“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

– Red, from the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Suddenly, it seems that there’s a white and empty boulevard ahead of me, and every tick of the clock resonates loudly.

I’ll be disrupting from my national service the week after, and starting school another week past that. From now until next Thursday, I’m clearing what leave and off I have accumulated over the course of this year.

It’s a strange feeling having so much free time all of a sudden. There’s no one to yell at you about where you’re supposed to be, what is it you’re supposed to do, and what is it you’ve supposedly done wrong. It is as if I’ve been kept in cold store for the past two years, and now I’ve been violently ejected out of it.

I’ve made myself adequately clear in the past how I disliked my period of military service, and the negativity of the experiences I had. Now that I’m outside, or almost outside of the system, I miss it. It is a routine that I’ve initially hated, but gradually grown accustomized to it, to the point where it becomes the norm.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

No such luck for the country I live in. On the contrary, our conscript army is getting larger simply because of more foreign nationalities who come here seeking citizenship. Even after two years being in the service, one is still eligible to be called up for reservist duties. This is the only country under no imminent threat of war that has such a long period of military service.

How can I be patriotic towards a country which does not honour articles 4, 20, and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, which respectively states that one should not be held in slavery or servitude, that no one maybe compelled to belong to an association and that everyone has the right to free choice of employment?

Contrast it to some of the previous games that I’ve played. Leveling in Lineage 2 is a constant, on-going affair. Your level is noteworthy, and if you’re sitting on the level cap, it is a bragging right. Most people don’t hit the level cap, yet they are able to participate in the game just as much, going through more or less the same content that the players who are closer to level cap does. In L2 raids and PvPs, you have players spread over a span of levels. Having a character that is higher level than the mean brings bonuses to the table, but if levels aren’t on your side, you can compensate for it in other ways.  In EQ2, you won’t even considering bringing someone 5 levels below cap to a raid. Having the level cap be illusive also acts as a safe-guard against boredom. Even if game content has been exhausted, you can always fall back on leveling.

Having levels and leveling disassociated from the game is a trap that most modern MMOs fall into. After awhile, there’s nothing to but create alts after alts. Soon enough, you have ten character all sitting at level cap, and you wonder what there is to do.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told WSJ staffers to ditch Flash and replace Flash-based content with other web standards—a move that’s doable, but not necessarily trivial.

via Steve Jobs to WSJ: ditch “dying” Flash technology.

I’m seldom in agreement with Apple’s philosophy of doing things. However, this is one bold move that I applaud and would want manufacturers to follow.

The trouble with Flash is that, like the less popular Java, it is essentially an external application that is being embedded in a web page. Having to depend on an external application is bad for security. It is my belief that executable code should never cross from the browser on to the desktop for no good reason. What’s more is that the use of Flash goes against one of the fundamentals of the web: accessibility. Content in Flash is encased in its own container and not text-searchable. If a website is designed entirely in Flash, there is no way for a search engine to index the content of it, neither is there a way to link to a specific page within that flash content. You can’t point a hyperlink to a particular frame of Flash content.

It’s time that we took up the axe against Flash and replace it with newer and web-friendlier technology, such as HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m glad that at least one company sees the problems behind Flash and is taking decisive action to move the world away from it.

However, if I were to perform optimally since day one, but on one day, unable to deliver a particular piece of work, the wrath of the brass above me would be incurred and all their fiery anger and resulting consequences brought to bear upon on me.

Compared the first and second case. The former would be multiple failures with little or no consequences, whereas in the latter, it would be one tiny road hump, but with drastic consequences.

The conclusion drawn is that it would be far more beneficial for one’s well-being to fail consistently rather than occasionally.

Expectations are such a strange thing.

“They spent $7 million on this stupid sidewalk,” he said, “and it’s tilted so that when it rains, the water comes into the stores. With such people in government, we will have the same circumstances forever.”

via In Heart of Iraq, a Plan to Revive the Pulse of a Central Artery – NYTimes.com.

Reading about the reconstruction project in Iraq, I can’t help but think of the developments of certain employer that I am compelled to work for. Regardless of the amount of effort and resources that goes into research and development, on the ground, nothing seems to have been improved. On the contrary, some apparatchik rushing to implement his latest new idea, probably thought of while taking a dump early Sunday morning, seems to drown the system further deeper in mud. The direction of this employer’s latest buzzword filled attempt at edging towards the next ‘third generation’ development echoes hauntingly similar to the CIA’s misadventures in Latin America during the Cold War era.  Ultimately, larger and larger pool of resources are expended, but the life the commoner, or in my case, employee reminds the same.

The extended weekend has been unremarkable for me, even borderlining on absolute boredom. I did manage to play a couple hours of EQ2, which is quite remarkable considering I hardly find any reason to do so these days. Station Market has a really neat 44 slot backpack, the Sinister Frostfell Backpack, complete with a Frostfell-theme appearance. At $20, it was pricey, but I gave in, though more so for the number of slots than it’s appearance.

At the same time, Steam is having a major discount on a number of games, and Christmas capitalism was having an effect on me, resulting in me buying a number of games for $10 and under. A number of them, despite their ratings and associated hype, felt rather mediocre to me. The campaign in Red Alert 3 seemed to be progressing at too fast a pace compared to it’s predecessors. A few missions in and I already had the full tech tree unlocked and was driving the enemy back into, uh, wherever they came from. Contrast that to the campaigns of before, where one side usually had a solid 12 – 15 missions. FarCry 2’s gameplay was unimpressive either. The majority of time involved traveling and the firefights were sporadic.

My spending didn’t stop there. While reading an article entitled Faux Friendship about the changes in the way friendship is characterized and defined in relation to the proliferation of social networking sites, I stumbled across an amazing TV series, ‘In Treatment’.

In Treatment is drama revolving a psychotherapist and five patients of his, with five episodes each week, and each episode being a session with a patient. After watching an episode on Google Video, I was completely hooked, and bought the whole season on DVD. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s phenomenal. I’m trying to not blow through the entire season at once, but there’s hardly anything else to do.