Thursday, October 25, 2007
At approximately 5 P.M. today, 25th October 2007, my cat Kiki passed away.
Our faithful companion for more than 11 years, she was both a source of great frustration and conversely, great happiness.
The frustration stems mostly from the fact that as she grew older, she began to defecate and vomit around the house more often. Though this was irritating to the extreme, it did not cause us to love her any less.
An oddball right from birth, she never openly liked us to stroke her or pet her and would bite us if we did. But despite her aggressiveness, she could not disguise the purring and playful manner in which she delivered her casual rebukes.
Here is a cat who is able to crack open bones with her teeth, yet can't bite us hard enough to draw blood? Seems pretty odd to me.
Kiki was a playful cat and often lost her balance while either playing with us, or entertaining herself. Many a times we have watched her fall off from the sofa or coffee table, pick herself up and walk away with a slightly hurt pride. But nevertheless, she retained her playfulness, right up till she got sick.
It began about three weeks ago, when she lost her appetite and refused to eat or drink. Over the course of a week, her skin began to turn from a healthy pink to a shade of sallow yellow. The vet's initial prognosis said that she was suffering from liver failure and prescribed a course of medicine for her, telling us that if she did not recover after taking the medicine, we should put her down for her own good.
During this period, she became very much attached to us and tried to spend as much time with us like never before. It was as if she knew that she did not have many days left and wanted to be with us more.
I never imagined it was possible for me to cry, seeing her sleep on my bed.
A week ago, she was admitted into Mount Pleasant Animal's Hospital and had an operation done to insert a tube into her throat in order for us to administer forced-feeding. But she was too weak to recover from all that, and passed on late today afternoon.
I have been dreading this day ever since she fell ill and now that she's really gone, I can't believe that it's real.
It is never easy to lose a member of the family.
Kiki, you have been a wonderful cat. Though I do not know if you were in pain throughout, but even if you were, you were very brave. It is too late to say this now, but we will always remember you and your place in our hearts will never be replaced.
Goodbye.
Monday, July 16, 2007
i have no idea how they accomplished this, but it's abso-fricking-lutely amazing.
p.s. for the clueless, it's tetris.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
at long last. after countless repetitions of bashing out python code and restarting the Zope server, i've finally managed to get my first ever Product to appear in the ZMI (Zope Management Interface).
well. one down, a few gazillion more to go. hurrah.
i'm not sure what to make of this. ever since monday, i've not been able to sleep past 9am without someone calling me to either arrange for an interview, or ask me for more details with regards to some information i requested from that particular company.
not that i'm exactly complaining, but it is somewhat of a stark contrast with my general lifestyle for the past few weeks or so where i lazed in bed till noon or sometimes even later, depending on what time i got into bed. usually somewhere between 4am to 7am.
so, sue me already.
moving along. plone.
what's it with wysiwyg tools for plone? till now, i've yet to see anything that looks remotely like a wysiwyg editor for plone interface designing. i really dread having to return to the days of bashing out html code in notepad.
*shudder*
Thursday, July 05, 2007
dammit. the spider clan ninjas in tairon are highly irritating. they're like, even worse than anything else i've seen in NG:S thus far, including the level bosses. i mean, first off, they come in group of threes AND they're highly agile. granted, their sword attacks do not break your blocking stance, but they do have this move whereby they get past your block, grab you and stab you in the back.
ok. point noted. no more block-camping. fine.
secondly, they have incendiary shurikens. what kind of a ninja has incendiary shurikens? you deflect them, they hit a surface and explode there. what often happens is either the deflected shurikens hit a surface near you and explodes, or another shuriken does not injure you but sticks somewhere underneath or behind you and explodes. either way, your blocking stance goes down and you get stuck with a few more boom-booms or you get sashimied.
o-kaaay. lesson learned. listen for hissing noises that means you're about to experience a world of hurt. fine.
thirdly, assuming if you get stuck with a boom-boom and you go into a blocking stance, you take relatively less damage (but damage nonetheless) and your blocking stance goes down, during which you are HIGHLY susceptible to further attacks. if you JUMP however, you take even more damage than if the spider nutjobs carved you up with their swords. WTF.
some choice expletives would be highly suitable for this situation. levelled up; don't get stuck with boom-booms. fine.
fourthly, did i mention that they come in threes?
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
well, things are slightly turning up. managed to get a job, salary's not too bad, location's quite ideal as well. starting training on the 16th.
now, next on my agenda: get an MCSE and MCSA certification. they ain't cheap though. the MCSE course and exams alone would cost at least $4,500 and coupled with the MCSA? i'm definitely gonna go broke. and this on top of my plans to get a MacBook Pro...
purty, ain't she?having said that, it's odd how those companies which provide the microsoft certification courses don't advertise their prices anywhere on their sites. only one company, New Horizons, actually does show the prices for individual certifications on their site. or .pdf, for that matter. perhaps i suck at surfing sites. i dunno.
but i was slightly surprised that HP provides certification courses. i was under this impression that they dealt mostly with hardware and software solutions. interesting.
on a different note: keyboard skills on new keyboard are, happily, levelling up. still lack the speed at which i bash out code on the traditional keyboards, but i'm getting somewhere there. thank microsoft for IntelliSense. without it, i'm, in a nutshell, fucked.
well. i'm off to go dig deeper into the enigma that's Plone. i'm definitely sinking deeper into geek-dom.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
having been bitten by the reality bug more than once, until recently, it still did not factor into a lot of my considerations. i blithely went about my life as usual and made plans as per normal. but life has its own way of bringing a person back down to earth.
now that things are the way they stand right now, i don't have many options left open to me. with this recent setback, i've wasted yet another year, thus putting me another year behind my peers. a heavy price to pay for arrogance, for it is paid with one of the things in life that cannot be bought by money.
time.
a year.
twelve months.
three hundred and sixty five days.
eight thousand and sixty hours.
five hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes.
thirty one million, five hundred and thirty six thousand seconds.
i'm morbid, i know. but i tend to do weird stuffs in the wee hours of the night anyway.
on a lighter note, i seem to be getting slightly better with Ninja Gaiden: Sigma. initially when i started, i totally sucked at it. even the most basic of enemies could trash me to ninja heaven and back. took me a while to realise the importance and boon of using ultimate techniques. i'm still getting the hang of it, but at least i do not get horribly raped by creeps anymore.
- attempts to master wall-running technique but fails horribly and has intimate encounter with floor -
Sunday, July 01, 2007
< mental type = 'note' destination = 'self' runat = 'mind' >
dim ramble as string
ramble = 'finish up work on blogger template that has been sitting in dreamweaver ever since it was in MX 2004 and now in CS3'
< /mental >
wow.
perhaps not the best word i could use to describe the movie 'Transformers', but it was the first word i uttered when i saw Barricade transform. i mean, having read both negative and positive reviews about this movie, it was with mixed feelings that i stepped into the cinema. but i left it with a profound sense of child-like awe and wonder. kudos to michael bay for doing a spectacular job of bringing my childhood fantasies to life.
Optimus Prime. Jazz. Rachet. Ironhide. Bumblebee. Megatron. Starscream. Scorponok. Barricade. Frenzy. Bonecrusher. Blackout. Brawl.
all of them, brought to life on the big screen, gratifying that inner child in me. the transformation from their vehicle mode to their upright robot form is nothing short of amazing and wondrous. you can almost make out where each part on the transformer belongs on its vehicular form and the amount of detail lavished on each transformer borders on the impossible. despite the autobots and decepticons being totally cgi-generated characters, they were dosed with near-human emotions, the most prominent example of this being displayed by Frenzy, when his attempt at hacking the defence network was thwarted at the last possible second and he bashes his head against the monitor in cyber-frustration. that takes the cake.
apart from the visual eyecandy, the script itself was no letdown either. interjected with humor and the right amount of emotions coupled with the spectacular pyrotechnics, it stands out from the usual gigantic robot slugfest that most people would expect it to be (not to say that you don't get all the transformers duking it out with each other towards the end).
apart from a few loopholes (how does bumblebee get his voice actuators to work again? what happened to scorponok? wasn't Prowl supposed to be the police car?) which are very much forgivable, this is THE movie of the year to watch.
bashing out this post on my new keyboard, Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, was an experience in frustration. fingers kept going to the wrong position after having received years of conditioning on normal keyboards. d'oh. punctuation is going to be yet another problem. commas and periods getting all messed up.
gah. if all goes well, i'm going to hafta learn how to use Plone and brush up on my Java skills. hopefully by then, i'd have mastered this keyboard. else my neighbours are gonna hear some very colourful swear words emanating from my room.
"Autobots! Transform, and roll out!"
Saturday, June 09, 2007
ord.
the most eagerly anticipated event (at least for me) for the past two years.
looking back upon these two years, it doesn't seem as horrific as i once expected it to be. i still remember the trepidation and hesitation with which i boarded the ferry to pulau tekong for the first time. the unfamiliar surroundings and the stifling sensation of discipline and orderliness, not to mention the first taste of 'wayang', the oath-taking ceremony in the auditorium.
well. it is over and done with. pink ic retrieved and objective met.
- ff7 victory tone -