UltraCrepidate

This is part eight of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

There are things that I remember doing, but in fact didn’t happen. There is some slight similarity to what people experience in mental institutes. You can’t tell dream from reality. You remember things that didn’t happen. Which is part of the reason why I am documenting everything here because right now, dream world and reality intertwines freely. At least when I am writing this blog, I know that I am not dreaming.

I discovered a sub culture of Guitar Hero 2 addicts on youtube and found people posting their videos with their score on the song called Trogdor at expert level. The current champion is at 180 000 points (By a 12 years old kid). So I decided to give it a try. Let me tell you, this mean song has sections where no finger can strum fast enough to keep up. So far, no one has perfect score yet. After one day of playing, I finally passed the song with a 80% accuracy and 70 000 points.

I questioned my motive on why I try so hard at this. Video taping yourself playing makes me feel like I must be on crack or something. I like this game because it is a game that requires superb motor skill and will help me understand my body even more. I can feel a new neuro network being connected each time I wake up, discover a new fingering technique I can now do when I couldn’t before the nap. My muscles are tired and my pinky is sore. I can move my ring finger and pinky independent of each other now. This, after only 7 days of practice.

I kept on going because I know that real guitar is harder than this. The reward I set for mastering this song is to get an iAXE for myself and start taking guitar seriously. Mastering… I set it temporary to hitting 95% accuracy on Trogdor.

This is part seven of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

I feel like I am restarting from day 1. I am beginning to have doubts about the benefit of this plan because of all the social restrictions it places on my life. The idea works fine during weekends when I don’t have to stay conscious for any sustained amount of time. The problems lies with anticipating waking up with only 3 hours of night’s sleep and a 10 hour working day ahead.

I’ve readjusted my sleep schedule back to the correct Triphasic pattern today with the help of an extra nap at noon, but I no longer experience the boost of energy that I used to get from having such power naps.

Here are some things that I’ve done this week which is definitely caused by my attempt at this insane sleep deprivation:

-Burnt my hand from grabbing the pan in the oven. Without the mittens.

-Lost consciousness on the road

-Fell asleep at work

-Returned home 3 times before going out to pick up things that I forgot.

-Sucked really bad at any games I attempted to play

-Sore wrist from overplaying guitar hero2

Take an introverted girl who grabs my attention with outfits I like, make her an engineer who can program and give her a nice face. Top it off with a sophisticated looking glass with a light brown skin tone. Then, put a big, fat diamond ring on her ring finger and make her work besides me.

That’s life’s perfect idea of a joke. Who knows, maybe I’ll find out that she competes in dancesport tomorrow.

I’ve been accused of being insensitive several times in my life and usually by women who wants something from me. I used to be embarrassed by it and wanted to “improve” my “sensitivity”. That particular path didn’t go to well, because there’s nothing to improve in the first place. The journey to understand women speech and women behavior led me to understand how they got people, or rather, got me to do things for them. Now I just give them a no before they even reach that far. You see, I’ve always enjoyed Tyler Durden’s direct approach in Fight Club:

“Just ask man”

“What are you talking about?”

“3 pitchers of beer and you still can’t ask?”

What used to hinder my relationship with others is now the perfect tool to keep them out. What changed was my belief in my own understanding of others and the fact that I can handle disasters better than others. When things go wrong, I act first and cry later.

The last time I was too drunk to remember was 3 years ago in Vienna Austria after consuming too much beer, wine and absinth with fellow backpackers. From time to time, I’d catch glimpses of spinning street at night when the group of us went searching for more alcohol. A name and her warm embrace.

Which is probably why I did a triple check to see if my memory has been intact for the past 2 years when I first heard this news?

“Peter, I missed my period.”

At which point several things passed through my head with tags that identified them as “OH SHIT”. The implication of such declaration to me means that she’s pregnant and I have some responsibilities. After ensuring that nothing happened between us that I didn’t know about, I begin to think about what she wants out of this. Her methods always involves getting you to agree to one innocent request and then using that as a leverage to further direct the flow to her goal in the end.

Hearing her story is like watching a typical white trash story unveils in real life. On one hand, I can’t believe this is happening, on the other, I can’t believe the outcome of everything is predictable by reading a TV script.

The worst part was knowing that we’ll eventually be having this talk when a few days ago; she asked if I want to go to the psychic with her. “So that I can experience the psychic experience too.” I know at that moment, that something is wrong, yet cannot bring myself to believe the textbook scenario that is to follow.

She doesn’t really need to go to the psychic, or even pay the psychic to tell her what to do. She’s already decided to keep the child by choosing to go to the psychic for answers. So what did I say to her out of all this?

“At least, get him to pay half of the cost.”

But what I really wanted to say, but know that it won’t change anything or will only make everything worst was this.

“Look, you screwed up, he screwed up you both screwed up when you fucked without condoms or any kind of contraceptive devices. I am surprised that it only happened now after 2 years of fucking that occurred every second day. What the hell is wrong with his sperms? Too lazy to swim? All your dreams that you told me about and the wonderful person you hope will come into your life that is better than him, you can basically kiss those goodbye till you are 30 or so. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is when I asked you if you’d taken the morning after pill and you gave me a confused look. IT’S AS IF YOU ARE PURPOSELY DRAGGING YOURSELF INTO THIS SHITHOLE.

How are you going to live? You are barely making ends meet at the moment. Who’s going to pay for diapers? No, the government doesn’t do that. If they do, I should probably move away from this country. Who’s going to do the cleaning? Can you stand a child’s wailing at night? You can’t even stand my cat! Why don’t you move in with him? Why do you want to raise a child alone? You need to keep your ego out of this and think for the child. This is not about you or what you like, not about proving yourself to the world or getting away with anything, most of all this is not about your pissass take me as I am or leave me attitude anymore.

WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING! Get your head above the cloud for once and look.”

It is true that being rich doesn’t necessary means the child will grow up ok. It is also true that being a mother changes a person. But I think we human have too much faith in ourselves.

This is part six of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

Having people over severally screwed this experiment up. It is very important to stick with the schedule as I later discovered. Any delay in sleep time, makes the next period of wakefulness that much shorter and it’s the excuse I use for myself to stay in bed and just sleep on. What’s the point of being awake only 2 hours or 3 hours?

I am going to keep the light on when I sleep now so it feels more like day light when I wake up. Hopefully, this weekend will provide some leeway in adjusting to the new working schedule now that I have some experience of what it was like.

Will I still be able to have a social life with this sleep pattern? I can already imagine a scenario at my friend’s house in the middle of a dinner:

“Yo bro, do you have a bed I can crash at right now? I am sorry, but this meal taste like mud because all my senses are shutting down.”

or at a party

“Dudes, get out of the bed NOW! Yes I am interrupting your fuck session and NO, I don’t care, I just need a bed to sleep. NO, I don’t mind you fucking beside me while I try to sleep.”

This is part five of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

I gave in to the temptation and slept for 5 hours straight. Although I still set the alarm for every 1.5 hours to fully wake up and fall asleep, I still broke the schedule. I guess the combination of working, going out and changing the curfew proves to be too much to handle together. Boy, do I feel great today after a 5 hour slumber.

To counter balance this problem. I am going to be inserting 30 minute power naps here and there if my schedules are going to have to change in order to make up for the loss of sleep.

The new schedule will most likely be 6PM~7:30PM, 1AM~2:30AM and 5AM~8AM. This is adjusted for days when I have social engagements for whatever reason.

This is part four of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

Working under this condition is brutal. I have a hard time staying awake after 2PM. The downside to this sleep pattern is that it is a shortened version of a monophasic sleep. Every day, I have to struggle with getting out of bed 3 times, trying to stay awake to finish a few tasks before I go to bed 3 times, feel extremely refreshed after I wake up 3 times and crave for coffee 3 times.

The night out with friends didn’t help as it completely screwed up my schedule which probably explains why I hit a big wall near the end of my workday. It shouldn’t be a problem except, I still have to drive home and collapse on my bed without getting into any car accident. The only downside so far. Maybe if I tweak the sleeping hours a bit, it might help.

The benefit of this is already paying itself off. The extra time allowed me to master the first song in guitar hero at the expert level after only 2 days of practice. My curtain is half done and my fridge is overstuffed with food. I feel that 80% of the time, my mind is in a heightened state of alertness.

This is part three of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

It’s harder and harder to tell time apart now since I spend most of my time awake. It reminds me of writing a journal entry in between planes in the middle of some country that I’ve forgotten. I remember feeling the same “blah” whilst interpreting everything through a veil. As if I am an impostor in John Malkovich’s mind. Well… am I?

My diplomatic tact and temper have all gone awry and I have lost all my patience with people who crosses the boundaries. Instead of slowly easing the conversations back to the main track, I chose to be confrontational. I think I really like it this way. Especially since I am so used to logical arguments, I am really satisfied with the retorts I’ve come up with. The hint of anger and nuisance in my tone adds the spice needed to make the whole thing fun for me.

“I finally finished cleaning my room and oh… guess what? I still have the kitchen and living room to clean. And Peter just leaves in the middle of the day and didn’t bother to help.”

“First of all, I’ve been cooking for Christmas dinner for the past 2 days and secondly, I had prior engagement that day which was scheduled before this. Besides, there’s nothing in the kitchen that’s mine.”

“I am pregnant and sick and you just left a statement like that as if it’s some kind of revenge.”

“If you didn’t like it, why don’t you just leave it as it is? I don’t mind.”

“But it’s Christmas and I wanted it to be special.”

“Well, then we can all establish a cleaning schedule. I have no objection against that. I stopped because I don’t like to be the one pulling all the weight. Excuse me, Jeannie pulling all the weight. But when one person doesn’t do anything. I get discouraged and stops, which is why I removed all my presence from the kitchen and just leave it to you two.”

“You are being defensive.”

“Well you are being aggressive. Have you seen how clean the bathroom is?”

“OH yeah, did you see what he mean by clean Jeannie? There was a big chunk of dust on the floor, some dirt on the edges of the bathtub and the sink stinks. Men don’t know how to clean.”

“Fine, I don’t know how to clean, but at least I cleaned it.”

“I am just trying to teach you how to clean Peter.”

“I have two eyes, I know they are dirty, not sure about the stinking sink though. I didn’t smell it, all I could smell was the scent of the soap i used to make that dirty toilet shine. Given the time constraint, I had to leave it like that to prepare dinner. You know, if you do it once and show me, then I will follow suit?”

“Why are you like that all of a sudden? Telling me to do it and do it all the time?”

“Because I evaluate a person by what they do and not by what they talk about. You can brag about how you can clean so much better, but since you’ve never cleaned the bathroom before, it means nothing.”

Now that I’ve written it down, the bullshit is more apparent. A strategy I’ve noticed other people uses. By making you feel guilty in order to control you and making you admit you are wrong, thus twisting the logic. So sneaky, but what’s more important for me is the fact that I am able to see through the crap and respond accordingly. I am amazed at how good she is at making me feel bad. At playing the ” I am a fragile girl” routine. That feeling did sneak it at one point during the conversation, but I was too phased out by my lack of sleep to notice it.

Other than that. I got Guitar Hero II as a Christmas present and has been playing the whole night to keep myself awake. It was awesome.

This is part two of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

I think my body is getting the hint. I’d sometime wake up 20 minutes into my 1:30 hr nap feeling refreshed afraid of over sleeping only to find out that I have another hour of extra sleep. Other times I’d wake up after an hour and couldn’t go back to sleep anymore. And always I’d wake up at 8AM in the morning feeling groggy as if I’ve partied all night.

I took a 30 minute power nap at noon so I can restore some of my lost sleep due to an overactive flatmate on day 1. I can’t believe how well I slept without any noises to distract me from falling into a slumber. Something feels wrong though, because if I sleep for the full hour and a half, I’d always wake up feeling groggy. Perhaps the timing is wrong and it should be one hour instead of one and a half.

I spend some time meditating as another way of resting my eyes while helping with my raging emotions. With the extra waking hours added to the day, my eyes aren’t used to the extra usage yet.

The effect of having these extra hours and having the conscious locked in a dream like state gave me an opportunity to do some insane boring and repetitive labors. I discovered that my patience might be better than a mule. The projects are getting done slowly and I should have a new curtain in a few days time.

It certainly made me wonder about repetitive tasks vs creative tasks. Are one type of people more brain dead than the other? The mutual exclusion of great memory and ingenious creation.

PS: I am surprised that I couldn’t fall back asleep this morning giving how tired I feel after I wake up.

This is part one of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

Right away, I am experiencing some of the symptoms to those others who’ve gone through the same journey towards polyphasic sleep patterns. Distinction between days are blurred and I am more susceptible to temperature changes.

My first nap was from 10:30PM to 12AM which gave me a slight boost to alertness. I said slight because it steadly declined after 2AM, at which point I am reduced to playing some computer games to pass the time.

I hit “The wall” at 4AM and think it’s best to sleep at this time to avoid having to struggle against the wall and set my alarm to wake me at 6AM, then slept from 6AM to 8AM. This is to train my body to understand that I will never get anything past 2 hours of sleep from now on. The reason why polyphasic works is because you trained yourself to go into REM sleep right away, whilst you are still stuck in the old sleep pattern if you stick with biphasic.
The morning is a blur because I can’t really concentrate. Life seems to be a stand still, I experienced the zombie like state that so many have told in which I jokingly remarked how everything gets registered, but I just can’t form any opinion or give feedback to anything. Most likely a shutdown of the frontal lobe as it is the part of the brain that tires out the fastest and least trained to perform repetitive duties.

I made the mistake of drinking coffee at around 2PM. Being in the shopping mood in downtown with the great clear sky smiling down on me et all. I’ve read about the negative effect that this has when you are starting the polyphasic pattern, but I wasn’t thinking enough to realize what I was doing. A routine is a routine and at the moment, it is what kept me going. Immediately, I noticed having cold sweat and more pronounced feeling of detachment from my body.

I pondered an experiment that I used to do whenever I get to wait for the train. To focus on a spot on the floor until tunnel vision sets in, then look up around to notice an increase in the amount of vision information I take in. I tried that in this zombie like state and couldn’t do it. The fact that I chose to try this at this time surprises me, don’t know why and can’t reason about it either. I also made a mental note to do it again when I am more alert.

The sleep from 4PM to 5:30PM was restless, any noise distracted me from falling asleep. I think this is due to the caffeine. I remember being like this before when I was a student and drank too much coffee. It’s as if you are too tired, but still couldn’t shut yourself up. So I tried concentrating on exhaling through the nose. Focusing my thought to follow the exhaling process. I don’t know why I chose to do that then, perhaps subconsciously, I know it is the trail I need to follow to induce a fast track into REM state sleep.

Alas the sleep was short, because my room mate woke me up with loud music from playing computer games. Strangely though, I felt really refreshed as if I had a whole night of sleep.

“Hold up a minute Sir! I’ll need to check your bag please.”

“Oh sure. Sorry, I was in the moon.”

Just another day, just another routine check by the security guard at the front door. After a day like this, who wouldn’t be in the moon. Having a project sacked by higher ups so close to completion date is like waking up from a dream still drowsy to find a bear mauling through your tent. A sudden reality check that brings life back at front and center.

When did it stop being surprising that people address me as “Sir”… what was I thinking anyway? How did the day pass by without me noticing.

“That’s a big cup of coffee, you expecting a long day?”

“Hey hey what do you think?”

“I think you are a crack head.”

A short exchange between co-workers wrapped up all the fun that happened during the meeting from 8:30AM to 11AM. 2PM is a conference call between clients and myself while a sudden surprise call interrupted my lunch, which wasn’t missed all that much because it was consisted 100% of caffeine. Time is ticking and 4PM seems to be closer than I thought whenever I had time to look up from the wires and papers that now clogged my desk. My 3 desks.

“Yes.” “No” “hmmmm” “arrg”. Some got lucky and I was able to consciously form a word whilst the rest will just have to contemplate the meaning of the guttural sounds that comes out of my throat. I trust them to understand that it means I am in shit and I appreciate that they delay whatever it is that they need to discuss with me till later. As the deadline approached, I was reassured by the presence of my sales guy sitting at my desk, using my phone calling in favors, pulling strings. It’s a disposition that granted me freedom even from the inquiries of my manager and bosses. There’s only so much favors you can ask a day before anyone start getting annoyed at you though, between the two of us, we’ve probably used up all our favor reserves for the year ahead to complete this project.

Favors to get the equipment, favors to get the drivers redesigned, favors to get in touch with the head of other departments and favors to pull the director into the picture to haul other department’s asses, cut through finance and override bureaucrats.

There! DONE! it works!. Adrenaline rushed through our veins as we hurried to the scheduled meeting to discuss the positive result and hear briefing from the client side…

Perhaps the most disheartening thing that can happen to people in our field, or any field of business, is to have their project sacked due to financial reasons. The concept works, the objective honorable but in the end it’s still up to a simple formula in one person’s head that calculates cost vs return. We are just small fishes in a pond of sharks.

QUICK GLIMPSE:

I got caught up with the whole rigging and over-clocking wave and have been a devoted Geek hermit for 4 days straight. This is my toy. It may look ugly on the outside right now, but it is a beauty inside. It has been a great experience neglecting every other part of my life and focus on understanding the technology as well as holding my breath and wrapping my Duvet blanket all around me in fear of flying exploding computer components. So without further ado, this is how I got my junk $87 graphic card to perform like a high-end $400 card.
BENCHMARK OF ORIGINAL SETUP:

The Vanilla setup of the system is as follows.

Pentium D915 dual core @ 2.8Ghz

2xCorsair PC5300 512MB RAM @ 266Mhz

Sapphire ATI Radeon X800GTO @ 390Mhz GPU and 351Mhz RAM

Measured memory bandwidth @ 4887MB/S

Measured CPU execution @ 12596 MIPS

3dMark2006 @ 1007

THE DIRTY DETAILS:

To my wonderful surprise, I found out that the $87 Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO VIVO 256MB PCI-E graphic card actually has a GPU that is designed for greater purpose. A quick check with ATI TOOL confirmed that the manufacturer used a R480 core that was intended for a ATI X850 XT Platinum Edition. All they did was put in some restriction in place so that this card doesn’t steal the market share of their high end graphic cards.

This card has 4 graphical pipelines that are diverted to do Video Input and Video Output to TV and are thus disabled from any 3d rendering for gaming. Since I can’t find a previous instance of hacked BIOS in the list provided, I push forward armed with the knowledge of the GPU’s BIOS, I proceeded with hacking the firmware using a free Hexeditor and a modified flashrom utility. After that is done, it is only a matter of fooling the OS into believing that the graphic card is an ATI X850XT PE so it’ll use the correct driver that takes advantage of the 16 pipelines. I used RAbit for this purpose and flashed the GPU firmware again.

The theoretical value of increasing graphical pipeline from 12 to 16 should be a 33% increase in performance ( (4/12)*100% ), instead I got a new performance rating of 1635 in 3dMark2006. A 62.36% increase in performance ( (628/1007)*100% ), not bad at all. The extra 30% is most likely from having the pipeline at a multiple of 8 instead of an uneven 12 which forces the processing to take one extra cycle to complete.

THE CONCLUSION:

The performance of a near $600 high end graphic board at the price of $87.19 is definitely the biggest steal and performance booster for this setup. I got lucky this time and purchased just the right card at the right price, but most importantly of all. I didn’t have to do any soldering at all. Comparing the result with Tom’s Hardware VGA charts confirmed the same 62% performance jump between the two video cards. However, I don’t understand why my score is around 1600 whereas theirs resulted in a mere 768. Anyways, mission accomplished on the graphic card.
All the files used are zipped and stored here (14MB) if you are interested in trying out yourself.

Next up: Access my hard drive from anywhere in the world

As I grow from learning about myself, I started managing myself as if though there are two entities. No, it’s not a split personality, but rather an understanding of my two extremes. I don’t know if this conflict exist in others as well, but I realized that there is a self that dreams and plans the future based on an ideal view of my possible interaction with the world around. Whilst co-existing, is the actual self that comes into play in the heat of the moment who is severely biased by the emotions of the moment.

Ideally, I’d like the two to be the one and the same, abiding by the images of the ideal self. However I’ve come to understand that the moment self is more like a brat that needs attention and supervised teaching to reach that level. The usual compensation for good behavior are French Vanilla coffee with cakes, a new game, electronic gadgets and dancing.

What I’ve neglected in the process is that the overlord dreamer and planner needs some patting once in a while too. Since its motivational imperative is dictated by learning and discovering, it is highly vulnerable to the underdog self who cannot stay interested in a subject for a long period of time. Which is why, I signed myself up for a beginner’s class to German language as a Christmas present, using my “waste not” attitude to force myself and see this through.

My interest in German comes from my numerous positive encounters with Germans. Perhaps because we share the same perfectionist attitude and a little bit of arrogance. This is a new racial preference link that I didn’t consider before. Unlike the other racial preference I observed, I don’t think this one is sex dependent like American white man with Chinese woman. No explanation yet, I just feel more at ease when I am with man/woman of German descent.

Like crack, once I get hooked on technology, there’s no turning back to simple cigarette butts. After 1 months of planning, 2 months of bidding on different sites for the cheapest parts and 4 days of painfully rebooting and rebooting, my final system is up and running.

I had tears in my eyes because it felt so free when I played around with the new system. It confirmed my suspicion that my capabilities are hindered by the hardwares I use. Multitasking no longer involves waiting indefinitely for the ram to swap to the hard drive and gaming… oh gaming.

I proceeded to play every game that I used to play and noticed so many bad habits that I have picked up to compensate for the machine. Small things such as predicting the movement of my target due to cpu delay, a few milliseconds delay after I acquired the target to wait for the graphic lag to catch up and a play style that’s focused mainly on dodging instead of accuracy that facilitate survival under extreme lags.

I can now truly appreciate a well made virtual sunrise and wonder in awe at how much effort is put into making it so beautiful. Although I don’t have the skill to create such beauty right now, I can at least see them as a possibility.

This is a system based on tom’s hardware guide’s Pentium D815 overclocking. I choose another motherboard and cpu so I don’t have to spend that extra on liquid cooling. The only thing I did not cheap out on is the RAM since it’s essential to stable overclocking. These figures are with shipping costs included.
- 600 Watt Power supply $52.78

- LG DVD RAM $46

- ATI radeon X800 $87.19

- Intel Pentium D 915 $131.95

- ASRock CONROEXFIRE-ESATA2 ATX LGA775 $136.45

- Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 1GB 2X512MB DDR2-667 $170.21

- Hitachi 160GB Sata HDD x2: $90

- Plastic rubber maid tub: $6
Total value: $720.58

Of course, because I am bidding on ebay, some shit happens and I end up wasting money over it. But overall, it’s still a better system than any one of those you can buy in store at the price of around $700.

- Bid on the wrong item and begged to cancel it: $10

- Bid on the wrong motherboard received it and tested it to find out it’s the wrong motherboard and having to sell it myself: $30

Total value after extra costs: $760.58

All figures in Canadian dollar.
I’ve ran several tests and burn-in program to test system stability and they checked out without problem with dual core 2.8Ghz with 1GB of ram, 256MB of video ram and 320 GB of HDD space. Then I tweaked the OS setup for the best performance possible.
The next step is to bring over clocking into play so I can increase performance by 30%. In theory, the cpu can be overclocked to 3.5Ghz with just a fan and maybe 4Ghz if I push it. The RAM at 6300 instead of 5300. I think there should be someone called “Hardware optimization engineer” in the future to help you tweak the system for the best performance. It took me 3 years working in the industries to understand why disks should be formatted in a certain way and why getting the highest clock rate out of your cpu might impede performance instead. Not for the weak hearted.

I’ve been blogging and surfing the web for about 10 years now. Starting at the time when BBS first got replaced by the Internet and text based web pages are owned and created by people who knows what they are doing.

My own half hearted attempt started me with the notepad and dos ftp commands while using windows paint as the picture editor, back at a time when no visual editor is available, I literally lined up pictures using the “table” tag by incrementing the width, height etc. It was impossible to be an artist and still able to learn web programming to have a decent page up. Which is why I always lose myself in one of the wonderful 8bit color pages I come upon. These are pages created by masters of technology at a days when only those have the ability to create. Needless to say, it was filled with technical jargon and represents the net in its infancy.
Later, with the introduction of photoshop and dreamweaver, I felt an increase of artists who bared the difficulties of tech and mastered it to represent their art. It is a rush to me when I discovered cliques of artists that showed me clean and unique designs. I opt out of creating anything on the net because I know that there’s no way I can come close to these masters in terms of graphics and writing. Knowing that the net is heading in the right direction, I withdrawn myself thinking that there’s nothing that I can contribute that can be worth anything compared to them. A focus on real life brought me some happiness.

It is to my disgust when I returned to serious blogging and designing that the current state of the net are cluttered with ads and copied contents. A design that looked good doesn’t directly translate to the owner’s skill. A great writing that gives me goosebumps doesn’t necessarily reflect the mind of the author.

All these contributed to the style I adopted and the people that I value online. I don’t like to have too many choices presented to me, but I like a few quality ones presented to me by people who’s decisions I trust. I will do the same and help eliminate the clutter that I currently feel imposed on us by the commercialization of everything. For money generation, I have another one that nobody reads. (Surprisingly, it has a few readers that kept on coming back, although from a different part of the world than those who check this one). Why would anyone want to read my commercialized blog is beyond me because I try my best to make it undesirable so they don’t waste their time.

Oh how I wish for the good ol days of blogging. When the knowledge needed to publish ensures that those without the skills and time gets filtered out.

By Technobabe,

Since it’s in my nature to make everyone’s life harder, I decided to add something extra spice to the tag game. I will reveal 5 things about me that no one knows, but done in a way that answered questions of: When Where, What, Who, How. The questions though, is up to you to formulate.

1. December 24, 1990
2. On the hood of a car in the underground parking
3. Putting on make up
4. Chloé
5. Over and easy
Since I reveal almost everything in my blog, this took me more effort than any posts, hope you like it.

Now, Rob, you are it.

Part of the series of Environment upgrade

There was a time when I lived with nothing but hand me down stuffs and enjoyed everything but the comfort of material possessions that’d make my life easier. Till today, I still have the same bed frame, same mattress, same cook pot and same PC speakers for the past 5 years.

Tier 1

After I got my current job, I went on a shopping frenzy to upgrade my life a bit in order to be able to do more. These are the items purchased.

All in one printer.

7 dress shirts for work and threw away the old ones and all the hand downs from brothers/parents.

Motorola Ming multipurpose phone

Dell 20″ widescreen

Used car

Electric saw
Drill
Altera FPGA

Microwave

Freezer

That’s about it. As I often said to people: “I have little needs” and you can see that these are the basic essentials to go to work, do any sort of basic household repairs as well as basic things related to computers.
Tier 2

As my ambitions grew and the things that I want to do grew along, I realize that the upgrade to the next tier has to happen together with the purchase of several devices.

New computer (from parts): $700

Creative X-mod product research: $59.99

USB Mug warmer for my daily hot tea addiction at work: $12.99

Picoo palm sized helicopter to play with my cat: $49.99

Intuos Wacom Tab For my drawing needs: $369.95

SpaceNavigator PE for 3d modeling and animation: $59

ATI Radeon x800 GTO 256MB PCI Express To support my would be multi monitor setup. $61

Dell 20″ widescreen LCD x2 For triple monitor setup. $500

Guitar hero 2 For my dream that was never there: $79

Wii: $250

Wow, only $2000. I am cheap. I think I might just upgrade my current life with all these sooner than I thought. These are related to computer/entertainment upgrade. Since I can’t have more without moving out to a house first.

Tier 3

Plasma HDTV: $2000

PS3: $700

Dish wasaher: ???

Dryer: ???

Washer: ???

Stove oven: ???

Fridge: ???

House: ???

Sofa:???
Pool: ???

Foozball table: ???

I’ve been practicing a psychology technique called anchoring. Simply put, it helps associate certain state of mind with certain triggers. These are secrets spots that only I know about (wouldn’t want anyone abusing my extreme happiness button now do we?). The effect of anchoring has not be thoroughly proven since this is all in the construct of our own mind. Like religion, it is more effective, if you believe in it. Self conceit, self fulfilling prophecy, blind belief, whatever. Use it to your discretion.

Because I didn’t intentionally craft it, my programmer mode comes with certain disadvantages. Similar when I am in the state of total involvement in dancesport, I lose the ability to speak coherently. My speech becomes slurred and it becomes hard for me to understand human speech. The mood is that of a depressive mood and I tend to grow zits if living in this mode for more than a week.
It is while trying to integrate a new anchor for when I need to switch to a programmer that I found out I already have one. Albeit incomplete, it is worth mentioning how the complicated paths of several bad habits became the defacto standard ritual I take before I write the first line of:

cout << DEBUG_MODE ? "Prgm mode on" : "Prgm mode off" << "Press to continue”;

getch();

It all started with university. Residence life is never quiet enough to concentrate during daytime, so I always leave the coding till well after midnight. It usually means involves all nighters from 12AM to 4AM and skipping the early English class next morning that doesn’t count for much. The nature of the all nighter calls for the help of caffeine to help me stay awake. Coffee, is the first ingredient. More specifically, Tim Horton’s coffee: 3 cream 3 sugar.
I also believe that coffee helps to suppress my thoughts, to slow it down rather. Normally, due to working in too many multitasking environments, I am very aware of the surrounding and every thought gets preempted by the next and I forget about the first one. With coffee in my system, I am able to focus on one trail and the noise of other random ideas gets muffled.

Sandals are the next requirement, which goes hand in hand with wearing jeans. Dressing like a slob probably got ingrained in my mind when I worked in a chip design house in Taiwan. My guess is it allow me to feel less like showing off and more like hiding in a corner so people won’t see me, hence ignoring any social engagement that might otherwise distract me from the matter at hand.

It is only when I am in this mode that I began to appreciate how far I’ve come in my self improvement. Hopefully it is only temporary.

Those of you who knows me probably heard me joke about being shy. And, most of you have brushed it off as a joke.

I have a phobia with being in a group of people bigger than 3. Three because I’ve had to go out a lot with friends who are coupled up.

This phobia comes from things that happened when I was fresh off the immigration boat and shoved into a class of French speaking Quebequois. There are quite a few painful memories and I don’t think I’d like to overindulge in these right now. Suffice to say that having the teacher ask the whole class if anyone pity me enough to include me in their group is quite a shameful experience. I still remember how people avoided looking in our direction for fear of getting me attached to their group.

Till today, I always have to mentally prepare myself, to convince myself that this is not the past, before any setting that involves a group of people. “It’s the best way to learn a language”, I think they read it from some book. It works, but I still don’t know if I should thank my parents or hate them for sending me to schools where there are no other Mandarin speaking people…

Maybe, you can understand me better knowing that I’ve never experienced or enjoyed high school life. It was as if though everything is buffered and delayed. Never in the moment. Lost in translation. Can you see me laughing at a joke 6 hours after, when I looked it up in the dictionary at home?

Sometimes I hate myself for not being emotional or impulsive enough. Otherwise I would’ve bought a house already. But I did not and do not plan on buying a house until maybe mid 2007.

The biggest reason supporting moving out on my own is to get away from my flat mates. Since we co-signed the lease, I can’t really force them out and am too comfortable in a below average monthly rent in a huge room to justify the hassle.

To give you an idea of what’s bothering me. I would like to enter exhibit A for case of Peter vs flat mates as a benchmark to measure mess.

Based on your expert opinion, would you feel good living in this environment? ….

Your honor, I would like to enter exhibit B as a clean kitchen created by my client after 3 days of work.

As a human behavior specialist, what would you say is the length of time that should elapse, before the kitchen returned to the previous state to indicate that a minimal effort has been made by the rest of the tenants? Or rather, any effort at all? …

Please witness exhibit C and D. Shots taken 3 and 7 days after.

Your honor, I would just like to enter into evidence that none of my client’s utensils are in these pictures beside the bamboo table mat. And the prosecutor rests.

The current economic condition of Montreal island indicates a below average housing price in the year of 2007. With the new release of the Canadian census for population and superimposed with the 8 previous year’s, I should be able to pinpoint the location of the most profitable area. For those of you interested, this is the link I used to further find the city of my interest. I then used the population density map based on age to determine where the population is shifting to. All points to a favorable buying time for middle of 2007… except of course for the issues against.

Increase of house value has to exceed certain percentages. Mainly, Mortgage rate + selling comission + housing tax + inflation. Assuming 5% mortgage, 4% comision and 2% inflation you have to surpass a 11% possibility at selling time. Looking at the past fluctuation graph, assuming history repeats. It’s less favorable. THEN!!! The government has to stir up another referendum to declare Quebec as an independent country. This, after promising that the last one will be the final referendum, which ended with a 50.5% against separation.

Never mind my complain, I I’ll need a good excuse for me to move away from Montreal. As the investor’s instinct take firmer hold on me, I am more and more frustrated at the double tax the government imposes on its population. Despite the socialist society that provides equal opportunity for everyone, the double tax means it’s harder for business to flourish. The margin of income has to be extremely good, but how can you do that with such a high cost of labor.