I opened my eyes. It was all dark beyond the window, and the street lamps made the falling raindrops on the window look like stars in the dark sky. After a short moment I finally fully awoke, and realized that it was going to my stop. Hurriedly alighting and stepping into shelter together with the rest of the commuters, I immediately turned to my left and saw several rows of shoes neatly arranged on the curb, with a big sale sign among the row. Those poor quality shoes looked awkward with their retro design, it's no wonder they're on sale. However, I was mildly interested and swept my eyes across the bed of shoes, barely noticing a dark pair of shoes with white polka dots under the dim orange light. Realizing they're not worth my time and purchase, I looked straight ahead... and there I was, lying on the sofa in the living room in my house. I sat up with a splitting headache. The dark street felt so real it felt weird that I could awaken from that world into this.
If only there is any way of waking from this world.
30 November 2010
24 November 2010
Miss-Understood
Nono, I'm not refering to the Ayumi song...
I guess I really enjoy reading and learning more for the sake of learning. I get distracted by ideas and often get lost in exploring them. Just a few days ago, because my brother posted BBC's top 100 books list, which I'll post below, I had been re-reading some of the books I had totally forgotten the contents of.
According to BBC, most people have only read 6 out of the 100 books listed below. The 20 bold ones are the ones I remember having read:
BBC Top 100 Books (2010)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The list is a little weird, especially when The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is part of the Narnia Chronicles, but oh well, let's just ignore that. =)
Currently I'm re-reading number 59, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I remember this was a rather queer book, with a lot of maths-y stuff in it, and the chapters were numbered in a strange way. However, reading it again was quite a pleasure, now that I understood much more the writer tried to put across in the seemingly strange and emotionless narration.
One thing that really caught my eye was the Monty Hall Problem. I had known the circumstances of the problem before, I think I have heard it from Kelvin before, and he had patiently explained the correct solution to me before, but I had totally forgotten about it and went with my intuition again. Reading and re-reading the solution I know of it to be correct, but it still hasn't registered in my head yet.
The Monty Hall Problem speaks of a scenario of a TV Reality Show. You are the contestant who gets to choose one out of the three doors, in which 2 holds a goat, while the 3rd door has a car behind it. You pick one of the doors, and the TV host opens another door to reveal a goat behind it. You are then given the choice to stick with the door you have already chosen, or to pick the other door instead.
My intuition tells me to stick with the current door I have chosen. I mean, at first, I have 1/3 chance of getting the door right on my first choice, once the host opens another door with the goat, my chance of getting the door right seems to have increased to 1/2. Thus whether I stick with the current door, or to make the switch, should give me an equal probability of winning the car.
But nonono~~~ That's a misconception, which many people fiercely believe to be true. Consider the following: Right at the beginning, I choose the door, and this door has 2/3 chance of having a goat behind, 1/3 of having the winning car. After the host opens another door, if I had chosen a door with the goat, and stuck with the door, the probability of me having a door with a goat is still 2/3 instead of 1/2, because the event where the host opens another door with the goat is irrelevant to my initial choice of door. This means, if I were to follow the strategy of sticking with my initial choice of door, I would only have 1/3 chance of winning. However, suppose that I had chosen the door with the goat and after the host opens another door with the goat, I choose the last door, I would definitely win the car. The probability of me winning the car by following the strategy of changing doors after the host opens a door with the goat will then be 2/3. Thus, in such a scenario, we should always change the door we choose. Opps is that a clear explanation...? =X
Anyways, that aside, I have been really interested in a few upcoming DS games (weird coming from me? Especially since the DS is like a dying console with the 3DS coming out in the early half of 2011)... Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney (as seen in this post), Ni no Kuni, and just today I found out about 999: 9 Hours, 9 People, 9 Doors.
In an interview with the director of 999, he mentioned that the inspiration for the game came from the Enneagram of Personality, which is one of the models used to classify personalities. According to 2 of the Enneagram tests I've done online, my core type most likely a Five, or maybe a Nine. It is interesting to read about the possible origins of each type, and I can already form ideas how this Enneagram concept could be used to form settings of games or stories. It is then no wonder that the Enneagram of Personality forms the inspiration of many literature.
The possible origin of Nines are particularly disturbing in my opinion, especially in relation to the recent events that happened; though the nature of Nines could also be due to their horoscope (especially Libras, who feel the need to maintain peace at any cost) in a way. Most adults view things so much different from children and simply refuse to look from their perspective (it's the center of the story of the Little Prince, which I have also re-read recently), or will deem their perspective as being weird and are not empathetic to their views. But by being so, children or the other party might feel that they are unable to communicate to the "adults". Maybe this contributes to the "generation gap" between parents and children.
I guess I really enjoy reading and learning more for the sake of learning. I get distracted by ideas and often get lost in exploring them. Just a few days ago, because my brother posted BBC's top 100 books list, which I'll post below, I had been re-reading some of the books I had totally forgotten the contents of.
According to BBC, most people have only read 6 out of the 100 books listed below. The 20 bold ones are the ones I remember having read:
BBC Top 100 Books (2010)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The list is a little weird, especially when The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is part of the Narnia Chronicles, but oh well, let's just ignore that. =)
Currently I'm re-reading number 59, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I remember this was a rather queer book, with a lot of maths-y stuff in it, and the chapters were numbered in a strange way. However, reading it again was quite a pleasure, now that I understood much more the writer tried to put across in the seemingly strange and emotionless narration.
One thing that really caught my eye was the Monty Hall Problem. I had known the circumstances of the problem before, I think I have heard it from Kelvin before, and he had patiently explained the correct solution to me before, but I had totally forgotten about it and went with my intuition again. Reading and re-reading the solution I know of it to be correct, but it still hasn't registered in my head yet.
The Monty Hall Problem speaks of a scenario of a TV Reality Show. You are the contestant who gets to choose one out of the three doors, in which 2 holds a goat, while the 3rd door has a car behind it. You pick one of the doors, and the TV host opens another door to reveal a goat behind it. You are then given the choice to stick with the door you have already chosen, or to pick the other door instead.
My intuition tells me to stick with the current door I have chosen. I mean, at first, I have 1/3 chance of getting the door right on my first choice, once the host opens another door with the goat, my chance of getting the door right seems to have increased to 1/2. Thus whether I stick with the current door, or to make the switch, should give me an equal probability of winning the car.
But nonono~~~ That's a misconception, which many people fiercely believe to be true. Consider the following: Right at the beginning, I choose the door, and this door has 2/3 chance of having a goat behind, 1/3 of having the winning car. After the host opens another door, if I had chosen a door with the goat, and stuck with the door, the probability of me having a door with a goat is still 2/3 instead of 1/2, because the event where the host opens another door with the goat is irrelevant to my initial choice of door. This means, if I were to follow the strategy of sticking with my initial choice of door, I would only have 1/3 chance of winning. However, suppose that I had chosen the door with the goat and after the host opens another door with the goat, I choose the last door, I would definitely win the car. The probability of me winning the car by following the strategy of changing doors after the host opens a door with the goat will then be 2/3. Thus, in such a scenario, we should always change the door we choose. Opps is that a clear explanation...? =X
Anyways, that aside, I have been really interested in a few upcoming DS games (weird coming from me? Especially since the DS is like a dying console with the 3DS coming out in the early half of 2011)... Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney (as seen in this post), Ni no Kuni, and just today I found out about 999: 9 Hours, 9 People, 9 Doors.
In an interview with the director of 999, he mentioned that the inspiration for the game came from the Enneagram of Personality, which is one of the models used to classify personalities. According to 2 of the Enneagram tests I've done online, my core type most likely a Five, or maybe a Nine. It is interesting to read about the possible origins of each type, and I can already form ideas how this Enneagram concept could be used to form settings of games or stories. It is then no wonder that the Enneagram of Personality forms the inspiration of many literature.
The possible origin of Nines are particularly disturbing in my opinion, especially in relation to the recent events that happened; though the nature of Nines could also be due to their horoscope (especially Libras, who feel the need to maintain peace at any cost) in a way. Most adults view things so much different from children and simply refuse to look from their perspective (it's the center of the story of the Little Prince, which I have also re-read recently), or will deem their perspective as being weird and are not empathetic to their views. But by being so, children or the other party might feel that they are unable to communicate to the "adults". Maybe this contributes to the "generation gap" between parents and children.
17 November 2010
16 November 2010
Totally cool~
Chris Bringhust redesigned up to 200 game characters into sprites that looked like if they're in the Mega Man game in his free time... Talk about coolness!!!
Click for the enlarged version! XD
Taken from http://blog.pikimal.com/geek/2010/11/09/200-gaming-characters-as-mega-man-sprites/
13 November 2010
weird dreams
I had a really weird dream where I was visiting Yu Chun's chinese medicine clinic, and in another moment I was playing on an electric guitar... The weirdest thing was, I could play the intro of a song perfectly well.
Wish that could happen in real life... =X
Wish that could happen in real life... =X
06 November 2010
Insomnia
Wide awake at close to 4AM in the morning while working on my assignment...
I hate the nagging voices in my head... "I must get some sleep before I have to go out later" "What if I can't wake up later?" "I don't know whether I'll have enough energy to go through today..." "Will I be able to sleep tomorrow?"
I shouldn't have napped in the afternoon. (Well I didn't have a good night's rest last night, and I had a headache)
I shouldn't have drank the tiramisu latte after dinner. (But I thought caffeine no longer works for me)
What's wrong with me??? Why can't I just have a good rest at the end of a long long day?
I hate the nagging voices in my head... "I must get some sleep before I have to go out later" "What if I can't wake up later?" "I don't know whether I'll have enough energy to go through today..." "Will I be able to sleep tomorrow?"
I shouldn't have napped in the afternoon. (Well I didn't have a good night's rest last night, and I had a headache)
I shouldn't have drank the tiramisu latte after dinner. (But I thought caffeine no longer works for me)
What's wrong with me??? Why can't I just have a good rest at the end of a long long day?
03 November 2010
Workaholic...?
I'm so tired, since I'm down with the 3-in-1 package (sore throat + flu + cough)... yet whenever I lie down on my bed, images and thoughts regarding my work just overwhelms me...
Is this stress or over-excitement regarding the work I'm doing? =)
After the 3 weeks worth of (boring...?) work, I finally get to work with something that really piques my interest... =D I feel really lucky, it's like... really rare for people to enjoy their work once they start working.
I guess it really is in my personality...? to be working towards something while thinking about others, instead of just ... implementing something for the sake of it. =)
These days, everything feels like a dream... It's as though as i'm living in a fantasy... (and I don't know why I have this feeling)
I hope I can continue to feel this way for the work I do everyday.
Is this stress or over-excitement regarding the work I'm doing? =)
After the 3 weeks worth of (boring...?) work, I finally get to work with something that really piques my interest... =D I feel really lucky, it's like... really rare for people to enjoy their work once they start working.
I guess it really is in my personality...? to be working towards something while thinking about others, instead of just ... implementing something for the sake of it. =)
These days, everything feels like a dream... It's as though as i'm living in a fantasy... (and I don't know why I have this feeling)
I hope I can continue to feel this way for the work I do everyday.
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