UltraCrepidate

This is a notice to all my readers.

I am officially in limbo now to prepare for my trip and will be back from my travels to Africa by June 1st. See ya then.

______________________________

Update May 2nd

For those of you concerned about whether or not I am still alive at any moment in time, I will update my progress through twitter whenever I find some Internet. Here’s the link to my twitter account.

Here’s the google map of the planned route we will take. Map will be tagged with our progress/whereabout if I get Internet access.

I will also try to upload pictures if possible (If the city has broadband). They can be found in my flickr page.

“lalalalala you are mean blah balh” ~WTF

When I am alone and nobody is looking, my brain would sometimes re-experience an embarrassing moment in my life. I’d feel the same way all over and my body would start doing some crazy shit.

Yesterday, I came back from one of these fit realizing that I’ve been shouting the same line of a lyric over and over for the past 60 seconds while brushing my teeth. I wondered to myself…

“What the fuck was that?”

I think it was year 2003 that I started knowing it was not normal. It’s only today that I realize that it is a problem. At least it doesn’t show when I am in public.

Getting organized always involves a certain amount of revisiting your old files. Which brings me back time and time again to this particular Chinese song. The song title and artist information has long since been corrupted from several English to Mandarin and Mandarin to English text code conversion. I have a hard time finding a folder for it because it has such a unique style. If I must categorize it, I’d say it is the Chinese version of Evanescence’s: Bring me to life.

I don’t know why, but lately I’ve been listening to it on several occasions and it has always given me calm, perhaps from the somewhat unrecognizable yet comforting Chinese lyrics (Yes, I have the same problem discerning words in songs in Chinese AND in English… No problem in French though). From the little I understand, it sings about promises, love and returning home. For once, a song that’s not entirely for love… a very attractive point when every other cpop song is about love. What I believe attracted me the most is the voice of the female singer. She reminded me of another of my childhood favorite, Frances Ruffelle, whom I first heard in a remix track on Phantom of the Opera.

The only thing I have to rely on is its English title: Millenium.mp3 and the detailed information telling me that it is the genre cpop released in the year 2004 and is track #3 in the album.

There was a period when I relied on Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwich to get through the morning. It just so happens to be right after I quit drinking their coffee. Back then, I was still in the middle of renovating my condo and the overall outlook on the economy seemed pretty pleasant. I didn’t have to plan for a 3 year recession.

I ate the Tim Matin sausage sandwich almost every day at that time, so I am well acquainted with its unique flavor. So, feeling nostalgic, I went and bought one yesterday as a quickie to a care free Friday. I didn’t know I was in for a big disappointment.

Right away, I noticed a cheapening in their flavor. Most notably from the lower grade processed cheese they use. It just doesn’t go well with the flavors of its “cookie” dough and the spices on their sausage patty.

The sausage patty also reduced in thickness, in its place, a bigger than usual egg. This change suggests that even the restaurant business is feeling the crunch from rising food prices as well as high transportation charges. So much so that they have to cheapen the ingredients.

A quick check at Loblaws on a few staple items confirmed my suspicion. Grain based products have increased in price and there’s a big sign at the flour section saying that a price hike will come in the near future due to wheat shortages. For now, only processed and treated product price have been affected and is slowly trickling into the raw materials. My favorite focaccia bread went from $2.99 to $3.17, a 6% increase. Poultry remained stable, beef increased a bit while pork see a big decline in price. I don’t understand why (Maybe because they are not being turned into oil).

One thing I don’t really understand is, why are we using grains as alternative oil? There’s a readily available source of energy we human generate called “fat”. Why can’t someone research a way of using that? I am sure free “liposuction” will appeal to a majority of the population.

Things are getting more and more ridiculous.

“It is every geek’s destiny to have his/her patience tested by Linux”

“I just know” a frustrating answer that I’ve been hearing from the Linux developers whenever I ask how they know certain technical details. “I just know”. I thought they were just being a cocky geek, but I noticed that I’ve started saying it as well.

How do I describe this. Linux is logical, even though I did not personally implement or write any code, because of its nature, it is easy to guess the different ways that something can be implemented. Once that is established, the only thing left is to run tests to see which of your assumption rings true. Most of the time I am dumb struck at why certain obvious implementations are left blank, but most often than not, I am just awe struck at my own ability to solve the problem.

I remember this one instance, when I thought about what I was doing. Something I’ve never done before, yet I am so sure that it is the way to do it. I didn’t panic when minor setbacks prevented the system from booting. I know how to recover the system, check the log, correct mistakes as single user and reboot. It didn’t phase me that I might have destroyed the hardware or something or the fact that I have corrupted the MBR and other sectors. A year ago, I would just reformat and reinstall XP, but nowadays I took it as a challenge to see if I could just modify a few files with vi to revive it.
“I was confident of the solution even though I’ve never done it once”
Playing with linux feels like playing with an OS that has all of the options yet nothing is automated for you. I miss window’s plug and play but at the same time, I really enjoy the lessons I learned while debugging this mess. Especially the bugs in kernel space. I was probably just lucky. But then again, I’ve been lucky with all the bugs that I fixed.