It starts with me waking from a nap. I feel weak. I don't feel like talking or moving, not even the slightest bit.

I just sit around watching other people, usually my family, doing whatever they do, occassionally giving me a little bit of attention. Till I fall asleep again.

Someone I used to trust, alot, asked me how am I doing. I told her, Great, cause I've been slacking like hell for the past 5 months, doing nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

---

So here I am, every morning, partying with bunch of carbon dioxide generating monsters who're barely travelling at 20 kmph, squeezing my way to the office, nod to the security guard who never nods back, punch my card and occassionally forgetting to do so, receive a call from the bloody warehouse, so I can provide them with a daily dose of technical support.

Philip K. Dick, one of the greatest writers of our time, his stories usually involve paradoxical ironies true to our lifes, reflect the incompetence of our society through the use of distant future setups, and often question our shallow perception of reality. He lived in poverty all his life simply because science fiction writers were not taken seriously during his time. Ate dog food because he couldn't afford human meals. Was an amphetamine user, indirectly influenced the nature of his stories, helped his productivity in writing, and caused his stroke.

A genius, so fucking brilliant, years ahead of his time, was neither acknowledged nor understood during his lifetime, till "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was made into a Hollywood feature widely known as "Blade Runner". Unfortunately, he died a couple of months before the film was released.

"2 weeks."

After much pleading and begging at the airport counter, we admitted defeat, then sat down in McD to have something to eat. Exiang was pretty excited bout the trip, don't be fooled by the photo, he might be wearing a Langkawi shirt, but he hasn't been there before, damn proud of being a tourist he is, but isn't.

It's hystherical.

I really don't know what to expect from life, it's just like that Alanis Morrisette song, the taxi driver has to run out of fuel when you're running out of time. And I don't think that's ironic, it's more like dipshit.

By the way, I don't know where to plug this in, a photo of my acting debut.


I guess uncertainty is all you can expect in life.

It's 6 a.m.

I ran out of beer, and didn't feel like buying any, so I couldn't sleep.

It's tough.

It's real tough.

Much tougher than I thought it would be.

Cause.


What a difference four years makes?

Thirty five thousand and fourty little hours.


She's about two thousand five hundred kilometres away now, yet I still can't figure out the math, of which is further apart, our physical locations, or our hearts.

That's it, three entries summarises it all, don't ask me, I don't feel like talking about it.

No, I didn't die, at least not when I end this sentence.

Those were the opening naration of the 1957 masterpiece, Det Sjunde inseflet, or The Seventh Seal, artfully crafted by one of the greatest filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman. You'll probably think he is long dead by now, but he is still alive and kicking, last I heard he is still making films, probably in his 90s.








The Seventh Seal, is a tale about a knight returning from the crusades, where he fought in the name of God, only to discover Death, a personified character, waiting for him as he arrives. He then challenges Death to a chess game of life or death. He makes his way home to reunite with his wife and progresses in chess along the way, while questioning his faith in the God he fought for. Eventually, he becomes so wary trying to win the game, he forgot he is still alive.

Back when Ericsson was still making wired household phones, when Volvo was still another crappy national car, and Ikea, still haven't quite figured out how to rip off their customers by making them hammer together their own furnitures, then tell them that's what lifestyle is about, Sweden had lots of Swedish films. Most youngsters might not have known, Swedish films are actually quite revolutionary back in the 20's till 50's, then the Japs took over, only later Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon.

Ingmar Bergman is one of the few directors who have the balls to criticize Orson Welles being a piece of overrated crap, and Jean-Luc Godard being utterly boring. It is not hard to figure why would Bergman make such a harsh criticism, he was way ahead, and often challenges themes that could shaken the faith of spiritual church goers. I've always thought I understand christianity a lot better than a lot of self proclaim christians, as they couldn't answer a lot of questions I brought up, and some didn't even cross their minds. I believe it is when someone examines and questions faith, that strengthens it, not by avoiding. Instead of watching torture oriented sadist docu movies like Passion of Christ, it is neccessary to construct solid faith in christianity, by going deep into movies like Monty Python's Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ and last but not least, The Seventh Seal. I know it is odd for a guy like me who's hobby is to mock christianity, putting on such a serious tone when dicussing the matter of faith, but I consider those who hasnt quite challenged their own faith to be nothing more than a dumb terminal receiving whatever feeds given by the mainframe, in IT terms.

The movie is quite dialogue driven as it used to be a stage play written by Ingmar Bergman himself. Characters are somewhat comical but it worked well in contrast with the deep and subtle main character. The composition is interesting, especially during the presense of Death. Errmmm, I think I just ran out of words.

Anyway, moral of the story, if you're really afraid of death, pick up chess, and be real good at it.

Isn't it amazing, when everyone gets their fair share of money, while only one guy has to work his ass off. When people tell me how wonderful multi-level-marketing is, I'll say bollocks, I'll rather do multi-level-do-nothing, a money making scheme brought to you by our beloved Malaysian government. On top of that, pyramid schemes are proven to fail after 10 levels of hierarchy in membership, while government outsourcing never does!

The genius of Katamari Damacy is somewhat similar to the genius of Homer Simpson, it might first sound like a stupid idea, totaly absurd but if you put some deep thoughts into it, it might be the most brilliant thing you've ever heard/played, yet it'll still appear to be rather dumb. Katamari Damacy simply satisfies the will to possess in most human beings, and with or without an objective it'll still provide lots of fun. Fun is not an intellectual understanding, it is as simple as something someone feels good doing, but unfortunately, we are usually so numb towards life, that we do not recognize fun, and do not believe it could be obtained so easily. And, there's where Katamari comes in.

Here's a trailer to give you an idea how the game works.

And, if Katamari ain't fun, then try explaining why this girl cosplayed Oujisama twice?







If you happen to like Katamari as much as I do, here's a tune from the soundtrack I use as my ringtone.

I don't usually blog about technical stuff, in fact, I don't at all, this blog is pretty much like my escape from our left brain dominated world, or my sanctuary that keeps me away from the society of logic and rationale.

Anyway, this one's about Google Map. I'm working on a project that concerns hacking google map images and putting them to good use. If you have no idea how it works, basically, google has an enormous set of tiles, 256x256 each, sized around 10-13KB, each containing a piece of snapshot from somewhere in this planet, of a particular zoom level.

I don't wanna go too deep in details, in brief, google map allows anyone to zoom 16 times, 1st level consists of 4 tiles, 2 for x-axis, another 2 for y, so 2nd level, each tile will split into 4 tiles, magnified and has a higher level of detail, resulting 4 on each exis, and so on. Therefore, the number of tiles for x or y-axis equal to 2 to the power of z-axis(the zoom level). All these tiles are images processed from Google's servers from mapping data, and are retrievable in JPEG and PNG cause they have a specific address for each tile. That's the basic idea, don't worry if you don't understand it, cause that's not the point.

So, I shared this piece of info with my greedy colleague, Mr.Alex, and he said this:





I have to admit, that is a brilliant idea, and I've never dreamt of doing that at all.

So...out of curiousity, I wrote a simple program, to calculate how many tiles are there to snatch and how much disk space needed. And here you go.

No, I don't exactly hate kids, even though The Best Page in The Universe says that you should hate 'em, no, I don't hate them.