This can usually be found on Twitter.
I'm through check-in and emmigration, so it's much too late to worry about anything I've forgotten/screwed up; at this point, it'll have to be explained, rather than fixed, so eh.
I have to stay, this was the quickest I've ever gotten through check-in/emmig: for one, I've only got one document this time, rather than three (passport instead of passport+student pass+multiple entry visa); for another, I checked-in online at the British Airway's website (very easy to use, and completely Firefox compatible, btw), and only have to duck my bags in, and for a third, the baggage lines were almost completely empty. So there.
It's always a pleasure getting to Changi; travel was decent, despite travelling during peak hours, and my cabbie gave me a long lecture on Comfort cabs and their evil ways (he'd transitioned to Premier at the start of the year). Money exchange was quick and easy, check-in was (as mentioned) botherless, and emmigration was a breeze (the officer seemed to give me an approving nod when she finally found the Re-entry permit tucked away at the end of my passport). Now it's two-or-so hours of boredom, followed by thirteen-odd hours of boredom in a little metal tube high in the sky.
The plan: on landing, clear immigration and be at one with my brand-new bag; call Zuji up, and cancel my hotel booking; then take the Heathrow Express into Paddington Station - my first bit of open defiance this holiday. I suppose if you're going to do it, you might as well start early, eh? Or: if 'twere done that 'twere done, 'tis best 'twere done at the earliest.
See you on the other side!
Labels: changi airport, holiday, travel
This post was posted by Unknown at 8:38 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
'sbeen a good day: the rain fell incessantly, except when I needed to go somewhere, when it very conveniently stopped =). On my way to the airport now, and sweating badly in my full-length pants. Gotta run!
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It's Friday morning: and I oughtn't to be here for Saturday morning! Yay!
Still need to: get traveller's cheques, start packing, finish packing, write program. Am I missing something? It can't possibly be *this* easy, can it?
This post was posted by Unknown at 8:39 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Less than 24 hours to fly, and I haven't even started packing (I bought the bag I'm taking to London less than six hours ago). Thanks to minor miracles such as the Internet, I'm already checked in, though. My flight leaves at 10:55pm tomorrow, giving me just over 24 hours to go, actually. The plan is to sleep for a while now, wake up at 2am or 7am or whenever, pack everything I need (clothes, camera, a book or two), then go to work (on the way to which I buy my traveller's cheques). Come back home around 7pm or so, catch a cab to the airport at around 8pm (hopefully avoiding the 6pm traffic crunch). Even if I'm delayed, I can go on until an hour before take-off, which is 10pm approx. Sounds good? Might leave early if I feel like, but with the unreliveable boredom of sitting at the airport, I'm much more likely to be late than early.
Labels: holiday, packing, travel
This post was posted by Unknown at 10:11 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
To begin: I've been reading way too much of The Straight Dope lately. It must be fun to get to research stories such as swearing in multiple languages, the meaning of the word 'callipygian', the meaning of the word 'colitas', and what Barney Rubble did for a living. Of course, you do get the occasional doozie.
Special mention to Larry Walters, the legendary helium-baloon-and-lawn-chair flier, even though his life seems pretty sad, too.
TSD's 'list' page also has some pretty cool links, too, such as a rather odd Windows bug (long fixed).
Also: Happy 17th Birthday, Hubble!
I'm off to London day-after-tomorrow night, so everything's going to be very quiet around here for a while. Hopefully, I'll still get to upload onto Flickr a lot: I just hope I don't trip my monthly limit, and that I get time to sort out my photos eventually!
Labels: links, the straight dope, today
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is that it's hard to stay pissy for very long.
I went to Bukit Batok yesterday and took a photo of the tower there. It took a while to get it right, which is probably why I'm so proud of it (actually, that last one came out not-so-bad too; hmmm).
My favourite songs right now are Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Blow Up The Pokies by The Whitlams.
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It's 3:40am, I've been up since 10-ish am, and I'm probably going to be the first person asleep in my house tonight =/
Labels: sleep
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Got my visa! All else is crap, etc. I wanted to sit and write down everything that happened, but I'm really just too sleepy right now. Ah, well. Another day, maybe.
This post was posted by Unknown at 11:58 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
... it's a beautiful day!
So, yeah, nice day. I'm decently sleepy now and all, so I'll go, but I thought it important to remember that even in the unending sameness of life there's always room for a little ripple or two.
Labels: food, music, nice day, ripple, today
This post was posted by Unknown at 11:38 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
And I don't mean just nice, right, I mean, like, really, really nice?
That's where you have a dream so real, so immersive, so entirely beautiful and interesting and perfect that you don't realise it's not real. That's beautiful.
The point that proves it: dream just now, a Story in Two Parts. Part Une involved flying my cousin brother's (!) large labrador (!!) puppy (!!!) from Bombay to Bangalore. And yes, I said "labrador puppy": at various points in the dream, the dog shrank to small enough that he could've fit in a cage on my lap (he didn't; the dream "jumped" over the plane trip entirely, detailing only the long, fairly eventful trip to the airport).
Airport achieved, my brain sorta flopped around for a bit before coming up with a movie dinner/random building (it was a random building on the way out, but a movie dinner on the way in; I should also point out that by "movie dinner" I mean one of those fancy premiere/reception dinner type things, with the lawn tables and chairs, and little vases and whatnot all over the place.
After some pretty weird going-ons at the hospital, a group of friends and I left the building. Like driving to the airport, this simple action seemed to go on and on, with much walking forward, oops, forgot something, everybody goes back, then down the path again. Somewhere in the midst of it, another friend of mine seemed to have developed a huge crush on this other girl (that one was a figment of my imagination). Fun times.
And how convincing was this dream? Despite plenty of warnings (like, what actually happened to the dog at the end of part 1, anyway?), when I was walking back to the school/random building (whatever for?), while a "movie dinner" was going on around my head, I saw a "commemoration" of some sort, written by a certain Mr. Shubtill (spelled "ShubTil" in the dream), and I was so completely fascinated that somebody could actually have that name (it's a semi-famous anagram for a pretty famous word) that I tried to take out my camera and take a photo, realised that I didn't have my camera (or I would've taken photos of the "weird going-ons", wouldn't I?), my brain tried to "slip" it in without my conscious mind noticing, except it did, and everything sorta collapsed on itself.
In other, not-so-happy news, some guy with a gun went nuts at Virginia University, killing 31 people (the worst school shooting in US history). As somebody else pointed out, that's peanuts compared to the number of civilians dying in Baghdad every week (oops, my bad: apparently, five hundred died in Iraq last week, 21 of them children. So, no, not really comparable). Not that this isn't a horribly tragedy, too. Ah, well. So it goes.
Labels: dog, dream, shooting, shubtil, that girl
This post was posted by Unknown at 4:22 am | 1 comments | Post a Comment
That was unexpected.
Labels: unexpected
This post was posted by Unknown at 2:47 am | 1 comments | Post a Comment
Yeah, but it's not all bad, really. Except that I'm still going to be sleep-deprived in the latter parts of the day. But getting (precisely) six hours of sleep every night isn't a completely bad thing, and for the first time in a while, my sleeping hours have corresponded (vaguely) with Real World Sleeping Hours (11pm-5am), so, again, not a dead loss. Actually, I might even make it to the late sixes or sevens or so before getting completely sleepy!
My lust for a new laptop rushes on unabated, particularly after realising that NUS Notebook Offer prices aren't really that great. Latest focus: a (possibly hypothetical) Lenovo Thinkpad R60 with ATI Radeon X1300 Mobility. If I do buy it, it will be my first computer with a dedicated graphics card. Oh my.
This post was posted by Unknown at 5:25 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Indian cricket, watching cheese age, writing that all-important first novel, Purity Balls (which don't really work, surprise, surprise), and things you used to believe as kids.
And OMG what was he thinking? I mean, seriously; who writes like that?
Last but not least: The Sopranos: six seasons in seven minutes.
This is the second day in a row that I'll be going in to work early. Yay! But lack of sleep is also an issue. Last night: 6 hours, so while it's nothing to get happy about, it's not a total disaster, either. And then stayed up and played Halo (sorry, that's finished Halo) with Ifti, so that was fun too.
Labels: links, more links, more more links, today
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Didn't sleep much last night (3-4 hours or something), so here I am in bed again early in the afternoon. With any luck (ha!) I'll be awake in four hours or so, and fresh enough to embark on a long-delayed expedition to Orchard. Thanks to being up, I was able to watch Bangladesh decisively beat South Africa; a pretty nice movie, and one of my favouritest movies ever, so it wasn't all bad. I was sort of resigned to staying up all night tonight, but with my somewhat altered schedule, who knows what'll happen tomorrow?
Oh, and also: my sister's birthday! Happy birthday, sister! Her presents are downstairs, and hopefully the means to have them delivered home will become available soon ...
This post was posted by Unknown at 1:06 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Such as: apparently, the original "Wear Sunscreen" article (really a column in the Chicago Tribune).
Or: Working for the Man by Jeremy Allison, a brilliant article about what you need to succeed in programming. And the related discussion on Slashdot, which has some very nice articles.
That's about it for tonight. Thinking on the BetterExplorer thingie is going nicely. Slept most of today, which was nice. Mmmm, sleep.
Labels: links, mmm sleep, reading material, wear sunscreen, working for the man
This post was posted by Unknown at 1:51 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
One of those "headaches all day long" days, and managed to get close to nothing done. Am seriously just waiting for
This sort of thing is seriously sad, and is one of the major reasons I still prefer Singapore despite all the issues they've got here. Not that it can't happen here, or anything; there's just going to be a whole lot less of it here, just because the state is richer. Or the government's iron fist. Or something.
One of these days something like this is going to happen. And then you'll be sorry! You'll be sorry!!
(Err, if the last link has vanished off the face of the internet, it depicted a group of eskimo fishing in a seal hole, turning around to look at a desert which has snuck up to them, complete with donkey, cactii, dead cow skeletons and guy staring back).
Anything else to grouch about? No, not really. I need sleep. Or, at any rate, some sort of shot to my brain. As of today, plain old coffee just ain't cuttin' it.
Labels: headache, india, internet, sad, singapore, sleep, ugh
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... how sweet is that?!
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Well, no, not fine, fine, but certainly better than last week. More, I don't know, vim in my step, or something. I guess.
I got to debug C code last night. My old adversary, scanf, no less. It was fun.
I've also been catching up on long-neglected blog-commenting (and an especial shoutout to Snake Anthony, whose blog I haven't commented on in a long while!)
Hey! I get publish! How cool is that? Popagandhi also get publish, but in a much cooler way, obviously, but I'm happy with my own wee little bit o' fame, too.
Just bought Heinz's Horseradish Sauce today. That stuff is amazing with cheese! Beautiful, beautiful!
And a page on Piet Hein's Grooks. Those things are amazingly beautiful, and incredibly insightful too. This one, for instance:
Naive you are
if you believe
life favours those
who aren't naive.
I'm also writing; it's an entirely for-fun piece (the language! it makes me laugh just looking at it, but it's fun to write in - sort of overzealously imaginative, almost surrealistically so (the similes and metaphors are strewn haphazardly across the floor, etc.). But, hey, anything interesting right now is A-okay.).
Am dreading going in to work today for several reasons. Maybe I'll fall asleep now, and go in at one. Maybe I won't, and I'll go in at ten anyway. Let's see.
This post was posted by Unknown at 6:56 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment
Seriously. Sleep was shot through most of it (although there was a bit of a recovery late in the week -- to the point where I came in super-late on Thursday because I found myself sleeping so enjoyably! -- and throughout it all, problems, problems, problems. It's not just the residual stress of honours coming up, neither; it just seemed to be one of those weeks everything just goes down the drain in. As a certain e-mail I got six hours ago only confirms. Ugh, ugh, ugh. So stress.
This post was posted by Unknown at 7:40 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."