It's been quite a crazy time--the summer holidays are almost over, and I'm into week minus-one of the summer holidays. The only problem is, the summer is almost over, but I don't quite remember having had any holidays, except maybe the two weeks when my parents were here some three, four months ago that seem like a happy, but hazy, distantly surreal memory now.

I guess people don't usually stop to think about what they've doing, where they're headed, and what they want to do with their lives, both because there's the daily grind that people usually get lost in, be it work, study, or even play haha, and because if you spent all your time and energy thinking and planning about the future, then where would you find any for living in the present?

In any case, I've been cruising to a stopping point of sorts, a checkpoint for the summer finally in sight, with the draft for one presentation out that's just waiting for results from an easily-run experiment, and the draft for one paper underway to wrap up work I started a year ago. It's been an enjoyable even if sometimes monotonously gruelling summer, but as I've cruised to what will hopefully be a gentle stop, questions about the future have come up once again.

It was almost befitting, that a great^n grand junior from way-back-when randomly started talking to me on IM, and was asking me about schools, courses, choices of majors, career options, and things like that--things that I wanted answers to myself 3, 4, 5 years ago before embarking on the journey and jumping into all this. And I couldn't help but see myself in all the questions he was asking--it's almost as if we want to be handed a road-map with all the dangerous places, potholes, and dead-ends marked out before we embark on the adventurous journey of a lifetime all on our own, with the collective wisdom of a gazillion people before us. We just want to be sure where we're headed, we don't want surprises, we just want to breeze through those years.

It's not wrong to plan at all, in fact, it's a good thing to plan ahead, know all the options, know all the rationalities/rationalizations for all the forks in the road. Planning never hurt anyone, I think. But the problem comes when you (I) get allergic to uncertainties, allergic to decision-making, and just want to get everything set in stone as soon as possible, so that we can "get on with life"--but hey, isn't that very thing we're trying to navigate life itself? Why are we then trying to avoid it?

I ended up telling the youthful individual, full of spirit and fortitude, that I was like him once too--concerned about (well I didn't say all of this but it's the same message) things from grades to employability and so on, and every few weeks I'd sit up late at night wondering what my (additional, haha, too bad the bond dictates the primary) major should be, and once in a while going crazy and starting to try to (re)arrange courses into my 3-year master-plan (I think I still have that spreadsheet somewhere) to see how many majors and minors I could manage in the same time haha.

But, if anything, these past three years should have taught you, that it really is a journey. You've had one heck of a ride, done some amazing things, met some amazing people, and I'm now some place I could only dream of years ago, but could never figure out how to get to, yet it's happened, perhaps the result of hard work, perhaps the result of serendipity, perhaps the result of the stars and the planets lining up, who knows?

In any case, maybe the point is, that we really don't know?

It's difficult, I guess, to jump blindly and have faith in anything at all, much less yourself, people are fundamentally weak, and the strong are but people who foolishly refuse to accept their weaknesses?

Or maybe I've just been sleeping at excessively odd hours and that's screwing with my thoughts.

In any case, The Most Happening City In The World in just 4 days!!!!! I've finally made it to the much-needed break, everything else can come later, haha, after I've had my fill of good food, good company, good times, and just goodness all around.

You know that you're getting tired of work and all you're doing when all you ever have time to do is to reply emails about work and talking about work without ever managing to get down to do the work that you talk so much about.

Since when did research take on the qualities of bureaucratic paper-pushing? Didn't you get into research precisely because you got tired of always talking about possibilities without getting down to making some of your own?

And now it's happening all over again--let's hope I can stem this and turn it all around soon.

1. Having your hg pull finish successfully without requiring a branch merge after you commit your code.

2. Having your Makefile actually do what you told it to do, and what you think it's doing.

3. Having your code COMPILE.

4. Having your 10, 20, 30, X hour experiments actually run instead of getting stuck asking you if the host is trusted at the ssh.

5. Having time to actually write something other than code and papers.

The past few days have been pretty amusing, with the throngs of new students hitting the campus, not least of all new people looking lost who look (and sound) like Singaporeans.

So, there's a few sure-fire ways to identify Singaporeans haha.

1. Their voices--this one is a no-brainer, the Singaporean "accent" (yeah yeah as much as Americans think they have "no accent" hahaha) is utterly distinct wherever you go, even if they're speaking in perfect and grammatically correct English, the intonations are unmistakable haha.

2. They stare at you and wonder if you're Singaporean, but will never, ever ask you--quite unlike people from other countries here who'll just ask, "Hey are you from blah-blah-land too?" And in fact, that stare, is part of the communication too, because maybe some days later you'll be introduced to the person and you'll both go, "Oh yeah I saw you on that day!" Haha.

3. They wear army-issued gear, e.g. Brooks or New Balance track shoes of that exact army-issued design (sometimes girls too!! though I've yet to see that here haha), which are the most common, or the AHM (Army Half Marathon) running gear haha.

4. The BCG scar! Haha this one is crazy, because I once saw a Chinese-looking girl outside the Shadyside Giant Eagle, whom I wouldn't have thought was a Singaporean, but the keloid at the exact BCG location was so prominent that I really wanted to go up to her and ask if she were Singaporean, though I didn't in the end haha.

Hmm, any more you can think of? Haha.

When is something a reality?

Seeing all the new people starting to hit the campus these few days, I haven't been able to help recalling my own first days here, as we set foot on campus with our enormous suitcases, two silly-looking guys, and I was standing at the back of the Morewood E Tower looking out at the parking lot, everything feeling so surreal, because we'd seen this place and all in pictures, on the website, and I had spent quite some time thinking about life here and what it might be like. Finally setting foot down here felt terribly surreal, and I think it probably took a few weeks for the reality to set in, that we were going to be living here for a good part of a couple of years.

I remember reading an article on CNN a few months back, about how dating college students did not consider themselves to be seriously dating if they didn't update their relationship status on their Facebook profiles to reflect that fact--and it was just all playing/fooling around if Facebook didn't say so haha. And so that's one more added to all the high-tech "realities" of The Dating Game, from putting the same MSN picture (and Facebook profile picture too these days haha) of the two perpetrators involved, to plastering the face of your significant other on handphone wallpapers etc. So, maybe that's one indicator of one kind of reality.

I still remember receiving my Pink I/C the day I ORDed; the run-up to the day was quite uneventful and honestly I'd been bored to tears watching movies non-stop on HBO all day long at home, and I was feeling quite nonchalant about the big day of the Return to Life as a Civilian, since I'd already been out of camp a good two or so months, maybe more. But, oh the reality of getting back that little piece of plastic, was indescribable, I felt like long, thick, heavy chains had finally been released from around my ankles, like I was born anew, ready to experience life all over again (without having to worry about weekend guard duty haha). That, was one heck of a reality that didn't take long to sink in haha.

So how do you know when you're done with coding? When it's code written for a course, I guess it isn't reality until you've submitted to the autograder and received a receipt or even a score, until you've met with the TA grading your code and got that email or marked up copy of your code back with the grade; because no matter how well (or poorly) the code runs, it's what the grader sees that matters haha.

And when you're writing code as part of a big project, and your supervisors finally give you the URL to their repository, and you finally check out the repository and commit your changes to THEIR main trunk--that, is when your work is done, and is a reality.

To cut the long story short, I finally committed my code today! The whole gory of all those thousands of lines of horrible code haha.

Ok so actually that's not true, that's not the end because you can still and still have to make changes if there are bugs, which there probably are anyway haha. So much for just wanting to be dramatic haha.