why must love
in all its gentleness
when it stretches out its hand, offer both
to be hurt,
and to hurt?
that as much as
we bare ourselves, our weaknesses to our beloved,
willing and ready
to suffer any pain to see our loved one smile,
sometimes,
we make them cry inside -
sometimes so badly
we can almost see the fresh wound
that will dry into another rough scar
on a heart that for a little time,
in our arms,
soft and warm,
beat so gently in its rest?
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Friday, September 15, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
I don't look at you too much
But more and more, like an athlete who steps up his_
_training sessions before a competition,
I slow down to imagine what it would be like
When I'm alone at night, or when
You're out or when I am,
If you should be suddenly gone one day -
Would I break down to cry,
Or would I find myself already too ready
To accept that this is part of the whole scheme of things?
For in my life you have been like a door,
An open one at times, and
A closed one at times, and at times
I wished that the door were gone and I could go out and play;
But this is one of those mornings
I can imagine that irreconcilable chasm
That would inevitably stand between you and me like the Night
Between Yesterday and Today. When I wake up, I would lean_
_against the wall
Cold from the night, recalling
What I was like yesterday, trying to warm myself_
_with the same blood
That flowed in my veins the day before, and the distance,_
_I know,
Would hit me.
And I would feel within my arms
The arms that were shorter and fingers less deft,
Still alive and wanting to reach out and run into your embrace
To hear you say that I have done well
even though my best no longer seems good enough
for the world around me
And I would bring to memory those precious scenes
When you stood beside me in front of the whole school on_
_Prize Giving Day
Proud that I have been your son.
Yet, when I saw you in the morning,
I didn't know what to say to you.
I simply let the day lead me into itself,
Walking into the distance knowing well that one day_
_when I turned around
You would not be there.
Sorry, can't do my linebreaks properly here :|
"_" at the end of the line indicates no line break!
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
think about doors that open by themselves, as if they were alive. think about rooms that can become cold in the day and boxes that light up. think about boxes that can make voices come out of nowhere. think about the energy delivered into our homes, as if from nowhere. think about the power plants that generate all this power. think about the fossil fuels that burn to release the energy to drive power plants. think about the lives that used to be in the fossiles that now burn to work for us, as if their ghosts have been called back to life into slavery to our urban fetishes. is this not the city, where the living and the dead live together? is this not the city where the dead still live in their death and those alive are dead in their living?
nothing comes from nothing. if the fan can move by itself, surely something, someone must have poured its energy into it. it's just so immense, the amount of energy we release. sometimes i think that all this energy running around is really the ghosts of the past, that all urbanisation must necessary suck the life out of someone or something in order to run itself.
think about outsourcing. think about how little we pay those workers out there to maintain our margins over here. think about how little Singapore pays foreign construction workers to build its prosperity.
if we found stupid aliens on mars, we'd probably bring them back to work in factories for us as well.
nothing comes from nothing. if the fan can move by itself, surely something, someone must have poured its energy into it. it's just so immense, the amount of energy we release. sometimes i think that all this energy running around is really the ghosts of the past, that all urbanisation must necessary suck the life out of someone or something in order to run itself.
think about outsourcing. think about how little we pay those workers out there to maintain our margins over here. think about how little Singapore pays foreign construction workers to build its prosperity.
if we found stupid aliens on mars, we'd probably bring them back to work in factories for us as well.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Imagine a pill...
that would be the fruit of Genetics, Nano Technology and Biotechnology, that when swallowed, would go into your system and find its way around your body, using the protein that it finds around to build components required for more complex genetic computations, planting the appropriate components in specific parts of the body, and finally finding its way to the brain, planting its sensory components there to receive instruction from the brain.
Imagine that this system could capture images in the retina and save them or send them out to external systems, giving you a kind of printable photographic memory that obseletes the camera, taking advantage of the eyes which are by farmore perfect nearer perfection that any lens possible.
Imagine being able to authenticate your identity in a way that allows you to go shopping without having to bring even a card. You just take what you what and go home.
Imagine being able to access information without a compture or a phone or anything, knowing all, yet not knowing anything.
Imagine messaging in your head, being telepathically connected to the world.
Imagine being able to move from country to country without needing a passport.
Imagine having to swallow a second pill because there were some problems with the first.
Imagine the pill to have some bugs and you go into security alert.
Imagine someone hacking into you and you are screwed because you stored too many important things not in your brain, but in the system inside your brain.
Imagine being able to do your work suntanning on a resort island and nobody knows you are in your swimming trunks.
Imagine getting paid for renting out five minutes of your brain a day.
Imagine being able to learn anything so quickly that people really realise the value of the journey.
Imagine how work and leisure fuse so readily it becomes ever more important to learn how work could be enjoyable, and that work is an inevitable part of life.
Imagine a different pill that is able to uninstall all this.
So, would you rather the blue pill or the red pill?
that would be the fruit of Genetics, Nano Technology and Biotechnology, that when swallowed, would go into your system and find its way around your body, using the protein that it finds around to build components required for more complex genetic computations, planting the appropriate components in specific parts of the body, and finally finding its way to the brain, planting its sensory components there to receive instruction from the brain.
Imagine that this system could capture images in the retina and save them or send them out to external systems, giving you a kind of printable photographic memory that obseletes the camera, taking advantage of the eyes which are by far
Imagine being able to authenticate your identity in a way that allows you to go shopping without having to bring even a card. You just take what you what and go home.
Imagine being able to access information without a compture or a phone or anything, knowing all, yet not knowing anything.
Imagine messaging in your head, being telepathically connected to the world.
Imagine being able to move from country to country without needing a passport.
Imagine having to swallow a second pill because there were some problems with the first.
Imagine the pill to have some bugs and you go into security alert.
Imagine someone hacking into you and you are screwed because you stored too many important things not in your brain, but in the system inside your brain.
Imagine being able to do your work suntanning on a resort island and nobody knows you are in your swimming trunks.
Imagine getting paid for renting out five minutes of your brain a day.
Imagine being able to learn anything so quickly that people really realise the value of the journey.
Imagine how work and leisure fuse so readily it becomes ever more important to learn how work could be enjoyable, and that work is an inevitable part of life.
Imagine a different pill that is able to uninstall all this.
So, would you rather the blue pill or the red pill?
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Friday, June 16, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
no more gymmers, please. because gyms don't make hunks. all these gyms around here are just churning out these strange people, with the body of a construction worker and the personality of a mouse. it's just distasteful, like pop songs getting sung by an opera singer. it's just painful.
if u wanna be a hunk, start from your personality. so that when you get that body working, you know how to handle it, and so that behind those huge chests, you also have an equally big heart to match up to it. because, because, the size of your personality matters.
if u wanna be a hunk, start from your personality. so that when you get that body working, you know how to handle it, and so that behind those huge chests, you also have an equally big heart to match up to it. because, because, the size of your personality matters.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Thought this was interesting. An exhibition at Tokyo featuring 116 life-sized panels of persons who had passed away in accidents and crimes, including those of children and of those who lost their lives to drunk drivers. The driving message of the exhibition was "life", and the panels featured articles such as photographs and shoes that belonged to the deceased, as well as messages written by the bereaved. In a time when Japan experiences so many murders and deaths, it was only timely that such an exhibition remind us again of how precious life is, and how much more we need to address crimes and accidents as very urgent social problems.
Original text: 生命のメッセージ展 始まる
Original text: 生命のメッセージ展 始まる
Friday, April 21, 2006
energy, rhythm and line
is what i have learnt from swimming, and is my current analogy for everything around me. refraining from writing long essays that give examples and then explain these examples, here's the heart of it all:
[energy - callibre]
energy to me, is the deep capacity for action. energy does not determine what you do or how much of it you can do, but rather, at what level you can do it. it is the substance that is consumed in action, the wax that is burnt to give light.
[rhythm - heartbeat]
rhythm is the consistency at which you can do things. in the short term, this is how regular you are to perform. it is the dynamism on a microscopic level that paces you to look forward.
[line - imagination]
it would be tempting to use the word "vision" but i thought "imagination" is less assuming. line is the process that pictures the present, imagines the future, and manifests this imagination in the physical world. this was my last addition to the set, when my freestyle somehow wasn't moving. line is what makes you move. line gives you the big picture that allows you to pace your rhythm.
That's all. There would be many things that flow from this analogy... but that would be another lesson.
is what i have learnt from swimming, and is my current analogy for everything around me. refraining from writing long essays that give examples and then explain these examples, here's the heart of it all:
[energy - callibre]
energy to me, is the deep capacity for action. energy does not determine what you do or how much of it you can do, but rather, at what level you can do it. it is the substance that is consumed in action, the wax that is burnt to give light.
[rhythm - heartbeat]
rhythm is the consistency at which you can do things. in the short term, this is how regular you are to perform. it is the dynamism on a microscopic level that paces you to look forward.
[line - imagination]
it would be tempting to use the word "vision" but i thought "imagination" is less assuming. line is the process that pictures the present, imagines the future, and manifests this imagination in the physical world. this was my last addition to the set, when my freestyle somehow wasn't moving. line is what makes you move. line gives you the big picture that allows you to pace your rhythm.
That's all. There would be many things that flow from this analogy... but that would be another lesson.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
my take on internet censorship
barring physical distance and network infrastructure that gives rise to poor connection, the internet has no definite boundaries.
yes, there are administrative boundaries, that can control how and to whom information can go out from private servers, but controlling what your users can access, on a nation-wide level, is quite a different matter.
on private networks, it is feasible, common and fair to implement proxies through which all traffic must be filtered, since such networks are relatively small (usually only up to a few thousand machines) and usually all the servers and often most of the clients as well, are completely owned by an organisation.
on a nation-wide network, however, users are connected through backbone lines to the internet. information is not just freely accessible, but overflowing. The practicals:
1. for gateways that filter on domains, a trivial workaround would be accessing content via public gateways. gone to china, done that.
2. for gateways that filter on content, encrypted traffice via a know foreign server would do the trick.
3. if you're looking for pure content, you could always try another language.
4. you could always get your friend overseas to keep you updated. if you don't have one, you could always find one on some chat server, forum, community, IM or dating site.
5. enforcing policies on local content providers does not mean that similar content is not available. uses will find it on foreign servers. unless you can shut the whole america down...
6. some countries have export laws surrounding software. but always, someone out there writes something similar and gives it away for free, from a server sitting in a country that doesn't have such laws. i still think it stupid to have a law that dictates whether you can send software out of a country purely based on the fact that the software was written while in a certain country. anyway, the link is usually there and you just have to click "OK"...
the principles:
1. the whole concept of the internet sits on the abstraction of physical connections. this is philosophically in disagreement with trying to enforce physically-based policies.
2. the internet is full of redundant links. meaning that if you close down one link (ie, filter at a gateway), chances are there are other links to the content.
3. search engines cache content. even if a content has been taken down, it is possible that a cache of it is available.
4. because we do commercial transactions on the net, we need encryption to work. the same encryption can let us tunnel through forign proxies and get to the content we want without the scrutinity of censoring proxies.
5. the internet is a world totally different from the physical world. the whole (yes, 100% of it) internet is made by hackers, not by policy makers. hackers made it work beyond physical and political boundaries and policy makers cannot change that. if there were any rules or laws in this world, their enforcement and implementation would have to be as profoundly different as the internet is different from freight routes.
6. people who grew up with the internet create a different social atmosphere. we need to remember how piracy actually drives sales through free marketing and customer education, and work from there. in the real world, theft leads to loss of profit. but when you step into the software world, everything is about knowledge. and it is knowledge that drives the hunger for greater knowledge. the only real reason people want to protect their trade in knowledge, i believe, is because they are not confident of growing faster than their customers to continuously attain a greater capacitiy to provide even more knowledge. ridiculous sales margins claiming to retrieve previous investments in research, at the end of the day, i believe, contributes to social stress. and i think the stress is building up - no longer between the workers and the beauracrary, but between knowledege workers who are scattered all over, including within the beauracrary, and the managers, sales people and politicians, whose sole purpose in this all is to reap as much unbelievable profit as they can. the difference is this - the beauracry used to own all the facilities in which workers can create something of value that can be sold by the beauracracy for money or power, but now, the worker owns all of this. in fact, the worker himself, is the facility from which all value flows. admitedly, the greed and selfishness of people will never change. but a new social order where the knowledge workers hold not just knowledge but also the ability to implement policies and managers have the authority but not the means to put their policies across, it would be interesting to see how they would evolve. as knowledge economies become more specialised and workers become more highly skilled and self-sufficient while markets becoming more discerning, the power game i think, would take on a new dimension. in such a world, the top-down approach to internet censorship is simply strange.
7. the reason we are starting to have social problems arising from the use of the internet, i believe, is not because we are not controlling the medium strictly enough, but because the policy makers have not come to terms with its nature. social response all these problems are signs that the old order is losing ground and a new balance has not been achived. i think policy makers need to change their approach to the internet and cosider it part of the social fabric in order to make policies that will work. but this might take a generation, when those who grew up with the internet become policy makers.
well, give and take, that's my take. might not be yours, for now, but let's just wait and see.
barring physical distance and network infrastructure that gives rise to poor connection, the internet has no definite boundaries.
yes, there are administrative boundaries, that can control how and to whom information can go out from private servers, but controlling what your users can access, on a nation-wide level, is quite a different matter.
on private networks, it is feasible, common and fair to implement proxies through which all traffic must be filtered, since such networks are relatively small (usually only up to a few thousand machines) and usually all the servers and often most of the clients as well, are completely owned by an organisation.
on a nation-wide network, however, users are connected through backbone lines to the internet. information is not just freely accessible, but overflowing. The practicals:
1. for gateways that filter on domains, a trivial workaround would be accessing content via public gateways. gone to china, done that.
2. for gateways that filter on content, encrypted traffice via a know foreign server would do the trick.
3. if you're looking for pure content, you could always try another language.
4. you could always get your friend overseas to keep you updated. if you don't have one, you could always find one on some chat server, forum, community, IM or dating site.
5. enforcing policies on local content providers does not mean that similar content is not available. uses will find it on foreign servers. unless you can shut the whole america down...
6. some countries have export laws surrounding software. but always, someone out there writes something similar and gives it away for free, from a server sitting in a country that doesn't have such laws. i still think it stupid to have a law that dictates whether you can send software out of a country purely based on the fact that the software was written while in a certain country. anyway, the link is usually there and you just have to click "OK"...
the principles:
1. the whole concept of the internet sits on the abstraction of physical connections. this is philosophically in disagreement with trying to enforce physically-based policies.
2. the internet is full of redundant links. meaning that if you close down one link (ie, filter at a gateway), chances are there are other links to the content.
3. search engines cache content. even if a content has been taken down, it is possible that a cache of it is available.
4. because we do commercial transactions on the net, we need encryption to work. the same encryption can let us tunnel through forign proxies and get to the content we want without the scrutinity of censoring proxies.
5. the internet is a world totally different from the physical world. the whole (yes, 100% of it) internet is made by hackers, not by policy makers. hackers made it work beyond physical and political boundaries and policy makers cannot change that. if there were any rules or laws in this world, their enforcement and implementation would have to be as profoundly different as the internet is different from freight routes.
6. people who grew up with the internet create a different social atmosphere. we need to remember how piracy actually drives sales through free marketing and customer education, and work from there. in the real world, theft leads to loss of profit. but when you step into the software world, everything is about knowledge. and it is knowledge that drives the hunger for greater knowledge. the only real reason people want to protect their trade in knowledge, i believe, is because they are not confident of growing faster than their customers to continuously attain a greater capacitiy to provide even more knowledge. ridiculous sales margins claiming to retrieve previous investments in research, at the end of the day, i believe, contributes to social stress. and i think the stress is building up - no longer between the workers and the beauracrary, but between knowledege workers who are scattered all over, including within the beauracrary, and the managers, sales people and politicians, whose sole purpose in this all is to reap as much unbelievable profit as they can. the difference is this - the beauracry used to own all the facilities in which workers can create something of value that can be sold by the beauracracy for money or power, but now, the worker owns all of this. in fact, the worker himself, is the facility from which all value flows. admitedly, the greed and selfishness of people will never change. but a new social order where the knowledge workers hold not just knowledge but also the ability to implement policies and managers have the authority but not the means to put their policies across, it would be interesting to see how they would evolve. as knowledge economies become more specialised and workers become more highly skilled and self-sufficient while markets becoming more discerning, the power game i think, would take on a new dimension. in such a world, the top-down approach to internet censorship is simply strange.
7. the reason we are starting to have social problems arising from the use of the internet, i believe, is not because we are not controlling the medium strictly enough, but because the policy makers have not come to terms with its nature. social response all these problems are signs that the old order is losing ground and a new balance has not been achived. i think policy makers need to change their approach to the internet and cosider it part of the social fabric in order to make policies that will work. but this might take a generation, when those who grew up with the internet become policy makers.
well, give and take, that's my take. might not be yours, for now, but let's just wait and see.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
stuck in the office
nowhere to go
no place to be
just myself
away from everything
what people think i am
supposed to be
stale
everywhere i breathe in the air
breathed on me
and now i just don't want to be
anything at all. i hate it that i used to be
such a good kid
that all these suckers around me are now putting chains around me
to keep me
the way i was; i hate it that i had not wasted all that energy
fighting parents that think i'll never learn to decide
what to do
next!
why does the world seem that bad when it is just one person
maybe two
who haven't learnt to love enough to let go?
Friday, March 03, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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