked.

if i had a mirror there i would have seen the shit-eating grin on my face, and simultaneously i was air-guitaring frantically in my room, at 2am in the morning. i haven't done that since i was 13.

and then i dug deeper, watched some more clips of him playing with slash, smokey robinson, queen and i was amazed. he looks like a emo kid on steroids but boy, he sounds like the most divine combination of axl rose plus steven tyler plus mick jagger, and all their good bits too. who the hell is this guy?

and he didn't win in the end? come on america. you're the dumbest lot i know.


+listening to: beth by kiss

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untitled

it's been a while since i've been moved to tears by music. i can't even remember when's the last time, i think it was when i heard someone play tchaikovsky's violin concerto in d major.

and i did once again today. it was this film called august rush. the music was... i wish i had another word for beautiful, but i don't. it was just beautiful.

i'm left speechless. and it reminds me how much i love the music. my music.

maybe it's god's way of constantly reminding us that there's something else besides us in this universe.

and you never quit in your music, no matter what happens because any time something bad happens, it's the one place you can escape to and just let it all go.


+listening to: untitled by mark mancina

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that was then, this is now

i'm finding it harder to remain focused. it just seems that i suck at everything i do, most notably all things pertaining to academics among others. i remember it hasn't always been like this, i used to be good. i used to be really good. somewhere along the way, something went astray.

i yearn for a better understanding of how my mind works. relevant subjects just don't seem to register, and that is before we even start talking about a thorough understanding. seemingly random and useless factoids gets stuck to my mind like flies to stink, i'd only need to read it once and it could never be forgotten.

why can't analog signals and systems be read and understood intrinsically like life of pi. are frequency response and fourier/laplace transforms that different from a few fundamentally philosophical questions? if anything they are all about trying to unravel the truth that this universe holds.

but it seems like my mind sits within an impregnable citadel. heavily fortified, severely lonely. and there's this unassuageable void. it sucks the life out and leaves nothing behind. determination and belief? those are only as strong as your mind is. and i have a weak mind. i surrender too easily.

what is the cure for that void and loneliness? someone please give me an answer. please.


+listening to: falling down by andy timmons

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revelation

my tube zone is working again!

just jammed to andy timmons's electric gypsy for nearly 2 hours. thank you mr timmons! it's been a while since i've listened to instrumental rock stuff, and this song just reminded me why i love it so much.

sometimes lyrics are not necessary. the music speaks for itself.


+listening to: electric gypsy by andy timmons

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this is number 300

this is post number 300. i have never done anything consistently for 3 times, let alone 300. waking up every morning doesn't count, because if i had my way, waking up would be... selective. that way i could only choose to wake up on the good days and skip the bad ones all together. and i am embarrassed to say that i once slept for 25 hours and skipped a day altogether.

so i should be happy. yet i am not.

i tried to write a song, and failed miserably. the lyrics were forced, and rubbish to start with. the chord progressions are repetitive and dull. and to add insult to injury, my prized possession, my pride and joy, has decided to ditch me and stopped working completely. and i don't know what is wrong with it.

being the electrical engineer that i am, i would have liked to say that it was a piece of cake to fix. but the reality is i have no clue what is going on inside with all the components and wires. it's too complex to grasp. i am doomed.

and i am having a hard time looking for a record store. it's not that there aren't any, it is just that they are always inundated with all the mando-pop malarkey. no offence to fans of the genre, it's personal taste. i just detest the manufactured and formulaic way most of those "music" are produced.

this might come off as hypocritical, but i refuse to pirate music. that's about the only thing i don't pirate. i believe that if you like an artiste, you should buy their records. that way they will continue to make good music for many years to come.

i wonder what i'm going to feel when the post count hits 666. i'd better be praying my ass off.

+listening to: so damn lucky by dave matthews

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oh my eff

this behemoth just arrived:

yes, i know you are making that face right now.

pardon me if i sound like a total geek. it's just way too exciting. this neat piece of gadgetry may be 50's technology and looks like a toy. it might also possess the psychedelic 70's hippie look. and it even has the austin powers-esque shag-tastic type font for its logo to boot. but don't judge a book by it's cover.

when you're not looking, it can bite your head off in a split second and you'd never know what hit you. because you're dead.

if i didn't know what it was, and if i had to put into words the sound this beast makes, i'd have no choice but to say that it was the sound of gods making love. there simply isn't another way of describing it.

i must say i am very impressed with the speed of which i've taken delivery of this delightful monster. i ordered it yesterday, and anywhere else it would have been "your item will be shipped next business day." that meant i would have to wait till monday morning for some bloke to wake up, have his coffee, stare at his computer screen and cringe at yet another order he had to fulfill, and then haphazardly register it into the system. and god knows when the item would actually arrive at my doorstep. down here we like to call it "if you can't deliver the goods in the next minute, someone else can do it for even less money". and that means weekends too. yea, sundays included.

i have no idea what the courier company is called, no one told me of any website i had to fiddle with, nor was there a tracking number for me to scribble down and lose in my pocket along with my pocket change and 40 million other things. and frankly i don't really care, because a man simply showed up at my door this morning looking like i owed him some money, yet had the good manners to bring my guitar amp inside. he even set it down as gently as he could like a baby.

now if only UPS or FEDEX would just show up at my door. i'm certain it is simply not in their vocabulary, i kid you not. just ask any of their delivery people and they'd look at you as though you're speaking an entirely alien language.

so no FEDEX, you don't live to deliver. just ask yourself this very simple question: "what did i do last sunday?" and if the answer has anything remotely related to the word "deliver", proceed to ask yourself this next question: "why am i lying?"

+listening to: gods making love

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building the tower

went to ikea last night expecting some pretty sparse crowd, since it's a thursday. and what a shocker i got. it was absolutely packed. apparently there was a sale on. an ikea sale? they might as well start handing things out for free. which they did. with certain purchases of course.

and sure enough, something caught my eye and i had to have it. it was glistening in the, uh... pretty artificial lighting in the store, begging me to whisk it away from the treachery of the life in a shop. and when i finally got around to collecting it, i immediately realized the downside.

there is obviously the length. i dare say that this is perhaps one of the longest items they have in stock. it's a pain in the ass to just navigate around the store with it. and it barely fit in the family vehicle even with the back seat down. had it been any longer, we might just have to tie a string to it and dragged it home. and then there is the weight.

this cd tower is not heavy. an elephant is heavy. an american is heavy. this thing is biblical. i almost had to give up an arm just trying to wrestle it home. and then there is still the not-so-enjoyable build process. but at the end of the day, i guess it's all worth it. now i have a proper altar to worship my growing record collection. and there's even room enough for one more tower next to it.

it's like walking into a record store at home. now, i don't understand the fascination with a walk-in closet, but i sure as hell know what i want when i have my own place - an entire wall of these.

there's just a slight problem left to sort out though. rearranging the records in alphabetical order. arghhhh...

+listening to: die to live by steve vai

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just give me some truth

               

the reason for the radio silence over the past couple of days is quite a frustrating one frankly. as of tuesday night, around 7.43 pm CCT, facebook no longer works.

i usually have a substantially high level of tolerance for all things ludicrous. in secondary school, a bloke who sat next to me shat himself on his pants. i kid you not. and i merely laughed it off. once on a 16 hour flight to chicago, the girl to my right vomited continuously from the instant the aircraft took off till the moment it landed. and i'm not exaggerating. i might have thrown up a little in my mouth, but that's about it. you get my point.

i must profess that i have no qualms with sensible government censorship. we all need something to tickle our funny bone, and if a little censorship makes the government feel all warm and fuzzy inside, i'm all for it. after all, every dictatorship needs a certain amount of paranoia to justify themselves as a totalitarian regime, no?

just the other day, i was reading a certain online synopsis of the transformers movie that had just come out, and i realized that the government had inevitably taken out an entire hunk of potentially mind-blowing action. and as you could imagine, i was furious. then i realized why they did it: it involved an expose and had that scene remained, millions of little children would have grown up with the warped idea that every specimen of the female species possesses the perfect pair of uh... you know what i mean. and 20 years from now, the unfathomable disappointment on such a massive scale might just spark off a plundering birth rate that would be unprecedented. there, the government: 1, hollywood pervs: not.

okay i made that up. but that's besides the point. first there was no youtube, no blogger. i can live without youtube for a couple of months and there's always other ways to blog, like for example email. and then over the last week twitter stopped working. and i was puzzled. maybe it was a network glitch, because i haven't exactly had the best experiences with my internet provider. then on tuesday, it was facebook. that was the moment i realized how naive i had been.

yes, the chairman himself or the "president" as we now call him has never done anything to annoy me. in fact, so far as i can tell, he has never done anything at all. and yes, we no longer use "long live chairman mao" as our official greetings, yet this is still the same regime it was 20 years ago. nothing has changed.

who are the busybodies who say that we can’t upload ugly mugshots of ourselves for our imaginary friends to see or twitt to the world every time we take a dump? the nitwits who say that we should, i quote, "achieve the four modernizations"? where do we begin? how about you stop meddling with our internet?

a question. it’s addressed to all the self righteous, politically correct, back room, conservatives who advise the government: “i am chinese. why is that a good thing?” i bet they don’t have an answer. and until they can come up with one, chances are we’ll never win at anything other than table tennis again.

call me unpatriotic if you like, and don't blame me if i have no sympathy for the nincompoops running this country. a little truth wouldn't have hurt.

now excuse me while i'm off to conquer the sofa.


+listening to: just give me some truth by eddie vedder

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out

today i've discovered a new vice:

ah hah. yea. yup. yes. coffee gum. how awesome right? who would have thought you could combine two of my favorite things into one.

that said, they've still got a long way to go in terms of the flavor. they should also have created products like gourmet coffee gum. how about an espresso gum? or... i don't know, caramel macchiato gum? just a random thought. heh.

anyways here's a view from one of the places i've been to today:

it's a bookstore. actually calling it a bookstore is a gross understatement. to be more accurate, you could call it an ORGY of books. 6 freaking floors of nerd-o-logy to be exact. my head hurts from just thinking about the place.

walking around town is exhausting. actually it's already exhausting enough just walking around in a single mall. and it seems like someone's building a new mall every other day. the rise of capitalism is... mind-bogglingly awesome and appalling at the same time. how often do you get to say that huh?

headed home after a pair of chucks and a scoop of haagen dazs... i love haagen dazs. the most american ice cream you can ever get that doesn't sound anything remotely amercican.

+listening to: neon by john mayer

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sundays are supposed to be sunny

headed out to the wetlands park with my family and relatives yesterday. spent one and a half hours driving there and... it started pouring the moment we arrived.

so we sat around waiting for the rain to stop, had ourselves some lunch and when the rain finally subsided, it was too wet to go anywhere. so the rest of the day was well erm, forgettable at best, picking stupid lychees on a lychee farm and watching ducks swim about a pond.

i don't like lychees. and i hate ducks. it's pretty much a dead ringer for a win-win situation.

tornado!


no tornado






lychees


ducks


harbor

+listening to: society by pennywise

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talking

sometimes all we need to do is talk.

just came off the end of a long chat with a good friend, whom i shall not name. let's call him Z. now Z is unsure of himself and what life holds for him. he's tired and drained from not being able to achieve certain things he set out for himself. and from what i gather, Z isn't really happy about the state of things on the larger scale either. he feels trapped in a rat race. like... another brick in the wall.

i had felt the same way before, and i understood what he meant. it's hard to get a grip of what life has in store for us. and me? i don't know... i've always gone about my ways, i envied some, loathed others. all i know is that my life is what i make of it.

the more i talked, and the more i thought, and the more i talked, i started to realize, that what really kept me going boils down to one thing: the belief that i'm going to do something amazing. i don't know when it will happen because it hasn't happend yet, or what i'm going to be doing. but i just believe.

it's always easier to be sad, and be pessimistic about things. it's our natural reaction to the fear of the unknown. maybe it is also because it takes a certain amount of courage to trust and believe, that things will turn out for the better in the face of impending doom.

and it helps sometimes to take things in from another perspective, to see things in a different light; we all have our own inclinations and biases. sometimes "i don't know..." is perfectly acceptable. after all, we don't and can't possibly know the answers to everything. we have to find those out for ourselves.

so hey Z, brother, if you're reading this, here's something you didn't know about yourself: you are AMAZING.

as a matter of fact, this applies to everyone of us. we're all here for a reason. there's no doubt. just trust me on this.

+listening to: guranteed by eddie vedder

» Read the Full Post of " talking "...

urgh

this is kinda awkward, because i've never imagined that this would happen to me in my entire life, ever. sigh.

it's like 5 am in the morning, and... and i'm sitting here watching korean drama online. this particular one is called Autumn in My Heart (가을동화, 秋天的童话), which belongs in the same series as Winter Sonata (겨울연가, 冬季戀歌). and i suspect i might have shed a tear or two some time during the third episode. but it is only a niggling suspicion though, because i'm a man and thus i'm incapable of crying.

now do not be mistaken, i am no steve mcqueen either. for he is the type who possesses strong smoldering sexuality, the sort of man who could punch a horse to the ground while driving a mustang sideways through the streets of san francisco. i, on the other hand, much prefer to retain a healthy dose of sensitivity. i'd like to think that i'm the type who could get a lady's clothes off by playing chess.

it is hence in my firmest beliefs that all korean scriptwriters practice some form of dark arts, and that their sole purpose of existence is to harvest people's souls through the television screen. because as hard as i'd tried, some part of me knows that resistance is futile, because, to quote one of my favourite lines from the godfather, "just when i thought i was out... THEY PULLED ME BACK IN."

ok i gotta continue watching. someone's fate is hanging in the balance and if i don't watch this, i might have to resort to looking at clips of kittens coughing up hairballs on youtube for the rest of the week. and even that to me is only slightly more comforting than getting stabbed in the eye with a pencil. so for the sake of my health...

+listening to: nothing

» Read the Full Post of " urgh "...

yay

today marks a happy day! completed my last hospital check up. everything is proceeding according to plan. and my thumb feels great!

and i also got to see transformers 2, like finally, in a kick ass cinema, on IMAX, and in ENGLISH! how sweet does life get? i did get a little disappointed, cause it's just so not fair that the decepticons have got so many more awesometastic transformers than the autobots. all the autobots acquired since the last movie are a couple of bikes and 2 douchebag little minivans? i mean come on, you can do better than that, like seriously. not gonna criticize the plot too much, we all know there really isn't much of a plot to talk about. but i do think that the sexual innuendos are a little crude and tasteless, especially with all the little kids watching. not to mention that they are not that funny at all.

oh well at least i'm a happy man. nothing too heavy on my mind now, just got a wish granted. and i'm happy.

and oh, to all the boys out there who are obsessed with megan fox: yea she's hot. get over it.

+listening to: nothing

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