IRC

watching lines of text
repeating and scrolling across the screen
it's like i'm watching a world
as small as my world now trapped in the room
pass me by
most of the time
it all feels like
the world is an LCD
with everything happening between two glass plates, not in my world;
i would like to think that my world has much more, and it must be somewhere else,
but outside the LCD,
is just me, sitting in front of the damned notebook,
my greatest comfort being my music tracks
programmed not to betray me.

もし生まれつきのすべては、ゲームのように生まれるまえに選択できる設定だったら、自分はいったいなんで今持っているすべての長所、弱点、頭よさ、顔、人種、両親、体の癖、体質、生まれた国などを、選択してセットにしたのか、思い出せますか？

If everything you have in life were like the settings u gave to your character before you started a game, would you still be able to remember why you had chosen your strengths, weaknesses, how intelligent you are, how you look, your race, your parents, your body and everything that you were born with?

僕は少し思い出せたと思う。だけど、設定時想像したのは、決して今の現実ではない。

Maybe I do somewhat remember. But what I must have had in mind back then, cannot be the reality that I am living in today.

世界はインターネットやテレビ放送など通信の発展により根本的に変わり、社会の価値の核心となる世界観もそれにつれて変化する。

The world has changed so much since... and its values has been radically altered by progress in communications technologies.

こんな世界に、今の設定だと、悔しいけど、もう設定済みだから、もうどうしようもない。
だけど、時々、考える。自分の顔のポイントをもっともっとアップしといたら、と。

It makes it painful to think about how i am left to live with settings that no longer match this reality. It makes me wish i could have gone back and edited my settings and gave myself more points for looks.

でもさ、人間は満足できないものだ。人を見たら、すぐそいつの何かがほしくなる。

but then again, humans are simply insatiable.

だけど、何でもあるほど完璧に見える頭がよくて、金持ちで、体質もよくて、格好いい人を見たら、知りたくなるではないか・・・そいつが選択した設定を。

still, when one sees someone incredibly perfect - having the brains, the body, the money, everything, one cannot help but wonder, what he had selected for his character before it all started.

周りの世界は意味がなくなっている
自分の生活も、大人ごっこに見えてくる
何かがほしい欲望なども
友人、仕事、夢も形だけ残っている

一人になった部屋で
今日幸せだった、とも言い切れず
でたらめに書いている詩（うた）をどうやって
終わらせるのかわからないように
今夜も夜更かししてしまいそう

明日も同じ生活が続くだろう
早起きしても期待はない
ただ見飽きた儀式のよう
洗練かつ無感情

Like stray cats
Wanting to be wanted,
Their eyes would look up at you, longingly, if it had not been
For their pride.
Lined down the streets you see them everyday in transit,
Their minds too, somewhere else.
If you gave fish to the cats
They would at least come by and nibble,
And rub their warm bodies against the trunk of your leg, but these
Would pass you by, shuffling along the invisible walls
That separate their worlds from yours.
Why should I be so surprised?
After all, this is the age wireless networks in the air
Can pull continents together, as much as its firewalls
Can put a sea between two rooms.
But I ask myself, what it is, about the city in this age,
That I love so much?
Or is it that, for the lack of imagination,
This has become, to me,
An easier loneliness to bear?

僕は正義の味方だ。でも勘違いするな、僕は決して君の味方ではありません。

いじめられたら助けてあげたいけど、それはいじめる方が悪かったからだけだ。

もし君がいじめる役を選んだら、僕は必ず君の敵になる。

悪く思うな。僕はただ冷静に考え、正しい方の力になるだけだ。

この世界の人間は正と不正に分けられているわけではない、それはわかってる。

仲間だって、正の一面があれば、不正な一面もある。

なんにしろ、正と不正の定義自体も、あいまいになりつつある。

でも僕は、僕こそが正義だ、とあえて考えたくはない。

とすると、誰が正と不正を定義するだろうか。

それはわからない。わかるのは、孤独感だけだ。

無条件で仲間を選ぶことができない僕には、仲間という意味がよくわからないからだ。

そう、僕自分もしょっちゅう不正な一面を見せてしまう。

その時の僕は、だれの味方でもありません。

そんな時は、ほうっといてほしい。

時間がたったら治るから。

もう一度正義の味方の顔つきになったらまた声をかけてください。

しかし、今の僕は、正義の味方の顔つきどころか、時間の味方の顔つきをしているだろう。

顔に刻んだ時間の流れ。

心に染まった永遠まで伸びるこの一瞬の色。

終わりがるような終わりがないような、

始まりがあるような、始まりがないような透明な客観的さ。

それは雨の点滴と同じ色をしている。

苦しみの涙と喜びの涙も、そして悲しみの涙も、
同じ色をするだろう。

average joe

yo yo horny joe
bend your waist n touch your toes
yo yo fucker jane
get ur strapon get in game

here we sing our happy song
morning loud and evening strong
hey hey i wanna play
here comes jimmy jack and james
no no i want my turn
on the butt'n let me paint
oh oh we're running high into my blue V paradise
say say who lost her way? let me come over don't be shy
put ya hand onto my steering
work it good into my gearing
here here we're getting started
hop on 'n ride; i love those thighs!

yes yes we're coming fast
onto the highway make it last!
forget the siren skip the toll,
relax and do as you are told
check ya belts we'll play it safe -
duncha wanna ride again?
come baby on ya face
i see that eager smile at me
i know u wannit say u wannit
here we go!

yo yo average joe
bend your knees and fold your legs
didya hear what i just said?
whats with that smirk what's in ya head?
oh.

i would imagine that once upon a time, when the family put their hands to the fields, that life would have been centred around the field - seeding time, rainy season, harvest, and festivals and social life would be built around all this. a time when social life was indistinguishable from work, and work was inseparable from religion, and religion was part of life, and everyone was part of everything.

i don't know if life would have been auto-pilot back then, but this i am sure - after so many years of urbanisation, many of us have not yet come to terms with work. we have pigeonholed everything and isolated the different parts of our lives, such that work and "life" are as separate as the Math period is from PE lesson in school. the bell rings, and we switch modes.

has it become so hard to integrate work into our lives, and be completely satisfied with it, feeling the same satisfaction a farmer gets when he sees his fields golden?

i don't know. but i think, maybe what i want most at this point of my life, is somehow to have a job that i can call my life.

test everything. trust only as much as you are willing to lose. hold dear the things that matter, but also be ready to lose everything, including yourself, because somewhere down the road, we all lose ourselves sometimes. when you can no longer see the things that used to define the person you are, reinvent. "redo from start" is an error message, but also good advice. it is sad, when people decide to kill themselves when they can no longer face the world without the things around them that used to remind them who they are. if there's a "true" you inside, then you cannot find yourself better than when you have lost everything that you can lose, and are left with that which you cannot. move on. life and time are a couple, and time does not look back. if something wasted your life, spending any more time on it would further be a waste of your life. let go. let go of the past, then you will be able to take hold of the future as it becomes the present. life is always in the present moment. lose it and lose everything. but remember, don't panic. DON'T PANIC. panic is your worst enemy that is always seeking to eat up every present moment you were born to enjoy. enjoying life is not a right. nobody will give it to you, and you can't fight for it. don't complain to the waiter that you didn't enjoy your soup. you just have to learn to do it. and to do it well, in any situation. and when you have mastered that, life would seem easy. some might see you as a loser, some a winner, but why bother, when you have enjoyed every bit of it?

色即空：空即色。

the abstraction gives birth to the instance, and the instance is exactly like the abstraction. you cannot see the instance, but you can know it is alive. you can see the form of the abstraction, but it is not alive. so which has more form, the instance or the abstraction?

just like the runtime is the program, the source code is the program, the binary is the program, but the source code is not the binary, and the binary is not the runtime.

that's why computing to me is both philosophy and engineering.

万物の
リズム読めれば
壁はなし

the easy solution to having too many icons on the desktop. use this wallpaper.

Abstraction n., 3. the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances (WordNet)

Abstraction must be the greatest achievement and sin into which the whole history of civilization has cumulated into. One professor once told me that it is the essence of computing. It must also be the motivation of mathematics. It tries to give one answer to all questions. If art were a lie that told the truth, abstraction, would be the truth that told lies.

I was listening to the BBC, they were airing a program on colour. And it made me realize that the whole spectrum of colours that we take for granted, choosing the colour of anything we like, once upon a time, were not given equal treatment, simply because, it was technically harder to make some dyes. Blue was once a big deal, cos it had few sources - indigo and lapis. Now it has become just another colour on the palette. We have drawn all the colours so close and given them equal treatment that we forget the truth behind them. We give ourselves the power to choose equally, but forgot the passion behind these choices.

Maybe you would understand better if I speak of the Internet. The Internet has abstracted the physical world, making distance inconsequential, reshaping the whole world into a different logical structure, one governed by numbers rather than by physical location. .com sites often redirect us servers in our own locality but we wouldn't care less (those manning the servers would, because less physical distance actually means less internet traffic and therefore higher overall performance for all their servers). But when main gateways (servers) in and out of the country gets hit by disaster, we start feeling the reality that sits under the 6 networking layers (network technology has a well-known OSI 7-layer abstraction that attempts to provide a platform where software can talk to one another without having to bother about physical location) that are so effective in making the world appear nearer.

So what is the problem, really? Abstraction is like specialization. It attempts to provide a common platform on which all issues within a known domain can be addressed easily. Which also means that, when it has become easy to deal with issues within a known domain, consistent exposure to a high volume of issues, alienate you from these issues, the way a worker in a diamond factory sometimes starts to forget what exactly is so great about these stones or <<insert your own analogy here>>.

Ok, put it in another way. If you have abstracted (ie, formularised) a method that can bring any group out there onto a top selling band on the music charts, it wouldn't matter anymore who the band were. Passion wouldn't matter anymore. It is simply machinery.

Yes, machinery is what we want, to get the nitty gritty details of life out of the way, so we can spend our lives doing better things. That's why Abstraction, to me is such a great achievement. It allows us not to have to think about how to extract oil to cook, walk through jungles and rough terrain when we travel, make clothes, but just be able to have the choices in front of us: what we want to have, where we want to go. But hey brother, you forgot all this nitty gritty detail shit, is life. In another words, abstraction alienates us from life itself. As much as we have decided that all these troublesome parts of life is a chore and thereafter figured out how to get over and done with it, we have also gotten rid of all these small bits of life from which we would have had the greatest chance to learn what it takes, to be happy. I think that's what fishing and evening walks are all about. Although I've never been fishing.

The "simple life" you see in movies is never so far away if you start realizing the lowest common denominator of life, and start enjoying every bit of it, like crushed nuts in a bar of chocolate. I used to hate nuts in my chocolates. But now I like them everywhere.

Well, next time you need to run an errand to wherever it is, for whatever reason, for whoever... be happy.

咲き誇り
疲れた夜は
花も寝る

In their passing,
They are always great;
As if we now understand
What mountains had burdened our dear ones that have made them
Socially incompatible with us.
We honour the moment
The news is spoken
Our lips and ears
Respecting that space of silence that follows
Allowing it to somehow summarise within us
The length of years of their rising and falling
Into a single moment of forgiveness.
We know that tomorrow,
We will be giving speeches about how great he had been
In our lives,
Now that he's gone,
And then in a few hours,
Return him to the air and the sea.

music... makes me believe that something like magic does exist. music makers are like faith healers. funny how energy waves entering your ears can make you feel relaxed and the energized. if you're looking for healing music here's my current listening tracks:

森山直太郎　 －　風待ち交差点
Mr Children - HOME

Went swimming and realised that most of the better swimmers are locals. Is it:

(1) Foreigners think swimming as a past-time instead of a sport so more foreigners who don't really swim visit the pool than locals who think swimming is a sport?

(2) Locals really made full use of the swimming facilities and thus more locals can swim than foreigners?

(3) Locals who don't really swim have better things to do than soaking in water?

(4) There are just more locals than foreigners who go to the pool anyway?

eddie is not a collection of habits;
   more like a philosophy.
but eddie is not a philosophy;
   more like a framework of thought that can hold philosophy.
but eddie is then again not just one framework;
   but more like a collection of frameworks holding together thoughts that almost disagree and thoughts that disagree.
but eddie is not really, a framework;
   but also all the varied bits of thoughts scattered all over that give form to this framework.
but eddie cannot be just a collection of thoughts;
   but the invisible laws that make sense of all their apparant randomness.
but eddie is not just a set of laws;
   but a set of laws so much part of being that it's almost habit.

But eddie is not a collection of habits. oops.
Let's try this again.

Starbucks Beijing
Starbucks KL
Starbucks Yokohama
Starbucks Hong Kong
Starbucks Singapore
Starbucks Osaka

そして、今日Starbucks Dalian。

と考えると、心強い。同じ値段すら払ったら、同じ環境、同じサービス、同じ味、同じ落ち着きが味わえる。でもよ～く考えると、アジアばかりやけど、こんな時はアメリカに感謝したくなる。アメリカの極力なコーヒーカルチャーの世界への進出は、まるで国際人的生活そのものだ。アメリカ文化＝国際文化とは考えたくないけど、今日はStarbucksがあってよかった。

Once upon a time when Malaysia money was as big as Singapore money...

大当たり
イカなるうまみ
冬の味

仕事後大阪の同僚と事務所の近所でおいしそうなところをさがして、とりあえずここに入ろうと思ってたどころか、大当たりで、凄くおいしかった。普段口に入れたら吐きそうになるイカも想像できなかったほどおいしく、たくさんいただきました。寒くて忙しかった冬の出張の最中こんな味と出会えて、いくら頑張ってもかまわない程に幸せだった。