a W a k 3 n | n G *

Thursday, September 29, 2005
3:18 AM

The Scar

its funny how a weeny match could draw a little blood
its funny how a little blood could rouse news to afar
its funny how new to afar could vivify care from you
its funny how care from you could pique a beep on my phone
its funny how a beep on my phone could awaken the depths of within

it was just a dinky message. maybe two.

but my dear, you made me feel like a jerk for the rest of last night
some things i can't kill. some things will never die

the voices in my head-

Wednesday, September 28, 2005
10:09 AM

Periods

i was playing for my division, jumping like a kangaroo and leaping like a toad across the courts while facing a very formidable ntu team when suddenly my face started menstruating.

it hadn't stopped bleeding, that hole beneath my chin worthy of 3 stitches. ah but i couldn't have that gargantuan gully sewn up, ridiculous as it may seem. a bleeding bloody stitch on a weekday 11pm costs $150 and 4 freebie hours.

one day whispers should liaise with the blood donation bank to save more lives. or at least come up with weeny flaps of pads that hook around the ears.

the voices in my head-

Sunday, September 18, 2005
8:34 AM

Hair Pea Berth They

they say pictures paints a thousand words.

i say, just three.

a little convertible. a little license. and a little piece of legal driving.
safe legal driving.

friends dug from the lost earth.

the invitees and uninvitees or so they claim.

a 2 seater converting to a 6 in a blink of a switch.
convertible living to its name.

singing the forgotten and unforgetting the unsung

ice. cream. fondue.

i love my friends. i love making them happy. a day's treat and many thanks. but thanks thrown back to you my dears for making my girl so happy.

girl turned twenty. three words indeed, i love you.

the voices in my head-

Thursday, September 15, 2005
10:15 AM

Bash

i shudder to think what would have happened if i hadn't had my pals with me.

don't you ever dare, ever. do that to me again
choose. you can only have one at one time

the voices in my head-

Wednesday, September 14, 2005
10:07 AM

On Mess Initiation

2 pints 3 jugs 8 mugs 4 cans 3 shots on the record

and a major hangover.

the voices in my head-

Monday, September 12, 2005
7:12 AM

Those Days

the best of days are, undoubtedly in the worst of days

for it is in weary solitude that i remember those days. the solitary beginning quite abrupt. the weary end quite too, abrupt.

the voices in my head-

Sunday, September 11, 2005
7:51 AM

Army Half Marathon

teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original.

landmark experiments are being viewed as a major advance in the quest to achieve ultra-fast computers, inside which teleportation could provide a form of invisible "quantum wiring".
"In a quantum computer it's straightforward enough to move quantum information around by simply moving the qubits, but you might want to do things very quickly, so you could use teleportation instead," said Nist's Dr David Wineland.
Professor Rainer Blatt, of the University of Innsbruck, told BBC News Online: "This is a milestone.
"We are able to teleport in a deliberate way - that is, at the push of a button. This has been done before, but not in such a way that you can keep the information there at the end."
Professor Blatt's team, an Austrian-US group, performed the teleportation on calcium ions. The Nist team in Boulder, Colorado, used ions of the element beryllium.
Despite this and some differences in the experimental methods used by the two groups, both teams reached similar values of fidelity - around 0.75.
Fidelity is a measure of how well the quantum state of the second ion after teleportation resembles the original quantum state.
Commenting in an article published in Nature, physicists H Jeff Kimble and Steven Van Enk said: "These two experiments represent a magnificent confluence of experimental advances, ranging from precision spectroscopy and laser cooling.
"The fact that such diverse procedures performed so superbly in two separate laboratories attests to the flexibility and great potential of ion trapping for processing quantum information."

in a nutshell, teleportation promises to be quite useful as an information processing primitive, facilitating long range quantum communication (perhaps unltimately leading to a "quantum internet"), and making it much easier to build a working quantum computer. But science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so.

aha. but i have attempted this mystic art today my countrymen. and kudos to the green force that drives forth each year's Army Half Marathon in a bid to spark breakthroughs like these in the field of teleportation.
it was 11th of september 6:15am. recite rerecite and remember, for generations to come will mark this moment in the thick books of history. so 6:15am it was, when i was striding up Benjamin Sheares Bridge a step ahead of the other, and it happened.
my eyes were shut a wee moment longer than a flutter of an eye would occur, and i felt my noodle-like legs running in a hovering continuation. next thing i knew i was plunked at the junction off fort road, a good 2km from my distant end in the teleportive gateway.

behold the great scientist of modern times.

the voices in my head-

Sunday, September 04, 2005
9:06 AM

Oldies

i marvel at that bit of determination each elderly has in him. peppered with dots of black on limbs somehow imbued with an age of knowledge between the crests of crumpled skin, a crop of hair blazing a kingly white, and a face so magnificently indifferent even with the apparent pain each step is causing them, these elderlys take hardships in much stride.
and the thunderous irony much as i could have witnessed a pattayan prostitute tasting wine amidst the UN council, i heard two little boys complaining how life was so very horrible with so horribly much homework upon a most horrible holiday, half spitting across each other at a pre-pubertified pitch with this old man limping by, cutting across them, bent over. a step, and another, and another, somehow deaf to the little wreck the boys kicked up. or maybe too preoccupied with simply the steps to notice anything else.

so now you know. as we complain about everything everyone anything anyone, oldies just mind their steps.

i love my grandma.

the voices in my head-

Friday, September 02, 2005
8:46 AM

8 bamboos and such

its been a most horrible week. i tell you, nothing beats the simplicity of losing the trust, passion and camaraderie in a clean swipe of an unfounded finger.

the friday was marked with the end of ex falcon. a sigh of relief as the kuey lapis layers of camouflage cream and dirt is scraped off my face. the tuesday, wednesday, thursday, my first tour as an outfield commander of a node; more like an outdoor adventure i must admit, with the endless experiments of scrambled eggs and chilli tuna upon a bunsen burner, SAF's (in)famous curry noodles dotted with spiced beef cubes off a mess tin, or better still, my platoon offering me chilled coffee out of a cleverly stowed away ice box amidst a baking day atop sarimbun pt.76

yet horrible week you ask, why so. horribliness ain't a mark of singular cellular events, but a beginning of horribriety that bites deep. and gets stuck beneath the chest, a lingering fume of horriborigity that snakes up my nostrils whenever a flashing scene of a most horrible monday night creeps upon the back of my mind.

mistake on my part i admit. i should never have basked in the sunlight of attention derived from the crucible of card tricks, mind games or yes, even those sets of unprofessional bridge from the old days. the unique gift of reading one's mind, concocted with the most nimble fingers trained from age 3, brews a potion so dangerously enticing. i could never have resisted a temptation to irritate xiaowei with the simplest royal flush suit off a random pack or wow my girl ticking 4 aces out of a deck. it hadn't been extraordinary feats of an ordinary card but rather an ordinary act of an extraordinary hand.

so what say me when an unfounded finger points at the left of 13 tiles so marvellously placed. what say me when i've churned up a history where cockups of a tile or more occurs within my set once a time or more. what say me when i've had a goddess worth of lady's luck in the previous winds. and what say me when i've left an yeti's footprint of an impression where i'm the first to displace and last to place 19 evil stacked cubes within a square of trust?

to have had licked clean that silly lan shop's owner cashier tray, to have had snicked the this and that off a shop (okay xiaowei. the these-s and those-s), to have had a illicit business in a thriving vcd reign back in the sec sch horny days, to have all the little money spinning out of nowhere yes i rule. but come on, to cheat my friends with 76 pairs of evil cubes and laughing alongside them?

what comforts me greatly though is the uncelebrated ownership of that unfounded finger. it belonged not to either one of us four within the square of trust, but an elderly one who had happened to be there, seen something she didn't like, seen someone she couldn't like, and for whom i thank God for. as it had been a stranger, a stranger who knew me not, who felt me not.

and i tell you my friend. my heart burnt in the most intense gratitude when you spoke. "i've known him for so many years, he wouldn't have done that..." in the face of apparent adamant evidence. words off a friend so forceful so sure so determined, that somehow i felt dear mond, the sum of every bit of horribliness, horribriety and horriborigity was worth it all even if it were just for that mark of trust. that mark of friendship.

deceive me not though, we're humans after all. and i spoke to you after that little incident that no matter how you guys did say you believed you trusted you knew, there would always be this little wee part of a human heart that fought the goodness. maybe its the ego, or the pride one might say, but i can't stand having a character flaw. i can't take a flawed character. and i detest having a character flaw floor my character. so i shall borrow a little history from '99 and kill each rising bit of doubt with the eradication of even the possibility to doubt.

it was 6 years ago. not the age of 19 evil cubes, nor even the era of hoops and balls. it was the fanatical archmage craze, an online utopian world of strategy and tactics. i was, by some wild skill and unmatched luck, racing neck to neck with my best friend to creep into the world's top 10 players amidst more than 20000 registrants. (yes mum, now you know what i've been doing on screen back then, not just porn and incessant uh-ohs off icq) and it ain't just bout the glamour of being imbued in the archives of archmage's very own hall of fame that drew so much time off our lives, but the prize money of US$800 which was a very big fat hairy deal back then.

good things always come to an end, and you might just have guessed it right. two days before Armageddon marking the end of the game cycle, my best friend's account was deleted. what other direction could that wretched unfounded finger lay upon, for it were only i who knew his password.
i saw a beautiful hazelnut oval pair evolved into circles of an indescribable emotion. part sadness, part disappointment, part fury and a tinge of confusion. what say me could, dear xinping, i could only offer silence for silence beholds the universal language of a shrug as a smile beholds the universal language of amicability, yet as if an innocent silence was skulking in a womb, that silence brought around not resolve among what could have been the best of friends, but a feigned mutual nod of understanding that lasted no more than the sunset.
i played archmage no more.

it was only four years after that i met xinping once more on court. not with a lawyer with that horrible white wig, or a judge with that wooden little hammer, but a ball in his hand, a hoop above his very yellow hair. and perhaps a little later than i had hoped for, a smile streaked across his face, with that somewhat native beautiful hazelnut oval pair of eyes there as i remembered them, of which i could have sworn deserved a king's homecoming.

but for now, i shall play mahjong no more. for it was upon that horrible monday night that i saw the familiar circles of an indescribable emotion. part sadness, part disappointment, part fury and a tinge of confusion on you mingmao, and yes one might argue i could wait another four years. because we could still make it in time for my marriage, but i rather not.

i rather not.

the voices in my head-