Category Archives: Thoughts

I don’t want to sell you death sticks

Posted on by
Reply

I want to go home and rethink my life.

I didn’t do as well in 2011 as I had hoped to. My performance in school was, to be put it bluntly, rather abysmal. General Patton once wrote after failing his first year at West Point, “You must do your damnedest and win. By perseverance and eternal desire any man can be great.”. That shall be my mantra for 2012.

I hope so for my own sake.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to declare “no games for 2012″, because I know I’ll still be raiding in Rift, still be playing SWTOR, and will definitely play Mass Effect 3 when it gets released. As for a certain game involving Deckard Cain, that I don’t know. I was never a huge fan of the previous two games in the series., and neither do I like the auction house idea.

Time to get serious.

Trialing a dragon for war crimes

Posted on by
Reply

Despite digesting a hearty amount of Skyrim news daily, I’ve still somehow managed to not know all the spoilers, and this particular discovery surprised me.

Paarthurnax is a war criminal.

Paarthurnax was apparently Alduin right hand man during Alduin’s last hunger episode where he ate up a whole bunch of Nords.

I did know beforehand that I’d eventually have to kill Paarthurnax, but I wasn’t aware of the circumstances that revolved around it. I had supposed there’d be some complexity involved, but its revelation felt sudden and rushed. The scenario almost seemed too casual and a little comical.

Me: I need help in luring a dragon and trapping it.

Esbern: Okay, let me check our archives. Ah! Here's the shout you need.

Me: Thanks, I'll catch you later.

Esbern: No problem, don't forget to close the door on your way out. Oh! And by the way, your buddy, the one you've spent lots of time with lately, the one who is trying to help you save the world, Paarthurnax was his name yeah? He has not been too honest with you. He really is a big bad guy that used to do lots of bad things. Don't mind killing him, yeah? Cheers!

Me: Uhm...

Okay, I’ll admit I paraphrased a little there, but that’s about the essence of what happened. The information is just handed over in one conversation axiomatically, and that’s it. It’s not very good storytelling.

That’s not all there is to take away from the event though. There’s still something else, a question that some of us think little about because there’s no easy answer to it.

What is statute of limitation on war crimes?

While I don’t know precisely when Alduin’s previous coming was, it can safe to assume from conversations with Paarthurnax that at least a couple of hundreds of years has passed since. Furthermore, since dragons have not been sighted since Alduin’s disappearance, Paarthurnax was not involved in acts of terrorism during that period. Simply, what Paarthurnax did, it happened a long time ago, and judging from the player’s encounters with him, he’s probably reformed.

How far back do we look when judging a person? Do people change, or are they permanently banded criminals? To this day, ex-prison guards who were unfortunate enough to serve under the Nazi regime 60 years ago are still being hunted down for their actions in the past. Are they the same person as they were 60 years ago? Or have they changed since?

I don’t have answers for these questions, but it’s certainly something to think about.

The Story of an individual in Guantanamo – This caught my heart

Posted on by
Reply

Detainee, the word itself, it must be noted, is one of the great Orwellian inventions of the past decade. A word that would have had great meaning to Solzhenitsyn, meant to describe a prisoner for whom, for a variety of good and terrible reasons, a suitable judicial system cannot be found. A “prisoner” knows his fate. A “detainee” just lingers.

Source: http://www.esquire.com/features/guantanamo-prisoner-0911

I encourage you to read the article about the life a particular individual before, from his humble birth, and through the inhumane system at Guantanamo. You’d think something like this happened only in the Soviet labour camps in the 60s, but it’s still a harsh reality today.

The author really captivated me with his style of writing – cold, detached, concise and absolutely minimalist. It brings out the sense of isolation and hopelessness the individual went through. It’s a touching read.

tl;dr – In support of Herman Cain

Posted on by
1

When I first saw this clip on The Colbert Report, I had a good laugh.It speaks volumes about our declining attention span and our increasing failure to comprehend anything longer than 140 characters, or even, two questions within 140 characters. Try texting someone the following:

“When are you leaving town? Want to catch a movie?”

Chances are good that you receive only one answer to the two questions, probably a “yeah” or “nope” response.

Laugh all you want, I did, at least until yesterday when the healthcare reform was brought up in a conversion between me and a friend. We tried to compare it a against the healthcare system here in Singapore to understand why government insurance works here, but might not in the USA. This is when we ran into a wall. Despite heavy media coverage on the topic, we both knew very little about the specifics, about how much money each person would be covered up to, the kind of cases covered, how the payout would be done and so on. We decided we had to get our facts right, and like most people would do today, we turned to Google. Herman Cain’s speech ceased to be a laughing subject.

There was no way either one of us could pour through over 2000 pages of text, and then have a discussion on it. Hell, when I read Gone With the Wind over a span of days, I had forgotten portions which happened early into the story when I was halfway through.

How many of us have actually read through a software EULA, wading through pages of heavily padded legalese before reaching a sentence that is useful information? A new version of the software, with a modified EULA, would have been released by the time we get through it.

To promote informed discussion, which is essential to any functioning democracy, information has to be readily available and easy to understand. It has to be concise. The old lady pushing her cart to the market should be able to understand it just as the well-manicured businessman in his lavish office does. Transparency is only as useful as the information that comes out during the process. Having a wall of text isn’t transparency. It’s simply a wall.

Quoting Einstein, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” We’ve been successful at advancing the human race as a whole because we’ve made basic scientific principles easy to understand. This is what drives the search for unification between the various fields of physics in search of a “theory for everything”.

In A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, he closed the book with the following paragraph.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the quest of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

This is what we should strive for in the field of politics and legislature, so that we, as ordinary people, can partake in the process of democracy.

The mess that is Google

Posted on by
Reply

I was one of the early adopters of Gmail back when beta invites started going out in 2004. That account eventually succumbed to spam over the years, and I was forced to abandon it. A few years later, Google Apps for Domain launched, allowing for the use of custom domain names with Gmail, and I eagerly jumped on to that.

In the midst of Google’s company acquiring spree, which saw YouTube and many other startups being added to its portfolio, Gmail accounts morphed into something of a more generic Google Account, giving access to other services such as Docs, Spreadsheet and so on. Initially, Google Apps for Domain had the same feature set as one would get with a regular Google account. During this time, a plethora of features were rolled out to native Gmail offering, but not the Google Apps version of Gmail. This was when Google App users, many of who were paying customers, started to feel as if they were second class citizens within the Google ecosystem. Google Apps continue to lapse behind in features when the now defunct Google Wave was rolled out and no support for Apps was included.

Then came the Google Apps transition in 2010/11 that was supposed to bring more features and timely updates to Google App users, matching up to the regular offerings from Google. This came with a huge caveat. Google Apps was now on an entirely different infrastructure and it forced users to create ‘personal’ accounts for services such as YouTube. I now have two accounts to juggle, and despite the multiple sign on feature, going back and forth between accounts is less than seamless.

Yesterday, Google+ was unveiled with Google Apps support purportedly coming somewhere in the hazy future. Over the years, Google Apps has gradually shifted from being the cream of the crop to being a walled garden within Google itself, frustrating those who wants both end user and enterprise offerings of Google. The online service has become just as fragmented as the Android platform itself.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple, both of who have a clear direction of where they want to be headed, with Office 365 targeting the enterprise sector and iCloud for individuals respectively, Google seems to be mired inbetween.

Musings on The Vampire Diaries

Posted on by
Reply

The Vampire Diaries, being primarily a teenage drama with pop-vampire overtures, isn’t the typical a show that I usually watch, but once I got past the first half of season one, I really begun to like it. When I hit episode 17 of season 2, the show hit a new note. It now had a 24-esque intrigue layered on top of everything. Everyone seemed to now be betraying everyone else. A word of caution, the rest of this post is going to be spoiler filled.

Rather than introducing an entirely new concept, the show is a neat summation of various elements and plots from other shows, and does exceedingly well at doing so. It doesn’t invent anything, but rather made good use of existing tropes. At many points throughout, I was often reminded and able to draw parallels to other shows. Maybe I’ve just been watching too much television.

Magnificent asshole John Gilbert. You don’t know whether to love or hate this guy. David Anders is excellent choice for portraying this character. No one can play an asshole better than him. Who could ever forget his “my loyalties are flexible” line from Alias?

Klaus. He’s one hell of a suave bad guy with body jumping abilities. When I saw him Alaric Saltzman’s body, I knew he’s secretly a Goa’uld in disguise. Who else could transfer from body to body like that? I knew there was going to be trouble the first moment he stepped into class. It was going to hasta la vista, Elena. Remember the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles?

thisclassisntgoingtoendwell

Yep, this class isn’t going to end well. But of course, if you’re the protagonist, neither vampire nor terminator are going to be stopping you.

Elena. At the start of the series, I thought she was going to end up in a ménage à trois with both Stefan and Daemon. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still confident that it will at some point. The better part of this character involves her finding out about her birth mother and how her mother is a vampire, much like how Sydney Bristow discovered that her mother was a KGB agent. It seems all female protagonists have mommy troubles. Poor ladies.

Compulsion. Unless you’re a Toydarian, or a human ingesting vervain, you can be at anytime turned into a Manchurian Candidate and told that these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. With the amount of compulsion going on, I’m surprised that the characters haven’t picked up on Fox Mulder’s wise words yet. “Trust no one”.

I’m almost to the end of the season and the show is on break until the next season is done filming. If they keep the pace and direction of the show up, they might just hook for another season or two.

The Internet is fragile

Posted on by
8

By now, news of the disaster in Japan would have reached every corner of the world. Even if you’re not located in Japan or any of the affected regions, nor have friends or loved ones to worry about, the aftereffects and consequences can still be felt. This is a good time to remind ourselves about how inter-dependent we are in our highly globalized society, and the fragility of this arrangement.

Japan is a huge communications hub. Numerous submarine cables plough the Pacific between Japan and the United States. These fiber optic cables carry the bulk of the Internet traffic flowing between Asia, and more specifically, South-East Asia, and the United States.

When I returned home from classes yesterday, my connection, which could usually sustain about 20 Mbps to the US was barely holding at 1 Mbps. Latency too, has gone to hell. My ping while playing Rift skyrocking to four digits at times and suffering a huge amount of packet losses. No doubt, some of the submarine cables had been damaged.

This might be a hint for me to take a step back from Rift and play some Dragon Age 2.

Stay safe, those of you in the affect regions.

Family relations

Posted on by
1

This is part of a series of post in the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com. The topic for this article is: What part of life confuses you the most?

Members of my extended family have this concept that since we’re related, there should be something connecting us and that they should have a higher priority in my life than compared to friends and other people I know. So what if the father of my father gave birth to you? It doesn’t automatically imply that both of us have a relationship, and most certainly not that we should be close buddies, especially since we’ve hardly ever spoken to each other since our very separate births. Connection through bloodlines is a medieval concept, and it should not be used to definite an implicit relationship between two people. I shouldn’t have to drop everything and do something for a person just “because she is your aunt”. I can’t understand why the child of the daughter of my father’s father (see how silly that sounds?) should play an important role in my life.

Zooming out to a larger viewpoint, there’s many of these implicit relations that go around everyday. People seem to think that you’re more closely related to them because of certain common attributes, and are upset or angry when you don’t respond to the certain level of intimacy that’s expected of the corresponding label.

Relations between people are developed as one gets to know another, even within families. It’s not a birth right.