A book to look forward to

Finally, a book to look forward to after a long time. I seldom read books except for a few titles. I discovered Tolkien's Lord of the Rings totally by chance. The trilogy appeared in my cupboard and I had no recollection how it ended up there. At first, I thought it might be my cousins'. From time to time I used to get some passed on stuff from them. Strangely, when asked, they do not remember those 1990 edition books either. Being sucked into Tolkien's well thought off world of Middle-earth was one great adventure. "The story never ends" it seemed, the books were like an epoch or a snapshot from a never ending time line. One of the major drawbacks of reading a good book is reading less. After reading LOTR, all other books of the same genre since then just seem like trash. Hopefully his son will get the new story right.

The books I have read from Tolkien and son are:
1. LOTR 1 - 3
2. The Hobbit
3. The Simarillion
4. Unfinished Tales

How do you know you have played too much DotA? No. 1 to 3

1. When you go to an Irish Pub and order a Guinsoo Draught.
2. When you feel that the rates for hiring a Geomancer have quadrupled. 3. When you begin to move exceptionally slow while suffering from diarrhoea.

No Excuse

Been rather busy recently. However, the daily rush hour times in the morning and evenings sparked me to say something about the people that like to say "excuse me". Unfortunately, all my encounters with these "excuse me" people thus far have been women of all ages. Perhaps men just do not like to speak, yet this is much better in some situations when "excuse me" no longer becomes a polite request. It has got me wondering which is more polite, to shut up and not expect to be excused when there is practically no way you can be excused, or to demand to be excused.

One famous example, while at a particularly long bus stop during the rush hour is illustrated below.

Two buses were aligned at the bus stop with passengers queueing to get on board during the rush hour (blue arrows). I was among those queueing in the bus on the right. Along came this girl, probably a student, running for the bus on the left in the direction of the red arrow. Now note that both queues are pretty long, there is no way her bus on the left is going to leave anytime soon. Upon clashing head on with the people queueing for the bus on the right. She said impatiently "excuse me!" right beside me. I was totally disgusted. There is no way this girl cannot see that there is no room for her to be excused. Furthermore, she could easily have circumvented the queue from the back to join the queue on the left. What nerve to demand that she be excused?

For a moment I pondered, should I tell her, "No, you may not be"? Alas it was the turn for me to squeeze up the bus so I plainly ignored her. Leaving her to wonder who was being rude. Sadly, "excuse me", an originally polite expression has turned into an unthoughtful demand. Furthermore, there is no doubt in my head who that girl thought was being rude. Absolutely preposterous!...

300

One of the best action movies I have seen so far. However, although it is based on an actual battle in ancient history, it is has a complete fantasy remake. It is funny how those Neanderthals portray Asians as demonic barbarians when they were a far more advanced civilization. Looks like the only bright one to notice that was Alexander. Makes you wonder who is the real barbarian, these hordes of Asians or these Spartans that throw their babies away because they are "imperfect".

Furthermore, Sparta had lots of slaves, since when were they a nation full of free people? Oh well, still an enjoyable movie, no doubt already stirring trouble with the modern Persians due to its fantasy-reality portrayal. Hopefully they can come up with some block-buster for the often vilified Persian Empire. No thanks to the Greeks for destroying their records and re-writing them...

A day by the SEAside Part 2

Mr S: Hey Mr I, your gardener told me yesterday that you can't sell me those nice round pebbles to decorate my garden. I thought only the soil was not for sale.

Mr I: What?! He told you that? That is ridiculous, soil and round pebbles are two unrelated matters. Looks like I have to reshuffle my gardening committee. This is nothing to worry about. You can still buy my nice pebbles.

*Seven minutes later*

Mrs S: Did you see that? It looks like over at Mr I's they have replaced their "No Pebbles for sale" poster!

Mr S: That's great now we will have enough round pebbles to decorate the sides of our pond.

Mrs S: But they have placed a new sign with the words "Pebbles for sale! Except for Ss. By order, the Gardening Committee".

Mr S: *Groans* How perplexing!

Emails for all to see

Can you imagine your own private emails being posted for everyone to see? That is what is happening at this site that covers an update of NASA's astronaut love triangle saga. I always thought it was normal to quote some relevant parts of the email being used as evidence, however they just placed the entire email online as a photo. What is worse is that you can even order the "photo" for a fee!

Customized Homepages

For those that are not already making use of a customized homepage, now is a good time to start. A customized homepage puts together a host of web widgets from the vendor (e.g. Google) in any way you like. These widgets can be functional tools (i.e. calendar, translator) or news aggregators. The latter being the most useful. The format of the homepage will be saved by the vendor and logging in anywhere in the world will present you with your unique homepage catered to suit your needs. Below is an example customized homepage using a Google account. Just visit this link to begin a customized homepage.

This is precisely what the new buttons "+ Add to Google" and "+ MY Yahoo" on the right are for. These will add this blog's RSS feed into a aggregator widget on your customized homepage (Google or Yahoo respectively). Alternatively, the "RSS" button will allow you to add a live bookmark on your browser or RSS reader. However, browsers are as mobile as the device they reside on...

Fish Nets

There are fish nets with big holes and fish nets with small holes. Fish nets with big holes catch only big fish, allowing the smaller fish of no interest to pass through. However they are weak, and may tear easily, leaving the fisherman with nothing. Fish nets with small holes are strong. However, they catch everything, including things that are not fish.

Decent writing to NTFS partitions in Linux

Been waiting for this for a long time. Basically writing to New Technology File System (NTFS) in Linux was considered unsafe. This is due to the fact that the open source developers had to reverse engineer Microsoft's NTFS file system. Finally there is a driver that can write to NTFS safely. It is released here. Not all features of NTFS are ready yet but there is one interesting thing -- you can now install Linux into an NTFS partition. In other words, you can access the Linux partitions from Windows in a dual boot system instead of installing some 3rd party ext2 and ext3 (file systems that Linux commonly uses) drivers for Windows.