This can usually be found on Twitter.
Blogging, according to Diesel Sweeties. So true.
Also: yesternight I managed to sleep from around 2am to around 5am. 'zats it. So now I'm kinda dazed, and wondering whether to sleep some more (and go to work late, presumably), or to go to work now and suffer braindeadiness all day long.
Sigh.
Labels: blogging, diesel sweeties, sleepy
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:11 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Nice things about falling hopelessly in love with the idea of buying myself a Lego train set:
Bad things about, etc.
There we go. Now: fight!
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:19 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
So we've got two Asian teams in the Super Eights. Goodie. It'll be interesting to see how the others react to Australia and South Africa ... we'll find out soon enough, Bangladesh's first match is against the Aussies!
Having an aircon is nice, especially now that mine has gotten all the bad smell out of its inside. Pity it doesn't turn off, though.
Suddenly struck me today in conversations with Ifti (not Ifty, mind) that I could go batshit crazy with my one-time Lego obsession, now that I had the financial capability to do something about it, etc. A bit of Googling revealed these guys, who also have a very healthy set of train legos! On the downside, Lego trains have many restrictions, but it's probably a lot more fun than, say, buying and setting up a "proper" system.
It's expensive enough that it's not an impulse buy, but I will keep it in mind next time I'm bored!
Labels: cricket, hobbies, lego
This post was posted by Unknown at 6:14 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Not knowing French at all, I figured I was missing out on a good part of Lolita (the novel by Vladimir Nabokov). So I've tried to figure out the meaning of every French phrase used in the book, mostly by using Google's Language Tools. Let me know if I got anything wrong!
In the following list, page numbers refer to the Second Vintage International Edition, June 1997.
(To be continued)
Labels: french, lolita, to be continued
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:37 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
So, here we go again; dead sleepy at 8am. Fun for the whole family.
There's a lovely essay I just read about creative inspiration and copyright, i.e.: if you borrow characters from another writer, are you stealing, etc. Nice.
Am vaguely considering just staying up all day. Apart from the danger of staying up at night because of the Bangladesh/Bermuda cricket match. Also, did you know that hauling sand to the beach could get you in trouble? As usual, there's plenty of weekend career worries, brought on by a combination of having to call home on Sunday and having way too much free time to think about such things on the weekend. Of course, going into work, say, now, instead of lying in my slowly chilling room moping might be a good idea, too. And getting my lamp fixed so I can read a book before sleeping ... yeah, it's possible. Certainly possible, for sure.
On the other hand, these more and more frequent day-night-day attempts can't be good for my health. God, my health. I honestly haven't thought about that in ages.
Labels: health, links, random, sleep
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:34 am | 1 comments | Post a Comment
Today (i.e. Saturday) was nice. Went to sleep at 9am, after watching "Black Hawk Down" (nice!), woke up around 5, went out cycling, played Medieval II, got wet in the rain, ate some very nice pasta, watched one heck of an amazing innings by Australia - as Ifty put it, they were using the #1 cricket playing squad on the planet to up their stats! Amazing show. And all of this with the amazing feeling that it was really Sunday ... on a Saturday! I love Sundays, and having two of them this week will be amazing.
Of course, after happiness comes sadness, etc., so I just found out about the end of The Show. No more Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day?! Oh noes! I never managed to watch it regularly - silly Ze, TV is for watching, computer is for reading! - but the man never failed to disappoint. And some of his stuff was really amazing! I've got one bookmarked somewhere, but it's in Google Reader which takes forever to open, and I'm kinda sleepy so I'll just leave it at that.
I suppose it is nice to know that you can download the entire 365 episode run of the show if you want to; finality really is "something you can lean against", sometimes.
Labels: the show with ze frank, today
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:06 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Do you think that's quite enough sleep? Doubtful. It's 7ish now, but I'm likely to get very sleepy all at once in an hour or two, just as I should be getting ready to go to work. Sigh.
All important India-Sri Lanka match on tonight. Should be interesting.
There was something else to mention ... but no, not really. My Flickr stats are climbing nicely. Interesting things are happening in all my friend's lives now, I think, which is nice. Saw this movie just now: it's like a Guy Ritchie film without the same level of "cool" - or jokes, or violence - but decent enough timepass anyway.
It is not an awful lot of fun to go to work underslept and with a crass headache. Particularly when you've already spent a lot on coffee and taxis this week. Argh. Maybe I should just spend the night at a hotel or something.
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:44 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
This is pretty weird, but really, not hardly out of place in India at all. No, what's really weird is the fact that Virgin Comics' Chief Creative Officer has a singularly appropriate name.
Also: how weird is this? How weird is that?! Wow.
Anything else to report? Not really. TaxonDNA is chugging along - a lot of interesting new features are going in, as well as some truely ancient bugs being fixed Which is nice. I've been at lab all night, so maybe I'll get some time off tomorrow, giving me a chance to catch up with odds and ends: probably not the passport stuff, but some of the paper stuff, hair cuts, phone fix-ups, etc. Well, actually, the visa dept has pretty respectable opening hours, so, you know, maybe.
Let's see! It's such a relief to feel like I actually have time! Real, live, actual, living time!
Labels: links, sleepy, taxondna, time
This post was posted by Unknown at 5:33 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
For no apparent reason, Blogger is not letting me log in on Opera/Macintosh. So now I need Firefox/Mac for both Organizr and Blogger. What a pain.
If I'm lucky, though, it'll just be a temporary, user-side glitch, and when I log in next time, it'll "just work". Well. Let's see, I guess?
In other news, John Backus just died. That's Backus as in Backus-Naur Form, also the creator of Fortran, so he's one of the Greats, all right. Rest in peace, John.
Labels: blogger, john backus, macintosh, rip
This post was posted by Unknown at 9:39 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Just finished uploading a whole bunch of photos to my Flickr account. As usual, Flickr "friends" see more photos than the rest of y'all. I'm also busy trying to use the new Collections feature on Flickr - essentially, what used to be sets should now become collections, and entirely new sets are going to be culled out of my photographs. Dunno what it'll all look like when the dust settles, but it should be fun!
As an aside, I really like how much better I've gotten at taking photographs - and, in retrospect, how good some of my earlier photos were. Hopefully, this exercise will help dredge out the oldies, so they won't have to hide in obscurity no' mo'.
It's way too late, and I'm kinda hungry, and have gone from being moderately sleepy to not sleepy at all, so, umm, yeah. Tomorrow will likely be a pain in the rear end. Still, lesse.
Labels: flickr, photography, photos, sleep
This post was posted by Unknown at 5:29 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
As you probably know, Bangladesh handed us our rear ends (I'd link to a page, but I can't find any that looks like it'll be around for a while). Still, no complaints: it was one heck of a match, with Bangladesh playing amazingly well throughout, batting, bowling and fielding. An extremely well deserved victory, in any case.
Don't like sleeping this late, but vaguely optimistic for tomorrow. Why? No particular reason. I was at lab for five hours today, but it really reminded me of why lab was such a fun place to work: everybody somewhat relaxed (atleast on weekends), Prof in a decent mood, work getting done, but everybody atleast trying to have fun doing it, too. For me: a variety of machines to play around with (I was using NetBeans on MacOSX "Tiger"), the ability to show everybody a funny video Ifty'd passed on to me earlier, and to just do-my-own-thing - atleast, somewhat - so, yeah, atleast a half decent day. The kind of day you can take after the kind of day day before yesterday was, and say, yeah, okay, it'll be crap, but it won't be completely crap. Or, at any rate, it shouldn't.
This post was posted by Unknown at 5:47 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Strangest dream just now (between sixish and tenish), sort of "Graduation the Way It Should Be", where everybody you ever knew in college just turn up and go nuts. Before that, Prof gave a little speech to a little table with just us (us who? We weren't all from our lab, but one or two were, so weird) and - being one of my dreams - it was fairly typically surreal, with people being carried in and lots of general silliness and so on. Crazy, crazy, but fun. Got woken up by people screaming because - I think - Sehwag got out. Aiyah.
Labels: dream, graduation
This post was posted by Unknown at 9:48 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
The nicest thing about having a blog is, when you have the same feeling you had before again, you can just link to it and say, yup, that's how I feel right now. Man, I need some excitement in my life. Hopefully, refixed Rocinante will help.
In a bid to clear out the tabs at home, check out this incredibly beautiful molecule. Deadly, too!
Err ... that's about it. I have to school tomorrow for two reasons, if I can only wake up early enough, but hopefully it'll all be over by six or so, giving me some time to just shlep around with Rocinante, so let's see. Otherwise: same, old, same. Blech.
Rivka's been having a rough time but things are better. It's nice when life works out the way it's supposed to, eh? Yeah.
That's a comforting thought, I think.
Labels: alpha-amanitin, rocinante
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:49 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Another night with lots of dreaming, very little doing. And is it five 'o' clock already? Sigh. You just know tomorrow's going to be a barrel of laughs.
Labels: dreaming
This post was posted by Unknown at 5:06 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
I used to have one playlist which followed me everywhere, called SFF (for Strawberry Fields Forever, duh) for those times where I just felt like "no-one I think is in my tree". Luckily, I did manage to grow out of adolescence, so my playlist-to-share instead is the much more blaise Mornings. I have it both on my phone (which can't recognize headphones any more, btw) and on my computer at work. The contents are:
Music being what it is ("'scuse me while I kiss this guy", anyone?) I'm probably wrong about a number of the 'meanings' to the songs. But hey - that's what they mean to me, right? It's the right of the reader to reinterpret and all that claptrap.
Also, apologies if I forgot to write any of the entries, or formatting is wrong, or whatever. I'll fix it eventually.
Labels: music
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:54 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Okay, Rocinante has suddenly recieved another lease on life, as the bike shop's air pump did wonders for her wheels. I'm pretty sure she's going to fall apart soon anyway, but hey, while she works, eh? I tried riding it to school, but collapsed midway (and I mean collapsed; apparently, by back is covered in road-crap) (note to concerned adults: no, not collapsed collapsed, I got tired and dizzy and got off the road immediately. I was never on the road if I didn't think I was competant enough to be there) (so collapsed here really means 'I was dizzy enough that I really wanted to lie down on the pavement; which I did. Hence back').
I was this close to just locking my bike up and taking a cab back home - I finished locking the bike up, in fact. Suddenly a blue open-backed van drives up and honks - on Clementi flyover too, no less. My first thought - oddly enough - was that it was a PUB van, and they were complaining 'cos I was locking my bicycle onto state property (that's good timing, I remember thinking) when the occupants came out and asked me if I wanted a ride. Then I saw the NUS logo. They weren't just from NUS, though - they were from two labs down from mine. Like, two. And they had an open-back van, with enough space for my bicycle. How lucky is that?
Anywho, I don't feel nauseous now, so I think I'd best be getting back to my life. Cheerios!
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:22 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Heh, heh - another one! My last things-to-do post must be atleast a year old now, if not more.
Sometime this week, I'd really like to apply for a visa to the United Kingdom (but it's Thursday tomorrow, and Friday day after, so not much time). Sometime this week, I'd really like to get the GenBankExplorer's multiple export working, as well as the probably-more-important BaseSequence import system. Sometime this week, I'd really, really, really like to either get my bicycle fixed, or just throw it away and buy a new one. That's a big one. A lot of my friends are doing fun and interesting things with their bicycles, the weather is - if you can catch it when it's not raining - beautiful, and I'm bored. Besides which, I really feel the need to exercise, and this is about the easiest way to make me do it.
So, yeah. If I can get up early enough tomorrow (is it really 3:30am already?) I'm getting my bicycle fixed. UK Visa can wait for Friday, I think/hope. Or even next week. If you think this week's going to be busy, next week's going to be much worse. Good thing I'll have my bicycle by then, though.
Labels: bicycle, todo, visa, work
This post was posted by Unknown at 3:02 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
My Flickr account has now has 6,000 views! I'm so proud.
Today was weird. Woke up, out of a weird dream, fell asleep again, had another weird dream, which I also woke up out of. Then I took a bath, got dressed, said "f*ck it", got undressed, went back to sleep, had a weird dream, which I also woke up out of. Waking out of a dream is disorienting, and doing this three times in a row is kinda scary. Also, it's raining like a maniac. Wonder how much work I'll get done tonight.
There are multiple good things on the horizon; might be a while before any of them pan out, though. Lesse.
Also: this is very not good. I thought Google could have played it a little better in China - if they'd left a notice on that pages had been removed from the search, I'd feel better about it - but this is just nuts. Isn't this exactly what court requests are for? I would have no problems against Google providing the information on a court request, but to provide it for free? If I was still using Orkut, I'd be really worried about what information I was putting out there - unless I couldn't really figure that out in the first place, what with Orkut having such a horrible interface. But that's another issue entirely.
Labels: dreams, flickr, photos, privacy, sleep
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:38 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Setting up the computers went smoothly; after two hours of usage, none of them have given in, so hopefully things will go okay. Staying up all night so I could come to campus on time: not so great. Am totally dead, although - as happens occasionally - this puts me into a strange, half-lucid state. So I've already had a large (hot!) coffee this morning, and am currently crashing while trying to pull the bits of my consciousness into a semi-coherent muck. To help, I'm listening to my "Mornings" playlist: I'll probably continue listening to it until I leave.
Oh, and-and-and: in about ten-thirty minutes, I leave to return a CD to the computer center - across campus! Fun. Seriously, if I manage to get back without falling asleep somewhere, it'll be quite the achievement.
Finally did something I've always wanted to do: set up a CafePress store. Why? No particular idea. We've got this idea for a 'What Would Leonides Do?' T-shirt, but that's it. Still, it's free, so what'm I complaining about? And hey, I didn't think Flickr would go anywhere much, but I've gotten almost 6,000 hits on 2,800 photos! It's not an award winning ratio or anything, but for somebody who's still in diapers as far as photographing goes, it's not too bad! So, you know, who knows!
I'm sorry, I get like this when I'm incompletely slept. Once I'm done sleepy, I'll be back to normal, I promise.
Labels: decomposing, monday, sleepy, today
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:08 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
I'll make this fast, because I've got to be to bed, there's work to be done and so on. 'Twas a nice weekend, watched 300 (the movie) with a whole bunch of friends, and their friends, and their friend's friends, and so on. For my money, it was one heck of a movie, beautiful visuals telling what is - at the end of the day - one heck of a story. Before the which, we had a fairly satisfactory, possibly final webadmin course, which was followed by a long and extremely pointless conversation, the type I seem to have fewer and fewer of each day (or perhaps I have so many pointless conversations at home that having some outside of here is a big thing).
I've (finally) started thinking about what to do, post June 2007. I have to schedule some time to just try different things this time, I just have to. I'm sorry. Computer programming and system administration-type stuff and all is nice enough, but there's gotta be something better than this. The nice thing is, even if the whole grad school thing gets underway, there's still a convenient gap between end-June (when my contract ends) and next year sometime, when I'll either get in or not.
What'll I do? I don't know, anything; anything, really, will do. Something I can wake up late for, that's for sure.
Labels: 300, crapping, movies, sleepy, weekend
This post was posted by Unknown at 3:21 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
There's a really amazingly beautiful video on eye donations. If you want to take your eyes to the grave, you need to watch it. As long as I'm a Singapore PR, I'm covered: Singapore has the legal right to remove four organs from me (cornea, liver, kidney, heart) after death. Dodginess, and a huge privacy violation, and whatnot; and I'd try to make a huge fuss about this, if it wasn't what I wanted (personally, for myself) anyway.
Sometimes - like just then - I wonder what I'm doing in this crazy country anyway. Then somebody plays "Chariots of Fire" at full volume at 1am (and by Full Volume, I mean, the entire friggin' S1A/S2/S3 complex would have been able to hear it), and it doesn't seem quite so bad after all.
Other stuffs: something for celebrities, a brilliant article on cricket-love in India, a scary story (this is Bangalore! my family is there!, etc.), and look at the pretty little wiggles!
I swear, I've had this page open through most of this week; when the work got too frustrating for me, I'd just look at it and remind myself that however bad things got, I could always use a regular expression to keep myself moving where others might have had to stop. It's my secret weapon :).
Btw, same guy just played the Für Elise. Very cool.
Labels: eye transplant, late night, links, singapore, video
This post was posted by Unknown at 12:20 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Okay, in the last two hours, I've set up a mailing list, refurbished a blog, and e-mailed everybody about it. Is it unfair that I feel happily satisfied?
Also, as of today, both the retrofit-TaxonDNA-to-handle-morphological-sequences hack and the GenBankExplorer-should-extract-everything-to-files hack are officially "done". And they are really, astonishingly bad hacks. I mean, really, craptastic, horrible, disgusting, sorry excuses of hacks. In the timetables I had, though (one week and one day, respectively), they're the best I can do. Hopefully, they won't step on other code's toes too much. Personally, I doubt this. The universe moves so as to maximize the amount of pain it causes you. Sod's law.
Still, however much the fiddling with the lab computers remains on my mind, and how much ever I don't like walking home at 2am, there's a nice buzz in the air. Smells like ... beginnings.
Labels: beginnings, hacks, success, work
This post was posted by Unknown at 10:58 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Was in a rotten mood yesterday; much better now. I'm not sure why, exactly, really. Probably just talking to somebody I wasn't expecting to talk to did it. Oh, well. Now it's 12:50am, and I'm really proud of staying up from 11pm until now, I was dead sleepy but I shouldn't sleep too early. In Rome:TW, Ifty (playing the Julii) just got declared an outlaw, and fought his first Roman vs Roman battle. Good stuff.
Am going to read a bit as usual, but probably not for long, I really am dead sleepy. Good night!
Labels: good night, sleepy
This post was posted by Unknown at 12:48 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Cute! Insightful. So true. Ha, ha! Interesting.
Aaaannndd ... this is so cool, it gets a separate paragraph all to itself; it's the coolest comment I've seen on Slashdot in a while. So without further ado, near-death-incidents and MRIs.
Labels: links, more links, mri, slashdot
This post was posted by Unknown at 1:48 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Like, you didn't want to sleep, because you weren't in the kind of life you were comfortable with leaving alone for seven hours or so without any feedback? That you didn't really want to wake up to, because that is just about the most depressing thing you could imagine?
I am to some limited degree therapeuticising myself by writing; it's not very helpful when you're fictional characters have more life than you do. Ah, well. Tomorrow will be tomorrow.
This post was posted by Unknown at 3:49 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
How cute is this? How funny is that? I need to see who wins, and to take part in this. How cool is that, and I'll have to remember Randal's guide next time I'm teaching someone Perl, speaking of which, did you know he's off the hook?
There's more, but I can't be bothered to link to everything. A very angsty post by Popagandhi. Half-price off some very nice and interesting books from Lonely Planet. That's about it, I guess.
Back to my almost-done-since-forever parser for Nexus files, I guess =/.
Labels: links, more links, today
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:53 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Just found out at the Oscars last week that Joe Barbera, creator of animated dreams extraordinaire, died last December at the ripe old age of 95. I remember reading an article by him in Reader's Digest back when I was ten or so; and thinking about how cool it would be to just sit down and create entire worlds like that. There's a nice obit on BBC News. Rest in Peace, Joe Barbera - you've deserved it. May many more rise to take his place in the world of storytelling.
Labels: death, joe barbera
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:01 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Ifty and I had a competition to see how many actors we could recognize from the Apple iPhone "Hello" advertisement. Ifty beat me 11 to 5. The final tally:
Seriously, 5:11 against Ifty in movie trivia is not bad! And apparently we're going to be making a movie soon. Stay tuned.
Labels: apple, ifty, movies, trivia
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:16 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
In one window, everybody's unhappy with Singapore; in the other, price considerations keep platform walls out of MRTs. The funny thing is, if they do put them up, a lot of people I know will point to it as further 'nannyization' of the country. I wonder which way I'd swing if I had to pick one option.
Also, nasty going-ons in schools. Good thing I'm not planning on becoming a teacher. And then there's the drug-execution issue, in which I lean on the side of a no-execution policy - but in this case, at least, I think the court should be given the leeway to pick a lesser sentence. I mean, heck, that's what courts are for: to determine guilt and punishment. I'm a big fan of jury judgements; it's some sort of guarantee that atleast twelve other people agree that you ought to die. At least, you know.
Sorry for the ramblings, didn't really get much done today. So. Yeah.
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:55 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
As usual, I have two birthdays this year. It's actually a whole lot better having two birthdays, actually: it gives you plently of time to just push back and have fun, lets you have two birthday breakfasts/lunches/dinners, confuses everybody (I've had atleast two "err ... should I wish you today or tomorrow?"s), and gives you the chance to have fun, take a breather - then get right back to having fun again! And that's not counting the usual random SMSs from all over, phone calls from friends far away, and all the other birthday hoo-ha. And of course, tomorrow is Gerard's birthday, and he certainly has stuff to celebrate; so hopefully that'll be fun too.
Since last post: we did go out for dinner, pretty much the whole lab; ate at Long John Silvers at VivoCity. Then the others went on for some more food (I think?), while I slipped off to Page One, a pretty nice bookstore. Looked through the music, but didn't find anything interesting (which means I'll probably blow money on Magnatune tomorrow!) Was just wondering around when I chanced upon my current favouritest book of all time, so bought that up. Then found The Shadow of the Wind, which I thought my sister would like, so bought that for her. Then I decided - heck - I was going to buy it sometime - and bought a very pretty hardbound "Complete Works of Shakespeare" thingie. Very cool!
Met up with friends again; we went to Ben 'n Jerry's for ice cream, then to Harry's for drinks. I'll slip in at this point that circumstantial similarities to previous engagements at Harry's did occur, but I feel I dealt with it a little better this time around. In short, where last time I stayed until the music ended, this time I left as soon as the music began to play. There's some music it just isn't fun to listen to alone, but why should you? Just get up and leave. I did.
Took the bus back home, then played a little bit of Medieval II: Total War by myself (defeated the Portuguese, after having defeated the Spanish yesterday; this gives me two other minor powers to my name, and also control over the entire Iberian peninsula), then multiplayer with Omar (he beat me silly), then multiplayer with Gerard (he beat me silly; like, death and blood and bones and so on). Then - as if I hadn't had enough fun in one day - watched the last half or so of The Tailor of Panama, a book I had a lot of fun reading. So yay!
As if all of this warn't enough, Xkcd has a new shirt I'm going to pre-order, and my uncomprehensiblicosuperpoweremessomessesalmokindsortasemialgorithm to read Nexus files just might have finally been tweaked all the way, so it both (a) works, and (b) implements pushBack(). What that means - if you can't read my mind, etc. - is that three-odd days of work might finally have come to a head, allowing me - finally! - to move on to more interesting avenues and better prospects. Yay!
Labels: birthday, books, today
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:08 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
"A beach house," he said, "doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate," he went on, "at boundary conditions". "Really?" said Arthur. "Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."