All is not gold that glitters

So it's the end of 2003, and true to sentimental form, we need one of those moments where your entire past one chronological year of life flashes by your eyes again! For no other reason than that this day, this day, is a special day marking the last day when you can automatically write 03 in the date and not have to curse and swear and cross it out with a red pen and countersign.

So much has happened over the past year, and yet so little. A year for breaking the boundaries of belief and ability (passing SOC, yay) (LEGALLY too.) a year of milestones, a year for readjustment, and most of all, a year for growing up. Nominally, or otherwise. A year of high emotions. And a year of lows, too. So what came out of it in the end? Sure, lots of eye-opening life lessons and experiences, and yes, astoundingly, i have army to thank for that. Two major works of video editting and animation, with a mass audience. Thousands of conversations about life, leadership (or lack thereof), religion. Old friendships forged anew. The crownless again shall have hair. Lifestyles changed in the blink of an eye.

So what comes out of it all? The realisation that so much in life is uncontrollable after all. Too many variables in the equation for any sort of vague long-term predictability. Too few certainties. Change is inevitable, and really, the only way to deal is to flow with it, when your fin is too small to swim against it. You just have to be able to sense the ebb and flow of it all, to know when the time comes to exert an influence for change, and when to just let go. But if we're all so powerless, then what's the point of living? And i start to sense the beginnings of another argument about determinism forming from the convoluted thoughts that i usually post because i need somewhere to ramble before i crystalise my opinions and direction, so i'll end with a wish for all my dear blog readers:

May this season bring the gift of Hope. Hope, which can survive where joy cannot, where love and peace are but fleeting images. Hope, because the lack thereof would be despair and non-action. Hope, because everything starts somewhere. Hope, because it is the foundation for Faith. Happy new year all, may this one be hopefully better than the last.

*whine*

jinx gear.

-Exuberance-

FUN FUN FUN!

started trying to learn spinach rag on the piano. One of my favourite pieces from the FF series, FF6 in this case. Suffice to say that my pi4n0 5k1llz don't quite cut it in doing the song justice. But it's a fun song to play anyway. Ooooooooh love the FF music. Nobuo uematsu is a genius! Somehow the old music from the FF series sounds much purer and cleaner and better in midi, if less grand. The melodies and themes are just much more striking.

Sorta like how rishi was telling me about a hindi movie he just watched (with subtitles of course) which had a much more pro plot about the endurance of the human spirit. How many Hollywood summer flicks just try to sell using their big budget special effects and sets and actors? Somehow foreign (read: non-american) films which make it here have a certain charm from their plots. I'm thinking of some of the cool french (and chinese) films i've seen.... which manage to give a very refreshingly unique experience. Recommended viewing for today: He loves me, he loves me not (A la folie, pas du tout) (okay maybe i just like audrey tautou) and 8 women.

And the most cunning english movie i've seen is still The Usual Suspects. I'm loving it.

still looking for someone to watch jeux d'enfants with me. I've already missed la papillion. grr.

Bottle Envy

this is a big bottle.



this, this is a BIG bottle.



no product placement involved. Merry Christmas everyone, and don't drink and drive. =) At least, not if it isn't a blue MX-5 with a rose vinyl on the side.

and THIS is product placement.



My mum's tiramisu. Good stuff. My preciousssssssssss.......
To yaox, designated photographer of our events. This tiramisu's for you. =)

Isn't it strange how far we've come from the days where it's "dya want me to bring my multitap and arcade sticks to your party?" to the days of "cabernet sauvignon or merlot?"

Edit: Oh yea, i almost forgot, most quotable quote of the evening was when we were trying to teach yaox the concept of winds and doubles in mahjong:

eugene: "There are two kinds of winds in mahjong. The round wind and the seat wind."
yaox: "?????"
me: "This round wind counts as a double for everyone, but the seat wind only applies to you."
wilf: "Yea, the round wind is the one which blows EVERYWHERE. *waves hands around*"
wilf: "What? what's so funny? That's how i remember it."

Part of the joke is lost in the retelling, but maybe it was the late hour and the metabolised alcohol after all. =)

Happy anniversary.



Time heals almost all wounds, but the hardest person to forgive, sometimes, is yourself.

sigh.

We were too young, after all.

outdated post

all caused by various weekend killers. grr.

but here are the coolpix from yaox's birthday celebration a while back.


The food.


The 1337 cars.


ooh yeah.

i'd start a more intelligent commentary about how it's funny that we have so many cars, and how cool it is to finally be able to go to far out places like bukit timah market *points* easily. Only i'm too brain-shot from too much guard duty and not enough alcohol.

Drive safely.

whee

choo.

When the lights keep going out in your life, you wish you'd bought that fluorescent light instead of these lousy 8 yellow bulb things which keep flickering. Warm lighting my foot. There must be a deeper parallel meaning to all that, only i'm too lazy to extricate one.

----

My CD is done. Burnt, packed, sealed and delivered. I'm published! My 3D animation and video editting will appear in 1000 copies! muahaha. Pity the 3D sucked coz i didn't add music coz it was supposed to run on into the menu and pity the video sucked coz all the good shots were all used up in my previous 2 minute trailer and pity we decided against using niche obscure music in favour of publicising the band of my friend. Still, it's a nice piece of work for about 3 weeks or so of effort. I wish we'd started earlier, though, it held great promise in concept.... but then many things always do.

----

So I come home the other day and i see my sis with "Learn C++ in a weekend". And i find dev-C++ on my desktop. And then i hear she's going for this open source challenge thingie, only she doesn't have a frelling clue what it's all about, and just signed up. So i lie safe in bed at night, knowing she'll either end up a hacker or a poser. And then of course i try to catch up with her on C++.

I wonder if she'll ever have a dream of working for squaresoft.

And finally, stolen off Grace's blog is this little eyecandied gem:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/index.html

This is why i love computers.

A new post!

Okay i've been lazy at the posting, just don't feel like posting pics about my holidays. Ask me for them, if you wanna see, otherwise i have the hard copies so you'll eventually see them. Too many nice pics, but not very many are actually representative and nice at the same time, those must be on the other camera which whirrs.

Very strange emotional swings of late, I suppose it's partly due to my inability to let go. Also still adjusting to changes in camp environment since i got back on monday, new miniboss starting to throw his weight around and he has this nauseating electric air freshener in the office which i just can't stand. I bet that contributed somewhat to my lung problems last week.

The weekends are always higher points, thanks to all my friends who bring happiness into my life. And so i sign up for french lessons at alliance francaise (they've got a REALLY cool building with a nice cafe and a small library of mostly french books and films and stuff, it's almost like a little french clubhouse, nice place to spend time if you have such a luxury, and, of course, a membership, which you need for the lessons anyway) next jan, because i still believe it's a beautiful language, even though it's unfortunately lost part of its sparkle to me since i started wanting to learn it a year or so ago. I eventually decided all the small informal attempts to learn french weren't exactly working very well, and so since rishi's keen on it, that's where we'll spend our sat afternoons for the first few months of next year.

Oh and welcome back, ah-gan =)

Here's a test i thought was interesting:

Advanced Big Five Personality Test Results

Sociability	||||||||||||||||	66%
Gregariousness	||||||||||||	42%
Assertiveness	||||||	30%
Activity Level	||||||||||||	50%
Excitement-Seeking	||||||||||||	46%
Cheerfulness	||||||||||||||	54%
Extroversion	||||||||||||	48%
Trust	||||||||||||||||	62%
Morality	||||||||||||||||||	78%
Altruism	||||||||||||||||	70%
Cooperation	||||||||||||||||||||	82%
Modesty	||||||||||||	46%
Sympathy	||||||||||||||||||	78%
Friendliness	||||||||||||||||	69%
Self-Efficacy	||||||||||||||||	62%
Neatness	||||||||||||||||	70%
Dutifulness	||||||||||||||||||||	82%
Achievement	||||||||||||||||	66%
Self-Discipline	||||||||||||	50%
Cautiousness	||||||||||||	42%
Orderliness	||||||||||||||||	62%
Anxiety	||||||||||||||||	66%
Anger	||||||	30%
Depression	||||||||||	38%
Self-Consciousness	||||||||||||||||||	78%
Immoderation	||||||||||||	46%
Vulnerability	||||||||||	38%
Emotional Stability	||||||||||||||	51%
Imagination	||||||||||||||||	70%
Artistic Interests	||||||||||||||||	70%
Emotionality	||||||||||||||||	62%
Adventurousness	||||||||||||||||	66%
Intellect	||||||||||||||||||||	82%
Liberalism	||||||||||||||||	66%
Openmindedness	||||||||||||||||	69%

Take Free Advanced Big 5 Personality Test

how accurate is it? I can't really say. What's the big diff btw 46% and 53% anyway? i guess they're generally correct but i can't really say if they're accurate to any large degree. Personality tests just serve to reinforce your conception of your personality sometimes, and it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I suppose you can't get too obsessed over a bunch of statistically calculated things sometimes, unless the questions are very clearly phrased and interpreted in the way they're supposed to be. but then you'll never know, will you?

Chic Pics

U CHICAGO!


Pizza Place along 53rd Street. American portions (oops)

Thanks to Jess for the net connection... more posts if i have the opportunity, but this is probably the last...

1337 h4X0r

so i go away to camp for a few days, and i return to discover that my start menu has had its clutter increased by a entrant. Dark signs, it says. So of course, in the spirit of adventurous enquiry, i run the program, thinking it's some funky screensaver or something that my sis keeps seeming to fall for.

And it turns out to be a console. huh? another one of my sister's text based games. argh. oh well. looks funky enough with all its coloured ANSI. so then.

>help
available commands:
- addchar;bgcolor; cap; cd; clear; cldo; color; commands; connect; copy; crack;
- cut; date; drack; decrypt; delete; edit, etc.etc.

woah, my sis has a game which pretends to be an OS. And includes its own programming language too, including a tutorial on how to program an ip scanning thingie.

And what does she do with it?

she programmes a command which will show the date and time and change colours and things when you type in 'bored'.

I love my sis.

www.darksigns.com for those of you interested.

Premptive leave of absence

This space for rent. Excellent location within 2 clicks away of an MRT. Spacious flooble and haloscan comments boxes.

Owner will be away from the 8th to the 21st, please don't call me, unless you wanna pay IDD charges....In the meantime please amuse yourself by spamming my boxes, safe in the knowledge that if you spam enough, i won't be able to read whatever it was you wrote on my flooble.

Oh, and if i catch SARS or the plane crashes or something, it was nice knowing you. Well, most of you anyway. =)

Which irrational number are you?

must i say something before blogger will publish it?

What Irrational Number Are You?

You are π Of all the irrational numbers, you are the most famous. You have many friends and fans. Like many people, non-Euclidean geometry makes you feel uncomfortable. You are involved in so many things that it seems like it would take two of you to make ends meet. You are particularly close to the rational number 22/7. However, you and e have been called "remarkable." Your lucky number is approximately 3.14159265

Shiny Lemur Straif's Blog

Legality

SO why's it that in the US, you can watch RA shows before you can drink, but vice versa over here?

It seems Singapore is more concerned that RA shows corrupt the sensitive asian values, and the US probably thinks that seeing something isn't as evil as getting drunk, and then possibly going out to do evil things. (like, say, looting!)

It's like that economic moral analysis.... that activities which produce more negative effects for society as a whole should be restricted more than activities which are less harmful to the public. Which means that drugs should be more legal than alcohol, coz people shot up with cocaine just sit in a corner lolling and getting high while being very low are less dangerous than drunken people who proceed to get into street brawls and drive over kittens and stuff.

What does the difference in laws mean, after all? That the US doesn't think their 16 yr olds can control themselves well enough to not drink to excess, while they can be trusted not to get their morals (further) corrupted by seeing wanton killings and other wanton things? hmm.

oh and what gogo uses in kill bill? it's a kusari-gama sans the kama, damnit, not a ball and chain.

A barrel full of fish

Ah yes the desire to post.

What makes an adult an adult and a kid a kid? More specifically, why do adults not behave like kids? Or at least, disregarding all the bits about work, why do adults have fun in the ways they do? (no that's not a reference, shut up those of you sniggering in the background) If doing stupidly kiddy stuff is such fun, why don't more people do it? Does it have anything to do with a loss of innocence? (ditto) Are some things just not funny anymore after you've seen the real world? Will the rhetorical questions never end?

Maybe it's got to do with how adults are afraid of being judged. Do adults still think that doing crazy stuff is fun? Somewhere along the timeline of growing up, people start to try and 'act their age'. It's partly peer pressure and herd mentality, isn't it? Somewhere along the line you decide that certain loutish behaviour is irresponsible and selfish. So out go all the mischievous behaviour. or. or...or....

*horrified realisation* maybe adults do have fun like kids do, just that all the adults i know are really incredibly stiff and boring.

I'm only rambling and scratching the surface with my confusicated thoughts. What even gives us the moral authority to judge others? Why should we let the judgement of others influence our actions? Obviously in a practical sense you shouldn't go to work acting like a fish, because chances are you'd get fired, even if you can work twice as well as everyone else. But outside of the usual organisational jobs, if you're the boss of your own company, or, say, a scientist or a film director, people probably tolerate your behaviour if you can produce good stuff. Hmm. I guess it depends if the value of your output outweighs the mental anguish they suffer from having to listen to sounds of "bloob bloob" all day long.

Now that post didn't quite make any sense, did it? I'm just basically trying to figure out what sort of twisted director would make a movie such as kill bill, and actually manage to get it shown in cinemas. Perhaps the value of the movie was lost on me, but as arthouse flicks go, that one was really quite..... a waste of money. That movie seemed to be created more for the scriptwriter/director Quentin Tarantino than for audiences. There were some cool fight scenes, one set in a very zen landscaped jap garden covered in snow, complete with a mood setting miniature waterfall with a swinging automatically-overbalancing hollow bamboo! WOW! which was i think as good as the movie got. It reminded me a bit of the animatrix, not just coz of the jap influence and the anime-inspired sequence.... but also the fascination with spurting blood that featured in some of the animatrix eps. Also, the movie seems to be rather segmented, with rather different stories of uma vs girl 1, girl 2, etc. Which do try to redeem themselves by being arranged in a non-linear way, but still.... it didn't quite achieve the usual objective of making people go "huh?" and then "OHHHHHHHH!" later on in the movie.

I need a good cunning movie. Like The Usual Suspects. One that has an ending which will make you want to watch the whole movie again to see it in a new light. oh well.

Dolphins!

For those of you looking at the pic and wondering about the title going WTF....

you corrupt jerks, don't tell me you can't see the dolphins??

Research shows that young kids with no prior associations with such a scenario see the dolphins, instead of that moment of intimacy. Dunno what sort of researcher goes around designing these pics, though....

Boing!

So there i was trying to look for amusing cute laugh-track sounds for my video. and so, like any self-respecting foley artist would do, i went and searched it on google. Search terms? "boing sounds" of course. And guess what turned up....

--
Gerald McBoing Boing Sound Book

Book by: Dr. Seuss Enterprises

Just suppose," said Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, "there was a little kid who didn't speak words but only weird sounds?" Thus Gerald McBoing Boing was born, brought to life by a studio called United Productions of America as an animated cartoon...... back in hardcover and, here, as an interactive board book that produces a delightful boing-ing sound when you press the button on the right-hand top corner of the book.

Gerald McBoing Boing Sound Book!

oh and for those of you aspiring to similar comic heights (or depths) i eventually found nice sound effects here:
the absolute sound effects archive

Brownian traffic

Singaporean traffic behaves in very strange ways. Traffic engineers unfortunately produce theories of limited exportability.... somehow Singaporeans always seem in a rush to get somewhere, and do strangely irrational things even if it means they'll cut about 4 seconds from their travelling time. (travelling time to the next red light, that is) and the one thing that traffic analysts don't account for, of course, is 4D numbers. Possibly because the license plate numbers in other countries sometimes have more than 4 numbers on them....

http://www.smartmotorist.com/wav/wav.htm is a theory on traffic waves, for those of you who're interested/bored. It's the phenomenon of there being traffic jams even when there's no obvious obstruction to traffic.... The only thing is, if you follow their advice and try to keep a constant speed instead of that typical stop-go behaviour in traffic jams..... some Singaporean driver's gonna think "AHA! an EMPTY SPACE!" and then cut right in front of you.

==

In other news, the obedient dog in the photo was spotted again, this time much closer to the entrance of the food centre. He's probably obediently tempted.

I must lead a really boring life.

There is no spoon.

Chanced upon this little nugget



which is a cute parody of the original house of stairs. Which, btw, is one of my fave escher works, of which i have a nice imported poster in my room. *grins*

Bikkit!

LONDON (AFP) - Scientists in Britain have discovered why biscuits seem to break so easily. Using sophisticated laser techniques, physicists at the University of Loughborough, in the north of England, found that a biscuit develops "fault lines" a few hours after it comes out of the oven. As it cools down, it picks up moisture around the rim, causing it to expand -- while at the same time, moisture at the centre makes it contract. The result is a build-up of strain forces which pulls the biscuit apart, making them vulnerable when handled, moved or packaged.

Doctoral student Qasim Saleem said the findings -- published Thursday by the scientific journal Measurement, Science and Technology -- could revolutionize the cookie industry.
"This will help biscuit manufacturers adjust the humidity or temperature of their factory production lines to change the cooling process in such a way that the biscuits won't break up due to normal handling, and hence producing the perfect biscuit," he said.

with thanks to filbie

West Side story

Obedient Singaporean dog



Yea it's always dangerous with us around....



more pics incoming, guys. After i get out of camp next week. Enjoy.

237

is today's magic number.

ORD loh.

20-sided dice

Or a singapore food guide. That's what we need. In rather predictable 2L fashion, a bunch of us went out for movie and then dinner, and of course we only decided where to go for dinner after the movie, coz, well, it just doesn't make sense to plan these things ahead of time, y'know? and it's so unspontaneously unfun. So yaox, eugene, filbie, chin, jxhuang and me were standing around wondering where to eat (the movie ended at around 7:30: aside: don't watch once upon a time in mexico unless you're feeling ready for some mental somersaults or someone's pointing a guitar case at the small of your back. The plot is just.....woah. It confounds you and then blows you away. With a double barreled shotgun. Of course, after the whole movie ends you're just left wondering 'WTF?' with no clear impression of what just happened except that it involved guns and things exploding.) until we decided we should check out the new paragon extension, which has a name which i've forgotten.

So after discarding the obviously-crowded marche (oktoberfest! (sic)) we head to paragon, only to discover that it was even more crowded, and there really wasn't anything much to eat there for cheap, although there was a spagheddies which i must check out some time in the future when the whole place has settled down. Spagheddies rates as my fav italian restaurant to go to when you're feeling like blowing money on a meal. And then we spend some more time discussing where to go, coz the queues were way too long to be worth it. And yaox goes to buy a drink. And yaox comes back. And we're still discussing where to go. In the end we decide lau pa sat is a nice new place we haven't been to, since holland V is too far away (yea fil, it IS.) and there's nothing left to eat in orchard which isn't expensive/overcrowded on a weekend. And then we Discuss how to get there, since fil and yaox had cars at yaox's house, but parking near LPS is pretty mad on a weekend. And to cut a long story short, after an hour or so and walking up towards somerset MRT (one stop closer to raffles place) and walking back up to orchard MRT (one stop closer to yaox's house) and multiple changes of venue, we finally decide on taking the cars there, since fil needed his car to get home after that eventually. So we proceed to yaox's house, and upon hitting the MRT, we decide that hey, why not just eat here?

So we did.

I think most of our deliberation is pretty pointless, and though we may bitch about it later sometimes, nobody really cares where we eat, just that we eventually eat when we're hungry. Of course it's nice to have grand plans to watch cool movies and eat at places with the best hor fun in singapore and whatnots, eventually it doesn't matter as long as there's eyecandy to laugh at (or with) and food to put in your stomach while joking with good company. I mean... there's only so many people who'll listen in rapt attention to the lieberman-frosh effect (or Leidenfrost or whatever) and then make jokes about straws scooting around the room.....

Life is too short to sweat the little things.

picture courtesy of aya.

SNH SNH SNH. 190903, 1500h

So what then, is worse than death? For all our small pity troubles and worries, all the grouses of a few hours extra spent working, or a liost privilege or two, a bit of money owed here and a nagging ache there, nothing can compare to the loss of a loved one. THe unexpected excision of part of your life. I guess it doesn't matter if you kept regular contact or not, you might not have seen the person in a decade, bu the mots irreversible fact is that you never had a chance to say your last goodbyes. Can you ever REALLY be prepared for the death of someone you know? Or worse, your own death? I don't believe so. For all the preparations and the wills and the settling of unsettled stuff, even if you go in the most peaceful way, the hole will still be there. Nothing can fill in the place a person leaves in your life, sometimes. The only solution? Not to have loved the person at all in the first place. Which is not to have known the person at all. Hurt arises from love. How tragic.

Death is a tragic thing. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's tragic, because if you're dead, you not be living anymore Death is only tragic because of what you could have achieved and done in life. Is life intrinsically good and death intrinsically bad? Life has the potential for good, I guess, as well as evil, and Death has the potential to walk through walls and speak in capital letters.

SNH.

A hazy shade of winter

Taken to writing blog entries in camp and then posting it at home. More efficient use of time, and i can get stuff off my chest when i need to, too.

so: 170903
It's highly chastising to realise you're growing old. And you're not as young and indestrctible and invulnerable as you once believed yourself to be. It's a back to earth slam and a "hello, this is your body speaking, you better bloody take care of me or i'll go on strike, you selfish carefree @#$#%". I guess when you're smaller all these diseases and illnesses are just things that happen to other people, and whatever you land yourself in, every little scrape and broken bone and bout of flu is just a temporary encumbrance and you'll heal soon enough. For most people anyway. I guess i'm lucky enough to not have to bear with anything really long term... no weakened joints or anything, but sometimes something happens and it scares you just enough to remind you that you're not so invulnerable (anymore). Which is why I now pledge to drink a lot a lot a lot more, and in so doing achieve my personal campaign to reduce-the-size-of-the-mothball-in-the-second-urinal-from-the-left-compared-to-the-oters-in-the-toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-second-storey. 'course, that's also secondary to my expose-the-deadly-biological-agents-that-SAF-is-growing-in-my-fourth-floor-toilet-next-to-my-bunk campaign.

Yam Seng.

Power Corrupts.

Haven't blogged in ages. Of course the main reason is the ubiquitous army... it takes up too much of my time, I really should get myself out of it, don't you think? But then my computer went wonky and the fan for the power supply decided to make funny noises, and I get freaked out and turn my computer off. Frankly, when your computer starts making loud grinding noises, it's scarier than a bad American horror movie, which the people downstairs are watching now: and includes the token chainsaw scene, as well as a bathroom scene, and of course the killer is masked with a plastic toy-looking doll face which has this eerie smile etched into it, since he's not a doll himself. So cookie-cutter. The end result of all that is that i'm now blogging from my cousin's house, where my niece just had her first double-digit birthday, (don't you feel old?) since my computer's down and there's nothing to watch on TV and i keep losing at blackjack when i play with those darned 15 year old kids.

to be continued... when i fix up my new power supply, which unfortunately has a wire which is 5cm too short so i can't give power to my CD-drive until i move it one slot lower, which i can't do coz the screw holding it in has lost its grip on its head.

sigh.

Illegal U-turn

More driving analogies creep insiduously into my language. I figure most of my terminology now has its roots in driving or army-related stuff. People complain that when you put a bunch of guys together, it's pretty inevitable that they'll degenerate into talking about army before too long. But i suppose if there's one thing NS is good for, it's for providing this treasury of experiences which is shared across the board by generations of Singaporean males (and the odd crazy female). I mean, last night i saw this teddy bear outside billy bomber's in Bugis (no nice pics, maybe eugene's blog will have some, after all, chin DID take 40 with eugene's camera) with a sign saying "No feeding".... and said the first thing that came to mind, which after range on tuesday, was, unfortunately, "IA IA." Which had the effect of Chin laughing and Darren looking really puzzled (well maybe not, coz he always looks a bit puzzled anyway). Ahhhh the joy of private jokes. And the thing is, they're usually very unfunny when explained anyway.

Anyway, to the point of this post. Last week was a rather disgruntled week for our platoon, and we whined a lot about our boss (rather audibly, and within earshot of him) till finally he seemed to get the point and approached Yang Hui for a really long talk about why we seemed to be disgruntled with him. (Major Milestone! Buy 4D!) and the next day he came to me and said that he realised some of us were unhappy with him, and said that we should approach him if we had any grievances. Which was good enough for me, for now. So I'm giving him a clean slate again and going to start practicing some tactful manipu....er.... advising. Who knows, it just might work, even if i'm asking him to do something which is very clearly deviant from his ingrained personality. We all start somewhere i guess.

So much for tomorrow.

Random title. What i really wanted to say was:

I haven't been to church for a long time. There's something about it which makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. Somehow it's this temple of love, and i don't mean that like some places in geylang might. Sunday morning church service is full of people with their families, mostly 30 odd with young kids old around the bawling/toddling age or the slightly older cute tiny-human stage. Then there are the youths with their groups of friends, or more often nowadays, just the One friend. (it's seasonal) And somehow it's heartwarming to have kids wander around. It just feels so....wholesome.

And for those of you who haven't done so in a long time, go hug your parents.

-- end family service centre message --

(8) Stranger still...

There was an odd Voldemort reference in the wedding banquet. THAT led to some stifled laughter, since no one else in the audience seemed to get it. Queer, indeed. =)

(8) Stranger things have happened...

Somehow the musing moods only last till i finish waking up properly and get into the too-fast rhythm of life. They never seem to linger long enough for me to get fingers to keyboard and bytes to blog. Either that or it's the ppl on ICQ who distract me into the more mundane everyday things and kill all philosophical moods. So I got off ICQ, and now i'm having a half-half philosophical conversation with someone on animal farm and slash. Unrelated. Hopefully.

But stranger things have happened.

Like 7 people buying tickets and not coming for the 2nd show in the world premiere of the wedding banquet. Which worked pretty fine for us, because we were sitting in the row behind them. =)

The view was pretty good anyway from all the way back in circle 2 in the esplanade. But of course you couldn't see the expressive facial expressions of the cast without a pair of good binos. The vocal and visual acrobatics of the cast solved that though. Simon's voice was powerfully controlled, and I thought the monologues of Ma Gou on the phone was just hilarious.
"Wei tung? pick up. Pick uuuuuuuuuuuuppppppppppp *singsong voice*.
I know you're there. so stop staring at the phone and pick up!
Ok you're not there. I just called to see how you were doing. We all miss you Wei tung. Your Pa has a lot to say to you."
"no i don't."
"yes he does. *shoves phone in his face*"
"Hullo wei tung. Pa here. ......
..
...
....
bye."

Which covered about 50% of all of Pa Gou's lines on the phone.

The script was fantastically comedic, while still dealing with very real and serious issues, and was carried off pretty well by the cast (imagine this old chinese guy coming on stage, looking reverent and manservantly, and then waving his hands and saying in a heavily american-chinese accented voice akin to a circus ringmaster: "Welcome to Old Chen's most magnificent seventh pagoda of the jade dragon green lotus red prosperity restaurant!" and this 10m long red chinese scroll with the appropriate name lowers itself behind him.) but the really interesting thing was the audience reactions.

Keeping in mind that this is singapore and a few years ago anything vaguely homosexual would be clamped down upon (I hear they cut certain, ahem, scenes out of card captor sakura? well false parallel but still.) and people like neil humphreys write stories complaining about how a video sent to him by a friend got censored by the censorship board for having a picture of bare breasts on a poster in the background, and out of focus.... I thought it was a small cultural coup that a musical like this was allowed to play at all, and receive so much publicity. (adverts on TV! as opposed to the complete advertising silence imposed on fireface not so long ago) And this didn't have any age checks or anything (Except a parental advisory that it contained adult material which might be unsuitable for children--which i still can't decide if it's in relation to the homosexual themes, or the scene of the.....wedding night consumation.).

The audience was expectedly giggly and tittering when the first hints of the relationship btw wei tung and simon were revealed (granted, it WAS amusing) but by the end they were applauding when

--spoiler warning--



when wei tung told his mum about his alternative lifestyle, and didn't laugh half as much when finally simon and wei tung reconciled and exchanged these lovingly sweet looks.


--end spoiler --


but anyway it was pretty well received, but i guess the people who paid good money to see this show already knew what they were in for anyway. Interesting script that struck a nerve with most of the yuppie crowd, maybe, with its roots in chinese traditional mindsets and the constant maternal harranguing of wei tung to get married. I think most chinese (singaporean, even? or maybe it's ALL) parents are like that too, and openly or not, they want their kids to get married, shag, and give them grandkids. Probably evolutionary. Which then follows that same-sex marriages will break this chain and leave the final objective of "Grandkids, damn you" unfulfilled. So perhaps homophobia is evolutionary inbuilt into most people, unless they try to think otherwise. hmm.

Whatever the reason, Singapore seems to be trying to dispel any homophobic notions in its populace. Or at least, it's being more open about it and is raising awareness on many fronts. For those who don't know yet, it's a longstanding ongoing debate from the day the govt openly stated its policy to not discriminate against hiring workers with an alternative lifestyle (well said). Of course this immediately sparked off the expected response from the more traditional religious groups and some people who complained about western corrupting values and generally displayed wholehearted revulsion. People naturally have their logic blinded by discrimination, and singapore's been fighting this impulse from day one, albeit on the less socially controversial grounds of majority/minority race issues. Minorities will be discriminated against. That is a fact of life. Discrimination breeds unhappiness. That is also a fact of life. Cohesion cannot be fully obtained with underlying unrest. Is the goal of the state ultimately to bring social unity? hmm.

Er i seem to have sidetracked (again). Anyway for some reason it seems that these gay-sympathetic movements are more visible now. There was that article in life a few weeks back about how some companies are (openly or not) targetting the 'pink dollar'. Which is an amusing way of saying "yes these people exist, and the only reason i can convince you that they exist is because they're an economic demographic who will buy your products. If i can't convince you to accept their social choice, will you at least make money from them?" And then there're plays like bent and Mardi Gras which are being shown that i actually know about (do i have more gay-sympathetic friends, or more gay friends, or is it just more visible now? hmm.) which leads me to the inescapable conclusions that Singapore's trying to prepare the ground for something. Maybe they found out that gays make up a significant voter percentage and political lobby. Maybe one of our future politicians is gay. I probably should toe this line before i get sued for slander, and after all my boss IS gonna be the PM soon. ><

(oh and BTW this boss i'm referring to isn't my NS boss. I'd migrate if he became the PM.)

Ed: The above opinions are that of the authors and do not reflect those of his associated organisation. ^_^;

Swirling what?

I've just realised that with the conclusion of ATEC, i won't have any more outfield so now my blog title is outdated.

And then i've realised that i've never really explained the title of my blog. Swirling clouds of dust of course, refers to my unfortunate sad connection with



and, more specifically, following behind a convoy of such vehicles. Which gives the result of



which is pretty cool coz when you whack your clothes big clouds of dust fly off. But of course it's hell to wash.

BTW I've also decided that the primary purpose of this blog is to share pics. =)

Power play

is a starhub plan with 80 free outgoing minutes and 100 free SMSes if you pay by giro and free incoming all day with per second billing so it's a pretty good deal for $29.12.

Also, it's probably one of the things i muse about relatively often, when i see it in action.

power is all about getting people to do what you want them to do. Usually achieved in more subtle ways than pointing a gun to their heads with two of your minions pinning them down and telling them to kiss your feet, in today's context. It's the controlling of people. They might not necessarily have to like it, but as long as they don't rebel, that's power for you. Of course, if they're totally clueless and actually approve of your power, then it's much more sustainable. Which is sort of like Singapore's political leadership. =)

Hypothesis 1:
Power is controlling the expectations of people. If you create the impression that messing around with you will result in dire consequences, people won't mess around with you. You don't actually have to DO anything after a while, just show that you will if the need arises. Similarly, ceteris paribus, if people expect you to make things difficult when they try to hoist unsavoury jobs upon you, they'll look for someone more bullyable.

Corollary 1:
Different shows of power work with varying success on different people. Some dictatorial people will try and pound any resistance to the ground. Assumedly (distorting?) most people are peace loving by nature and try to seek a solution which involves less conflict. Unless they're pushed to the edge and have no choice but to resort to conflict. Thus power plays with people who are on the brink have to be handled with caution.

Deriviation from corollary 1:
Proper power is only sustainable with the ability to analyse the situation and know just how to act. Thus power is not simply blind fury, it is a calculated dance involving large amounts of self-control.

now that wasn't too bad for rambling trite, was it? So much better when you can blog random thoughts when you're at home all the time.

Aha

So finally blogger is up at the same time that i am. Haven't found the time to blog since eons ago... It's impossible to blog properly when you're stay-in, i realise. But while my life goes from this

ATEC - we rocked and achieved a high score for this fiscal year

to this

Happy birthday Yeshan, i'm in love with your dog

to this

Welcome home allan, we're all quite fond of ue.

I start to wonder if happiness is really entirely internally controlled. And yea for those of you who're wondering what those pictures are all about, and can't wait to hear the stories of how i got that scar on my forehead in picture 2 from the activities in picture 1 and how the people in picture 3 completely freaked out total strangers by nonchalantly discussing certain timings in certain restrooms, you have to ask me i guess.

So just how long does it take before you get to the part where you decide that you're not going to let some other idiot control your happiness? How long before you get fed up of getting angry at someone, and decide that it's so much better to just ignore it all and forget about all their incessant banterings. So as a result i'm beginning to sense the hardenings of my soul and the increasing detachment i have. So that's a thank you to my army compatriots who helped me learn how to get angry, and have now helped me learn how to build walls around myself and be an insensitive prick, for my own self-protection.

And a big thank you to my boss, who's let me see the great goodness of the human spirit, in other people when placed in contrast with him, and of course who's help foster this sense of community and platoon unity amongst us, in the sense that we're all united against him. So well, i guess as far as army is concerned, my motto is now that if you f* with me, and i'll f* you back, but i won't get all upset and angry with it. After all, lots of people get plenty of joy and fulfillment from carnal acts. I'm sinking. I mean, how much does it say for my sanity when i start to do things like this

Patch chocolate blot test

with melted chocolate? Which by the way goes down oh-so-smooth and luciously.... and when it's coated over a strawberry.... mmmmm.....
Chocolate fondue. $12.80 for a pot (scrutinise the picture carefully) at some swiss restaurant in suntec. Which is pretty cheap when it's shared between 5 ppl (how much chocolate are you planning to consume in one sitting ANYWAY?!?)

Good restaurant. Good value for money. All the suntec sky garden restaurants are all pretty desperate for customers, so you can land some pretty good set deals there. Just that, well, it's more expensive than the food court in the basement.

I've just gone off on a tangent, haven't I? Must be those detachment algorithms at work.

You are the Raging Kitten, You look cute and
innocent on the outside, but are a mauling lion
on the inside, you show just a little of your
anger, but just enough to let people know that
they don't want to fuck with you. Intimidation
is your high point! use it wisely.


What anger personality do you have?
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Absolut Zero

Sensory overload.

So I'm a newbie chiongster. I haven't clubbed properly since Eden in J2, and that's eons ago
and in a small place really crowded and with bad drinks. Eden isn't even here anymore.

Enter Uchicago with Absolute Zero, and suddenly there's a reason for me to step foot into zouk with loads of people i know. Was it an excuse to get people together for a party? maybe. But anyway i had fun and got to see zouk for the first time. =) Abs 0 itself was a little tame, but that's probably due more to the general relusiveness of the audience than anything on the part of the organisers and performers, who were pretty pumped up:


obviously the audience didn't have enough semi-crazed weasels like these:



Although the audience DID have plenty of old friends of mine... ran into the 2L bunch (where
else do you find 2 people calmly sitting at a table discussing the techniques of the DJ in
technical lingo while downing tequillas while bass beats palpitations into their hearts (all
your bass are belong to us)? Among the other distinguished guests were my JC class, the MAS
bunch, edwin kek, chris, david liu, lihao, kenneth et al...so much so that by the end of the
night, i was convinced that the only thing worse than my memory for faces was my capacity for
faking smalltalk. When this slightly familiar stranger starts staring at you like you're trying
to steal his girlfriend and you stare back and try and place his face and he eventually waves
and says hi, how have you been? and your mind is whirring faster than an overclocked P4 and you
STILL can't remember where he's from..... that's the time when you say:

"crowded tonight, isn't it?"
"yea, yea. where are you now?"
"oh, 41. Where are you?"
"School of combat engineers.... yingchiat's there too."
"oh yea he's an officer there, right?"
"yea... have you heard from cheknam?"
----KACHING!!!! and it all slots into place and you remember who the heck he is----
"no, haven't talked to him since sec 4 (just like you.)"

Which works slightly better than
"hi, haven't seen you in a long time!"
(oh shit who's this guy damnit why's it so dark in here)"hi, yea, you too! how're you?" (ohshit

who is this guy)
"great, blabla-bam-bam-guitar-hits"
"huh? yea! um... it seems like half of RJ is here tonight..."
"......."
"um yea i'll catch up with you a little later? my friend over there's waiting for me...."

and then slightly later
"hi, do you remember who i am?"
"uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......... um....... honestly...... no."
"not even a guess?"
"uhh......" (damnit why's he look so familiar)
"david lah!"
"oh, hi! yea...." (who?)
"how's joel?" (OHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.)
etc.

embarrassment.

only it didn't matter after a while when everyone started having some drinks and became fully
crazed weasels on the dancefloor. It's really cool when tonnes of dry-iced smoke blast at you
and you can't see anything except white, can't feel anything except wind in your hair, can't
hear anything except bloody loud bass....sorta like being sprayed with a CO2 fire extinguisher
with ppl shouting at the same time. hmm.

But i've finally decided that ppl dance only if they:

1. are deaf
2. have consumed more than 100ml of alcohol in the past 1 hour, and
3. have managed to keep alcohol inside of body

And of course if you hang around friends with free drink coupons in zouk all 3 conditions are
inevitably met. hic!

photos courtesy of official photographer:

Driving Miss Daisy (crazy)

Beware, innocent denizens of the lion city, for a new fiend has been unleashed uponst the unsuspecting populace! With dual-wielded shiny new glittering P-plates, you'd better RUN AWAY!! RUN AWAY!! and let the poor sod filter, damnit.

Once more a person has stepped forth to take the solemn oath and swear that when he becomes a skillful road user (i.e. filters without signalling and speeds up when orange lights appear) he'll be nice to all the poor newbies out there with L and P plates. The biggest road hazard out there, after all, is not the unnecessary re-repairs of the BKE which takes ages to finish and eons for them to finish painting the lines on the road... it's the other road users. Witness how many people crash into other cars, as opposed to cans of non-existent paint.

So there i was today, with my family in the car and me in the driver's seat trying to gain some experience on the road (need to level up to gain cunning skills like Dodge and Haste and take 20s on (radar) traps) and of course the newbie's nightmare is being stuck on the leftmost lane in the expressway and having the most insane problem trying to filter out. Now i know why so many Singaporean drivers are aggressive: it's Darwinism at work.

Time to test my skills again.

Another year, another video

I'm drawn by this very strange compulsion to blog, for some reason. I feel this need and obligation to update at least once a week. You never really get those on paper private diaries, but then again you don't quite write the same stuff in blogs as in diaries... But why? privacy? Probably boils down to some deep social fear of being judged. hmm. Also i guess it doesn't always pay to wear your heart on your sleeve. Coz then you tend to do a lot more cleaning up when blood is spilt.

So i'm 20 now.

So far, the better b'day presents have been to the tune of passing SOC on monday and an IPPT silver on thursday, both completely legit, too. ^_^ So i've actually managed to persevere long enough to pass my 2nd yr and 1st yr SOC without any .... stealth camouflage. Whether that makes me stupid and masochistic or not, i dunno.

That and a b'day SMS greeting from someone half the world across whom I haven't spoken to for half a year at least. Which is pretty touching, that someone i've practically forgotten about actually remembered and bothered enough to send a message. =) Nothing more heart warming than to suddenly hear from a long-lost friend.

strangely now the tides of sleep call so strongly that i can't remember what it was exactly about the video that i wanted to write.......... so i'll write that another time.

what a pointless blog entry.

Absolut 0 @ Zouk

Advertisement! UChicago's hosting this party at zouk on the 2nd of august, and it'll be a gathering of mostly US and UK uni students... i quoth:

"with a whole planned program prior to the party that features wacky US drinking games like a beer pong as well as dances cheoragraophed by Richard Tan (he's some zai cheorographer i hear)."

"Absolute Zero aims to bring together current Singaporeans studying in the United States, prospective students, as well as professionals working there. We hope to provide a fun and relaxed atmosphere to allow intermingling and a chance for students to interact with one another. In the process, we hope to create an awareness of the American culture and to give another perspective of how Singaporeans adapt to life in the United States. "

tickets go for $16 pre-order and $18 at the door, and they include 2 standard house pours, all night entry to zouk/phuture, and entry to absolut zero. do lemme know if you're interested in going!

You're the smirk,a frown-smile hybrid that's a
little bit cocky and usually associated with
evil or arrogant,but attractive people.You
probably just don't give a damn,but it's
everyone else's fault if you don't because
you're too awesome to have any real faults.


What Kind of Smile are You?
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Driven

I passed my driving! w00t! only problem now of course is that my driving sucks so bad in a corolla that i don't trust myself to drive alone in that without getting either hopelessly lost, killed, or in jail. Nissan sunnys rock. Somehow my mum's car has a really stiff clutch and gearshift and her mirrors enlarge the view so it's unsettling the first few times you look back and see the pickup truck is right THERE and GAINING FAST.

but yea no lifts for now until i can drive safely enough to not need insurance. That's illegal, isn't it? hmm.

--

Some SDP people were selling their newsletter outside centrepoint last weekend. So of course i bought it, just to see the quality of opposition in singapore, you understand. And without taking any particular political bias (stop sniggering) i think the SDP newsletter is pretty darned shallow and one-sided. Although it does have some salient points (Where's the GIC money going to? cf DJ calch's bye chee bye 17 billion dollar remix) some of it is just martyr-ism about chee being thrown in jail and a lot of stressing the increase in minister's wages (which isn't terribly true either, they had a wage freeze and then a pay cut) But welllll. I suppose a political newsletter has to be politically motivated. Some other things i wanna say shall be censored for the purpose of being politically neutral.

I suppose i just proved the SDP's point about there being no real free speech in singapore, didn't i? hmm well.

Phlogging is cool.

Kah Keng and Kah Seng are in the news again! This time for a new innovation that allows people to update their blogs using their phones. kewl, ain't it? The full story as it appeared in the straits times is available here, and the website for registration and stuff is www.whisktech.com.

Would you use your phone to update your blog? Can you SMS as fast as you type? Is this finally the end to al those irritating moments where you wanna blog something, but can't be bothered to write it down coz you don't have pen and paper handy?

hmm.

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

Books by people with too much time

So there i was browsing thru Borders with Am, and in the young readers section there was this book called "an analysis of harry potter books 1-4" selling for $50. Hard to believe, but within its covers was a chapter by chapter analysis trying to discern the direction the septology was taking...which....when you do think about it, is prolly pretty futile since J.K.R. probably has a pretty vague idea herself, or at least she doesn't have anything set in stone yet and will probably adapt her story according to which characters and direction hollywood likes best. =P The book even goes so far to suggest a few imponderables ("where was colin creevey going with that bunch of grapes?") and even a couple of potential endings (The Alice in wonderland scenario: supported by these little clues they seem to have discerned from dissecting the text) Gosh.

Which is probably only second to this other book i saw in borders once upon a time: Postmodern Pooh, which dissects Pooh in even greater more farfetched detail, and reads into the tiniest details to suggest how Pooh is actually a story built upon strange themes with names i cannot begin to comprehend without a uni course in anthropology and history. What i DID manage to grasp was how they suggested how quite a few of the characters were gay....

-- major mental image changer warning --

based on stuff like
"and Piglet suggested: 'why don't you stay over at my house until your new one is ready, Pooh?' Pooh shuddered and replied 'I should like that very much, Piglet. Very much indeed."

-- well okay it was paraphrased but the gist is the same --

And these really free people actually make money from it! ick.

Starvation and Feasting

Been too busy to post this past week. But what a week.

Was outfield from monday thru till thursday, and gained some insight on what odd subconscious streamers of thought must have inspired my blog title: was reminded of the multitudinous joys of travelling behind armoured vehicles on a dry dirt road. Rapture. But well it's an experience anyway, and after all the squished up attempts to sleep in a rover seat with an AC1 drum next to you giving you just about enough width for your shoulders if you position it -just- right.... and the incense offerings to the mosquitoes of the forests in frenzied attempts to appease them and LEAVE ME ALONE and my boss was repeatedly interrupted from his dinner and in the middle of changing his undergarments by the call to move out ("jiiiiii dan!!!")... i guess things could've been a lot worse.

To cut a long story short, I lost some noticeable amount of weight after 4 days (forgot to weigh myself coz i was in such a rush to book in last weekend. blah.) and put it on again at the MAS D&D on saturday:


That's me in blue with a grey tie. *vaguely*

At which i looked completely crap coz my hair was misbehaving after being mistreated by 4 days of dust and dirt and no water, and i looked pretty haggard too for some reason (no it wasn't the late friday night playing black and white till 3am, i swear ^^) but was memorable nonetheless: It happened to fall one day before Jess' birthday, so we bought this sinfully sweet white choc truffle cake from the shangri pastry kitchen and had them wheel it into the ballroom (which had 85 tables BTW, go MAS!) in the middle of the D&D. Supposedly it was going to happen during a lull in the programme, but due to some cockups and running behind schedule, we eventually decided that it wasn't too wise to start singing loudly while people were receiving prizes on stage so we snuck out with a tray with a beautiful cake on it and started behaving more our age.

All in all, quite a night, especially when we moved out of the hotel and to the esplanade where we sat and chatted for a long while and heard the strange stories of seniors of cultural differences ("I asked for a lift and the receptionist directed me to a gym") ("their co-ed toilets have urinals!")

and of course none of us won the lucky draw prizes. Although i suppose we won almost-free dinners at shangri. $3 apiece. MAS knows how to take care of us alright.

The last supper

Welcome Calvin! The latest to return from the land of milk and honey.... to the land of the Sambal Stingray. oh yeaaaahhhhhh. We're starting a gang to hit all the good hawker centres in singapore, now that 2 hungry people actually have access to convenient transportation. (and it'd better be 3 ppl soon. *mutters*)

So we whacked chomp chomp for an oily $47 worth for 5 people, not counting our individual main courses. The kway pie tee and fried taupok there really rock. But to digress from more trite ramblings... I wonder what sort of people would queue 40 minutes for a plate of fried hokkien mee? Is anything really worth that much effort? And across the road is this fried kway teow stall where people queue up to an hour at lunch (i learnt the hard way.) Singaporeans are horrendously spineless when it comes to some things, like japanese cat dolls (tm) and long queues for anything in particular. It must be some instinct....maybe it's due to some variant of the law of gravitation. =P

But mmmmmmm. good food. the last i'll eat for the next 4 days. Time to lose all that unhealthy oil by starvation. And no i'm not anorexic, i'm just going outfield.

menu for tonight (for future reference):
6 x $2 vats of lime juice (yes for 5 people)
Char kway teow
Chicken century egg porridge
lemon chicken
chicken chops
kway pie tee (oooooh)
sambal stingray
sambal calamari
ou luat (however you spell fried oysters)
fried taupok/fishballs/fishcakes
various desserts and snacks (goreng pisang! sweet potato! yam!)

which ended up with this broken belted result:



that's not me, by the way.

What Finding Nemo Character are You?
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The morning after

Ah damn i closed my browser by accident. chewed up a really long post. @#$#@$
But it went something like this....

I'm still looking for an opera-friendly commenting system, haloscan doesn't quite cut it coz the counter doesn't seem to work.. so i won't know if there are any comments unless i actually click on it to check. Grr. if i can't find any better commenting system i might actually have to use *choke* IE to update my blog. =P

But now that i've actually got comments up, I feel much more inclined to long proper posts on this blog-under-retrofitting. =)

Yesterday was the most frelling stressful day in army for as long as i can remember. Not so much of the oh-no-i'm-screwed-i-just-lost-20-pagers kind of stress, but the kind of mental and emotional presssure cooker which just keeps pressing down on you until you go past your elastic limit into plastic deformation. =P

I don't know of any other place where you can go from running 5km in the morning to running to get that damned ID tag you left 4 storeys up which you need *NOW* to running outdated badly coded programmes on sucky slow computers to running after people to hunt down their signatures and pass them stuff to running down the corridor to try and finish up that errand faster so you can get out of camp before you waste too much of your civilian time... (I still booked out 40 min later than most ppl, but well.)

But work stress is nothing compared to emotional stress. Somewhere along the line i must've really cracked, coz when this other equally-stressed soul went from playing computer games to complaining about how he just got f*ed upside down by 4 superiors he didn't even know for someone else's mistake, to criticising how i did my work when i was scrambling around trying to find something that someone else had misplaced... i just lost it and shouted at the whole bunch of people in the office coz the thing i was looking for was just -there- and despite my repeated pleas for people to help look nobody cared. And then this person took it personally and shouted back ("fine you can do it yourself") even though it was as much his responsibility as mine... and i got really angry and him and told him "yes, good, now scram." in less polite words. Which is something coz i can't remember the last time i swore loudly at someone and actually meant it. :$

My problem is that I can't stay angry at someone for long enough for it to have any productive use. After a while i started feeling really bad at shouting at him and miserable and upset and still buried in work anyway. And so i finished up the work alone, and felt really crap coz i'm gonna be spending 4D3N outfield with him next week and if we got into some argument it'll be complete hell. But luckily he came back down the office after he was done showering and changing and packing... ("go pack, i'll finish up.") {insert sappy scene equivalent here} So good, we'll live to be stressed another day.

I really don't understand why i can't stay angry. My capacity for anger is probably rivalled only by my capacity for lima beans. It's quite a bad drawback coz it means i don't show my fangs as often as i should, so i tend to get the shorter end of the stick if i'm unable to wile my way out of things. I've never thought so much about power balances and control in life before i entered army. It's just so much a part of life now... But i guess this is the real world.

Happy birthday.

How disgusting

The comments don't work properly in Opera. Yet another non-opera friendly java code. But it's still the most geek-friendly browser around anyway. How ironic that finally now that my comments and guestbook are up, i'm too tired to post anything of commentable significance. Oh well.

Aha!

Yes finally on porting to haloscan instead of enetation the comments code seems to be working!! and i can go to sleep now. yayyyyy!

Dance of the sugarplum comment boxes

Damn things are like wraiths. They're not there after all.

Perhaps the comments are hiding...

In a non-mozilla interface! HA!

THERE YOU ARE!

Ruffles BBQ-Flavoured Ice cream cake

There's something oddly satisfying about giving yourself food poisoning. I'm either a really lousy cook, or hotdogs and chicken wings don't really mix with oreo chocolate cheesecake and cookie monster ice cream cake. =)

Went to a friend's condo for a BBQ... and was really irked by singaporean inflexibility. We happily started lugging all the charcoal and food and stuff down to the pit at 4 plus, only to discover that there were 2 identical pits about 2m apart from each other. Which one did they book? "Should be pit no 1 lah... anyway if it isn't we'll just ask the person who booked it to use the other one, it's not very much difference." so we started building a fire in the tray provided at the pit.

After much effort we managed to get our charcoal on its way to smoldering success, which was of course the time the security guard came up and told us we were using the wrong pit. His name was probably Murphy or something, and he had this lady in the background who was of course the rightful renter of pit no 1.

"if you don't mind, could you use the pit at pit no 2 instead? we've already started our fire..."
"no, the kids prefer this one, it's closer to the pool."
*folds arms*

ooooooooookay. whatever you say, lady. nevermind that the diffference from the tables to the pool is about 4 extra footsteps, and that the kids eventually didn't actually come anywhere near the pit to cook anyway. we'll move our fire since it's in this nice portable tray.

Which we later realised was meant for the ashes of the charcoal, not the charcoal itself. Unfortunately we only realised this when the security guard took it and dumped our coals unceremoniously on top of this grill he brought.
"come come, help put."
"put what?"
"hold the corner, there there."
"okay."
"put."
"put what?"
*dump*

*staaaaaare* *blink*
"er. okay."

The fire died. How symbolic.
Quote of the day: "You know you're back in Singapore when you hear 'No, no, that's not the way you do it!"

Warm fuzzies and hot chocolate

It's such a nice feeling when long-lost friends from overseas return and start talking to you again after looooooong periods of absence. Almost like you've found something precious at the bottom of a drawer you've lost and forgotten about, and you return to the glory of the past, when things were all good again.

Life is worth living.

I am

a rather sad pathetic javascript newbie. I can't even figure out where to paste this darned thing to make the comments work. Comments and help are appreciated, but of course, you can't comment until there's a comments box! *dramatic music*

comments?

WHERE DID ALL THE REST OF MY POSTS GOOOOOOOOOOOO?

still no comments. *pastes*

Comments!

Testingggggg.

Grand opening! 20% off!

My first blog! I've decided to leave all the frills and formatting and stuff and start blogging while the thing was under construction. Partly coz i'm too lazy to go fix that now, and i have this urge to write something down, and partly so that people will be able to gawk at the layout of my page and see how it evolves. I guess it's also an added incentive to redo the page FAST now, isn't it?

But that aside, i'm still trying to decide what i really want this blog for. The reason why i haven't gotten a blog before now is coz i like to actually communicate to people in real time, and have them respond to whatever i'm saying on the spot. What sort of world are we living in anyway, when we write something and hope and pray that someone'll respond, and keep checking your blog comments for people who have something to say? But i guess i shouldn't be too quick to judge since i can actually see myself doing that sometime soon. =)

My blog -- it's more for me to ramble and rant on. I think it's a bit too personal and weird to go listing out my whole story here, with all the events and activities that make up my life.... but maybe it'll be for all the little things which makes my life, Life. Who knows? Let's see how it evolves. *blog amoeba quivers and shakes around in test tube*

So i present..... my blog!

more testing

of names

now i have smaller titles?

I should test this offline.

now i have titles?

I think.