Sengkang New Park

It has been almost 10 years since I shift to this corner of SG. From the ulu town which no taxi drivers know and only 2 bus services, it has grow to a bustling new town 20 min away from town via MRT and numerous bus connection. Now, more amenities are built, hockey stadium, swimming pools, and a new riverside park. Hope it will continue become more vibrant.

The Day I Almost Cried

People cry for many reasons. Although guys are not supposed to cry while females have all the rights in the world to do so, this social norm seem to get more blurred as the society progresses. Guys who cry nowadays are sensitive, understanding and everything nice while those who did in the the past are emotional, weak and everything bad. Today, the tears in my tear glands almost overflowed but that was the furthest it went. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't especially sad, angry or happy; I went to see a sensei regarding my nagging ankle problems. Disclaimer first, I didn't not cry because my auspicious 49 days excuse from running ended; I almost cried because of the pain, something I thought I could handle. I dare say it was one of my most painful experience ever. The thought of carrying out an Adebayor celebration did come across my mind but i simply can't run nor even walk half the pitch. No pain no gain. I do feel better after the earthshaking pain inflicting session. Hopefully, I will get to jog pain free soon.

Careless bet

Made a wrong bet and I only realised after the match! Damn. It's double whammy when my predicted results actually come true. Damn damn.....

Finally got my dslr. Next is to buy a proper lens and shoot.

Weekend soccer frenzy

Since I was bored at home I decided to dig into the weekend soccer matches, with every intend to bet on them. Betting increase the spectator adrenaline rush if you watch the game. Anyway, I decided to start off searching the net, the place that has it all. To my surprise, tips actually cost money. There are actually punters charging people for tips. If they are so good they might as well be a full time soccer gambler. After a little more intense searching, I found free tips -- from an arsenal fan website (who else). The tips actually do serve it's purpose. After reading them, I either agree with them or disagree with them, which gave me a direction to bet on. With 3 of my 5 matches down, I have already break even, hopefully my luck will serve me till the end of the last match. I know I am leaning here, more than just luck is required for Aston Villa to beat Liverpool.

Poker and MJ

Long weekends are great. Everyone loves them and it always seems that so much can be accomplished in a three days weekend. Of course other than typing a disgustingly boring report, I had some fun pokering and MJing. Life would suck real bad without them. Life would less bad if I hadn't lose $30 in 14 hours of gambling....

Diversity at work

I know everyone comes from very diverse background, culturally, economically and academically. My HR project was on diversity and the benefits of embracing it in wide open arms. Maybe I was too engrossed in promoting diversity at workplace, I myself totally believed in it. The joy of working in an environment where diversity thrives is something that I once looked forward to. With different inputs, ideas and perspectives, complimenting each other, great things are just waiting to be achieved. One small flaw in this hypothetical situation is the assumption that everyone one will contribute constructively. There just seem to be a special breed of people who just know how to make non constructive protests to stop work from being done, including endless excuses to not work, creating unnecessarily delays and making life difficult for everyone, in short kpkb. Sometimes I really wish these people will just shut up instead of opening their mouth. If I have the chance, I would make some minor amendments on my HR project and emphasize more on the word "constructive". This led me to another question, how did kpkb-ers get recruited in the first place.

Murphy's Law

Even when works of many dedicated, hardworking and really smart statisticians say that there's a really minute chance of an event happening, that event almost always happen. Or so it seems. Well, the famous murphy's law has been busted by Mythbusters, haven't it? So what makes murphy's law so endearing to most people? I see it this way:

When everything goes according to stats, you/me/everyone will most likely treat it as a normal occurrence and pay a normal amount of attention on it. After a few days, weeks, months... that occurrence will simply be eased from our memories to clear up spaces for more normal occurrences. What people usually remember, for a really long time are the anomalies. i.e. events when murphy's law strike. These are usually traumatic events like going all in with ACE pair only to be beaten by someone with 8 3 offsuit without even seeing the flop. These get ingrained in the memories and being really interesting stories, are retold, reiterated and refined many times over. After a few cycles, they become long lasting memories together with other ML events. If you live long enough, engaged in a little socialising, you should have gathered enough ML stories to share and when such stories are traded, everyone gets the illusion that ML events are occurring everywhere. When in actual fact, life is still very well predicted by simple and boring statistics.

The most superstitious people are gamblers. The very gist of gambling is the excitement of beating the odds. Luck is an over-rated factor here. If anyone can quantify luck, please contact me, I would love to meet you. So when weird events happen at a gambling table, superstitious ideas and really weird suggestions appear to be the most obvious thing to do. Some times, high stakes are even more powerful than intoxicants like alcohol. Don't you just love gambling.

Commencement

Finally a graduate! Although I don't mind a few more years of lectures and tutorials, they have to be put on hold for a while, at least. Who am I kidding right? Like I really love to attend lessons. What I actually miss is the freedom that allowed endless mahjong sessions, spontaneous suppers, drinking and talking cock sessions.

Rantings

This few weeks easily qualify as the busiest period of my entire 4 years in NUS -- which isn't what I envision my year 4 life to be. I don't know why but I am actually typing this despite the need to hand up my second draft in 6 days time, Materials homework in 5 days, and term paper in 2. Something, maybe my inner devil, is always telling me official works can wait.

Imbal photoshopping

Sheares Hall Dinner & Dance 2009 - Photoshop Timelapse Video 1 from Ervine Lin on Vimeo.


Sheares Hall Dinner & Dance 2009 - Photoshop Timelapse Video 2 from Ervine Lin on Vimeo.

Floorball

Being the last year that I get to play IHG, naturally I wanted it to be a good one. Well, it was almost good. Last year I flew off after the third match. In the first three matches, I was literally flying everywhere in the court. I picked up floorball thinking that it is a technically inclined sport that don't not have much body contact, I was so totally wrong. The rude realisation happened during IHG last year. This year I went in mentally prepared. However, being IHG, where hall pride is at stake, people tend to get carried off more easily. Obvious fouls and tackles were still committed despite repeated warnings, manhandling seemed to be the norm. So I managed to stayed on the ground for the first 4 matches and started flying only on the fifth when it seemed like I was in a match with one team trying to play floorball, the other trying to play wrestling.

With that being said, I think the most difficult role on the court in the fifth match (against raffles hall) was definitely being the referees. Numerous times, they must had been wondering if they need to go on their knees, slap the floor and count to ten. They better be paid quite a lot to go through such a traumatic experience. I admire the RH players for putting their heart and soul into the game, squeezed a win against KR with the wrestling tactics. Played really hard against all KE, EH and TH which they gathered so many fouls and send off that would have qualify them for the "smelliest" team ever in modern history. To name an example, the RH keeper hug the opponent players to prevent him for scoring (maybe the opponent was too cute for him to control his inner desire). Maybe it's not players fault, most of them seem really convinced that they did nothing wrong and even tried arguing with the referee; someone must had taught them this and it's that someone's fault. I really don't understand how can a team be happy when they know they don't deserve the result, getting a 4th placing is really unfair to the other two halls which played much better and fairer.

Being IHG and being SH, there will be supporters during games. That's something Sh do best and the convening comm should seriously give an award hall with the best supporters. Then we can definitely win something every year. Then comes the egoistic part of players. The need to impress suddenly set in when we are up against a technically less gifted team, everyone wanted to play and maybe show off too. Repeated failed solo dribbles and refusal to substitute yourself when you know you are useless on court aside, complacency creep in. From one goal up to a draw. Something seemingly impossible happened and everyone panicked. People get frustrated, dejected, demoralised, and things never really pick up from then on. That was quite a sad ending to an otherwise wonderful IHG outing.

Race of Life

When we were young

Age must be catching up with me. Suddenly, I feel really old, even though I am not even a quarter of century old. It must be the younger ones, filling the atmosphere with so much energy. Either that or it's all the reminiscences during all the drinking sessions, meetups or even random spontaneous talk cock sessions. Maybe it is the year of Bull again. 2 cycles. Many years ago, 1 cycle seem eternity. Now it just comes and goes. Or maybe, my friends are getting married; it just shows we are moving on to the next stage in life.

Then, the stupid thoughts I held when I was young came flowing back to me. There was this project in primary school where we had to research on Singapore history and make a scrape book (yes, that was in primary school). I went to the library, found a nicely illustrated book for just that, describing Singapore history. Thinking that I can't do a better job than the author (I was 10 years old then), I zapped part of the book, binded them and hand up to the teacher, thinking that I am so gonna do well since after looking glancing through my classmates' works. Then the mother of all horror struck me, my teacher told me that my work was not up the standard.... slip short.... badly done..... I went like, how an it be, mine definitely has more "stuff" than all the others. The concept of plagiarism wasn't really made clear to me. How dumb I was. Maybe I was just plain lazy. All I need to do then was rewrite everything in my ugly handwriting, editing is totally unnecessary, rearrange some of the pictures, add a cover page... then I would have done a magnificent job (by my teacher's standard). The power of packaging.

Rise of the machines

Interesting find.

WHY do human beings grow wisdom teeth? It doesn't make any sense to me and why hadn't natural selection removed it from human? They serve not much purpose in processing food with eight other molars in front of them. Even their name is oxymoronic. Having them don't make you any wiser. After plucking them out, you will most likely be stupider for 3 days. The pain, numbness, and the inability to enjoy your meals will definitely affect your intelligence, judgement and reasoning skills. Since wisdom usually accumulate with age, theoretically, elderly folks should have wisdom teeth, but the teeth don't last that long. Most would have been extracted in their teens since they have been know to cause splitting headaches and teeth misalignment. Even if they survived past the teen stage, due to their awkward position, they are most likely to decay and have to be extracted in time to come.

The one and only purpose that I see in wisdom teeth now is to support the dentistry industry. I still don't understand why it cost a few hundred bucks just to pluck one out. Multiply the price by 4 and wala, easily a thousand bucks gone to suffer in pain and agony for days or weeks. If some one actually manage to find a prevention for wisdom teeth growth, he should be awarded with a nobel prize.

Quantum of Reds and Blues

Caught Quantum of Solace aka latest 007 offering at the cinema. One of those days where you know being a student is great -- unless you are a senior citizen, you can't get a cheaper rate for movies. Quantum is really not my typical James Bond movie. He is supposed to sleep with the female lead, have lots of cool gadgets, drive a supercar load with weapons in all possible compartments and look cool and witty throughout the movie. Somehow, he behaved more like Jason Borne from the Borne trilogy, especially the Jason in Borne Supremacy. Constantly looking tired and almost always never smile. Fights and actions were leaning towards to more realistic side too, just like the Borne series. Overall, it felt more like a Borne movie than a Bond movie.

Walking back to an MRT station brought us across SMU. It was a mini adventure by itself. We being "mountain tortoise" NUS students, were in awe of all the publicity display/posters that SMU students put up. One word, rich. Either that or they have a really cheap source of printing poster on canvas sheet.

Then we come across a really interesting art display. It is part of the Singapore Biennale 08. Basically it's a pic that consists of two pics. It was late, sun was down, so I couldn't get a decent pic with the blue and red filter. So I took a pic without the filters and prayed that photoshop will work. Well, it did and the results below.

The orignal pic on the facade of Raffles City

What you are suppose to see behind the blue filter

What you are suppose to see behind the red

This was followed by a mini debate on the interpretation of its true meaning. Of course it don't really have an conclusion. It's art and we are suppose to be open to it's underlying meaning and message.

Ave Q

First time in Esplanade made me feel like a sua ku. If not for Ave Q I think this experience would have been postponed another few years.

Suakuness aside, Ave Q rocks. I never knew watching puppet have sex can be so funny. I wonder what's going though the puppeteer mind while acting out that scene. Behind all the humor is a plot that really touched on the relevant issues that people face. Unemployment, singlehood, sexual orientation, commitment... ... i.e. whatever make life suck. It also bring out some facts of life about human nature in a refreshing way; "Everyone is abit racist" and "Internet is for porn" should be included in the syllabus in school.

The complete trio

Now all three haos have the same style of display pic.

I am not sure if KH changed it intentionally but who cares?

Stability fail

Display pics

If someone had told me that from the MSN display pic (dp), one can infer the name of the owner, I would had gave them two slaps and brush them off as being nonsensical. But after a message from Tianhao, 1/3 of the odac Haos, with a dp that bears such a striking resemblance to mine, it is scary. So now, we just need to check with the last 1/3 of the Haos who is in Hongkong now, to prove this hypothesis.