Ratatouille

Watched it opening night. What can I say? It was awesome! :)

That little fella with his little pink nose is just too darn cute.

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ITB is my bane

Ran 4.5km at 10km/hr and when I stepped off the treadmill, there it was again, like an old friend, but this time, in my good leg. My good leg! What do I need to do? Realign my hips, or what??

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Sheares Bridge Run 2007

Actually, it really wasn't that bad at all. In fact, the 12km was quite enjoyable — no ITB pain, no fatigue, no problems breathing, no chafing, no blisters, no muscle ache... haha! What a ride. :)

I felt nauseous the first 3km because the piece of french loaf I had for breakfast 20 minutes before the run felt like it was expanding in my oesphagus and coming back out, but once I got over the nausea, I was okay.

I should known that it would do that, but what to do, I wasn't well-prepared and NTUC doesn't sell Jacob's breakfast biscuits any longer. Poooey. I really like my Jacob's breakfast biscuits, the chocolate ones especially. They are awesome for a pre-run breakfast 'cos it's fuss-free and you gives a lot of energy without being voluminous (the way bread is).

Anyway, it was fun. I'm developing a higher tolerance to being squished in a big crowd of smelly people. As usual, since this run is organized by the Army, the guys outnumbered the ladies possibly 10 to 1. They made announcements like these: "Brothers, please slow down. We are letting the vehicles pass through." What, brothers?? I looked at him; he looked at me, but he repeated the announcement word-for-word. I suppose this is my one chance to experience the camaraderie of the Army. (Thank God.)

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The best part of this run is running on the Sheares Bridge. It makes you feel so important, like a car. The uphill wasn't that bad at all, but we were running slowly.

We went to MacDonald's at Marina Square for some breakfast after the run. It was packed with smelly people, myself included. I felt quite sorry for the normal people trying to have a quiet Sunday morning breakfast. Went home, had a nap, then had some chilli I made yesterday. Yum!

Now I'm walking around with a post-run glow. Heh.

(This post is about running, even though it sounds like it is about food and women, it is about running.)

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I'm going to suffer tomorrow

• Sheares Bridge Run, 12km, bright and early.
• Haven't run in two, three, maybe even four weeks.
• It's 1:15am and I just got home.
• All I had for dinner was snack food.
• Like I said in the title of this post.....
  

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A poll for my gentle readers

Every so often, this blog gets boring and degenerates into a digital brain dump. So I'm taking a poll. This is your chance for your voices to be heard. So head over the right-hand column and cast your votes today! You may click more than one option.

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I came home and there were bananas

I came home and there were bananas on the table, happy, yellow and grinning on the glass coffee table in the middle of an empty house. I turned on the lights and went into my room; the bed winked at me; the feel of the cool sheets, the enveloping softness of the pillows, the safe warmth of the blanket seemed a lifetime ago.

And I made myself a hot cup of Yorkshire tea and put my legs up. It had been a long day.

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On determiners

Determiners are used before a noun and make specific sense of the noun. Traditionally, determiners are categorised as a type of adjective. (See earlier post) However, it is becoming more common for grammars to categorise determiners as a class of their own.

Determiners can be thought about in terms of their position. For example, in the phrase "all the seven people,"

all = pre-determiner,
the = central determiner,
seven = post-determiner,
people = noun.

Each determiner has a specific place. You can't say "seven the all people," if you know what I mean.

The diagram above shows which types of determiners can go in which position.

Some thorny things to take note of:

1. Demonstratives can be used both as a pronoun as a determiner.

That rambutan is hairy! (determiner)
That is hairy! (pronoun)

2. Note the difference between possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers) and possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her). Possessive adjectives function as determiners while possessive pronouns are pronouns.

3. Of- pronouns can be categorised either as indefinite pronouns or determiners. Of- pronouns refer to those words that can be used with "of", for example, each, all, some, any, a few, none etc.

Suitably confused? Well, me too...

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On adverbs: adjuncts, subjuncts, disjuncts, conjuncts

A slightly more detailed organisation that in the previous post. Conjuncts = conjunctive adverbs. Intensifiers fall into the category of subjuncts.

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The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

You should have seen the face of the sweet young thing at the ticketing office when she asked me what I wanted to watch, and I said "The pervert's guide". Only later did I notice that the billboards had unobtrusively referred to the film as "Cinema". Well.

Anyway, The Pervert's Guide is an intriguing look at cinema and what it tells us about ourselves. Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, basically gives a two and a half hours lecture on cinema, with clips from some of the most highly-regarded films in history. He says, "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire — it tells you how to desire."

I don't have the brain right now (as the scarecrow says in "The Wizard of Oz") to put my random thoughts into paragraphs, so here they are in point form.

- Zizek talks about our need for fantasy so that we can negotiate reality. In Blue, the female protagonist escapes reality into fantasy when she couldn't cope with her dead husband having had a mistress, but later escaped fantasy back into reality, and it was with this sense of the fantasy that she could cope in the real world. In Eyes Wide Shut, the male protangonist finds himself struggling and failing to catch up with his girlfriend's fantasy about her having an affair, and so he creates his own, but he finds himself at an impasse in the fantastical world as well.

- The use of a window, glass, a crack in the door as a double metaphor of the character looking into his fantasy world (cp Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), and viewers watching a film.

- Fantasy is a bit like religion, I think. Everyone needs a meta-narrative of some sorts to be sane. But those are just my thoughts, not Zizek's.

- I don't think I will ever want to watch any of David Lynch's films... Zizek mentions that the extermination of the paternal figure is a key element in Lynch's films. I think to a certain extent that is true, in the sense that everybody wants autonomy, but in "normal families". this is expressed as a shift in the balance of power, rather than the desire to kill our fathers.

- Zizek also talked about the birds being "raw incestuous power" in The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Erm. Okaay.

- Watching a movie is like watching a toilet bowl. You flush your excrement into the "netherworld" and never see it again, but watching a movie is the opposite of that — you stare into yourself, wondering what will come up.

- Sex requires fantasy. It isn't just about bodies; it is about your idea of who you want, what you want. Males and females have different fantasies. The male is always baffled by the mystery of the subjective woman and wants her to fit neatly into his fantasy. Women's eroticism is in the re-telling of the act — the narrative.

- The power of music. In The Dictator (Charlie Chaplin), the same music is used after the speech by the dictator, and the peace-loving speech of the barber. The response from the people is the same: wild cheering. So, does the content matter?

- The belief in illusion. In some films, the director actually appears at the beginning to say that it is fictional (for example Frankenstein), but viewers are still affected despite knowing that it is not real.

- I wonder what that says about our current obsession over reality tv?

For a more coherent idea of what The Pervert's Guide is about, read this page.

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Free stuff I cannot do without: Calq

Since I've moved to a Mac, I've had quite a bit angst over the inbuilt calculator on dashboard. I can't exactly pinpoint why. Perhaps it is because the screen is small and sometimes when you click on a number, it doesn't register. The calculator that came bundled with Windows worked better for me.

So it is a bit ironical that Calq is an application that works for both Mac and Windows, when for once, the Windows folks don't actually need such an application. Aw well. Maybe after reading about Calq, Windows folks will want Calq anyway. :)

Calq is a quick and nifty calculator that you can call up with a hotkey combination. What pops up is a small window that lets you type in your calculations from your keyboard. It recognises brackets: (1+2)*6; it even remembers the last 100 calculations! Just click the up arrow to look through your calculator's history. How useful!



And when you are done with your calculations, the calculator fades away unobtrusively.

Perfect. :)

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Free stuff I cannot do without: Skim

All I want to do is to be able to highlight my PDFs so that I don't have to print it and underline it manually.

Skim does this, and more. Not only does it let you highlight text, it also lists all your highlights in a column on the right. (See screenshot above.) It lets you insert notes, both sticky-style and inline.

The inbuilt search engine is sweet too. You can search the text of the PDF (search bar on the top of the left panel), or you can search through just your highlights and notes (search bar on the top of right panel).

Combined with Yep, an iTunes-like application that tags and organises your PDFs, you are good to go. Yep costs US$34. I may buy it if I get a scanner.

Skim and Yep are Mac-only apps.

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On verbs: have had and had had

This article by BBC sheds light on the matter.

If you think that that is ridiculous and you have had enough of the "had had"/ "that that" debacle, read the section of The Well of Lost Plots where Fforde pokes fun of it. It's great fun. :)

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On verbs: tense and aspect

Remember my table of tenses? Well, apparently it is wrong, at least according to David Crystal. David Crystal says there is NO FUTURE TENSE. Rather, English expresses future time by a variety of other means, such as using the words "will" or "shall".

It makes sense. Because when we write "I ran", "I run", and "I will run", "ran" and "run" signal tense. On other hand, with the verb phrase "will run", "will" is actually a modal verb without any tense markers. Semantically, it carries the meaning of the future, but not it does not signal tense.

Also, it is imprecise to say that verbs like "running" and "have run" are the "progressive tense" and "perfect tense" respectively. This is because the -ing form of the verb does not have anything to do when it happened, whether it is in the present or the past. Rather, it has to do with aspect, which is concerned about duration: is an action continuing or completed? There are two aspects in English: the progressive aspect (-ing) and the perfective aspect (have).

Note that the word "have" must always be used with the perfective aspect. In the sentence "I have eaten", the perfective-ness of the verb is not determined by the -en form of eaten, but by the word "have". Therefore the sentence "Apples were eaten" is not of the perfective aspect. "Apples were eaten" is in the passive voice.

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On verbs: finite and non-finite

There are so many ways to understand grammar. Grammar is a bit like the elephant that the five blind men tried to describe, each of them grabbing on to a different part of the elephant — trunk, tail, leg, body, tusk — each of them convinced that he is correct.

Anyway, I've discovered a different way of classifying verbs. One of the pitfalls of studying on your own from a book you pick up from the library is that the terms you learn may not be the same as the ones used in a test. You stand there holding on to the stringy tail when everyone else has her palm on the body. Naturally, there will be miscommunication.

A simpler way to think about verbs is to classify them into finite and non-finite verbs. Finite verbs are verbs that are signal contrasts in number, tense, person and mood. Its form changes from sentence to sentence, depending on the meaning.

Tense
I walked.
I walk.

Number
He works.
They work.

You get the idea. Now non-finite verbs are what I called verbals in this post. Except you need to throw out the part where I said they don't act as verbs, 'cos in this definition, they sometimes belong to part of a verb phrase. Also, this definition doesn't seem to care too much whether it is acting as a noun (gerund), adverb, or whatever. It even says that the word "gerund" is used by "older grammars". Hmm.

As defined by this grammar, non-finite verbs can be the following:
1. Base form used as an infinitive.
2. -ed participle
3. -ing participle
4. -en form

And I don't even have to worry what the non-finite verb is functioning as. Much simpler, don't you think? But I'm rather fond of the word "gerund"....

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Happy iCal day!

Today's the day when the date on the iCal icon doesn't change whether or not iCal is running. Not that it makes a difference to me, since iCal is configured to run on start-up on my Mac...

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A student

I love being a student. I love meeting people who are young at heart, who still have that glint in their eyes. I love listening to my new friends tell me about their religion; I love telling them who Jesus Christ is to me. It is like being given a rare chance to talk about a beloved friend who lives very very very far away, so far away that I don't talk about him for months and months on end, but when I finally get to say his name aloud in everyday conversation, I remember that he is real, and that he is someone I know and love — a friend.

And I love learning. I love being bombarded by information that I have to assimilate into my mental schema. I love using new words like "schema". And I love it that my schema is changing because of the new information bombarding me. I am getting smarter every day. Okay, maybe not. ;)

And the hours! And the casual clothes! And the cheap coffee! And the salary! And the books!

Seriously, everybody should take time out to be a student every once in a while...

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An octopus goes to school

Being in school brings out the sotong* in me. It is horribly embarrassing.

For the benefit of those who haven't been in school recently, school campuses these days are quite high-tech. To book a computer at the computer lab, you need to queue up at a booking terminal, swipe your matriculation card in this card-swipper apparatus-thing, and then choose an available terminal from the screen. The screen that pops up looks like the screen at the cinema ticket counter: bright blue for the seats that are available, grey for seats that are occupied.

So last week, I queued at the booking terminal and when it got to my turn, I swiped my card. Didn't work. Swiped it again. Didn't work. Until this guy** behind me told me that my card was in the wrong direction. I quickly swiped it the right way, chose my computer, and scampered.

Two days later, at the same booking station, I managed to get past swiping my matriculation card and the screen popped up. I found a computer I wanted and I chose it. Nothing happened! Tried again. Nada. And then the guy*** behind me said, "Xiao jie! Use the mouse!" I had been pressing on the computer screen with my finger! Alamak!

And then, in Ed Psych**** class, I did it again. The prof was doing a verbal roll call. I heard her call out my Chinese name so I lifted my hand and said "Here" in a loud voice. Then someone else in class said: "No, that isn't her. That is me. There are two of us with the same name in this class." So I said, "Oh," and retracted my hand. Not too long after, I heard the Prof call out my Christian name, so I said "Here" again, convinced that it must be me this time, but someone else put up her hand as well! What?! I still have no idea whether that second one is me or not.

I give up. I think I'll just go and blend into the wallpaper now.

* Literally, an octopus. Not so literally, a person who does not know what is going on.
** A fairly cute guy in my Ed Psych class.
*** The same fairly cute guy who pointed out my mistake the first time! What the...!!
**** See point **

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway

It is said that Hemmingway revolutionized modern fictional writing with his direct, almost brusque style of writing. Some call it the "hard-boiled style": macho and to-the-point.

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella. I finished it on the train journey to and from school. It is about an old fisherman — how he catches an extraordinarily huge marlin — and his relationship with a boy apprentice.

Primarily, it is an adventure-type of story. His relationship with the boy adds a bit of "heart" to it.

The religious comments, such as when Hemmingway writes: "Ay, he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood" (107), isn't central to the story. They seem to be off-the-cuff remarks.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

And so concludes the most popular novel of the decade.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is akin to Charles Dicken's serialised novels in the 19th century. Very popular. Hugely successful. And a damn good story.

It was the most I had ever forked out for a fictional book, but how could I not be a part of this 21st century wave?

A poll: how many of us have read it? (I know Jim wins the record for handling the most number of books..)

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Mac and PC: IT guy

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Mac and PC: Security

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The Bourne Identity: the 1988 version

How many of us have watched the 1988 version of The Boune Identity?

It is three hours and five minutes long. I like watching old movies because it is interesting to see how much things have changed. People in this generation have become so much more sophisticated in interpreting images on a screen. Show a microchip with the name of a Swiss bank and a string of numbers, cut to a scene of a surgeon removing the chip from a man's thigh, and any modern viewer can make the connection.

Whereas in The Bourne Identity, you get conversations like these:

Surgeon: "What do you think the microchip means?"
Bourne: "The numbers on the chip must be a bank account! I must go there now because the bank account has the answers to all our questions."

And conversations like these too:

Maria: "Put your arms around me, Jason... I need you to hold me, even if it is only for one night."

Teeheehee. The love scene, compared to modern ones, is tantalizingly slow. The man wears thermal underwear and the woman has a corset + petticoat under her bathrobe. And you can see *gasp* bulges. Quite cute, actually.

I can't remember the last time I watched a thriller without bombs, mobile phones, sports cars, and high speed chases. Instead they had radios that looked like cupboards, telephones that look like the one I remember using in the 80s (did the entire world use that model of telephone then??), and huge silencers on their guns.

Overall, very entertaining. Great plot too.

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Making your Mac keyboard-centric

I noticed a while back that my Mac is very mouse-centric. Hitting TAB only let me jump through text-input options. For example, when I want to sign into my wireless network (see box below), hitting TAB only jumps me between "Network Name" and "Password", and I'll have to use my mouse to choose the type of Wireless Security I require.



So I looked it up, and found out that Macintosh systems were developed as mouse-controlled environments and hence their reliance on the mouse. I shrugged my shoulders and put it down as one of the quirks that I've got to live with since I made the decision to switch.

But I really shouldn't have given up that quickly because the solution was right under my nose. I kinda stumbled into it while looking for something else, and it was simply a matter of going into system preferences, selecting "keyboard & mouse", selecting "keyboard shortcuts" and checking "all controls" under "full keyboard access".



Now I can TAB to my heart's desire.

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The Essence of Rabbit and The Shape of Song

Essence of Rabbit makes me think of Essence of Chicken, but it is nothing like that at all.

It is actually a mandala made up of contemporary depictions of the rabbit.



Close-up


By the way, can anybody find Bugs Bunny in there?

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The Shape of Song analyzes music in terms of repeating themes. An explanation of their method here. Check out the website to see the shape of just about any song online.

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Not a creature of habit

I'm not really a creature of habit. Some things that ought to be habits, I kinda do on a whim. Take brushing teeth for example. Before you get any funny ideas in your head, let me state unequivocally that I have clean teeth and fresh breath. Most of the time, anyway. And I do brush my teeth every morning.

But I don't do it out of habit. I do it because of my mouth is icky when I wake up, and my toothpaste has "icy mint" in cool blue letters on it, and it makes my mouth nice and icy and minty at the same time. That is why I have never liked those kids' toothpastes that has the same concentration of flouride and whatever-ide in it but tastes like a lollipop. What's the point of brushing your teeth with a lollipop? Or, for that matter, chicken-flavoured toothpaste?

I like icy mint. That's why I brush my teeth.

And when I came home today, I wanted some icy mint, so I brushed my teeth, and then I wanted some cheese bread even though it was 11:45pm. so I had some, with my clean chompers and all.

Oh, by the way, sometimes when I want icy mint, I have an ice-cold peppermint green tea instead.

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A worm

In my mind is a worm. The worm digs through my memories for scraps of conversation, conversations that gets dragged out to my temporal lobe, as I search for meaning.

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Free stuff for all your concept mapping needs

Are you a visual learner? Do you like Concept Maps?

Want to see where your blog stands in relation to the World Wide Web?


Pencil Shavings in relation to the World Wide Web

This blog is the small red dot at the top right of the picture above. Apparently, the most important link on my page is Hackosphere.


Zoomed-in image

Click here to find out where your blog stands in relation to the WWW.

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If you don't own a blog, perhaps you may be interested in this visual representation of the New Testament. Every single person's name is visible. How cool is that?



This map is created by Crossway. If you go to this page, you can click on any of the names to see who the person is related to. See picture below for the people related to Paul.



Crossway has also created visual representations of Popular Names of God in the Bible and Who Gets Mentioned Together in the New Testament.

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If you like words and their definitions, check out Visual Thesaurus. It gives the various meanings of a word in a visual map. See the map for "love" below. The definitions are colour-coded for adjectives, nouns, adverbs and verbs too.



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If you want to create your own concept maps, download CMAP, a free software that works for both Windows and Macs users. It is really cool and easy to use. It makes me wonder why I bothered creating all my grammar maps on Word.




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Still can't get enough of concept maps? Check out Visual Complexity, your one-stop portal for everything visually complex.




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Ok, I'm finally done.

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Guilt/ Fear/ Grief

My friend committed suicide two days ago.

Since then, I've been through the whole gamut of emotions: shock, disbelief, guilt and then slowly, grief. I hardly slept the night I found out. At that time, all I knew was that she had suddenly passed away, but that was enough to make me toss and turn all night long, wondering what happened. It is a horrible thing to hear your phone beep, look at it and think, "Oh it is your friend," then open the message later only to find out that, no, it isn't your friend at all, it is her sister, and your friend has passed on. Then you feel a shock that goes to the very core of you, and suddenly it is empty, hollow, and it feels like you have swapped the real world for a living nightmare.

I felt guilty immediately. Why didn't I show more warmth and concern as a friend? Last week, I got carried away by the million and one things that were going on, forgetting the people I was with. If I wasn't so preoccupied, would it have made a difference? Would I have reached out, just that little bit more?

I went for the wake — twice, actually, because when I went in the morning, the casket company had not set up, so I had to go back again in the evening because I needed some resolution — I needed to see something — but when I was finally standing in front of the coffin, there wasn't anything — no grief, no thoughts, nothing — only a few words mumbled in prayer.

It was only today, when I came out of the MRT station, and I remembered how we used to meet right at this spot, remembered how she would invariably spot me before I could spot her, remembered our conversations as we walked together to the bus stop to take the bus, remembered her voice, that I missed her and the tears came.

Life goes on, slowly. I don't want to talk about the details; it is not my place to share so please don't ask; the truth is that while I've been thinking about her and her family more than I've been thinking about myself, I can't write about any of that; I can write only this, an observer's reaction to a tragedy.

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