-_-|| or genius?

"My Boyfriend, Our Army"

The new slogan of the army here.

My first reaction: "SERIOUSLY?!"

Okay, we have a pretty good army (:D), so let's give credit to most of those guys for being intelligent and physically fit.

But seriously... SERIOUSLY? Using the prospect of becoming a girl magnet to attract guys to join the army is the craziest advertising idea used by the army so far.

Because I'm too appalled to think coherently, here's a link to Mr Brown's blog post. Thank you Mr Brown! For some odd reason, we seem to share many similar thoughts on this.

Quotes from his post:
"Or is this to tell young men, "Hey, SAF scholars get all the hot chicks, man! Sign on now!"

"If you watched this commercial, and signed on as a regular because of it, we are doomed."

Nicely done.

The Ukrainian army recruitment advert at the end of his post promotes the same "army guy=chick magnet" idea, except that it's overly exaggerated. (and therefore, funny!... Even the music is unnecessarily dramatic, haha!)

Who knows, maybe these adverts were meant to create a kind of anchoring effect in our young men, like other commercial products. People tend to buy the stuff they see more often. I don't know why. Maybe humans just like familiarity.

At the end of the day, bad publicity is still publicity. :)

My Non-Portable PSP

Yep, my playstation portable is no longer portable.

Why?

Because it can't charge by USB or by the standard charger. :( In fact, the only way to turn it on is to connect it to the mains while using it. It doesn't even recognise the battery!! Sigh. I hope there wasn't anything that blew up inside. I *really* hope it's just the battery that has gone nuts.

Some forums suggest that a fuse may have blown.

Oh well. One more thing to add to my very short wishlist!

1) 1TB hard disk
2) New PSP battery

By the way, I chanced upon this guy's amazing blog. He hacks and mods video game consoles and other stuff. Recently, he jazzed up his self-made portable xbox 360! I can't believe that I've only found his blog now... Better late than never! :D :D :D

Ben Heck's Official Blog

Premonitions

17 November 2010, Evening
Feeling bored of studying, I decided to take my DSLR out to take photos of my turtles. I don't know why, I just felt like it.

21 November 2010, Sunday, 9pm
Sitting in front of my laptop, this song suddenly popped into my head.


优客李林 - 认错

“我又怎么告诉你我还爱你？”
“是我自己错误的决定。。。”

Yeah it's a really old song (1991) but it's kinda nice. :) (I've never seen the music video, but yes, it's a real cheesy video, so just listening to the song is a good idea.)
I didn't know why I thought of that song.

This morning, I knew why.

Photo taken on 17th November 2010

My favourite turtle, Shun Shun, left the earth this morning. I was about to feed them their breakfast when I realised that she was just laying there, motionless, with her eyes shut, and her hands neatly placed by her side.

She didn't eat much for the past few days, which was kind of odd. Two days ago, the water in their tank started to smell really bad very often.

The other turtle had been attacking her pretty often this week, and I was seriously considering separating them. But I remembered how sad my aunt's turtle was when my mum and I separated it from its violent friend, so I decided against it.

Photo also taken on 17 November 2010. As you can see, nearly half of her tail was bitten off by that crazy turtle.

I don't know whether she died because of her injuries, an illness, or my decision of not to separate them. Whatever it is, my heart still believes that I caused her death. And I feel extremely bad about it, so this post is dedicated to her. Sigh. So here's my message to my turtle.

++++++++++++
Wherever your soul resides now, I want you to know that everyone in my family loves you! I'm really, truly sorry if I did something wrong to cause your departure. We will always remember how adorable you were, how you blew little bubbles in the water for fun, and how you yawned or burped from time to time. You have been the best turtle, ever. We will miss you dearly.
++++++++++++

Not sure if you believe in reincarnation... In either case, just in case there is such a thing, I hope my turtle's soul will enjoy a good life in her next reincarnation.

Sniff. Love my turtle. >_<... May she rest in peace.

I love...

my fantastic family and friends.

my friend's wonderful mum.

the exhilarating sense of release I feel after each exam.

watching movies. :D

good food.

cuddly soft toys.

air-con on a sweltering day.

acts of kindness.

I wish I could attach a photo to each of those things written above, but I guess those warm, fuzzy feelings they can give you is enough. :D

My laptop has a good chance of passing the Turing test!

Trying out last year's cg1101 paper... And I forgot how to read in a text file with the string of numbers "111" such that the 1s will be split up in an array...
My computer laughed!

Here's a closer look!

Cheeky computer.
On hindsight, it must have been tracking what I've typed so far, or it wouldn't have known that colon D is my favourite emoticon. :D

/*EDIT!*/

I finally figured it out, after 1 hour of frustration. And I don't feel any smarter. On the contrary, I think my intelligence today has hit an all-new low. Must sleep by 11pm from now on. >_<

In case anyone had trouble with that too, (I doubt so, but anyway!!) here's the code.

Note the 4. NOTE THE 4.

Bleddy number 4 wasted 1hr of my youth!!!!! To make it worse, I'm gonna be 20 soon.
ARGHHHHH

Have a nice day, everyone. :D

A Sudden Burst Of Inspiration

Creativity struck while I was revising for the final year exams!

My entry for NUSPS's photo of the month. This month's theme is 'destruction'. It reflects how I feel right now. I feel really sick of studying, and I really need a break from all this madness. I need to spend some quality time with my family and friends. And take more photos! (my poor little camera feels under-utilised...) hehe.

This was taken during the basic photography course conducted by NUSPS this year.

Just as how the old adage goes, "You can never know when true love comes knocking on your door", my thoughts run wildly into the very sought-after zone of creativity during the strangest of times.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw

brain hack!

Just broke one of my own records!

Haven't slept a wink since 5am today... which means that I have stayed awake for nearly 22 hours consecutively.

All thanks to the tutorials. Luckily, this week's tutorials are pretty easy. In fact, I'm stunned by how fast I completed this week's cs1231 tutorial! It usually takes me ages.
But surface integrals for ma1505 is another story. :P It's a different; depressingly melancholic story... That's the way it goes for engineering math, I suppose?

while(student_status=alive)
Practice(paper, ink, a hell lot of time, a hell lot of hard work);

Darn. I couldn't resist typing that. :P


Before I get some well-deserved sleep, here's a really interesting site I found today:
http://dustincurtis.com/index.html

This guy writes about pretty interesting stuff... And meticulously places them in magazine-like templates. His designing skills are really good too! You gotta read it to appreciate how much effort he spends on writing interesting essays, accompanied with equally, if not more awesome website designs which he creates for EACH essay! Now that's unorthodox. :D It really set my imagination ablaze. Whee!

Did you know that it might be possible to 'hack' your brain (not with a blunt metal object, hehehe) so that you don't have to sleep so many hours every night... while still feeling energetic throughout the day?

http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

I don't think most of us are in a good position to try this, though. The time schedule which society considers to be 'normal' is way too widespread for us to take so many short naps throughout the day. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing idea.

-----------------------------------------------

The welfare pack from the SoC computer club actually contains a GLOWING STICK!!! Oddly, my mum was the one who found it in the pack. I was oblivious to it until she told me. :P How thoughtful of them to appeal to the inner geek in all SoCians! :D :D :D (i.e. lightsaber substitute, since I don't think anyone has figured out how to stop/break a laser beam in mid-air without blocking it with any visible material??)

My childhood days are long gone, but I just can't stop marvelling at how the liquid in the stick appears to be yellow in light, and glows a very mesmerizing blue when you view it in the dark. No matter how old you are, you just HAVE to admit that glowing sticks are SO COOL! :D Thank you, computer club!

is this the life of a programmer? if it is, then for the sake of my sanity, I'm not going to be one. O_o

cg1101 lab was the terrible-*st* lab, ever.

I was trying to do it since the weekend, but a flu virus took over my nose (and brain), causing me to feel woozy all the time. (teethers and wobbles around...) The medication only exacerbated the drowsiness I felt... and so did my blocked nose, which probably cut off some oxygen supply to my body. :S With all the other tutorials to complete, it felt like my life just hit an all-time new low.

Thanks to the help from so many nice people in my life, I finally got it done last night around 11pm. Even more thanks to my aunt's friend, Jasmin, who took time off her super hectic schedule this week to help me with the recursion qn 1e. :) My aunt also came to my house with loads and loads of nice food, and a much-needed pore pack which I wanted to buy, haha! Thank you all so much! :D
After much trouble trying to print it... (I was so tired that I kept printing stuff on the wrong sides of the papers!!! >_<) Yep. I took my medication, drank a cup of water, replied my aunt's friend, watched big bang theory season 4 episode 6 (damn funny, as usual!) and went to sleep around 1am.

I have no idea why I abruptly woke up at 5am today. I tried and tried to force myself back to sleep, but nooo... I couldn't sleep. This random thought of assigning a different variable name to my blocked nose could cause me to stop breathing forever, because the rest of my bodily program need to have their variable names for my nose changed, too. Deciding that I may be losing my sanity, I replied my aunt's friend again (how nice of her to reply last night!), and started to write this post.

This almost feels like recursion, because my thoughts in this post just went in a big circle, back to this post.

Now, let's read my daily horoscope on iGoogle...

Gemini

By Rick Levine

You are set on having a good time, but you might not be willing to jump into the flow of fun until after you finish tying up some loose ends. Taking care of them today can free you up to enjoy yourself, but ignoring previous obligations could invite unnecessary problems toward the end of the week. Work now and play later.

Generic as it is (who DOESN'T LOVE HAVING A GOOD TIME?!)... I gotta admit the iGoogle horoscope is the most frequently accurate daily online horoscope that I've found so far. Final exams in 3 weeks... Can't argue with the last line! :D