omg, i really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really want to meet Zakk Wylde :(

to me, Zakk Wylde is the guitarist with the biggest heart. he also has the most awesome picking technique. this year, i have missed Andy Timmons, Mr. Big, Tommy Emmanuel and now Zakk Wylde. i wish they will all come again, again and again.

you cannot imagine how disappointed i am :(

yay, the guys at Australia are done with fighting ATEC (Army Training Evaluation Centre). a NSF unit fights ATEC is macham primary school students tackle PSLE or a singer’s first solo concert; it’s the ultimate evaluation. so, it’s actually kind of weird that i missed ATEC, but never mind.

the consensus, over generations of soldiers is such that it will be ‘ORD mood’ after ATEC. who the hell still practices ten-year series endlessly after their ‘O’ levels right. but time should still be spent in a productive manner nevertheless. everyone will be back from Wallaby next weekend, can’t wait to meet my bunk mates again. i don’t give a damn that i will probably get a lot of shit from my S4 when he comes back, just got to bear with it. i have mastered the special power of switching myself off many insignificant and redundant things in life. Charlie says one should not work for someone one doesn’t respect and admire and also to work only with people one enjoy. how, Charlie, howww?

impossible la.

i downloaded a widget to countdown to my ORD, about 200 more days only. sounds quite good.

i have my Macbook for about 3 months already and i am loving it. i ain’t the IT geek or Apple is God type but everything has really been so simple and pretty.

2009 has been so good so far, please let it be good until the end :)

can’t wait for the rest to be back from Wallaby.
for Christmas.
for Chinese New Year.
for ORD function.
for June’ 10.

i am turning 22. i need a plan, a convincing one.

Music: Whispering a Prayer- Steve Vai

November, 7 more months to ORD. recently, there has been a very strong desire to quickly ORD. i am getting quite sian of the whole army routine. regimentation can be really really really frustrating sometimes and there is nothing too practical one can do about it. opportunity cost is a very relevant thinking in the army.

with regards to ORD, i was thinking of coming up with 2 long list of consequences, categorising the pros and the cons of the event. but i figured it will be a complete waste of time and effort. after all, no amount of content in either list would possibly change the fact that 11 June 2010 will bring ‘Chapter- I am a (NSF)soldier’ in life to a conclusion. then, it will be the start of yet another new journey, one which i got no concrete plans quite yet.

but i got some ideas, some a little far-fetched, some expensive, some down-to-earth, some straight forward, blah blah blah. but nothing too idealistic, Charlie reminded that extremely intense ideology should be avoided because it cabbages up one’s mind. so i seriously don’t know man, what will happen after ORD.

but for now, i am happy to read my books, surf the net and listen to all my favourite music.

i am very grateful for my life.

As far as our deep understanding of the universe is concerned, the greatest discovery in thermodynamics is the so-called ’second law’, which says that heat always flow from a hotter object to a cooler object when the two objects are placed in contact. It sounds blindingly obvious; yet this simple rule has been described as the supreme law of nature. Its tells us which way time flows, and that things wear out.

There are two classic examples which highlight the importance of this law. First, imagine a cup of coffee, into which you drop an ice cube. The ice cube melts, as heat flows from the hot coffee into the cold ice. You never, ever, see a cool cup of coffee start to get hotter, all by itself, while an ice cube grows in the middle of the cup. This is what we mean by saying that the second law defines the arrow of time. If you made a film of the melting ice cube, and ran it backwards through a projector, everyone who watched the film would know it was running backwards.

There is also an example of things wearing out. A cup of coffee with an ice cube in it has more structure than a cup of cold coffee, just as a house has more structure than a pile of bricks. Like the melting ice cube, if you leave a house unattended for long enough it will turn into a heap of bricks. But no matter how long you leave a heap of bricks unattended, it will never form itself into a house. This kind of structure possesses a quantity of information. The lost structure is like lost information, because the cold coffee has no ‘memory’ of the fact that some of the liquid used to be an ice cube, just an a brick has no ‘memory’ that it used to be part of a wall.

Being slightly perverse, physicists actually measure information in a negative sense, and give negative information the name ‘entropy’. The second law of thermodynamics can be expressed most succinctly as saying that entropy always increases- things wear out, ice cubes melt, houses fall down, people die.

But there is one strange feature of all this which we ought to mention. The second classic example of the second law at work is based on imagining a box of gas with a partition in the middle. One half of the box can be pumped out, so that it is empty, with no atoms in it. The other half is full of atoms, tiny little spheres moving rapidly and bouncing off one another in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion. If we pull the partition out of the way, the atoms will spread out to fill up the entire box, and the temperature of the gas will fall as they do so. But if you start with a box full of gas, you will never see all the atoms move together up into one end of the box, leaving a vacuum in the other half.

Or will you? Boltzmann calculated that if the atoms are moving about at random there is, in fact, a very tiny chance that all the atoms in the box will happen to move together in this way. The chance of this happening is so small that it would take billions upon billions of years for it to happen. And this gives us another perspective on the universe. Low entropy states are possible, but they are extremely unlikely.

……

In one of those early paper, published in 1903, Einstein thought that he has found a proof that the second law of thermodynamics must always hold. The second law, remember is the one that says things wear out. In modern language, Einstein thought that he had proved that the arrow of time is built into the laws of physics, although he never used that expression himself. But he had failed to appreciate one of the key points in Boltzmann’s argument, which jumped off from a comment made by Johann Loschmidt, and was published in 1877, in a paper Einstein cannot have read in 1903. This made it clear that the second law is not an absolute law of nature, but only has a statistical validity.

Remember the box of gas, one half full, the other empty, with a partition in the middle? We talked of pulling the partition out and letting the gas fill the box, then waiting for a very long time to see if the molecules of the gas might ever move together into one end of the box again. We said that, according to Boltzmann, this might happen, after a very, very long time. It would be as if we watched a pile of bricks, for a time much longer than the age of the universe, and suddenly it did assemble itself into a house. During such processes, the flow of entropy is reversed and the second law is violated- in the case of the gas in the box, the gas would get hotter as it squeezed itself into one end of the box. Time, by our everyday standards, would be running backwards.

Taken from Einstein- A Life in Science by Michael White & John Gribbin

i didn’t know Tommy Emmanuel will be playing a concert in Singapore yesternight until i read the feature on Monday’s Life section. but the 600 seats available has already been sold out and my WTB effort on SOFT forum was futile :(

i remember i first watched Tommy Emmanuel on this random DVD i borrowed from the Esplanade about 5 years ago. he played Classical Gas and i was amazed by the whole intensity of his performance. his finger-picking style was something i never knew existed, juggling bass line, rhythm, melody and percussion all at one time. Tommy is essentially a one man band.

you can only imagine how excited i was when i found out in 2006 that Tommy will be coming to Singapore, to conduct a Masterclass and play a concert later that night. of course, i didn’t hesitate to skip school and subsequently spent 1 entire day at Victoria Concert Hall, engrossed in Tommy Emmanuel goodies. Tommy was super nice, like SUPER nice. he was happy to share whatever he knew with the audience, he tried to entertain all our requests for pictures, autographs and whatever not. plus, he is this guy full of wit and good humour.

that night, i was seated on the floor of Victoria Concert Hall cause tickets were sold out. not that i will complain, cause i was on the floor in front of the very first row, watching Tommy play under his nose! it’s no wonder why Eric Clapton hails Tommy as the greatest guitar player he ever seen. Tommy has got awesome charisma and stage presence, i was absolutely overwhelmed by his performance, it was mind-blowing. so since then, i had this whole Tommy Emmanuel experience etched in my mind. and yea, i can pretty much recall every single detail of that day so vividly.

Tommy came back again the next year, played at Esplanade and i was damn excited to watch him again. i couldn’t attend last year’s concert cause i was stuck in Tekong if i didn’t remember wrongly. and this year, i can’t believe i missed it because i didn’t know about it. sucks man. but never mind, it definitely seems that he will be back again next year judging from the trend.

i know i look damn kuku, but hopefully i will get to take my 3rd picture with Tommy next year. i will also print the above 2 pictures huge and let Tommy sign on them. oh yea, and perhaps wear the same jacket again. hurhur.

my 2 days finance course was concluded by a 30 questions MCQ paper. it was an open book test, we were allowed to discuss, and look around. so i got a handful of answers from this middle aged uncle who sat beside me, dressed in civilian. i thought he is probably some retired high ranking finance officer, there for refresher purpose. plus, he finished the paper so quickly and confidently. best of all, he was happy to share his answers! it turns out that most of his answers were wrong though, and i probably would have fared better ti-kam-ing myself.

Me: Sir, where are you from ah?

Uncle: HQ NCC.

wahlauehhh NCC you know? those secondary school boys and occasional confused girls, and uncle himself probably served the army more than 2 decades ago.

in the SAF, one of the nicest things to do is to go on course. you get to stay out, siam all the whatever bullshit in camp and ok la, kinda learn something new. plus, all these courses are typically quite relac. so yea, i ain’t complaining about attending this finance course for 2 days this week. just that i forgot to bring my boots, beret, and uniform back when i booked out last Thursday and had to go back to camp again on Friday just to bring all these items back. spent 3 hours to and fro k, fuckking noob shit.

last week, my family had to send mum to A&E because she was feeling really unwell. the doctors did a MRI scan and confirmed that the recurrent tumour has indeed grew bigger and an invasive operation will be inevitable, in order to remove the tumour. looking back, its been 3 years since mum first got diagnosed with a benign brain tumour. throughout this time, she has been extremely fortunate to have went through a series of successful operations and treatment. however, they haven’t been able to eradicate the root of the problem, sadly. so yea, hopefully with this operation on the 25th of November, everything will be good and well afterwards. i am optimistic.

the family has went through a lot, but its really not as bad as it seem to be. mum has always recovered 100% from the operations and live life as per normal. personally, it has never been clearer, the importance of being healthy, of a credible medical insurance (which we lack, but never mind now) and probably how with love and support from the family, we can pull though anything together. and like what Charlie reminded, there is really no point in drifting into a state of self-pity when sad things happen in life. i think its amazing how he likens the habit as a form of mental hygiene. mental hygiene, there must be so much to explore and decipher what actually constitutes a so called hygienic state of mind.

its going to be November again. i want to go out and take pictures with Kristy, catch up with Alicia and Gracie at somewhere nice and meet Hafiz this Saturday. you know, i am never the person to initiate a conversation on messenger, leave a comment on your blog or post a random message on whoevers’ facebook wall. but i really do miss many of my dearest friends very very much.

to all the people i love, i hope YOU are doing good :))

another week closer to ORD, yay!

I quote the wit and wisdom of Charles T. Munger.

“Self-pity can get pretty close to paranoia. And paranoia is one of the hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity. I had a friend who carried a thick stack of linen-based cards. And when somebody would make a comment that reflect self-pity, he would slowly and portentously pull out his huge stack of cards, take the top one and hand it to the person. The card said, “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.” Well, you can say that’s waggery, but I suggest it can be mental hygiene. Each time you find you’re drifting into self-pity, whatever the cause, even if your child is dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to help. Just give yourself one of my friend’s cards. Self-pity is always counterproductive. It’s the wrong way to think. And when you avoid it, you get a great advantage over everybody else, or almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard response. And you can train yourself out of it.“

- Excerpt from Charlie’s USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address, on May 13, 2007.