When do you know that you hate a subject? When you intentionally drop your pen onto the floor so that you can pick it up, thereby giving you an excuse to spend 5 seconds not studying.

But for all the slack I give INFO, I gotta say, it's the only subject that has really made me realize how pointless existence is and that mankind is going wrong. I mean, the textbook actually uses the phrase "talk the talk and walk the walk". As someone once said, "That's not good".

Here are some of the things I've thought about in the last 4 hours:

• Disproving well-established theorems that form the basis of mathematics


• Making up new and wonderful theorems that allow you to solve an entire exam in a page


• Becoming God, and having people worship me


• Iron Maiden's The Wicker Man


• Transforming into a professor from university


• Becoming a rock star who sings gentle folky-tunes


• The earth being ravaged by a foul creature of the night that is summoned by an evil magician


• Various psychotropic substances


• Burning down the house

And you thought sitting at home and studying was safe. Hah!

I'm jealous of blogs that get lots of visitors. It's possibly because they have actual content and gifted people behind them who don't spend all their time musing on random things with no apparent structure.

Sorry, I can't resist a Seinfeld quote. I am like George in many ways I think. Perhaps I'll write about that someday?


"George: I'm sorry. I can't live knowing Ted Danson makes that much more than me. Who is he?
Jerry: He's somebody.
George: What about me?
Jerry: You're nobody.
George: Why him? Why not me?
Jerry: He's good, you're not.
George: I'm better than him.
Jerry: You're worse, much much worse."


Exactly what I was thinking when I saw someone's blog littered with random passer-bys commenting, "What's so great about his blog?! What about mine!?" :)

Historic post today, because I do believe it's the first time I've ever used a smiley. I think I had this notion that it detracted from the whole atmosphere of the place, or rather the pseudo-atomosphere that I've conjured up in my head, of this place being a hallowed place of deep philosophical reflections and what have you. But in reality it would be laughable to suggest that, and so I'll just hang my head in shame and embarssement.

Now that I'm a compulsive blogger, I wonder whether I will attribute the inevitable failure in my exams to this blog.

Gah, it's getting increasing hard to get anything done anymore. It's 5 now, and I don't feel like I've done anything. I want the exams over but at the same time I want more time to prepare for them!

In other news, I am typing really slowly now in order to try and get all fingers trained in typing - I am getting tired of making so many mistakes when typing, it's about time I did something about it. Let's see how this cruel experiment turns out. Currently, I tend to use four fingers in my left hand (excluding the weak little pinky, which only does the occasional Shift press) but only the index finger in my right hand. So although letters on the left side of the keyboard get typed fairly quickly, those on the right are usually the ones that cause a problem. But yeah, like I said, I hope to correct that. After using a computer for all these years, you'd think I would be a decent typist by now, but I guess not. Yet another failure to chalk up I suppose!

Yay, pretty much everything is working in Fedora now. The sound card was giving problems but I think I've solved that now, it can play OGG and WAV files, just not CDs. I suspect this is because I don't have the audio cable attached onto my soundcard, so I will check that out soon. But other than that, it's all good - wireless internet, printing, sound and full access to my XP box. Plus, I got to muck around a little with funky stuff like /dev/dsp and other cool Linuxy things. So nice to get your feet wet editing these weird and wonderful files.

Watership Down was coming on TV this morning. What a subtly beautiful story! I remember trying to explain it once to someone, but it sounded so silly and I felt embarassed. Once you say "there's these group of rabbits, see?", you automatically sound silly. Admittedly, that is something of a turn off, because it automatically draws up the idea of being a children-only thing (I suppose Animal Farm might be another thing that might come to mind? Hmm). Yet if one only read the book or watched the movie, one would (I think) be struck by the sheer beauty of it. I still get chills when the eagle flies in and takes away Violet, and then Fiver just says "Violet's gone" - it's hard to explain, I suppose it's another one of those things that has been buried in my memory and so is something I have built a strong emotional attachment to over time.

A pity I couldn't watch the whole thing today, especially the really good bits with the general, but I will try to make it a point to watch it by the end of the month (assuming it comes again, which it should).

I also saw Alien a few days ago. Amazingly enough, I was able to remember the plot quite vividly - but from the Mad magazine spoof of it! I don't remember it as being particularly funny too, it's just one of those things that stays with you, a memory burn as Seinfeld puts it. The movie isn't as scary as I though it would be, although I think the supsense is done superbly. Ridley Scott is obviously a very talented filmmaker. It makes me wonder whether there have been any genuinely scary/creepy movies made in the last 10 years? Nothing really comes to mind, but then again I'm comparing a pop-culture icon to stuff I see at night on Showtime, so yeah, my opinion is worth dirt. I rather unfortunately missed the sequel, but that's another thing on the "to-watch" list, which seems to ever-growing.

And the fact that it is growing is disheartening, because I have exams coming up next week, and I really should be thinking more about them rather than what movies to watch. I suppose I've never really been comfortable with the idea of relaxing too much during periods when it's fairly critical to maintain focus. But it is becoming especially hard to maintain focus with uni work nowadays. Have I reached the limit? Am I so totally burnt out that I simply cannot spend as much time on study as I used to? Or am I becoming a lazy slob desperate to cook up excuses? Does it really matter? It matters to me, for reasons that are no doubt strange in the light of cold reason. Reason and logic dictate my two areas of study (computer science and maths), yet I still choose to ignore them whenever convenient. I'm sure I have a bright future ahead of me.

Speaking of which, I came across some MSDN blogs and saw a few MS developers talking about tech interviews. As always, I became paralyzed with fear as I realized that I would probably not be able to do any of the sorts of questions they were asking. I am a terrible logical thinker and what's worse is I hardly ever do coding anymore unless it's for assignments - I simply don't have the time. What this means, essentially, that I'm probably going to end up with no job prospects whatsoever, or at least not at any major company like say Microsoft. "Ok, so maybe you're not Microsoft material, but that ain't so bad now is it? I mean, there are plenty of fish in the sea". But the thing is, if I ain't MS material, what material am I? A small software company that staffs 50 people? If so, is that what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life, working in a small company? I suppose we all have the illusion of becoming rich and successful, but with me I can only see failure and everyone saying that I'm "wasting my potential", when in fact, no, I'm not, I'm utilizing all my potential, I'm just not good enough, that's all. "Ok ok, so maybe you won't be rich and successful, is that such a bad thing?". There's a question whose answer is worth recording. Of course the rational side of me says "money can't buy happiness" and other cliches, and I actually agree with that. But it's not the money, I think it's more the success side of it - I want to be successful, to fulfill this image in my head of what a good life should be. A good life should be successful would imply that a good life is a successful life, no? Is that right? Hmm.

I suppose the way to do anything about this (if at all there is anything inherently wrong with such a view) would be to try and think critically about things now and challenge my own ideas to see if I can put my mind at ease. But I'm far too scattered in my thoughts to do that. Hopefully this blog will help - I can try to continue and have conversations with you, gentle reader.

And one more thing, while I'm on a roll tonight. Do I want to do software for the rest of my life? What is my legacy? Creating software systems, essentially things that exist in the most abstract sense inside a computer? Is that something I should be proud of? Where is my mark on the world? When I die, what will I leave behind for people to remember me by? Do I want to be remembered in the first place? All very interesting questions, ones that I have thought about for a long time. Depressing questions too, because most of the time I am forced to conclude that it is very likely that I will merely fade away in the sands of time. Now, I don't think I am suggesting that software development is a "dead-end" field or anything. I suppose a similar argument could be applied to pretty much any profession there is under the sky. Bankers, lawyers, what legacy do they leave (unless you're the top of your field, of course)? Actually, a little reflection reveals that it is not ones' profession that I am questioning, but rather it is life itself. Life and ones' legacy, if such a thing is still possible in the modern world. Even greats of the past are eventually forgotten - off the top of my head, mathematical geniuses who came up with some amazing results centuries ago will soon vanish as individuals and remain only as names in theorems. What an unfitting end.

Mortality is one of the scariest issues that you can think of, and so I suppose I'd best leave it at that.

Wow, by far the longest post ever. Let's see how long before I get burnt out by over-blogging.

I have to modify my template, it seems everyone has gone crazy with the template options, and so every blog looks the same. I have to make mine stand out, I simply must..

Well I'm typing this from Fedora Core 2, and I gotta say, I am impressed. Linux has definitely improved since I last played around with. When I first installed Linux some three years ago, it was quite simply a nightmare. There was no chance of any but the most basic hardware getting detected. This included my monitor, video card, sound card and mouse (!!) being for all intents and purposes the bare minimum models required in a computer system. I had to manually go in an edit files like /etc/fstab and run strange commands like xfree86config to get things to work, and they never really did.

But now, Fedora detects (nearly) everything straight off the bat, no problems at all - I boot to a beautiful Gnome desktop with 1280x1024 resolution in 32-bit glory, and I didn't have to do a thing. Gone are the days of guessing your horizontal and vertical sync ranges, and the warning that providing a wrong range can cause permanent damage to your monitor. Amazingly enough, with a little coaxing, it was even able to get my wireless network going. Although, I must say, Knoppix did a far better job in that I literally did nothing and everything worked. But still, compared to earlier Red Hat distros, the improvement is remarkable (well duh, it's been 3 years!).

That's all a good thing, right? Well, although it is nice, it sort of lessens the view of Linux as the OS of the true techie, in that you don't have to muck around anymore. Lots of things now have nice GUI interfaces and installers, and so the experience is a lot like Windows. Before, it was clear that you were in another OS - the dark console screen, waiting to see what tons of errors you were going to get, now that's an atmosphere!

Of course, you can still work at this level if you want to. I mean hey, they can't force you to do everything with a GUI, right? But once you're exposed to the ease of use (in most cases) of the GUI approach, it's hard to go back. Having said that, a fair few GUIs offer far too little control over settings, and so sometimes you'll be forced to get your hands dirty. For instance, Fedora can't read NTFS partitions, so if I want to read my Windows partition from here, I'm going to have to install a separate package and (presumably) muck around with config files. Sounds like fun!

It remains to be seen how the various dependencies for packages are handled by Fedora, because last time I used Linux it was a pain having to download a program only to be told upon compilation that it required three not-installed libraries to run, and those librarires would in turn require more libraries..I'm trying to think why this is different to the Windows case. I suppose the open-source nature of Linux means that there are a lot more freely available libraries, which means that there has been a lack of structure in the way they have been used, in the sense that there are many different libraries available and in many cases there isn't a standard way of doing things. Actually, come to think of it, I think that's changing (was it ever the case in the first place? Or more ignorance on my part?).

I guess it may seem like I am being totally contradictory, and in a sense I am. It's great that Linux is becoming more user-friendly, but I still would like to relive the Linux that is the rite of passage among techies, just for the heck of it. "Then why don't you", you ask? Because my first priority is to test out Linux and see how feasible it is to use it on a daily basis. Work (hah, what work?) first, play later, as they say.

If you haven't played Morrowind, you're missing out. Not just because it's a great game (and it is), but because you will never have the joy of seeing a bosmer. To be more precise, a bosmer with a fur cap. I'll take a screenshot of one once I get free time (probably in another month), so stay tuned!

There's been a lot of speculation lately, so I thought I'd clear everything up. Iwmne's blog is not as good as mine. Mine is better. Thank you for your time.