We hit the Asobi Seksu concert at The Drake on Monday evening. The tickets had been bought months and months ago, apparently. Anyway, they were on an acoustic tour, and I really, really liked it.

First: venue. I'd seen them a couple years ago at The Horseshoe, which is a tiny little bar. I've seen a lot of shows there, and while being squished and rocking out with people who obviously enjoy the music as much as you do, you're also squished and rocking out with way too many people in your personal space (I know, I know, concerts =/= personal space). Before you get too snarky, my other problem with The Horseshoe is the the ceilings are super low, and so is the stage. I can never see any of the artists when I go.

Next: sound. Most places have pretty crappy acoustics. Yeah, it's a bar. They make up for the low ceilings and oddly proportioned rooms by placing speakers everywhere and blasting them so you have no choice but to rip up some TP and stuff them in your ears or forget about keeping your hearing into your old age. I do this TP thing every concert I go to now, btw.

(photo by Dave Greenwald, from a different concert because I didn't bring my camera and can't find any pics)

The Drake underground was a great venue for a fantastic acoustic show. It's cosy, clean (The Horseshoe is dingy and sticky with spilt.. beer.. I think), there were people sitting on the floor in front of the stage, it wasn't ear-piercingly loud. I really enjoyed it. It wasn't as rock-out as the previous concert I'd attended, but I could really enjoy their arrangements and the sounds, and Yuki's lovely voice. Nice, intimate, acoustic. I must be getting old.

(taking a break from (trying to) write)

The Ring Series, Koji Suzuki
Ring, Spiral, Loop

So.. I've not seen either incarnations of the movie, but I've heard that it (they) deviates() quite a bit from the book. Obviously, the movie was produced as a single-genre horror; the book's really quite different. The book cover says something insipid like (I can't remember it now) "combines Murakami with Stephen King", but I think that's just sensationalist and completely untrue; it's a lot more like Michael Crichton. It's a lot more sci-fi and science/medical-mystery than horror, and I like that a lot.

There were a number of pretty scary moments through the 3 books. Jeff read Ring to me over the course of 4 months or so. Being read to makes things a little less scary. I read Spiral and Loop myself, and there were moments when I had to put down the book and go off to do something else when Jeff wasn't around, otherwise I'd have twisted my neck trying to look over my shoulder.

Suzuki paints very easily imaginable places and people. It's a very effective style. The prose is relatively compelling. I raced through the second and third books, drawn along by the plot, aching to find out what happens at the end.

It's almost a philosophical mystery in the beginning. The sense of urgency in Ring is palpable as the protagonists (Asakawa, Ryugi) puzzle over the video and scramble to find a way to save themselves. The back story they uncover about Sadako Yamamura is so interesting you almost forget about their one-week deadline. The book, naturally, ends unsatisfactorily - it leaves you hanging, wanting more.

Spiral introduces a new protagonist, Ando, and it begins almost right where Ring ends. The series quite earnestly turns into a medical mystery. It's full of cute little mathematical puzzles, scientific explanations of viruses, DNA, RNA, genetics. Really interesting stuff.

Loop seems to be set in a completely different context, even though the world still appears to be the same. Unlike Spiral, it doesn't seem to have any relation whatsoever to the preceding plotlines until the last 3rd of the book. The scientific mystery deepens even further. This time we're dealing with a virus that causes cancer. There's even more about genetics in this one, combined with an almost-completely out-of-this-world adventure plotline. The departure in plot-style from the first two books is a little bit jarring, but the story is still compelling, and there are a couple of WTF moments that can only happen in the warped mind of fiction-writers.

It's not great literature, but it's a fantastic lazy and rapid read for those times you don't want to have to put too much effort into reading fiction (because you should be spending more time and effort reading non-fiction academia). I'd recommend it if you're looking for a series to take up the next couple of weeks. Or to read to each other before bedtime.

I've been dying to do this for ages, but kept procrastinating with all sorts of excuses, like not having the right nuts/fruit combination, not having the time, being too tired to stir stuff, not having honey... and then I had this day all to myself and I thought, that bag of rolled oats has been sitting in my cupboard for months.


mmm, granola
My recipe (altered from Gale's):
6 cups rolled oats (not quick cook/instant)
2 cups nuts (I used walnuts and almonds, crushed)
A few teaspoons of cinnamon
Pinch of salt
1 cup sweetener (I used honey, you can use agave, maple syrup, whatever)
1 cup dried fruit (I used apricots and cranberries)

Mix oats and nuts in big bowl.
Pour sweetener over the oat/nut mix, add cinnamon and salt and stir until everything's well-coated.
Pour the mixture on 2 baking sheets (I had to use 3) in a thin layer. I lined the sheets with wax paper first.
Bake in 325-350°f for 20-30 minutes. Watch it carefully. It may burn. I found that for my oven, it was best on 325° for 20-25 minutes. You may find it helpful to take it out at the 12-minute mark to stir the mixture around, especially if your oven heats unevenly.
Pour the mixture back into your big bowl, add the fruit.
Let cool, pack into airtight containers.

We caught Youth in Revolt yesterday. Yeah, another Michael Cera rom-com sad-sack movie. I was quite reluctant to spend time and money on what I thought was going to be yet another rom-com sad-sack movie, but about 15 minutes into the show I changed my mind.

Now I know J likes Cera to a certain degree, but not quite enough to watch everything. He missed Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, for example - it just wasn't appealing. But anyway, part of the reason J really wanted to watch YiR was because Justin Long is in it.


So yeah, it begins like any other rom-com sad-sack virgin-looking-to-get-laid movie. Nothing new right? Surprisingly not that boring, or even that predictable at all. I guess the issue is presented in a rather different way, and the characters really drive the movie, and are intriguing enough to make me feel for them. It also helped that Steve Buscemi played Cera's character's dad, and it was a lovely little role.

The only thing that bugged me about the movie, probably the same reason I didn't end up watching (500) Days of Summer was the god-awful, annoying semi-ironic, pseudo-intellectual hipster way of speaking the main characters (Cera, Doubleday) had. Good grief. It made me want to tear my ears out. It was what I'd imagine living on Queen W-W would be like. Sure, there were some great lines, but by and large most of the conversations had me rolling my eyes in pain. Still, worth a watch if you don't mind the language.

Michael Cera may be the next John Cusack, but he's just not that good-looking.

We finally received New Super Mario Bros.. We ordered it from amazon's US site before Christmas, had it shipped to thymia, who then mailed it to us. It took about 3 weeks. bah amazon.


We cracked it yesterday and got to playing. I was really apprehensive because I really suck at Super Mario.

We haven't broken up yet! Haha. It's not an easy game. Playing 2-player co-op means we're constantly stealing each other's power-ups and bumping each other off the screen or into various enemies, or even swallowing and spitting each other out into pits with Yoshi. All by accident, of course. J is by far the better player, I'd say he's a Mario expert, and he's being extremely patient with my inability to jump large gaps or heights of certain distances. He's spent a bit of time waiting at the top of the screen while I negotiate weird moving blocks and swings several times from the bottom. Several times. Over and over again as I keep falling off, sliding off, jumping too far, or not far enough. Ridiculous.

But we're having an incredibly good time. It's crazy, insane fun, and we both have that ADHD 100%-completion thing, so we keep going back to completed levels to look for the big coins and secret passageways.

I'm really glad J is my co-op video-game partner. :)

A few evenings ago I turned around from my computer to see kitty lying face-down on the spare bed we have in the study. It was actually kinda hard to tell what she was doing, but I realised after a bit that she was asleep. She looked so funny, so I tried to get a picture of it. Mind you, it's pretty dark in here, and I had to use the flash.


sleeping face-down
After the flash went off she woke up and looked blearily at me as I burst out laughing.


that little triangle patch of moisture on the sheet is from her nose!

but better than never.

Finally, after over 4 years, we have a family photo (and grumpy kitty).



Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Winter 09/10

Happy new year!

It snowed all day, which made staying in and cuddling up really nice.



Here's to another year full of love and happiness.

This is me, halfway through my morning coffee, still waking up, and just checking up on the day I was missing on the other side of the world, while I was asleep.

This is kitty, deciding that my workchair is big enough for the both of us.

(it's not.)


But it's nice to have her here so close to me anyway.

I'm no pagan, but I acknowledge the winter solstice. One of the best things about it is the knowledge that from the 21st of December, days will be getting longer again, and there will be more sunlight. No more 4pm twilights.

After a weekend of debauchery, err.. actually no, I had two parties on Friday night, one was dinner and boardgames, and the other was just drinks with Laura and Léon who were passing through Toronto; sleeping in on Saturday; and having what turned out to be an M:TG party chez nous on Sunday. Seriously, Phil was coming over; but we had bumped into an old M:TG friend, Kevin, earlier in the week, so we invited him over as well, then Dave turned up, and Kevin brought another player, Jenny, and suddenly we were playing a 6-way attack-left game in the middle of our way-too-small living room.

It's great having people over and everything, but our apartment is too small to comfortably hold more than 4 people in any one room.

Anyway, we hiked out to Robarts Library yesterday to do some work. It was gloomy and snowy, although not enough to collect on the ground. I was comfortably ensconced in the course reserves, where time passed way too fast, because designing a course really is that fun.


Library on a snowy day.
Funny, after the snow and gloom of the solstice, the official first day of winter dawned achingly cold, bright and sunny. It's a beautiful day out, but there's work to do before we head up north to the Mays' for the Christmas festivities.

When Leslie and Louis were here (they left this morning, after arriving on Friday - and Louis was in shorts. It was -7°c) I got the opportunity to fiddle around with their new camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. What an incredible camera. The quality of the shots are just jaw-dropping. For a point-and-shoot, it sure doesn't produce pictures like a point-and-shoot.


With Leslie


with Louis
The shots were taken on two different days at the same coffeeshop, my latest caffeine hangout two blocks down the street, the Communal Mule (984 Dundas W). The americano here is simply the best americano I've ever had. The owner/barrista (one-man-show, this guy) brews a mean cup, and is friendly and generous, lending the little joint a fantastic easy-going vibe. I figured Les and Louis would've loved it, so brought them there Saturday morning, and they keep going back.

So anyway, this camera. It just produces incredible colouring, and is just so forgiving on light. I didn't think it was possible. The 2nd shot, with Louis, was taken in the morning, with bright sunlight streaming in the front windows of the shop. The first shot with Leslie was taken in the late afternoon on a grey and misty day, and the colours are still really vibrant. It's just crazy.

Makes my Sony DSC-T3 look like a toy.

Anyway, it was simply fantastic having Les and Louis here. It's also the first time we've hosted more than one other person in the apartment. It got a little bit squishy at times (all 4 of us on the couch, plus the cat on the arm of the couch) - especially when sharing 1 bathroom, and we had at least two heaters running full-time for our tropic-blooded friends who were completely unprepared for the cold-snap we've been having. But it was really nice. They're in Niagara at this moment, and will be heading to NYC tonight. Christmas in New York, such leisure.

It was nice to see them again, and we'll be back in Singapore in February for Chinese New Year. So soon! Partings are less harsh when the dates are small and manageable. :)

kitty was sleeping by my work chair one morning and she woke herself up snoring. When I looked down she had a big stretch, and I got to rub her tummy a little bit before I grabbed my camera.

big stretch kitty!

1. book review for Can Geogr
2. abstract for hxl fragments conference (@perrinleaflock, funding is a must! :P)
3. sign sessional contract
4. postdoc app (don't think I can do this).

Fingers crossed.

My widescreen monitor dreams came true - Gerald bought me a new 20" LCD for Christmas. Yay for best sibling! I picked out a couple of possibles on newegg.ca, and we discussed prices and sizes, settled on one, and ordered it. It arrived on Wednesday, and there really is nothing like more screen real-estate. Easier to do work on it!


new desk - top.
I've decided to just run the single screen and save my laptop's screen for when I'm mobile. I've noticed the laptop screen getting a little bit iffy over the past few weeks. Right now the cable clutter behind the laptop and the screen is unimaginable. I'm also running low on USB ports (there are only 3 on the T60). I went and got the keyboard yesterday.

Desktop wallpaper ganked from the amazing Orioto's game remake art. This one is from Worms. Ain't it a beauty? I've also used the FFIII (SNES), the Lemmings, and the Zelda ones.

The little white case at the bottom of the picture (what a mismatch) is the Nintendo DS Lite. I bought it 2nd-hand off a dude last week for a very decent price. He had bought it a couple years ago, but shunned it for the PSP, saying that "the DS isn't for hardcore gamers". I almost rejected the sale right there, but I wanted it too badly. I'm currently playing The World Ends with You, it's pretty awesome.


I was telling J all about the guy later on, and he was reading this review of Chrono Trigger, this first line of which goes, When it comes to Role-Playing Games there are essentially two groups: those who have played Chrono Trigger and those who haven’t. I balked at that. Come on. If you really want to be so pedantic about it, then when it comes to RPGs, there are two types of gamers - those who've played D&D and those who've not.

'strewth.

Yesterday evening we took kitty to the vet.

Tuesday morning, I was up, eating breakfast and catching up with stuff on the computer, trying to ignore the constant mewing she emits every morning until we feed her (she gets breakfast at 9am). Eventually she stopped mewing, and I heard her go dig around in her litter box. A few minutes later I heard strained huffing and puffing behind me.

I turned around and there she was, preparing to take a dump on the rug.

I freaked out, naturally. J was still in bed, and I hollered at him while frantically searching for a piece of paper I could sacrifice from my desk. I found an envelope, and by the time I reached her, there were three malodourous pebbles on the rug, and the cat was walking away - and get this, I swear she was looking extremely pleased with herself.

Kitty has always been incredibly good with her toilet habits (she's probably more regular than most of us), despite the few freak accidents here and there. I was initially puzzled, it couldn't be that she was pissed we wouldn't feed her until 9am - we'd been doing this ever since we got her. While I cleaned the rug, J went to check the litter box and found another pebble on her mat outside of the box. I call them pebbles, because that's when we realised her poop was rock-hard.

She displayed no other behavioural problems otherwise, and we hadn't changed her food lately. I did scrub out her litter box a week ago so now it smells like nothing, but she had evidently been using it before the incident. I figured she was probably constipated.

And since she needed a regular vet check-up, we made an appointment with the Animal Hospital 2 blocks down the street on Wednesday evening when I got home from school. Since it was only 2 blocks and we didn't have a carrier, we slipped the harness and leash on her, and I carried her down the street.

5 minutes of freaking-out and yowling later, we straggled into the clinic (it was drizzling), where a huge labrador was incredibly interested in her, and she spent some time hiding beneath the chairs and hissing at everything in sight. Eventually she calmed down enough to lay in my lap while glaring at the resident orange tabby (such a sweet little thing). J had to do all the administrative stuff and registration because I couldn't get up.

When it was our turn to see the vet, she couldn't cuddle up to us enough. We'd never gotten so much voluntary cuddling from her before. She spent most of the time on the table growling, and even tried to bite him. He confirmed her constipation, prescribed some malt laxatives and weight-loss wet foods, gave her a general checkup (she's 5.28kg, just a tad overweight), stuck a thermometer up her bum.

When we left the consultation room and J was waiting to pay, two ladies began cooing over kitty. I warned them that she wasn't in the best of moods, but one of them was pleased that she could pat her. I had my misgivings, but I let her do it. The lady sat down, and kitty jumped into her lap. At this point my misgivings got worse, but I figured she jumped into her lap willingly, what could possibly go wrong?

She looked up at the lady's face and HISSED at her.

We were completely mortified. J and I talked about it later and agreed it was like bringing your 3-year-old out to a restaurant and having him yell "fuck you!" at the waitress.

We eventually managed to get home, with kitty hanging on to my neck for dear life.

Kitty's been good so far, but we've had to smear the laxative paste on her nose to make her eat it.


my little black bear.

Gmail web-based email or thunderbird email client?

I've been using thunderbird for a long, long time. I have several email addresses that can be easily filtered into two gmail accounts (work and play). Recently I've been thinking about getting rid of thunderbird altogether. Just seems simpler now that I pretty much have guaranteed access to the Internet anytime I guess.

Thoughts/comments?

So a few weeks ago, Ubuntu 9.10 (or Karmic Koala) was released. I waited a little bit before upgrading, mostly because the servers and mirrors are always slammed in the first week, and also to have a little time to let any latent bugses get sorted out. A few days ago, I backed up /home/ to my external, and let the upgrade run overnight.

Apart from the font hinting in the Firefox 3.5 upgrade, everything ran perfect right off the bat. And then a couple of days later, I got used to the font hinting. Sure, it still looks a little odd, at times, but it really doesn't interfere with my work.


Looks good.

Anyway, what is ubuntu? For everybody who've ever griped about how they dislike their computer, I like to lightly recommend ubuntu. Ubuntu is an operating system (two very common operating systems are Windows and OSX), one of many linux distributions.

Why use it? So many reasons. Apart from the fact that it's free and open source. Free as in beer, and open source as in you can do whatever you want with it. Free is enough to get me going though; I'm not enough of a programmer to tinker with the source code (of course I wish I could, but that's another hobby..). But it's also light, it runs on computers that don't run Windows XP very well anymore (I'm not familiar enough with Macs to say anything useful about them), it works, and you don't have to pay a single cent for anything you want to use on it.

Like Firefox, to surf the net with. Or Open Office - word processing (with ability to save in any format AND export to pdf!), spreadsheet, presentations, database, etc. Free, free, free. Free to use, free to change, free to burn and distribute without feeling slightly shady.

Peeling the the Windows XP stickers off my laptops was one of the most exciting moments of my mousy little life. No logo! (ok, except for the Intel Centrino Duo and the IBM ThinkPad ones).

I also use it to be free of all the proprietary software that inevitably comes with paying for operating systems like Windows and whatever it is Mac calls their OS (maybe I'll call it OS n). You don't have to use their products, which usually comes with some kind of price tag. I can build a new computer system without having to go out and purchase some kind of operating system (or its CD-key), and have it run from scratch, and it just works, only having had to pay for the hardware.

Ubuntu - it just works, and you don't have to pay anything for it.

I want one of these!



Dual-bay, because the more the merrier. From thinkgeek.com, but probably available elsewhere too.

I would also love to have a nice, widescreen LCD monitor (it makes reading, writing and preparing presentations that much easier).

and a Nintendo Wii, and a DS, and and and and... ;)

(because I'm writing and need a distraction every 5 minutes).

(Kitty is a good reason to love working from home).

(also, for riendel)

For your snorgles, I present:


A study of kitty's paw pads.


Kitty's little fuzzy snout.

We're pretty sure she loves him more. I think it's because his lap's more comfortable than mine, and he smells stronger than I do. The red strap and blue leash is her harness. We've pretty much succeeded in getting her used to it, and she doesn't struggle anymore, or even try to chew it off. When it's not too wet out one of us will take her out the back and let her wander about the deck until we get too cold and have to come back in. This outside thing might end soon - we can't take hanging around in the cold like she can.


morning kisses


kitty's in on the video gaming, too.