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™‚

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˜‰

A day of spills…

spill1.jpg + spill2.jpg

=

spill3.jpg

I spilt Diet Coke TWICE on my Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical
keyboard yesterday. I forgot all about it and went to sleep. Upon
waking up, I started typing and wondered why some keys were going
crazy. Typing s brought up Outlook Express, Ctrl puts it into Sleep
mode and stuff like that. I was wondering why, I couldn’t even remember
the spillage incident yesterday…until I saw some liquid coming out from
the seams on the side. I overturned it, and a significant amount of
Diet Coke steeped in gunk dripped out. Fuck. I’m letting it dry and see
if it works, if not I’ll flood it with water (coz it’s sticky), dry it
and try again. That sucks because I have an assignment due on
Wednesday, while all the time I was thinking it’s due on Thursday. This
A$5 backup keyboard has a Sleep button where my Outlook Express mapping
was (grr…), I keep reaching for a non-existent volume control and the
keys feel too hard. I have to apply considerable force to make each key
press register and since I’m used to the softer Logitech, I keep making
typing mistakes coz the key strokes are not being registered. Typing
with such force is tiring too. I also managed to spill chicken topping
sauce on my pants during dinner.

spill4.jpg

Oh well, back to work. I’m about to nod off, I need an infusion of something. Too bad I don’t have anything.

Arrrrgggggggghhhhhhh

MIA coz assignments. It’s Saturday! Time fastfowarding, I can’t keep up! No, stop!!!

rhnptape.jpg

Quick one, took this photo just now. Around 6 AM. Hmm…I thought 6 AM
was just an hour ago. But the clock says I’m wrong. Where did the time
go? Jumped to 3:37 PM? PM??? Wtf? Noooo…go slower k. About the pic,
I’ve been meaning to photograph that since it was implemented a couple
of days ago, but didn’t get around to it till now. There’s a new policy
at our halls, the main stairway door is to be locked 24/7. The picture
up there is the latch that is used to keep the door open, it’s been
taped over to avoid people from using it to prop open the door. Now I
gotta remember to bring my keys every time I go out…wait, can’t
continue like this…MUST WRITE IN FRAGMENTS. Quicker. No time.
Assignments. Here’s another pic to show perspective:

rhnpdoor.jpg

Something else. All hail Win XP System Restore. Got a corrupted
profile this morning. My personal profile won’t load. XP loaded default
and I was shocked to find all my assignment files missing (all saved in
My Documents) and all my photos (stupid Nikon Browser…default to My
Pictures in My Docu). They just weren’t there, browsing to Docs +
Settings -> My Name -> Desktop
Nothing!
<-
-> My Docu
Nope!
-> My Pics
All empty!
Horrified! Restarted but same thing happened, after shock passed
(partly due to remaining disk space still the same and worse come to
worse, go for disk info retrieval tools – digressing, not good,
anyway), went for sys restore hoping I didn’t turn that off. Always used to turn it off coz didn’t want the extra load.

sysresto.jpg

Thank God I didn’t turn it off this time. Restored to previous day
and right as rain. Worked on ass and STILL didn’t back things up. I
never learn. Mouse froze just now, “fuck!” I thought. Mouse error is
common error, bios disables USB support and have to restart and set
things rite – only happens occasionally, so didn’t bother to isolate
cause, but prob coz of the wireless mouse +kb driver).
Anyway, uh oh, this is bad I though. Had to reboot…prayed won’t see the
corrupted profile. In vain. Yep, got the same corrupted profile.
Please sys restore, do your magic. Whee. Restored okay, BUT….
Nothing in all my docs
My ass was in there…12 hours of work…gone?
Made offerings. Prayed. Restored to earlier date, didn’t dare to look, went to toilet.
Came back and phew, everything fine again.
Except a couple of database files were missing

puttyass.jpg

Luckily they were on the Unix server I work on. PuTTY r0x. Doing the
backbone for my ass. Using SQL Plus command line via SSH to Unix. Don’t
want to bother with downloading Oracle for GUI SQL Plus. Command line =
faster for me. If you’re working on something like this too, and didn’t
already know, easy way: Type SQL tables in notepad. Save as
“database_create.sql”. FTP upload. Go SQL Plus Prompt. Type “start
database_create.sql”. If you’re like me and makes a lot of mistakes
you’ll also have created “clean.sql”. Just a fast way to drop all
tables. Copy table names from db create. Also, save typing, script
“see.sql” with “select table_name from user_tables;”. Just in case
clean.sql ordering wrong, FK dependent tables not deleted first.
Reorder again. Populate db separately “populate.sql”. SQL not fun.
Doing the Java and PHP front end now. Still have CSS and HTML to go.
Bye sleep. BTW, me != retard. Just in a rush. Gotta go, time moving at
the speed of lite. Keeping up, hard. Trying. Wish me luck. Thanks!

Crossing t’s and dotting i’s

wenjiass.jpg

This is how my blog looks like in Netscape 4.7. teddybwear
[blogspot.com] sent me this screenshot today. It’s very bizarre seeing
an ICQ message with my nick flashing in a screenshot, I felt like my
body was somehow switched or something. =D I know there’s something
very wrong with the templates but I never got around to fixing it
because it works fine in IE 6 and that’s what most people are using
anyway. πŸ™‚ I’m just lazy. Anyway, I got around to hunting down the
problem and found out that I wasn’t crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s.
Most pages were missing the closing “html” tag and most “div” tags
weren’t being closed too. I think I got all of them so it should be
displaying properly on other browsers now. I’ve also added an About sixthseal.com
page to the sidebar since I’m pretty much brain dead from lack of sleep
and I can’t concentrate on my programming assignment. Sleep beckons
me…

I******* M*******

It’s only 6 weeks before my graduation so I’ve started to take
photos of anything and everything in an effort to document scenes of
Melbourne that has been part of my life ever since I arrived here in
2000. I’m starting with the basics – campus and halls then moving to do
photo shoots of the city and other places. Here’s one I took today on
the train, I was sitting in the first carriage and just shooting random
pics of the train interior when I saw this:

trainhlp.jpg

No, not the guy in front of the photo. I’m referring to the train
driver helping a physically challenged guy on an motorised wheelchair
to exit the carriage. I found this photo nice, because it showcases the
level of service available for the physically disadvantaged here. Train
drivers will stop and come out of the driver compartment and come into
the carriage to help them enter and exit. I’ve been impressed by the
allowances this country makes for the physically challenged ever since
I was here.

Link of the Day: Infected Mushroom live at Bliss 4 @ QBH tonight!!! [earthcore.com.au]

Infected Mushroom! If you don’t know who they are, kindly disregard the next paragraph and continue reading from the one after.

Heresy! Go back and listen to your Paul Oakenfold and Paul Van Dyk. That’s what trance means to you anyway. :p

If you read that anyway, you have my apologies for the unacceptable
elitist insult. πŸ˜‰ I was impressed by their intense psy-trance when I
was introduced to their music and I had wanted to see them live ever
since. I want to go so much…but I can’t. Unfortunately my plans of
working ahead to have an Easter break totally free from assignments has
not gone according to schedule. There are just too many assignments to
complete and I need to catch up over Easter break. Why can’t I take a
single night off to go?

Well, because if I go, it’s not going to just affect one night, I’ll
need at least a week to recover. Why? Because if I go, I just know I’m gonna go all out
by justifying it’s the last big one before I go back, so I’m going to
be pushing the limits, fuck the consequences, going out with a bang and
that. And the thought of me contemplating “going all out” scares me too
coz in my dictionary:

going all out
phrase
1. Mental state where excess is celebrated and consequences are not taken into consideration.
2. Implicitly trusting your body to handle and deal with the strain
exerted by the prodigious consumption of various supplements.
3. Living only for the “now”.

See also: Trips to the hospital, formidable financial repercussions, extreme neurotoxicity, comedown from hell.

I’ve also noticed that every time I decide to go all out something
bad happens at the end which more often than not causes regret or
remorse. =D I trust myself not to do anything too stupid and reckless
that will lead to long lasting repercussions, but still the recovery
period from my sessions of going all out (in this context) takes a
week. One week of (horrible) depression, overwhelming anxiety, panic
attacks, unshakable lethargy, mood swings, suicidal tendencies, crying
spells and utter helplessness before the dopamine and serotonin stores
starts grudgingly filling up again.

There was a time in my life when I would have said “fuck it” and went all out, quad-dropping* and candyflipping*
every few hours and get totally mashed and HAVE FUN till the break of
dawn. Unfortunately, I seem to have sobered up and realized the
importance of not fucking up this semester, because it’s my last
semester and I’m graduating in June. I want to spend my Easter break
catching up and finishing assignments and doing some photo shoots
instead of lying in bed depressed and feeling like a significant chuck
of my brain has taken leave.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to go though. This is probably the
last big event that’s happening before I go back, and Infected
Mushroom!!! It’ll be absolutely crazy in there, I want to go! I can’t imagine what a powerful experience it’ll be to be candyflipping*
while listening to Infected Mushroom live in a “psychedelic mad house
featuring multiple monster lasers, death defying stunts, mind bending
installations + more”.

*I don’t do any of these things, mind you, it’s just an
analogy. I don’t even know what it means! It’s not to be taken
literally. πŸ˜‰

It will be a total mind-fuck. I want to be there! But I
can’t. Our one week long Easter break has got to be used for catching
up and assignments instead of recovering. Thus, I’m afraid I’ll have to
ban everyone from mentioning the words “infected” and “mushroom” in
front of me, in my near vicinity, within hearing range, or in the
comments. This is because I don’t want to be reminded of what I’m
missing. πŸ™ Those who insist on defying this ban will receive a hefty
kick in the balls. That goes the same for girls, I’m sure it’s gonna
hurt too. =D

I’m serious, no one use the words “infected” and “mushroom” until tomorrow, when the event is over.

No more zzz…

slopsscr.jpg

Arrgggghhhh…I’ve been sleeping too much these days. I just woke up
in time today to grab something (the something above is sweet and sour
chicken with rice) from slops before lunch services closes. Well,
according to my calculations, my sleep debt should have been paid off
by now, so there would be no 10-12 hour sleeps again after today.
Hereby, the court orders the plaintiff “Mr. Sandman” to stamp the sleep
debt sheet “Paid in Full”. Er…yes, back to work. =D

Another day…

anotcaul.jpg

There’s 1000 words right there. πŸ˜‰ I’ve having a really busy time
with all my assignments, so I haven’t been making real posts lately.
I’m going to take a nap now coz I woke up fairly early today. I’ll post
again tonite. Oh and that picture is of the Monash University campus in
Caulfield.

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