thanks

Thanks to all who came down for the bbq. 22 of us. It felt good to see super seniors like cling, youmin, caleb, ben, ben, chet, daniel and ivan taking time out to support this.

The last meal on the rooftop with my batch. Good that we come in full force. Thanks jan, harold, aaron, mayn and those who've helped in a way or another.

Going to miss this place.

my second life

For those who still doesn't have a clue on what i'm doing for my thesis, here's some visuals to help you digest some of intangible and confusing stuff i've been harping about in recent weeks.

Topic: Examining the Social Metaverse - A Study of the Motivations for Contributions in the Virtual Communities of Virtual World. Sounds massive. May or may not be.

Just had a conference with Second Life Singapore (SLS) community comprising of scores of Singaporeans (duh) in a 3D graphical environment not many has explored yet. Agenda for the day was on 2nd Life's potentiality in Singapore. If you haven't heard of 2nd Life till now, you heard it from me. It may be quite a big initiative in Singapore in years to come. I know for one, MOE, the polys, the unis, creative agencies and some architectural and engineering firms are taking it quite seriously.

And so we were teleported to a nice condusive location to have our mini conference with the singapore flag flying proudly behind us.

And we had some neat slides flashing images of singapore while we have our coffeeshop talk.

And then there's the moon in Second Life.

And so we discussed till it was 'night'. Everything looks promising. We'll see how it goes.

Anyone interested in exploring Second Life, just download the client server from this here. Yes, it's free. My moniker's Efilsidas Tuttle. My avatar's an albino with sharp pointed ears and i wear a tight-fit penguin shirt. Quite gay. Add me and i'll show you around.

modern lingo

-_-"""

chopin

You probably think i'm a nut case with signs. Or some guy who has been smoking too much of the wrong thing to actually start hallucinating.

Recently over these past few months i’ve been fervently looking for classical music. Especially those of piano solos. And i’ve probably found the most famous pianist composer, Chopin. Without any doubt, i really his pieces.

This coming from someone who listens to ballads to sleep because it transport him into another dimension. Totally surreal. But i always thought that being able to appreciate ballads is seriously an art that without doubt leads to an appreciation of other forms of music like classicals? Or rather maybe because that was what i am that i actually think others would be too.

I love music, and i love all kinds of music, however, because of the associations with some music, i tend to stay clear of them and only listen to it guilt free when no one is looking. But i digress.

Chopin and the classical music. Instead of listening to Chopin before i sleep, i thought of listening to it when i wake up. I decided on Mazurka in C Major, Op. 24, No. 2 because of its rather soft and light hearted beginning (i hope you can describe it like this). I don't think anyone would really want to wake up to “Military” Polonaise in A Major, unless they want to shock themselves out of beds.

Sometimes when weird coincidences happens, you think for a while and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes it doesn't mean anything but at least it puts a smile on your face knowing that life can be really quite beautiful.

for the love

There used to be this old bike shop situated near my flat when I was still studying in primary school. Sometimes, I would watch this bikeshop uncle work on whatever he was working on. I could watch the guy fix a bike, rims or deraileurs. And I would literally watch the entire project take shape as I silently observed the guy over the passing weeks. It was endlessly fascinating for me to come back a few day later and see what progress he has made.

And the guy would be working away, totally oblivious to this young intruder watching intently - both immersed in what they were doing. Me watching him work and him, working. This was the last of a dying breed, old school craftmens who dedicated their entire lives to doing what they were doing. And the proof is in the pudding as the bike could pretty much take a beating and still last a whole lifetime. This days, you count yourself lucky if the generic bikes you bought from the middle-end shops are still standing 1 year after they've put it t0gether.

In this age of globalisation, dedication and craftmenship are already a thing of the past. These days, its all about doing things cheaper and faster nevermind if it's better. I guess, we can’t help it, either get with the programme or get left behind in the dust. Really what choice do we have, its like a knife hanging over our head all the time. Always the fear of competition from the cheap labour in China or India.

Crunching or crunch time is an inescapable fact of life in the academia, but continued over a long period of time inevitably burns any student out. Soon you forget just made you want to be a student in the first place because day after day, week after week, its just rounds and rounds of deadlines, changes and amendments. Your only objective is to meet the deadline and when push comes to shove, the essence and quality is always the first to go out the window. Which is why it is important for students to cultivate a love for what they pursuing. An inner reservoir of strength to tide you through the difficult times, and rest assured the life of a academic will inevitably be filled with them- either crazy crunching schedules or months of job hunting wondering if you’ll ever find another paying job.

With all the demands of work, sometimes it's difficult to hone your skills. For one, your artistic vision may not always match the project and two, when on a job, your first and foremost thought is probably always to get the job done. One don’t often beat a new path. No, you stick with what you know and what works best and it's tough to forge new grounds because there’s too much at stake for experimentation.

Which is why, no matter what I am doing or where I am working, I still try to set aside time for personal projects be it physically challenges or voluntary work though sometimes i procrastinate because i'm beat in recent. These days I don’t devote as much time as I did when I was first starting out. Nevertheless, whatever time I could make, I would love to use it for experimentation, to try new things, learn new techniques and new methodologies. Basically personal projects are my proving ground, a place for me to discover myself if there's nothing left to uncover in my mundane academic life. Hopefully, such pursuits can refresh my creativity and help to renew my passion for whatever I do.

imagine googe

Gizmodo highlighted Google's V-day header image. Google or Googe?

Funny thing is i bet those guys over there at Google probably realised the mistake after some time but refused to change and add in that elusive L so that everything seem intentional. It's pretty much still Googe now.

gong me

Somebody needs to "gong" my head real hard.

I've been moping around all afternoon. Awfully unproductive day. Punishable by death if I allow knowledge to mock at me, twist me round and round with its little finger and slam me into blank walls. Dammit. It will not happen again.

Then I came across something - "the only thing standing between me and everything I want for my life is my own self hatred." The "gong" sound was resonant but I'll leave the dissection for another time. Enough brooding and procrastinating for today.

the mind

"You can't imagine how often I've called a player’s exact hand to myself and have been proven right. There’s even a plausible, though completely unproven explanation how a person could know what cards another player is holding. The brain’s function involves electrical impluses. In this electronic age, we’re becoming more familiar everyday with electrical appliances which broadcast, as a purely an unintentional by product, energy impluses that are picked up on dissimilar appliances at considerable distance.

Is it too unreasonably to suspect that a highly sophisticated electrical device such as the human brain, during the intensity of concentration in a big pot, could broadcast a simple message as like ‘pair of Jacks’ a mere eight feet?"

- Doyle Brunson - Super System

Now i just hope i don't get electrocuted while swimming in the pool.

open water training

Team started open sea training this week.

First you start off like a pack of mad dogs, pissing each other with your strokes to fight for your personal space.

And hopefully, you pull away and become a loner.
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.
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Training's fun.

a pie to savour

Yesterday was a pretty zoned out day for me, i was zoned out from the world. Gf would testify to that. I was pretty much taking many wrong turns on the roads. and i don't take wrong turns, i might get lost, but i just never take wrong turns on familiar roads, not that many at least.

I believed it was the heat that i was having that made me feel like that. But then, my state of health, the fatigue has never really bothered my moods or my state of mind. So i was thinking why i felt like crap. I feel useless. Useless for the fact that i'm lucky. Too lucky to even raise my own finger to do anything. And that my saliva is just like the magic wand that makes everything work. And mind you, a very small amount of saliva.

In my whole life, i have never really gone through any relatively major hardship, everything has been smooth sailing. And if money makes the world go round, that area has never really affected me like it has for some others i know. I'm not trying to boast how lucky i am or how fortunate i am. I just feel plain useless because i know at the end of my arms length, there is always support. And the tendency to always grab that support, even when we're not falling. Typical of humans. Taking things for granted. Ungratefulness.

People around me has gone through much more than i have, and sometimes i believe that i’ve gone through more than them. Like i always say, to some ppl, I have done a shitload of things. To others, what I've done is of no consequence vecause they've done a shitload of other things. This delicate balance is always always breached at my side. I always think I'm right. I'm the assertive-directing sort (from nm5204) or the ambitious leader (from career fair). But hell i know nuts. I know, because i always think that many people live in their own bubbles and believe that they’re always right when they know shit about the rest of the world.

This final sem is going to be an awakening, a reflection and a humbling one for me.

pet peeves

One of my biggest pet peeves is the failure of switching back my biological clock.

As most people do know, i hardly sleep, and i have crazy sleeping hours. I do try to change it back from time to time, but it doesn't work anyway.

So today i woke up at 7am to go out. I can say i thoroughly tire myself out the whole day and by 10pm, i was so damn tired that i fell asleep drooling on the bus.

I tried to stay awake but i concuss at 11.45 only to wake up at 12 midnight by mummurs. Well thankfully i did wake up at around that time and not 'the next day'. I’ve afterall been missing lots of activites all due to unforeseen circumstances like the really stressful training that left me quite immobile and the morning that i was close to being sick, i decided to just head for training, be a good boy and stick to the bench.

So its 12.45 am and i don't know whether i should study or go to sleep…i can still feel a little bit of fatigue in my eyes which is a good sign that i'm might afterall still be slightly sleepy. But a day gone by without any 'work' done is just...incomplete.

photocopying

I swear photocopying is an art.

First of all, photocopying with it aligned poses a problem with a book. You also need to have what you are photocopying best fit the desired size of the paper you’re photocopying on. This usually means that you have to adjust whether to enlarge or reduce since many many many books are not designed as an A4/A3 spread. After enlarging or reducing, you then have to strategically place white paper on the spots that not covered by the book so when it's printed out, it looks like white space rather than black. Not only does this make it look nicer, it also saves much carbon.

So today after photocopying quite alot of pages from the klandermans text, which was bits and pieces here and there, i'm happy to say that it looks quite good. The photocopied result was perfect, it was aligned properly, no words were cut out and it used all spaces provided.

Then looking at my masterpiece, admiring its beauty, i realised something. Remember how it's bits and pieces throughout the wholebook? Meaning it's not in order? Yeah… i didn't manage to get the page number of every single bloody page…going to be damn difficult when referring back to it.

So now i have to piece the blardy jigsaw together and I'm totally loving it.

.................#$%^&#$%#$%^#$%^

100 People Flashmob

This is a clip from 'Troop of One Hundred', taken from a Japanese comedy/prank show, where a 100 people chase after random strangers and you see their reactions. Totally harmless but the reactions are priceless.

Translation of what they're shouting (from youtube):

- For the 1st and 2nd guys, they shouted: "There's a tsunami!!" (tsunami da!)
- For the 3rd guy they shouted: "That's the guy!!" (koitsu da!)
- Nothing for the 4th guy
- Last scene: "Watch out!!! (danger)" (abunai!)

This is hilarious. Flash mobs are fantastic guerilla marketing tactics. But sadly only M1 has replicated it in their tv commercial in sg and few got what it was trying to say.

sonorous silence

I feel so divorced from the world.

But I'm happy. I like it this way. Not to be tainted by prejudiced minds, hurtful words and materialistic ideals. The bitter reality of human nature. It is a naive illusion but a transient safe haven. Don't you just love the sound of silence?

The laptop and the house. My faithful companions these days. I'll rather trust the keyboard than anyone else. The qwerties makes me feel alive. And doing the neverending chores is fantastic therapy. You just keep going and going and going until fatigue takes over. It's tiring but extremely gratifying. Something that teaches you about life. About priorities.

I'm so anti-social now and yet I'm organizing a bbq party two weeks away. Strange.

I guess that's what they call...a split personality.