I, robot

Saw the movie I, Robot last night. I must admit, when I learnt that the storyline was not the same as the novel of the same name by Issac Asimov, I was a little disappointed. However, fortunately, the movie turned out to be quite entertaining. The special effects are just ideal for this type of movies. Essentially, the I, Robot series (“I, Robot”, “Pebble In The Sky”, and “The Stars, Like Dust”)was more of a detective series rather than conventional sci-fi dealing with technology or alien life forms.

Continue reading →

Small world

Was reminded once again today how small this world of ours is becoming, day by day.

A colleague of mine who is currently in Athens watching the actions in the Olympic Games was spotted last night on local – well, international actually – TV! She was among the Singaporean supporters there, rooting for their women table tennis team.

The corollary to all this is that when you are attending any public events where there will be TV cameras, better make sure you behave. Otherwise you may be caught on TV and become famous, or infamous as the case may be. 🙂

Common knowledge

Yesterday on the way home, as the bus wound its way through the wooded parts on the perimeter of the NUS campus, it suddenly occurred to me that we are now into the the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar. For those not familiar with Chinese traditions, the seventh month is the the Hungry Ghosts Festival. According to folklore, the King of Ksitigarbha opens the gates of Hell on the first day of the seventh lunar month to set hungry spirits free to roam the world of the living for a month. Spooky…

Continue reading →

Irony

Heard a statement on the local TV regarding Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) recently. The basic gist was that it is because of the practice of TCM that the Chinese as a race has been able to survive till the modern age.

Could not help to think of the flip-side of this statement. By simple extension, isn’t it an even greater miracle that all the other races, deprived of this brilliant Chinese technology, can survive till now?? Really says a lot about the worth (or lack of) of TCM in this context, doesn’t it!?

Image of The Truth

Two views on interpretation on “truth”, whatever that may be.

“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”

Albert Einstein

“If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.”

Elizabeth Bowen

Pack up!

Tomorrow is finally the big day, for moving house that is!

However, still quite a bit of packing to do. 🙁 Also, once I am over at the new place, probably won’t have broadband immediately, or telephone for that matters, so will be silent for a while. Lastly, it’s been raining cats and dogs these past few days. Well, can only pray…

ps. Have been steadily working on the migration to b2evolution. I think I am finally getting the hang of it. 🙂

Thinking out loud

Some of the my considerations before choosing to switch from :mt: to a different blogging engine.

Currently, :mt: generates a static file for each post I publish (strictly speaking, actually this is a number > 1 since I use all of :mt:’s archiving features and each archiving method generates one file). On PHP-based systems, each post that is stored in the database is pulled out and reformatted on-the-fly appropriately depending on user requests. As a result, there is no delay in publishing. Furthermore, there is the option of publishing at a specific time.

Continue reading →