Photo gallery is up

I’ve finally put up the photos section
[sixthseal.com]. It’s a bit sparse at the moment, but everything in
there is new. Well, not new as in recent…it’s just the first time it
has appeared on the site. πŸ™‚ The pictures are a mix of (personal)
digital photos and scans of film photos. The quality of the scans are
somewhat dismal – I’ve either messed up the scanner’s settings (it
looks like perpetual twilight) or I’m having visual disturbances from
sleep deprivation. The photos are currently categorized in reverse
chronological order under “Monash College 2000”, “Girlfriend, Sibu
2001”, “CPL Pacific 2001”, “Photos 2002” and just so there’s something
representing this year, “Recent”. Two of the recent photos are really
recent too – one taken yesterday (curry) and the other taken within the
week (campus).

I’ll post more photos in a couple of days. I have assignments due later and an exam tomorrow. Wish me luck!

I’ll rather be asleep

I’ve been up for three days and my body is saying no. Today would be
the day I came the closest to having a heart attack. I wish I’m
exaggerating, the damned chest pains and headache would go away then.
No food + no sleep + stimulants (caffeine, I always feel the need to
reiterate myself) = heart working overtime. No water (stupid me) = not
pissing for the whole night. Drank a bit before I went to class, was
feeling terrible before then…hypertension, the kind that makes your
head pound and makes those veins on the side visible, with tactile
rhythmic pumping too. I don’t know what I’m saying. I had to walk as
slow as a slug to not overexcite my overworked heart and yet I still
feel constant chest pain, breathlessness and that damned pounding and
random tingliness and pain in the extremities. Okay, enough of the
feeling sorry for myself bit, I’m going to sleep…sedate me, trusty
thingies.

dogcute.jpg

Of course by thingies I mean food…it makes you sleepy when you
haven’t had any in a while. Anyway, here’s a photo I took while on the
way back today…was feeling like absolute fucking shit, but that dog is
so adorable I had to take a photo. His head is too big for his body and
so is his tongue! πŸ™‚

Thanks for commenting everyone, I’ll reply when I wake up. I am
going to sleep now, before that vein makes good on its promise to give
me a stroke.

Pantone memories, greyscale eyes

Infected Mushroom – Classical Mushroom [sixthseal.com]
(right click, save target as)
[9:18 minutes 192 KBPS STEREO 44.1KHZ 12.7 MB .mp3]

[Edit: MP3 deleted]

dance.gif

I don’t know where that animated GIF came from. I got it in the
signature of an email from a friend and he doesn’t know where he got it
too. Oh well, these things tend to fall into public domain anyway. πŸ˜‰
The track is off IsrAliens 2 – Bizarro. Please be kind to my limited
bandwidth. πŸ™‚ It’s an Infected Mushroom one, but it sounds more
‘mainstream’ than the stuff they usually come out with. That makes it
easier to get into, give it a listen, you might like it enough to get
their other albums. Infected Mushroom makes great psy-trance, my
favourite track is still Tommy the Bat off The Gathering. That one just
blew my mind away the first time I heard it. Hmm…in fact all the tracks
in that album is great. Messy! πŸ™‚ MP3.com used to have a lot of their
tracks, but it’s all been replaced with Deeply Disturbed off their new
album.

Okay, I have an assignment due tomorrow, and I can’t write much so here’s my day in GREYSCALE photos:

captaina.jpg

I saw this new display at the Caulfield campus B block first level
public art box. Captain America! This photo doesn’t look good in
greyscale…

630longq.jpg

I noticed a very long queue for the 630 Huntingdale bus at the
Clayton campus bus loop when I came back. It usually is quite long at
around these hours, but I’ve never seen it grow to these proportions
before. Lack of detail at the back, I’m still learning how to take good
night photos. I took three – one with suppressed flash, one with full
flash, and one with “quick flash” (a fast and short flash before the
shutter opens). I found that quick flash works well in night photos,
but only in enclosed spaces, it doesn’t do much at all in wide open
areas like this. No flash produced the worst photo, hardly any detail
in it. Full flash wasn’t good (I already knew that, but just tried
anyway) too, it just artificially brightens the front people and hid
all detail at the back. The photo above is from the quick flash shoot,
which was the best shot in among the three. I used a sensitivity of ISO
400, aperture of f/0.8 and a shutter speed of 1/125s. Noise reduction
was also turned on, but it’s not exactly the best settings.

stair8lg.jpg

This was what I saw when I got back. The Stairway 8 door’s lock has
been removed for some reason. No need for keys then. Back to
assignments…after 9 am today I’ll only have one left! =D Oh wait…it’s
past 4 am now, so that means…that means…*calculating in head*…I only
have 4 hours to complete this one! Fudge! No, I really am eating one.

Link of the Day (internal): The Anonymous Game Developers at www.tierragames.com comments on Magnum “The Sixties Nine” [sixthseal.com].

You really have to read this comment…classic! πŸ™‚

Link of the Day (external): A good parent? [sanlive.com].

Insightful. Read this.

Link of the Day (news): Police charged over heroin [theage.com.au].

No wonder the contact I used to get heroin off insisted on being called “Detective”. Kidding! I joke too much. πŸ™‚

Breakfast food!

I had a rather large breakfast today. πŸ™‚ Well, technically
yesterday, but still…Anyway, I seldom have breakfast and lunch so it
feels good to eat “breakfast food” for a change. Here’s what I had:

hbreak1.jpg

The two paper bags contain egg and bacon muffins. The one in plastic
wrap is a chocolate eclair and the strange aluminium wrap thingy hides
three hash browns and two eggs. The dining room cashier thought it
would be hard to carry that many stuff so she helpfully wrapped it in
foil. How nice. Oh, and I did get “Wow, you must be hungry” again. Heh.

hbreak2.jpg

That’s the egg and bacon muffin. Mmm…salty.

hbreak3.jpg

Hash browns and nicely done eggs. πŸ™‚

hbreak4.jpg

Eclair…the cream filling is so nice, it bursts out whenever you take a bite.

Thank God for artificially increased metabolism rates. πŸ˜‰

Beyond the Rainbow – My day in pictures

Dead parrot. Rainbow. Tree bark. Walk with me…

parrotd.jpg

Dead parrot. Too colorful. But real.

rainbowp.jpg

Rainbow. Caulfield Plaza. Nice.

rainbowc.jpg

Rainbow. Monash University Caulfield Campus. Picture of the Day.

treebark.jpg

Tree bark. Pointless? But for texture stock photo collection.

NOFX – Monosyllabic Girl [sixthseal.com]
(right click, save target as)
[0.54 minutes 128 KBPS STEREO 44.1KHZ 0.86 MB .mp3]

[Edit: MP3 deleted]

I take her down to the aquarium, she says ‘shark’
I take her to the planetarium, she says ‘dark’
I take her to the seaside where she likes to spin and twirl
You know, she says ‘sure’ and ‘cool’ and ‘yeah’
She’s my monosyllabic girl

I take her to the university, she says ‘huh?’
I take her to her anniversary, she says ‘one!’
I take her to the jewelry store
I say ‘diamond’, she says ‘pearl’

Oh, everyone knows I’m in love with a monosyllabic girl
You know, everyone knows I’m in love with a monosyllabic girl

Men At Work

mawcaulb.jpg

I took this photo below Caulfield B Block after my tutorials today.
I like the way the construction people cut slopes into the sandy
ground. It kinda aligns with the steps in the backdrop.

conmay03.jpg

I see that the convocation ceremony is today for some people too. It
feels strange watching them mill around with their families in their
graduation regalia. I’ll be doing that soon too since this is my final
semester. I just have one last month left. πŸ™‚

Mmm…’s at Halls

mmmrobs.jpg
Mmm…vomit @ Roberts Hall

mmmricho.jpg
Mmm…urine @ Richardson Hall

The regurgitation stained toilet bowl has been left uncleaned for
almost a week now. πŸ™‚ It looks like the person with poor aiming skills
behind this missed the bowl by a large margin, most of it ended up
towards the side. I think I’ll make this one Picture of the Day. The
second picture is of a clogged up urinal, I thought the color was
interesting and the amount is quite voluminous (as you can see) so I
took a photo of the toilet. I like the Webster’s definition:

In man, the urine is a clear, transparent fluid of an amber color
and peculiar odor, with an average density of 1.02. The average amount
excreted in 24 hours is from 40 to 60 ounces (about 1,200 cubic
centimeters). Chemically, the urine is mainly an aqueous solution of
urea, salt (sodium chloride), and uric acid, together with some
hippuric acid and peculiar pigments. It usually has an acid reaction,
owing to the presence of acid phosphates of soda or free uric acid.
Normally, it contains about 960 parts of water to 40 parts of solid
matter, and the daily average excretion is 35 grams (540 grains) of
urea, 0.75 gram (11 grains) of uric acid, and 16.5 grams (260 grains)
of salt. Abnormally, it may contain sugar as in diabetes, albumen as in
Bright’s disease, bile pigments as in jaundice, or abnormal quantities
of some one or more of the normal constituents.

Yes, I really have nothing better to do. πŸ™‚

This week is Week 10!!!

Week 10! I thought it was Week 11!!! Who told me that it’s Week 11?
Fess up now, I know someone did, or I wouldn’t have got this idea into
my mind. I need to…thank you, coz that really put my ass into gear. :p

Things that have gone wrong (in a good way) because I thought this week is Week 11:

I submitted my GSC2714 Alcohol and Drug Use essay on Monday and
wrote “Sorry about submitting this late, I didn’t realize it was due on
Week 10”. I wasn’t late after all because this week is Week 10!

I actually did my GSC2714 Alcohol and Drug Use presentation today.
Oops…I was scheduled for Week 11, but I thought this week WAS Week 11.
No harm done anyway, there wasn’t anyone else in contention for the
presentation spot and I think I did okay in the presentation even
though I fudged up my lines a bit.

I…uh, drank a lot of coffee because I wanted to stay up late
today to finish my CSE3151 Network Performance assignment that’s due on
Thursday Week 11, which I thought is tomorrow, but it’s really next
week. Duh!

Oh well, at least I got most of my work out of the way. It feels
good to “gain” a week. =D Anyway, I’ve been messing around with the
blog last night and earlier today coz of that gaining a week thing. I
read up about the Movable Type tags and made some changes to the
layout. The things that have changed are:

Recent Comments
I’ve added some tags to display the 8 most recent comments with a link
(Go!) straight to the comments section of the post in question. I did
that using #comments which is somewhat of a hack, sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn’t. Oh well. This is replacing the previous “Recent
Entries” sidebar, which displayed the 5 most recent posts. I doubt
anyone actually uses that since the main page has 14 days back anyway.
Or am I mistaken and there’s people that actually like that navigation
bit? The comments are set to be truncated at 50 characters, so it won’t
take up too much space. The nick of the person who commented can be
clicked to open up a new window to their URL (if they provided one) or
their email if they didn’t. This doesn’t really work well though, when
you click on an older post, it only shows the comments for that post
and if you click on an older month, it shows the 8 most “recent”
comments for that month. However, it works fine on the main page, so I
guess that’s okay.

Sticky Posts
I’ve wanted to do this for a while and finally got around to getting it
done. I was planning to add another field in SQL to mark a post as
“sticky”, but Movable Type’s category tags gives the same functionality
without having to modify the database so I used that instead. It makes
things easier by automatically showing all posts that is marked
“sticky” in the sidebar. Veritas has a link to show all of his posts, I
feel that this is appropriate as his posts are very specific (almost
always about substances) and it would be good to have an archive of his
posts without making too many posts “sticky” as that clutters up the
sidebar. I’m not doing that for myself because my posts are more
general, so there isn’t much point in implementing that. There is a
problem with the way the tags work though – clicking on an archived
month will only show the sticky posts that is chronologically behind
that month. Thus, if you click on the first month, you can’t see any of
the sticky posts. Oh well. πŸ™‚

Persistent sidebar
I’ve made the sidebar to be always visible, don’t know how you all feel
about that, but it does make navigation slightly easier and makes the
site more cohesive. I just took the sidebar stuff out and put it into a
template to be included automatically by every page. I read that
there’s an easy way to create an “About me” page based on the Movable
Type tags, but I didn’t bother to go through that, so I’ve changed all
the about pages to PHP so I can just include the sidebar template
easily without having to read up on the tags. Unfortunately, while
doing the sidebar, I lost all the blog links!
I haven’t done backups of the site since the time I changed hosts so I
had to rebuild everything from memory. My bad, I cut the sidebar stuff
out and cut some other thing again before pasting, thus overwriting the
sidebar stuff. πŸ™ My memory isn’t really good, I’ve tried to put up all
the links that I could remember but I’m sure I missed quite a few,
because the list looks much shorter than before! I didn’t remember the
exact order too, but anyway, if I linked you before and it’s not here
now, it’s because of the cut and cut fiasco. I can’t remember every
single link I had, my memory is going down the gutter as the days go
by. Sorry about that, please email me if I accidentally left you out.

Aesthetic changes
I made the date bar grey with black text to differentiate the archives
easier. The posts on the main page have a white date bar with grey
text, and all individual and monthly archives shows the grey one so
that it’s easier to see that you’re browsing the archives. I also
changed the banner, so a different banner will load up if you’re
reading the older posts. It’s nothing much, just applied the “Wind”
filter twice and turned down the hue and saturation to make the banner
look “older” and more uh, weathered. That and the grey archives date
bar would give a better visual cue that you’re looking at the archives
instead of the new posts.

That’s basically it. Tell me what you think of the changes, I’ll
love to hear some input regarding the new features. I think the sticky
posts makes the sidebar a bit too cluttered and long, perhaps I should
be more discriminatory in marking a post “sticky”. I already tried to
squash the list by using a small font size and minimal spacing in the
CSS class definition but it’s still fairly long. Anyway, I’ll
appreciate any feedback regarding the changes. πŸ™‚ Thanks!

Exam timetable

2003sem1.jpg

My exam timetable doesn’t look too good. I’ll only finish on the
24th, I prefer to have them all crammed together instead of spaced out
like this. I haven’t been updating much lately, sorry about that.
Assignments…

Link of the day: Seized criminal assets ‘lost’ [theage.com.au]

You know, drugs seem to have legs and a mind of its own…I wouldn’t
be surprised if they somehow found their way back into the market. πŸ˜‰

Mmm…meat

meatspvl.jpg

I’m hungry and this meat display (taken in Springvale) is making me
drool. If you squint a little, you can even see the people working
inside. Oh well, I’ll eat after I finish this bit of my assignment.
Check out the trailer of Better Luck Tomorrow (on the main page of the
link below), it sounds like a really good movie.

Link: Better Luck Tomorrow [betterlucktomorrow.com]

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