Clouded in mist

damianov over at Voyages in Eternity tagged me with this so I’ll go ahead and give my contributions.

Rules

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

There’s already been another rather similar post here in the past so I’ll try to list something different this time.

1. I don’t own any pets. I used to long for a dog when I was about six or seven years old, but my parents were adamant that I was not up to the task of caring for them. Today, I think they might be right after all, seeing as to how between school and gaming, I’ve very little free time.

2. I failed my basic driving theory test and couldn’t be bothered to take it again. I know driving is an important life skill, but I can’t realistically afford to purchase an automobile in the next 10 years. Cars here in Singapore are extremely costly as they get slapped with a huge tax.

3. I’ve never got to travel much and the only places I’ve been to are the UK (with my school) and Indonesia (with my family). I don’t come from a very well off family and we usually don’t have too much to spare at the end of the year.

4. I love long vehicle rides that allows me to gaze out the window and enjoy the scenery (or the urban crowd rushing about here) while listening to music. It’s extremely relaxing and I often feel reluctant to get off at the end of the journey.

5. While on the topic of transportation, I can never read nor watch a video while traveling in a land vehicle. It gives me a headache.

6. I frequently carry a notebook (the paper kind) in my bag although I almost never write anything in it. The current one has been with me for a few months now and it’s still blank.

7. I hate waiting for the elevator and would very much rather take the stairs as long as it’s about six stories or less. I guess I could describe myself as being a rather restless person because standing around and waiting for something just irritates me, and I’d rather be doing something every moment. Doesn’t matter what, just anything!

8. I selectively eat only from a small variety of food, and am often hesistant to try something new. On the rare occasion that I discover something new I enjoy, I’ll order the same food repetitively for a long period of time, up to months, before I get tired of it.

I don’t have 8 people that I want to pass this to, but these are the people I’ll like to tag: Clifton, Leander, RailGun, Richie, Stargrace, Gothun. I’m going to break the 4th rule and not comment on everyone’s blog directing them to this post as that’d amount to spamming.

Carrying the ball on from Richie, here are 5 things about me that might not be common knowledge among all my peers. I’ll just note them briefly because if I were to let my thoughts flow freely, it might end up rather philosophical.

1. Introverted.
You might not be able to deduce this from my behavior in class, but I’m introverted. The Myers-Briggs Type Indication classifies my personality as ‘ISTP’.

ISTP stands for: Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving. A detailed explaination can be found here.
If you are curious about yourself, the test can be taken here.

2. Loves movie/game soundtracks and trailers.
I’ve a rather decent collection of soundtracks and my favorites are those orchestral and vocal ones.

I can’t really explain my love for trailers well, but I guess this has a connection with me spending plenty of hours wandering around watching demos and trailers on those home theatre display sets.

3. I’ve difficulty sleeping the afternoon.
No matter how tired I’m, once its past 10am, I’m usually unable to fall asleep. Even if I had the aircon turned on, I still feel warm and uneasy.

If I do manage to catch some sleep, I’ll wake up feeling stretched and having this weird feeling in mouth that is kind of like waking up in the morning and your teeth screaming at you to be brushed. The feeling remains even if I try brushing them.

Either way, I hate it.

4. Dislikes applying/equating a monetary value to anything
One thing I loathe about this society is that everything can be equated to a certain monetary value. I simply can’t bear to charge a friend no matter what is being exchanged.

Sometimes, this results in me giving away an item or a service more than I’m willing, but still, I can’t bring myself to accept a single cent for it.

5. I’m a gnome!
Tinkering and collecting things, that’s me! If it wasn’t for my height, a gnome would describe me perfect. I just simply adore collecting and keeping anything. Just like an invading army, there is nothing more fun than looting; grabbing anything that isn’t bolted down, and then everything that is. But rest assured, I certainly wouldn’t pocket anything from your residence if I was invited, although I make no promises about tearing things apart.

A noun used to describe an excessively pixellated image of an object that renders it unrecognisable. This effect often occurs from an image recording device of unsuitable quality, or user error.

1) That webcam is bad, it makes me look like a pixel monster.
2) Bill is bad at photography, all his subjects turn into pixel monsters.

The term pixel monster was first coined while I was experimenting with a Creative webcam about a month ago over at a friend’s place. I was rather skeptical about the webcam’s performance and asked if “is this thing good or would it make me look like a pixel monster?”. Pixel monster was thus born. Truth be told, it did make me look like a pixel monster of sorts and it had a 2 - 3 sec delay when testing it on MSN Messenger locally.

The above definition was written by my friend, Leander, over at The Open-Source Conversationalist and was submitted to urbandictionary.com. Unfortunately, the entry was rejected, probably because the penetration of the term in the general population was nonexistent and its use only limited to within my small circle of friends.

In the Internet age, such a term warrants an image to compliment it. It was quickly decided over the next few days that the Pokemon, Missing No., resembled the description perfectly because it was literally a chunk of garbled pixels, and something most people should be familiar with. However, we never actually got down to the process and it wasn’t until today that, after crossing a screenshot of the appearance of Missing No today that we got down to the task, which resulted in the above picture.

With the increasing popularity of camera embedded phones, and the quality of image most of them produce, coupled with the relative inexperience of most people when composing a picture, there is no better term to describe the output than a pixel monster.

Dropped by Borders and Kinokuniya to pick up some reading material for the upcoming holidays. Borders actually housed some official Dungeon and Dragons material, including the main rule books and scatters of the various campaign-specific ones.

Surprisingly, they’ve a pretty good collection of DnD novels at Borders, but most series were lacking one or two for the complete set, which made it really fustrating. What worst was that for most of them, the first in series was unavailable, rendering the rest of the series unreadable. Hit Kinokuniya up next.

I’ve always loved the terminals at Kinokuniya which allows you to search for and locate specific books. Imo, all bookshops should implement a similar system. It’s a lot more convenient than to browse through shelves of dusty tomes looking for something you already have in mind. The system was a bit unresponsive and there was a 2sec or so delay between hitting “print” (for a map to the book location) and the actual printing process, so I tapped it a few more times, and wrecked the system, which then started vomiting out volumes of the same map, while the other controls remained frozen.

I had a hard time deciding between reading on Elaine Cunningham’s Swords & Songs series, R.A. Salvator’s Elminster or his Drizzt Do’Urden series. After some deliberating and tossing of a few dices, I settled on the following:

• The Introvert Advantage (great understanding of myself and would be something I would keep referencing against)
• Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky (always wanted this book and could never locate it previously. Oddly, one copy was available)
• The Dark Elf Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore (which was basically the first 3 books in the Drizzt Do’Urden series)

Really wanted to purchase The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins too, but was already choking up $108~ for the above purchase. Would have to wait until next time.

It feels really good when you can google up your own nick, and have a list of results exactly about you, and only you. In a way, it’s like writing one’s own path into the books (web) of history. Also, if you were to google up the words ‘Thermonuclear Exchange’, the first result would be this site. Nothing much content wise though, but then again, there ain’t much content on this site to begin with either.

Was wondering if the “fog” outside last night at approx 2200h was haze or due to some bloke playing with laterns (mooncake festivle here atm) , but apparantly I was about it being haze, as this morinng’s news confirmed that the PSI peaked at 130 early this morning. Here’s a picture I took last night so you can judge how bad it really was. The health advise was to remain indoors (duh) but that doesn’t affect me, since I’m at home the majority of times anyway :P.

Haze over Singapore on 6/10/06 2254h

As with every festival, the highlight is always food. I’m enjoying my mooncakes :P.