Five Minutes With Me.



I can't remember exactly when the last time i cried was. Um.. i mean i can't remember exactly when the last time i cried before yesterday. Last few days were the pits for as long as i cared to remember.



There are many things i like to say, but very few that i could put to words. Even fewer that i wish to put to words, for i do have an inkling of who might read this blog. Suffice to say, people who had been in my life, carries a deep impact on me. And the deepest wound could only be inflicted by the female species. Rest assured my friends, that what i speak off is not death... and well... not love too i think.



Why am i writing all these? Well, coz i think i need to talk to someone, even if that someone was a computer. My friends, do not be alarmed if i choose not to explain to you what this blog entry is about. It doesn't mean i treat you as less of a friend, it only indicates that i am not comfortable with talking about it.



This would be the last entry for now. I can't think of anything to write with my current state. I need time to... i don't know what i need time for but as someone wiser than me once said, "Time heals everything." That is if anything is broken at all :)



So long and take care. Cheers.

Kyu do har. muga muga ooga ya. Boly buta namek jon jon har.



Did i just say some gibberish? i think i need more sleep... these assignments are killing me, literally.

I like to talk abit on last friday's article on 'The Darkside'. Kudos to anyone who figured out what was happening. The last line of the article actually had this "...and to stroll the lonely path of the darkside.", which is kind of a contradiction to what was being said earlier "...perhaps it's the friends we keep,...". As such i have changed the wording into the current "...and to stroll the twisted path of the darkside."



Also of notable mention was the phrase "...the day when people decide to let faith decide over fate." It is actually a very subtle pun of one of my cousin's friendster lines which i think even he wouldn't recognise if he read this. The line was found in his 'Who you want to meet' section and was written as "Let faith decide", which i figure is a wrong spelling on his part. I think he really meant "Let fate decide".



So much for now, back to assignments.

ping

I saw some bits of a show done by a magician called David Blaine yesterday. If you do a search on his name you come up with loads of stuff about his feats. It turns out that he don't just perform magic tricks, his feats includes extreme tests of the human endurance. His endurance that is.



The bits i watched was on two feats which he called 'Frozen in Time' and 'Vertigo'. Abit on 'Vertigo'. In this feat, he stood on a 10 storey pole in new york for 35 hours with no safety belts or safety nets. At the end of 35 hours, his team brought in loads of empty boxes for him to drop and fall into. End of one simple but extremely diffcult feat.



In an interview with one of the passerbys in new york, the passerby said something like this "...new york is a busy city of commuters. People moving from point A to point B, point B to point A... it's difficult for people to stand still for even five minutes, and this guy is standing still for 35 hours in the middle of new york city... what he is doing is something great for this city"



Hmm... standing still. Perhaps the next time we encounter a problem, we should stand still and try to make some sense of what is happening. Do something for ourselves, if not great, atleast enriching.

Just a little thought. If ever any of you were in a grading system of A, B, C, D and you got a D for your subjects and i said "Wow, that's good", don't feel offended, it was not sarcasm. Coz the grading system over here is HD(high distinction), D(distinction), C, P, N. Whenever i hear a 'D', my first thoughts would be Distinction :)

Have a nice good friday and a good easter. cheers ;)

The Darkside



If you hang around with me long enough, you would have definitely heard me talk about the advantages and disadvantages of being good and bad. It usually goes on as something like this; the good guys loses all the time, they lose all but the last time. The bad guys, on the other hand, wins all the time, they win all but the last time.



Of course, many goody two-shoes have been pro good-guys and religiously believe that the last and only time they win, they would win with a big bang. Personally, i am not a guy for flashy endings, so while i'm at it, why not win all the time eh?



To further investigate the validity of the said hypothesis, where bad guys win all the time, i ventured into friendster and into the valley of the shadow of death. It was a chilly night, under the watchful eyes of the stars, at a time when the traffic was still whizzing past, but late enough for the pavements to be bare.



I saw a little girl walking along the road seemingly mesmerised by the lights from the lamposts. She keeps her head real low, staring at the long shadows casted on the ground and a tiny smile creeps to the corners of her mouth as she fiddled with playful thoughts.



Not willing to interupt her reverie, i continued my venture, until i came upon a guy carrying a gundam manga. An average guy. Someone with average grades living an average life. But appearances are deceptive, for after chatting him up, i quickly learned that he was the meanest sonofabitch in the valley who feared no evil. Impressed i was. Even the average guy could become the meanest of 'em all.



Further on i ventured, and more happenings came to be. I saw a raven enraptured by madness unable to flee from it's opened cage. It was trapped, not by the barriers that lay before it, but by the state of madness that the northern wind recites. "Madness is not a state of mind, but a choice a mortal made in life." the raven said. Didn't make much sense to me, but couldn't expect much more from a mad raven.



There were those who sold their souls for love, those riddled with vengeance, and those simply incapable, devoid of the chance that the good guys denied. Perhaps all these would change. That could be the day when people decide to let faith decide over fate. Or it could be the day where witches rises from the graves and angels falls from the skies.



At the end of the venture, just as my cousins were going to kill me for stealing their friendster lines, i met yet another girl.



"What's cute, bubbly, cheerful, smart, intelligent, friendly girl like u doing here?" i asked of her.



"Looking for frenz lor... duh... this is 'friendster' rite?" the girl replied, her exact words.



Then i realised, perhaps it's the friends we keep, that urge us to win all the time, to overcome the last but crippling defeat, to be scorned by the so called good guys, and to stroll the twisted path of the darkside.

Here's a riddle for ya. There's a house with two levels. You're facing three switches in a room in the lower level. One of the switches controls a light bulb in a room in the upper level. If you plan to go up the stairs only one time, how would you determine which switch controls the light bulb.

Sidenote: There's no way you can look into the upper level room from downstairs.



This is actually more of a creative thinking exercise than a riddle. I learned of this in one of the R&D classes back in poly where the lecturer used it to tell us about paradigms and mindsets. "Think in more than one dimension" he said. No, i wasn't supposed to go for the class, but i stole into the lecture room. I'm after all the bandit :)

Nondescript. Today can only be described as nondescript :)

Today is a rather different day. I finished my shower with a spider in the cubicle... But this spider was different, it was one of those with long spindly thin legs. Anyway, since i was already wet when i noticed it sticking on the wall, i couldn't be bothered to go get the vacuum cleaner to eat it up.



In fact, i think i spared more than one spider today. Coz after my shower, i noticed another spider, also long spindly thin legs, sticking on the wall very close to my shower companion. Since spiders are territorial carnivores, it is my guess that their close proximity and identical species probably meant that they were making babies... um... i mean eggs. Yeah, that means i probably spared close to a thousand and two spiders today :D 'Ur me tor for'... but then, i'll probably feed em to the vacuum cleaner later today :p



I just remembered another person whom also delights in killing spiders. And this person, or rather cat, is none other than Garfield. I still remember my younger days when every t-shirt i owned has Garfield on it. Though some of you would notice the evolution to bossini/giordano t-shirts. Haha, survival of the fittest... they gonna hafta survive my fashion taste... take that Darwin.



I guess gone are the days of Garfield t-shirts and people calling me Garfield, for eating and sleeping alot while doing little at the same time :)



So much for now, and praytell that the spiders/spider (spiders are cannibalistic ya noe, especially the female after mating) have decided to spin their web somewhere beyond the reach of the ravenous vacuum cleaner.

I've set this blog to show only 9 days of posts on the main page. Apparently, it's showing more than it should. Anyone have any idea what's not working?

I played pool yesterday and today. It had been quite awhile since i played pool. One of the guy i played with was actually my neighbour... and he didn't know that until i told him... guess i need to get out and socialize more :) oh well, we'll c.

cheers.

Dissecting Lies



I can't remember when the last time i lied was. Not very long ago i'm sure. Everyone lies a little sometimes. I've seen people living in a perpetual lie, where they think they're fat when they're not. Kind of like me thinking i'm extremely gorgeous, ya noe :)



Investigating into lies, I find that a lie could be hypothetically identified by several aspects. Consider the following scenarios.



Scenario One

I'm walking with my friend and i point and say "Look! That tree ate up a little boy." Then my friend turns to look and i proclaim "April's Fool!"



Scenario Two

I'm bored with nothing to do. Then my friend calls me and asks me some questions about his assignment. Not willing to help him, i told him that i'm busy with something. (Don't worry, this never did occur. I always help people with their assignments, if i can. This is only a hypothetical scenario.)



The most basic aspect of a lie would be the purpose of the lie. (No, this is not like the matrix where all things have a purpose and should expire when the purpose is fulfilled. I'm neither a fortune teller nor a doom sayer :p) The purpose of the lie in scenario One is to solicit an activity from my friend, the act of looking at the tree. The purpose of the lie in scenario Two is to solicit the lack of activity from my friend, in that i don't want him to pester me further.



The second aspect would be the intentions of the lie. Although the scenarios are common in that the intention to lie is present in both. The flavor is definitely different. One has the intention of introducing humor while the other has the intention of being unhelpful.



These aspects of the lie, while interesting, is not sufficient in quantifying the severity of a lie.



Scenario Three

I tell a friend i'm in trouble and asks for a monetary loan. After getting the dough, i disappear.



The third aspect of a lie would be the kind of harm done. Consider the above scenario, and without going into lengthy issues of debating what is moral, we'll treat the scenario as immoral. The third scenario has the intentions of benefit and not only solicits an activity (the act of forking out dough) from my friend but also causes financial harm to him. From this perspective, it then is possible to quantify the severity of a lie if it were proportional to the kind and amount of harm done.



Another aspect is forgivability (Yup, no such word). Forgivability is not inversely proportional to severity of a lie. Although severe lies are usually hard to forgive, there are also non-severe lies which are also hard to forgive. How so? One possibility is incessant lying.



Do note however that even if a lie is forgivable in the forgivability range, it might not be forgiven. This would be due to properties that reside beyond the lie, how easily the person being lied to forgives. However, this would be beyond the scope of this article.



There are issues that are not the properties of lies but figure rather importantly. One of these issues is trust. Levels of trust would depend on the intentions and severity of the lie. Similar to forgivability even if a lie is not trust breaking, it can cause the loss of trust, which again is not in the scope of discussion.



So please do consider these issues and forgivability of the lie the next time a seemingly severe lie is about to be made.



Oh... this article is dedicated to a couple of my friends, with a rather unique habit.