something foolish...

Things have been quite messed up. Or rather, not really. It might seem to be, but its times like these when you learn to step back and look at the larger picture. I am fine. Really. But spiritually, there are battles, and conflicts, requiring confessions and retreat, and returning to the altar, and laying everything down at the foot of the cross, and be cleansed, purified, sanctified. Destroying walls where it is mis-built, destroying where there is imperfection. Because God is the creator, and He will accept nothing less than perfection. i only work with Him, and where i build by my own strength, He demolishes and He builds, and rebuilds. Because truly, there is nothing that CAN BE DONE unless HE builds, and when he BUILDS, it is because it is PERFECT; it is HOLY. He has a perfect plan for my life, and He will accept nothing less - a life that is perfect to His will. And where i stray by my own strength, He will do a crisis, an uproar, an earthquake, just to come back to Him, unless in my quietness, He reveals my straying. Because of His love, He does all of these. He loves us so much that He cannot bear to leave us alone.

wow...

and i can only stand in awe of You.

A crisis...

I ran in the heavy rain today. Was that wise or unwise? Lord protect me.

 I felt a lesson was being learnt here. When it rains, when things don't go well, do we quit? If God wills it, then we learn to strive on, despite of the rain, despite incidents and accidents. If not, walk away, leave nothing back.

So did I learn anything? I don't know. But if I had to run in the rain just to realise the passage above, then I guess, its all in HIS hands anyway...

its a friday... no.. its saturday!

Its a friday night/saturday morning already, and i have no real idea why i am staying up so late. i originally intended to just load some photographs, print out the assignments... and on and on... tasks kept piling up on each other, and before i knew it, it was already 4am... met chew qi, eugene and zhang pei, and before that, went to meet the platoon people for steamboat. a little bit tired to reflect, except that its simply amazing how God prepares the us in the past for the future that He wants us to enter into.

I'm happy. got decent results (more than decent). Thank God. To Him all glory and praise. found myself singing hymns i sang in sec sch. haha. Technorati Tags: God, NUS, cell

favourite scene in wall.e

That's my favourite scene in wall.e It's simply beautiful how wall.e and eve dance together, so poetic...

watching wall.e, a point to make

I loved wall.e. I love how the movie was made, how the producers, editors, directors, were able to stitch together a story line from all the seemingly disparate story threads. More importantly, it was also about the way they were able to represent abstract ideas and imageries into this coherent movie. Its simply amazing. There are just so many themes in the movie, and though the director didn't intend, they are simply there. People-technology overdependency, social withdrawal due to tech, tech supremacy, tech amok, the meaning of love, emotions, the meaning of being human, ethics and responsibility, perceptions of reality, corporations and government... the list goes on and on...

Now, wouldn't it be cool if these different ideas could all be represented and explored in greater detail? It would be like Photosynth - where different photos contribute to a single synthesis of a place, whereas this Ideasynth would be about how different ideas contribute, as in wall.e's case, a single narrative. And the best way to do is via tags. Tags have a powerful ability to become more than just labels, these labels become crucial nodes in an idea network.
Also, tags are meta-information, information about information, and for these kinds of high-abstraction data that we're talking about - ideas, philosophies, the such - the meta-layer should be the layer where all these high-abstraction ideas rest on, allowing for an ecology of ideas to emerge around them.

Yes. Ultimately it is all about how information connects to become networks...Technorati Tags: tags, labels, information, network, nodes, ideas, knowledge, connections

wall.e and ending up close reading it, and onto even bigger stuff

I watched Wall.e, and i think its one of the best films of the year. It is well-composed - multiple story threads put together into a single coherent narrative without too many complications. The stories themselves are easy to follow - the love story between wall.e and eva can be thought of as the city girl - country boy love story arc, and then there's the defiance over the machines story arc, and then the usual redemption of humanity part. For most movies, the story ends with the ending credits, but not so for wall.e. If you bother to stay long enough, the story continues, and there are views here and there about humanity rebuilding civilisation back on Earth. The way the story is told is itself beautiful - how different components are put together - the captain marveling at the past history of Earth wants to know the meaning of dance - dance having made unnecessary due to the convenience of hover chairs. And as the definition is told, wall.e and eva are dancing outside in outer space - eva moving around with her thrusters, wall.e using an extinguisher to propel himself in space, in an intricate dance... It is beautiful. And of course, the scenes where wall.e attempts to hold eva's hands, trying to cure his loneliness...

Then in the movie, there is the concept of Plato's cave, of the conception and perception of reality, and how people accidently realise the external reality around them and REALLY realise what the heck is going on, and realising the richer world out there.

These are the emotional scences that struck me the most, and the robots dancing in outer space is really a tear-jerker, and i guess i would have cried if there was someone i love in the seat next to me, or held her hand or something. But there wasn't.

Oh well. Who would have thought a love story between robots could mean so much...?

Cheers to Pixar. Hope they make better movies every year!

ooh! it's been a month already!

i didn't realise that its been a month already. how time flies when doing work in NUS. oh well. i guess the year will go like this as well, my time on NUS will fly as well.

have been doing alrite, and things have been tough, not exactly a stroll in the park chemistry requires a deeper level of understanding, and its no longer simple language clothed in quantum mechanical BS. Now, its no longer about BS-ing with QM inside, but requires a deeper level of comprehension. And with USP, it too, is no longer about simple BS-ing either.

but anyway, had been banging my head on the wall for the past week, because had to hand in the final draft for an essay for the writing-critical thinking module of USP. staying up till 2am, 3am many days, just to to clarify thoughts and writing them down, clashing against my thoughts, finding old thoughts unsatisfactory, throwing them out, restarting again, and then coming back to the old thoughts and find something nice, and then starting back again with a different perspective. Its been a crazy experience. To stray so far off only to come back full circle...

And to know that, going through this whole experience hasn't been an entire waste of time. To know that the hard work done was all worth it!

Thank God!

onward ho!