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.

A few days ago, I somehow mentioned to my housemate that Malaysia has a significant minority of Indians. He was surprised, and was curious if they brought their own culture (from India) or assimilated into the existing culture.

He said he was interested because Australia is seeing a lot of Indian immigrants recently, and he is not keen on Melbourne turning into “Little India”.

This coming from a white Australian’s mouth is extremely ironic, because Australia is Little Britannia.

***

On another note, I have confirmed and paid for my air ticket back home. I’ll be arriving on the 30th of November and departing on the 3rd of January. This is probably a good time to start collecting reading material for the flight. Wuxia novels sound like a good option- the plots are sufficiently engaging and I read pathetically slowly. Also, downloaded and printed sheets do not take up much space.

***

The restaurant I work at might be redoing the menus to incorporate photographs of the dishes. And I’ll be doing the photos! Finally, my photography might have some commercial value after all.

Photos tomorrow!

Interesting reads

Updates - Beijing; Nokia 6510; Mother Goose Suite for piano duet

My family and relatives are going to Beijing at the end of the year. Twenty of them. I’d love to bring that number up to twenty-one.

To do that, I need to raise money for the air ticket and accommodation. This means I need to get a full-time, professional job A(F)SAP.

As a further incentive (apart from the trivially obvious merry-making with the cousins), May has promised that if I go, she will hand over her Nokia 6510 for a long term loan. I demand only three functions from a mobile phone- calls, text messages, alarm clock. This little thing from half a decade ago has the advantages of being aesthetically pleasant and having Snake 2 installed.



Who cares about colour displays, funny ring-tones and horrible little cameras?


***

And here is something from Monday’s concert at the music faculty. Due to the inherently short attention span of the internet-generation, only the highest energy portions have been posted.

Mother Goose Suite for piano duet by Ravel, performed by Bonnie Brown and Stefan Cassomenos (excerpts).


Watch those pedals!





Interesting reads

This is going to be one of those long entries. It will cover four main areas:

Kaya and butter toast
A meme from Politikus
A pointless composition
A brief notice on Saturday's puzzle

Kaya and butter toast

Speak of the devil!

After a light lunch of pork and century egg porridge, the entrée chef brought out two triangles of toasted sandwiches. Between the slightly browned bread slices was a rich, yellow solid, a huge chunk about 5 mm thick. That is a lot of cheese. I like cheese.

I gave it a second look. The cheese looked suspicious.

“Is this cheese, or butter?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be butter kua…” Shawna remarked.
“Stop asking and just eat it; you’ll know when you eat it,” the entrée chef pointed at the triangles with an exasperated look.

I wasn’t about to be a pansy and risk a wussy nibble; I took a bite. And 5 mm worth of butter was in my mouth. It was frightful. There was a tinge of kaya too. I like kaya.

It turns out that Shawna had taken an exploratory bite too, and there was a simultaneous eruption of horrified looks and various muffled phrases that effectively meant “OMG you actually used so much (hand signal- index finger and thumb opened to show an exaggerated gap of 30 mm) butter!”

I like kaya and butter toast, but 1 mm of kaya with 5 mm of butter is just preposterous. The chef had even defended himself with, “if it’s to sell we will give a smaller slice, but for ourselves, we can cut a larger piece.”





This is a later incarnation, severely toned down from the earlier 5 mm version.


***

A meme from Politikus

RULES:

1. If you read it, you’re tagged.
2. Post the Rules when you complete the meme.
3. Complete the five sentences below.
4. When you post the answers, leave five new sentences to be completed by your readers.


These are sentences from Politikus:
1. I have a pet monkey, he’d be called Vanker.
2. “You are so beautiful to me” is what you get when you search “you are so” on Google. Which is true, if suitably chosen pairs of “you” and “me” are used.
3. The world we live in is filled with bifurcations. And a few tossers.
4. One, two, three, four …erm, I lost count.
5. Crap! I saw hair growing out of a bee. Really.



Click here for large size image


And for anyone who bothers, complete the following sentences:
1. Ten years from now, this …
2. The oldest text message on my phone says…
3. The dentist said …
4. Two days ago, I would never imagine …
5. Tomatoes and herbs …


***

A pointless composition

The kitchen was quiet. The setting sun’s yellow rays, its intensity dulled by cloud cover, slides in from the western window, drawing elongated oblique shadows on the walls.

A light continuous breeze flutters through the open window, a blind hanging across the window sways lazily in the wind. Every few seconds, it knocks on the glass pane with a tiny “thunk”.

Over the sink, the tap’s valve was not tightened properly. An imperceptibly tiny stream of water seeps through the gaps in the valve, accumulating as a droplet at the end of the faucet. Beyond a critical droplet size, the water’s weight exceeds its surface tension force, and the droplet falls. It hits the metal sink with a dull plink.

I spoon my ginger, fish and century egg porridge slowly. Shadows from the sunlight become more acutely inclined, and the light starts appearing red shifted. The periodic tapping of the blind continues, as does the calming slow drip of water.

Cash registers, blouses for under $30, coffee shops and ice cream parlours, Price Waterhouse Coopers, SLRs, supernovas and black holes, nihilism, double-clutch heel-and-toe, greenhouse gases…they all do not exist here.

It would be nice to sit a while longer, but I had to work.

Occasionally, a faraway car’s gentle purr stirs through the windows. I finish my porridge and wash up.


The clock says 5.45pm.
“I’d better get going.”

10 minutes later, I was back amidst the cash register, bar and delivery orders.


***

A brief notice on Saturday's puzzle

And since there appears to be some mental activity on Saturday’s puzzle, I’ll postpone publishing the results for another 24 hours. If you don’t see the pattern by then, it will be too late.



Photographs

Interesting reads

The closed loop

Click here for large size image


In college, organic chemistry was my favourite subject. It was not because it was interesting, nor because it had real world applications.

I loved it because it appeared so difficult. The amount of equations, processes and reaction steps that one needed to know was frightful. Fortunately, I chanced upon an underlying structure (out of many others, no doubt) to all those migrating electrons and apparitional bonds. It should not surprise anyone- it was electro-negativity. Instead of relying on the brute force of memory, I had the periodic table to help me. The universe ceased to be a mystery- it was 42.

After that, I moved on, and went on to study mechanical engineering. Organic chemistry, although an interesting experience, appeared to have been nothing more than a sightseeing detour.

Three years later, a small part of organic chemistry finally became applicable in my life. I made chilli oil.



Okay, enough of that rubbish. I made chilli oil yesterday, this time a larger quantity that before, and with an interesting twist on the side.

Also ready is a small quantity of Szechuan pepper oil made by heating dried pepper husks (花椒) in very hot oil for about 10 minutes. The vat of chilli oil will be doped with a prudent quantity of pepper oil to give it a tinge of lip-numbing effect.




Click here for large size image

On a more personal front, my family and a large bunch of relatives (of about 18 people) are making enquiries towards a trip to Beijing somewhere this December.

2 days ago, they were having a dinner together when I exchanged a few text messages with my mother.

Having dinner in Renaissance Hotel with Chongs, Loongs and guests from Malacca. […] We all miss you.
Send my regards to them all. The grapevine tells me of a trip to Beijing. Sounds fantastic. Can you all please get me a quote too?
They say the same to you. By the way, quote for 1 or 2? (WTH...)
Don’t care 1, 2 or 9. Can get the quote in a quantity-invariant form, such as cost per unit participant.
To share a room is cheaper than single occupancy!!
That sounds something the aunts would say. Send her a snort and a grimace.
Ya, actually your aunts dictated that massage to me. Guess you know only too well how their minds work.
[...]
Stopped by at Sabrina’s house after dinner, just got back 1 hour ago. JLee came to sleep over, with just a toothbrush in her hand. She is so cute. Tomorrow we’re all going to Jonathan’s birthday.

Damn, how I miss their company. I’m going to Beijing.




Click here for large size image


Photographs

Interesting reads

Warning: very long, multi-section entry

Table of contents:

An eye-opener of a lunch
不礼貌之客 (no English translation)
Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral (photographs)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson


An eye-opener of a lunch

Lunch today was actually preset to Tai Ping Yang (太平洋) in Richmond. It is a popular Chinese restaurant, and apparently it is good. Upon arriving at the venue, its popularity was confirmed- there was a queue at the counter, and the floor was packed. It looked like a scene straight out of Hong Kong, complete with strips of juicy char siew (叉烧), hunks of crispy siew yuk (烧肉) and roasted birds hanging at the front window, and strangers sharing tables in a crowded eatery.

Precisely because the restaurant’s popularity was confirmed in such a resounding manner, I could not investigate claims that the food is good.

There was another interesting restaurant in the vicinity, with an extremely attractive name too: Chilli Paradise (辣翻天). The most interesting (read: shocking) dish we ordered was the 水煮鱼 (literally, fish cooked in water).

It came served inelegantly in a huge, thin-walled stainless-steel bowl basin. But that’s not the point, it’s the edible bits that is the point.



Click here for large size image

Slices of fish and bean sprouts come immersed in the basin-full of liquid. A large quantity of little red dried chillies float on the surface of the fluid. The fluid itself is not soup but…

*drum roll*

chilli oil.

The chilli is remarkable. Unlike the chillies we are accustomed to, this is a completely different animal plant. It is numbing- bite into a seed or whatever chilli fragment and the tongue takes on a tingling, numbed sensation. For a first timer, it feels extremely weird. However, it is not hot in the usual sense. There is no perspiration nor runny nose, avoiding the unpleasant scene of a wet scalp and dripping nasal fluids.

But that numbing spiciness is a real eye opener. It will rearrange your perception of the universe, assuming the sight of that pot of chillies hasn’t already done so.



Click here for large size image



The dish itself was wonderful. The fish was liberally rubbed with pepper before being immersed in the chilli oil. The bean sprouts gave a nice crunchy contrast to the smooth fish slices. The chilli oil had sesame oil and what feels like some (spring) onions. And it is not as frightening as it looks, so stop whining.

There was quite a lot of fish and bean sprouts hidden between all that chilli and oil, and at $12, it is worth every cent.

Very, very highly recommended, but only if you dig chillies. Otherwise, stay away.






不礼貌之客

今晚，有四个客人到餐馆用餐。

同事Gregory给他们点了菜、送了饮品后，跟我说他们很不礼貌。当时，我还没跟他们接触，就把Gregory的埋怨当为耳边风。

他们差不多吃完了，我去把他们的水杯装满。正倒着时，他们四人一点反应都没有。到完后，没有一个抬起头来，没有一声谢谢，没有一个人把手招一招。果然不礼貌。

我把空水瓶拿回bar去，见老板和Gregory在讨论着这四个客人。老板横着看了他们一眼，问起：“不知他们是什么地方来的？”

Gregory说：“应该是马来西亚吧。”
老板问道：“你又懂？”
“他们讲广东话的。”
“可能是香港嘞？”
我答：“一定不是，香港人的口音不是这样的。”
“新加坡呢？”

这继续了好几分钟，老板似乎希望着这几个人不是来自自己的母国。论了一会，发现他们都很像马来西亚人。这时，老板就开始才他们来自哪个州。

老板笑着说：“一定是马六甲啦！”他指着Gregory，仿佛他罚了严重的罪。
来自马六甲的Gregory反驳：“喂，又关我什么事？”


另一桌吃完了，我把他们的碗碟收回到厨房。手里拿着许许多多的盘，走过这四个客人。只听一声“卖单”，没有招手，没有抬头，没有“excuse me”。我转了身，向他们点头表示明白，便走向厨房去。走过bar时，我跟他们说声“3号要bill。”

搞好了那座得空碗碟后，我说：“真的过分。走过他们就‘卖单’的一声叫单。”
Gregory答：“我们知道。你走了进去他们还喊着卖单卖单。”
我的双眼自动得睁开了一些，半信半疑地“哈。。。？”了一声。

他们终于付了钱（没有小费）而离开（老板向他们说谢谢，他们没反应）。

老板：这些人，真的事。。。
一维：是啦。你刚才跟他们将在煎他们都不回答。
老板：最好是出去跌进水沟里。

老板：都是不要那么衰。踏倒狗粪就好了。大块的狗粪。
一维：又软又臭的。
老板：然后没有发现到，进了车弄得整车都是狗粪。
一维：不然回到家里，印到地毯上。
老板：而且是白色的地毯！



Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral (photographs)

From a particular entrance to my block of flats I get a clear view of the white dome of the Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, a Ukrainian Catholic cathedral in North Melbourne. When the sun is just behind the dome, it shines through it’s stained glass, and becomes a dramatic beacon.

Yesterday, I took a walk to the cathedral to have a closer look. It’s quite a magnificent structure.




Click here for large size image




Click here for large size image




Click here for large size image




It even has a lightning rod!



Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Some time ago, Michelle Chong recommended Cryptonomicon. It is a brilliant book. Below is a 2-page excerpt:



“Let me just demonstrate,” Waterhouse blurts, and strides out of the room and doesn’t bother looking back. Back in the church, he goes to the console, blows the dandruff off the keys, hits the main power switch. The electric motors come on, somewhere back behind the screen, and the instrument begins to complain and whine. No matter – it can all be drowned out. He scans the rows of stops – he already knows what this organ’s got, because he’s listened and deconstructed. He starts yanking out knobs.

Now Waterhouse is going to demonstrate that Bach can sound good even played on Mr Drkh’s organ, if you choose the right key. Just as Father John and Mr. Drkh are about halfway up the aisle, Waterhouse slams into that old chestnut, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, except that he’s transposing it into C-sharp minor as he goes along, because (according to a very elegant calculation that just came into his head as he was running up the aisle of the church) it ought to sound good that way when played in Mr Drkh’s mangled tuning system.

The transposition is an awkward business at first and he hits a few wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata into the fugue with tremendous verve and confidence. Gouts of dust and salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole ranks that have not been used in decades. Many of these involve big bad loud reed stops that are difficult to tune. Waterhouse senses the pumping machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The choir loft is suffused with a brilliant glow as the dust flung out of the choked pipes fills the air and catches the light coming through the rose window. Waterhouse muffs a pedal line, spitefully kicks off his terrible shoes and begins to tread the pedals the way he used to in Virginia, with his bare feet, the trajectory of the bass line traced out across the wooden pedals in lines of blood from his exploded blisters. This baby has some nasty thirty-two-foot reed stops in the pedals, real earthshakers, probably put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off power chords like salvos from the mighty guns from the battleship Iowa.

All during the service, during the sermon and the scripture readings and the prayers, when he wasn’t thinking of fucking Mary, he was thinking of how he was going to fix the organ. He was thinking back to the organ he worked on in Virginia, how the stops enabled the flow of air to the different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the keyboard activated all the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ visualised in his head now, while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftman’s view. Then it transforms itself into a slightly different machine- an organ that runs on electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He has the answer, now, to Turning’s question, the question of how to make a pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine so that it can be later disterred.

Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter to Alan immediately!

“Excuse me,” he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he brushes past a small woman who had been standing there gaping at his performance. When he is several blocks away, he realises two things: that he is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck her. But first things first!




中文文章

Photographs

Interesting reads

He learned, a little too late, that inter-personal skills are a critical part of living in a functional, semi-civilised human society. For many years, he had thought that he could float through the madness of life solely on the vastness of his library of technical skills. His beliefs were reinforced by the fact that he did manage to do exactly that at various institutes of education.

The fact that he had unknowingly developed symptoms of APD (avoidant personality disorder) over the past decade of his life only added to his recently discovered troubles.

Collectively, his behaviour, decision making scheme, surroundings and perception of the world formed a feedback loop, of which the result appears to be exponential in nature.


***

Anyway, enough about my story; lets move on to something more recent.



A long time ago, I had arranged to do shoot some portraits for the Head Chef’s family. Unfortunately, weather on that day was a bitch, and I got invited over for dinner instead. This matter was then forgotten as the seasons gradually chilled from autumn to winter.

Circumstances changed last week, and we arranged to do it yesterday. Despite the drizzles early in the afternoon, we went ahead with the plan.

Since we are doing digital, I just went berserk with the shutter button. Just like I always do anyway. By the end of the day, we had about 185 photographs. I removed the worst technically flawed (bad lighting, out of focus...) and printed the remaining 143 on 7 sheets of A4. Since they are properly numbered, I figure I’ll just give him the lot and ask him which ones he wants printed.

Thank the gods for batch processing on Photoshop.

It’s one of my first serious attempts at portraits, and I learned a great deal. The flash makes a huge difference. Natural light is nice, but a tiny burst will reflect off the subjects’ eyes, giving the eyes some texture.



I had a weird customer at the restaurant this evening. An elderly couple came in, the man looks East Asian; the lady, Caucasian. He spoke English with a strong twang of Australian; she sounded native.

He was in a light grey suit, the colour of battleships, with the front unbuttoned. Below that was a shirt of insignificant colour. The unbuttoned suit’s opening revealed a silk necktie, beige in colour with faint diagonal stripes of muted gold.

When speaking short sentences, he drew out the individual words, stretching them into long thin strands and then projecting them forth in a nasal voice.

I sent them their menus. He said, "good…."

Two interesting things: One, he did not say thank you. Two, he sounded like a Hollywood villain, pleased to hear that the second-in-command had successfully kidnapped the hero's pet alligator and even managed to rape the said alligator without suffering grievous emotional trauma. Grey Suit also sounded like Squealer from the 1990 film Animal Farm.



Tomorrow will be another interesting day. I’ll be meeting Diana in the evening for some photography, probably involving the sunset, infrastructure, cityscapes, waterscapes and rush hour traffic. If the sun plunges faster than expected, we might even have night scenes in the bag.

Will post photographs tomorrow.



Interesting reads

Untitled

Evening Sky(line)

That's St Paul's Cathedral on the right.


I worked the lunch and dinner shifts today. In the intervening hours between shifts, I went for a drink with Tony, the head chef.

On most days when I have double shifts, I tend to drink coffee with Tony. The first time, he paid for the drinks, so the second time around, I naturally bought them. A pattern emerged, and soon seemed quite natural to pay alternately.

We were waiting for the tram to take us into the city when we spotted Henny, a regular weekday lunch waitress. And yes, she’s Indonesian, hence the name. So Henny came along for coffee.



Conversation was awkward.

Imagine a situation where 2 multilingual people are talking in the language of their choice, say, Cantonese. They are then joined by another person who does not speak Cantonese, but operates well on another language they can work with, Swahili, maybe.

And so it is common courtesy to switch from Cantonese to Swahili so that no one is completely out of the loop, even though the first two may not be extremely well versed in Swahili.

Our situation was not quite as simple. Henny is good at Indonesian/Malay, ok with English, and not so good in Chinese. Tony, on the other hand, is good at Chinese, ok with Malay/Indonesian, and not so good in English. Yee Wei, on the third hand, is good at English, ok with Chinese, and not so good in Indonesian/Malay.

Represented in a grid, a matrix, a tensor:



Oh look, the tensor exhibits a diagonal trend!
Let’s try to represent this tensor in a more concise notation:



If you’re already thinking ‘what the fuck!’, worry not. I typed that exact phrase a moment ago before deleting it. Back to the matter at hand. Before going back to the matter at hand, I just want to say I feel empowered by symbols. Hence the triple-barred equality (congruence), inverted ‘A’ (for all) and rounded ‘E’ (that is/are an element of the set). Wait, another confession. I had actually thought of putting the Kronecker Delta into the definition, but that will spawn whole lot more complexity involving a third index, making the notation not concise at all.




That's Henny and Tony


In hindsight, it was amusing (the conversation, not the symbols). Complicated phrases and abstract concepts had to be parsed translated before full comprehension can be achieved all round.


***

Tracey：地板很脏了。扫都不干净。以前有几次我们把椅子全都叠在桌上，然后把地上拖干净。
一维：（混乱一会儿）哦，抹地是吗？
Tracey：啊对，你们叫抹地的。在国内我们说拖地。
一维：拖地。。。哪一个拖？是不是‘拖拉’的拖？
Tracey：（在纸上写了‘拖’这个字）
一维：哦，就是这个拖。（感到满意会读这个字，因为两天前刚习写了‘拖拉’这词）


老板：（对着Tracey，手里抓着的小盒子交给她）哪，这个你拿回去吃啦。
Tracey：哦，什么来的？
老板：甜酸鱿鱼。
Tracey：（拿了盒子）谢谢。
一维：（空闲得在纸上式写‘甜酸鱿鱼’。写了好久都写不出‘酸’这个字。）
一维：（把一大糊涂的纸张推给Tracey）怎么写‘酸’这个字？
Tracey：哈，这样来我可以跟你收学费的啦。
一维：你的要求很高吗？
Tracey：当然啦。要补回我考车不及格的钱，还有找不到工赚不到钱。


***

There is nothing interesting to translate here. Just a half hearted effort to write something. Brain not working; off to bed!

Photography

Personal

Mathematics

So, how long is this 'eternity'?

Eternity- an ever present concept (at least in the various religions)

Imagine the earth turned into a solid orb of steel- a smooth, shiny sphere, carbon-tinted silver in colour, drifting lazily in the emptiness of the inner solar system, catching the sun’s rays and reflecting them in all directions.

Also imagine a fly, an ordinary house-fly, with deep red compound eyes, its black exoskeleton tinged with an infinitesimal layer of shimmering metallic blue-green colour and on its thorax, delicate translucent wings that on closer inspection appear to be made of crystal grown from the finest crystal shrubs in the gently rolling hills of southern France.

This fly, ordinary in every sense except for its exceptionally long life, travels far and wide within the solar system. Every thousand years, it arrives at the earth- that gleaming orb of carbon steel- and stops for a moment to rest its crystalline wings, then flies off towards the baking heat of Mercury.

Over time, after countless landings, the fly’s legs have worn away part of the earth’s metal by the gradual effect of friction.

In due course, the earth would be completely worn away, and the fly would have to find another resting place along its interplanetary flights.

And yet, despite the unimaginable duration in the meantime, eternity is not yet halfway over. Why, it has not even started!


***

On a completely different note, I read an automotive magazine ‘Motor’ just a few hours ago. Or more accurately, I flipped through the publication half heartedly.

There was an article about the Lamborghini Gallardo. Crammed between the columns of text and graphics, were quotes from the article itself in bold, attention grabbing fonts. One of these quotes went,

The exhaust note barks with a visceral noise [...] like Kylie Minogue being ripped apart by a pack of wild dogs.

I put it back onto the shelf with disgust.

Having thought about the issue at some length, I’m still not sure if that sentence was brilliant or just plain crass. It’s either A (in which case the journalist and editors would deserve a Pulitzer, ignoring the rumour that the Pulitzer is a prize awarded for achievements in American journalism, literature or music) or F (where they would be condemned to licking fly legs for eternity) .


Personal

Hoorah for Boobies!

Whenever I have a camera with me and I see a decent flower, I have an urge to inspect it for its colour, shape, and the environment around it. The fact that my Deviant Art album of 62 photos contains 10 flower macros should suggest something.

On my last trip across the state border, we stayed at a nice house with a very well maintained garden, with bushes of magnificently coloured blooms. I looked around for the most well formed one, with the best colour density.

If anyone does not know that rose bushes have horrible thorns, well, they do. It’s impossible to snap them with your bare hands if you happen to be a pain abhorring creature such as me. Out came the Swiss army knife, and from that, out came the scissors.

The flower fell gently to the ground, whereupon a pair of metallic tweezers emerged from the same menacing Swiss Army knife. Gripping its thorny stem, the poor rose was rapidly whisked away, very much like a typical alien abduction scene.



untitled

Click here for large size image


In other news, I am looking for a new room to stay in. Now that I do not go to the university daily, I do not mind staying a bit further from the university and the city centre. The rental rates do tend to fall off further away from the central business district.

In yet other news, I have modified my flight back to Malaysia to the 19th instead of the 20th of January. The reason being there will be a family dinner on the 20th, a pre-CNY sort of a party. Mom’s side seem be able to find all sorts of excuses to have get-togethers, just make noise and have a ball. Suits me just fine.

The far sighted cousin May has already planned that we go to the Cheras night market on Wednesday for our very own mahjong set. That would so kick ass. And of course, to look out for fireworks and crackers, legal (as if!) or otherwise.

Closer to the present, I’m mostly packing up my belongings into boxes and the suitcase. So far, my collection of books and magazines has been sorted out into three sturdy 10 kg courier service boxes. When they are all boxed and zipped up, I fully intend to measure the dimensions of each packing crate, and thus find out how many cubic metres my three years are actually worth. The printer and 2.1 speaker set will add to the volume easily, but value wise, one proper text book (used) can easily out-value these two.



The phrase ‘second cousin, twice removed’ jumped into my head in a completely arbitrary fashion. It must have come from a latent memory, or my past life as a goat genetics analyst. Regardless, Google, in its infinite wisdom, revealed that a ‘second cousin, twice removed’ is a second cousin (sharing a pair of great-grandparents), but separated by two generations.

Both sides of my family being rather recent arrivals from China (4th generation at most), I haven’t seen one of those convoluted ‘second cousin twice removed’ characters yet.

I take that back. I realised I’ve actually got a large bunch of them, the 舅公’s and 姨婆’s, the many siblings of my grandmother who contribute healthily to the noise levels during those aforementioned gatherings.



Having given up packing for the day, I am now going to bed. The phrase of the day is, “Hoorah for boobies!” which you are supposed to shout at the top of your voice every so often.

Personal

New year's eve and other things

The keen reader would have noticed that yesterday, I said, “I hope to get some good photographs of pyrotechnics later tonight. Failing that, I can always snap bad photographs of pyrotechnics.”

Most turned out to be bad. As in bad bad, not ok lah bad.




I had somehow confused the aperture numbers, mistaking the largest (2.8) for the smallest (8.0) and thus was working with the aperture fully open. With great quantities of light washing onto the CCD, a mere half second of exposure would be more than enough, or the image would become a bit screwed up. Thus my shots were of spastic little light worms in the air, not magnificent tufts of hairy light balls as most decent pyrotechnics photos are.

And adding to add misery to misery, I let the camera use its autofocus. Unfortunately, it focused on the smoke instead of the light bursts if I click the shutter before the things actually pop. That wasted another lot of good opportunities.




Near the end, I finally realised my error with the aperture settings. And here they are, 2 decent images from about 100. It was crowded, but I’m quite sure the mess in KLCC and Bukit Bintang is much worse than this.




Enough talking about crap photos; I saw a rather cool paragraph from Saffron:

I hope the contortion of my features passed for joy and happiness, cos (not so deep) inside all I could think of was, "Please, if there is a god, kill me. Kill me now."

Oh look, I didn't die.

In slightly related news, the index sheet for my graduation photos have arrived. From this proof sheet of 6 images, I can place orders regarding the prints I want, how many of them in which sizes et cetera. They are fucking expensive; I’ll probably just get some mid-sized prints and send them back home for my parents.




A 3.5 x 5 inch print costs $25, and the range topper is the 24 x 16 on canvas for a cool disgusting $360. Of course there are the usual packages where you buy a predetermined quantity of prints at a slightly more decent, but still obscenely unfair price.

But the photographer who did us was quite good. It’s very hard to get me to smile for photos- I tend to feel stupidly artificial, facial expressions contorted in a dumb grimace. That’s one of the reasons I’m rarely in photos; usually it's me manipulating the camera.


Personal

Vanilla Ninja; Russian mail order brides

I’m over the moon.

Having seen Vanilla Ninja’s performance at the 2005 Eurovision, and being rather impressed by them, I obtained (not purchased) their latest album, Blue Tattoo. The band members’ degree of prettiness had nothing to do with my enjoyment of the album- it was audio, not video.




[image source]


Sometime ago I decided to look for their earlier album, Traces of Sadness.

[Unnecessarily long sob story truncated.]

This afternoon, I found two torrent files, one from a German torrent site, and another from a Polish site. The download rates for both files were pathetically slow, to the order of less than 0.1 kb/s. At this pace, I’d never get the 70Mb downloaded.

It did appear that if I really wanted this album, I will have to pay money for a genuine CD to be flown into Australia. The CD itself would cost £7.96, US$27.96, £7.10 or €15.00, depending on which retailer you ask, not including the shipping of £3 to US$5.49 to £7, depending on who is mailing it. That’s the problem with Estonian bands- you can’t buy their albums from your friendly neighbourhood music retailer even if you wanted to (in these parts of the world anyway).

Sigh.

When I came back from (a nice Japanese) dinner, I noticed that one of the albums had finished downloading. [various exclamations] In the two hours I was away, the download rate must have experienced a delta function-like spike and finished the file. Wheehehehe...

Email me at bare_proton@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll send you two tracks.


***

In searching for those torrent files, I came across a Russian site. I could not make anything out (I don't know Russian), except for a link that said "Russian mail order bride". I simply had to click on it. HAD TO.

Now you can send email messages to ladies even if they do not have a computer! Why wait 6-8 weeks for a response by post, when you can have a message translated into Russian and delivered to the lady in a few days.

We provide various services to make your contact with mail order brides most efficient. You can send flowers to the lady of your choice, get acquainted with hundreds of women during our tours, and even order a Fiancee Visa Kit for your soul mate. To start corresponding with ladies you need to register, and get either a simple or an executive search account.

Her response is then translated into English and sent to your own, confidential "mailbox" on Anastasiaweb.com´s secure Email Server.

Your love and romance starts here!

These things really do exist! So if you see me hanging out with an Eastern European girl in the future, you'll know what happened. Pfft...

click click click





Personal