Word of the day

syncategorematic \sin-kat-uh-gor-uh-MAT-ik\

forming a meaningful expression only in conjunction with a denotative expression (as a content word)

Example sentence:
“In any language, there will be what are called syncategorematic words, such as prepositions and articles,” explained Dr. Lewis.

Listen to pronunciation here.

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Wet day today

Wet day today. Never wear running shoes and thick cotton socks on a wet day. Because they will get wet. And stay wet all day long. And then they'll start to stink, that sour, stale smell that old socks specialize in. Then you can't take them off because they'll smell; and you can't leave them on because they are damp.

I am full of important thoughts today.

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Minuscule student woes

Having trouble starting my essay (so I blog instead). Theoretically, this is an easy essay to write — all I have to do is to churn out 1,000 words and compare two different literary theories — but for some reason, the introduction is stumping me big-time.

All I need is one central idea to anchor this essay... before I fall asleep tonight...

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Fishies among the Flowers

In memory of Su's grandfather.

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Shards of conversation

You: "So, have you dated before?"

Me: "Yah.."

You: "Was your ex a jerk?"

Me: "No, no. Not at all. He was good as gold."

You: *disbelief* "...."

Me: "Well, he really was..."

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Movie overload

Midnight. I'm chomping down on cold samosas and writing in this blog. There is a big 1.25l bottle of cold water beside me, and I take a glug every three bites or so. This school business is throwing my meal-times way out of whack.

Watched The Home Song Stories tonight. This has nothing at all to do with the quality of the film—it is a good show— but I feel like if I have to suspend my disbelief one more time, I will, well, keel over and die. Too. many. movies.

In other news, Joan Chen is gorgeous in the movie. It's for people like her that cheongsams were made for, if you know what I mean. Uncle Joe is good-looking too.

Okay, I'm going to put the rest of the cold samosas back in the fridge now...

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Dying at a Hospital, 1993

A film by Ichikawa Jun about what it is like to die in a hospital. It is a very slow and long-drawn film, but that creates the effect of time slowing down at the end... As one of the characters say in the film, "TV shows aren't realistic 'cos the patients in the hospitals get well too fast."

The blurb on Singapore Film Society's website:

This film comprises the stories of various families dealing with death inside a hospital – a young father dying slowly, an elderly couple in separate hospitals who want to be together and a woman who fights to stay alive. Ichikawa deliberately shoots his actors' fine performances from a distance – middle and long shots, no close-ups – painting a realistic picture of people dealing with death. Interspersed with these stories are lyrical montages of life outside the hospital. The end result is a hopeful yet sensitive treatment of life and living. By Ichikawa's own admission, this is “perhaps the closest [he's] come to an Ozu movie”.

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917.

She found herself daydreaming, following the road,and ending up in a strange place with no sign posts.

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Squashed hips

Played squash by myself yesterday. The racquets they loan out at my school are better than the ones I own! I think that's amusing; and awesome for me, 'cos that means I don't have to lug my Cash Converter racquet all the way to to the boondog parts of the island.

After pitting myself against the unforgiving wall and working myself up to a dripping, hot and happy state, I went to do some hip exercises for my sore ITB at the gym. I used the lever machine you see on the left. I'm planning to work on my hips every other day. I suppose this is just about my last resort when it comes to my ITB. The thought of never being able to run a LSD makes me sad.


You could do the exercise with a cable machine as well but I've never tried it. I used to do my hip abductor exercises with a ball in between my legs. But I think it may be less effective than going to the gym and working on it consistently with weights. I'm not sure. I'm hoping for the best in any case.



Below is a pic of a seated hip abductor exercise. This webpage gives good information on everything you can do with your hips. Erm, just about everything unexciting anyway. ;) All the animated gifs in this post were taken from http://www.exrx.net/.

Tomorrow, I shall swim! The revenge of the slow marlin!

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Quote about grammar

I realise that only one person (whose name starts with a "B" and ends with an "n") voted for "Grammar" in the recent online poll, making "Grammar" the least popular topic by far. But I've just got to post this quote. I think it is funny, in a grammarian-humour-kinda-way. Okay, maybe only slightly amusing. Please oblige me...

Grammar is something of a "more or less" phenomenon, with some rules applying more consistently than others. (Batstone)

And therefore:

The process of learning grammar will involve a progressive shift from more to less *idealized notions of how grammar works: in other words, a gradual `descent' from more to less idealization... (Batstone)

*Idealizing about grammar: making very general statements about grammar

Which would explain why so many advanced speakers of English cannot seem to formulate grammar rules... I can't formulate rules from my working knowledge of the English grammar either. I have to relearn it from the bottom-up.

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Terry Fox Run: Photos

At Siloso beach



Late!



Running on an island



Stretching my painful ITB



A very inspiring man



Post-run banana and activities

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Faraway Sunset (1992)

I must be in a weepy mood. Yesterday, The Ballad of Narayama made me tear. Today I couldn't even keep the taps off at Faraway Sunset. Dang it, it is supposed to be a happy success story! I'm in such a strange mood.

Faraway Sunset is the biography of Noguchi Hideyo, a famous bacteriologist known for discovering the bacteria that caused syphilis. It is also the story of a mother and her son — her extraordinary, yet in some ways, perfectly ordinary, love for her son.

Considering my weepy mood, I really wonder if I should continue with my plan to watch Dying at a Hospital this Tuesday.

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Terry Fox Run: 6am

6am: "Why does it rain _every_single_year?"
7am: Eating a rather stale piece of coffee bread
8am: Stuck in jam in taxi
9am: Feeling a little faint and nauseous from the stale piece of bread
10am: Limping

It was quite an inspiring run. There was a guy on crutches who was doing the 8km. He had only one good leg. And a lot of cute little red and blond headed kids.

[I must have been tired when I wrote that. I don't mean that he had a lot of cute kids. I meant there were a lot of cute kids at the run.]

My ITB in my good leg acted up. Sigh. 8km only.

(Photos later..)

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The Ballad of Narayama (1983)

A heart-breaking film by Shohei Imamura.

Why is it that the other Japanese show I watched was also set in a really poor village, where they lived such bitter, hard lives?

Driven by poverty, the villages live out John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. They make laws so that the village as a community will survive: thieves are buried alive, those who are 70 years old are carried up the mountain to die. It's sad. Heart-wrenchingly so. Is this what we become when you take away our food, lodging, warmth, lodging? Are all our ethics and principles just sentimental fluff, suitable only for the well-fed?

The show intersperses cuts of animals mating with each other or devouring each other, almost like a periodic reminder that only the fittest survive — that life is nasty, brutish, short.

Watching grandma made me tear. She is too stoic, too selfless, too much like my own grandma.

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Visitor Map

Once in a while I take a look at my statcounter page — okay, I lie, I'm a bit obsessed about my statcounter page — and look at the visitor map. I get more random hits nowadays from people looking for Walt Reynold's ITB Special, how to remove a mole with string?, how to secure a dlink connection?, and even abjunct, subjunct, disjunct searches.

So it means the folks are coming from all over the world. Someone came from Fayetteville, AR the other day, and Sabah, Malaysia too, not to mention New York, New York; England, London... I think it is pretty cool.

Of course, these are transient visitors who pop by primarily for information. They check in, read the horror story of the infarcted mole, and check out, hopefully with the moral of the story.

Only a handful stop by not looking for information — you, perhaps — you are the one I write for.

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Right here right now

I'm sitting outdoors on a wooden bench just about at the edge of civilization. The live firing zone is less than 200 metres from me. On a quiet afternoon, I can sometimes hear the prattle of gunfire, and it always makes me thank God that we are not at war. And that I don't have to do NS.

It is very nice being right here right now. I have a large cup of kopi in a disposable cup. Every once in a while, an ant crawls across my Macbook and up my arm, and I will bring a few ants with me into class later.

I can hear the sounds of machines far away, pounding and drilling at something, who knows.

Was supposed to be doing an online tutorial on visual design techniques, but I'm glad I didn't.

I love this space.

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When you read your friends' blogs, do you hear it in their voice?

I do.

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The Profound Desire of the Gods

I have so much to do but I have to write this down, before I lose this fleeting feeling. I can still hear the haunting song sung by the crippled old man in the wheeled wooden chair set low to the ground...

"Long time ago, a brother god and a sister goddess...."

This film makes me ache, and I cannot quite explain why. Perhaps it is true what Slavoj Zizek said, that cinema makes alive desires we never knew we had.

The Profound Desire of the Gods, also known as Kuragejima - Legends from a Southern Island, was shot in 1968 by Shohei Imamura. An engineer from Tokyo goes to a remote island populated by a primitive, superstitious, tribal people, and in going to this tightly knit community, upsets it irrevocably. The film pits the primitive against civilization, modernity against superstition, incest against social norm.

Toriko, a mentally retarded girl, epitomizes base human desire in all its rawness. The film opens to her dancing and laughing without a care in the world in the middle of a raucous crowd of men. She sings of herself as a lover who comes to tempt in the night, and bares her desire without shame. The engineer, the modern man, is enraptured; but he abandons her in the end, and the villagers tell stories of how she turned into stone while waiting on the beach.

Yet we see her again at the last scene, always one step ahead of the steam train, showing that in spite of all of our advances in culture and technology, we cannot stamp out base human desire: this is the reason why we feel "all in pieces" in modern cities. Although we have driven out the primitive, the primitive is always with us: in our hearts, always condemning, never dying.

You see, I am a modern person. There is no reason why I should mourn for the loss of the primitive. Yet, I do...

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What I am having for breakfast

Coffee and saltines. I love saltines. :)

(Obviously, I'm not very good at creating the curved cropped effect on my pics.. Aw well.)

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The Bourne Ultimatium (2007)

Plot-wise, there is very little elaboration on the 1988 version of The Bourne Identity. (Technology-wise, we've improved by leaps and bounds since 1988!)

But an entertaining movie nevertheless. Watching people do surveillance is always fun.

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Cutie

This little yellow fella dances better than me.

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A quiet night

It's a quiet night. One of those nights where you can almost hear yourself think. I'm chatting with my sister online. It's eleven in the morning where she is, and she is practising the piano.

She sends me a funny picture of her dog. Her Superdog pose, she says.


Superdog stretches and falls asleep mid-stretch, she tells me. I think it's hilarious.

Superdog just flicked my sister's hand off the piano. My sister tells that she had been neglecting Superdog since she started working out in the school gym, and so that she will go take a walk with her now. Go walk your doggie, I say. And off they go.

And it is seventeen minutes past midnight here, and I sit in front of my Macbook, with my MSN contact list for company.

I wonder what they are thinking, or if they are thinking about me.

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Actiontastic sync problem

[As Gwynne says, this is the most sophisticated form of procrastination.]

I have a problem with syncing Actiontastic with iCal. I think it is an issue of a corrupt database. I removed the database (delete Library> Application support > Actiontastic) and synced it again, and to my horror, it deleted all my tasks in iCal with narry a warning! My heart skipped a beat.

I reinstated the database, synced it again, and it populated iCal with my current tasks, but of course it couldn't replicate the tasks that I had dragged into my calendar the last six months. I backed up the database and reverted it to a version two weeks ago, but in the end I decided not to go with that version and went back to the current version without past "task-events", 'cos I suppose when it comes down to it, I choose the future over the past.

In any case, I'm traumatised enough to steer clear of Actiontastic for now. Right now it keeps hanging every time I try to make a change. Worrisome. 'cos I don't have a way of organising my projects without Actiontastic. Eventually I will try to fix it again, but this time, I'll back up my database right before I do any syncing. Perhaps there is truth that wisdom comes with experience! Knowing me, I'll fiddle with it again this afternoon...

(I'm such a nutcase. I say things like "choose the future over the past" and "wisdom comes with experience" in a post about syncing.)

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Flashback

I don't know why, but this pic made me miss dorm life. Not that the dorm I used to live in looked anything like the one in the photo...

I miss autumn. Pecan shells in my shoes. Riding my bike on a Sunday afternoon.

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Think I may need more RAM?

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Who said this?

Asian or Western? Your guess.....

"We apologise for causing trouble and thank everone who helped us return home safely."

"We owe the country and the people a great debt We plan to live in a way that will make you proud. We promise that to you and we will repay our debt."

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I think too much about the process of getting work done

I really need to be disciplined this week. I have so much work piled up for every class that it has exceeded the seven items I can store in my temporal lobe and so I rely excessively on iCal and Actiontastic. The thing is, it is a bit of a circular reasoning when it comes to me and my to-do list: if I write it down in my to-do list, I can usually remember it because I took the time to write it down so I don't need to refer to it anymore; if I don't write it down, then I can't remember it, nor refer to it in my list 'cos my list is full of the the stuff I can remember.

But I'm making a point of jotting everything down the minute I know it because, as I said earlier, the number of items is exceeding what I can normally remember.

I re-inherited the Palm Zire this weekend so it may help in making me more diligent in jotting things down. At present, I jot it down on paper, stick an asterisk beside it, then later that night, stick it into the list. It may work better than using the Zire actually, since the Zire doesn't have bluetooth (I'm sold on bluetooth) We'll see. I actually like having paper involved somewhere along the factory line...

I spend way too much time thinking about the process, and too little time doing it!

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Epson Stylus CX5500

Got an all-in-one printer from the Comex fair today: the Epson Stylus CX5500.

The price for all-in-ones has dropped quite a bit from about four years ago. Then, I paid something in the region of the high $200s. My new Epson cost me $118. Yet I paid it grudgingly.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, I just don't like spending money on printers. To me, it doesn't make sense to put money into a plastic machine that will probably jam up, konk out, clog up, or refuse to turn on in about two years' time. Buying a printer also means that I'm stuck having to buy expensive ink cartridges that seem to hold less and less ink over the years so that the manufacturers can "lower" the retail price of their cartridges. I mean, it may actually cost more for me to print at home than to print in school at 5 cents a copy.

Yet, having said all of that, I'm quite happy with my purchase. I chose the Epson over the Canon because it looked prettier and was cheaper, and the Epson over Brother because I could get a $9.90 cartridge of ink. The cost of ink is actually the same for Epson and Brother; it is just that with the Epson, they have smaller capacity ink cartridges. This gives me the option to keep a small capacity cartridge for my colours ($9.90) and a high capacity cartridge for my black ($17.90) if I don't do a lot of colour printing. Canon is always my first love, but the low-end all-in-one was just way too bulky. It's a shame, but I hope this Epson will be as good as my first Canon...

If anything, I'm looking forward to scanning. At least I'll save some money on photocopying! :)

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