Fading Out

And could I forget about Chage and Aska?

Imprinted in my head, literally

Easter Summary

Friday: Went to Long Bay for a casual barbeque/walk on the beach. Did not have enough meat to go around so ended up eating grilled ham slices and grilled bananas. After that a friend was nice enough to offer a tour of his new house and a ride in his ice cream van (Literally, he no longer need to earn his living but still scoops ice cream 3 days a week purely for the laughs. I'd love to do this after my retirement in, er, 40 years)

Saturday: Fatigued from yesterday so stayed inside to watch South Park and Nisemonogatari. A headache inevitably developed and got worse after dinner. Slept from 8pm to midnight under the influence of ibuprofen.

Sunday: Unable to go back to sleep so decided to do an allnighter. Attempted to start composing my literature review but ended up looking at random photo collections on cracked.com. Washed my lab coat and canvas bags before discovering that I had ran out of bleach; went all the way to the supermarket without realising it was sabbathEaster Sunday. And no, there was no high nor crash following that thanks to my messed up sleeping cycle.

Piled Higher and Deeper, the xkcd especially for graduate students

Monday: Drove to the old house to mow the lawn, boring except the part when I had to mentally calculate a 2 stroke mixture

Sorry but no photos, I was way too relaxed and perhaps lazy for it.

Anyway thanks for reading, at least there will be a (good-ish) song in the end as a reward.



P.S. I have always meant to catch up on viewing Guren Lagann but did it reallt come out in 2007? Unbelievable.

World peace is here

Updated on 10/04/12; replaced the video with the first version from the author (or singer). Essentially the same.

Did I mention there was not a single black character in Hokuto no Ken?

Farewell 2012

Fitting song for the occasion, taken from a post that I started 2 years ago but never finished.

No, that's not the worst thing. I have recently decided to use Evernote again. After logging into my old account I found a couple of todo lists I wrote back in March this year. Sadly, NOTHING on that list has been completed yet.

Seriously, 2011 went in a blur. I have sorted of managed to finish a degree and contemplating another but my life is not going anywhere as we speak. I hope 2012 will bring some much needed changes.

名無し

歌おう
今 风にのって
遥か远い あなたのもとへ
いつか空は
ひとつに繋がる
渡っていける あなたのもとへ

Carry on, carry on

泣いたって、笑って、憎んだって愛して
生きていこう

This blog is not dead, not even close to that.

With Apologies to Rebecca Black

I am sorry for the awful comments I have made in public or private about your mis-understood masterpiece Friday as well as reporting your music video on YouTube for child abuse. I was fooled by assumptions and failed to see the connection at all until fate led me to listen to the song Baby by Justin Beiber three times in a row last night.






Please accept my most sincere apologies, I will queue outside my nearest music store when your new single/album comes out.

Tomorrow I will hold a bottle against the sun

if the weather is good and the following is true:

"Tonic water will fluoresce under ultraviolet light, owing to the presence of quinine. In fact, the sensitivity of quinine to ultraviolet light (UV) is such that it will visibly fluoresce in direct sunlight."

LOL

Never been a fan of U2 at any time, however one must appreciate Bono's guts for appearing in a video that plays satire on the fundamental hypocrisy of showbiz.

Shtarker: Too bad about all the dead movie stars.

Siegfried: Yes. What will we do without their razor-sharp political advice.

And with late happy turkey day to everybody:D

Random Bits of Information

Suffice to say, I am very busy right now with everything in life trying to strangle me. More posts are in the pipeline, and expect frequent updates once I am out of this tar pit.

In the meantime I can make up for the lack of music in recent posts.

End Title Nostalgia

Performed by The Warsaw Philharmonic, perfected by Yoko Kanno

Yeah, the 7/7 live was more than a year ago, time surely flies...

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

The end of my undergraduate degree is not "in sight", it is here to be felt.

On Monday there was a exam review tutorial which went so well that I became somewhat depressed towards the end since it ended so abruptly.  We shared some food and drink in the end, and one of our tutors even baked miniature cupcakes for us with cheeky messages and self-promotion attached, bravo!

 Rachel is the nicest person I have ever met

Then a friend organised a shared lunch on Wednesday which was good fun filled with nice food, bad jokes and photos with stupid faces.

Thanks to all the awesome people I met at uni, you have been an inspiration to me.

Apparently Grafton campus will become a mini-limbo from next week on with construction, and with all my exams in either City or Tamaki today will be the last time for me to be on Grafton campus in a long time. I went to the last undergraduate lecture, which had a disappointingly low turnout. 

Well, they totally missed out on Graeme Finlay's review session which could not get any better.

After the lecture I printed my last assignment after adding some finishing touches while laughing at my friend's ineptness in starting a lab report that was due on Wednesday. I then went to the aforementioned tutor to talk about exams before going home on a bus which I managed to catch just in time.

Yup, I know the bus stop outside Auckland hospital has always had some construction on during the semester and the bus time display has been having issues before it suddenly disappeared overnight. Nevertheless I was able to check real-time bus arrivals on the web via maxx.co.nz, with the stoo number 1028. If you need an idea for Christmas gifts, I highly recommend getting your loved ones smartphones, which will transform the way they go about your daily lives. :P

Anyway, the rest of the day was spent on daydreaming, eating melon-flavored ice cream, reading RA Weinberg's cancer bio on my kindle to the realisation that everything I thought to have learned from a semester's work in cancer biology is already summarised in the first fifteen pages of this great textbook.

Another few changes that happened to my life this semester:

• Craccum magazine and talkback radio have quit my life entirely. The former due to lack of time and the latter because my new phone did not have a usable FM module and I am too lazy to get a standalone FM receiver. I did manage to discover the infamous ND magazine for the medics and found them good read for they have absolutely no serious content.
• No more new books/games/movies/etc before I could clear out my existing pile. I have too much property and I still have too much after actively trying to downsize for much of the year. 
• I have been wearing boots for so long that regular shoes are no longer comfortable; I wore my suede sneakers today for a change and my ankles almost broke down after a short climb uphill to home. 
• Takeaway lunch became a regular feature of my routine, especially the chicken wrap and pork turnovers from the bakery on Park road. Spending on food did not help with my wallet however it had a spectacular effect on my wilingness to study, and I could have not made to every single lecture this semester without sustenance.
• I actually began to enjoy reading journal articles; some reviews are so well written that they answer a many lectures' worth of questions in mere minutes. Note it was before I bought my kindle and this statement is the cause, not result. 
• Ever since my first year I realised it is possible to go into any lecture without being asked who you are. However, I did not begin to informally audit lectures till this semester for a paper I could not take due to timetable clashes. Some of my new friends in class were shocked to find that I am not actually enrolled in the course, despite turning to lectures regularly, answered a bunch of questions and even prepared a presentation in front of the class. Looking back, I really should have done this earlier, especially in the first semester when I had a huge gap between my morning and afternoon lectures. I have already made loose plans with a friend to co-appear in random undergraduate lectures next year to make full use of our time.
• Cellphone bills skyrocketed, partly due to the $20 mobile broadband which I could not live without anymore, but most of it is actually due to text messages and calls to friends. Next year I will consider going on account, 3GB data per month for $40 is just too good to be missed. 
• I am a happier and more sociable person in the second half of 2010. It is true that I still get the occasional bouts of depression and anger, however I am doing much better than before like I said in several previous posts.It is time to believe that you are having a positive effect on others; even if they don't seem to reciprocate your feelings, it does not imply that you are abandoned by the world.

It seems that people only came out of their shell and began to know each other before they are about to get on their own ways, and I shall be grateful that I am definitely heading back to the same place next year as a postgraduate student, hopefully for my BSc Honours. Meanwhile, I should get ready for my exams which are both close (first one on the 28th of this month) and clumped (three exams in four days, huh).

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

Finally a little update to the kindle post I made last week.

Apparently I overlooked the fact that my Kindle DX is the international version (serial number starts with B0005) and actually has free wireless service in NZ. I was not able to use the browser due to some problem with region settings but finally managed to get it working.

It is a very generous for amazon to provide free 3G web access; it cost them US$0.12 per MB transmitted in the US and probably more for my AT&T powered Kindle to roam here. Would I use my Kindle DX to surf the web more regularly? Well no, and there are technical reasons apart from being unwilling to abuse Amazon's generousity: The browser on 2.5.x firmware is poorly coded in Java; it uses an obscure rendering engine that is not suited to large screens and probably does not render most web pages correctly anyway. It is a "nice to have feature", however Kindle 3 is much better in terms of browsing websites.

In more flattering note, I have managed to jailbreak the system to replace the stock Caecilia font with sans-serif Droid Fallback which is much sharper and easier to read, especially for the (ridiculously) smaller font sizes. This also brings the much needed CJK language support.(Not needed for K3 which support CJK characters out of the box, with some rightfully ugly Korean font)

The default screensavers are a mixed bag, which has since been replaced by my favorite paintings converted to the Kindle format.

The jailbreak is well documented and very easy to carry out, if you are keen please find instructions here, however take full note that this may brick your kindle and Amazon will not be happy when they find out.

I have attempted to use the kindle as a classroom tablet (very good, however you cannot take notes with pdf files) and read under direct sunlight(bad idea, the white borders had too much glare)I am also experimenting with the root shell access and see if I could get more from the device. Right now everything makes me want to actually learn Linux, did you know that you can manipulate people with shell commands?

With Summer on your Doorsteps

Officially summer did not begin till the end of November, meanwhile we can listen to Hisaishi's brilliant composition and hope for the best.



I have been very busy but calm at the same time, life is so much easier if you focus on nothing but the road ahead of you. 

The Music of Our Time

56k warning: This is a video heavy post and I recommend a fast internet connection (with some dedicated reading/listening time) to make the most of it. 

Maybe it is just me, but certain tunes always remind me of a bygone era. Here I have complied a small list of songs for each year since 2000. Some titles included here may be of rather poor taste and rather embarrassing, yet my memory remains unapologetic.

1997

WANDS - 世界の終わりまでは/Till the World's End

Assuming you grew up in the 90s, your life is not complete without Slam Dunk. I mean it,full stop

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

1998

Ricky Martin - La Copa de la Vida

While not a real fan of any competitive sports, I am still able to polymorph into a hooligan every for years for just for the FIFA World Cup. I guess this is where everything started.

Nevertheless, if I could only choose one Ricky Martin song to listen to for the rest of my life I'd go for Linvin la Vida Loca; for HG.

:-D

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

1999

Bee Gees - Melody Fair

Dad gave me a (rather flash back then) Onkyo brand CD/MD player for 10th birthday and some albums that only people of his age would be interested in. I had no alternative and ended up listening to a lot of doo-wop, jazz and pop standards, many songs I am still fond of.

By the way, the movie in which the song had an honourable mention was fortunate to have been filmed before the Katakana plague of the 90s set in. While Melody will always be cherished as 小さな恋のメロディ, poor kids nowadays have to watch stuff like ロード・オブ・ザ・リング(I shall refrain from any attempt to pronounce or it might give me a heart attack.).

Another twist of the story is the device itself, which had MD player failures every six months. We had it repaired several times under the warranty but eventually gave up after the third claim.  Never bought any Onkyo equipment again.

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

2000

Bon Jovi - It's My Life.

This one is especially notable because of the music video above. Admittedly, I have seen no movies back then and it totally blew my mind. It took me years to realise they ripped the idea off Run Lola Run. Well, I can forgive their deadly sins for the music.

Also, I have not met any Bon Jovi fan in years, not a single soul.

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

2001

Jay Chou - 安静/Silence

Jay is probably the last M-Pop (no, he does not do R&B) musician I have paid some attention to. He continued to produce exceptional songs in the upcoming years however his second and third album will always be my personal favourites.

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

2002

Avril Lavigne - Sk8er Boi

Fast and catchy, something that suits pubescent teens. It is actually of little relevance to my life but somehow got imprinted into my mind every time I think of 2002. Maybe whoever in charge of the student TV back in BBI played it too often.

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

2003

Chisa Yokoyama et al - 夢の続き/Lasting Dream

For some time between 2002-2004, my best friends all belonged to this Sakura Taisen fan club. Looking back it is kind of scary since many of them are Takarazuka fans in heterosexual disguise. I spend most of my time not caring about the theme but talking to whatever normal people present and trolling the lesbos.

To this day people from the group still make up over 50% of people on my MSN contact list, although many of them never appear to be online. I remember one, to whom I had a rather exciting conversation with one day only to find her blocking me from the next day, still have not figured out why but I'd probably blame PMS.

Folks, I don't know where are you or what are you doing, but I appreciate everything you did for me:

Thanks to V-gun for listening to my pointless rants.

Thanks to legato for sending me all the episodes of Last Exile, although I never had time to watch it.

Thanks to toby for cheering me up at the hard times, I wish you will find your dreamed one soon.

Thanks to xephon who kept contact with me till this day. I pass through your city almost every year without stopping and I really hope to meet you again some day.

Thank you all.

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

2004

L'arc~en~ciel - Ready Steady Go

My aptitude for Anime peaked around this time and my selection became rather Anime-centric. I would not normally listen to L'arc~en~ciel or any Visual-kei band but this song was in the first FMA anime series. So be it. 

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

2005

Angela Ammons - Always getting over you

It was a rather pleasant time. I transferred to another school and everything appeared to be on an upward track. My interests also shifted and I was once again, back in love with easy listening mainstream pop.

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

2006

Kuribayashi Minami - Shining☆Days

Things were still holding out fine and I decided to give Anime one more chance. Rather than following new series on a weekly basis, I bought several completed series and watched all episodes in one sitting during the winter holidays.

Turns out my selection was rather good: Mai-Hime, Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG, Speedgrapher and Cowboy Bebop. Nevertheless by the end I was kind of turned off by too much Anime goodness, knowing that I will never be the old fully-fledged otaku again. I still watch occasionally but mostly moved on.

P.S. Had to copy and paste that star, why some songs must contain un-typable symbols?

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

2007

Groove Coverage - She

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

2008

Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue

Dr Colin Quilter introduced country music to me, an genre that I had previously neglected. Above all, country music reinforced my reactionary tendencies, and Johnny Cash convinced me that it is feasible to do drugs and get away with it.

Taylor Swift came into the picture a bit later but just like Jay Chou, she is doing a fine job albeit on something different, certainly not country.

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

2009

Laura Marling - New Romantic

It was all a blur, all I remember is inebriation, truancy and melancholic British love songs.

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

2010

Sukima Switch - 全力少年/Boys with All Our Might

澱んだ景色に答えを見つけ出すのはもう止めだ!
濁った水も新しいひかりですぐに透み渡っていく

積み上げたものぶっ壊して　身に着けたもの取っ払って
幾重に重なり合う描いた夢への放物線
紛れもなく僕らずっと全力で少年なんだ
セカイを開くのは僕だ
視界はもう澄み切ってる

Stop seeking answers in the stagnant scenery!
Right now a new light passes through the muddy water

Destroy the things that have piled up
Get rid of the things that weight you down
Riding a parabola of many dreams
We're definitely always going to be boys with all of our might
I will be the one to open up the world
My eyes also become clear

Finally, getting back on terra firma. Looking back I wish I had done things differently, but it is all of this big thing called life.

In other news, today marks my 9th year living in New Zealand. Still lovin' it.

I must not panic already

A piece of  advice I often give to others but rarely heed well myself

It would be overt generalisation to say that men are incapable of multitasking, but maybe it is good to be taken with a grain of salt. I don't handle stress well and I always knew it. The mere thought of a looming deadline(still below the horizon but somehow visible) is enough to drive me mad.

Well, it is just an one page abstract, how much harder could it get?

And I must not forget about music.

Break Break Break

Sylvie Vartan, check her out if you have not already, one of the under-appreciated belles in the anglosphere.

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

The first half of semester went so fast and the two week break is already here before I realised. I have managed to kept the good progress from last semester and actually tried not to get freaked out by assignments/tests, etc. 

In addition to the four MEDSCI papers that I am enrolled in, I also elected to audit a BIOSCI paper which I could not enroll in due to timetable issues. Looking back, what I really should have done last semester was

1. Swap MEDSCI201 for the protein structure and function paper once I have been to the intro lab, which was the sole reason I took that paper.
2. Audit BIOSCI356, it would helped me a lot with cancer and I had nothing to do before that lecture anyway. Still, better to realise your mistakes late than never.

 

Highlight of this semster: Queenie. I still remember the first time I tried to talk to you which was met by your utter indifference. Still, you are the most intelligent and pretty female I have met in a while. All the best and I hope you will live in a grand house with your Great Danes. 

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

In my continued self-pursuit, I have planned to attain my ideal weight in one year's time (By the end of August 2011). Surprisingly I am a lot closer to the goal than I thought; according to my not so accurate scale it is only 15-16kgs away. I'd be ready to call a partial success if I weight 80k or less by the end of the year.

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

Quick Recap on movies viewed recently:

(500) Days of Summer: Smart and quirky, Zooey Deschanel Summer is really the type that I would fall for. The ending is rather depressing, but this is life. 

An American Carol: Some scenes are pretty funny, but overall too much stereotyping and overt jokes to make it more worthy than direct-to-video stuff.

Angels and Demons: I liked it more than Da Vinci code, the same goes for the books and the movies. Overall the plot stayed faithful to the original Dan Brown, nevertheless some rather audacious scenes (i.e. the free fall) did not make it to the screen which is a major setback. Still a very much viewable piece for conspiracy theory lovers, although the ending may be somewhat of an anti-climax.

Good luck

In Loving Memory of Izumi Sakai

"The theme song of the lost decade" according to almighty Wikipedia

The clip above is from the last and only live tour by ZARD, Budokan, 2004. The group is no longer active following the death of Sakai Izumi, the lead vocalist in 2007.

She was one of the dying breed of versatile and simple singers like Harry Nilsson, who rarely performed live and had a modest life in relative obscurity despite her album sold in millions.It is hard to recognise that the world has been going on for over three years since Sakai passed away. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2006 with distant metastasis to her lungs. She is immediately hospitalised but sadly perished in February of the year after(not directly to cancer, nevertheless attributable) at the mere age of 40.

 R.I.P. We miss your voice

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

Back when the news of her death broke, I was particularly offended by a comment to the meaning of "she deserved what she had got because she had a venereal disease" Excuse me, HPV can be transmitted sexually, but I am ready to thrust my pitchfork if you carry on to imply (without evidence) that "she is a slut".

I had to relive my anger today as two different lecturers mentioned HPV vaccine and the problems of distributing the vaccine among the vulnerable population. Most resistance, surprisingly, came from parents, who reckons that vaccination will make their daughters have less fears of sexual intercourse, which of course might lead to another assortment of undesirable things.

How could a mature person think like that is truly beyond me. What kind of a cold-blooded sadist put their self-righteous moral standards before life and death?

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

As a firm believer of free will, I have no basis to judge people on their freedom of choice in their lives, including their sexual orientation. Over time, I have observed the fact that the most vocal homophobes are fags in denial.

On the other hand, accuse me for double standards if you have to, I do have issues with some people in the LGBT subculture. They can be roughly divided into two groups:

- The reactionary type who, upon any constructive criticism, react with the assumption the world is biased against them. For example Chris Carter MP, who with great zeal defended his right to excessive spending on taxpayer's tabs, all because he is subject to unfair public scrutiny due to his own homosexuality.

I can see his logic, which is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as he continues to give gay people a bad name

- The disillusioned type who, following admission to their own homosexuality, took it as their license to promiscuity and irresponsibility. Or worse, to cause harm in innocent people.

Wake up, most developed societies of the world are amply enlightened, as long as they live a moral life like the most other people.

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

Irrelevant good news: Froyo is coming to Milestone at last, minus built-in tethering and a few other bits but those wont be missed.

I have been using andriod phone for a while and I have little to complain about. The only thing is the behavior once "low memory" warning kicks in: sms will drop without warning, sync functions will cease and other weird things happen, most of them without any indication that is it related to low memory. So the phone goes into voluntary brain spasm once available NAND storage gets below 20MB, and the situation gets somewhat paradoxical since the 20MB mark is set to prevent loss of data but data will be lost anyway.....

Travel Light

Music of Evangelion 2.22

The producers were probably lazy on the music front. While they did put in some original scores, the four songs featured are not exactly new.

Theme Song: Utada Hikaru - Beautiful World (PLANITb acoustica mix)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0czubAn8A
A straight remix from the last release, they couldn't have got much easier than that. It is slightly better than the first version but that is it.

Shinji vs. Bardiel: 森山良子/Moriyama Ryoko - 今日の日はさような/Kyou no Hi wa Sayonara
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_qxs_jMsUE
A 60s pop hit that is better known as a graduation song or the Japanese equivalent of Auld Lang Syne. The juxaposition of a mellow tune with gory visuals is a good idea, however it did not work because there is not enough tension to build prior to that scene.

Shinji vs. Zeruel: 赤い鳥/Akaitori - 翼をください/Wings to Fly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34JsHTl9oFU
The same idea, better executed. My rant is only because I don't like this song, it has been used in so many different productions that it had become stale and lame. Did I mention that even Susan Boyle did a cover?

Mary vs. Unnamed Third Angel: 水前寺清子/Suizenji Kyoko - 三百六十五歩のマーチ/March of 365 Steps

This is Mari's song as she drives Unit-05 forward; unfortunately it never made to the soundtracks due to copyright disputes. It belongs to the same league of j-pop standard of the previous two, however with some enka flair. My personal favorite, it effectively presents Mary's character in less than a minute.
Lyrics:
しあわせは　歩いてこない
Happiness does not fall from the sky
だから歩いて　ゆくんだね
Therefore we must walk towards it
一日一歩　三日で三歩
One step every day, three steps in three days
三歩進んで　二歩さがる
Three steps ahead, two steps back
人生は　ワン・ツー・パンチ
Life goes like one-two punch
汗かき　べそかき　歩こうよ
carry on with your sweat and tears
あなたのつけた　足あとにゃ
By the footprints you left behind
きれいな花が　咲くでしょう
Pretty flowers will bloom
腕を振って　足をあげて
Shake your wrist, raise your feet
ワン・ツー　ワン・ツー
One-two, one-two
休まないで　歩け　ソレ
Without a break, FOWARD!