today i was reminded

why some things are just not worth holding on to. And it more sucked that I cannot write it here cos I know who is reading this.

leave it.

engineering problematics

Charles stays on the 17th floor and he wants to go to the first floor. There are 2 lifts that services his HDB flat. Lift A is at the 3rd floor and lift B is at the 15th floor. When he presses the button to summon the lifts. Lift A moves from the 3rd floor towards the 17th floor. After lift A past the 16th floor, lift B begin moving from the 15th floor to the 17th floor too. Both lift A and lift B arrive at the the 17th floor one second after another. Charles wonder why couldn't lift B have been sent to the 17th floor to pick him up without activating lift A from the 3rd floor. a) Deduce the logical algorithm used to control the lifts b) Write a new decision algorithm to optimize the system. Minimizing the distance traveled by the lifts and waiting time of the residents. (Hint: Make use of that you have learn in electrical engineering applications to solve real life problems.)

I would gladly do it for a fee.

baker's moral

They hauled all the ingredients from IMM back to her place. The bakers were hailed all the way from Paris. Their objective is simple: to make the best lemon cheese cake in Singapore and give all the confectioneries a run for their money. Engineers by training, they picked up the lost art of baking in their plateau retreat. Where else can aspiring bakers hone their skills other than in a secretive plateau hideout? Hidden from the long arms of human rights groups, human experimentation was blatant and rampant. They knew that anything eaten in excess is unhealthy, but being bakers, they added sugar and butter freely and in excess. Unwilling to succumb themselves to the effects of diarrhea, obesity and high cholesterol, unrefined experimental prototype were forced down the throats of human guinea pigs. The human sacrifices were necessary, they claimed, in the name of higher learning. The oven as their altar, they worshiped the yeast as the manifestation of living beings with the ability to raise the cake from the dough. Cheese cakes, un-cheese cakes, chocolate cakes and un-chocolate cakes tested the robustness of the human alimentary tract. Now, 2 years later.

Making good cheese cake is simply a piece of cake to them now.

feeling bored

but adventurous? Talk To Strangers. No strings attached. No need to be nice. but no need to be mean too. Just go to..

http://omegle.com/

Oooo kitty

"because we are chinese."-cj

i felt a chill.

3 more days

You guys have any idea how it feels like when your program compiled and ran seamlessly. Monday, I decided to throw away what my schools have taught me about object orientated programming. They always balloon into some messy monster and I will be, consequently, devour by it. I summarized my problem : Throw in pallets transfer matrix between containers and churn out the door allocation and container sequencing as a result. If you guys have no idea what all these jargon mean, it means a lot of mental logical gymnastic. (cool. i just coined a word for human's mental process for solving logical problems - mentalogical) Like all java programmers, we have developed the habits of drinking coffee while coding. But if I do not quit it soon, this habit is going to become an occupational hazard of mine. Then, time flew the moment i began to hit at the keyboard. and Voila! After months of research, hundreds of pencil-scribbled papers, dozens of rejections by the boss, hours of writing a code. I finally have a source code as my final product. Sorry for this messy piece of writing, i'm just too happy. Happy thoughts do not trickle out, they burst out.

3 more working days.

sleep

For the whole day the camera has been staring at me, as if challenging me to pick it up. The rain just stopped and I contemplated about going out later tonight to do what I enjoyed the most. However, the thought of it being monday tomorrow makes me want to turn in early tonight. I have an obligation to give my best to my employer, don't I. sleep. what I need most, I usually do not get enough.

What to do?

messy timetable

Due to my lousy timetable planning, the whole universe time continuum implodes on me this weekend. But like all winners, I will mentally walk myself through the activities the day before so that nothing screws up. In the morning of Saturday, I have to work for my dad. "It's not hard work",he claims,"just 600kg worth of rice to unload." Anyway, I figured. If I carry 10kg per trip, I only have to make 60 trips. I shall take it as exercise. Then, from Tampines I will rush to Orchard for a discounted lunch at Border's Bistro. Then, I will go and have my fossil watch fixed. After that's done, it's time for the event of the day. Heavily subsided shopping at Ralph Lauren. I love friends who have friends who work at Ralph Lauren. I will squeeze in an hour of pool if there is still some time. At 4pm, we will commence our mahjong session. This is usually a chance for me to distribute wealth. Ensuite, dinner cum birthday celebration at Old Airport. Then if my kind OG members are willing to wait for me, I will join them for their post dinner activities. There everything is now going to fall into place.

Monday is not going to be pretty either. Deutsche, tango or Pattern Recognition?

night walk

I left school at 9pm. The smell of the burning of joss sticks and white paper was unmistakable. When I was young, I had always enjoyed the 7th month. My dad had always brought me along for the dinner cum bidding. It was at these dinners where I was introduced at a young age to appreciate XO. Uncle at my table will generously bid 200sgd for a bottle of XO and share it with everyone at the table. I liked him instantly, cos he did not discriminate against age. Everyone, regardless of age, got a cup full. I was 8.

When I reached the void deck of my block, I saw my neighbor. She was still poly when I left Singapore 2 years ago. Still pretty. Now, she looked different and she dressed different. Clad in a short tight denim skirt with a cigarette dangling from her fingers, she looked like as if she had already seen more of life than me. How time can change somebody. She casually dropped the half burnt cigarette butt onto the concrete pavement. My misplaced morality has always given good looking people a larger gray area to flirt with before I decide to condemn their actions.

The cigarette was put out within moments of being dropped on the floor. A two wheeler rolled over it at high speed. Woah! I took my eyes off the svelte back of my neighbor and looked at what zipped past me. I had unknowingly walked into my neighborhood's mini version of Tour de BtMerah. 10year old kids were racing around the badminton courts with dustbins as checkpoints. The same dustbins they used as goal posts during soccer. "See how I drift around the corner!", shouted the Indian boy. He accelerated towards the dustbin, turned his bike, squeezed the back brakes and drifted. I didn't know you can do that with bikes! His tires probably have to lose their threading in order to do that.

I remembered how I used to be like them. action bedeh.

wednesday night respite

It has been a while since I ate dinner at home. For the past two weeks, I am not really a master of my own time, everyone else seems to be the master of my time though. I shall cut out all the boring parts of the week. Even though, this may make my life sounds like a series of non sequitur events, so be it. So,

"Have you met ted?". I'm not referring to ted from the tv series "How I met your mother". I'm talking about TED talks directors. Go to youtube and type in TED and you will find yourself being enriched and amused at the same time. Though the talks covers every possible themes, my favorites are those that discuss behavioral economics. Maybe I will post some of the more interesting cases in the next post. But seriously you check it out. Here is one of my favorites.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Next, gay bars. Thank you amanda for introducing me to gay bars. I seriously do not think that I will be interested in the crowd nor the rainbow flags they hang in the bar. I know I am not going to be too popular with the local crowd, cos the locals prefer ang mohs. But, neither do I want to use my cute english accented french to pick up foreigners.

Ensuite, sexual exploits. Sometimes it is hard to look at your colleagues in the same way when you heard stories about how they do it like bunnies on a bunny timetable basis. So if any lessons here for me to learn, it is never to rent your room out to foreign interns. They can hear you no matter how you try to muffle the synchronized symphony, or lest that can be done.. get a bed that does not squeak when rocked.

AHM. The atmosphere was the same. The throngs of runners, the heat, the water points, the soldiers, and the adrenaline rush from seeing so many people running at the same time. For the first time since I was introduced to the race, I was standing on the wrong side of the finishing line. I was reminded of how I loved the feeling of finishing the race. The continuous shuffling of the legs back and forth. The momentum gain from running the first 15km always create an inertia to stopping. I missed the times when your lungs have given way, and your breathing is screwed and yet your legs continue to move in the rhythmic, cyclical movement which they have already been accustomed to after 15km of pounding on the road. I missed chasing people. I missed feeling healthy and alive.

I want to run again. soon.

sleeping

i am damn shag.

children of singapore

Celebrating National Day Observation ceremony with my neighbors, I noticed that the my precinct's demographic does not follow a normal distribution. There is a disproportion number of elderly and kids. If the elderly can rally the kids and run a mutiny against the working adults, I am sure we will lose to the sheer number of red hill elderly and the craziness of the biting, kicking kids. Here my first community service to my RC!

"the singapore idol.
come sing with mummy."-cj

"the barbie doll. pretty in pink."-cj

"the towkay.
oh crap. i forgot to switch off my handphone
during the honored guest's speech."-cj

"the guest of honor."-cj

"the runner. post run drink."-cj

"the gourmet."-cj

"minah melayu."-cj

"nonchalant."-cj

"the karate kids."-cj

"let's punch the concrete together
and reverberate singapore."-cj

"ah jie and her ah lian and ah huay."-cj

"the romantic. laying out rose petals."-cj

"hey hi! what's your name?"
and i follow it by a oxy moron question.
"so do you stay around here?". duh.-cj

"babies love chocolate."-cj

"my fav little girl. she is so cute."-cj

"yea! I scored a goal!"-cj

"do his post goal celebratory run like a real EPL player."-cj

"the lost."-cj

"look there baby. he wants to take a photo of us."-cj

"eh brather. u relak in my korner. stare wat stare?"-cj

"our friendly neighborhood spiderman,
as usual, is on top of everything,"-cj

"porcelain skin."-cj

"i swear before the nation. with my skooter as my witness.
I will be singapore's next race queen."-cj

"pre race equipment check. orange socks - check.
pink hair clip - check. pink shoes - check."-cj

"black safety helmet - check."-cj

"i wave my flag."-cj

"don't turn to look. but there is a weird
man trying to take photo of you."-cj

"aunty."-cj

"aiyoyo. lucky draw missed by one digit again."-cj

"what to do. shake leg lo."-cj

happy birthday singapore!

framing people

This weekend, I have been asked again to take graduation photos for a group of friends. I am the best person for the job they claim, since I am the only one among them who is not graduating this year. I wondered if this is some sort of conspiracy among all my independent groups of friends to remind me that I am not fitting of mortar boards yet.

I can take jest.

I like taking photos of landscape and architectures. Main reason being, these things do not move. They will always be there. If I screw up a shoot, if I want to try another angle, frame it another way, wait for a better lighting, a better sunset, I can always come back again. So a producing pretty picture is just a matter of time. Here is my confession. The 400 photos you see I lugged around are actually picked out from 2 years of sweat. With a 5% conversion rate, you guys can calculate the numbers of photos I have taken. The number of photos of sunrises I have taken of the Eiffel tower, I can arrange them in sequence beside one another and you will be convinced that sun does not rise up but slide along the Parisien landscape from right to left. One day every month, I would leave school at 4am to catch the sunrise from the same spot at Trocadero. Each time the sun rise from a different spot.

Taking photos of people brings the game to a whole new level. Today, a recce to the Botanic Gardens, NUS and Supreme court gave me a better idea of what to do on Monday. I even made it a point to look at all the graduation photos taken by my friends so that I would be able to direct the shoot. No matter how many time you can tell me that there is no pressure and no expectations at all, I still believe in making every photo count. Not every photo is going to come out nice, I just need practice.

i will to improve. 5 shot 1 kill. someday.

framing lin

On the pretext of showing him around Singapore, I brought Lin to his first visit to Singapore's Botanic Gardens. I thank him for willingly posing for me no matter how feminine the poses are. You can try to imagine 4 girls in the place of lin.

"this one better?"-cj

"or this one better?"-cj

"Evolution garden. 65m years ago."-cj

"gravel path."-cj

"camouflage."-cj

"and i got distracted by pink flowers."-cj

"more flowers."-cj

"circular path to wonderland"-cj

"closed up."-cj

"up"-cj

"benched player."-cj

"peek a boo."-cj

"polarized."-cj

"slope."-cj

wah a damn hot day.

trivial

12:34.56 on 07/08/09

fyp

my prof. his words i surmise..

"work wherever you want, but there's always a desk available."
"stop wherever you think is enough for your fyp."
"choose any topic you are interested in with keywords : combinatorial optimization, model"
"take whatever modules you want, "
"look for me whenever you encounter problems."

my prof is cool.

monday morning

I spent the first working hour of the work week doodling on the research paper. When I finally realized it, a giant ninja pig with pegasus's wings was already wielding its AK-47 and shooting at the hundreds of stick men who are either jumping at it from the abstact paragraph above or throwing stick spears at it from the opening paragraph below. Ninja Pig, watch out for the commandos parachuting from the C-130 flying across the top of the page! It's partially hidden by the "Genetic Algorithm for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem"' Title smoke screen.

One look at the messy scrawlings, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the ninja pig will soon be swarmed by the tsunami of stick men whose population has grown proportionally with time. There is probably as many stick men as alphabets on the page now (Its so much easier to draw 50 stick men than 1 more ninja pig.) .Dissatisfied with the big scheme of things, I decided to equilibrate the balance of power. I drew an axe for the ninja pig and mused about my own lame poetic justice which I am serving; turning stick men into chopped sticks.

Happy with the little chaotic world I have created, I declared the doomsday prophecy to come true at 1015am. I stacked the papers together into a neat stack and slided them into the shredding machines. Goodbye pathetic little stick men, your fate were never in your hands. Not even if you manage to defeat the fictitious ninja pig. your lives were just lies anyway.

Good Monday Morning, Everybody! Let the work begin! Some people just need more motivation to work than others.