The Label Monkey

More Amps For You

2008-07-26T04:43:00.005+08:00

My new to ys make it painfully obvious which tracks in my music collection are lacking in the bitrate department. I now have higher listening standards and will find even less pleasure in uninformed-consumer-level gear. This can only end in a swirling black vortex of unpronouncable acronyms and modded audio equipment, all FLACs and DACs and golden jacks. I'll have to build a little amp to carry on long journeys, hooked up to my portable player in a disconcertingly bomb-like manner.

That last bit sounds like fun actually :-)

I meant the building part not the bit where hefty air marshalls stomp on my fingers

That Zen Feeling

2008-07-18T23:50:00.009+08:00

I’m in the theatre with a group of friends waiting for The Dark Knight to start. My camera bag sits on the chair beside me, booking a seat for a friend buying drinks. There’s a good two minutes before the trailers start rolling plus another ten minutes before the movie begins and I could describe the ambient anticipation, the feel of an audience with nigh insurmountable expectations for the film to come, but I won’t. This isn’t about them.

A man in a suit saunters up to me, glances at the camera bag. Then he lifts it high and hurls it hard onto the floor. People look up at the thump.

“Excuse me?” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He’s too busy rearranging his legs atop the seat in front of him, placing its occupant in close proximity with his black leather shoes.

“Hey,” I say, “I was saving that seat for a friend.”

“Well!” he says, finally acknowledging my existence. “This is me not giving a fuck.”

At this point his antics have gained notice of a pal beside me who tells him as kindly as possible that he’s being a jerk. The man’s response is an extended fuck off.

“Well, I hope you love yourself,” says Dan.

“Oh yes, I love myself. I’m awesome. Why are we still talking about this?”

“Yeah, because it’s obvious that talking to you won’t change anything.”

“Exactly. Now shut up.”

“Chill,” I tell Dan. “He’s either drunk or a banker.”

I could continue in this vein, explaining how his equally obnoxious friend threatened me while he was out to the bathroom. I could go into detail about how he screamed his opinions at every trailer, had a loud conversation about how great he looked in a suit and through all of this was completely sober. But this isn’t about him either.

This is about how I didn’t lose my temper, for just a few years ago I would have engaged in a screaming match and probably lost. There are very few ways to crack a man like that. He’s one of the entitled many who have discovered that being loud, rude and selfish usually gets you what you want because the average person is either too shocked or polite to call you out on it. That wasn’t why I backed down, though, it was because I didn’t care enough. I daresay high school forced me to develop a controlled sense of apathy and it’s helped me ever since. I don’t care if his brusque belligerence earns him a six-figure salary or erects a glass ceiling above his head. I also don’t care if he goes too far and gets knifed in the chest tomorrow. Because there’s a lesson to be learnt here: even as you strive for altruism, keep your sense of apathy close at hand. Some people are worth caring about and some are not, and it keep you sane to be able to block out the latter.

Freaking Equator

2008-06-03T11:58:00.002+08:00

So I'm at home, wondering what I could use to make my new room in EC really snazzy. Then I thought, hey, I have a wireless mouse in one of these cupboards! So I dig around and pull out a little black box, open it eagerly and find a little black mouse inside. Then I grab it, and it feels sort of gooey.

What.

The outer rubberised skin of the mouse has slightly melted at Malaysian RTP. No shit. I have black sticky goo all over my fingers. The question is, do I leave the mouse in disgust or bring it to EC with me and let it recuperate in milder climates?

Gotta love to be home.

Quick fix

2008-04-13T13:19:00.002+08:00

Overheating.

World Lion Dance Championship

2008-03-23T05:14:00.007+08:00

I was listening to The Dodos today when their drumming reminded me of a lion dance.

...
I haven't seen one for quite awhile. Lion dances are a phenomenon incredibly removed from American life - the colours, the sounds, the elaborate costumes and aerial acrobatics - a blend of tradition, percussion and Cirque du Soleil. You find them all over Malaysia come Chinese New Year. Lions dance in shopping malls, by the street, sometimes from house to house. In some places people hang ang pau from the tops of doorframes for the lions to jump and bite down, in others there are mandarin oranges instead. There are all manner of sensations which I associate with the lions: excitement when they leap, awe when they stand, mild shock when they abandon their dance and bound towards and through the crowd; and realising that almost everyone on hall would find Lion Dances strange and exotic only serves to remind me of how I'm not from around here.

Priorities

2008-03-08T13:13:00.003+08:00

So D says 'find more freshmen' as he walks past my room, and I stab the button on the door hard enough to both close and lock it. No mad partying for me this weekend guys, what with that absurd no-sleep marathon I did (you don't even want to know), the complete trainwreck it made of my health and the fact that I am still failing Physics. I have the following things to do this weekend:

1. Figure out what the hell happened last exam.
2. Figure out what happened on my last pset.
3. Do my current pset by Monday.
4. Do some extra-credit problems to save my grade.

If I pull off all four of these by Sunday night I will be Happy Shen again, which differs from Happy Shen Bday because it lasts longer than one 24-hour chocolate and cake adventure.

Wrong

2008-03-04T18:48:00.005+08:00

Whatever it is I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong.

...

I should NOT be this cold or stressed or starved or overwhelmed. I should NOT be even half as unbelievably, preposterously exhausted as I am now. I'm sick of not sleeping, not eating real food, not understanding classes, of watching my weight slough off the scales like a hemorrhaging organ, of always being just on time for every class and every deadline. OF NOT SLEEPING DAMMIT, FOR HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS

I shouldn't be this swamped.
I'm doing something wrong.

EDIT: I really shouldn't blog anything after 40++ hours of being awake, I just embarrass myself.

Best Music Video 2007

2008-03-03T12:39:00.002+08:00

And continuing on my trend of posting random awesomeness..

EDIT: ..and I just realised that the bee doesn't actually make it. Oh bother, now I'm sad.

Amazing Album Art

2008-03-02T04:49:00.002+08:00

Critical Condition

2008-02-27T01:31:00.001+08:00

If you see me doing anything besides working, eating or sleeping, smack me and send me back to my room. I need to sit down and stop this term from going completely to hell.

You Know You Have A Problem

2008-02-25T22:39:00.003+08:00

when you only have time to sleep for 3 hours and you can't because there's too much stress

Yay

2008-02-12T12:31:00.000+08:00

There's been a dearth of good new music recently, so I turned to the stuff I'd long given up on..

and holy crap! I understand Dan Deacon now!

EDIT: That's an understatement. This album is bloody genius. It's like a percussive dreamland populated with Looney Tunes characters.

EDIT 2: Also finally started listening to Odelay and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Daaamn this is good music.

We Live In Interesting Times

2008-01-29T03:38:00.000+08:00

and I think I prefer it this way.

Ouch

2008-01-24T23:50:00.001+08:00

Now I look like an emo kid.

2008-01-23T20:57:00.000+08:00

I've given up trying to make annual Best Album lists. There's too much good stuff out there to try to drag the best down to a top ten, or even a top thirty. Plus I can't help being biased towards the 'fresher' stuff which gets released later in the year, which I haven't yet played several dozen times. Then there's that end-of-year music rush, where I pore through everyone else's annual lists in search of some hidden gems... and when they finally sink their hooks into my brain, the year is over and my list has no space for them.

EDIT:
All the same, here are some things which will please your ears.

Studio: West Coast (or Yearbook 1 which is West Coast + 2 songs)
It is a sunset showdown at the beach. Your weapon is a bass guitar. You are a badass.

Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
You are high on drugs and riding a roller coaster on New Year's Day. It is the best trip of your life.

Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala
An earnest man with a mixing board walks in. He makes everyone cheer, clap and cry.

MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
Kids with fantastic electronics remind us how great it is to be kids.

Simian Mobile Disco: Attack Decay Sustain Release
DANCE MY DANCING MONKEYS
MOVE YOUR MONKEY BODIES

The Tough Alliance: New Chance
Arabic/Caribbean/Electronic awesome whatever.

Weird stuff in Penang

2007-12-30T22:33:00.000+08:00

So you're driving around in Penang and suddenly you notice a little signboard. What's that?

(click for translation)

This must be the Asian equivalent of Megadik.
(To make Asian, add Ninjas.)

Just barely a block away, we have this:

Catering to the crowd which desires both hairstyles and Gundams at once.

This is Your Brain on Finals

2007-12-19T13:09:00.000+08:00

There are bags under my eyes now, dark circles which people don't ask about because it's pretty much expected at this time of year. I've come to realise that bags appear not when you're tired but when Mother Nature decides that your sleep schedule is the work of a madman. I get six hours of sleep, honest. It's in the space between dinnerish and midnight and another hour in the morning just before the exam. It's ideal. The hall clears at about 3, giving me the space and privacy to sit in the lounge with my notes all over, sipping tea, muttering nonsense, occasionally breaking out in a jig. Plus my notes are kept fresh to an hour within the chilly confines of my brain.

I didn't plan this. It sort of happened.

It happened with 8.012, really, that PhYSiCS ClAsS of Physics Classes, a trifecta of vectors and Newton and masochism served by Adam Burgasser on one steaming platter. I wiped out that sucker by 3am, and damn, I felt ready. Then I realised that I still had 24.02 to study for (Philosophy Intro for People Easily Fooled by Cool Subject Titles) and the night was a lost cause. I stayed up that night till 6.45am , a grand total of 19 hours of no-sleep. Then I went off to test for the hardest freshman Physics class in MIT with my brain buzzing on one miserable hour of rest. My head was a slosher, a pitcher full of milk, and in the milk there were bees.

(I owned that paper, by the way. 8.012 RIP.)

Then I had a quick lunch and three more hours of sleep-deprived madness writing papers about loud people and why I think their ideas are stupid. On the way out I collide into Kenny, my 24.02 TA. He's a fantastic guy. He thinks I'm just a little nuts.

"Bye Kenny! It's been great having you as TA. Fun as heck."

"Yeah, bye Shen. You're a very fun student to teach, extremely smart guy. But I worry about you, son. You don't sleep enough."

"Yeah.. I know. I didn't sleep much before this exam either."

"I had a late night too! I went to bed at 12.30!"

(Yeah, Kenny's messing with me)

"Oh? That's nice.. I went to bed at 6.45."

"Shen! 6.45 is not a time to go to bed! It's a time to get out of bed!"

"No Kenny, 7.45 is the time to get out of bed."

"That's fantastic. Imagine how much smarter you'd be if you got enough sleep for a night."

"Sure, Kenny. I hope to find out someday."

Then there was a walk back through snow, and random absentminded wandering through East Campus, and a nap which started post-dinner and ended oneish. Then I studied for 3.091 till 7am again, slept for an hour, did the test, slept after dinner, rinse and repeat. It works perfectly fine and the sleep madness will prove beneficial when I swap timezones in a few days from now.

It works, bitches.

LEGO ROBOTS HERE I COME

2007-12-15T11:20:00.000+08:00

YAAY

6.270

I'm totally doing this. I have already found two awesome teammates, both of whom are smart and witty and talented and awesome and a blast to be around. Plus it involves LEGO, and as you know, that's half the reason why I even got into this school. And robots. Did I mention the robots?

GO GO SPEED RACER

2007-12-09T05:15:00.000+08:00

This is going to be the most mindblowingly good or bad movie of the year.

Either way.. minds will be blown.

Random Photos

2007-12-06T05:09:00.000+08:00

Quincy

Deli Haus, aka students selling food + sex appeal

New York

Katyn

Path Station

NYSE

Trump Tower

Technique

Fuck Fuck Fuck

2007-11-12T06:46:00.000+08:00

I'm just waiting for some idiot minister to say something like "We must maintain political stability so as to not scare away foreign investors."

2007-11-08T15:42:00.000+08:00

The past 24 hours have been a series of difficult decisions, the last one being the most difficult of all. I just try to do the right thing.

..and now I keep going and try to pretend it is a normal day.

Maybe I am a terrible person.

November the 5th

2007-11-06T12:30:00.000+08:00

Remember, remember..

(click to enlarge)

Your New Best Friend

2007-10-04T01:30:00.000+08:00

Let's say, completely hypothetically, that you are a student from Malaysia who is making your first long-term stay in the frigid, barren, bone-dry tundra which is Everywhere Else. You are freezing to death in that sub-30°C wasteland and wondering if the freedom you now experience will come at the cost of frostbite. You are, in fact, cold.

Let me introduce you new best friend.

I feel obligated to point out that the common hair-dryer is a fan, space heater, point heater, propulsion device and dehumidifier in one handy package. To illustrate my point, I shall describe below some tricks of an experienced Hair-Dryer Ninja.

TRICK #1
Your room is freezing cold. There's all there is to it.

Hair-Dryer Ninja says:
Take the hair dryer and place it somewhere facing you where it won't get clogged or set anything on fire. Set on HIGH. Enjoy your newfound warmth!

Similar problems: The bathroom is freezing when I get out of the shower.

TRICK #2
You put on your snug winter clothing, specially designed your protect your vulnerable flesh from raging snowstorms. Unfortunately, as the clothing is currently at room temperature (Way Too Cold) it sucks the heat out of your body like a Dementor on crack.

Hair-Dryer Ninja says:
Set hair-dryer to HIGH and blast warm air down sleeves and legs of said clothing. Enjoy elevated levels of snug.

Similar problems: Your pajamas need preheating. Your bed is too cold to sleep in.

TRICK #3
It's late at night, your hair is wet and you want to go to sleep.

Hair-Dryer Ninja says:
DRY YOUR FREAKING HAIR.

Similar problems: You cannot work out how to turn a doorknob. You don't know how to walk down the stairs. You are not sure if the cereal goes into the milk or the milk goes into the cereal.

PS: Don't use a hair-dryer to propel a boat. That's just stupid.

Here's to me!

2007-09-05T21:21:00.000+08:00

Classes start in one hour. I wander into the shower wearing my bathrobe, to be confronted by a boombox blasting heavy metal from under one of the sinks.

Here's to my first day of term!

Rush @ East Campus

2007-09-01T02:56:00.000+08:00

Rush is the time of year when the various dorms try to attract incoming freshmen. Most cook food and bake cookies, build kites and show people around, etc, etc, etc.

East Campus constructs a frickin amusement park.

Trojan war elephant. People with water weapons hide inside.

Building human hamster wheels.

Homemade trishaw. Later on it was retrofitted with Plexiglas armour and water balloon slingshots for the water war.

3-axis Human Spinning Device.

2-seater roller coaster with splash pool at the bottom. Named Two Girls At The Same Time: The Ride.

These guys are hardcore.

Close up of the roller coaster.

The awesome that is East Campus

2007-08-19T11:43:00.000+08:00

My room is matte black with neon spiderwebs.

The dorm's Athena Cluster (MITnet access point) is built into a dentist's chair. Yeah, that's a keyboard and mouse.

You travel between the 2 halves of EC with secret underground tunnels.

Overpowered water-cooled server with 6 hard drives. Ghetto-style.

Ghouly bathroom!

2007-08-12T19:02:00.000+08:00

Did you know what you can buy at Tesco?

My brother, having just bought a pile of clothes, had plenty of plastic clips left over.

So he made a robot.

Marketing is Everything

2007-08-12T18:12:00.000+08:00

I am often fascinated by the toy gun sections of department stores. There's a miniature arms race going on here - of spring guns being slayed by air-pressure darts, which are trumped in turn by clip-loading disc launchers, which lose out to the almighty automatic BB. Just as interesting is the anything-goes approach to marketing used by cheap Chinese toy manufacturers.

Today one toy caught my eye. Mechanically, it was nothing impressive - yet another trigger-crank noisemaker which didn't even shoot anything. However, there was a big and clearly unlicensed picture of Morpheus on the box and the toy was named

The Dream Of Cracker

Which is the coolest allusion to computer-hackdom I've ever seen. The box went on to read:

Go to heal the world with The Dream of Cracker in your hand

It is the most powerful weapon on the world

The Dream of Cracker is coming true at this right time.

Which is well and truly WTF. Another toy below it ditched the wordiness and simply read

Superweapon

I Didn't Make This Up

2007-08-03T12:49:00.000+08:00

BEIJING: An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that a local government set up to teach people about the perils of graft is proving a roaring success, state media said yesterday.

“Incorruptible Fighter”, developed by the government of Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and is already so popular that it is being redesigned to accommodate more players, the China Daily said.

“I feel a great sense of achievement when I punish lots of evil officials,” one gamer surnamed Sun was quoted as saying.

The game, which lets players get ahead by means of “weapons, magic or torture,” has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily said.

The different game scenarios are based on well-known incidents taken from Chinese history, but the parallels in modern China of people struggling against seemingly insurmountable corruption are clear.

In order to advance to a new level, the players must enter into an “Anti-Corruption College” to be lectured in more detail about ancient cases, the Southern Business newspaper said.

Along the way Internet vigilantes are rewarded for the capture, torture and killing of not just corrupt officials, but also their sons and daughters.

Once the player has punished enough corrupt officials, graduating through successive layers of vice, he or she enters into a graft-free paradise.

“We want game players to have fun but also to learn about fighting corruption, folklore and history,” said Qiu Yi, a local official in Ningbo, one of Zhejiang’s most prosperous cities.

Some experts have questioned, however, if the game is targeted at the right people.
"Government officials should be the ones getting anti-corruption education, not local youngsters,” Peking University professor Wang Xiongjun told the China Daily.

Corruption is a source of immense and growing anger among ordinary Chinese.

President Hu Jintao has identified corruption within the Communist Party as one the greatest threats to its legitimacy as rulers of the country, and the government regularly authorises the real-life killing of people for graft.

The former head of China's food and drug watchdog, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed last month for corruption, with his killing hailed by the state-run press as a warning to other corrupt party members.

From The Star, 3 August 2007, as reported by ATP

OMG WTF BBQ

Cake Scrawl

2007-07-29T00:34:00.000+08:00

We were going to have a little family gathering that night, my immediate family plus the families of three aunts and my grandmother. It was really just an excuse to chat and eat Bah Kut Teh and play with tiny cousins. For no clear reason my mother decided to add to the festivities by bringing a cake. We ended up in a cake shop with a friendly cake lady saying what would you like me to write on it and us not having any idea what the occasion was.

"What about Happy Birthday?" my mother said.
But it was no one's birthday.

"Happy Family Reunion?"
But there were too few of us to call it a reunion.

"Happy Family Gathering" didn't roll off the tongue and none of us had any idea what "Many Happy Returns" even meant.

"What about Happy Day?"

"Happy Day? But what sort of day??"

"Not any day in particular. Like, a normal day. Which is happy."

And so we met up with our relatives and ate too much and talked into the night. At some point the chocolate cake with the words Happy Day! was fished out and devoured. And a happy day it was.

Little hack at Discover US Education

2007-07-26T14:56:00.000+08:00

I'm sorry, Harvard. You really should pay more attention to the things people give you to decorate your booth with.

Photos taken by WJ

Bigshots

2007-07-23T12:32:00.000+08:00

I've been manning the MIT booth for five hours now, rallying an endless crowd to put in their applications. Half a group leaves, half a group arrives. At no point am I actually finished with any given gaggle of prospective applicant, even through lunch. Running on the energy of two McChickens I turn to the next guy, not himself an applicant, asking questions on behalf of a son who isn't even present. He's the archetypal Power Parent, the sort who bludgeons his way through each conversation with charming phrases like you're wrong and you didn't understand me. Suddenly he says:

"What about connections? How can I use my connections to get my son into MIT?"
"Uh, I don't think those will help very much at all, sir."

'Sir'. It's my nervous substitute for 'you bastard'.

"That's ridiculous," he says, brimming with entitlement. "All the good schools do it. How do you think George Bush got into Harvard?"

"Well, sir, I think that MIT may be more of a meritocracy than Harvard."

"Hah. Really."

I recount the story with W later, during a rare break.

"Me too," he says, "Some old guy. He wanted a PhD and mentioned his contacts."

"So what did you say to him?"

"I got scared. Told him to ask Dr. E about it. Then he went all do you know who I am?? and whipped out his wallet. There were pictures of himself shaking hands with Abdullah Badawi."

"So who was he?"

"I dunno."

EuroTrip Souvenirs

2007-07-21T14:25:00.000+08:00

click to expand

So yeah, I flew to Cambridge last month. I rode by plane, bus, train and tram through Bratislava (Slovak Republic) and Vienna (Austria) before going back to Cambridge, after which I zoomed around South England in a rented car before ending up in London.

I'm not the sort who buys souvenirs wherever I go, whether for myself or for other people. Instead I collect these.

Discover US Education 2007

2007-07-16T13:56:00.000+08:00

Be there or be a rectangular thing.

Yet another video

2007-06-12T16:24:00.000+08:00

If you put a million monkeys in front of a typewriter they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. And bake tiny pies. And build catapults with which to launch them at flies.

Kickass Commercial

2007-06-09T13:44:00.001+08:00

I really need to start experimenting with chemical reactions.

2007-06-08T16:19:00.000+08:00

It has rained everyday for more than a week.

I want to swim quite badly :-(

MAKE loves cats.

2007-06-04T19:59:00.000+08:00

MAKE magazine is one of my favourite online reads. I don't have access to their highlight articles thanks to my non-subscriber status, but their 'instructables' and fabulous DIY links are always worth a look.

Today they seem to be all about cats.

There are two very cool articles on MAKE about cats today - the first is a DIY tutorial on how to purify catnip using kitchen equipment to create a chemical capable of driving cats insane with joy. The second is the story of a man who built a camera for his cat. This includes photos(!) which reveal an insider's unwilling eye into the Secret World Of Cats.

Click here for DIY SuperCatnip!

Click here for CatCamera Project!

Cat Camera Galleries: 1 2 3 4

Mr. Mosquito!

2007-06-04T18:10:00.000+08:00

RM130 isn't a small amount of money, but it isn't a lot either. What can you buy for RM130? Some clothes? Yeah. A few day's groceries? Yep. Good shoes? Maybe. A handphone? Sort of. An iPod? Nope. A table lamp? Just barely.

It turns out that RM130 will get you a helicopter.

Meet Mr. Mosquito!

Its real name is the Alany Indoor Micro Heli, though I prefer to call it a him, and to call him Mr. Mosquito. Mosquito because this fellow zooms all over the place and only gets to his destination on average. And Mr. because I would expect a woman to show more poise.

Mr. Mosquito gets his lift from a pair of coaxial 4-bladed rotors. This is an ideal configuration for a helicopter of this size because both rotors provide lift and you don't need a powerful secondary rotor on the tail to counteract torque. Rapid turns can also be made by altering the power ratio of the two rotors. The secondary rotor is relatively weak and aims straight up. The idea here is for it to tilt to heli forwards, so that the main rotors provide some forward force.

But enough about rotors.

This thing is bloody fun. It's got the sort of discharge/recharge cycle which really fits my lifestyle - I play with it for ten minutes till it dies, then work for half an hour while it charges. It's also remarkably tough. The rotors bounce off the walls, floor, and occasionally end up supporting the weight of the heli whenever it lands upsidedown. I do the most terrible landings. Mr. Mosquito always survives!

There's been only one breakage so far, and it's not really a breakage - each main rotor is held in place by four tiny metal rods. One fell out and disappeared between the cracks of society. No problem; I harnessed my incredible engineering powers!!

Repaired rod on the left, normal rod on the right.

First of all I snapped the eye-end off a big needle. Then I jammed the resulting metal piece into the place where the metal rod should have been. Finally, I threaded some ultrathin nylon string through the eye and bound it to the rotor body.

Piloting Mr. Mosquito is fun as hell. It is also absolutely backbreakingly difficult. The height at which he hovers is affected by everything from the circulation of air in the room (even with the fan off!) to the texture of the surface below him. He spins in the air unless you've got his main rotor torque alignment just right. Plus running his rear rotor produces a 'phantom' precession force which makes him spin even more. Moving forward requires that you fire the rear rotor, increase power to the main rotors to compensate for less power being allocated upwards and turn slightly to the right to offset the precession force.

Worse of all, Mr. Mosquito is slow. I've started modifying him to fly forwards faster - I figure that moving the centre of gravity fore a little will encourage him to angle a bit more with the help of the rear rotor. I've stripped some insulation off the antennae wires, knocked off half a centimeter of rear shock absorber and stuck some blue-tac in the appropriate places. It sort of works, but like I said before, he ain't called Mr. Mosquito for nothing.

Finally, I popped the hood open to have a look inside:

Alas, no space to shift anything forward.

I'm having doubts about this whole 'moving the CoG' thing because it really doesn't seem to have much effect. The best I can do is fly very carefully in a completely windless environment.

Give me a month. You won't recognise this guy :-)

EDIT: Further modifications to Mr. Mosquito's legs and antennae. Now he flies like a dream. Can't complain :-)

Stereotypes Unite

2007-06-02T16:49:00.000+08:00

The Math 4 exam takes 105 minutes. Not even an hour has passed and us Further Math students (past and present) are done, dead bored, tired of checking our work, tired of redoing the paper, tired from sleeping just a handful of hours the night before, just bloody well tired. Every person is given one blank sheet to scribble ideas and workings on. Most of us haven't touched it.

Fifty minutes later we're ambling outside. My working sheet is covered with plans for a steam engine.

It ain't a great design but it's mine!

C takes a look.
"Well, doesn't that show how different we are. Look what I've got."

She's written 17 Reasons Why in tiny font on her scribble sheet, dozens of times, back and forth. Filling the shape of a huge number 17.

Out comes J, mumbling integers. He has his paper too.

"What've you got there J?"

"I've memorised the roots of numbers one to ten to four significant figures! One point one four one! One point seven three two!"

We're such a class act.

The Brain Buster 6000

2007-06-01T17:59:00.000+08:00

Complete Study Area Solution

Click to expand

Objective: To produce a workspace which encourages massive swotting by cutting off the subject from the Real World for several hours.

Lab report: Subject left workspace to eat three cookies.

Suggested improvement: Upgrade Box o' Motivation to Cookie Box Edition.

2007-05-30T00:51:00.000+08:00

WHO THE HECK TOOK MY EIGENVECTOR NOTES??

Those weren't just your mamma's notes, no, those weren't crappy commercialised textbook notes either! Those were my personal notes, full of stuff which didn't come from no book but straight from MY BRAIN! That was some damn good thinking I put down on paper and now it's gone! I don't get to think that clearly very often and I'd rather have a souvenir (such as for example MY NOTES which I WROTE during such a period of lucidity) to remember those moments by. I know who you are! You and you and you you you! Okay, it could be any one of you but I'm suspecting the lot of you until someone gets honest. I'm too nice about this stuff. I should be charging rent when people walk around with my Intellectual Property! Plus if you lose said property or fail to return it I should have unrestricted access to your personal information! Like.. your address! And your least favourite disease! And your bank account number! Ha!

I'll probably remove this post when I am not Full Of Rage.

EDIT: Still don't have my notes, but I managed to redo all that thinking. Yay. I'm not taking this down because, well, 'least favourite disease'?? *snerk*

A Game of Opposites

2007-05-29T17:00:00.000+08:00

What I like:
elegant solutions
mechanical efficiency
intellectual rhetoric
good lighting
witty dialogue
precise instruments
responsive user interfaces
method behind madness
being different for the right reaons
80gsm paper

What I hate:
quick fixes
unnecessary motion
shameless pedagogy
gloomy corners
obvious one-liners
large margins of error
laggy anything
directionless entropy
ironic/non-ironic/post-ironic conformity
70gsm paper

Holy Crap

2007-05-28T00:50:00.000+08:00

This video makes it blatantly obvious why Physicx is one of the world's best breakdancers. It highlights his speed, agility, strength and creativity as well as his trademark insane elbow spin. It's less like breakdancing and more like.. ballet? Gymnastics? What it doesn't show is the multiple concussions he's probably suffered in practice.

I like hip-hop dance. I am, however, a strictly right-way-up guy. No headspins and headslides for me, no dancing on my hands. I've banged my head so hard once that my left eye shut down for half an hour. I've split my chin and dripped blood on the floor. Lesson learnt - I'll just enjoy this stuff from a distance.

Zero Points for everyone

2007-05-27T12:10:00.000+08:00

Nobody Scores! is the latest addition to my list of crazy good comics. The artist, Brandan Bolt, takes a very tired formula of three roommates having zany adventures together and twists it into something amazing. For one thing, these aren't just your average twenty-somethings cracking jokes and ignoring the real world. There's Sarah Peterson, Machiavellian Capitalist. There's Jane Doe, Anarchic Sociopath. And finally there's Beans Mulroney, Conscientious Arist and the only humane human in the apartment.

(There's also Raoul Walker, the Nobel Laureate downstairs. But who cares about him.)

Brandon Bolt takes these wildly different characters and rubs them off each other with enough friction to set the house on fire. Then he does it all again.

Let me explain that.

People die in this comic. They get killed, tortured, removed from this plane of existence and so on. One would expect the author to run out of characters after a month of this, but no, he hits the Reset button after every strip. You will see every character meet his/her untimely demise - be it zombification or bankruptcy or demonic possession - again and again and again. This gives the author a crazy amount of freedom in the terrible things he can do to his characters. People get shot. The world is eaten by nanobots. Nuclear Apocalypse is had. Anything can happen in a world where nobody scores.

Awhile ago Brandon Bolt was asked to illustrate some kiddy flashcards. Some words are quite hard to put into pictures, but he managed. May I present:

This is what hell looks like.

2007-05-22T14:42:00.000+08:00

Pavlov & Me

2007-05-21T20:00:00.000+08:00

I have only very recently managed to rid myself of a phobia of car doors. The ridding is, I think, not a very interesting story. I'm fairly certain that the world in general is more interested in how one develops a phobia of car doors in the first place.

Short answer:
Electroshock therapy.

Long Answer:
My dad's Harrier, I suspect, has long tried to kill me. Every time I grabbed its doorframe to clamber out of the vehicle, I was at risk of receiving a nasty electric shock. On the conscious level, at first, they didn't bother me. I got my biggest electric shock when I was eight - these zaps were nothing in comparison. Alas, the conscious mind is not the only one in charge.

Let's analyse what happens when you get zapped:
1. Your arm convulses from the sudden charge. (ow!)
2. You reflexively pull your arm back.

The car didn't always zap me. It did so maybe once a week, maybe twice. Every time I approached it there was a non-zero probability of getting shocked. The uncertainty, I think, probably heightened the anticipation of pain. Worse still, I was the only one who was being zapped. The car, it seemed, was out to get me.

As time went by I began to observe a strange effect. My arm would convulse and jerk every time I touched the car's doorframe even when it didn't zap me. Worse still, this Pavlovian response occurred not just with the Harrier, but with every car I entered. Even without the electric zap, my arm's reflexive response was already plenty uncomfortable. On top of this, the sense of impending doom as my fingers approached the smooth metal only heightened in intensity.

Suddenly I found myself avoiding car doors altogether.

There is a certain art to closing a car door without actually touching the doorframe. You press the very tips of your knuckles against the glass window and push gently. Don't use your fingertips, you'll smear the glass. Don't push too hard, you'll shatter it. I closed each car door with a surgeon's precision, taking precautions to never touch anything but the glass.

That's the story. And now the boring part - I discovered that the part of the door which framed the car's windows was uninsulated. The rest of the door - the handles, the lower frame - was perfectly safe to touch, and that was what everyone else had been doing. And so, with some patience and will, I relearnt how to push a car door shut.

More Joanna Newsom

2007-05-21T19:56:00.000+08:00

Monkey & Bear

Loopiness

2007-05-20T11:35:00.000+08:00

A whole lot of people are praising Battles' new album right now and I do understand why. These guys are tight. Not a note is out of place. The drumbeats fall with inhuman accuracy. All four bandmembers click together with a telepathic, terrifying precision. The production of Mirrored is crystal clear and without a hint of reverb; on a lesser band this might have dragged any recording mistake into the open. Battles makes no such mistakes - instead it just eccentuates their perfect synergy. If fifty years from now a group of wirelessly-linked cyborgs were to start a rock band, some old geezer in the back row would scream "You sound just like Battles!".

So why am I not screaming praises at these guys? For one thing, they're too good. They play so well that I start to forget if these drumbeats are recorded or preprogrammed. I start wondering if the repeated verses in this album, perfect and identical, are the result of ultra-consistent instrumentation or digital looping. I know that these guys are really this good live, but on record format, without the visual aid of actually seeing them play, it's easy to forget that.

There is no Art

2007-05-19T14:11:00.000+08:00

There's a downside to being a perfectionist. I find cooking extremely difficult and that's because I get too hung up on getting every detail right. I worry inessecently about how many minutes something should stay in the pot, how many eggs to crack, how many shakes of pepper to add, how finely each ingredient should be divided, what colour every stage should be. I ponder what volume of water should be poured (how many cups? What sort of cup?), what consistency the result should have and which country the potatoes are from (death to floury rubbish). This might make me a better scientist or a more precise engineer but a terrible cook.

So here's the solution: I've got to drum into my head that cooking is not an art.

This is not gastronomic chemistry. This is heating chunks of meat to eat. There is no exact 'right way' to cook anything. Two minutes will not always work better than three. Eggs are not always the same size. You deal with what potatoes you have. I must learn to accept and ignore the fact that every dish will contain a zillion imperfections and that the 'best method' is something I must discover for myself.

I follow my parents to the market every week. The first dozen times my mother asked me to 'pick the good veggies', I would ask "How do I tell?". Was there a just-right colour for a tomato? How firm was firm enough? "What feels right." she'd say, only increasing my confusion.

I eventually learnt to trust my gut in making these good/bad decisions. I accepted that one vegetable might be minutely fresher than the other and that it didn't really matter. Now I must develop a similar instinct for cooking, or I'll never get anywhere.

I think this applies to more than the culinary 'arts'. What about other things, like obtaining a visa or living alone or getting a job? There aren't skills to be learnt here which involve numbers or reliable theories, just muddled-up people and the laws they create. There are plenty of wrong ways to go about these things but probably no 'right' way.

This comes back to my initial decision to pre-study a whole bunch of stuff for MIT and then have an easier time there. What exactly is my motivation? I already have credit in two classes thanks to my eighteen months at A-levels. I already have a head start. It's not as if I'll be sleepless for four years if I don't pass a whole bunch of ASEs in my first week. It's not as if I'll be depriving myself of the 'college experience'. There are people who start behind me, I'm sure, who still find time for the hundreds of cool activities which are possible at MIT. I don't have to make the absolutely most of my time there as if my life depended on it. It's not essential.

But I'm a perfectionist and a kiasu one at that, so you can bet that I'll try.

I Felt Like Writing Drivel #2

2007-05-15T20:19:00.000+08:00

Most people do not realise that Tai Chi, now practised as a form of exercise and self defense, was originally designed by the ancient Chinese astrologers as a means of representing the complex motion of heavenly bodies. The hands of the Tai Chi practitioner symbolised the location of the planets - he swiveled them around to indicate orbits, holding his body still when necessary or moving it as well to show a change in the position of the centre of mass.

Classic stance: Binary stars orbiting a common point

It is fairly clear to the common observer that Tai Chi cannot accurately build a representation of more than two bodies. Furthermore, eccentric orbits and planetary rotation are both underrepresented due to the limits of the practitioner's range of motion. There have been attempts in the past to extend the art by utilising one or both feet as additional astrological elements, but these methods, due to their difficulty, have never been popular. In the face of these limitations, it is important to understand that Tai Chi was meant primarily as a teaching aid in schools rather than a form of upper-level instruction. Occasionally, however, the use of more than one demonstrator has managed to capture signicantly larger astrological phenomena.

Rare stance: Tangential collision of rocky bodies

In this age of digital electronics, Tai Chi's original form has been almost completely replaced by a slew of computer-generated graphical simulations. Tai Chi has since been repurposed to fit an unmet requirement of modern life: physical exercise.

I Am Confusing

2007-05-15T14:41:00.000+08:00

"Here is your test paper. That will be 30 cents."

"What if I don't intend to complete this paper?"

"Then you will still have to pay me 30 cents."

"What if I intend to not complete it?"

"Then you shouldn't have to not pay me 30 cents."

"What if I don't intend to not uncomplete it?"

"Then I don't have to not pay you 30 cents."

*pause*

"Okay! Bye!"

"...Hey!"

2007-05-09T16:04:00.000+08:00

A contact lens advertisement outside Taylors:
So cheap it hurts!!

Back to BSS

2007-05-08T16:57:00.000+08:00

More Videos:
Fire Eye'd Boy
7/4 Shoreline
Cause=Time
So that 30-second ad reminded me of how much I love Broken Social Scene, and guess what, I've put them back on my playlist and listened to Cause=Time waay too many times to be healthy. BSS is like a hurricane of sound - every little bit of air going in a different direction, all scruffy and chaotic and destructive; but the whole is undeniably going somewhere.

Want an example? That song up there is Almost Crimes. Now I know what you are thinking, who is that awesome girl? That's Leslie Fiest, a classy Canadian lady who is living proof that you can singe the eyebrows off every man in the audience while keeping your clothes on. She's got an amazing voice and wields a guitar which is larger than she is. She's also just released a new album.

Check this thing out. Her songwriting is rock-solid and she has a voice of melted honey. I've had this thing on repeat for two days now and it's just freakin' great. She croons and lilts, jumping from slow-burners to funky jazz tracks to kickass guitar solos (Did I mention that she rocks the axe?).

Here's an early standout:

Oh, one last thing. What's better than Almost Crimes?
Almost Crimes live with guitar warfare!!

It happened again!

2007-05-05T23:45:00.000+08:00

I'm at a cousin's house, reading The Science of Discworld III: The Globe (Which is full of difficult and mind-bending time-travel/infinity-mathematics stuff, plus some neat material about natural selection) in front of the TV. The TV, tuned to Channel 8, is blaring a Cantonese show called Superstar where tousle-haired pretty boys sing tunes while a troupe of dancers move erratically in the background. My cousins are thrilled. I'm less so.

Then the shows pauses for some adverts, and I hear a familiar tune. It's an odd repetitive drum loop which I can't quite place. The ad itself is a typical short segment about the latest ditzy canto-pop stars - I can't speak Cantonese worth a damn so I can't give you the details. Then the ad ends with a little punk-girl uhuh! and something clicks.

Windsurfing Nation!!

from the 2005 self-titled album of Broken Social Scene.

Geez, indie rock is all over the place. In this case, though, I'm not sure that's a good thing. Only someone with a very specially-tuned ear (in this case, me) would have recognised the half-minute of the song which they played, plus BSS's contribution wasn't mentioned anywhere, so I assume that this little jingle won't lead anyone new to the band. Plus the sheer randomness of the choice makes me suspect that the band knows nothing of this. It's likely that they will get neither money nor popularity from this advert. Oh dang.

2007-04-27T23:02:00.000+08:00

Self-explanatory.

She wrote my acceptance letter. This is so bizarre.

Hooray!

2007-04-25T23:26:00.000+08:00

Joanna Newsom, who is just about one of my favourite musicians ever, has released a new EP. It contains one new song and live versions of two old songs. It is super duper great. It is fantastic!

The live version of Cosmia here is somewhat more accessible than the original on Ys as Newsom's voice is a little more refined. It still hovers in some odd region between Kate Bush, Bjork and a small squeaky animal, but she takes her syllables a little smoother and doesn't squeak quite as much. Her wonderfully delicate manner of enunciating words hasn't changed, for which I am glad. It brings to mind a cloud of floating white feathers, whirling and stirring with every gust of breath.. but I desist.

This comes as a wonderful surprise. I still haven't gotten over how awesome last year's Ys is and then she drops this in our laps. But then again, I may still love Ys (and this) in twenty years. It's that good.

EDIT: Want to know what she sounds/looks like?
Watch "Only Skin":
Part 1
Part 2

Fun Stuff

2007-04-21T18:10:00.000+08:00

Hello T Shen,
We have received your reply form accepting our offer of admission and have secured a place for you in the class entering this fall.

Welcome to the Class of 2011! In May you will receive a packet of information regarding the freshman year. Have a great summer!

The MIT Admissions Office Staff

Hooray!!!

2007-04-16T12:08:00.001+08:00

Omigod the press
One person to interview
One more for photos.

They want a story!
They want to see inventions!
But I'm just this guy.

Why must they come here?
They have an office don't they?
My room is a mess.

I don't trust the press
They misquoted me before
They'll do it again.

2007-04-14T21:06:00.000+08:00

My brother and I are wandering through the soft toy section of Ikea. A huge plush snake hangs from the roof by a rope at the end of its tail. I grab its head and shock my brother with it.

"Grarr!"
"Gah! What was that for?"
"You know.. what was that for."

I bend down and examine the snake. Its head is hung at just the right height to be grabbed by a trailing hand. Hanging from the middle of the ceiling makes it impossible to ignore. There's something magnetic about this creature - I decide to do a test.

"Okay, let's stand here and see what happens. I'm betting that someone else is going to do the exact same thing."

The next person is a T-shirted guy holding his girlfriend by the hand. His other hand touches the snake. He grabs it by the head, holds it in front of her and goes "Grarr!!"

"Wow. This snake has awesome mind-control powers."
"Here comes another!"

After the couple comes a father holding his baby on one arm. He automatically grabs the snake with his other hand and scares his toddler with it. ("Grarrr!!")

Amazing!

2007-04-08T19:26:00.000+08:00

I was in a pharmacy today when I heard a familiar tune. Atmospheric guitars, tinkly piano, extremely familiar drumming.

Explosions in the Sky??

Yep. What Do You Go Home To? from All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone, to be exact. I wondered how it got there - did some random employee with a liking for post-rock (pretty rare around here) slip it into the store player? I hung around for a few minutes, waiting to see if the next song was also from EitS, and whether it would be the next track from the album.

Guess what? Next came a commercial.

Conclusion 1: The store is playing off a radio station.

Conclusion 2: Explosions in the Sky has started playing on Malaysian radio.
What the heck? When did this happen?!

Here We Go

2007-04-05T19:17:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow is my last A2-trials paper. It is Math Mechanics. Half the class couldn't care less about this topic - we're all so overprepared that the exam has, in our minds, already ended. I'm sure as heck not going to study for it. I just sat for my Further Math Mechanics/Statistics paper yesterday, that was more than sufficient.

So what shall I do?

8.012!!!

Yep, it's time for MIT coursework. I need to clarify - I'm not doing this because I'm kiasu. No really, I'm not (and yes, I just read that EducationInMalaysia blog). It's a form of delayed laziness - I work more now so I can relax later - and I want time to enjoy the MIT campus without assignments and stuff hanging over my head.

Also, this stuff is so fun.

Wheeee happy

Faster!!

2007-04-01T12:38:00.000+08:00

I have recently found myself slowing down. I am getting less work done, less distance covered and less thoughts processed per unit time.

This is unacceptable. I still remember how, just some scant months ago, I could dress myself, brush my teeth, listen to music, take a call and type on this blog all at the same time. Truly, that is better use of every moment, no?

So what shall I do? I shall accelerate!

I have long associated physical activity with mental activity. Sluggish movements lead to sluggish thoughts, zooming around a racetrack leads to quick thinking and/or sudden death. I must move faster to think faster. I must think faster to go faster.

So, I now avow:
To weave throught crowds and dodge through traffic!
To free run over anything and everything!
To grab dropped things before they hit the ground!
To type faster and to hekl woth the spellinh!
To zoom up stairs fast enough to launch myself over the top step!
To eat like a scared scavenger and drink like an angry man with a shot glass!
To maintain the metabolism of a skinny sugar fiend!

So, see ya!
Whoosh

Muahahahaha #2

2007-03-31T20:29:00.000+08:00

Dear T Shen,

I write to notify you that we are, regrettably, unable to offer you admission to Stanford University for fall 2007. I appreciate the thought and effort you put into your application and into selecting Stanford as one of your college choices. The overall strength of our applicant pool and relatively small size of our freshman class means that we disappoint the majority of our applicants each year. I am personally sorry to share this disappointment with you.

Who cares?? I'm going to MIT!

Muahahahaha

2007-03-30T09:50:00.000+08:00

Dear T,
Thank you for applying to UC Berkeley. After careful consideration, we are sorry that we are unable to offer you admission for the fall semester 2007.

Narbonic!

2007-03-29T23:28:00.000+08:00

Are you dead bored? Got an afternoon or two to kill?

Read Narbonic Labs!

There are five and a half years of mad scientist goodness in there, equivalent to a few days' worth of quality reading until the eventual, wonderful conclusion. Shaenon K. Garrity is now one of my absolute favourite comic strip writers. It's a pity that Narbonic is the only webcomic she appears to have drawn. It's an even bigger pity that she doesn't seem to realise how her cute, cartoony drawing style is far more enjoyable than the soulless realism to which so many artists aspire.

The main attraction is the writing, anyhow, and boy does she deliver! She moves the story forward without missing a punchline, develops characters with rock-solid consistency and plans her tale for years ahead. The strip starts a little shakily but soon finds its legs, looping through the outworldly plotlines made possible through Mad Science. It just keeps getting better, even as it tantalises the reader with little hints of foreshadowing. Then comes the climax - massive and magnificent and emotional - which one both loves and dreads.

I place Narbonic among the best comic strips I have ever read. It is a blast of solid storytelling which entertains, bends to no stereotypes and never takes the reader for granted.

Also:
Don't you dare tell me I don't love you enough
is one of the greatest lines ever.

2007-03-27T20:37:00.000+08:00

So, having been sucked into the vortex which is The Meaning of 8, I've decided to go through Cloud Cult's back inventory.

First stop:
2005's Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus

Aside from having the greatest title ever, this album also reminded me how to spell hippopotamus (double p, then one p!). It is addictive, clever and hooky as heck but less tight than The Meaning of 8. Cloud Cult chucks in random minutes of silence between certain songs for no clear purpose. Think 'Song of the Deaf Girl', diced and sprinkled.

Current Fave Moment: 'Light at the end of the tunnel' is a monologue of a woman recounting a near-death experience. A strummy, jingly beat backs her voice, timed so perfectly that it seems as if her words were built around it rather than the other way round. Then her voice shakes, and the orchestra takes flight.

Epiphany

2007-03-24T20:50:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I feel empty. It's a regularly scheduled what-the-hell-am-I-doing phase, the product of sitting in a room and working alone for weeks and weeks. I start questioning the point of my work, the societal relevance of my dreams and why the heck I'm not outside dancing or something.

It's these thoughts that turn people to God or philosophy; they provide justification. They help you find - or imagine - a greater purpose to the daily humdrum. I have long suspected that said thoughts result from the general unnaturalness of modern life. We never evolved around supermarkets or income tax or uranium. Handling these things does not come instinctively, as does hunting or mating. Barracuda aren't taught to attack in packs anymore than spiders are taught to spin webs, but people go through almost two decades of schooling and societal programming before being allowed to drive a car. We aren't designed for this level of complexity; our tolerance of it is entirely acquired.

I had a bout of this sort at the tail end of SPM preparation. So many things we went through were pointless - the questionable history lessons, the imbecilic moral education, the many issues (evolution, 'justice', free speech) which were barred from classroom discussion - that I was more than a little frustrated with the whole process.

We had a massive thunderstorm one evening, the sort which tears down trees and causes electrical blackouts. I moved to my sister's room for the natural light and continued studying. Then lightning flashed and I felt the happiest I'd ever been.

The swaying of the trees, the smell of rain and the wonderful, mystical darkness formed a moment of unforgettable beauty. Buckyball was on the roof outside, curled up against the mosquito netting, mere inches away. We sat there in silence and took it all in. It was perfect. It cleared my mind.

In retrospect, the experience could have triggered some deep part of my mind which holds jobs and school and roads and buildings in deep disdain. There was Weather thrashing Nature, majestically and unpredictably, and perhaps that's all prehistoric existence ever was. For a moment everything made sense, and it brought joy.

I don't need a path or a deity. Spiritual fulfilment is wherever you find it.

MIT

2007-03-18T17:10:00.000+08:00

I just got accepted by MIT. I am, as of now, part of the Engineering Class of 2011. Omigod.

ARE YOU HEARING ME!! MIT!!
THE PLACE WHERE YOU DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE OF KNOWLEDGE UNTIL YOU POP!
THE PLACE WHERE PEOPLE DON'T SLEEP! I'M GONNA DIE!!

Was receiving an offer supposed to make me relax? Anyhow, I'm now frantically downloading the course information for 18.02, 18.03 and 8.02 to make sure that I know my stuff and I can pass the ASEs with flying colours. I intend to make the most of my time there. This involves much preparation.

I'm not going for the thing in April, probably, which leaves me time to learn up on electromagnetic fields and multivariable integration. Plus I'll have plenty of time to dwell on my own inadequacies and wonder how I'm going to measure up against the rest of the student population.

2007-03-17T21:24:00.000+08:00

Screw everything I put ahead of Joanna Newsom's Ys in my 2006 Best Album list. Ys is The Bomb.

T9 attitude

2007-03-11T16:36:00.000+08:00

My handphone's T9 dictionary has an attitude problem. A friend sent me an SMS saying that his computer had just crashed, and I wanted to reply with a

Damn.

The T9, however, refused to write Damn, preferring Econ and Ebon as more socially acceptable alternatives. I firmly believe that a curse word is acceptable in certain situations (such as your hard drive failing), so I disabled the T9 and typed Damn before reenabling it.

Then I tried to add a full stop, and guess what happened.

Damn!

Yeah. A programmer somewhere lacks middle gears.

2007-03-09T23:20:00.000+08:00

Tried to do a stupid stunt today and landed on my chin. Skin split, much blood, huge mess.

Three stitches.

EDIT: It doesn't hurt. Figures.

OMGs come in threes

2007-03-04T18:58:00.000+08:00

OMG!

I have stuck something on my wall for the first time ever!!
It's an 8-speed power transmission. Go figure.

OMG!

Explosions In The Sky plays on the Conan O'Brien Show!!

OMG!

I have Apologies To The Queen Mary!
Thanks SY!! (No, the other SY)

I felt like writing drivel

2007-02-27T19:13:00.000+08:00

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Loving It

2007-02-25T17:48:00.000+08:00

THIS IS A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCASTING SYSTEM

THIS IS A TEST THIS IS ONLY A TEST

XD

2007-02-24T16:44:00.000+08:00

I just read about a guy whose creation produced electricity with a 'Lego Generator'.

Since when did Lego make generators??

So I checked out his website, and guess what, his 'generator' is a Lego DC motor operated in reverse.

$%&^$&%#^%#%$!!! Why the F*** has that never occurred to me???

2007-02-17T11:05:00.000+08:00

Chinese New Year is traditionally the driest time of the year. The old folk think it's because the weather doesn't want to interfere with celebrations, the rest of us consider it a timely seasonal change.

It's CNY eve. There was a downpour this morning. The past few days have seen plenty of heavy rain, and signs are it isn't going to let up anytime soon.

Should I be worried?

OMG OMG Global Warming OMG

EDIT: It rained again in the afternoon. What the hell?? We never get thunderstorms at 1pm!

2007-02-14T22:47:00.000+08:00

I only just recently discovered the original Virgin Boomtube EX and was blown away by the specs. It stows away easily, fills the space of three Coke cans and boasts a massive 40 Watt output! That outstrips my current (equivalently sized) system by a good 200%, plus it has internal rechargable batteries and home-theater-grade sound quality. I have yet to find a professional audio review which hasn't gushed shell-shocked praise at this system.

The product was eventually discontinued by Virgin but is now being sold by Think Outside. Same speakers, same 40 watt magnificence, different brand.

I hope they're still making these when I finally enter the workforce!

Generation LOL

2007-02-13T21:18:00.000+08:00

I once read an article about modern teens, of how we, despite shutting ourselves in all day with a computer and the telly for company, are actually more socially connected than any previous generation. The article cited MSN and other chat programs for this 'phenomenon'. Teens would meet once, exchange online identities and be forever in contact.

It occurs to me now that MSN and the like may keep us in contact, as the article claimed, but discourages us from actually communicating with each other. It is so easy to add some person to your list, chat with him/her exactly once and forget said person forever. Sometimes people who add me don't even bother establishing first contact and I never find out who they are.

Having everyone you've ever met on your list of contacts has another effect; it makes keeping in touch a completely passive activity. It used to take a telephone directory and a pinch of commitment to keep the lines open with some particular individual - with MSN, that person is in contact forever.

So what exactly is wrong with this? Isn't it good that maintaining connections is practically effortless? Well, no. For one thing, people are less inclined to drop a line (whether through MSN or phone) since they always know where to find you. And I don't know about you, but when someone who hasn't said hello for two years drops out of the blue to ask for help, I get a little pissed. And I don't mean minor help, I mean the "give me several hours of your time" sort.

Then, of course, there are people so catatonically bored that they say HI and follow up with a LOL, whatever your reply, leaving you to do the rest of the work. You are not an Ultra HAL. You were not born to keep the monkeys entertained. You are a human being with things to do.

Eventually, we tend to end up with a behemoth contact list of full of people we barely know. Look at yours. How many do you chat with at least once a month? 40%? 30%? If you speak regularly with half, you're either new or really motivated. I know people who have too many contacts, especially too many idiotic contacts, who go to great lengths to sever them. Unless you change your email address, they'll always be able to ping you. It's not even like a phone, where they at least get charged for the call. Your other alternative is to block them, which is itself an irony - connected to the point of exhaustion, members of the new generation start hiding from each other.

Ocular Orientation

2007-02-11T20:31:00.000+08:00

Here's a little experiment you can try with no apparatus whatsoever. Look at an object, any object, preferably at medium range. Then tilt your head sideways. Chances are that your sight will remain stable and you will have no doubt about the actual orientation of the object.

This puzzled me for a bit. My eyes were being rotated but my vision did not. There was a slight possibility that my eyeballs were rotating to compensate, though I later decided that it was not hardware, but software which was responsible for the correction, i.e. my brain rotated the confusing image to its correct orientation in real time.

The next half of the experiment involves unfocusing your eyes. I'm not sure how many people can do this at will, but the idea is to see everything as a horrid blur. I unfocused my eyes while looking at the same object, then tilted my head. Lo & behold, the whole world seemed to spin around the forward axis!

By limiting my sight to a significantly less detailed image, I gave my brain much less data to work with and less cues as to which way was up and which was down. Unable to understand what I say, it simply gave my mind exactly what it saw- a blurry, rotating mess.

Two interesting questions:
1. How much of a role does gravity play in figuring out how the image should be rotated?
2. Do people in a completely unfamiliar environment (no upright tree stumps, horizontal tables, loose objects sitting on the ground, etc.) have a diminished ability to rotate their vision correctly? What would happen if I built a sideways house and put people in it?

Siti Nurhaliza gets Grammy Invite

2007-02-06T17:03:00.000+08:00

Eye-catching title ain't it? It's taken straight from today's copy of The Star. Second page, National News section, no less.

It seems that Malaysia's most popular politically-powered prim & proper pop princess prolefeed really has been invited to the Grammy Awards. Wonderful, no? It will make people all over the world sit up and acknowledge our existence, that sort of thing. Exactly the sort of publicity which the Visit Malaysia 2007 campaign could use.

Now, I'm thinking, did she get in because someone important has been enthralled by the collosal talent contained in her diminutive stature? Or was it something else?
Let's read on:

Siti made it thanks to the two tickets she won as Best Dressed celebrity at Star World's "Breakfast With the Stars" in conjuction with the 78th Annual Academy Awards last March.

"Siti is very popular in this region and she deserves this honour," said Nini Yusof, assistant vice-president of Star TV in Singapore.

"We are sending our Channel V crew together with the local team in Los Angeles to film the footage which will be shown later over Star World."

Oh dear. Our petite popstar appears to have 'made it' not because of her bountiful vocal ability, but due to her success in a celebrity dress-up show. A show hosted by the Singaporeans, no less, who will also take credit for filming her presence at the event.

Nini said if Siti's dress stood out, "she might attract the international paparazzi. We hope that happens. We are giving her the platform as she is a big icon in this part of the world."

Dear Siti,
I understand that you have always dressed conservatively, as in accordance with your religion. This is very noble. I daresay that your fellow poptarts from around the world will be stunned by the novelty of your non-cloth-conserving ways. They will trot about looking for ways to cover themselves up, while the international paparazzi photograph you from every angle.

Pain in the Eye

2007-01-28T21:28:00.000+08:00

One day, after a series of nights spent working till the small hours of the morning, I woke up with a feeling of having been punched in the eye. I more or less ignored it and swore to get more rest the next night.

Well, here I am, a bunch of day later, and it turns out that I have a nasty infection in both eyelids. It stings when I blink, it stings when I close my eyes, it stings whenever it wants, really. It's driving me nuts.

I finally went to the doctor who gave me a thick antibacterial gel to squeeze around my eyeballs, beneath the eyelid. Uncomfortable, no? No matter, I've gone through worse. The stuff effectively renders me blind after application, so I put it on and go to bed.

Three AM and I'm parched. I get up to find the jug of water in my bedroom and, guess what, my eyes are glued shut. GLUED SHUT. Plus they hurt in an incredibly extruciating way when I try to open them. These are eyelids which cause immeasurable pain when touched gently. They are now GLUED TOGETHER with something of similar strength to cyanoacrylate adhesive and are being ripped apart at the slightest attempt to move them. Either way, I need to get to the water jug so I do my best to get them open and the pain makes my head swim. I am, if you recall, the sort of person who could rip his arm on a nail and not notice till hours later, yet this freaking eye infection is managing to affect my sanity.

Tonight I will try putting the gel on the worst eye and coordinating myself monoscopically until morning, when I can try ungumming it in a more intelligent manner.

Out with the Old

2007-01-22T17:20:00.000+08:00

The Bangsar Night Market has run every Sunday, without fail, for as long as I can remember. It is famed for its business, its laksa, its soul. I often see tourists among the regulars, coming in flocks to witness two roads of a major 'hip' area transform into a bustling market by evening and then revert by night.

Well, no more.

A massive retail complex has been built along the site, and consequently, the entire market has been relocated (squashed is a better word) to a parking lot and some alleys. The stores are ditching the area, customers are buying their groceries elsewhere, and this timeless feature of Bangsar is approaching nonexistence.

Screw you, shopping centre. Screw you, land developer. You have sacrificed a rare piece of Malaysian character for yet another ubiquitous building. When all we have left to show the world are branded goods and staged 'traditional' dances, I'll think of you.

UPDATE: About a third of the stalls have decided to boycott the move. The storekeepers are balking about the cramped conditions of the new area, it seems. To add insult to injury, the authorities have forced them to buy a specific blue tent and other equipment for their stalls to make things 'cleaner' and 'more hygienic'. And more uniform, and less vibrant than the multicoloured mess of canvas and umbrellas previously in use. Those in charge cite traffic congestion as the main cause of the relocation. Funny, this market has existed and 'caused congestion' for so many years yet this only happens when the shopping centre shows up.

Dishwashing Liquid

2007-01-19T14:52:00.000+08:00

What every overworked housewife would love to buy.

And don't forget our new and improved product,
Skilled Labour™!

2007-01-17T19:53:00.000+08:00

I wish I had more time to write. Fiction. I have little plots swimming around my head which will probably never see a first draft.

TO A CERTAIN PERSON I KNOW WHO LOVES TO WRITE:
Keep it up. When it comes to writing application essays you will feel more capable than 99% of your peers.

Hmm?

2007-01-08T16:33:00.000+08:00

I have just received a letter from Queen's College, Cambridge.

I am pleased to write on behalf of the Admissions Committee to offer you a place from October 2007 to read Engineering conditional upon you obtaining A grades in each of Further Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry A-levels 2007.

How very jolly. Yay.

Then I check the top of the letter, and it's definitely my address. That's my street, that's my name. But I'm referred to as Miss Tshen.

OMG WTF BBQ

By the way, I'm a guy. But Chinese names are hard, and with a 'Shen' in mine, I'm not completely surprised that Cambridge got it wrong.

5 Dollar, 10 Dollar

2007-01-07T22:25:00.000+08:00

The bazaar streets are built of cobblestones set deep into the ground. It's not easy to tell - a carpet of sand obscures the lines. Passers-by kick up dust as they walk along, perusing glass pyramids and woven scarves, colourful shishas and stuffed toy camels. It's a tourist den.

Dust collects in your socks. It's unavoidable. Then the wind picks up and the dust is everywhere. The storekeepers hose the roads to keep the dust from rising; hardly the behaviour I expected in a country this deprived of moisture.

I'm using an old compact camera. The lens rises exactly one second after the camera is turned on. In places like this, I tend to turn it on inside its pouch and remove it just before its lens extrudes, so as to reveal it for as little time as possible. I take the shot - a man hosing the street - and conceal it quickly, but not fast enough. He notices.

"You! You take picture of my shop!"

"What?"

"You take picture! Pay me money! Ten dollar!"

None of his shop is in the photo. His back, perhaps, and a stream of water, but nothing else of his. Not that it makes a difference. I'm acting on principle.

"No. I took a picture of the road! Not your shop."

"You pay me! Ten Egyptian dollar!"

"NO."

I give him a look normally reserved for frightening small children and turn away. He hesitates. I use the moment to place a pillar between us. When I turn around, he's no longer tailing me.

I wonder if he's acting on principle as well.

The Many Santas of Egypt

2007-01-03T22:59:00.000+08:00

About 10% of Egyptians are Christians. The rest care just enough to put these up for tourists.

Tshen's Best Albums of 2006

2006-12-22T18:10:00.000+08:00

#8: Shut Up I Am Dreaming
by Sunset Rubdown

Every song in this album is an exercise in metaphor. Spencer Krug sings of snakes with legs, mothers who eat their babies, kids who are mutilated in exchange for a 'ride' and plenty more, often reusing the words 'ghost' and 'snake'. A whole chunk of it is open for interpretation, of course, and I'm sure everyone sees meaning in every line, though it may not be the same meaning they see. Krug, surely, sees the most; it is disturbing to think that this man experiences the same world that we do yet somehow extracts so much more from it, enough to make something as incredible as this. This is an important album. Listen to it.

#7: Writer's Block
by Peter, Bjorn and john

The name is misleading; this is easily one of the most creative, inspired pieces of pop in recent history. A little intro leads into Objects of my Affection where a wall of guitars alternately fades and returns to make space for the words. This, as well as the next two songs, are among the best in the album: Young Folks bounces breezily along on whistle-power while Amsterdam sounds decent until the bouncy synth chorus kicks in and makes it glorious. Writer's Block drops points for losing momentum, almost halting entirely in the last two songs.

#6: Destroyer's Rubies
by Destroyer

Dan Bejar sounds exactly as he looks, at least in my opinion; slightly scruffy and rather Indian. His arrangements made me think, in fact, of a war veteran singing on a blues stage with his pals backing him up. Esoteric lyrics, chanting melodies and frequent dynamic changes quickly dispell the image. This album is better suited for mature audiences, not due to bad language or 'mature themes' thank goodness (which are really quite juvenile), but because it caters to those who listen for more than cheap thrills and an instant kick. There are rockish bits too, but don't look for them at every turn.

#5: The Crane Wife
by The Decemberists

What can I say? It's definitely a Decemberist album, with exactly the sort of songs one who has been following them might expect. Lots of hyper-literary lyrics and even more prog-rock influence, culminating in that huge (and also very, very good) 12-minute 2nd track, The Island. One major distinction this album holds over their earlier work is marvellous instrumentation. Too many of their past songs were held up by lyrics alone (can you say The Sporting Life?) whereas the backing here alone is worth the price of purchase. Precisely one song is a departure from the norm: The Perfect Crime 2, an almost dancable, jazzy track which sounds nothing like their previous work. It stands out lyrically, too, for throwing out vague descriptions of events rather than simply narrating.

#4: Ys
by Joanna Newsom

"Is this your music?" asked my mother.
"Yep."
"What an awful voice!"
"Yeah, well as far as I'm concerned, this album is among the year's best."
Yeah, it is. And her voice is high-pitched and sometimes squeaky, it takes some getting used to. Newsom's strange vocals are set against a backdrop of wonderful harp-playing and minimalistic instrumentation. The whole sound is a break from convention, and a very worthwhile one too. If we could just throw out our predefined ideas of what constitutes 'good' music for awhile, more people might appreciate her quiet genius. There are five tracks, each about ten minutes long, each a little wonder in itself. Hear this, please. You'll be entranced within the first thirty seconds.

#3: Silent Shout
by The Knife

This is house music, technically speaking, but technical terms rarely do justice to anything. First of all, this album is creepy. Techno music is, by its very nature, cold and inhuman. The Dreijer siblings took that property to new heights and built a whole album around it, resulting in one of this year's most magnificent creations. It will have you hooked from the very start with Silent Shout, an ominious tune with a deep beat and disembodied voices hidden from view. The vocals here are all done by Karin Dreijer, which hardly means that they sound the same. No, she cuts and slices and excites them into startling new forms, from the high-register wail on The Captain to the booming man-voice on One Hit. Her brother surrounds this voice with haunted keys and thumping beats. Together they build something dark, beautiful and very, very spooky.

#2: Citrus
by Asobi Seksu

Yuki Chikudate can sing. This she does in both English and Japanese, backed by a solid rhythm section and a lead guitarist who blasts his axe in everywhich direction. This is an album which manages to be both crystal clear and sonically dense. Some songs are relatively sparse - Strings, for example - but the vast majority of them feature Walls of Sound which echo off rocky cliffs and propel the listener into euphoria. Exotic Animal Paradise is both; the devastating coda is made even more terrific by the minutes of relative peace which precede it. Masterpieces abound - Thursday and Red Sea particularly stand out - while catchy tunes like Lions & Tigers will grab your heart in seconds. The only mediocre track is the album closer which meanders a little too far into J-pop territory. Best listened loud.

#1: Return to Cookie Mountain
by TV on the Radio

I was a lover / Before this war
croons Kype Malone as the album opens. The band's second singer, Tunde Adebimpe, is close behind, almost echoing his words. The message is simple: This wasn't meant to be a protest album. This didn't have to be a dissenting voice, but so many awful things have happened recently and now it is.
TV on the Radio have always shown a lot of promise. Two excellent, complementing voices and pitch-perfect production - it's about time they made a record worthy of their individual talents. This one, full of their signature loops but rockier and more urgent and better than their previous efforts, finally is. The addition of a drummer has really helped things improve, but there is a curious sensation of increased purpose in this album which really makes the difference.

I won't describe this any further. Track it down and experience it for yourself.

2006-12-22T12:07:00.000+08:00

My cat recently found and helped kill a poisonous snake in my garden.

2006-12-14T10:40:00.000+08:00

This more or less describes the first 80% of my life.

Blah

2006-12-10T10:40:00.000+08:00

Blah Blah Blah.

I'm tired of yakking about politics. Something stupid happens so often in that respect that my fingers could snap just trying to keep up with it. Either through sheer exertion, or through the efforts of the Anti-Sedition Finger Snapping Squad. Omigod! Who are you! Snap! Aaaah!

Yeah, Michael whatshisname wrote another article about us. Do I care? Somewhat. Am I going to put it here, like I did with the last two things he wrote? Go do the legwork yourself.

Nyahahah. Apathy rules.

More internet drama

2006-11-20T18:42:00.000+08:00

Michael Backman, it seems, isn't done with us yet. The Head of Wanita UMNO, Datin Seri Rafidah Aziz, recently produced a completely inane response to his article. There are many opinons flying around at the moment, and it seems that a decent number of them have ended up being heard by Michael Backman himself. He writes back:

----------

The response to my recent column 'While Malaysia fiddles, its opportunities are running dry', published in The Age newspaper on November 15 has been overwhelming. I've received hundreds of e-mails and messages, many from Malaysians both in Malaysia and outside. Thank you for these. It seems that the column has given voice to concerns that many Malaysians have.

I'd like to emphasise (and as many of you realise already), that I wrote the column as constructive criticism. I like Malaysia very much. I visit often and have many Malaysian friends of all races. I've also written a lot that is positive about Malaysia in the past, most notably in a previous book of mine - The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian Business, which has no less than five chapters to explain to people outside Malaysia why I feel that Malaysia should be given more credit than it gets.

There have been many achievements. There is much about which Malaysians can be proud. Malaysia, for example, is far more politically mature and developed than is Singapore. The media is more open too (but of course not as open as it could or should be.) Malaysians are more entrepreneurial too. AirAsia started in Malaysia and has revolutionised air travel across Asia. In Singapore, there is very much a sense that the government has to do everything.

I also believe that the NEP, which has seen special advantages given to bumiputeras over other groups, has been important for Malaysia. It has been essential for nation building. Malaysia is peaceful and while the various groups may not mix much there is clear mutual respect between them. That is a huge achievement.

However, the problem as I said in my column, is waste. And also the use of statistics that are blatantly wrong. Malaysia also has a big problem with transparency. Too little account is made of how other people's money is spent. The police too are way too corrupt for a country as developed as Malaysia. The rote learning that is practiced in the schools also needs to be done away with. Generations of Malaysian children are missing out on an education that should teach them how to be creative and critical - this is what a truly modern, boleh country needs. Again, my comments are meant to be constructive. And I make them as a non-Malaysian largely because many Malaysians feel rightly or wrongly that they cannot say these things themselves in their own country.

Since my column was published, plans for a new RM400 million Istana have been announced and the Agriculture Ministry parliamentary secretary has told Parliament that Malaysia's first astronaut will be playing batu seremban and spinning tops and making teh tarik while in space. There are countless scientists around the world who would give anything for the opportunity to go to space and do real experiments. For the Malaysian government to send an astronaut into space to play Malay children's games serves only to re-emphasise my point about waste. Not only that, it makes Malaysia look infantile in the eyes of the rest of the world, which is a great pity when Malaysia has made so many real achievements. The world is getting more clever, more competitive and more dynamic every day. There are too many in Malaysia who don't seem to understand this.

Of course my views are just that: my views. But I have spent most of my adult life analysing and writing about Asia. I am direct and critical; I do not veil my criticisms because I don't want to waste my time or yours with readers trying to guess what I really mean. Open debate is absolutely critical for all modern, dynamic countries. The free flow of ideas and information helps to make countries rich. Political leaders cannot do everything on their own be they in the UK, Australia or Malaysia. They need help. Otherwise they make mistakes. And when they do, whose fault is that? Those who prefer to stay quiet? And should I as a non-Malaysian be commenting on Malaysia? Of course. Malaysian political leaders and commentators routinely comment about other countries. That's how the world is now, an inter-dependent, global world. And the world is much better for it.

I will write another column about Malaysia soon.

----------

Will the government reply to this reply, or his next column for that matter? What will they say?

Or will they just listen for once?

Rafidah pooh-poohs Aussie article

2006-11-19T10:55:00.000+08:00

Rafidah has announced that it does not matter what that Aussie has written for The Age. She says he wrote such things because he does not understand Malaysia, has never attended the UMNO party talks, etc. and therefore as an outsider has no right to comment on us.

See, that's the trick. No one can understand the chaos of our administration from afar. All they see is entropy and write about how Malaysia is too messed up to encourage foreign investment.

Then you have a half-coherent article written by said Aussie who shows a bit more inside knowledge than most international reporters, and it's rubbished by our government for not being 'insider' enough. Unfortunately, he's built a pattern of sorts from our madness for the outside world to easily follow. What he says may or may not be the absolute truth, but it's a clear, quotable text for the rest of the world to read and believe.

How close to Malaysia does he have to be before his views are taken seriously here?
Does he have to be a Malaysian?
An UMNO member?
The prime minister?

Here's the catch: being that close to Malaysia would mean that he is eligible to unlimited stay at the Jailbird's Hotel, without trial, under the ISA. No one that close to the government would say anything bad about it.

Therefore, anyone with the right to criticise us will likely never do so. What a recipe for denial.

Besides, if that Aussie in question had stayed in Malaysia to learn more about us, then attended the UMNO party talks and everything else, would his comments have been nicer?

Or worse?

What's new, Malaysia?

2006-11-15T21:46:00.000+08:00

(An Aussie with a lot to say)

While Malaysia fiddles, its opportunities are running dry
by Michael Backman
November 15, 2006

MALAYSIA'S been at it again, arguing about what proportion of the economy each of its two main races — the Malays and the Chinese — owns. It's an argument that's been running for 40 years. That wealth and race are not synonymous is important for national cohesion, but really it's time Malaysia grew up.

It's a tough world out there and there can be little sympathy for a country that prefers to argue about how to divide wealth rather than get on with the job of creating it.

The long-held aim is for 30 per cent of corporate equity to be in Malay hands, but the figure that the Government uses to justify handing over huge swathes of public companies to Malays but not to other races is absurd. It bases its figure on equity valued, not at market value, but at par value.

Many shares have a par value of say $1 but a market value of $12. And so the Government figure (18.9 per cent is the most recent figure) is a gross underestimate. Last month a paper by a researcher at a local think-tank came up with a figure of 45 per cent based on actual stock prices. All hell broke loose. The paper was withdrawn and the researcher resigned in protest. Part of the problem is that he is Chinese.

"Malaysia boleh!" is Malaysia's national catch cry. It translates to "Malaysia can!" and Malaysia certainly can. Few countries are as good at wasting money. It is richly endowed with natural resources and the national obsession seems to be to extract these, sell them off and then collectively spray the proceeds up against the wall.

This all happens in the context of Malaysia's grossly inflated sense of its place in the world.

Most Malaysians are convinced that the eyes of the world are on their country and that their leaders are world figures. This is thanks to Malaysia's tame media and the bravado of former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. The truth is, few people on the streets of London or New York could point to Malaysia on a map much less name its prime minister or capital city.

As if to make this point, a recent episode of The Simpsons features a newsreader trying to announce that a tidal wave had hit some place called Kuala Lumpur. He couldn't pronounce the city's name and so made up one, as if no-one cared anyway. But the joke was on the script writers — Kuala Lumpur is inland.

Petronas, the national oil company is well run, particularly when compared to the disaster that passes for a national oil company in neighbouring Indonesia. But in some respects, this is Malaysia's problem. The very success of Petronas means that it is used to underwrite all manner of excess.

The KLCC development in central Kuala Lumpur is an example. It includes the Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world when they were built, which was their point.

It certainly wasn't that there was an office shortage in Kuala Lumpur — there wasn't.

Malaysians are very proud of these towers. Goodness knows why. They had little to do with them. The money for them came out of the ground and the engineering was contracted out to South Korean companies.

They don't even run the shopping centre that's beneath them. That's handled by Australia's Westfield.

Next year, a Malaysian astronaut will go into space aboard a Russian rocket — the first Malay in space. And the cost? $RM95 million ($A34.3 million), to be footed by Malaysian taxpayers. The Science and Technology Minister has said that a moon landing in 2020 is the next target, aboard a US flight. There's no indication of what the Americans will charge for this, assuming there's even a chance that they will consider it. But what is Malaysia getting by using the space programs of others as a taxi service? There are no obvious technical benefits, but no doubt Malaysians will be told once again, that they are "boleh". The trouble is, they're not. It's not their space program.

Back in July, the Government announced that it would spend $RM490 million on a sports complex near the London Olympics site so that Malaysian athletes can train there and "get used to cold weather".

But the summer Olympics are held in the summer.

So what is the complex's real purpose? The dozens of goodwill missions by ministers and bureaucrats to London to check on the centre's construction and then on the athletes while they train might provide a clue.

Bank bale outs, a formula one racing track, an entire new capital city — Petronas has paid for them all. It's been an orgy of nonsense that Malaysia can ill afford.

Why? Because Malaysia's oil will run out in about 19 years. As it is, Malaysia will become a net oil importer in 2011 — that's just five years away.

So it's in this context that the latest debate about race and wealth is so sad.

It is time to move on, time to prepare the economy for life after oil. But, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, the Malaysian Government is more interested in stunts like sending a Malaysian into space when Malaysia's inadequate schools could have done with the cash, and arguing about wealth distribution using transparently ridiculous statistics.

That's not Malaysia "boleh", that's Malaysia "bodoh" (stupid).

-----------------------------

No shit, mate!
Some might say he should replace the word Malay with UMNOputera, but nevertheless the meaning is there.

Isn't it strange to be cheering on a foreigner as he verbally assaults your country?

Hey, someone had to say it. We're all in denial, it might as well be him.

2006-11-13T21:38:00.000+08:00

Ahahahahahahaha
Man, the Japanese rock. Read the comments too.

HolyShitTheNewMenomenaAlbumWasLeaked

2006-11-13T15:51:00.000+08:00

And I have it on my hard drive.
And I'm listening to it.
Say what, if I find it anywhere I'll definitely buy it.
But I'm probably going to hell.

2006-11-09T22:28:00.000+08:00

Princeton University Exposes Diebold Flaws

This is your democracy on drugs.

2006-11-06T12:04:00.000+08:00

I am totally hyped up about the new Menomena album. I still haven't managed to find the entirety of I am the Fun Blame Monster! (anagram: Menomena's First Album), but the 80% I have is reason enough to send my Anticipate-O-Meter crazy. Glitched-beat drum attacks on Cough Coughing, switch-hit orchestral overdose on The Late Great Libido and so much more, all with insane rhythms thanks to their very own beat-distortion software. These songs feature up to a dozen instruments and include some odd electronic sounds.

And they play these monsters live.
And there are only three guys in this band.

One song from their next album (Friend & Foe) has been released to the public, you can download it here (see bottom of page). It has so many instruments that playing it live is a masterpiece of multitasking.

Menomena - Wet and Rusting

dammit they cut off the last thirty seconds :-(

You really ought to download and hear the song before you watch that, it'll help you appreciate the enormity of what they're attempting to perform. That little electronic tututututututu noise? The drummer mumbles it into his mike. The lead keeps tapping his effects pedals to make his axe sound like two different instruments and the keyboardist switches for a guitar twice a minute. Then the insane drumbeat finally kicks in with the drummer's arms becoming a vertical blur.

Friend & Foe is totally coming out next January. Must must must get my hands on it.