Move

I'm considering moving to http://paintedworld.tumblr.com/ but there's so much accumulated shit here .. oh wait, that's a good reason to move. And it's much easier to post on tumblr, so there might be more updates - might.

Isn't it ironic

It seems only natural that when faced with tight academic related deadlines, I blog. Exams coming and I had barely started studying; blog. The million and one things to do can wait.

I find myself now in a similar situation where I need to finish a first draft of a 10 or 25 page business case by this Friday. It's not graded, but late submission will penalized. How that works, is of course a mystery.

Perhaps tomorrow I will attempt to locate the requirements document. I'm sure it's somewhere in my email account, but if I can't find it I'll just ask a friend for a copy.

It has always been this way - relying on Weeli in secondary school to tell me what subject is being tested on that very day, counting on a whole bunch of friends in polytechnic to keep me in the academic loop, and on Japheth in college to keep me up to speed with deadlines and important dates.

It's somewhat ironic that the same person who's nonchalant at best about matters most find important is now working his ass off to secure a job in a foreign land 8000miles away from his support network.

Sloth, not unlike hedonism, is a habit awfully hard to break. To counter Sloth, I draw from Pride. To refute hedonism, I look to Love.

paper crane

"Are the frivolous
strangers to pain;
or the whore possess
not one ounce of pride

Does the truth forever elude
the factitious;
can love, not take root

Do their words ring ever hollow
their heart, a shallow pan

But a moment, extrapolated in time"

For the Love of Cow

I seem to always end up being the one preparing and grilling steaks at cook-outs - if, I think the meat's of good quality. It just pains me to see gorgeous meat adulterated with half-ass marinates or treated with a lack of respect for the deceased cow; like cutting a beautiful one inch thick New York steak into half length-wise and turning it into western food stall grub.

Someone did just that at the NUSEA + Singapore Connect picnic yesterday, and it was all I could do to keep a smile plastered on my face as Aunties expounded on the merits of a thinner steak while the culprit was slicing my poor steaks into half.

Yes, I'm a bigot. And I never cook steaks past medium-rare .. intentionally :D

Shut up.

Quit bickering. If you must, do it privately and not talk to the Press, you idiots.

CSJ and CST, for the love of God, have kopi together, keep smiles plastered on your faces and get people to take pictures of you. Same goes for you guys, KJ and NTS. If you need motivation, pick up some old secondary school Chinese textbook and read about the one chopstick vs 10 chopsticks story.

And for every point you bitch about, offer a solution.

You clowns don't need a 25 year old bum to teach you how to contest an election, do you?

Into a million pieces

[8:07:28 PM] GL: can you please look after your physical appearance while you are there?
[8:07:35 PM] Shaun Lim Jin: :(
[8:07:37 PM] GL: being an IT geek doesnt mean looking like one
[8:07:37 PM] Shaun Lim Jin: i look like crap?
[8:07:44 PM] GL: you don't look as nice?
[8:07:53 PM] GL: i won't say crap la
[8:08:02 PM] GL: just that you are letting yourself go alittle
[8:08:08 PM] GL: a littlllleeeeeeee bit

Hypocritical?

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Same Same but Different? But of course, we should bear in mind that Lighthouse bases its teachings on very tangible manifestations of the spiritual - healing and such.


Chant. Tongues. Chant. Tongues. Same Same but Different, one can argue. And I might not know much about Buddhism, but Fuck la, that dude knows jackshit as well. If posting some racist comments on blog/facebook can result in one being charged .. what should happen to this Pastor Rony? Is this another manifestation of God's divine protection?

Help.

Update: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1036451/1/.html

if

if(self.skillSet() == softwareEngineer.brilliant())
{
self.setEmployer("Google");
} else {
while(success.rating != OBSCENE) {
self.fightSloth();
self.figureSomeShitOut();
}
}

Dream

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau

Fatigue

I'm so tired. Now, don't go saying "There's no rest for the Wicked"; I've been good. I've just been so swamped with work and school that I hardly have time to breathe.

Climbing has unfortunately taken a backseat. Dinner is usually horrible Shaun-cooked food, save for the occasional steak that I pick out at the supermarket to treat myself.

The Rockstar mentality of start-up culture has rubbed off on me. I actually look to do things outside and beyond my job scopes. Yes, scopes, plural. The fact that I'm an intern, and a lowly paid one at that, doesn't seem to stop me from doing so. Perhaps that's a good thing. I came here to shake out the perpetual sloth that has been bogging me down, and so far it seems to be working.

I'm just .. tired, man. I'm gonna crash. Good Night, folks.

Here's a totally unrelated picture to show that yes I'm alive and it's actually pretty nice out here.

Disjointed Verbal Diarrhea

I postulate that at the basest level, a male harbors desires to gain carnal knowledge of any attractive female he encounters. In every other species, the male's success pretty much boils down to how strong he is in relation to the female or his other male counterparts. Our kind however, is bound by other factors much more intricate than mere strength.

Coercion, is naturally (or perhaps unnaturally) frowned upon in most societies and there are explicit laws dealing with that. It's boring for the most part unless you consider the mock rape that so excites some of us.Moving on.

An attractive girl should banish all hopes of purely platonic friendships with males of our species. In fact, given that attractiveness is relative, it is plausible that every single woman has around her males who whether consciously, subconsciously but never unconsciously, want to sleep with her.

Of course, such lustful thoughts might, ironically, facilitate friendships between the sexes - a guy harboring even a remote thought of somehow bedding a girl will be a lot more accommodating to any idiosyncrasies she might have. For example, a hot girl can throw a hissy fit, and the guys around her might smile indulgently or at least find it somewhat acceptable relative to how attractive they find the girl. Let a whale or equivalent do the same, and you'll observe very different results. Of course there will be whale-lovers or equivalent around these girls who'll display similar accommodating behavior because hey, Lust is for everyone.

With that, we come to the intricate factors that stop a male from carrying out his desires - be it sleeping with a friend, cheating on a partner or randomly copulating with consensual females.

That'll be material for another post, another time, provided I don't get lynched for this.

Decisions

I make bad decisions.

First, I procrastinate far too much. As usual, laundry time's when I'm down to the last pair of boxers - the one I'm wearing - and no fresh bath towels. And of course I had to wait till 11pm before reluctantly dragging my ass to the laundry room. It would have been an hour and a half affair though, if not for the washer deciding to break down on me and not finish the rinse/spin cycle.

This happened to me a couple of times back in Sheares but then laundry was free there and here it's $1.50 per load. A smart thing would be to run clothes through another wash cycle in a different machine, but this time, as I did in Sheares, I chose to dump the whole lot in the dryer instead.

There're two problems here:

1) The clothes are dripping wet and would never dry with the normal dry cycle.

2) The rinse cycle didn't complete so the clothes are still soapy.

Where does this leave me? Waiting for soapy wet clothes to dry in the dryer. Bah.

Similarly tragic decision making accompanies my car. The first was to drive over 400 miles to San Diego instead of flying. The second is to allow the fuel to run low, and the next to rely on the GPS to locate the nearest gas station. What followed was 15 miles driving South, North, then South again on the I-5 highway before eventually running flat out of gas and rolling to the road shoulder 40 miles from Kerry's place in San Diego. Fuck the GPS, and fuck my life.

I spent the next hour keeping a wary eye on the side mirror as I saw gazillion-ton trucks wheeze past me at over 70 miles/hour and feel the road rumble every time they past. Kerry eventually came with a galleon container of gas, I started the car, drove 8 miles and lo and behold, a gas station. If I had ignored the damn GPS and just driven on, I would have hit that, and save myself the other headaches to come.

Car Education 101 - old cars have gunk lying on the bottom of the fuel tank that minds its own business mostly, but let the tank run dry, and the fuel pump sucks up said gunk and totally fucks up the fuel line. That resulted in a $400 fuel pump and filter change, but not before I brought it to another workshop where they misdiagnosed the fuel line problem but found a problem with the brakes instead. That was $400.

$800 in repairs later on my 18 year old Miata, I decided to sell it. Posted an ad, got a response, but blew it off cause well, it was running along just fine after the repairs and I love my car too much to let it go.

Took it for a 100mile each way drive to Pebble Beach. Many beautiful pictures later, my clutch's now loose. No idea what the problem is but a couple of google searches seems to indicate either a master or slave cylinder problem. Bah. Taking it to the workshop tomorrow.

Take a look at this picture though, and empathize please with my love for the Miata.

Sunset