My father kindly brought me down to the computer repair shop at Bukit Merah, and the shop I got the power supply from at Sim Lim just now.Apparently the motherboard's fried too.Whee. Hope the HDDs are okay, as I didn't backup my data (!)

I think I'll be better off buying a new rig. 1 year and 4 months the current system has served me, and with not a few problems too. I appreciate Chris helping me to assemble it, but somehow things just don't seem towork out. Maybe I'm just suay. Or it's bad feng shui.

So I come back from Sim Lim with my spanking new power supply, screw it in, plug in all the cables and turn on my CPU.

It powers down after a few seconds. I think the power switch got stuck. I turn it on again.

Bang! With a deafening sound and a giant white spark flying out of the rear of my system, my power supply gets fried (or so I assume because I care not to open it at this time). A faint burning smell can be smelt in the air. My CPU won't turn on again. I check the back of the power supply, and the voltage is correct. What could have gone wrong?

Maybe I have rust-spreading fingers.

Splish Splash

Vanilla Coke, which Andrew had been raving about, is finally in Singapore. I've had it twice so far - the first time it reminded me of Coke with sour plum (seng guei) flavour, with some Baygon insecticide sprayed in (though maybe that was because Meng Kiat planted the thought in my head) and the second time like Coke with Vanillin added. Interesting.

Someone was searching Yahoo! Auctions for Men's underwear... because he claimed he wanted to sell his own. Bah - no one wants male underwear. Only female underwear is in any demand.

The next time someone uses the cliche - "It takes two hands to clap", I think I'm going to respond with "But it only takes one hand to punch someone". Next cliche!

I saw this advertisement for a SMS chat service on the bus. It had pictures of Japanese girls, and guys of indeterminate race, all over it. Bah. And the number to call is "76969". Bah. I wonder why they didn't make the cost per SMS sent 69 cents too, instead of 88 cents.


I got arrowed to go outfield for about 48 hours this week. Yeh. This was my second outfield experience since BMT, and the first overnight one. It's still as bad as ever. Well, not quite. In units you get certain... luxuries. No one eats combat rations, for one - and since we only got vegetarian and muslim combat rations somehow, despite being a unit with no muslims, we were even less taken with the idea of consuming them. My diet for the two days consisted mainly of instant and cup noodles, bread, Nutella, luncheon meat, sausages and tuna kindly provided by the people from S3 branch, though I did offer them some of the measly supplies I brought myself, having little food suitable to bring outfield. I also drank ice cold Chinese Apple Drink, Season's Chrysanthemum and Coke, thanks to the copious amounts of ice we brought. I must go buy them a drink someday.

I was outfield as a Medic, but I only saw action three times - once to give someone Panadol, once to dress the wounds I got cutting myself with my jack knife while trying to open a can and once when Eron got injured doing the same thing *g*

On the second night, everyone was bored so after an abortive game of 7-up, ended when people got tired of doing jumping jacks for forfeits, they started playing the sort of games that my class played in JC 1 - games involving trying to spot hidden, non-obvious patterns while avoiding information that is apparent but irrelevant, and so guess a certain attribute - the time, whether something occured, a quantity or such, while conspiring to keep clueless people out of the loop. Perhaps some examples will illustrate the point better. The person posing the question designates one hand as a fence and another representing sheep and mimes the sheep jumping over the fence, all the while making noises, then asks: "How many sheep jumped over the fence?". The obvious answer (the number of times one hand went over another) is wrong, and players of the game are challenged to figure out how man sheep *have* jumped. The correct answer is the number of syllables (or words) of the line: "How many sheep jumped over the fence?" - either 8 or 9. A variant of this is to replace "sheep" with "mair mairs", "white mair mairs" or such, and the new answer is the number of syllables of the words replacing "sheep". Another example: Black (or whatever colour you want) Magic. The poser declared that they are playing Magic of a certain colour, and then mentions certain objects, asking if they are what he has in mind. Now, the correct object is the object AFTER the one which is of the same colour as the Magic being played. For example, the object sequence for "Black Magic" would go: "The Moon, my uniform, Paul's Spectacles, Eron's boots, Sergeant Daniel's underwear". Now, I have always ignored these games, because they are inane, pointless, dumb, stupid and irritating. More importantly, I'm lousy at them, but that's another story altogether. The others were tormenting Eron, as he was trying, but failing, to guess the answers to the games, so I advised him that, since he was ignorant, he should be apathetic too ;)

While outfield, I was struck by the truth of the statement, by Marx, that religion is the opiate of the masses. I was touch more on that in my vapourware essay, but I also happened to think about censorship. Books, plays, films and such are frequently banned or cut because parts of all of them are deemed offensive or dangerous, but almost all materials of this nature possess these qualities in a form or another, as they induce thinking. If stability is paramount, perhaps the world of Fahrenheit 451 (Hah! Something I will always treasure from the Core Reading Program [CRP]) is the future.


Today, I was at Amoy Quee camp covering the NCC Precision Drill Squad Auxiliary Instructors' course, held at HQ NCC (where I believe some of my friends are. Most of my friends are incredibly lucky). Or its ending, at any rate - all the cover I did was done indoors, mostly sitting inside a theatrette, presumably in case anyone got frostbite from the air-conditioning. Somehow, most of the trainees were male, and the few females that were there were all Malay.

Sinsiang was telling me sometime back that a plus point of doing NCC cover is that the cadets have to call you "Sir". I think that this is a rather cheap, transient and pointless thrill. As Krusty has pointed out to us many times, even when you go to McDonalds, you get greeted as 'Sir'. Rather cheapens the whole experience, I think :) A more exciting perk of the whole thing, I think, was that I woke just after 7:30am today! Unfortunately there was no breakfast, so I had to eat the night snack again (Tuna sandwiches - argh! We had been eating lots of tuna outfield I think I've eaten enough tuna for a month in this week)

I wonder why people like to join the NCC. Join the National Cadet Corps! Get knocked down! Suffer some of NS before you are forced to! Whee. Why are these kids so eager to experience a little Slavery? Granted NCC is to National Slavery as Iraq's army is to America's, but why suffer any more than you have to? Ah, the folly of youth!

The NCC have a song. Complete with jingoistic lyrics and badly rendered, artificial sounding and shrill MIDI music, all horribly sung by some people sounding like Alessandro Moreschi. I was forced to listen to the tape while waiting in the theatrette, and though it couldn't get any worse. Then the Guest of Honour came and the cadets started singing. Horribly, and out of tune. The shivers running down my spine were going to send me into convulsions, but luckily the song was mercifully short.

At the end, I was invited to be in the picture, so if you happen to come across the next NCC newsletter, do look to the edge of the back row to see a fat medic standing there looking somewhat bewildered :)

One guy's certificate got lost and he was crying. Now, I have no qualms with males crying, but I don't understand why the cert is so important. Especially for a course like this.

For some reason the MC described the passing out ceremony as an "auspicious" occasion. Wha?

Last night, some strange activities were taking place. I saw some boys with 'breasts', and apparently there was [male] pole dancing too. And then this morning one female cadet lieutenant chased after this guy after he told her, "Don't tell me you don't watch porn". I guess he was asking her to do a pole dance. Maybe NCC makes people depraved too, or it's just adolescent hormones.

For some reason, the cadet lietenants kept singing "ORD loh" this morning, and one said he had half a year left. Wth? These boys must be seriously deluded.

This guy was singing a melancholy song, alternating between falsetto and tenor, and some boys from Deyi were making a lot of noise, so the Malay girls from Tanglin were scolding them. One even scolded, "Wah lan eh". How inappropriate (not in the prim way)!


Quotes:

The supercomputer thing is not true right... There's this page on your site. Your friend has a supercomputer. [Me: What do you think? It also says he got 14 A1s]

I'm infuriated at the thought of orgies involving 28 year old women... It sucks. Literally.

[Me on a song: Something like: What can take away all your worries? What can make you happy forever?] Tell him: Sex. Sex and violence.

[On the Nokia 8910i costing more than $1000 even on a plan] Why so expensive? Can watch TV ah?... Watch TV, watch porn.

Gabriel, what are you reading? Economist. Chao Chee Bye... [Tosses me Newman magazine] [Me: I flipped through it while on duty yesterday. *tosses it back*] I'll give you something more suitable for an RJ student. [Tosses Sophie's World at me] [Me: Nah, I heard that gives you headaches. *Tosses it back* Let me finish my periodical first] 'Periodical'? You dareto use the word 'periodical' on me outfield?

The last time I said 'Thank You' on the comms I got fucked... [Someone: Foxtrot Yankee {Read: F* You}]

[On my Nano Nano] Before you eat you must know how to sing the song (eat it)

[On the hexamine fuel in the combat rations which smells like fish mixed with dog food] Come and smell the pussy hair [Someone: Chao Chee Bye!]

[On canned spiced pork cubes] Take this to the Malay cemetary and eat.

I trust that everyone has, by now, heard of this?



The school's too prudish, really. AJC rocks :P


Book thoughts:

Colin Cheong - seventeen

A book from the other side - Giving a human face to Hualalalala.

The concept of this book was most interesting - JC fiction. For those of you who are deprived (like me), reading this book might, erm, enrich you. That didn't come out very well, but I'm lazy so I'll leave it as it is.

The reader can tell that this book is predicated on JC life a long time ago, but most of it remains a poignant reminder of the joys of JC life (or maybe NS life is just too droll in comparison, I don't know). The writer makes JC relationships sound so very sweet - it sounds wonderful to be in the same school asyour significant other.

I didn't like the chaotic introduction, with the seemingly nonsensical and unlinked sentences, which gave me no idea what the writer was talking about. Actually I suspect it is a literary device used by insecure writers to give their works a veneer of sophistication, but luckily the narrative picked up and resolved into something intelligible after a few pages. In the rest of the book, the writer neglects to use any inverted commas, so it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is speaking. Again, I think this is an attempt at faux sophistication, but the book was still interesting enough - or played on the nostalgia factor sufficiently - to keep me reading. Otherwise, the writing was a little raw, but fresh.

Something that I'm somewhat disturbed by - what's the deal about Convent Girls? Extracts from Pages 12-13: "I'm going to Catholic [JC] too. Where the Convent girls are, Heaven is too... Uni or girls, man, you have to choose, Tim says. I think he just wants to keep the Convent girls to himself... In any case, at the tender but turgid age of 16, I wisely choose my future over Convent girls."

I didn't like the ending of the story, though, as it left me rather disturbed. The ghost bit was very unbelievable, and the death was too abrupt: it put me in the mind of the stories I used to write for my own chinese essays. The dramatic (if cliched) ending does make the story more memorable, but it doesn't sit well in my stomach. One is tempted to suspect that the tragedy is inserted for its sake - and at such an opportune moment, too. One calamity is more than enough - why have another? That said, I did feel like crying for the protagonist, so the writing was rather emotive.

My computer is down again.The power supply blew, this time. Why am I so jinxed, I wonder?

In other news, my mother went to wash Blue Bear again. Gah. I hope no fur fell off.

ETA for my mega-essay (it's exceeded 32767 characters already - I should write a book instead): Unknown


Re: this should have been worthy of gabriel's mention, being as inane and childishly anti-establishment as he is, and equally spastically impotent in achieving anything aside from online chuckles.

Bah. I'll have you know that my material is of infinitely higher quality and lucidity. And I'm not anti-establishment for the sake of being anti-establishment - it's just that I tend to be freer with my criticism than with my praise (which I dole out silently). Besides which, just because something won't achieve anything concrete does not mean you shouldn't do it.

Why else is Saddam resisting? Why else are Chee Soon Juan and friends (or otherwise) continuing trying to up their total of Parliament seats from the current measly *2* to a grand, effective total of 3? Why else are you going to hike your skirt up? *quizzical peer*

can't have an essay against atheism per say cos they'd have to erm, propose a god.

My essay goes on and on, and I think I'm almost a third finished. Whew. I hope it's not getting more and more incoherent.

Anyone want to help me edit it?


This is amusing. Apparently some Muslims were unhappy at Answering Islam, so they came up with Answering Christianity.

Both are shrill and take digs at each other. It's amusing to see how they try to put each other's religions down. They criticise each other incessantly, yet gaping holes are visible in both's arguments. Even such an un-learned one as I can spot a myriad of errors and omissions in their slamming, flaws in their logic and how they conveniently ignore common and crystal-clear rebuttals to many of the points they make about the other's religion :)

I wonder if there's one against atheism ;)