yjblog

Saw Wall-E last night (every bit as awesome as I had read), and was exposed to the trailer for what could be a terrifyingly bad local 3D production, Sing To The Dawn.

I looked up the official website hoping to find something to make fun of, and MDA certainly didn’t want to disappoint here.

Check out the horrible font choices, nigh-unreadable text size and colour contrast, the hilarious combination of drop-shadow AND outer-glow text effects on the main title, and the amazing playable “background music” involving screeching monkeys and a low-quality version of the (admittedly very melodious) theme song that builds up to a rousing climax and… stops. Even the standard Flash video controls on the trailer are mysteriously ginormous and pixelated. Aargh my eyes.

I wonder why other people run. To get fit? To challenge themselves? To compete?

I run to not feel like crap. See this New York Times article:

Yes, Running Can Make You High

Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.

I only started running at the beginning of last year. A few things happened, really — a friend recommended I do so to feel better about the breakup, and it sounded reasonable (I had no idea the endorphin thing wasn’t proven at the time); I realised I was, strangely enough, feeling very positive after each NS remedial training session; and, most of all, Akmal encouraged me to join him in volunteering with the Special Olympics running club, and that’s been making me run regularly ever since.

While I was busy feeling sorry for myself at the beginning of the year, I did resolve to not let the year go to waste. Thank goodness, then, for the amazing volunteers and athletes with Special Olympics. While I risk sounding like a terrible cliché, running with them really made me feel alive, and finishing the half-marathon in December with my athlete and friend Shaun truly made the entire year worthwhile. I don’t think any of the other volunteers knew why I started going (except maybe Akmal), but it still means a lot to me that they took me on — even when I was initially unable to keep up with their training — and let me have a chance to be part of what they do.

One comment from the article above:

Nothing quite compares to how I feel when I finish a run: everything becomes possible, I feel great exuberance and joy, and completely and totally energized. If that’s a “runner’s high” then I’m in, for life.

Yeah, that’s about right.

This year’s been awfully busy so far, so I’ve been running a lot less. My mood’s been suffering as a result, and even though that could also be attributed to any number of things (new responsibilities at work, living by myself, living at work), running has so far still succeeded in giving me that rare feel-good moment.

I hope the rain eases up soon. I need to go for a run.

(Aside: The Nike+ kit Hansen sent over (before it was available in Singapore) helped a lot, too. Having something track my distances every run, every week and every month (even if it was mildly inaccurate) did push me to run more. Seeing numbers stack up on the Nike+ website makes me unnecessarily happy — it’s like a RPG of some kind, and all they need to do now to complete the experience is to level us up after a certain numbers of miles. And add weapons and armour.)

I’m back for a bit, because I think I actually have things to write about. For example…

A friend gave a talk to my computing students about working in the software industry (thanks Tim), and one of the points he mentioned was keeping a professional blog for all of one’s work-related writings. With what I’ve been (slowly, slowly, very slowly) figuring out in this most recent web development project, I figure it’s about time I started collating information somewhere, even if it’s just to be able to track my own “professional development” (hooray for work-speak). I’ll be cross-posting those entries to this blog, so I’ll just keep the URL to myself.

Furthermore, I do want to draw again, and I do want to launch Stupid Chicken: The Comic at some point (this decade). My printer/scanner/tea-maker doesn’t seem to work with Mac OS X Leopard, though, so I can’t quite get started. Damned HP printer… the model number is PSC something, which might explain my unnatural antagonism towards it. Also, I’ve lost track of what I was trying to explain here, but in essence, I’m going to try and bring back the webcomic here (and get around to setting up the separate site sometime).

I also met up with a former colleague who’s finally quit to pursue his dreams full-time. Plenty of food for thought from that conversation, and some things I do feel the need to write about.

Speaking of colleagues, I came across another colleague’s blog, and it’s SO. OVERWHELMINGLY. POSITIVE. I’m not sure I can even bring myself to be cynical about what he writes — from what I know of him, he really does seem to be someone who thoroughly believes in his job, his faith and his life. So, yeah, thank goodness for everyone he’s in teaching, but then, what the hell am I doing in this job?

And, hell, I’m actually still really fucking depressed from that whole mess from the end of 2006. I might even write about that, in a departure from my usual spew of vagueness. Maybe.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, but this blog is going away pretty soon.

Here’s a teaser for what’s coming up next, though:

Also, monsters! Everywhere!

That’s all for this site for now… I’ll update when the new site is ready. In the meantime, look for me on facebook for status updates, I guess.

Stumbled across this Ars Technica report on the MPAA’s newly-released list of top 25 movie piracy schools. On the list:

24. Stanford University - 405
25. University of California at Berkeley - 398

Alright! Way to make up for years of losing Big Game. Respect.

Also,

A number of schools have the dubious distinction of being on both the MPAA and the RIAA list. The overachievers are: Ohio University (#1 RIAA/#18 MPAA), Purdue University (#2, #5), University of Nebraska at Lincoln (#3/#13), UMASS (#6/#9), Michigan State (#7/#20), North Carolina State (#9/#14), University of South Florida (#11/#23), Boston University (#15/#3), and the University of Michigan (#18/#10).

Am I the only one who thinks that list reads like a NCAA sports ranking list, with AP ranking followed by USA Today ranking? For that matter, why can’t piracy be a NCAA sport?

That’s what my comment spam just told me.

Three months is an awful long time to spend feeling sorry for yourself, right? I’m back, as soon as I get over this inconveniently-timed bout of weekend flu. In the meantime, I’m on twitter, just like half a million other new signups.

Besides, if I don’t bother posting again, I can claim this was just an April Fool’s special.

I think I’ve inflicted enough of my self-centred whining and complaining upon my dear friends these past few days. So, to all of you — you have my deepest appreciation for the help getting through the end of last year. May your new years’ wishes come true. Those that are practical, achievable and not involving inflicting excessive bodily harm upon others, anyway.

That’s all, really.

Looks like the Ministry of Education’s finally made it official — no more Gifted Education Programme at the secondary level:

Gifted kids to take ‘integrated’ path (Channelnewsasia.com)
NOW MOE finally slaughters SACRED COW (The Electric New Paper)

Nothing surprising, apart from the TNP article being bizarrely smug about their “prediction in 2004”. Because YELLING CAPITAL LETTERS in your headline makes you SOUND MORE CREDIBLE.

What’s surprising is that where I teach, the school’s shutting down its internal GE programme as well. A pity — the small class sizes were nice and manageable, and it felt easier to connect with them than the one or two non-GE classes I’ve taught (granted, I’ve only taught 9 GE classes vs. 1 mainstream here and 2 elsewhere). Maybe it’s my own prejudices at work, but I’m not certain it’ll be as easy to amuse the mainstream kids with my nonsense. We’ll see, I guess.