|
[ July 2007 ] | |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
|
bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ today's page views: 130 (28 mobile) all-time page views: 3403797 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1228 page created Tue Jul 22, 2025 11:28:35 |
|
- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
|
- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
| ||
|
So the three-month hols are almost done and over with, and it's back to the three-day half-holiday school term; Can't say I will be too apprehensive, given that I mostly do my own thing whatever the calendar says. Next semester will end rather early too, with my last scheduled examination being on the first of December. No repeats of the long guilt-ridden wait for a paper for which there is not much left to be studied for. And the roster for the upcoming academic season is more than tentatively: CS3208 Undergraduate Research In Computing I - Ah yes, I better write a program for this and fast. And scan some notes. CS3212 Programming Languages - Better not underestimate this. CS5340 Uncertainty in AI - Good News: No tutorials! Bad News: May be stat-heavy. Warning lights blinking. EC3332 Money and Banking I - Only six vacancies in Round 1A, with min bid over 900. Thankfully I have tons of Programme Account points by now (not as much as a certain 10000-point guy, however. 万分, 万分, 万万分!). EC3333 Financial Economics I - Slightly oversubscribed. PH2110/GEM2006 Logic - Hope this is just the Philo department equivalent of Discrete Math. To be bid for in the second round. Since CS3208 won't have any official lectures or tutorials either, and with the rest of the modules having at most one two-hour lecture a week, this may be one of my emptiest timetables to date - The total hour count will be 14 or 15 hours per week on campus for six modules even without skipping anything, which means I'll be even more responsible for my own mugging. Personally I don't think I could stand certain other faculties' rigid timetables. As a side bonus, I get Monday free, which means there won't be any impediment to watching early-Monday EPL matches. Talk about a perk. While I'm on the subject of the EPL, Starhub won the latest rights and promptly jacked up the rates. Not too much more, I hope, given the availability of free if slightly inferior alternatives on the Internet. This reminds me of an interesting analysis on multi-agent bidding, though; Given that different companies likely have different guesses of how much they can milk consumers for, with some guesses being more optimistic than others, the winner of the bid (who offered the most) often holds a less realistic outlook on the profitability of the product in question, assuming that the "correct" price is around the average of the bids. Put another way, one can suspect that the winner of an auction with ten participants may have overpaid, and the winner of an auction with a hundred participants... let's just say he had better have some special use for the commodity. Of course, at least some people must be aware of this, and it may be interesting research to try and determine how widespread any self-limiting behaviour is. In other comparatively recent news, our possible future Prime Minister shows his integrity even as a junior officer. For a summary, mr brown's podcast take can't be beat (thanks occ). With such mettle in the younger generation, Singapore's future is bright indeed. At times, I am prone to wondering what exactly is my place in this world. It seems obvious that people should provide a service to others in one way or another, at least if they intend to partake of services from others; Some services are ranked higher than others, and money is how we keep score. But what do people need? The physiological needs fall quite elegantly into a hierarchy, I feel. The air that we breathe and would perish within ten minutes without, has always been free (if perhaps more polluted), and will be for the foreseeable future. Water, which we can go without for days at most, literally pours from the sky, and if push comes to shove I would gather that putting some pails out in a tropical rainstorm might sustain one for quite some time. Bathing would be a luxury then, though. And food, what about it? Despite the careless admonishments of many a parent (and amusement of sharp kids), food does grow on trees. Amartya Sen won a Nobel for pointing out that famine is at least in part precipitated by poor distribution, which would seem an obvious enough observation. Then again, sometimes only the truly wise can see the blatantly obvious. Without resorting to any hard data, it would appear that this world does indeed have the potential to produce enough to feed the hungry, and the wherewithal to deliver it to them, but for some reason it mostly doesn't pan out that way. Avoiding discussion of geographically far-flung areas (i.e. Africa), less than two centuries ago Ireland actually continued food exports even in the midst of famine, just because prices were better next door in England. Yet even today, a third of humans supposedly may not have enough to eat. A famous Sen quote is, "there is no such thing as an apolitical food problem". The most cynical among us might postulate that the current system works just dandy for those with assets - it is not their fault that the poor do not have enough cash to buy meals, after all, and if they are malnourished and entrapped in poverty, that is just regrettable; Throw another feel-good Live Aid concert or something and be done with it. Meanwhile, their own kids will quietly have a relatively greater headstart in life, in true Darwinian continuity, though of course nobody says it out loud. More reasonably, people are probably not so callous on a personal level, given their willingness to help out that I have personally witnessed more than once. Somehow I have forgotten to mention the shaking hands of a none-too-well-groomed old lady in a none-too-well-furnished flat who handed some foodstuffs to me during Project C.A.N., which briefly led me to wonder about the point of it all given that she looked the part of a qualified recipient. Collectively, though, unfettered charity doesn't seem quite so prevalent. But a more thorough investigation would involve game theory that should be more relevant in an upcoming post, and there it shall go. On some level, I suppose that kids who are told to eat their food because "there are starving children in Africa" suspect that it isn't a good argument at all, that the stuff on their plate that they would consume or not would not be shipped there anyhow. To round things off, here's some bad photography from yours truly - demonstrations of out-of-focus and underexposed images: 
Do not do this On the left is a baby lizard - I wouldn't have thought that I would ever call a lizard cute, but this one had the tiniest stubby tail and not enough sense to escape into the dark. Haven't seen its parent for some time, now that was one fat and alert specimen. On the right is a pretty darn noisy procession of some sort right in the carpark downstairs. Maybe some National Day rehearsal. Eleven floats in total.
- gaming - My jiggling of RAM sticks has miraculously caused the BIOS Power-on Self Test (POST) to recognize my system for having the full 512MB that it has, instead of the paltry 256MB it previously detected. Believe me, the difference is palpable. 256MB meant that even opening a new browser window could cause much grinding of hard disk virtual memory and lamentation. Let's not go into trying to run Warcraft III. One of these days I'll reward myself by popping down to SLS and getting myself a gig or two of DDR2 RAM, which I believe costs like S$70 a gig now. Watching XP limp along on 256MB is just torture. I'll save my accumulated musings for the next post, since a project that demanded my absence from blogging for nearly two weeks deserves an entry for itself. And yes, it's Fouiero!  More information can be found on the official site, but suffice to say that it works, at least on my home network. Quite a few improvements could be made - in the collision handling of the characters themselves and on the ordering of data packets, just to name a couple, but as an initial foray into real-time networked gaming I guess it's not too shabby. Of course, if I had to do it all over again I would probably just throw my hands up and start by devising a robust general-purpose UDP networking library, which would save a lot of later grief. Funny thing about UDP, and the Internet in general, is that there is no (simple) way for two computers behind routers to handshake each other and set up a high-speed connection by themselves, even if both parties were willing to divulge all necessary information; Which may not be such a bad thing with all the exploits floating around. Getting around this entails more fiddling about with router configurations than the average user may be prepared to do, or a third-party server to act as the middleman initially. Blah. Well, one thing that I realised in the middle of Fouiero development was that it wasn't really hard, in the way that setting off on a forty kilometre march isn't. Yes, it's tedious and sometimes painful, but one never doubts that one can do it. It is a matter of checking that all the required tools are available, then just plugging away. Once I had the ability to draw pixels and send bytes, it was done. I would say that a graphics-light 3D first person shooter could be achieved with, oh, half a megabyte - and the extension required from say, Fouiero, isn't even that great, since essentially all that is needed is to add a third spatial dimension and update the collision detection. Might be interesting when I next find myself with some spare time, though I had best push myself to continue on the web-based Utopia/Civ hybrid. Soon.
- programming - Let's see what's gone this week or so - met up with some old NS pals for sushi and pool, where I chowed down three uncomfortably cold baby squid-like objects. Racked up my T-shirt count after receiving the MILK Run one belatedly while on Project C.A.N., for which I arrived at 0830 hours at Toa Payoh MRT only to start at 10 plus. Then again my group was chockfull of 4O people and we had a deck of cards, so everything turned out fine. The actual collection itself didn't take long, what with a majority of the residents not responding (which might have been expected, being a lazy Sunday morning and all that). Doing such stuff always reminds me of how a salesman might feel, with long barren periods interrupted by bouts of success. Had a little discussion while on the job, on whether it might be better in some cases to just do "normal" work and donate the proceeds, i.e. if the ends should take precedence over the means. The thirty storey blocks also somehow led me to wonder about just how tall megaskyscrapers like the Taipei 101 and soon-to-be Burj Dubai actually look up close. Strange given that my own block is twenty-five stories high. Another observation was that the residents appeared to be almost all middle-aged and above or young kiddies, with nary a young adult in sight. Odd. Originally scheduled to be over at "five or six", we were in fact finished by twelve-plus, including the sorting of the canned food into Halal and non-Halal categories; It was then a long wait for the complementary lunch, but some rounds of bridge, hearts, blackjack and poker helped time to pass. Some of us then visited Settlers' for a spate of board games, and I finally experienced what Munchkins was all about. I suspect the game would go appreciably faster once we get familiar with the cards, instead of having to read the text each time we come across it. Was recommended a German fish bidding game, and ended the day with a fast-paced dinosaur card-exchanging bone-grabbing game. Don't ask. Discovered the Cheapass Games publisher, and their founding principle - that providing dice, counters etc with games is like bundling each can with a can-opener - makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, given that almost everyone has access to a printer, the obvious next step is D.I.Y download-and-print with zero delivery costs, if they could just find a way to stop people from redistributing the games for free... Talking of computer games, Liero (381KB) probably offered me, byte for byte, the most enjoyment (ADOM might run it close, though); Ah, for the days when we used to play it in class, projected on the big screen, during recess and after school. About the only gripe I had about it was that it could only be played in two-player splitscreen hotseat mode. It was a blast with two - imagine what it would be with four or more. So, with blatant disregard for the scores of Liero-clones on the Web, I did what any bored computer science student 
BAKA vs. AUTOMAT KALA The logic behind Liero-like games isn't particularly challenging, and once one gets a basic 2D physics engine going with decent collision detection, it's basically smooth sailing from then on. However, the very attraction of Liero, which is its fast-paced tactical movement and frantic rope swinging, makes it very dependent on the speed that data can be transferred between online players. My current UDP server-client setup (another reinvented wheel) does most of the processing on the server, which is not much of an issue given the relatively low computational requirements; As with terminals, the clients simply send their keystrokes to the server, which after doing the number crunching passes back the positions of the players and projectiles for the clients to display on screen. 
Latent considerations Now, information is not transferred instantaneously over the Internet. A realistic expectation between two computers within Singapore might be in the region of 20 to 30 ms, including overheads. Thus, in any online real-time game, it is completely unavoidable that all non-server players are 20 or 30 milliseconds behind of the action. Is this fair? Nope, but it can be made equally bad for everyone by operating at the transfer rate of the slowest client - not that this is an attractive solution. Is it crucial? Perhaps not, depending on the game itself - if the objects in the game travel only a pixel of two (or even less) during those 20-odd milliseconds, i.e. about fifty pixels a second, it would likely not even be noticeable. Unfortunately, in Liero-like games, it could make a huge difference. A change of direction might mean that a player character is ten pixels to the left instead of ten to the right in that short time, and the correction that the client's screen has to make contributes to suboptimal jerkiness. This cannot be resolved by predictive algorithms moreover, since such algorithms would reduce jitter when they turn out right, but actually worsen jitter if they guess wrongly. We could make smoothness a priority, like most FPS games in my estimation, in which case what is shown on screen may not be the most accurate representation possible (recall all those headshots in CS which came despite aiming some distance from the head...). This may be good for FPS since one doesn't really see the bullets flying, but in Liero where life and death hangs by a pixel, I would deem it unacceptable. But all hope is not lost - with the right firewall and router configurations, it should still be playable at pings of 20-30ms or less. Can one lah!
Hokay, I'm going to try my hand at my superlong-delayed MMOG (multiplayer online game). And before I start off this time, I will solemnly swear to myself - no graphics, no registration forms, no help files, no frills at all, just the meat. Or I will hit myself upside the head. This doesn't count because it's just an old concept doodle: 
Walky walky As for those who may have wondered about the Freshman Philosophy-Major man cartoon in the previous post, it's a Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip (which does not however feature a character named Tom or any bugs, dancing or not). Many of the strips are available on the Salon.com archive, just watch a short ad to get temporary free access to the site. It's well worth the effort, and not just for the God-Man episodes. Before I forget, a heads-up for a nifty little utility, the 4t Tray Minimizer (681 KB)! The Windows Taskbar has limited real estate, and many applications don't give the option to minimize to a nice teeny icon in the system tray, instead clogging up a quarter of the taskbar in an ugly manner (*cough* Microsoft's own Windows Media Player *cough*, especially since the user will generally want the player to be running while doing other stuff). 
Before/After So if you run plenty of programs in the background, or just want to hide them off the taskbar, the Minimizer is for you. Yes, it's freeware too, need you ask?
- philosophy - I'm up to here in continuing with the rest of God's Debris (Part One) (Part Deux), much of the latter part of which is not that relevant to what i really want to say, so I'm winding up the review with nothing about the book itself. Just go read it if you want. 
"Humanity needs a lesson in humility"(Source) Richard Dawkins, atheist extraordinaire, suggested a Spectrum of Theistic Probability to categorize one's strength of belief in the existence of God. It ranges at one end from 1. Strong theist, which is movingly summed up by Carl Jung: "I do not believe. I know" (though Mark Twain might beg to differ, as "faith is believing what you know ain't so"), all the way to 7. Strong atheist, who would assert with equal vigour the non-existence of God(s). Interestingly, Dawkins only claims to be "a 6.8", which leaves him open - just barely - to conversion in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Then again, as a professional scientist, he could likely do no less. Now, when faced with the same question, where would I place myself? The midpoint of the spectrum is described as "Completely impartial agnostic. God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.", which doesn't strike me as being an accurate description of myself. If I am not sure of a thing, I would hardly automatically assign even odds! Still, that didn't help in determining my own position, and after some consideration I had to say that that spectrum is not really all-encompassing. Here, the words of Bertrand (Hi, Bert!) Russell may be the best: "I never know whether I should say 'Agnostic' or whether I should say 'Atheist'. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods." Therein lies the innermost roots of my concern. "God" is a loaded word; When it is mentioned, we instinctively think of "my God", and I daresay the conception of "God" held by different people, even of the same religion, are not exactly the same. There is some beauty in the ontological argument, even if it ends up logically flawed: God is, by definition, a being greater than which nothing can be conceived (imagined). Existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind. God must exist in reality; if God did not, then God would not be that than which nothing greater can be conceived (imagined). The ultimate key, however, is that I cannot claim to know; Can something this perfect, for lack of a better concept, be known? Where do we find the words to approximate something without limit? Are our current mental abilities sufficient to attempt this? Will they ever be? 
And I can prove it! (Source) Consider a bunny, for in weighty matters cuteness assuages the strain - by all appearances, it is sentient; It feels when poked, and is subject to some form of pleasure and pain. But I would deem it an impossibility to teach a bunny to multiply (numbers, not more bunnies), and there are feats of logic far beyond mere multiplication. Hence I say that the maximum intelligence available to a bunny, as it were, is limited. Does this apply to the human condition? We adorn ourselves with the sobriquet of sapience, but is this "self-awareness" the highest that can be? May we be as to some superior awareness, as bunnies are to us? Is our logic, even our system of counting numbers, the only logic that could be? If the amount of time it took for zero to be discovered is anything to go by, we could still be blind to many basic truths - what the chances that we are the last generation to have made all critical discoveries? Certainly this looks to be an unfalsifiable proposition, and probably is of little practical consequence. So, the postulation of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent One - referred to by many names throughout the ages, but commonly understood as "God" nowadays, is not actually disagreeable to me; The thing I find incredible is that mere men, who if they look should realise just how great this Being is, can turn around and have the presumption that they can help to do Its Will. This alone would be sufferable, as most religions are rooted in some morality - but when the presumption is that they have the only correct way, which I see as an unfounded pride quite beyond mere temporal hubris, the world will surely again endure the excesses of zealotry, as it did during the Inquisition, and today in the shadow of terror. Sadly, the properties of popular religions that aid in their survival are the very ones which encourage such behaviour - as men will not patronize a barbershop whose workers have bad haircuts, so will men sincerely looking to find God be attracted to religious institutions where faith runs deepest; But strength of conviction is no proof of morality, and exclusivity (we are the only righteous ones, we are Chosen) is the cheapest attraction, for men love to have their specialness affirmed; And though many may not think of it in these terms, as genes do not comprehend their full function, the effect nonetheless remains. Have I ever quoted myself? I will do so now, a piece I wrote in April 2005: "...Religions do change, get absorbed and go extinct with regularity, like species and companies. Yes, yes, it may be a disrespectful comparism, but true nonetheless. Let us zoom out and look upon this Earth from a far wider viewpoint. If you had lived in ancient Egypt, your gods would have been Ra, Lord of the Sun, Maat, Goddess of Truth, Seth, the Strength, Thoth, Keeper of Wisdom, Hathor, the Celestial Cow, Horus of Law and Order and many others. Where are they now? And yet in their time their followers knew that they were eternal. ...The Greeks and Romans were once the leaders of civilization. They shared much the same pantheon, Jupiter being Zeus. In culture they had no equal. Their reputation spanned the ancient world. But today Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Ares and Dementer are studied only in childrens' tales. Once, they strode and threw lightning in their believers' minds. And the mighty ones of the Aztecs! How they have fallen! Xilonen, to whom maidens were sacrificed; Tlaloc devoured the sick. Huitzilopochtli disposed of the prisoners, while noble Tezcatlipoca accepted only volunteers. Now their temples lie empty, though at one time tens of thousands met death in their honour. Quetzalcoatl has been laid to rest. And Zoroastrianism! It was enlightened before its day. They had gender equality, promoted cleanliness, valued hard work and charity, and condemned oppression of other human beings. So they hold fire in high regard, but were by no means arsonists. Maybe they were not ruthless enough: they did not proselytize. Thus Zoroastrianism became a stepping stone for its juniors, Judaism and Christianity. They are now a shadow of their former glory, having a couple hundred thousand adherants. And where are the gods of our fathers? The unorganised pagan deities? Surely at one time in an ancestral village in a corner of China, they had lit incense for some local spirit. No one cares, they are but small gods, irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. But they were respected, and worshipped once upon a time. So why all this? Simply, to all things come an end. Who knows what even a mere thousand years may bring? Before you believe in a god, cast your mind back to that shepherd boy in ancient Egypt; the scholars in ancient Greece. Are we that different that our gods may exist forever? In the fullness of time, a kid from Later Earth will point his finger at a picture and ask, Mommy, what's that? "Oh, one of the gods of the Old Religions." "How fascinating! Tell me more!" "Not now, dear, let us go and worship Tyrintian-II the Greater first. We're almost late." Note the emphasis on "a". Verily, it may be true that all the gods that all the people that ever lived have worshipped, are in essence the same God; But when men lay their baggage on the Divine, when they maintain that He did this, or commanded that, or desired thus - I cannot feel but it detracts from His perfection. The story of Saint Augustine, I read as part admission thereof: "In his contemplation Augustine decided to take a walk along the seashore. There he saw a child playing in the sand near the shoreline. Having dug a hole in the sand the child was bringing over handfuls of water from the nearby ocean to fill the hole. When Augustine asked what the child was trying to do, the boy replied that he wanted to empty the entire ocean into the hole he had dug in the sand. 'But that's impossible, Augustine observed, 'can't you see the ocean is infinitely greater than the hole you have dug in the sand?' At that moment Augustine realized a profound truth: it is equally impossible to fill one's limited mind with the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity." Without going into any specifics about the Trinity, it can be easily seen that the concept of God Himself cannot be smaller than that; And yet it is claimed that God can be obeyed! To obey must imply the knowledge of His will, and I am eager to behold with my own eyes the holy grandeur of the man who deigns to know (or interpret) God's will. And these words may not be as heretical as they look at first sight (perhaps a pity!) - a primer on the evolution of Christianity will reveal that religious leaders have had their differences with the prevailing church more than once, with the most significant break perhaps coming with the Protestant Reformation as a reaction to the perceived corruption of the then Roman Catholic Church; It could be said to be progressive, in giving a recognized God directly to the people by refusing to acknowledge papal authority. Similar schisms are found in other mainstream religions (Sunni & Shi'a Islam, Theravāda, Mahāyāna & Vajrayāna Buddhism, etc). So which denomination/sect/school is to say who is the original? Again I cannot resist quoting the very readable Russell: "If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time..." Dawkins builds on it... "The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first." Well, it is getting very late, or less early as may be the case, and it is time to settle on a conclusion to this topic for the foreseeable future. After all this talk, or nonsense as it may be, where does it leave me? I can say with some certainty that I am not a praying man, and that neither my derision nor my obsequience is of any significance towards a supreme being I could never pretend to understand; But if I would pray, I would pray for the end of such pride so thinly veiled in poor humility, the love of fellow men being the cornerstone of grace, and the sweetness and light of a bunny innocent of being cute; But I do not pray, so it is moot. 
Sic transit gloria mundi "Thus passes the glory of the world, Servant of the Servants of God" While there is much to be disagreed with, some of the sentiment is well appreciable. They say God is Good. I believe in Good.
- outings - Set off for the Citi-Milkrun the day before, and for the first time in a long, long while saw a pet bunny. Hooray! This particular specimen was vaguely disinterested in moving, though, even with its roughly four year-old owner shaking its leash. Disapproved! Arrived at Tiong Bahru MRT, and while walking to the starting point (Zouk carpark) heard the famous RK House No Pork mp3 in its entirety for the first time (yah i slow). The place was pretty packed, mostly with school kids who had been conscripted in, by the looks of it. Thanks to the crowd control measures which saw the human tide redirected to bend back on itself, we endured quite a bit of standing about and shuffling our feet before even making it to the start line, and eventually I crossed it at 13:45 after the beginning of the Community Run. The crowd didn't disperse for some time even after that, with most opting to walk, and I ended up walking for a few hundred metres, managing some sporadic sprinting whenever the opportunity presented itself. I had almost forgotten how good it feels at the end of a long run. Passed a luckless kid, maybe seven, being exhorted by his coach-dad to "open up his stride", which didn't seem much fun to him. Encountered a guy encouraging the runners with "two hundred metres only" rather earlier than expected, though, and crossed the finish in a time of 32:00 exactly. That gives 18:15 for a 4km route, which comes out to an 11:24 timing for 2.4km. Which, given the circumstances, I highly doubt was the case. Tried to ask around to see if anyone else took their times for comparism's sake, but no one did. So either my watch was slow, the route isn't really 4km long, or I took a wrong turning somewhere. 
Milking the number for all it's worth Came pretty close to 2nd prize in the lucky draw that followed - it went to tag number 5053, I had 5050 (sound familiar?), and the rest of us had tags ranging from the five thousand and forties to 5051. Scooted off home to change for my cousin's wedding at the Orchard Hotel. Quite a grand affair, complete with a personalized animation describing their courtship. Haha. Reminds me of when I helped in one of those for an Army event (not about courtship, obviously). Video footage of the groom and his best men having to do stuff like push-ups and pole dances to be allowed entry into the bride's home was also shown :P The food wasn't half bad either.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
