Tuesday, May 30, 2006

(Insert Anger)

Mood of the Day:

*I must impress upon all of you that this was plagarized from kennysia.com

Monday, May 29, 2006

The computer room.

I have abandoned the computer room in the library.

Every damning day ,there is a bunch of first-year college-goers that skips class, only to race there and proceed to have the time of their lives. And I am ashamed to admit that they are A-Level students. Any decent A-Level student would, upon skipping class, go and find some solid means of entertainment. And Taylor’s being the central hub of a tightly-packed mass of Internet cafés, eateries and shopping centers, there really isn’t a problem. In fact, I think the neighboring secondary school has considerable problems dealing with truants.

Anyway, back to the story. These people, they talk raucously, make obscene gesticulations, and, upon encountering anything remotely funny, proceed to laugh the top of their heads off. The only reason the library staff hasn’t done anything about this fiasco is that the room is pretty well insulated. The room was designed for IT studies, see, and it was right smack in the centre of the library, so in order for some semblance of peace to be maintained (not that it ever does anyhow) the architectural committee sound-proofed the room. To my articulate dismay. It has led me to suspect that the security camera installed in the room does not convey sound, but then again, why would they? This is why I am now in the Web, the internal Internet café offered by the college.

Now, I know it does sound a lot like what my class does in their free time (creating huge amounts of verbal hubris, generally causing a breach of peace etc.) but we DO control ourselves to some extent. And there is a basic code of etiquette to follow. You do NOT, I repeat NOT, maul your classmates, be they female or male, be you female or male yourself, for fun or whatever malign purpose. You do NOT open your emails and proceed to tell your friend (and in doing so ululating soundly enough for everyone in the vicinity to have a listen in, whether they like it or not) about how damned funny it was. Even if the sender was Jim Carrey, or some HTML genius, or basically someone with too much free time on his or her hands, which in that case, should be relegated to the deepest depths of Azkaban with the oldest, clunkiest computer in creation, that processes everything with the speed of a gerbil learning how to count, and finally shutting down just as your download is 99.95% complete. HA! HA! HA! … You do NOT play free online puzzle games, on five different computers simultaneously in order to increase your chances of beating* your friend - who is also using five other terminals to achieve the same means. So the cumulative effect viewable to someone who sits in the back row (guess who?) would be that of two maniacal primates, or maybe octopi, lurching from side to side, tapping, occasionally falling over chairs and bumping into table counters, ensnaring themselves in mouse wires, and managing to keep up a steady stream of giggles, curses, primal screams of rage and individualized victory whoops. I’ll leave it to your imagination. You do NOT consume edibles (or drinkables) you snuck in with exaggerated smacks, slurps or any other audile contortions reminiscent of the complex sexual practices that Eric Van Lustbader wrote in his books ‘Ninja’, ‘White Ninja’, or ‘Zero’ (actually, I have nothing personal against bringing food in. It’s the food processing that gets to me). And as coup de grâce – or more like a coup de la souffrance - you do NOT greet your friends like you own the damn place, with affected tones, such as “My! You look so retarded today!” and so forth, on the same verbal plane as the afore-mentioned, bang each key ferociously, swear loudly and fluently in nasal tones when you cannot locate the USB hub for your mass storage device, causing each and every other person beyond your nearest and dearest to hate your guts immensely, and issue your mating calls to your friend across the room, inflecting unnecessary sound waves on those unlucky enough to stray across your path (and miniscule projectiles of sputum on the computer screens of those directly in front).

I swear, I get a headache every time I go into there. I have also resolved to limit my library periods to, strictly speaking, study time. Nothing. Else.

*The game in question being Hapland stick game. If you've played it before, you might understand the need for five computers, actually, but that's BESIDE THE POINT.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Cup of Life.

Well, after four long glorious years, the basketball programmes will be cut mercilessly short by the imminent World Cup matches. All 64 of them on 12 interactive channels.

But then again, is it not a good thing? To savour the glorious taste of victory, to see sights never seen before, to almost smell the turf, the sweat and the bodies of men willing to sacrifice their pristine starched jerseys for their country? To see the joy, the absolute happiness, the exquisite delicacy that scoring a goal can be. Beautiful, yet savage, festooned with history and ordained with pride, besotted with admirers and blatantly upheld by commercialism, the game of football knows so many faces, is spoken of in so many different languages, all united beneath that orb of cowhide, stitched with loving care, and adorned with blazing colours reminiscent of the physical emancipation of testosterone.



To be in the crowd, to see, feel, breathe and scream as one, as they witness the passage of this orb of glory, weaving through the forest of legs, neatly slipping past the outstretched, gloved digits of a flailing player, to nestle deeply within the corner of an oblong space enshrouded with netting.

Indeed these are great times to behold.


Enjoy.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Sigh.


Mood of the day:

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Sometime later.

"O Sorrow!
Thy name is Chemistry."

-Anonymous.

Cartoon Physics

Another great post from Wikipedia. Sometimes I don’t know what I would do without it.


Cartoon Physics: Dynamics

No matter what happens to cartoon characters, they always return to their default shapes.

Any body passing through solid matter will leave a dent conforming to its perimeter.

Explosives, even if detonated close to a character's face, will cause only scorching of the
skin. (Prior to the efforts of the American Civil Rights Movement, characters would often take on the appearance of blackface.) Similarly, a gun discharged directly into the face will not fire an actual bullet.

If a character walks off a cliff, they will not fall, and continue to walk on thin air, until they notice they have walked off the cliff. In some cases, they will not fall until they look down, regardless of their awareness of the situation.

Alternatively, when a character runs off a cliff, notices the situation, and begins falling, at first only the body below the neck falls, during which the neck is stretched for a few seconds before the head follows.

If a character falls from a tall building, another character from the same floor will be able to run all the way down to ground level in order to catch the falling character before he/she hits the ground.

Characters are allowed to "swim" or blow themselves upwards a short distance in the air before falling normally to gravity.

When a character chops the only thing holding another character from falling (such as a tree branch) the chopper will fall, together with whatever he/she was standing on (such as the tree or the ground) and the other character will remain floating in the air (branch included).

An explosive device taken by one character will not explode until it is given back to the original character who triggered the device. Also applies to booby traps.

A boomerang, when thrown, will not only change direction, but will actively hunt out its thrower so that the thrower may catch it, regardless of his or her relation to the initial point of the throw.

Motion reference frames are arbitrary. For instance, an outboard motor in a pan of water on wheels causes the motor and pan to move together. Likewise, a fan and a sail attached to a wheeled platform will cause the platform to move.

A gun may be fired any number of times without being reloaded.

Any fall is survivable.

Holes can be physically picked up and moved. This also applies to mouths.


Anvilology (The study of anvils)

Everything falls faster than an anvil (so that the evil character can hit the ground first and then be crushed, but not killed, by the anvil).

Anvils are readily available.

Anvils have mass but not much weight, so that they are very hard to push around, but it is possible to jump out of a plane with an anvil instead of a parachute and not notice until the parachute is opened while airborne.

Anvils can stay in the air until noticed by a character, at which point they fall on the character.

If a character moves out of the way of a falling anvil, the anvil will shift its position over the character before falling, so that it crushes (but does not kill) the character.


Cartoon Physics: The Second Law of Motion.

For a given cartoon character C:

1. If C runs into a wall,
a: If the wall is too thick, C will strike it and flatten out like dough, often regardless of clothing.
b: If the wall is thin enough, he will leave a hole in the wall in the shape of his body.

2. If C runs into something made of metal, he will dent it in the shape of his body.

3. If C runs off a cliff, the impact crater he leaves will conform with Rule 1b.

4. If C has a fragile body,
a: Running into any wall will cause him to be squashed into a musical instrument (usually an accordion), or
b: Any collision or fall will fracture him into a zillion pieces.

5. If C runs into a wall which has been painted to look like part of the landscape or a tunnel:
a: If the "camera" angle blends the painting with the actual landscape, he will enter the landscape or tunnel as though it were real.
b: If he was the one who painted the wall, he will just run into the wall — see Rule 1.
c: If the "camera" views the painting at an angle such that it is, without doubt, a painting on a wall, he will just run into the wall — see Rule 1.
d: Trains or large trucks are often known to drive out of walls painted in this way, usually just after the painter has slammed into the wall and is feeling sheepish for having fallen for their own ruse. However, if the view of the oncoming vehicle is blocked, then the vehicle will apparently stop.

*Cartoon collision physics are a subset of cartoon physics regarding the laws of collisions. Note that these laws deliberately refer to male subjects; bad things do not generally happen to women.



...It’s a shame that Physics 4 finished some time ago.

*Plagarism courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

About other blogs.

Don’t get me wrong, though – I love blogging. I would’ve loved to tell you about my Bleach indulgences, my exams, and how I got water up my nose when I was drinking at the water fountain, only I sort of think that you all might not want to know.

Therefore I have nothing remotely interesting to post at the moment.

Xiaxue is steadily becoming a disappointment to me. Her earlier posts are very good, to the point of being extremely controversial (damn do I love controversy. You should have read that one where she wrote an impassioned post about how she was NEVER, EVER going to be a Christian after her Christian friend attempted to convert her. Although, being her, the whole thing was dissected and nitpicked to the ends that a Singaporean female can, it did have a hint of truth in it. And as a result, there were about 583 comments in the comment box) but the ones now are simply not up to the standards that she set herself some time back. Now, I understand the posts about herself. Being human, after all, it must have been nice to write about oneself for a change, as opposed to what other people want to see on your blog. It does get to you at times. But the ones I cannot tolerate are the ones where she insults products for being off-colour (in off-colour humour as well), people and basically things around her. And it’s not because she does it (personally, I think some of them may deserve it. No one’s THAT evil, to just diss people for fun. Or are they?) It’s because, more than once, she fails to put up solid reasoning to support her motives. Not even solid insults. Even a dose of racism would’ve been preferable compared to this. To just read and read and read (her posts are LONG. And pink. Which is okay if you like pink, but then again.) some rant about a guy who was fat, only to find that she ended her post without managing to convince me that the guy was the most unlikeable person in the universe, is disappointing for someone who was awarded ‘Best Blogger’ awards for three years running.

By the by, her writing may sound bimbotic, but she sure doesn’t sound like one. She posted an audio clip and it was totally unlike what I expected of a Singaporean. (No offence, Daniel or David. But then again, Daniel, you Singapore-bashing Singaporean, it probably won't matter to you. I'm only writing this because you are my blood cousin. Haha.) It’s just like kennysia. If you try and conjure up an image of what he sounds like based on what he wrote, you’d be surprised to find out that he is actually quite articulate. Very articulate, in fact.

So yeah, I am probably going to remove Xiaxue from my links. But she won’t notice – she has millions of other readers. And neither will you, dear reader. In fact, go read kennysia.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Um...Just read, kay?

Here is a log about what I did today.

9.00a.m.
Arrived at college late (Overslept, but that’s a different story) and immediately went to the computer room, but was shooed out by the teacher there. Oops.

9.30a.m.

After half an hour of desperate searching, no free terminal was available (barring my genitals, of course, but hey, I don't write about these things. I leave them to Jin) Proceeded to sit down and attempt to compose self for work.

9.32a.m.
Diligently slept.

10.32a.m.
Woke up and rushed to the terminals, only to find that the departed computer class was replaced by an influx of college-goers with nothing better to do than lounge around and talk in innately loud voices. At the terminals, of course.

10.40a.m.
Got one!! Finally!!...But the mouse wouldn’t work

*********

These polite asterisks represent a moment of sadly necessary violence on behalf of the author.
Plagarism courtesy of The Amulet of Samarkand.

10.45a.m.
Found one that actually worked. But as I was helping Zhao print something, I completely forgot my ulterior purpose.

12.00p.m.
Lunch.

1.00p.m.
Got another one! Drafted out blog post, only to be shooed out by yet ANOTHER computer class. Desperately searched for X-drive* to save it in, only to find out that the hellish people in the ICT Department removed it!!
*X-Drive is a sort of personalized drive on every computer.

2.15p.m.
Another one!! Perfect!! And the mouse worked, too!! But the computer was sooooo slow that it died.
While loading MICROSOFT WORD.
Gave up in despair.

3.00p.m.
Exam – Physics Paper 5

5.00p.m.
Got yet another one – only to receive call from brother, saying he was tired and wanted to return home. AAAGH.

6.00p.m.
Returned home and almost instantly whisked off to tailor’s (No, not Taylor’s) for jacket fitting.

7.00p.m.
Dinner.

8.00p.m.
Finally at home. At terminal. And I wrote what I wanted to write all day long.


Happy Birthday, Suan Ee. You have always been special to me, and I treasure all the motivational advice and encouragement that you gave me all this while. I’ll never forget what you told me when I was down and depressed with my blog. If it hadn’t been for you, and that you always spared a thought for this poor, newbie blogger, I wouldn’t have made it this far. You are truly remarkable.

Here’s to a girl that will be always Suan Ee to me. I never did get used to you being Kimberly.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Friday, May 19, 2006

Meme!

Thanks, Kim!! Really! I feel that there's no better way to introduce a new blog. So here goes:

Four movies I can watch over and over and over:
-Constantine. I loved it, loved watching it, and still want to see it. Again.
(Actually, I don’t really watch movies either. Never got into the habit. But, since Kim so thoughtfully meme’d me, here are some which I found nice)
-The Little Mermaid
-Gensomaden Saiyuki Requiem
-Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gan. For the songs! Hehe.

Four places I’ve lived:
-My current home in Subang.
-The college library.
-Penang
-Regrettably, S.M.K Seafield

Four books I recommend to everyone:
-A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain
-Stiff by Mary Roach
-The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend
-the entire Terry Pratchett Discworld series

Four of my favourite dishes:
-Spaghetti bolognaise. The one my dad does
-Any reasonably good chicken rice. NOT the commercializd ones, though. Yuck.
-Soup.
-Cauliflower cheese. The one my mum does.

Four sites I visit daily:
-Quicksilverlining. I check it even before I check my own blog.
-Google.com.
-My current rave. It used to be Jay’s Blog. Now it’s Mighty Illusions.
-Kennysia.com. Proud to be Malaysian.
-Add: Does my college homepage count? Because I blog mostly from the college and it’s the first damn thing I see. Not that I want to.

Four places I’d rather be right now:
-At home.
-The basketball court.
-Sunway Pyramid. I don’t know why – I always preferred it to other malls.
-Actually, I’m pretty happy where I am right now. HAHA!

Four bloggers I am tagging:
-Ju Li
-Yun Yi
-Li Sian and Geraldine
-Christinae sp.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Another One.

What, here already?