Why isn't there decaf tea when there is decaf coffee? Can ice milk tea really keep me awake all night? Did I try to fake sleeping as advised by closing my eyes while fully conscious? Did I make it to the office after all?

The answers are no idea, yes, yes and yes. And today is a rainy Friday, wonderful for sleeping in. There is no justice.

Every word was once a poem.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Forever meeting people... but not meeting the people that I really ought to be meeting.
- my UK travel mate, summing up her days (as well as mine) pretty aptly

The most common phrase used by my friends to describe me to strangers seems to be "not your type". Once I pinned down a friend and asked her what she meant by that? She looked nonchalant and replied, "You know lah... you read too much, write too much, think too much, talk too much, play pool too much, listen to music too much, travel too much, club too much, go out with guys too much. You're just... too much." omg.

Someone just described an innovative IT gadget to me as "very Harry Potter". Gee.

When I told Quest that I want to sleep at 8.30pm tonight, he quipped that sleep is for the weak. I don't care though, I need to sleep at least 10 hours tonight.

Sleepy. This morning was spent wading through customer lists we're supposed to send Christmas greetings to. And I'm still not done, urgh.

Yoyo just asked if I wanted to go visit the zoo and have tea with the orang utans. He says it's de riguer but frankly, it has never occurred to me to do this. Is anyone game though? :)

I just got home from playing pool with an old friend from work. We were talking about being ambidextrous at pool, and he said that a true test is to try drawing a circle with one hand while simultaneously drawing a square with the other hand. I tried to do that but the shapes came out suspect. When I asked him where he got this test from, he replied that Xiao Long Nu from the chinese tv serial is ambidextrous this way. lol.

What I really need right now is to roll into a tight little ball and sleep.

My office mailbox gorged itself to death, and now I'm forcing it on a crash diet to trim down enough for me to access emails again. I will strive to housekeep my emails more often! At least for this week.

limabean sent me a joking sms that I can't judge new guy acquaintances based on guy friends like him cos the standard set is real high. I wanted to laugh but then I sobered up cos he hit the nail on the head.

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
- Matt Cartmill, anthropology professor and author (1943- )

Yesterday I dropped by the Opera Gallery at Takashimaya before meeting limabean for dinner. They were featuring a series of lesser known works by Chagall, Botero and such. However, what captivated me most was this unlabelled sculpture piece. It's of these 2 stick figures striding along on bendy willowy stilts, and one stick figure tilted his head back in mid flight to glance at the other stick figure who was looking forward at him. They froze in motion, waiting for time to melt away and set them free. If there's any piece I could afford to buy, I would get this one.

I spent the whole of today migrating from my 4-year-old office laptop to a new one. :) This one is the sleekiest by far. Woohoo!

limabean's logical reasoning on why we shouldn't buy Christmas presents for each other is that we will probably only give each other books or CDs, and even then we also run the risk of buying something the other doesn't like (or maybe already own). Hence, it will be much better not to buy Christmas presents for each other but to buy something we like for ourselves instead. Well you can't argue with that, can you? lol.

Spent a lazy day at home before meeting up with limabean for dinner. I suggested trying out this noodle bar called Yellowtail in Paragon's basement cos I've seen it a few times but have never eaten there before. It turned out that today was actually their last day of operation... what a weird coincidence. Basically they only sell fishball noodles there and you can pick the soup base and the type of noodles you fancy, but fishball noodles is actually the last on my list when it comes to ordering noodles... I don't seem to like it much. Dinner was fine though.

Afterwards we dropped by Bread Talk cos limabean had never tried the bread there, and for the second day in a row, I bought pastry there. Maybe I should seek some endorsement deal from these folks for free publicity eh? :) Then we wandered into Watson's and came across these mini-games on keychains. We got pretty excited and limabean ended up with a mini-backgammon set while I bought a mini-scrabble set. I just browsed through the mini-keychain catalogue and have fallen in love with these other stuff like the mini-mousetrap keychain (wonder what it is!), mini-magnetic poetry, mini-boggle, mini-ouija board, mini-etch-a-sketch, and most impressively, a mini Lava Lite lamp!

We proceeded to Mac's where I tried out the coke float with pearls. I have a thing for coke floats and I also have a thing for pearl tea, but mixing both is too surreal for me. limabean then taught me how to play my first backgammon game. I guess we looked fairly ridiculous... 2 adults using their stubby fingers to shift round tiny pieces on a board the size of a palm, and tossing the smallest pair of dice that I've ever seen. Man, my antibiotic capsule is at least 4 times the size of it! It was fun and I'm quite tempted to get a mini-backgammon keychain too, cept I can't get all the rules straight. lol. We started but didn't manage to finish a game on my mini-scrabble. Lining up these little magnetic specks of letters on our palms was incredibly weird, and there's only like 31 letters in the game. Aww. Must bring the mini-scrabble out some time to challenge folks I played online Literati with! :)

The weekend is over before it's even begun.

I have no problems with knowing what happens in movies I haven't watched yet, so sometimes friends will describe their favourite movie scenes to me before I've seen them. Then when I do watch the show, I'll do a double-take as the movie progresses and I realise that I've reached their favourite scene. At this point, I'll actually analyse why this scene will appeal to the friend, rather than see this scene in the context of the movie. Very unnerving but it works for me.

I've been asked how my blog can be a memory aid if I don't re-read my archives. Well, maybe I've not re-read yet. :)

Right at this moment, I have a green tongue. I stained it while trying to dry swallow an antibiotic capsule (without the aid of drinking) for the past 2 minutes. In the end, I had to go drink water to wash the capsule down. I don't get it. I've managed to dry swallow the capsules previously, and both times I was stuck in the middle of performances where water wasn't available. Then, in order not to miss the timing for consuming medication, I just popped the capsule in and swallowed without much thought. Now that water is just within reach, I can't make myself repeat the trick again.

German idiom #61: Der Fisch beginnt am Kopf zu stinken.
Translation: The fish starts stinking from the head.

Incredible what weird phrases you learn in meetings. :)

I managed to sleep about 5 hours before going for family dim sum. After that, I met my UK travel mate and we went down to Simei to check out the used library books store at Eastpoint Mall. The collection is quite dismal and not worth a trip, but I did manage to buy an old and slightly dog-eared copy of Burton G. Malkiel's classic book A Random Walk Down Wall Street for $3. 3TapRiff recommended it once and my best friend has even lent me his copy, but I've not gotten round to reading it for such a long time that I've finally returned it to him unread. I have no qualms about buying used books even if they're not well preserved. On the other hand, I've never sold off any of my books before. Unconsciously, I've taken further steps to prevent this from ever happening... by scribbling short inscriptions on the front pages of most books I own. I'll write my name, the date of purchase, and a little paragraph on the events leading up to the purchase of that book, as well as who I was with when I was buying the book. With so much personal information revealed, there's no way I'll ever sell any.

The rest of the day degenerated into a consumer orgy. I went into a buying frenzy and bought bread from Bread Talk, the December issue of Mixmag, Kate Bush's Best of album The Complete Story (which I've only got on cassette a long while back), Zero 7's album Simple Things (so I can return ttj his copy), a Chinese VCD movie and the December issue of Her World. Had dinner with Yoyo and ttj at Marche, and we ended up drinking at Coffee Bean while browsing through Her World. Flipping through women's magazines with men is a totally different experience altogether, they focus on all the odd stuff. lol.

Anyway, I'm home blogging now instead of braving it out at Zoukout, and in a little while I'll be off to bed. I'm looking forward to sleeping already.

I played pool with Jedixus, Strider, my best friend & M, Quest and Hegemony last night. Apart from Strider, everyone either blogs or writes a .plan. lol.

For me, it was surreal playing pool with Quest and Hegemony cos I've only done yahoo pool with them before, but it was fun. I was tickled that though Quest doesn't really play pool, he played it with the same precision steps like he did in yahoo (and won, drat!). Hegemony was kind and considerate... though he just flew in, he dropped by and brought along kangaroo jerkin for us. It was the first time I've seen them, but there wasn't any real awkwardness translating from net friends to real life. Afterwards, a couple of us went for drinks and chatted (ok ok, my eyes glazed over whenever the topics strayed to games, army etc), and though it doesn't seem too apt a description, it felt... nice. :)

Most importantly, Happy Birthday today to my fantastic brother! Without you, I won't have known manga and anime; the first book I read wouldn't be a Hardy Boys book; I won't have had a shared passion for Star Wars; and I won't speak English the way I do now. :)

Thank you, and I hope I'll always be there for you too.

Oh yah, my cell phone will be off during office hours today cos I'm in a whole full day of meeting. I'll be contactable after 6pm ok?

Damn, I don't have enough sleep these past few nights. I'm getting panda eyes! :(

Just got home from the Second 42 Theatre Festival at Waterloo Street. For me, there are 2 good reasons to catch the performances:

1. Jonathan Lim's performance of Emerald Hole, which is a spoof on the plays Emily of Emerald Hill and The Coffin is too Big for the Hole. Hilarious from start to end, he's a perfect riot.

2. 3TapRiff's wonderful company. At a particular low point in one of the OTT performances, I turned to him and whispered mock-jokingly: "This is cheesier than a double-cheese burger! It's cheesier than even a New York cheese cake!". He grinned mischievously and replied, "Well, you can't have nachos without cheese." And I remembered his line more than the performance. lol.

Well, for those who don't know 3TapRiff personally and can't have the advantage of point 2, go watch for the sake of point 1. And hey, thanks again for asking me. :)

"We're more J2EE than the other guys."

We hear this one a lot. We assure you it is pure nonsense. It's akin to being a "little bit pregnant." You are or you aren't. The same is true with standards. It's either/ or. Yes or no. Utterly binary.
- excerpt from a Sybase advertisement called "The Straight Goods on Application Servers"

My archives have gone AWOL for the upteenth time. Fickle heartless things.

I truly cannot keep up with your guy friends. If you were my gf, I would have appreciate you have less of the guys friends heh!
- my best friend, on the seemingly unbalanced gender ratio of my friends

Last night I went to watch a play Love Bites with my UK travel mate. Tonight I'm watching another play, this time with a married man. Hmm. That didn't really come out right, did it? lol. So 3TapRiff, what play are we going for tonight? Hiaks.

Eh, if my nick were in German instead of Spanish, I would be Gehen instead of vaya. It'd be majorly odd. :)

Whimsical thought of today. If I could give a piece of advice to myself 5 years ago, it would be "don't bother buying nail polish". All those spur-of-the-moment purchases will be left untouched and later discarded when I finally realise that I really like short clean-cut nails.

I have some friends I haven't and don't foresee quarrelling with. For eg, in my trips with my UK travel mate, I don't recall ever having angry confrontations with her. However there are also friends whom I treasure, but somehow sometime, our conversations will lapse and degenerate into a sulky childish thread I can't seem to get out of. Really, all I ever want is to tread lightly. I hope you can see that.

Last night I watched a Hong Kong movie called Heroes in Love on VCD, sorta like an indie attempt by young directors. There are basically 3 stories within the movie: Kidnap, Beloved and Oh G!.

Kidnap goes like this: Girl A is a tomboy and sullen, and she likes Girl B secretly. So one day she kidnaps B in the hope of making B reciprocate her feelings. However, B is already attached to an indifferent boyfriend. A doesn't understand why B doesn't want her, despite how much A cares about B. It isn't enough that A even knows how many pairs of shoes B owns, when B's boyfriend can't even figure out her correct shoe size. The saddest moment is when A asks B if B will accept her if her current boyfriend cheats on her, and B says no, she will find a second boyfriend. But what if the second one cheats on you, A insists on asking. Then I'll find a third boyfriend, B replies.

Beloved is a story about a guy obsessed with guns. To be honest, my mind drifted through this story so I can't comment much on it.

Oh G! is my favourite story of the lot and the most upbeat. It's about how teenagers Charlene and Lawrence met on icq, arranged to meet in real life, and subsequently, sorta fell in love. It's quite hilarious when throughout the story, the two of them took turns to phone their voice mailboxes to leave inane messages for each other (even when they are already in the other's company) but there's bits of dark moments, like when you realise Lawrence just left his previous girlfriend before he turned up for the meeting with Charlene.

Worth watching.

Vaya drew her legs up on the bed and laced her fingers around one knee.

"I still haven't properly thanked you for saving me. Why did you do it? You didn't know me or anything about me, but you recruited those hunters and came after me. Why? Why risk your life?"

Good question. Damn good question.

"I've been wondering about that myself," I said. "It doesn't really sound like a sane thing to do, does it?"

Her mouth quirked up at the corners.
-Fan Fiction by Darrell Whitney: Phantasy Star II: Street Magic (Part III)

Well, I stumbled onto a fantasy story which featured a character named vaya.

Accounting is an art.
- my boss, on creative book-keeping (or what I call playing magic with money... now you see it, now you don't)

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder".
- Aldous Huxley

But do. Try to be a little kinder.

There is no brand loyalty. Just brand habit. Don't assume customers need you.

B12 and I were discussing about our personalities. He has the ability to be calm, detached and indifferent, while I, on the other hand, am Mother Hen personified.

Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL). lol.

Dark Syphid. :)

I lost my blog archives (yet again). I had to regenerate them and lost every single comment I had while I was on Reblogger since I've now switched to BlogBack. :( I feel like howling.

I had to run errands during lunchbreak today which involved a lot of legwork in the sweltering heat. I took along my Discman and played Kylie's first track More More More on auto-repeat for nearly an hour. The music's pretty infectious and I couldn't help but be one of those annoyingly sunny folks... I positively beamed at everyone who crossed my path while I strode along to the beats. Music cures my spirits.

Which brings me on to the fact that there is an independent music label called Medical Records. Besides the obvious literal meaning, the name also implies music as therapy. I thought this is a wonderful label name.

I'm seriously considering backpacking in Chile. omg.

My favourite pool joint played Kylie Minogue's latest album Fever everytime I was playing pool there. Though I'm not a Kylie fan circa her Locomotion days, the dancey Fever really makes me feel like bopping round the pool table while waiting for my turn. And this is how playing pool has influenced me to buy my first ever Kylie album.

There's a spat of weddings going on nowadays. If I have read the signs, I wouldn't have attended the wedding dinner tonight. Fate was really going against it. Firstly, I've misplaced the wedding invitation card a few days ago and emailed the bride for details. Alas, she was already on leave and didn't read her email. Unfortunately I've also lost the bride's phone contact. Careless but utterly in my character to do so. Since no one else I knew was attending the wedding, I resorted to emailing some stranger whose email address is the first one on the mass email attendance confirmation that the bride sent out. No reply there either. I could just give up but decided to make another last minute attempt to locate the errant wedding invitation card. Well, I found it.

Then I went with B12 to a talk on touring Chile before going for the wedding dinner. Somehow, the flimsy handle of my tiny bag gave way at the talk. I could think this is yet another sign for me to ditch the wedding dinner, but I got quite determined to buy a replacement dinner bag instead so I could carry on and attend the wedding dinner. Yes, stubborn I know.

So B12 was kind enough to help me shop for a dinner bag, and he also offered me a tip on attending wedding dinners where you don't know anyone else besides the bridal couple. His advice is to pretend to be a vegetarian and go join the Muslim table. At least the conversation can revolve around the different food being served.

But of cos I didn't take his advice and ended up sitting at a table with only one other lady. All the other 8 guests who's supposed to sit with us didn't turn up. Wow. This has never happened to me before. Anyway, they finally rearranged the 2 of us to sit at another table of relatives and we ate awkwardly. I couldn't last the whole wedding dinner and left halfway to play pool with Jedixus and Anarchy. That was pretty fun. And now all 3 of us got home and are online chatting together.

We all need to get a life man.

Insight on love today. It's better to be single than to be a BUG (Back Up Guy/ Girl).

It's been a long time since I surfed the web for Palm add-ons. Found and installed a drinks recipe list. Wondered if I needed the Palm application to calculate temperature by counting cricket chirps but dropped it. Keep track of animals that you slay? Where do people come up with these ideas anyway?

Yoyo missed David Lean's black & white movie Brief Encounters but made it for Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours. I realise that I bought the movie script for Brief Encounters 2 years back, but never got round to reading it. This is what happened with the movie Total Eclipse (on Arthur Rimbaud, the young french poet genius).. I also watched the movie a year or so after I bought (but never managed to read) the movie script.

I've still got a couple of movie scripts left unread. Some friends either watch the movie or read the book, but they think it's a waste of time to do both since they know the plot already. On the contrary, I like to do both.

I hope you're not reading this blog in the hopes of surfing the links to some babe's blog, are you? Jedixus may have exaggerated a wee bit on that. :)

I just met up with some secondary school girlfriends at someone's home. Though we have very different lifestyles now, it's fun chatting with them and catching glimpses of how I used to be. One girlfriend told me she still had the Miss Saigon cassettes I dubbed for her in secondary school. The astonishing thing is I didn't realise I ever owned the soundtrack for Miss Saigon before, even after I watched the musical in London 2 years back. Strangely, I even recalled what these girls like to eat. I asked one of them if she still likes to eat eggs, and she quipped that when she was pregnant, she ate 2 eggs gleefully every day rather than the normal recommendation of 2 eggs per week. Then everybody remembered that I was lousy at ball games and couldn't believe that pool is one of my favourite hobbies now. lol. Gosh, I really miss these women. :)

Remember when you were young
You shone like the Sun
Shine on, you crazy diamond!
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on, you crazy diamond!
You were caught on the crossfire
Of childhood and stardom
Blown on the steel breeze
Come on, you target for faraway laughter
Come on, you stranger, you legend, you martyr
And shine!

You reached for the secret too soon
You cried for the Moon.
Shine on, you crazy diamond!
Threatened by shadows at night
And exposed in the light
Shine on, you crazy diamond!
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision
Rode on the steel breeze
Come on, you raver, you seer of visions
Come on, you painter, you piper, you prisoner
And shine!
- Pink Floyd's song Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)

This song's for ttj. :) My favourite Pink Floyd song is quite an odd one called Run Like Hell. I like the long opening guitar riffs somehow.

All this joking about my nick resembling an Indian name has actually led to other mixups too. I've just received a Deepavali email greeting from HindiSong.com. lol.

I've finally visited the Reblogger site to find out what's wrong with their comment script. Seems like the creator has run out of space and has no time to look into it till Christmas or so. In the meantime, BlogBack has been recommended as another comment script so I've gone and installed it. It should work.

Today I bought the double-CD Best of Pink Floyd compilation called Echoes. I don't have any Pink Floyd CD but I had a bunch of their cassettes which a Uni senior gave me a long time ago. Also bought 2 huge blue plastic container boxes from ikea to store my books. Filled both to the brim and still there are books left over. Oh well. :)

The more innovative your idea, the smaller the number of people who will understand it - and people have great trouble imagining that they will buy something they cannot understand... [Market] research supports mediocre ideas and kills great ones.
- from Harry Beckwith's book The Invisible Touch

I told my best friend I was surprised that Disneyland employed geniuses like Danny Hillis to be their Fellows, and he replied that Disneyland is actually one of the top research places in the world. At Disneyland they call it Imagineering, a combination of Imagination and Engineering.

To dare to dream and make it into reality.

... Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score, whose interpretation amplifies our reach and lifts our spirit. Leonardo da Vinci called music the shaping of the invisible, and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software.
-Alan Kay's Computer Software, Scientific American, September 1984

Just got back from jogging with my best friend. Surpised when I was able to chat in complete sentences while jogging this time, though it's been a while since we last jogged together. Among topics like companies, corporate culture and programming, he introduced me to a programming language called Toontalk. Toontalk seems to be a success of concurrent constraint programming and meant to teach children about programming the fun way... by playing video games. And to think my first encounter with programming was Turtle Logo way back in the past. lol.

Wednesday is Deepavali holiday so I went for pool on Tuesday night with my best friend and Jedixus. My best friend kept commenting that it's surreal, cos 5 years ago while all of us were in contact, we would never have expected to be playing pool together now. I thought I spoke more with Jedixus this past week than I ever did all those years back. Life is funny sometimes.

I told a friend that I used to harbour thoughts of being (and nearly was) a xiao nu ren (Chinese phrase which literally means small woman, ie. meek subservient woman who will obey men and be contented). My friend snorted derisively and said the only way I could qualify for that now is cos of my built. Gee. Thanks a lot.

I really mean it though, but there's no turning back now. Nor do I wish to.

I mentioned before that, I would change the water tank on the mineral water dispenser (yes, nearly 20kg) when there are no male colleagues around. But this morning there was a male colleague in the pantry, so I asked if he could change the water tank please since it's emptying. He said "Later" and walked out without a backward glance. Wow. Even if you're busy, how much time will this rob from you eh? I looked down at my pencil skirt and heels, sighed and hauled the water tank to change.

Don't rely on others when you can help yourself.

Instead of mobile picture logos, my UK travel mate placed her mobile phone number on her mobile phone's display screen. She did it so that she wouldn't forget her own phone number. 'Nuff said. :)

My first memory of chewing gum. My mum offered me a stick of chewing gum when I was very young. She didn't have time to explain what it was before attending to something else in the kitchen. I scrutinized the stick of gum curiously, popped it into my mouth and promptly chewed and swallowed it. At this point in time, my mum turned to me and asked me to spit out the gum. I was puzzled and replied clearly "What gum?". My mum freaked out (she could imagine the wad of gum sticking to the insides of my intestines or something) and she never bought chewing gum again that I could recall. And of course it got banned here too later on.

I don't know why I have a sudden craving for it now.

After bringing my UK travel mate to buy Playmobil figurines (my evil influence is infectious, muahahaha!), we had dinner at Tanglin Mall and walked from there to Holland Village. Afterwards, I carried on walking home from Holland Village. I really miss walking for long distances. It's so therapeutic.

The book sale was selling books priced from $2 to $5 (hard covers) and I managed to buy 4 more. They're: Richard Hell's Go Now (likened to Jim Carroll's works for junkie roll & roll literature), Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late (on the origins of the internet), Jeff Gomez's Our Noise (sorta like Go Now) and my best buy of all, John Brockman's The Third Culture (a compilation of essays from scientists.. Chapter 23 is by Danny Hillis, the man behind the Millenium Clock). All at $2 each! :)

This makes 13 books this week. Woohoo.

I spent a lazy Sunday hanging out with my US and UK travel mates. Remember I blogged about not having gone on a road trip for ages? Well, we had one today while trying to locate the book sale at Alexandra Distripark. We went to the Keppel Distripark and the Pasir Panjang Distripark before we finally found the right place. lol.

Along the way, we were chatting and not really noticing traffic... till we found ourselves parked behind 2 stationary vehicles at a traffic junction though the lights had turned green. A pile of cars built up behind ours and my US travel mate considered honking the car in front. My UK travel mate exclaimed "Stupid driver" and we squinted ahead to check out what the driver looked like. Then we realised the car in front was empty. There was apparently an accident and the 2 drivers were discussing by the side of the road. At that moment, we all burst out in spontaneous fits of laughter. 3 hysterical friends in a car.. it's a beautiful day.

I just attended the outdoor acid jazz and DJ sets combo at Fort Canning Green. Basically, the gig is on a gentle grassy slope and the stage is at the bottom of it. People have to dance awkwardly on the slope in order not to slip, but it's still manageable. Sad to say I'm not really keen on the live sets from Incognito, James Taylor Quartet and Soul Bossa Trio, but I really enjoyed the DJ sets from United Future Organization and the Freestylers & MC Navigator (rapper and DJ collaboration). I missed some performances near the start though.

To summarize:
1. We sat on the slope behind a guy who kept smoking awful cigars, but didn't shift cos of the vantage view. We're stupid, yes.

2. We got so bored waiting for the last DJ set to come on at 1 am, we went to rest on a bench outside the men's toilet. For at least 20 minutes, we checked out the guys who visited the loo. There were 3 guys with dreadlocks. There was an asian guy who tried to sneak a caucasian girl into the men's toilet (cos there was a long queue snaking outside the women's toilet). The security guard caught them though.

3. Someone stole the purse of a musician from Soul Bossa Trio, and his/ her passport was in it. Freestylers' set was interrupted repeatedly by pleas for the return of the passport. I hope the passport was found and the musician managed to fly home in time.

As Hegemony pointed out, Blogger is making me play hide and seek with my archives. Reblogger's comment script hasn't been working for a couple of days either (yes you're right, I didn't email the creator for help like I should've. Well.) If you've got something you really wanna comment on, email me and I'll blog it in for you till the comment script decides to function ok? :)

Boston is like a nicely arranged four-food-group meal on Sunday china, and Seattle is a huge hunk of Microsoft barbecue with a few thawed peas rolling off the paper plate, but Silicon Valley, California, is not just a stew, it's a stew that never comes off the gas heat.
- from PO Bronson's book The Nudist on the Late Shift

Adults are just children who have learnt how to behave.
- Danny Hillis

I met up with a real old friend Jedixus last evening. I haven't seen him like for 5 years or so but recently we bumped into each other in Phuture on two consecutive Fridays. Surreal. It's a real small world isn't it? And he blogs too. lol.

Will you believe me if I say I just bought another 6 books today from 2 different book sales? And I'm still checking out the book sale I've mentioned previously on Sunday. Urgh. This book fetish is going out of hand. The combined thickness of the books I've bought this week alone have exceeded 30 cm! omg. The freaky things I do.

Taking the afternoon off to hit the gym with my UK travel mate. Then we'll go for a leisurely lunch and shop in town. Can't wait already. :)

I find less and less people do whimsical reading. Why is the general trend for those who read (and there aren't exactly that many) towards these "How to get rich?" manuals or thin pseudo-motivational "Who Moved My Bread and Butter" types? All this craze for buzz books which aren't balanced by other books which aren't wealth-generating. Very disheartening really.

A friend was telling me that it's important to fall for someone with the same "internal timing", ie. someone who marches to the same beat as you. Like calling someone up just when they're about to call you. Bonding instinct, shall we say?

Another gem of info from WhatIs.com.

"The Wayback Machine is a Web site that enables anyone to see what a particular Web site looked like at some time in the past - from 1996 to the present. This enormous archive of the Web's past requires over 100 terabytes of storage and contains 10 billion Web pages! The archive of pages was originally gathered by the owners of the Alexa program, a toolbar you can install on your PC that provides Web site information and ratings.

At the Wayback Machine site, you can search for and link to any of your favorite Web sites of the past and find them preserved very much as they were at various "snapshots" in time."

Out of curiosity, I searched for my own blog and the Wayback Machine actually has a snapshot of my blog from June 10 this year. omg.

Like this blog is a memory aid for me, the Wayback Machine is a memory aid for a generation. Incredible.

Am I your Mad Magazine?
skin trampoline
pin-up pinball machine
your fantasy girl
of puzzling parts
but none fits or starts
we match wits but not hearts
I'm heard but never seen?
- from Suzanne Vega's song Machine Ballerina

I met up with a girlfriend whom I previously studied German with. We had tea and caught up with each other, and she suddenly told me that I've matured. I've a sort of calm stillness about me now.

Where I used to be an exclamation mark, I'm now a full-stop.

Baking analogy at work. I brought bakers out to make a sales pitch today, and to customers who have never even tasted cakes before. I didn't bring the sales folks along cos I'd rather have bakers to answer techie questions on the spot, and we couldn't bring too many people.

I like making sales pitch with bakers. It's like this... while rehearsing the presentation, we would horse around and say stuff like 'Here is where I go blah blah'. On our drive to the customers, we blasted chirpy Japanese pop songs in the car and sang along nonsensically. But when we got to our customers' office, all the bakers would switch into their expert mode and be earnest and eloquent in presenting to customers. Amazing transformation. I really felt like laughing out loud in today's meeting at the incongruency of it all. Luckily I controlled myself and we wrapped it up, and drove back to the office this time bopping to Blink 182. We had fun selling, though I doubt we would clinch anything for this.

What's important is I really love the bakers for trying. They are the reason I love my job.

You could be reading your email through your eyeglasses or hearing your voice mail through your earrings.
- Charles Trentacosti, HP's vice president and general manager, Network Storage Solutions Operations, Asia Pacific, alluding to future storage trends.

Only a man will think that women will want to listen to voice mail from their earrings.

I'm not really awake yet. There's still a presentation this afternoon. Woohoo. Maybe today is the day to try coffee.

I've found out there's a books warehouse sale from 5th Nov to 31st Dec 01 (11am to 7pm daily, even on Sundays & public holidays). It's at Blk 2 Pasir Panjang Road, #06-26, Alexandra Distripark (PSA warehouse). Check it out if you've got time. I don't know what sort of deals or books are available though. :)

WhatIs.com explained about brain fingerprinting today. To summarise:

"Brain fingerprinting is a controversial technique that is advocated as a way to identify a terrorist or other dangerous person by measuring the "brainprint" of that person when shown a particular body of writing or an image that was previously familiar (such as of a training camp or manual). The brainprint is based on the P300 complex, a series of well-known brainwave components that can be measured. The technique is said to be more effective than a lie detector test."

What struck me first was the oxymoron name of this technique. I can just picture fingers sprouting from brains like plants. Not a pleasant image eh?

During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in the prison queues of Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear (we spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
I said, "I can!"

Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.
- extract from Anna Akhmativa's Requiem

I can't describe your pain but I can be your friend. Take care, keep safe.

The mobile bookfair near my office has probably made a fortune off me alone. If my life were a movie script, today would have been:

Cue Monday blues and woman passing by bookfair on her lunchbreak.
Close up on the resigned look on her face as she pretended to herself that she was merely browsing.
Zoom in on titles of books she bought: Susan Sontag's In America (always a sucker for books which win awards eh?); Michael Lewis' The New New Thing (also a sucker for Silicon Valley stories); and Allan Gurganus' Plays Well with Others (on New York and AIDS pandemic).

I seriously think I may have to take leave to read all my books.

Yesterday I was contemplating buying an anime boxset which has 80 hours of screen time. ttj pointed out that I probably didn't have 80 hours to spare to watch it through. He's right. At the rate I'm slacking behind everything, I'll have to take 8 days off and be disciplined enough to sit through 10 hours of episodes daily. Eh.

Today, B12, ttj and I went nuts over Playmobil. There's a shop in Tanglin Mall which sells them and we took turns to relive our childhood by buying Playmobil figurines. lol. On separate occasions, the guys bought firemen figurines (cos fire-fighting seems to be what they're doing at work). I must admit the firemen are way cooler looking than the chef figurine I bought (cos there's no baker figurine, and the chef looks like a baker... when he's not holding the dead chicken in his hand that is). Argh, but mine is a baking analogy. I did buy another tiny devil figurine which is really hilarious looking with a gap-toothed smile and little devil's tail poking out from the red cape. B12 even asked the store folks if the big Playmobil police figurine by the door is for sale (no it's not).

And if you don't know it, Playmobil figurines have evolved. You can now twist their wrists! *bliss*

My mum and I both like to eat bread, and our latest craving is for the bread from Breadtalk. We've been trying out different varieties and everything is great, cept for the deathdefying cough-inflicting pepper sausage bun (steer clear! that is one evil bun). My favourite bread moment is still those occasional mornings when we have ice-cream on bread for breakfast. Yes, strange but acceptable in my family. :)

Woman driving, man sleeping.
Wear the suitcase on the rack.
White lines shooting by,
on the pavement like the sky.
Looking straight ahead, into the black.

Woman driving, man sleeping.
There's no radio to play.
Sitting with the map,
laying crumpled on her lap.
Looking for the toll money to pay.

Man sleeping is man dreaming,
in a large apartment house.
Walking and knocking on doors.

Woman driving, man sleeping.
Passin' all the other cars.
Searching in the black,
but never turning to look back.
A little metal box under the stars.
- Eels' song Woman driving, man sleeping

Road trip. Haven't gone on one for ages.

I'm not sure how other folks buy CDs. For me, I have a convoluted purchasing process. It's going to be mindlessly boring so don't read further ok? You've been duly warned.

For eg, I bought 3 CDs today: Abandoned Pools' Humanistic, the Strokes' Is this It? and Eels' Souljacker. I've never heard of Abandoned Pools till sampling their album from Borders today, but the band name is itself an instantaneous draw. I just like the name and the image it conjures. Then I check out the band's pedigree, and realise that Tommy Walters (who was in the band Eels) is in it. The music isn't bad and I like the album cover (cartoon-like etchings of a guy in a red jacket on a white background). And I realise I've been acquiring too much dance music recently and it's time to realign back to pop rock. Thus is the first album bought.

On the same sampling machine rest the album by the Strokes. At this point I did a mental checklist about the Strokes. This album is critically acclaimed. The band is from New York (yes!) but the music doesn't grab me right away (no!). Well, cept for the title track Is this It?. But maybe this is one of those grow-on-you kinda albums? I'm not sure if you know, but there's 2 album covers for the same Strokes album. One is a black and white picture of a naked side profile, and a black gloved hand is resting on afore-mentioned naked posterior. The other album cover version is a sickly yellow background with weird stylistic loops. I hate the latter. Borders stock only the latter. So I didn't buy the Strokes there and decided to check out Gramaphone instead.

When I got to Gramaphone, I found that they stock the Strokes album with the cooler album cover so that kinda clinched it. Cos of Abandoned Pools, I decided to go take a look at Eels' latest album Souljacker. Then I recalled that John Parish (who collaborated with PJ Harvey before) collaborated with Eels on this album. Hmm. The words on the back of the album are fun too. See, fun people make good music. :)

And that's how the albums were bought.

I wandered down to Borders today and actually sat through the entire reading of Douglas Coupland's latest book All Families are Psychotic in 4 hours. I didn't plan to but I couldn't put the book down, so I really read it. No skimming. After that, there was no need to buy that book so I bought Tracy Kidder's House instead. Basically this book traces the building of a house from architectural floor plans down to the minute details in fictional form. And I still haven't read Soul of a New Machine,a previous book which I bought by this same author.

Just got home from my regular Friday night pool session with the guys. I'm blissed out to receive a lifetime membership card from my favourite pool joint tonight. :) What I really like is that they only printed my initials (2 letters) instead of my full name on the card. Actually, it's the only card I own which goes by my initials. My best friend retorted that I could choose any name to be printed on a credit card. He said we could choose the name 'Somebody Else' and ask for the bill to be charged to 'Somebody Else' everytime. Yes, I know it's corny. :)

Sometimes I think Pi is so powerful it should be made a swear word. Eat Pi and die! Pi you! Pi Pi Pi!

Some people count to 10 to control their temper. I recite Pi.

i needed a hand
but you gave me a glove
and so we carry on
in this masquerade of love

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment -
I wouldn't call it
happiness -
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.

it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.

to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade -
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror -
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.

what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.
- Charles Bukowski's poem how is your heart?

This poem says more than I ever could. I won't call it happiness either, but at least I'm not getting burnt.

Baking analogy at work today. To me, a good baker doesn't depend solely on how many cakes or the speed at which he bakes. A good baker has to be aware, like he has to sense if an oven is breaking down and bring it to other people's attention. He has to take note of how other bakers are doing and help out if necessary. He has to optimise the total number of good cakes the bakery can deliver.

Interested in the Singapore Film Society?

Yoyo is explaining to me about furniture music, ie. music that is more ambient than ambient. It literally fades into the background, soft and meditative.

Despite the General Elections, my friend's wedding at the Registrar of Marriage carries on this Saturday. Hope it doesn't rain then as it's doing the past few days.

Consciously or not, you can't doubt parents have a sense of humour when naming their kids. It's only to what extent they flaunt it.

... the second key overview concept of Java programming, "Not Caring". The less a building block of code has to care about what other blocks of code are up to, the less likely the bubble-gum bubble will burst. Code that "slopped" was code that was too interdependent, code that made the mistake of caring.
- from PO Bronson's book The Nudist on the Late Shift

The key concept is called code re-use. If a game is assembled from core blocks the shared blocks can be reused when an Internet user switches between games. It's sort of like being Spiderman for Halloween one year and Superman the next: you can reuse the blue tights and red boots and have to pop out to Wal-Mart only for a cape.
- from PO Bronson's book The Nudist on the Late Shift