jia_han

My progress report says: "Jia-Han has been away from school for most of the year participating in the International Maths, Physics and Informatics Olympiads.  He will certainly do very well if he starts to focus on his 'A' levels."


:O

 Why don't smartphones come with hard disks?  I'd rip all my CDs with ALAC if I had an 80GB iPhone.  I rip at 256kbps (some of the older stuff is still in 192) and already I'm pushing the disk capacity.  Considering how the old iPod Classics came in 120GB flavours a cap of 16GB seems an unpardonable regression.

I've switched the layout to a light background / dark text theme for improved legibility.  If I had the time I'd rewrite the CSS to remove the annoying bar on the left and reclaim the horizontal screen real estate but eh.

Especially when I'm (well my mom is anyway) paying by the cubic centimeter.


Maybe if they had filled the container with those little styrofoam pebbles they might have been able to claim that they did it to cushion the fragile contents, but no.  They stuffed a small cardboard box into a big cardboard box and that was that.  I'm sure the vpost bill wouldn't have exceeded $25 if they hadn't been so generous with the packaging, rather than the $42 (after a 15% discount) it stands at now.

The amazing thing is, after all the postal shenanigans it still costs significantly less than the retail price here.  How they can get away with it I have no idea.

Too bad there isn't student pricing for cat 3 tickets.  I want front row seats damnit.  Now I'm going to be relegated to row Y/Z for 3 of the 4 concerts, forced to subsist on the distant echoes.

The right earpiece of my er6i is screwed (operating at half-volume).  Good thing I kept the receipt properly this time.  Why do all my headphones die after a few months?  I've killed 3 $100-$200 headphones over the past couple of years.  The only ones still working are my gigantic Sennheiser cans, although at this point it's pretty much held together with duct tape.

Man on Wire is going to be released on my birthday.  That certainly took a while.  Since I've already seen it I'm not sure if it's worth watching again on the silver screen, but it's pretty awesome so I might.  And then there's also Drag Me to Hell.  It has the same metascore as Let the Right One in, which was very good, and horror movies pretty much never get any critical acclaim so it should be pretty decent at least.


SWEDISH INDIE POP/JAZZ.  WATCH IT.

ReCaptcha presented me with a word where one of the 'e's was crowned with an acute accent.  Being too lazy to look up the ASCII code, I omitted the diacritic.  Somewhere, someday, somebody is going to read an ebook with an emasculated glyph.  Ha.

I completely forgot to spend that last voucher while i was paying, so I have to make another trip down before 31 July.

Boris Berezovsky's performing Debussy's Images and Rach3 at the esplanade next Friday.  Thanks to the tardiness of my ticket booking there weren't any seats left on the first floor, so I had to settle for a circle seat on level 2.  And it's tucked away at the side as well.  Nevertheless it's right in front of the parapet so there won't be anybody obstructing the view.

Also, APIO is tomorrow.  I haven't touched gcc since IOI last year, so it'll be interesting to see how spectacularly I'm going to screw up in the penumbra of a nine month long hibernation.

On an unrelated note, Animal Collective is made of 24-carat WIN.




The second one's actually a fan-made video, which just goes to show some people have way too much time on their hands.

YES I HAVEN'T READ WATCHMEN YET.

I've spent close to $500 at kino in the last 8 months.

3 and a half more months to spend that last voucher.

I got the "ok ok ok ok ok ok" marker for GP.

For one paragraph s(he) wrote "ok..." instead of "ok".  I wonder what that's supposed to signify.

 I open my bedroom door to see a four inch long spider scurrying past.

How the fuck am I going to sleep tonight.

 My GC refuses to calculate the sin of any number larger than pi * 49999999.9999990999999 recurring.  Don't ask me why there's a zero there.

http://justinelai.com/statement.html



Click on "works" (NSFW).

Writing on unruled paper is wonderfully liberating. 

 

I can only hope they don't screw up my shipment as badly as their website.

 I spent ten long minutes sitting there trying to recall that word, but it refused to surface from the dark recesses of lexical memory.  I'm pretty sure it's worth at least half a language mark =(

 In lieu of actually studying for CTs, I'm going to complain about them instead.

Topic statements are unnecessary.  At best, they are superfluous reiterations.  At worst, they break the narrative flow, turning the essay into a verbose list transformed typographically - bullet points replaced with paragraphs, dot glyphs swapped for whitespace - but retaining the same choppy cadence.  There is no reason why a properly written paragraph needs to be preceded by an explanatory prologue.  If you find that you need a summary prefixed to every argument you make to pierce through the fog of cryptic prose, you're doing it wrong.

The other alliterative offender commits a rather more egregious crime.  Announcing your stand within the first few sentences is a heresy akin to divulging plot spoilers in the opening credits of a movie.  Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, in one and a half thousand words time you will discover that I indeed mostly support the claim that democracy is the best form of government with reservations that you feel hard pressed to care about (and truth be told, so do I) - had I not divulged the fact so anticlimactically eleven words into the essay under the guise of a thesis statement.  Mea culpa, mon cherie.

In four days time I'm going to be sitting in the MPH (ISH?), one hour fifteen minutes and less than halfway into my GP essay, with an incoherent hodgepodge of lunatic ravings staring back at me out of the blotted foolscap.  One day I will stop picking questions about which I know nothing and worse, have nothing to say, the inchoate awareness of which (in the spirit of discovery through empirical observation) does not dawn till I have exhausted all available time and mental faculties.  My modus operandi consists of me stumbling blindly around a messy patchwork of half-formed ideas and conceptual links never fully realized, hands flailing wildly.  And sometimes metaphorically too.

Yes, I have reneged on the resolution proposed in the previous post.

 I really, really, need to write shorter sentences.

So my brother got a new laptop today.  The notebook itself appears to be fine as far as I can tell (unlike my oh-why-don't-we-ship-the-power-brick-as-two-seperate-components-that-have-to-be-connected-together-but-cant-because-we-didn't-bother-checking-to-see-if-they-would-fit Dell) apart from the usual crapware they load every new PC with, but it comes with a wireless mouse that... well let's just say it doesn't appear to have been subjected to any quality control procedures.

Firstly, the tech specs declare that the mouse is compatible with "95/98/Me/2000/XP", despite the fact that the laptop comes with Vista pre-installed.

Strike two, the instructions are written in Chinglish.

"You can use your wireless optical mouse freely and improve your efficiency and enjoy your beautiful life from the high technology."
"As bellow, press the receiver-out button, and then the receiver can spring out automatically, at this time, mouse begin to work."
"You'd better use the mouse on the white desk, in this way the batteries can be used longer time."
"A few seconds later, it will be on which shows it is successfully to finish the digital transmission."

Finally, unlike normal mice, which work automagically when you plug the dongle it, this one requires you to press a tiny button on the USB stick, and another one on the base of the mouse.  And when I say tiny, I mean 1mm in diameter tiny.  And it's set into device so you have to use something sharp like a pencil to depress it.  And you have to do so for both buttons in the space of three seconds.  Every time you switch on the computer or plug the mouse in.

And the worst part?  It's not stated anywhere the manual, at least not in any passage I could decipher.  I don't even know if it's the correct setup procedure, but after 10 minutes of random jiggling it's what appeared to work.

The notebook also shipped with this USB cooling fan surface thingy.  Which would be pretty neat if it weren't covered in vomit-blue (the color your puke would be if you ingested all the lead it's probably painted with) LEDs.  It's fine if one can't afford to hire somebody to craft a proper design, seeing as to how the margins on widgets manufactured in child sweatshops are razor-thin, but did they really have to create the peripheral device equivalent of a thirteen year old's myspace page, complete with blinking text and animated cursors?



I genuinely don't understand the computer-as-a-christmas-tree aesthetic, what kind of tasteless philistine does this gaudy lambent mess appeal to?  Don't the manufacturers realize that some people have their laptops next to their beds and don't want to sleep in a room that looks as if an alien spaceship of the '60s comic book variety crash-landed into it (one of these days I'm going to post a long rant about overly luminescent LED indicators on electrical appliances, culprit no. 1 - air conditioners).  I've thought about severing the cables leading to the LEDs, but they're ostensibly wired up in series with the fans.

On the bright side, at least I can now watch flash videos without my notebook asploding.

Knowing Muphry's law, there's probably going to be a whole array of typographical errors in this post.

Amazon keeps spamming me with advertisements for stuff that isn't available outside the US.