I came to the sudden realization two days ago, as I looked at the season schedule for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and realized that I'll be in Singapore for the last two, three game of the NFL season, and I started scouring (again) for places where I could catch the non-national(now national even has different dimensions)ly-televised games, and I was sorely disappointed to find that it would be next to impossible to catch those games in Singapore--that I've grown into this place a lot, grown into a lot of the things here--the way of life, the place, the people, the stimulating, intellectually insane environment, where the people and ideas I've encountered, not just in this last year alone, but really, in all these three, almost four, years, have never ceased to amaze and excite me.

I came here thinking I'd just get an education, enriched, technically, at (one of) the best place(s) (ah forget it 86% of us are MIT rejects haha) in the world for Computer Science, and then go home, and return to life where I can just unpause things and get back into the swing of things, with old friends, with the old way of life, and just move on.

But it's been so much more I've gained, so much more that I think I've just been blind-sided completely, and although I came here intending to just do one thing (unfortunately), so much has happened, I've learnt so much, seen so much, done so much, thought about things so much, that I don't know I haven't changed, although I'd implicitly, silently, told myself I'd never not be a part of where I came from.

I'm still not not a part of where I came from, I miss home dearly, miss the country that I never cease to marvel at, and its terrible humid weather and fickle rains, but I think that's more than what I am already.

It's been a crazy four years--not that long, not too long, maybe even too short. Oh I don't know.

..to go to the New Year countdown and catch the fireworks on Sheares Bridge.

..to go to the Chinatown festive market to catch some festive warmth before I have to leave home again for the dark, cold winter.

..to go to the Point State Park in spring next year to catch the cherry blossoms.

..to catch the spring blossoms of the pear trees along the street just behind our house here.

..to catch the long, beautiful summer sunsets come June.

..to catch the sunrise once more from the overlook past the Fort Pitt Bridge, and to see the sun rise over the Pittsburgh skyline.

..to take a deep breath of the (maybe not-so-fresh? haha) air of home when I get back.

I couldn't stop laughing haha.

An apology, according to Wikipedia, is "a justification or defense of an act or idea, from the Greek apologia (απολογία). An apology can also be an expression of contrition and remorse for something done wrong." And the dictionary says, to apologise is "to offer an apology or excuse for some fault, insult, failure, or injury"

Which makes sense, doesn't it?

Apologies are so convenient--they make faults and failures "go away", they justify faults and failures, shortcomings and inadequacies, they invite consolation and reaffirmation from others when you feel bad about your own failures. But what good do they do? Nothing at all, other than to assuage the weak, without salvaging the situation at all, without making things any better materially.

It's no wonder apologies are so easy, so convenient, for the weak, for people lacking in self-esteem, in confidence, who are just seeking to make up for their feeling lousy about those shortcomings by seeking reaffirmation in other ways that doesn't require them to repair the original problem.

Apologies really are band-aids that don't get to the root of the problem, that don't work.

Anomaly detection, as opposed to failure diagnosis, really should be called a band-aid, as opposed to a cure. The next paper we write should be titled: "Apologies: There's Something Wrong With Your System But We Don't Know What".

It takes the strong to find a cure, a fix. Yet, fixes often come by coincidence too, such as Alexander Fleming's discovery of Penicillin.

So, how do you fix a problem rather than apologize for it?

First year: "Wow! I've never seen snow!," and head out and play in the snow after pulling on ten thousand layers of clothing.

Second year: "Ok time to go take photos before those pesky newbies destroy the snow."

Third year: "Erm, too bad there's an exam tomorrow, whatever."

Fourth year: "****. What the heck?? Snow again so soon??!! Now where's my gloves and beanie?"

Now I REALLY can't wait to go home.

As we grow older, and move on through life, the crossroads and junctions become fewer, and further apart, and the opportunity costs of taking one turn over the other become larger, and larger, as we make decisions at each point, that take us further and further away from where we started, for better or for worse, as we get either further, or nearer, to where we wanted to get to in the first place, with no way of knowing which it is, and sometimes we end up somewhere not even remembering if we wanted to be there to begin with.

And as we get older, we're no longer what we used to be, no longer able to spend so much time staking out sunsets anymore.

I remember reading a random netizen's blog a few weeks ago, when I'd first wanted to write about this (or rather when the feelings that made me want to say this were first stirred), whose blog I've read before on occasion some time ago, and I began to wonder if she'd always written like this (disclaimer: I don't know her personally), if it was just age showing, maturity, or the combined wisdom of all her experiences. And lo and behold, I realized that she'd been writing in that tone, with that view, that perspective, since years ago from days all through university through years of work (disclaimer 2: I'm not a voyeur, just that blog-surfing can be a terribly good way to waste time and, well, drift out of whatever predicament you find yourself in haha). That made me sit up and realize, hey, no matter what's happened, I'm still me, for better or worse.

And, lo and behold, I found the same was true even with my own writing; the tone may have changed, the material content may have changed, I may be doing materially different things, but it's still me, for better or worse. I don't even know if that's a good or a bad thing anymore. I'll always be, well, the same old workaholic, never quite content with the present, never quite content with what I have, with what I've done, always looking for the next big thing to do, the next place to go to, and always feeling, well, terrible about not being there haha.

But that wasn't the point. I just sort of digressed. I guess I used to, or maybe even still do, think that we're always getting somewhere, on the way to somewhere, to a better place, where things will be better, where we will be nicer, or people will be nicer, where things will work out better, yet, they never seem to.

Is hope but a fool's delusion?

And you think people will change? In the end, deep down inside, it's every man for himself. Oh I don't know.

Yup, nothing ever changes--work over a suite box seat at a Penguins game? How about the (rescheduleable) internship interview over a press pass to cover Bill Gates the last time huh? Nothing ever changes haha.

2. You have a fileserver in your room.

1. You number things starting from 0, or even -1 etc. and go backwards.

0. You have a separate local area network in your room that plugs into the home network, and when you need to transfer a huge file from your desktop fileserver to your laptop, you pick up the LAN cable lying on the floor and plug it into your laptop.

Oh whatever I was just bored haha.

[T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"]

I wonder what Merlin was asked; it's kind of like 42 isn't it? That's the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but what's the question?

It's time to keep the magic alive, and keep working at it. Do things really turn around at a snap? Maybe, we'll see. It's time to get going.

And a big thank you to everyone who made it happen, We're going to Disneyland! (said Jerome Bettis after Superbowl XL.)

And it gets even crazier when you write stuff on whiteboards, and instead of saying "okay this is between 6 and 7 noninclusive", you don't even say it, and just go write "[6,7)" on the graph haha, and it's much clearer and people in the room are nodding in agreement. Soon I'm going to lose my whole vocabulary and just speak in formal language or something--like how I was cooking dinner on Thursday and as I was thinking of what to do first (fair-scheduling?), I was thinking in terms of what couldn't be done at the same time (critical path?), and when I'd finally got all the ingredients prepared (synchronization barrier?, it was almost like all the chopping was Maps and the frying was the Reduces), all I had to do was to fry everything at the same time in the two frying pans (embarrassingly parallel). Too bad for you Amdahl's Law I beat you!

People who work in Distributed Systems make good cooks, as you can see :-P. You could even come up with a scheduling/queueing algorithm for optimal cooking, with different metrics of optimization such as optimizing for finishing every dish at the same time, or finishing in as little time as possible, etc. Then again you could also think of it as a Linear Program? Okay this is going too far haha.

In any case, I invented the ex post Chicken Rice recipe! In my sheer laziness, I recreated my 麻油鸡 in a way that doesn't require frying! And I finally figured out that throwing ginger in and boiling it straight would just destroy whatever taste there was from the sesame oil, and lo and behold, just a tad of the gravy on the rice, after refrigeration overnight and a trip to the microwave, yielded rice that tasted exactly like Chicken Rice! Now beat that! Haha.

For a moment, it was almost like home, the balmy, warm air (it's 29 degrees Celsius indoors), the heavy, torrential rain that came suddenly, that was so heavy that I could see the splashback of the rain as it hit the ground, forming a blurry sheet of white across the ground, the smell of rain thick in the air.

There's something comforting about the rain, about the gloomy, dark, cloudy skies, that just reminds me of home (and the gazillion times of being caught in it haha in good old tropical Singapore), and in just about two months I'll be back home!

The countdown begins haha.

But still, it feels good to see a shiny poster with your name on it, and to know that there's stuff there on that poster that (i) is cutting-edge, (ii) is completely brand new, and (iii) you know more about than anyone else in the world.

Hopefully this gives me the impetus, the energy, to go do more, work harder, get more done, and get somewhere, somehow. I don't want to discredit all the people around me who believe in me, so I want to give myself a reason to believe in myself.

I really hope that life isn't all about the materialism, the materialistic things, but I really, really hope to get my name returned in a search result from DBLP/CiteSeer/Google Scholar haha.

Come to think of it, I'd actually got the mechanical pencil as part of a pen-and-pencil set (I think it was Papermate? And that used to be such a huge brand then, and I think it still is but I haven't been to Popular and Big Bookshop and what-not in ages, and that just makes me want to go home now) from the 宗乡会馆's annual scholarship award, way-back-when in Primary 1--and it's been a whopping 17 years since! It's not that it hasn't taken its beatings--the tiny eraser on one end's been used up/lost, and so is the shiny pocket holder, and I had, in those more restless younger days, scrapped the words off its brushed-metal body haha. But it's one of the things I've really liked, that's really stuck with me, it's almost like my good-luck pencil; although I've never said that before, I've always treated it as that since, well, goodness-knows-when.

And I guess it's also true that I don't lose things a lot--but that's mostly because I don't like to lose things, because I think it's a waste. That said, though, I remember losing my meal card, this bar-coded card, during BMT, and I was fortunate to not be confined for it, but that made me feel really, really terrible because the whole platoon had to stay behind and search the parade square for it. And since that incident, I've always taken the whole "equipment check" thing seriously, and I periodically scan all my pockets for all the things they're supposed to hold, from keys to wallet to phone(s) and what-not, and there's the whole internal mental SOP of never closing a door on myself before I've actually verified that I have the key.

(And when I'm driving, it's a whole different story, I can check all the doors in duplicate or even triplicate--because the cheapest rentals always come without central locking haha, and check the headlights and handbrake multiple times--because, yes, I've parked without engaging the handbrake before haha though in these days it isn't so important because with automatic transmission, the Park has a brake too.)

So, yes, I don't lose things a lot, because I don't like to lose things. But I think that makes it tiring to be me, though it never occurs to me that that is the case, because I'd rather feel at peace, knowing that I've double- and even triple-checked everything.

But you can't do that with life, can you? How many things can you actually double- and triple-check?

So maybe it isn't such a good thing to not lose things so often--because you prevent yourself from losing things so much, that you don't know how to lose things, and how to cope with losing things.

Oh well.

And oh did I mention that you started at 1st and Goal on the 1-yard line?

I think I suffer from extremely bad GPS-vision--it's tunnel vision in some sense, yet it's more damaging/destructive than tunnel vision. With tunnel vision, you're so focused on that small thing that you neglect everything else that could be important along the way; it's the opposite of "taking time off to smell the flowers", and of the "it's the journey, not the destination that matters" adages/cliches/what-not. But at least it could be good to a certain extent, because at least you're focused. But GPS-vision is a whole different thing altogether, one, if not more, orders of magnitude worse than tunnel-vision.

I've grown highly accustomed to using the GPS in recent years, since I bought that refurbished Magellan unit a year or so ago, and it's been with me to various places, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Niagara Falls, D.C., Shenandoah (on a rented unit), and more recently the Bay Area. I've already forgotten how to navigate with maps, how we used to do the freeway-exit-number thing and write down instructions to ourselves deduced from paper maps, and that meant that missing exits on the freeway at crazy speeds was disastrous because it's difficult to look for the next exit.

GPS-vision is the more high-tech version of tunnel-vision, except it's a lot more literally tunnel-vision than the original tunnel-vision in most uses of the term. So, my strategy to navigating new places I reach has evolved into search-for-the-nearest-large-supermarket-chain, save-address-in-GPS, and head out there, when I'm searching for food. And it's a pretty good way to do it too I guess, because there'd usually be restaurants and things near where these huge supermarkets are. The problem is, I'll just happily follow the GPS directions, even if I pass by a gazillion other things that I'd remark to myself as being interesting, like how I passed a gazillion MacDonalds' and Taco Bells and what-nots in the drive out to get lunch two days back.

I'm terribly allergic to hearing the GPS chide me with its "Calculating route" too, my most-feared thing to hear from the GPS when I miss the turn it said to take, and I'd try to religiously follow the indicated directions. That resulted in pretty funny things happening during our Shenandoah drive, when we ended up in a disused granite quarry.

Less literally than that, I guess that's also a pretty accurate depiction of times when I'm not using a GPS, and exactly why I always "don't seem to be listening", or rather "don't listen" at all, as you always say, or maybe, just said a lot of during those few days in NYC. I don't listen precisely because there's that GPS in my head that already has this crazy pre-set route to goodness-knows-where, and whenever it has to re-"calculate [the] route", I go crazy, and I just try like mad to not let that happen.

But when it can't even calculate the route, then I go even crazier--when there's just too many things to consider, when the DFS in my head gets busted because it can't reach the end of the path before backtracking to try another branch; because I'm just not programmed to do a BFS on life.

And perhaps that explains this all right now--because the DFS is stuck without the base case.