Realm of the Imponderable

DDOC #17
To continue on from yesterday, which, incidently, was done whan I was in a half comatose state at 3AM, I was saying that there's plenty of bike trails to ride on here. There's a river that runs sort of through the north of the town and there's plenty of scenic routes along it's way. Lots of roads run along it as well, and these, surprisingly, are nicely wooded and pleasant to drive through. Of course, you can also cycle along them too.
Spent the whole of yesterday evening putting together a computer. Ordered parts with help from Eugene through the mail order and they arrived through FedEx a day early. And puting them together took far longer than expected. I still have yet to install all the necessary programs in this thing, though obviously the bare essentials are up and running.
Went to a little fair today organised once again for the benefit of the fresh meat in Umich. They had some cute games that you would put your children through if you bring them to a fair , but they were catered for adult sized people. All of them involved inflatable arenas or setups of some sort. The most novel one was a sumo ring where participants wear body suits so they look like sumo wrestlers and they proceed to do the thing that sumo wrentlers do.
End of today was a walk that started out with just 2 people but eventually became almost the whole Singapore contingent here to one of the nature parks here. It's a bit like McRitchie, but with some subtle differences to the flora. And the scenery's fantastic, considering that we're only 10 mins walk from a pretty large town.
It's quite a nice place and there's plenty happening. I hope all you people there have a good time too.

WDOC #16
helo helo all you people out there who actually bothered to take a few minutes to read this page. I have been really busy the last few days and it was not helped by the fact that I had no computer till just this evening, so I haven posted anything here for a really long time.
I've been in Ann Arbor for about a week and I'm settling here quite nicely. I'm getting a social security and inshah Allah, (Allah permitting, as any good muslim will say on occasion) I will also get a driving license too. I only lack a test and a trip to the secretary of state building.
Starting to get a feel of the things around here, the culture here and the common practices. There's American football, where you get to see a bunch of big hulking men clubbing each other and fighting over a tiny ball no bigger than their heads without the helmets attached.
There's quite a few party scenes here too, though up in north campus where I'm staying there's not much going on and it's quiet here. I do hear from others that there are reguar parties in the frat houses and in other places, and of course in the day there's plenty of activities organised for our benefit too.
I haven't been going for many of those, sad to say, since I've been a little more busy getting things sorted out and getting room essentials like stationary, household accessories, et cetera.
Cycling here is a really good scene. There's lots of new things to see for the first few days, like careless people who not only lose their tyres, they lose their seats from the bike as well. There's railings for bicycle locking and really wide pavements. Plenty of uphills and downhills too. And I'll bet there's plenty of off road biking trails too.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.

DDOC #15
I'm beginning to think I should change my system to WDOC (weekly dose of crap), seeing the frequency with which I write entries nowadays.

Highlights of last weekend include a housewarming session at one Dr Yeo Seng Beng's house and a foraging trip down orchard in search of little beads that are hard to find but nice to look at. There's a number of birthdays coming up... If you know me well enough to be reading this you know what I do with little beads and such...

I went back to school to copy a few documents on monday and met Mr kuna, who as always, was cheerful and full of complaints about the chemistry lab. Rumours of Mr Lenn coming out of mothballs and doing relief teaching received some confirmation when I met him during recess time at the school canteen. The same old sarcastic, slightly sadistic self he's always been, he lectured me and Eugene (who went with me) on the virtues of what we were studying, gave us a story about how his daughter is going to the antarctica on a field expedition as part of her studies in oceanography. How is she to find a job here? As we said: No competition for a job but no job either...

Tuesday was an anomaly... I actually went shopping. Not for clothes (no no that would be really too much)... Got myself a little hardware that would be useful for knocking around nuts and bolts in my room in Michigan when the need arises. (and I'm pretty sure it will) SOG produces some pretty nifty multipliers; if you ever have need for one, that's a good brand that's not too pricey.

Had another D&D session yesterday.. I'm finally getting quite involved in the whole affair. Table top role playing has its advantages over the computer version, even though it does have its disadvantages.. You really need to know the rules to play tabletop, and you take a little longer because the scene is described by someone, not pictured on a computer screen and you roll dice and write; you don't have the computer do it for you. On the plus side, you have a dynamic playing style, you have a game master who can adjust the situation according to any action you take. As an example, if you are on a bridge over a lake, in the computer your only option is to either go forwards or backwards. If you're playing on a tabletop, you can also choose to jump of and swim, you can string a rope elsewhere or you can cast a levitation spell. Your GM will allow you whatever options he sees fit

Only 7 more days to go. I'd better start packing

DDOC #14
Another weekend past. What have I accomplished? what else do people do on nice, lazy weekends? ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzz...
Well, I did attend a birthday party on saturday night and was quite amued by the proceedings at the end, though the start and middle were a little dull. Suffice to say that the birthday boy was extracted from the final proceedings by his rather irate father without too much serious injury..
ah, come sunday, the day of sleeping..
But that was not to be. Getting dragged out of bed at 1030 for a heavy breakfast followed by a heavy lunch is no joke. Yet things like this have the tendency to happen when you have a father like mine. Eccentric, unconventional and quite unpredictible; eccentrics beget eccentrics...
So it's the end of another glorious weekend.

DDOC #13
Hmm... Those of you astute enough to notice the lapse in time since my last DDOC will be wondering what I've been doing the last 2 weeks. Well, I have been seeing the world, meeting people and going places.
I've joined a table top Dungeons and Dragons group with some friends from the army. True to our thick skinned nature (acquired after much pain and suffering in the SAF) we blithely had our sessions in the middle of Mcdonalds at Serene Centre, ignoring the stares we got from many people. After all, how often do you see a bunch of people playing with lead figurines and rolling dice in Macs? Anyway, it's a good way to relax and have a bit of fun in the process. (Those of you unfamiliar with D&D: just imagine the old days where old men told stories to groups of young children about fantasy lands with heroes and monsters. Only here it's interactive, players choose a character to role play and make decisions as the story unfolds)

I've been meeting many of my fellow Singaporean students from UMICH. In preperation for my impending trip to the Land of Guns and "Freedom", I thought it would be prudent to find out as much as possible about the culture there and how the singaporean scene fits in. Apparently, we fit in quite well, and seem to have a reputation as Rule Abiders and People Who Don't Study And Still Get Good Grades...
Anyway, there were a fair number of meetings, both official and otherwise and the usual "initiation rites"... I shall have a few modificatinos to make to the program next year... Starting with the degree of messiness involved. If I had my way, raincoats will be SOP items for the seniors next orientation. I guarantee it...
As for unofficial meetings, well, what can I say? You meet people, try to remember faces and attach names to them, but it's something that some people just can't do. How many times have you been talking to someone without knowing their name or worse still, discovering later that you thought they were somebody else? Ice breaker games like whacko just don't cut it. Typical to singaporeans, they think of devious tactics to sabotage somebody else and basically if you have an easy to remember name then be prepared to run alot...

Ah yes, another highlight of the week: my attempt to "upgrade" my computer to windows XP. An utter, miserable failure on the first 2 attempts due to the insistance of Windows to do everything for you and also its refusal to do anything that could result in it being removed from my system. Seems Microsoft is getting paranoid: once their software is in your hard drive, neither heaven or hell can get it out. Even "format" the most holy of mantras for the removal of evil, fails miserably in the face of microsoft's latest and greatest demon.
Obviously, since I'm writing this blog here, my computer is in sufficiently good shape to run a stable internet connection.

The greatest virus is not written by any genius hacker in basement supercomputer. It is created in the labs of Microsoft. The entity of windows XP has spread, dealing out power with one hand and iron chains in the other. It is a virus because it does as it pleases to your computer and few people have the technical know how to control it, and it resists even the strongest effort to remove it.