Screw titles, I don't do titles

Skyline

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Today, the old warrior and myself inadvertently made a pair of disclosures that were so ironic that they “felt like a counter-backthrust.” The situation is so unique that to mention the nature of the irony here would point towards the source of interest as surely as an iron(ic) compass needle towards Magnetic North.

What happens when you have a set of three entangled differential equations? Just like the three-body problem in celestial mechanics- chaos.

Perhaps when all of us are no longer chaotically entangled, we will still be sane enough to look back at this day and laugh our asses off over glasses of teh-o-ais limau. I will buy the both of you teh-o-ais limau; mark my words.





Eureka Tower
Melbourne's greatest erection and tallest building


***

So Chan Yu Mei has dropped a little parcel bomb my way, which is probably a good thing because this page has been so devoid of words it’s starting to look like I’m illiterate.

5 things found in your bag:

- it sometimes holds my lunch and a pair of fork and spoon
- it frequently holds my gym clothes
- when I was still waiting table, it held my working shirt and black shoes
- now and then, when I don’t need the camera bag, it carries my optical instruments.
- a long time ago it held my sparring gloves


5 things found in your purse/wallet:

- HK$ 100.00
- AU$ 54.35
- RMB 11.50
- RM 5.00
- US$ 1.00


5 favourite things in your room (my room does not hold much so I’ll look at the house):

- the vegetable knife
- the meat knife
- the silicon-carbide sharpening blocks
- the chopping board
- the 320 Gb external hard disc drive


b5 things you're currently into:

- pseudo-boxing
- optics and photography
- the knife arts
- getting into a semi-trance like mental state
- coffee. definitely coffee

Click here for large size image

There goes the weekend, pranced past in the multi-coloured blur of a magnificently huge dim sum brunch, cleaning and rearranging the house, endurance racing on GT3, time wasted waiting for late trams and idle time-wasting in general.


***

Tan Yee Wei asked me what I'm obsessed with:

Knives
Optical instruments
GT3, for now

I’m not tagging anyone.


Perhaps we should fleetingly introduce this confusing character who has the same name as me, the one who said, “Gah... my email's [address removed]. Now I know who took the other tanyeewei.” She’s female; I’m not.

[truncated]
I’ll come over and marry you tomorrow
Haha
...
Nono, can’t do that
There’d be problems with the name
Yup
It will drive the guests mad
Haha
The bride and groom's sides will sit haphazardly
I think it will drive us nuts too

The scope for daft jokes is quite vast.


***

On optical instruments, I received my recently ordered lenses, a Super Takumar 135mm f3.5 and a Jupiter-9 85mm f2.0.

And there they are, the 85mm Soviet copy of the German Carl-Zeiss Sonnar, and the Japanese Super-Takumar 135mm. Note the minimum focal distances of 0.7 m and 1.5 m are closer than what most zoom lenses can give.

The Super-Takumar has six aperture blades (resulting in the hexagonal aperture when partially closed) while the Jupiter-9 has...

Ah yes, the Jupiter-9 has 16 aperture blades, resulting in a hexadecagon aperture. By the way, you will need your fingers and toes to count the aperture blades. Unless you are a male with three 5-fingered hands...


***

The first two minutes of the GT3 intro scene is superb. With various views into an operational engine block, it’s sure to get any petrol head’s blood running. I especially love the scene with the invisible engine block, pumping pistons, combusting fuel mixture and running cam shafts- it nearly always brings tears to my eyes, and I can watch it over and over again.

Justifying this page’s existence

Every now and then, the topic of the aims of blogging crops up. I might as well do mine now.

Why I do it:
To show off that I can take photographs, that I know my mathematics, that I can handle non-classical physics, that I can write rubbish. In other words, attention whoring.
To keep my idea organisation and presentation skills sharp
To practice my Chinese
As a dump for the dirty thoughts that would otherwise clog up my cranium
To let friends and family (those that read anyway) know I am still alive and doing things


What I have gained from this little game:
Met a few more people: Diana, Jean, Pamela, Wuching, Yvy
Got myself a job
Reading those interesting people on the right


A bit more about the job hunt adventure:

The advertisement said they were looking for someone with "technical and presentation skills". For the interview, I printed the following articles as my portfolio:

A general handwaving guide to digital photography
The JFE 8555 problem revisited- digital roots
Experimental results on the Panasonic DMC-FZ30’s macro focal distance and magnification factor throughout its zoom range
Floor cleaning algorithms
Intake Horns- an excerpt from the draft of 'Automotive Engines'

“This paper is on pure mathematics, number theory. It proves that digital roots can be obtained by summing digits in any order. And this is one on automotive engineering. It is presented at a level suitable for an interested non-engineer. It also shows my idea presentation skills, where the concepts are incrementally changed to transform intake manifolds into induction horns. And this is a guide to photography written with minimum technicalities [blablabla…]”

I got the job.

(this section is a good example of ‘showing off’)



Interesting reads

Fresh new look; same girly colours

A few hours were spent here designing, coding and reverse engineering HTML templates.
I did not feel particularly inclined to editing a mass of background images, and thus decided to work on a less graphics intensive layout.

The downside of this is the need to plunge into a huge ream of symbols. I came back out alive and armed with better CSS style sheets manipulation skills.

The three strawberries at the top might be replaced with a lavender and strawberry shot to match the link colours and the cover of “Good Writing Guide”.

This started off as an aimless rant. But i found something that changed my mood.


OMG OMG OMG, I just found something that would make life easy for this nerd blogger. Observe the following characters (not images)

∀ x ≠ 0, x ∈ ℜ, ∃ y ∈ ℜ, y = 1/x
For all x which are non zero and real, there exists a real y that satisfies the equation y = 1/x

A few more interesting symbols:
ℵ - Aleph, used to denote the cardinality of various infinities
∂ - partial differential of
∫ - integral
≅ - is congruent to
≈ - is asymptotic to/ is almost equal to
≡ - is equivalent to/ is congruent to
≥ - is greater than or equal to
∝ - is proportional to
∞ - infinity


<rant>

Can you just feel the personality of this blog sapping away? That's not the important thing; but it implies that I am losing my edge/ mind. Where are the stories, the descriptive narrations, the Chinese posts?

If it's not photographs, it's some mad-scientist entry. The next entry will probably be a fusion of statistical thermodynamics and a pinch of chemistry. Goodness, who the hell blogs reads quantum physics and statistical thermodynamics posts anyway?

And have you noticed how I can never be satisfied with my state of mind? Sometimes I weep at my lack of Chinese proficiency, then I complain about my decline in technical articles, or I bitch about too much bad photography, now I'm ranting about too many technical articles.

Not too long ago, I was lamenting that I had not written anything technical. If past trends can be used as a guide for future behaviour, I think I'll get my muse back in a few months and produce loads of half decent writings. Then I'll probably go on about my lack of photographs...

</rant>


Anyway, here's a photograph. I discovered that it was extremely simple to climb onto the roof of my block of flats. With a tripod and some copyright infringements, I produced a 360 degree panorama.




Click here for large size image (remember to scroll sideways)

So, who are you?

Forgive my temporary flash of narcissism, but I am curious about the people who read this blog.

So, who are you? Drop a note in the comments section.

Any quick remark will do, like:

Hi I am Carl Friedrich Gauss, and I am a professor at the University of Göttingen. I find your inconsistent Chinese posts useful for my learning of a new language.

Or something completely irrelevant like

What's brown and sticky?
A stick.

To the comments box!

Futtprints is back online

Foot Foot's photoblog Futtprints was the first photoblog I discovered, in the era when the Saffron was still actively publishing. Yes, Saffron probably is still my favourite blogger, even if she’s retired from the scene.

The photographs by Foot Foot are refreshingly varied, with macros, scenery, portraits and what appears to be street photography. The sepia photos depicting everyday life in our towns and cities are particularly enchanting; especially those that manage to convey a quiet, historical stillness about them.

In the middle of the year, Foot Foot’s photo entries slowed down to a trickle, and then stopped entirely. It was frightful.

Anyway, she is back with what she calls a “sweet little thing”, in fact a Canon EOS 350D Digital Rebel. Yeah, now you realise that envy actually has a pressure that builds up in the cranium.

BMW Williams F1 team inspired template

Do the colours look familiar?


My brother modified his template recently, with a black/orange theme reminiscent of the eye catching but now defunct Orange Arrows F1 team.

Then Yvy mentioned that she would change her template earlier today. “How about this, you change scenery I change backdrop?” I asked her. She did change her template, so here I am.

[paragraph edited 6pm 18 Nov 05]
The header sucks. Pink will probably be back in a week or two unless I can cure the horrid splatter of colours. The header no longer sucks. Just threw out the complicated agglomeration of blue rectangles and now it's clean.


PS- the launch car looks impotent. They should have dailed in some (visible) negative camber into the front tyres to make it look more honest.

[edited 6pm 18 Nov 05]
PPS- This page was designed using Firefox. It looks a little retarded in IE. I don't care, "I'm going to snub IE."

Holy cow! That's me in here, as the Ghost Hunter. Brilliant name, no?

It's probably not going to make much sense unless you start right from the beginning of the story. Here is a list of chapters. Read them; they're worth your time.

I have no idea how I ended up in that tale. A big thank you to plink. Yes, spelled with lowercase characters.

New layout

25th October:
The original contents of this post is now void. I've reverted back to the standard decaying-strawberry hue of pink.


To be honest, it's not really new seeing that its a standard Blogger template but with a few modifications. I'm not very satisfied with it. In particular, the boundary between the main column and the sidebar is not present. As such, the jagged right edge of the text block forms the boundary, making for a rather messy appearence.

I also fiddled with the image borders. I think it's for the worse. Bleah.

In all honesty, the usual pink layout will probably return with no changes. I basically did this because my fingers were itchy.




Personal

Word verification is now on

That’s it. I’m retiring from this mess.

In the past, I tolerated the odd spam comment or two. It was too much work to have to do the word verification thingy every time someone wanted to make a remark.

It was also a bit of fun coining insults to throw at those spam automatons.

However, they seem to be rather prevalent of late. As such, word verification will be turned on.


Sample insults I’ve come up with:

Illegitimate half-bred child of a hairless goat... go sodomise yourself with a fork.

I have a FREE tip for you. Train your pet iguana to sew with blunt, rusty needles and coarse nylon thread. Then, request that the cold blooded creature sews up your anus. Subsequently, recruit a horse to forcibly rip it open with its huge horse dick. Repeat.

You wank using 2 fingers.


[Edit 6.17pm 4th October 05]

The party responsible for all my recent problems has the following details:

Country: Canada
City : Ruchmond Hill, Ontario
Organisation : Rogers cable inc. mtnk
IP address : 69.196.38.11
Visit length : 00:00:15
Referrer URL : bookmark
Species : hairless androgynous goat

At the top of the pecking order

Of late, I have seen a good many visitors dropping by via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. The search terms, and their frequencies:

kongkek	23
KONGKEK	2
arithmetics	2
(mathematics)	2

Kongkek? Yes, I had a post that contained that word, but still, the abrupt influx was puzzling. A quick investigation on Google explained it all- my blog is in the first results page if you search “kongkek” in Google. A few days ago, I was in the third spot. Today, I’m at the top!

The top of the kongkek pile.



A public expression of thanks to Adrian for his curiosity and thus pointing out that I'm at the top spot today. If you are wondering why he was searching "kongkek" in Google, you would have to ask him.

Click here to search kongkek on Google.




*kongkek – Malay for intercourse/fornication.

Blogging in Malay, because everyone is doing it

Among my many traits, I am sometimes a weak minded person. Without a rational mind to think ideas through in an objective manner, I usually end up making weird choices.

I also have a strong inclination to be in the ‘in’ group. I have a tendency to do things just so I am not left out. Thus, I am an easy prey of mass hysteria.

As a consequence of the above two qualities, I am opinion-less like a hopeless strand of lalang in the brutal embrace of Katrina. If digital pets are the thing to have, you will see me with several of them beeping around my pockets.

As a direct effect of the above three attributes, I will be blogging in BM tomorrow (31 August). I am doing it because almost every other person is doing it. I want to be cool. I want to be accepted.


Do not take the above paragraphs seriously.

Since it’s our National Day tomorrow, since it would be interesting to write in Malay for a change, and since everyone else is doing it anyway, tomorrow’s entry will be in Malay.

My linguistic skills are not top notch. As such, do not expect anything of decent quality at all tomorrow.

Adaptive (sort of) comments tag- code

Continued from here.

I can't get the HTML code to be displayed. The instructions saved as a *.txt file available here.

[Yvy has highlighted a problem: the code cannot be shown by certain browsers because IE will automatically read the stuff and execute the instructions given in the code. Firefix users should be fine. Solution: switch over to Firefox lar...what are you guys waiting for? For your 4 grilled chicken wings? Anyway, IE users, "Save target as..." and save codingexercise.txt to your hard disc as a txt file. Make sure you change it from HTML to txt format. IE is fiddly. I'll see if i can get browsers to display the code. Maybe tonight... Also, come to the dark Firefox side.]

The variable a represents the number of comments. The various if conditions are such that if (condition) is true, {do something}. If (condition) is not true, proceed to next (condition). The last one is a simple else {do this}.

I have not tried these, but it might be possible to design more complicated conditions, such as:

if (a%2==0)
-> If a divided 2 has remainder zero (implies that a is an even number)

if (a!=5)
-> If a is not equal to 5

if (a==3 || a==7)
-> If a is 3 or 7
-> With ||, at least one of the conditions must be satisfied

if (a>=10 && a<20)> if a is greater than or equal to 10 AND smaller than 20 (for a = 10, 11, 12... 19)
-> with &&, both conditions must be satisfied

For more information.

Adaptive (sort of) comment tags

I've modified the java code (presumably its java...) to adapt to the number of comments, n.

n=0 -> No food ordered
n=1 -> 1 bowl of laksa
n=2 -> 2 glasses of teh tarik
n=3 -> 3 cups of coffee
n=4 -> 4 grilled chicken wings
n=5 -> 5 bowls of rice
:
:

The current version is a purely experimental one, and only runs up to ## (I'm not disclosing my limitations. Yet)

The code will be coming shortly.

And no, I am no glutton. It's just that most readers are Malaysians, and most Malaysians have a thing (or two) for food.