While blogging is one of my favourite hobbies, this post and the one before this is one I dread to make. Alas, like taxes and death, both of them (the posts) are kinda inevitable.
Yesterday, Sautern once again had to send off one of its own. This time, it is our most prized assets turn to take a bow. In pouring rain, we sent off Chong Yang to meet his destiny. From now on, there will be no more shop closing, no more slippers flying towards his head, and no more high pressure datelines and last minute server maintaining. Or rather, he will still be expected to do some of those, except that he won't be within reach of any retribution if he doesn't.
As with Jupes jungle paradise, high tech and sterile Singapore will probably be heaven to CY. Hopefully he will not get too enamoured of all the gadgets and fine time to get to know the chicks there.
Regardless, whatever pleasure he may derive from slacking off official business will be (possibly) negated by the stresses of being in a foreign country, so we will let that slide. Anyway, like with Jupes, even though CY is not physically here, his spirit will be forever ingrained in Sautern. In the same vein as WWJPD, WWCYD will probably appear whenever a decision is to be made. Of course, his eccentricity rivals Jupes, so I hope we should be forgiven if WWJPD is only partially applied.
Anyway, I better end this before I get to emotional. Au revoir, my techy friend, till next time.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
A Tribute (part 1)
Sautern lost one of its own today.
Our resident atheist, celibate, treehugger and renaissance man has left us today, physically at least. Jupes in his desire to achieve a higher level of tree hugging and poacher poaching was lifted into the clouds today, hopefully towards the tree hugging paradise that he so yearns for. In spirit though, we all know that he will always be a Sauterneer and have Sautern in his heart. Likewise for us, he will forever live on in our memories.
My last image of him before his amazing journey will always be of him toting his weapon of musical distraction (WMD) aka his violin and bidding Tommy and me farewell. Hopefully, his musical goal of mastering his instrument will not lead to too many sleepless nights for his future companions and consequently lead to his own sleepless nights caused by his expulsion from his lodgings. As for his other inanimate companion, I hope his laptop, whateverlongassedcomplicatednameithas, will be friendly with the broadband connection there, so as not to screw up whatever reputation Sabah has with Linux users. Yes Jupes, I think you will not only take a step for Sautern but also for Linuxkind.
Anyway, what's done is done, and Jupes should safely be at his paradise now. To commemorate him though, I propose we implement WWJPD (what would Ju Ping do). Of course, owing to his extreme views in fields like environmentalism, music, social activism, Holy text discussion, relationships... well just about everything, WWJPD will effectively be inapplicable, by us at least. Darn, which leaves WWJPD only for Sautern affairs. Hmmm, well, I guess that's good enough.
Of course, it might just be about 5 months to the next university break, so our resident enthusiast of obscure interests will not really be gone. In the mean time Jupes, keep those ideas coming. Who knows, the rarefied air there will giving you some sparks of inspiration. Till next time, my friend.
Our resident atheist, celibate, treehugger and renaissance man has left us today, physically at least. Jupes in his desire to achieve a higher level of tree hugging and poacher poaching was lifted into the clouds today, hopefully towards the tree hugging paradise that he so yearns for. In spirit though, we all know that he will always be a Sauterneer and have Sautern in his heart. Likewise for us, he will forever live on in our memories.
My last image of him before his amazing journey will always be of him toting his weapon of musical distraction (WMD) aka his violin and bidding Tommy and me farewell. Hopefully, his musical goal of mastering his instrument will not lead to too many sleepless nights for his future companions and consequently lead to his own sleepless nights caused by his expulsion from his lodgings. As for his other inanimate companion, I hope his laptop, whateverlongassedcomplicatednameithas, will be friendly with the broadband connection there, so as not to screw up whatever reputation Sabah has with Linux users. Yes Jupes, I think you will not only take a step for Sautern but also for Linuxkind.
Anyway, what's done is done, and Jupes should safely be at his paradise now. To commemorate him though, I propose we implement WWJPD (what would Ju Ping do). Of course, owing to his extreme views in fields like environmentalism, music, social activism, Holy text discussion, relationships... well just about everything, WWJPD will effectively be inapplicable, by us at least. Darn, which leaves WWJPD only for Sautern affairs. Hmmm, well, I guess that's good enough.
Of course, it might just be about 5 months to the next university break, so our resident enthusiast of obscure interests will not really be gone. In the mean time Jupes, keep those ideas coming. Who knows, the rarefied air there will giving you some sparks of inspiration. Till next time, my friend.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
I <3 Green Tea
I did promise in my last article to begin my articles in the future with a brief description of my favourite music. Well, forget that promise.
I have a great story to tell now. It's about green tea.
Green tea has a long history behind it. And I'm humbly decline to explain any further because I am not a verifiable source of information for tea. All I know is the following:
Peter is a loyal Red Devil, while Tommy is a pre-Abramovich Chelsea supporter. Flyzzx doesn't watch football.
Me? Everton.
A quick recap:
Peter supports champions, Tommy is a fan of the rich, Flyzzx doesn't care, while I have a preference towards underdogs punching above their weight.
Before the match, me, Flyzzx, and Tommy went over to the Sunrise McDonald's outlet, where for the first time in probably a decade, I bought a meal from McDonald's with my own pocket money.
Me and the big yellow clown have a history. I ate stuff from McDonald's when I was 7 or 8 years old, and threw up.
Basically, the plot of Batman versus the Joker.
Anyway, our first industrial tie up with a college (KDU) would officially begin. And after some discussions during the past fortnight, we decided to arrange an informal meeting with the college candidates who would begin working for us.
It's strange how thing's turn out, don't they? We started our company when we were finished with the SPM in 2005, and now, we would be supervising people at least one year older than us.
Since we have yet to receive confirmation for new projects, Flyzzx proposed a mock project for the college students. Since we trust they will do everything they can to find out which project we have modelled this trial after, I'll keep silent on the name of the project here.
The proposal was well received, and being the social-experiment nut of the bunch, I immediately dropped brash hints to turn the mock project into a cut-throat reality-series style game where the loser would have to vote someone off the island.
Fortunately for the students, Tommy overruled me and arranged a potential split of 70/30 to the winners and losers respectively.
For this mock project, all of us will be judges, but really, only Flyzzx knows best. The winner will be the team that does a better job than the other. As simple as that.
We bade adieu and went over to Peter's place to pick him up.
Back at Champions Leagues central, we still had five to six hours to kill, which I immediately invested in my loyal companion, Enceladus.
Enceladus is the name I've given my Compaq Presario F762AU.
And I have installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Look out for an article on my blog.
As usual, Enceladus refused to connect to Tommy's WiFi's network. Something about WEP really bugs Enceladus.
Meanwhile, Flyzzx began implementing Project Torrential. A very secret project (now a viable business) that will receive no promotion at all except through word-of-mouth.
Here are a few clues, you can probably postulate the answer:
Using the broadband connection, I eventually obtained a podcast I had wanted to try for quite some time: Podtoid-san.
You can find the latest versions of this podcast on japanator.com.
And so I played it out loud on my laptop's Altec Lansing, much to Peter's annoyance.
“It's very distracting,” he says.
Meanwhile, I was editing Tommy's proposal to request for seed funding for another business project called Cember.com.
It was slow work, and something was anchoring my spirits to the ground.
Thankfully, Flyzzx decided to test my intelligence by giving me this IQ question, heavily embellished by me so you won't misunderstand the question:
Without missing a beat, I assaulted Peter and Flyzzx with orders to go, because they still wanted to breed.
I guess that speaks of my preferences.
Peter agreed, Flyzzx stayed back to configure Torrential. Which was just as well, because for the first time in a very long time, I watched an excellent Japanese animé series in Japanese.
Clannad is not being shown anywhere in Malaysia, so I'd encourage the fansub route. Very soon, you will be asking to import the DVD from Japan.
*** I will now give a brief education on fansubs.
Fansubbers are animé aficionados who write their own subtitles for animé fresh out of Japan, to spread the good word. They employ an honour system, whereby people who have downloaded fansubs (and loved the animé and want to keep it) agree to buy the animé as soon as it's licensed and available for sale in the respective country.
Of course, that's the best case scenario where people actually want to reward good work and not steal it.
Since this is Malaysia, nothing animé related here is confirmed legal, you have no choice but to import them; if you are truly an honourable and trustworthy person.
End of sermon***
In anticipation of a long night, I asked Tommy if he could provide some green tea to last the night, and with that simple request, began the most productive 40 hours of my teenage life.
Just like wine, tea has different grades and quality. The difference may be as apparent as the taste, or in this case, the measurable quality of the tea leaves.
As surprising as it may seem, none of us fell asleep during the match which dragged all the way from 0230 hours to 0600 hours.
I only watched the first half of the match, where two goals were scored by each team; while the rest of the gang watched the second half, the first half of extra time, and the second half of extra time, where no goals were scored.
Thus proving I have some form of circumstantial luck I like to call my bloody Irish luck.
In all sincerity, I wish to thank all 22 men on the field for not scoring any goals while I wasn't watching.
The penalty was a torrid affair – for Peter and Tommy.
All bets were off, and Tommy began shouting football curses aloud. Possibly ripping apart the fabrics of space-time wide enough for Cristiano Ronaldo to miss his penalty kick.
Peter trusted the power of Lucky, Tommy's dog. And as if Lucky were god, caused John Terry to slip and miss during his kick. (What's dog spelt backwards?)
To prove that man and dog are the best of inter-species friends, Anelka missed his kick to send Peter into frenzied one-armed taunting air boxing in front of Tommy's wide-screen television.
Throughout it all, Flyzzx was in a semi-sleep state, utterly unmoved by the proceedings.
All in all, I was just pleased Tommy didn't have to bust out the champagne, a distinct possibility if Chelsea had won.
And then, off to bed, at least, that was the plan.
The lights were off, and everyone went to rest. Only Enceladus was up.
The green tea kicked in.
I felt strangely energetic, and after failing to drown myself in dark dreams after two minutes, got up and checked up on Enceladus.
Not long after that, I moved Enceladus to the modem upstairs to attach an Ethernet wire from the router directly to herm (I can't decide yet whether my laptop is male or female).
For a brief moment, I saw Peter on-line and available for chat. And dismissed it as a technical mystery. After all, he was sound asleep in the house right?
With nothing better to do, I started editing Tommy's business proposal while Enceladus downloaded stuff.
Very soon, sunlight entered the room, and the household began to stir.
I completed the editing, only to find myself facing Mr Ooi who had some things he wanted to add and change to his website.
Hmm... At this point, I have had only half-an-hour's rest in 24 hours.
It wasn't the most stimulating of conversations, but though sleep was lacking, I never felt encumbered by it during the discussion and managed to pull it off with everything (especially my credibility) intact.
“Must be the green tea,” I thought.
And very soon, it was 1000 hours, and I went down to join Flyzzx for some breakfast. Fresh milk, cereal, and ham sandwiches. Arguably the best breakfast I have had in years.
I asked him where Peter was, since I didn't see him anywhere in the house. Flyzzx told me he left after the match, which must have been when I had retreated to the kitchen for some cleaning up.
“I saw Peter on-line,” I said.
“He probably didn't sleep either,” Flyzzx said.
“You didn't sleep too?”, I asked.
“No, I rested for a while, but couldn't sleep,” he answered, “it was your green tea. I have never experienced anything like it before. I even sleep through coffee!”
Thus began an avid discussion on the humble tea leaf that created this astounding scenario.
After breakfast, we went upstairs to do some productive work.
First to cross off the list was a viewing of Clannad Episode 1, which totally blew me away with the extreme and obsessive attention to detail in every scene. The storyline is rather complex... well, you can Google it.
After which we set out to create a complete mock project for the KDU students, which took up all of our time until 1600 hours.
In total, we generated probably three days work within those hours.
And were powered on by green tea.
Seriously, if you have problems concentrating on school-work – green tea.
If you have an examination tomorrow morning and have yet to finish revising – green tea.
If you have a few hours to kill while awaiting your non-green-tea-drinking-CEO to awake from a late late night of football and wish to spend those hours doing productive work instead of sleep – green tea.
By the end of the day, we had delivered the documents to the students, completed the successful Beta test of Torrential, and had even sold three slots for Torrential on that day alone.
I almost felt sorry I had to leave that day, since I was still being powered by a full pot of green tea and was experiencing the mind-altering effects of broadband.
Geek drugs.
Anyway, we ended the day at Pizza Hut where Tommy and his girlfriend treated us to dinner with coupons. Just before the day was done though, Flyzzx asked me another IQ question:
Using an unlimited supply of water and two pails which hold 4 litres and 9 litres respectively, produce 6 litres of water in the most exact fashion possible through the actions of pouring alone.
And after solving that, with some hints from Flyzzx, we reached Bayan Lepas, where he went home, while I awaited the bus.
By the time I got back to Balik Pulau, the effects of green tea had worn off. Significantly.
With a quick explanation of my lack of sleep, I excused myself from dinner, retreated to my room, and slept for 12 hours.
Upon awaking, I solved the 25 MacBook Airs question to officially end what must be the most productive 40 hours in my teenage life.
I have a great story to tell now. It's about green tea.
Green tea has a long history behind it. And I'm humbly decline to explain any further because I am not a verifiable source of information for tea. All I know is the following:
- Green tea is good for you;
- Zen Buddhist monks in Japan employ them to stay awake during meditations;
- It does not have the side effects of coffee, which incidentally are:
- fever, nausea, headaches, and flu-like symptoms if you skip even one cup for one day;
- extreme poverty, if one does not have the salary to support Starbucks.
Peter is a loyal Red Devil, while Tommy is a pre-Abramovich Chelsea supporter. Flyzzx doesn't watch football.
Me? Everton.
A quick recap:
Peter supports champions, Tommy is a fan of the rich, Flyzzx doesn't care, while I have a preference towards underdogs punching above their weight.
Before the match, me, Flyzzx, and Tommy went over to the Sunrise McDonald's outlet, where for the first time in probably a decade, I bought a meal from McDonald's with my own pocket money.
Me and the big yellow clown have a history. I ate stuff from McDonald's when I was 7 or 8 years old, and threw up.
Basically, the plot of Batman versus the Joker.
Anyway, our first industrial tie up with a college (KDU) would officially begin. And after some discussions during the past fortnight, we decided to arrange an informal meeting with the college candidates who would begin working for us.
It's strange how thing's turn out, don't they? We started our company when we were finished with the SPM in 2005, and now, we would be supervising people at least one year older than us.
Since we have yet to receive confirmation for new projects, Flyzzx proposed a mock project for the college students. Since we trust they will do everything they can to find out which project we have modelled this trial after, I'll keep silent on the name of the project here.
The proposal was well received, and being the social-experiment nut of the bunch, I immediately dropped brash hints to turn the mock project into a cut-throat reality-series style game where the loser would have to vote someone off the island.
Fortunately for the students, Tommy overruled me and arranged a potential split of 70/30 to the winners and losers respectively.
For this mock project, all of us will be judges, but really, only Flyzzx knows best. The winner will be the team that does a better job than the other. As simple as that.
We bade adieu and went over to Peter's place to pick him up.
Back at Champions Leagues central, we still had five to six hours to kill, which I immediately invested in my loyal companion, Enceladus.
Enceladus is the name I've given my Compaq Presario F762AU.
And I have installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Look out for an article on my blog.
As usual, Enceladus refused to connect to Tommy's WiFi's network. Something about WEP really bugs Enceladus.
Meanwhile, Flyzzx began implementing Project Torrential. A very secret project (now a viable business) that will receive no promotion at all except through word-of-mouth.
Here are a few clues, you can probably postulate the answer:
- We have a lot of extra server storage and bandwidth;
- The server fees are relatively high, making the investment fairly disproportionate;
- We found a way to sell the extra storage and bandwidth.
Using the broadband connection, I eventually obtained a podcast I had wanted to try for quite some time: Podtoid-san.
You can find the latest versions of this podcast on japanator.com.
And so I played it out loud on my laptop's Altec Lansing, much to Peter's annoyance.
“It's very distracting,” he says.
Meanwhile, I was editing Tommy's proposal to request for seed funding for another business project called Cember.com.
It was slow work, and something was anchoring my spirits to the ground.
Thankfully, Flyzzx decided to test my intelligence by giving me this IQ question, heavily embellished by me so you won't misunderstand the question:
In a room on an island on the planet Neptune, a mad scientist invents a machine that ranks computers by performance. Nobody knows why he doesn't just invent a machine that spits out raw numbers to compare the performance of the computers, maybe that's why he is a mad scientist on Neptune. The machine has five arms, with five corresponding one-LED displays that only show the rank of the computers in relation to one another.Suddenly, Tommy interrupted our very important work by suggesting we kill some time at a collegiate party.
In another part of the room, a group of students from MIT have concluded that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would result in differing performances in the 25 MacBook Airs waiting to be tested by the mad scientist's machine.
The question becomes: What method would you use to employ the least amount of tests to determine the top three performing MacBook Airs?
Without missing a beat, I assaulted Peter and Flyzzx with orders to go, because they still wanted to breed.
I guess that speaks of my preferences.
Peter agreed, Flyzzx stayed back to configure Torrential. Which was just as well, because for the first time in a very long time, I watched an excellent Japanese animé series in Japanese.
Clannad is not being shown anywhere in Malaysia, so I'd encourage the fansub route. Very soon, you will be asking to import the DVD from Japan.
*** I will now give a brief education on fansubs.
Fansubbers are animé aficionados who write their own subtitles for animé fresh out of Japan, to spread the good word. They employ an honour system, whereby people who have downloaded fansubs (and loved the animé and want to keep it) agree to buy the animé as soon as it's licensed and available for sale in the respective country.
Of course, that's the best case scenario where people actually want to reward good work and not steal it.
Since this is Malaysia, nothing animé related here is confirmed legal, you have no choice but to import them; if you are truly an honourable and trustworthy person.
End of sermon***
In anticipation of a long night, I asked Tommy if he could provide some green tea to last the night, and with that simple request, began the most productive 40 hours of my teenage life.
Just like wine, tea has different grades and quality. The difference may be as apparent as the taste, or in this case, the measurable quality of the tea leaves.
As surprising as it may seem, none of us fell asleep during the match which dragged all the way from 0230 hours to 0600 hours.
I only watched the first half of the match, where two goals were scored by each team; while the rest of the gang watched the second half, the first half of extra time, and the second half of extra time, where no goals were scored.
Thus proving I have some form of circumstantial luck I like to call my bloody Irish luck.
In all sincerity, I wish to thank all 22 men on the field for not scoring any goals while I wasn't watching.
The penalty was a torrid affair – for Peter and Tommy.
All bets were off, and Tommy began shouting football curses aloud. Possibly ripping apart the fabrics of space-time wide enough for Cristiano Ronaldo to miss his penalty kick.
Peter trusted the power of Lucky, Tommy's dog. And as if Lucky were god, caused John Terry to slip and miss during his kick. (What's dog spelt backwards?)
To prove that man and dog are the best of inter-species friends, Anelka missed his kick to send Peter into frenzied one-armed taunting air boxing in front of Tommy's wide-screen television.
Throughout it all, Flyzzx was in a semi-sleep state, utterly unmoved by the proceedings.
All in all, I was just pleased Tommy didn't have to bust out the champagne, a distinct possibility if Chelsea had won.
And then, off to bed, at least, that was the plan.
The lights were off, and everyone went to rest. Only Enceladus was up.
The green tea kicked in.
I felt strangely energetic, and after failing to drown myself in dark dreams after two minutes, got up and checked up on Enceladus.
Not long after that, I moved Enceladus to the modem upstairs to attach an Ethernet wire from the router directly to herm (I can't decide yet whether my laptop is male or female).
For a brief moment, I saw Peter on-line and available for chat. And dismissed it as a technical mystery. After all, he was sound asleep in the house right?
With nothing better to do, I started editing Tommy's business proposal while Enceladus downloaded stuff.
Very soon, sunlight entered the room, and the household began to stir.
I completed the editing, only to find myself facing Mr Ooi who had some things he wanted to add and change to his website.
Hmm... At this point, I have had only half-an-hour's rest in 24 hours.
It wasn't the most stimulating of conversations, but though sleep was lacking, I never felt encumbered by it during the discussion and managed to pull it off with everything (especially my credibility) intact.
“Must be the green tea,” I thought.
And very soon, it was 1000 hours, and I went down to join Flyzzx for some breakfast. Fresh milk, cereal, and ham sandwiches. Arguably the best breakfast I have had in years.
I asked him where Peter was, since I didn't see him anywhere in the house. Flyzzx told me he left after the match, which must have been when I had retreated to the kitchen for some cleaning up.
“I saw Peter on-line,” I said.
“He probably didn't sleep either,” Flyzzx said.
“You didn't sleep too?”, I asked.
“No, I rested for a while, but couldn't sleep,” he answered, “it was your green tea. I have never experienced anything like it before. I even sleep through coffee!”
Thus began an avid discussion on the humble tea leaf that created this astounding scenario.
After breakfast, we went upstairs to do some productive work.
First to cross off the list was a viewing of Clannad Episode 1, which totally blew me away with the extreme and obsessive attention to detail in every scene. The storyline is rather complex... well, you can Google it.
After which we set out to create a complete mock project for the KDU students, which took up all of our time until 1600 hours.
In total, we generated probably three days work within those hours.
And were powered on by green tea.
Seriously, if you have problems concentrating on school-work – green tea.
If you have an examination tomorrow morning and have yet to finish revising – green tea.
If you have a few hours to kill while awaiting your non-green-tea-drinking-CEO to awake from a late late night of football and wish to spend those hours doing productive work instead of sleep – green tea.
By the end of the day, we had delivered the documents to the students, completed the successful Beta test of Torrential, and had even sold three slots for Torrential on that day alone.
I almost felt sorry I had to leave that day, since I was still being powered by a full pot of green tea and was experiencing the mind-altering effects of broadband.
Geek drugs.
Anyway, we ended the day at Pizza Hut where Tommy and his girlfriend treated us to dinner with coupons. Just before the day was done though, Flyzzx asked me another IQ question:
Using an unlimited supply of water and two pails which hold 4 litres and 9 litres respectively, produce 6 litres of water in the most exact fashion possible through the actions of pouring alone.
And after solving that, with some hints from Flyzzx, we reached Bayan Lepas, where he went home, while I awaited the bus.
By the time I got back to Balik Pulau, the effects of green tea had worn off. Significantly.
With a quick explanation of my lack of sleep, I excused myself from dinner, retreated to my room, and slept for 12 hours.
Upon awaking, I solved the 25 MacBook Airs question to officially end what must be the most productive 40 hours in my teenage life.
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