Chunk of updates, and my beautiful new Big Cat.

Well updates updates updates....ok nothing much to say, cos it's just work work work. The only highlight is an essay which is due this coming Friday, but has been written for more than a week. Constantly refining it. Won't talk about it cos it's gonna put everyone to sleep. I'm expecting an A+ for this one haha... or at least I hope I can get an A+... Albeit my first.

Anyways, a simple summary is that personal identity is nothing more than stringed-up memories engaged in the process of losing old memories and gaining new ones. This implies what we deem as the soul, is the same for every single person. The "I" cannot persist beyond death, while the soul can. The soul being the basis upon which "I" can say "my" experiences of the world belong to "me", yet it is, being the foundation, superior to the self and is unindividuated.

Ok, I spoke abit excessively. It's a philo of mind essay, 3.5k words. One of the strongest papers I've ever written IMO, cos I normally write papers 1 day before, proofread twice and submit it. For this mind paper, I've revised the draft about 5 times already, inserting references and cleaning up arguments to make them clear, etc.etc. And prob gonna keep doing it for the next few days. Sthg like my Magnum Opus, albeit a little miserable at 3.5k words. It's definitely part of the book I plan to write.

Well work aside, one of the rare days I had a rest wuz Thurs, where we had a fun Pig Clan gathering!! Full strength!! welll.. almost. Anyways, we had a great time at Spageddies Paragon, pix r with Cindy, and it sorta doubled as a celebration for all e November babies, and it was great when everybody enjoyed mah surprise...thee extremely light chocolate cake, which was famous at spageddies.

We sang a birthday song, and took our bites at the cake, which was a perfect dessert. ^_^

Ktv after that was good too, been ages since we last sang, much less singing in a room. AND in a room, you can try all those crazy songs which you would never try in the hall. OK. maybe I'm the only one who did that, and tortured the eardrums of Wanz Sky and Sheen. Joined YH and Jess after, who went shoppety shopping, and I parted as they went for dinna.

Great day, great gathering. ^_^

Now after I'm done with all these deadlines, I'm also preparing for my hk trip! ^_^

Well everyone is prob amazed at why I'm going to hk when my exams are just around the corner.

Just as my parents are.

Well firstly, on my side of the equation, I've been utterly overworked in the past year, haven't really taken any breather. This is gonna be my first holiday in 14 months, the last one being tioman in Sep 06. I'm going there to just walk around and prob relax, and study a little, and yup. Depart on 18th Sunday, and fly back on 23 Fri afternoon, and my first paper is on 24th Sat 1pm.
Yesh, I'm not crazy. I'm just desperate for rest.

On the other side of the equation, one major pushing factor is that Clarisse is there on a biz trip. So I can accompany her while she's there. Ok honestly that's just half the reason. Her company's covered her hotel stay, a room to herself facing the harbour, at 300+ per night. PLUS. She can claim $xx for breakfast, $xx for lunch, and $xxx (o_O) for dinner everyday. Much much more than enough to feed the both of us very very good food. So, I only have to pay for an air ticket, or anything extra that we might wanna spend on.

And yup, while she's at work I'll be studying fer mah exams in da hotel room, or walking around the nice little city.

Well...a little side event is my parents were originally upset that I was going. But I got pretty pissed cos they somehow wanted to stop me from going when they haven't provided for me for eons now, not even when I most needed help back when I was a teenager. The only exception was that one-off gift when my dad got first prize in Toto. Now they wanna stop me from giving myself a break. Which I thought was pretty ridiculous, save for the fact that I still have blood ties with them. So somehow, Clarisse and I discussed, and we PR-ed the problem away. But still pretty upset at how they think they can interfere in my life when they didn't contribute much to where I am today. They should be glad that I'm still on good terms with them given their treatment of me in the past.

Ok...end of the glummy topic.

Random Pix time! well...actually only two.

The flowers which I bought for Clarisse 2 wks back, now sitting comfy in our Ikea vase. complete with pebbles and shells ^_^

There, don't call me lazy, I retook a nice pic of Tan Kim Seng fountain, as I passed it by on Friday. Background: It's built 12 years after the death of Tan Kim Seng, to commemorate his donations to the construction plans for the Singapore water works, which saw fresh water being brought to the town.

Okie.... And behold my new big cat.

The Leopard.
OS X 10.5 Leopard.

every version of os x is named after a big cat, and so was this new one which was launched on Oct 26. I spent some moolah to repair Cindy's iBook G4, and paid her a fair balance of market value, and invested extra to push the ram to 1.25gb (internal is 256megs.) And then I downloaded OS X, which took bloody 7 days for a mere 6.6gb, and installed it.

As borat would say, NICE. I LIKE.


Well considering it's been pretty messed up, I also bought some organic solvents from mah dad, to clean up the iBook. It's still got many scratches, and many missing or half-missing letters, but generally it's sparkling white ^_^

I actually bought some rub-on stencil letters with nice fonts, thinking of doing it over the missing keyboard letters, but realised that it was pointless as it won't really last. Besides, I couldn't clean off the half-missing or full letters using any solvent available at my dad's factory, so there isn't any point. To top it off, I'm geeky enough to type without seeing the keys, so the letterings are actually not very necessary, so I decided to leave it as it is.

Nice Leopard, with the Expose, reflective dock (it's really pretty, you have to witness it to believe it), and very friggin easy to use. If there's any time that the Mac should take over Windows as the operating system of choice, now is about the right time.

Wif Leopard, it's much more intuitive than before, and is also prettier than tiger (os x 10.4).


Browsing files is easy and very friggin pretty through cover flow. I'm so used to flippin thru my data, began with the iPhone, then in iTunes, now in the entire mac os x. You can basically browse files thru cover flow, and even scroll thru pdfs and play movie clips right in cover flow.

Not to mention, check out the reflective base... It's a streaming reflection of what's on top. Seamless I tell you. No lag whatsoever, even when it's running on quite an old processor, a G4 PPC 1.33ghz.

Numerous great features, including the fact that everything is so much faster than in windows. Pretty makes it twice as enticing.

I'm now learning to hack, in my free time, so I can put leopard on all 4 comps in my house. ^_^

I'm a happy Apple Fanboy now. But no, I'm still not blowing moolah to buy their hardware which is pretty often exorbitant.

By the way, we should all watch Ali G Indahouse, it's the first film by the Borat actor. It's nice.

R-E-S-T-E-C-P !!!