we are not butterflies

Yoko has gone back to Japan. It was heart wrentching to watch her striding towards the boarding temrinal, away from me and the world that we shared. I am glad though, that she's back with her family, in a place where she doesn't have to feel too self-concious about her language skills to speak to anyone. All of a sudden, my life returned to its previous tempo. Wake up, go to work, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. Was the last two months but a fleeting dream that I've just awoken from? Or am I dreaming now, and when I wake up, she'll still be in my arms? I have no choice now but to look forward with my life, and embrace what the future will bring. Oh yeah, we decided to keep the relationship going despite the distance. So it really isn't as bad as it sounds.

Obligatory Status Update

Really nothing much new with life with me. I started working at Alias for my PEY term. Well, I've been doing that for the past 3 months already, so I guess it's not really "starting" anymore. Work is pretty routine. I get up at around 4:30AM, go to work, check email, work on customer cases, debug their code, reproduce problems in Maya, log bugs and think up workarounds. Sometimes I get to work on some side projects like working on fixing the Alias website, and write up internal web-based solution viewers for the Alias Support. I've grown quite tired of web app development though. It's simply not challenging anymore, I feel like a robot always going through the same coding process, but I digress. I think I've grown tired of games. I bought a bunch of them 2 weeks back. Got F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion, The new Falcon 4 version, and Pacific War out of obligatory contribution to the developers. I haven't touched any of them yet, I tried Quake 4 a little, but was bored out of my mind even before the game started. I kind of dread playing F.E.A.R, simply cause it freaks the hell of of me. I just have no real desire to play any of them. I think this will be the last time I will buy any games ever. The most exciting thing so far is to be involved in a new relationship. I'm very happy with how things are progressing right now, but she's going back to Japan in a month, so I really don't know how things will work out. Hm, ok, so there are actually quiet a few things that are new. :)

Keats couldn't have said it better

Whene'er the fate of those I hold most dear Tells to my fearful breast a tale of sorrow O bright-eyed Hope, my morbid fancy cheer; Let me a while thy sweetest comforts borrow: Thy heaven-born radiance around me shed, And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head! - John Keats "To Hope"

"That's right ma'am, we get up before the chickens"

At work, group bonding time, co-worker cracks a joke.
Little old English lady, upon hearing that we work the 5am shift, said in the dearest possible way "Oh my, you must get up awfully early", "That's right ma'am, we get up before the chickens."

Everyone laughs, I stood there blinking my eyes for a full minute before the joke hits me. What can I say, it's been a while since I heard the cry of a rooster. I actually fully remember, in techno colour, roosters crying in the morning in my grandmother's house. I must've been 2 or 3 years old then, the apartment we lived in was long demolished to make way for new residences. I actually remember the entire floor, the stairs, the balcony, the old concrete kitchen and of course, the crying of the roosters. There would be virtually no electronic appliances. We used unscented soaps, cooked with coal stoves, and entertainment of the week would be watching my grandmother gutting fish.

And there I stood, still smelling the fish soups, and realized that I'm working in goddamn Alias. Surrounded by computers, 2 feet away from me there's a blazing 64bit computer with 4 gigs of ram, I got 2 computer on desk and we are calling people around the world with a few mouse clicks, and I had just answer a question in goddamn Japanese.

The amount of change in the world that I experienced is pretty extreme. There are generations these days who can't even imagine a world without TV or computers. People of my generation is funny. We are brought up without much technology, and yet we are comfortably immersed in it. We are the generation that bridges across the technological divide. Our sons and daughters will have no comprehension of the world of their grandparents, not only their lifestyles, but also their morals and ethics. This worries me. It'll be up to us to transmit such ideals and build characters in the next generation. However in this age of mass media and overwhelming competing sources for attention, have us learnt such ideas well? Have I?

Two worlds

No kungfu practice today at the Taiwanese Cultural Center. With the whole day free, I decided to check out the English-Japanese language exchange in ISC for JCSA. Aside from the fact that I'm always busy with kungfu on Saturdays, I was also a little unsure of attending such event as well. I've heard some horror stories from Alex, and kind of doubt the sincerity of the Japanese participants. With the PEY job though, I won't have a chance to study Japanese for at least a year. I need to continue to practice it or my Japanese will definitely start to fade. Well anyways, it turned out to be alright. The people are friendly enough, and the girls are as cute as one would expect. It's an encouraging environment to say the least. :D At the end of the day, I found this detour from my usual routine to be suprisingly invigorating. It's strange, seems that I have a choice of two completely separate world on Saturdays. One is the traditional and physical world of Chinese martial art, and another is the unexplored and mentally stimulating world of the Japanese connection. ( The historical and political implication of the choices is best left unsaid. ) I wish to balance these two choices, hence I'm considering maybe attending both events interchangeably. Alex, Jenny and Justin are all going to Japan in the coming months. Whereas I'm still staying in the big smoke for 2 more years. I envy them, we've all worked towards the same goal, and now I feel like I'm being left in the dust. I am of course very happy with my chance of working in Alias, and understand this course of action is indisputably the best. However, a part of me really want to simply say "screw it", and pack it up and head for Japan. I say to people that I plan to go to Japan once I graduate, but I wonder if I'll have the determination to carry out this endeavor, or will I go for the easy way out and get a job. A man's goal should lie not at home, but in the far reaches of the world.

I love May

I'm going to buy a new bike. I just spent 3 hours replacing brake lines on my bike today, only to have it go kaboom because of an over-inflated tire. I'm tired of fixing it, the wheels frames are unbalanced, the brake pads needs adjustment, the back-wheel needs fastening, it's literally falling apart. My application for Alias' PEY position was accepted. I'm starting my orientation next month, and will officially start to work in July. I'm ecstatic over it. All of a sudden the next 5 years of my life just came into clear focus. I now know exactly what I need to do, and where I will be going. This new sense of direction life is refreshing to say the least. This month is really going my way, today Guo laoshi took me aside and actually began to teach me Bajiquan privately for half an hour after practice. Seems like my effort of building the basics finally paid off. Now onto one more year of deligent Bajiquan basics.

Problems

The storage partition on my second computer gave out. I have no idea what was the cause, it just suddenly became inaccessible. It would've been a simple task of finding a diagnose tool online, but my internet connection somehow dropped as well. The problem was obviously corrupted partition information, but it had heavy impact on the system performance, as the OS tried to read the partition in vain again and again. In my frantic effort to alleviate the performance hit, I deleted the problem partition, and made a new one over it. I didn't format the new partition, since I still want to be able to recover the data. When my internet connection came back the next day, I got Active Partition Recovery, which managed to recover my old partition, but it appeared as RAW to XP. Then I got Partition Table Doctor, which fixed the boot table in a jiffy, but the partition returned to its previous state and became inaccessible again. In the end, I gave up and just created a new partition in its place. I lost my 40GBs of data. All the backup programs I had, all the Japanese dramas, all the K-1 fights etc. I now suspect all would've been well if I didn't delete the faulty partition at the beginning, and instead fix it directly with partition Table Doctor. Let this be a lesson to you, don't delete partitions on a whim.

Whoa, Ominous

We are fearing for the safety of our store tonight. Some dude came in today close to closing time to "check out" our store for sacking, or so my dad said. He was pretty freaked out, and we promptly moved all our tobacco stocks upstairs for safekeeping. Our security system had being malfunctioning for the past week, so we are staying on our toes tonight. While dad was arguing on the phone with the security system support, I decided to string together my shinai, which I had previously taken apart for maintenance. Just in case I needed something to wack with you know. That's when it happened, my shinai handle's support string broke. I suppose it was just obeying the laws of physics, it was pretty old, and had taken ton of abuse. However, you know how in all the stories, when bad things are about to happen, strings break, porcelains crack and all hell breaks loose? That's when my heart sank. By the way, I have my last exam of the year tomorrow. I'm sitting here trying to study for it, and all I can think of is how to react in case bad things start to happen. How am I supposed to study like this? Maybe the omen is really meant for my exam, rather than the fate of our family security? I sure hope so.

Song translation

I can hold your hand baby - Brilliant Green

赤く空を燃える丘で その涙を拭いてあげる

ここにいるわ baby always you love you
そばにいるわ baby always you love you

I can hold your hand baby
I will lead the way oh yeah

夜に触れた唇で 今せつない夢をあげる

二人を引き裂く朝日よ
別れの光など 月の手で
籠へと捕らえて閉ざしてしまうわ
愛してる ここへ来て

I can hold your hand baby

広がったオレンジの闇の中に
創り出す 永遠の夜をここに

On the hill that burns the sky red, I'll wipe those tears for you

I'm here baby, always you, love you
I'm by your side baby, always you, love you

I can hold your hand baby
I will lead the way oh yeah

On the lips I touched at night, I now give you painful dreams

Oh the morning sun that torns us apart
the light of our parting, with the hands of moon
into the cages I'll catch and trap it
I love you, come over here.

I can hold your hand baby

In the spreading orange darkness
here we'll create the eternal night

Exam season

Got Japanese exam tomorrow, naturally I'm here blogging away instead. With the release of MSN Messenger 7, suddenly everyone and their dog have a blog. I give it 3 months before everything die down again. I really have nothing against MSN Spaces, except it's slow, its interface is butt-ugly, and there's no API so synchronization between my stuff in Blogger and in the Spaces is possible. I was looking to streamline my Saikano site's code, and that's when it hit me: I should take advantage of the stream of visits I get and make money off of them with Google AdSense. However UT's webspace usage guideline indicates that the spaces cannot be used to generate profit. This means I'll need to move the site somewhere else. I'm considering actually just get a web host, it's not that much money.

The best news I've heard this year

The world certainly is becoming a happier place. Click and see the glory that be!

For quite a while, I havn't been keeping up with myself, and especially lately, my life seems so absurd and meaningless. So meaningless that I have nothing to say about them other than "Oh another game!". Perhaps, I should encourage myself to step out of this sickness and regain my youth... I know that's gonna take lots of effort, and I have been trying ever since the beginning of this school year...

XMLHttpRequest, the way of the future?

Recently, the impressively responsive interfaces in Gmail, Google suggest and A9 is attracting a lot of attention. By effectly separating presentation logic and business logic, not only does it gives a better user experience, its logical clarity is amazing. Finally, web applications can compete with traditional applications in interface response time. Not only that, it can even go above and beyond traditional application interfaces in customizability and design. It's all held together by standard compliant methods. XHML + CSS for presentation. Javascript, XML for presentation logic. These are all clientside. Then we can have serverside scripts take care of the business logic. I can't imagine a better use for PHP in this case. It's all held together by something called XMLHttpRequest. It enables the browser to send request to the server without having to refresh the page each time. For people who do web app development, this is huge! Now we can use javascript to send requests to the server, get the response back in nice XML, and then process it and display the contents clientside. If we can do this, why not take it a step further? We can in theory completely separate interface logic and server side data processing. Then why not do that? Put the server stuff elsewhere. This is not a new idea, but what's new about it is the ability for faster interface prototyping. Seriously, if we can do this, who needs flash for interfaces anymore? This sounds amazing, I plan to develop a web-based calender/organizer with this method to learn the ins and outs of it. Stay tuned.

I sold my soul on eBay

Here is something I read while surfing the net about game pad making... "I dont mean that metaphorically, or anything. I literally sold my soul on eBay. Sometime, around late 1999, I was extremely bored, and sitting around looking for things on which to waste my money on eBay. As I was looking through their fine selection porn, old computers and cool boots, an idea suddenly struck me. I didnt have any useless crap laying around the house that I was willing to part with, but I did have one thing that I could sell. The age-old and eternal currency. My soul. So, I went in, chose the catagory "Antiques," and started the bidding at a dollar. I emailed a link to a few of my friends, chuckled for a moment at my extreme wit, and went off to do something else. So, the next day, I decided to check it out, and see how my little auction was coming along. I was quite pleased to see that it had gotten up to the respectable amount of a few hundred dollars. I was quite happy about this, so I went on to brag about it to a few of my co-workers. That was when things got interesting. After being up for a couple of days, the amount on the auction was getting quite high. I began checking it periodically and obsessively. It was getting into the thousands. Did this many people really want my soul? Were they bidding for real? Or were my friends just messing around? I was never to find out, though, as, shortly after seeing it pass the $10,000 mark, the unthinkable happened. I refreshed the page, and the auction was gone. After a little while, I got am email from eBay administration. After reading through their explanation and enclosed guidelines, the real kicker is the actual reason they gave for taking it down. eBay does not allow the sale of human organs or bodily fluids. You see, this was shortly after the whole kidney selling fiasco, and that baby selling thing. I had offered a contract as proof of the deal, which was to be, as you'd expect, signed in blood."

Ganbatte Kudasai

A discussion with an acquintance is making me contemplating the validity of my corrent direction in life. She had caught me speaingk in Japanese to another, and to my suprise started to chat with me with possibly the most fluent Japanese to come out of a non-Japanese person that I have ever heard. Although studying computer science now, she had spent much of her time with Linguistics, and particularly that of Japanese. She had also spent time in Japan for graduate studies. However, she has given up all her accomplishments in her previous area of study. The reason was that in her heart, she feels that her accomplishments will never be acknowleged. No matter how much she loves it, no matter how hard she works, she will never bridge the social gap, and will have no chance to compete with native Japanese. That is why, she reasoned, computer science is useful. There is no cultural or social barriers to it, as long as one works hard, success is within grasp.

I can't imagine the frustrations and disappointments she must've had experienced, to have had worked so hard single-mindedly for one thing, and to give it up so completely, that is truely tragic. Did she make a wrong decision? She choose a path that she loved, and yet the choice didn't give her the same love in return. Life isn't a fairy tale after all, having faith means nothing in the face of harsh reality. To work at something one loves doesn't guarantee happiness and contentment.

Am I more fortunate then? To have choosen such a "fair" path to begin with. Up to now I have always treated Japanese as just another skill to have. I have always heard of the horror stories of the xenophobic nature of Japanese. Only now I had sat face to face with someone who had been scarred by it. To have abandoned someone's hopes and crushing someone's dreams so completely, I am filled with rage and contempt for the individuals and the society that are the cause of these misfortunes. Yet there is nothing I can do to change it. I am powerless to even make a difference in the person's life. The only thing I could offer, was in all irony, a "ganbatte kudasai". But words are just merely words, empty and lifeless.

Why am I studying Japanese? Everytime I hear the overly polite and scripted conversations, I am always reminded of some vaguely sinister intentions possibly buried underneath a mask of culture and social harmony. I look at the society's impressive social discipline and rich functional traditions, and it pains me. My fellow countrymen, who were born out of the same soil as I did, had forgotten about the richness of our own culture. Nothing remains of them except soul-less husks of tourist attractions and novelties. They had forgotten about our great thinkers, and have no unification of purpose. Without purpose, how can there be social discipline? I am by no means a Chinese nationalist. I have no blind loyalty to the country, and I can find no place for myself with my generation of natively-raised Chinese. That is however where my roots lie, and it is my responsibility to be a torch-bearer for what little of Chinese traditions I can carry. Why am I studying Japanese then? Is it solely for interest? Is that enough?