… the shower. Have you ever wondered why the best ideas comes when you are showering? Maybe it is because you really have no where else to go or nothing else to distract you thats why you think, or is it because of some magical properties in inherent when you combine water, steam and soap together that causes that lightbulb to spark to life?
There are many theories to explain this intriguing phenomena. The other day, while driving home from work, I overheard them discussing this on radio. It was said that when it rains, something involving static and cleaning and what not happens, which makes the air around the head clean. Breathing in the air (and clean oxygen) helps improve thinking capabilities and this can be applied to showers as well. Apparently.
According to one blogger, there is a simple explanation for this phenomena. He says that when you’re relaxed, your mind’s free association and creative thinking processes are enhanced. Although you won’t be thinking any deeper, you’re instead able to generate new ideas much more easily. It seems that putting any sort of stress narrows your field of focus and while it helps build details, it doesn’t bring new ideas.
A few explanations can be found in Alison Stein Wellner’s article. In her article, she states that Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist explains that creativity requires an attitude that is a paradoxical blend of attention and relaxation. As it happens, the shower is a near-perfect place to cultivate such an attitude. This lack of anxiety is what helps kick out good ideas in the shower. It’s similar to what psychologists have discovered in treating sexual dysfunction.
Steven M. Smith, a cognitive psychologist at Texas A&M added that as we scrub, our minds revert to a sort of neutral state in which we are receptive to issues or themes that bother us or that are unresolved. In other words, the mind begins to wander aimlessly, which makes it easier to entertain less-than-serious thoughts.
In an article by Michael Fitzgerald, a quantum physicist has developed a model to explain why. It goes something like this:
1) There is an unconscious part of the mind that processes things without our knowing it, and in fact while our conscious mind is doing its thing.
2) Ideas are either algorithmic, like working through a differential equation, or non-algorithmic, which means they get worked out more or less randomly.
So in summary, i believe that because we’re showering alone (generally =x), you’re in a personal space, a place of privacy free from distractions. It is probably the only place where we’re are totally alone with our own thoughts. I guess it is also the soothing sound of running water creating a type of white noise that drowns out distracting background noises.
The Dark Knight was simply awesome and I must say, Heath Ledger’s performance is simply top notch. It is sad to see him go but he’ll always be remembered for his talents. I really love the dialogues as well. Some are very thought provoking, especially Joker’s lines.
Warning: S P O I L E R S
You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. It’s all part of the plan. But tell people that one tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds!
- The Joker
You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
- Harvey Dent/ Two-Face
He’s the hero that Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now … and so we’ll hunt him … because he can take it … because he’s not a hero… he’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector… a Dark Knight.
- Commissioner Gordon
No, don’t talk like one of them. You’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak–like me. They need you right now. When they don’t…they’ll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. They’re dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show ya. When the chips are down, these, uh…civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster; I’m just ahead of the curve.
- The Joker
Also, this quote by Two-Face
We thought we could be decent men in an indecent time… but we were wrong! The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance.
When you think about it, in this unfair world where there are no absolute values like justice and mercy, the only justice is chance. We see in many instances where the innocent suffer while the guilty escape. Some are born healthy and others not. Simple observation will tell you that there are a great deal of injustice in this world and a lot of things happens by chance.
Chance may also be interpreted as probability or randomness. Since randomness is a lack of order, purpose, cause, or predictability, then a random process is a repeating process whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern, but follow a probability distribution. In simple layman’s term, chance lacks biasness and correlation, which means chance is fair. Chance is justice.
Anyway, my brain just died of over-usage. Too much concentration juice was used to watch The Dark Knight whilst simultaneously trying to absorb every quote, philosophical statements and awesomeness that is The Dark Knight.
Just completed Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. Another game strike off my list. Pretty good game. It has been praised as a Pixar experience by The New York Times. Check out my review here for more info.
Oh, and I can’t wait to watch The Dark Knight tonight! Been dying to watch this since I watched the trailer last year.
This is to advise you that you have been made an offer to graduate at the following graduation ceremony: Saturday August 23rd at 10:30am.
An offer letter/graduation intention form, and information about regalia and the ceremony will be posted to your Winter period address today (Monday 21 July 2008).
After so many weeks of feeling anxious, I finally let go a sigh of relief.
A new Heroes season 3 commercial! Seems like they are upping up the ante by taking the Super Hero VS Super Villains approach. 22 September 2008 can’t come soon enough!
I went in to work at 5pm, the late shift, the slow boring dull shift. The interim manager is still in her office. She was someone not used to doing so much work. She is one of the laziest staff but when the previous manager announced her sudden resignation, she has to fill in her shoes. I laughed at that sight. The more she suffers the more I’m happy.
Looking around the unit, I saw the nurses were busy going about their tasks, or rather appears to be. I did my usual rounds with the patients enquiring whether they need anything taken care off, any change in catering orders, transportation etc. Then, it is to the store room sorting out the new shipment of stock that arrived today.
Clock strikes six, the interim manager started packing up. Time to make another round the ward. Staff still appears to be busy and glances were exchanged. We waited.
Time passes. The interim managers leaves the office, slides her finger off the biometric scan (no more manual timesheets to cheat on T_T) and left the building. We looked at each other and smiled. Finally that bitch is gone. ‘L’ left her computer and went straight to the staff room, pops her dinner into the microwave and opens her novel. ‘S(m)’ dived into the computer and logged into eBay and Facebook. ‘S(f)’ sits in an empty patient chair and watches Foxtel and I went to the staff room as well to make myself a latte (damn I need to get a coffee maker for myself too >.<!)
It wasn’t always like that at work. Before she took over, everyone was happy and does their job with dedication. But since she took over, a lot of staff left. Why? Because she is a control freak and she is bloody anal. Her recent spate of cost-cutting is driving us nuts. You can feel the cheapness everywhere. How are we to provide quality service with this kind of policy?!
Anyway while sipping my beloved cup of coffee while reading the newspaper, ‘S(f)’ walked into the staff room and we all chatted. ‘S(f)’ was here to work for two weeks due to staff shortages. Because of a spate staff resignation and annual leaves, the interim manager needed to request staff from the national office and ‘S(f)’ was sent here from Adelaide. Of course, the bitch had to pay for ‘S(f)’s accommodation, air fare, car and food. So much for cutting cost.
Somewhere in the midst of chatting, this part came up
Me: We drove down to Melbourne all the way from Sydney, going up and down the Great Alpine Road while stopping by a few small towns. Oh I’ve also been to Gold Coast and that was pretty much how much I’ve traveled in Australia since I moved here almost 5 years ago.
‘S(f)’: What? You are not from Australia? Where are you from?
Me: Malaysia.
‘S(f)’: Wow, I never realized. You don’t have an accent.
Me: *shocked*
I don’t have an accent? Does that mean I have an Australian accent? Since when o.O?
Then later on we got back into a mood to work. This time the atmosphere was filled with energy and positiveness. Talking smack to each other, cracking jokes to each other and to patients as well as we’ve always been before she took over. Somewhere along the line, ‘S(m)’ asked me where to get a certain product even though hes been working here for a long time. I just scanned through the database in my head, walked to some obscure storage space and pulls the product out. I find it amusing that I know exactly where everything is in the unit whilst the nursing staff don’t.
It was 8.41pm when the last patient left and we’ve shutdown most of the unit. We were in the staff office, staring at the computer, or more specifically the time ticking down on the Timeteq program (thats the replacement for time sheet). In the past even if we finished like half an hour before 9, the old manager will still pay us up to the time we were booked for, i.e. 9.00pm. However, with this new management, she pays us to the minute and never pays us if we worked a little bit overtime due to some unforeseen circumstances.
Hence, four of us were standing in front of the computer staring at the clock!!! Once it hits 9pm, we each quickly slide out fingers on the biometric scanner next to the come and sped off work. Madness.
MMORPG is short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (thats a mouthful ain’t it?). MMORPGs allow thousands of players to adventure and socialize together at the same time in a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a fictional character and take control over that character’s actions. The biggest difference here is that you are inhabiting a persistent virtual world with thousands of other players. Even when you log off, the world carries on living on its own.
I love playing in MMORPGs because of the fact that I’m playing with living breathing people. Of course, there are many assholes online as it is in real life as well (and I still do enjoy single player RPGs), but the charm remains nevertheless. MMORPGs by their very nature is persistent. Your character will always be there. Your progress on building up your character’s achievement, wealth and reputation is there. The world may evolve and change with time, but your character will always be the same as you left him/her/it (this could probably be the reason why games like Defense of the Ancients(a popular Warcraft III custom map) never appealed to me as once the game is ended, your character is gone).
Most MMORPGs have an expansive world in which your character can roam around and explore. Exploration is MMORPGs satisfies my wanderlust. The sense of finding something new and interesting, or a scenic vantage point off the beaten track is exhilirating for me. MMORPGs provides the platform for me to do all these with my friends. The social aspect cannot be underestimated.
My current main MMORPG is The Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine did a good job with the license and crafted a well designed world true to the lore of Tolkien. As my friend Tiffany started taking up a new degree in addition to her full time job *salutes*, the rest of us can only play on a Sunday night. No healer means we’ll be dead within the minute anyway T_T
So why did I go about talking about MMORPGs? July has been a strange month to me. I was just looking at my desktop and my shelf when I realized the stack of MMORPGs I have at the moment. A few weeks ago, I’ve received a free copy of Age of Conan from Atomic PC Magazine. Age of Conan is primarily based on the original works of Robert E. Howard (but also draws upon over seventy years of books and comics). The game itself plays out shortly after the events that are described in the story “Hour of the Dragon”. In this world, filled with cruel gods, mythical creatures, lost civilizations and a struggling human race, the mighty barbarian, Conan has finally seized the throne as king of Aquilonia.
One of the key features of Age of Conan is the unique combat system. Traditionally, fighting in most MMORPGs involves targeting by clicking something, clicking auto attack, then occasionally clicking a special attack. In Age of Conan fighting revolves around something called Real Combat System. You actually move up to your foe and start swinging your weapon in different directions in real-time, using direction keys. You can unleash devastating combos and even brutal finishing moves. In ranged combat, you can actually string your bow and aim manually from a first person or over-the-shoulder viewpoint to strike your enemies. Spellcasters can combine a series of spells, aka ‘speallweaves’ like combos for melee fighters, which unleash devastating results and fatalities.
This game is a refreshing change to the flood of MMORPGs released recently. Although this game is still riddled with bugs, it has a lot of potential and I’ll be following this game closely over the next few months.
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a high fantasy-themed MMORPG. There are 19 races and 16 classes to create your characters from. Races differ in appearance, special abilities, diplomatic affinity, and adventuring class selection. Vanguard offers three primary arenas of play: Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy.
The maximum level in each of the three spheres is 50. These spheres are mostly independent of each other, even if that independence is now less than in the very beginning.Each of these spheres has its own equipment tab on the character window, which allows the player to equip the gear set appropriate to the activities they wish to perform without carrying around different sets of gear in their bags.
The Adventuring sphere features the traditional set of MMORPG activities: completing quests and killing mobs. Crafting involves creating in-game items using recipes and raw materials. Crafting recipes are a set of actions that must be performed in a particular order to produce a final result. Each of these actions costs ‘action points,’ taken from an action pool. The maximum number of action points available varies with each recipe. During the crafting process, “complications” may arise which affect the crafting process, usually but not always negatively. The crafter can attempt to correct complications or resume crafting and deal with the consequences or benefits of ignoring the complications.
The third “sphere” of Vanguard, Diplomacy, allows a player to influence factions and to gain benefits for themselves or other players by means other than simply killing large numbers of enemies. As well as obtaining faction, gear and money, an additional reward of successful Diplomacy are Civic Benefits, are usually in the form of city-wide buffs triggered by city diplomats for the benefit of the Crafting, Adventuring or Harvesting spheres, and which affect everyone in the city regardless of whether they participated in the diplomatic parley or not.
Vanguard is by far the most immersive MMORPG I have ever played.
Also, EVE Online, a very niche MMORPG set in a science-fiction based persistent world, recently announced the launch of the eighth free expansion for EVE Online. EVE Online: Empyrean Age destroys the peace of New Eden as long suppressed political tensions between the four major Empires of EVE boil over into direct conflict. By choosing sides in this epic war, players have the power to direct the course of the conflict. New players can quickly immerse themselves in the EVE universe by diving into large-scale factional battles. With this, there is also a 14-day free trial available. In the past, I’ve played it for awhile but got distracted by real-life, so I’ve been very tempted to jump back in. The only limiting factor now is time and money (should I continue to play past the trial period). There is a very interesting read about EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer.
Finally, there is my Final Fantasy XI Online 30 day starter pack which is still sitting on my shelf waiting to get intimate with me. All this bombardment of MMORPGs at me this month is making me not want to get a job and play them all! There is evil in the air I tell you!
Edit: Oh, i also found a free copy of Pirates of the Burning Sea trial from Atomic PC lying around as well =x
All Ping0 and Flagship Studios staff have been made redundant. Employees were notified at a company meeting and subsequently informed that the offices will be officially closed on Saturday. Three of the studio’s top brass dug into their own pockets to provide 30 days of pay to all employees.
I know there is always the single player campaign to allow me to complete the game but nothing beats playing with friends. If they do close down the servers, hopefully we’ll be given the option to host the game over TCP/IP or LAN.
The other day, while reading newspaper at work, an article caught my eyes and I immediately felt revulsion and disgust. What is the world coming to? Bestiality is ranked quite highly in my list of Things-that-disgust-me-most, necrophilia however tops it. Necrophilia is the sexual attraction to corpse.
Police say the three men, carrying shovels, a crowbar and a box of condoms, went to a cemetery in southwestern Wisconsin in 2006 to dig up the body of Laura Tennessen, 20, who had been killed the week before in a motorcycle crash.
Nicholas Grunke had seen an obituary photo of her and asked the others for help digging up her corpse so he could have sexual intercourse with it, prosecutors say.
Authorities say the men used shovels to reach her grave but were unable to pry open the vault. They fled when a car drove into the cemetery and were eventually arrested.
The men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and misdemeanor attempted theft charges. The case has been on hold as prosecutors appealed the dismissal of the assault charges.
Apparently this case went to the Supreme Court after the lower courts ruled nothing in the state law states that sex with a corpse is illegal. Naturally, this caused public outrage and a push for a law banning necrophilia. In a 5-2 decision in the Supreme court, state law bans sexual intercourse with anyone who does not give consent “whether a victim is dead or alive at the time.”
The ruling reinstates the attempted sexual assault charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 22. The charges carry a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. For a more detailed report on this, please read it here.
Ever since getting my first x386 computer, I’ve been fascinated with it. I’ve been following the evolution of computers since then. My computer has taken many forms over the years. The PC which I can truly call mine is my Ye Olde Pentium I. It has 8MB RAM and runs on Windows 3.11. Yeap, that is some old shit I had.
Nibbles is a very simple game which is ran from MS Dos. To run this game, all I had to do was type in “QBASIC /RUN C:\DOS\NIBBLES.BAS” and voila I have Nibbles. So what the heck is nibbles? It is a very addictive game which many of you in the future came to know it as Snake which is found on almost all Nokia handsets back in the day (future? back in the day? same sentence? I know -_-)
In addition to Nibbles, there was another game that I used to play with my cousin which is also written using QBasic. It was called Gorilla. The game consists of two gorillas throwing explosive bananas at each other above a city skyline. The players can adjust the angle and velocity (we actually type in the number) of each throw, as well as the gravitational pull of the planet. Think of it as Prehistoric-Worms.
Then in 1995, Warcraft II was released. My poor baby couldn’t handle it. it needed 16MB RAM, and I only had 8MB! The horrors! I managed to convince my dad to upgrade my RAM to 16MB and CPU to 133 Mhz. Then Diablo I was released in 1997 and my baby has barely enough grunt to run it. It required 16MB RAM for online play (ah the good old days of dialup racking up huge phone bills =p). The following year Starcraft I and Fallout 2 was released. My PC was still going strong.
In 1999, my favourite game of all time was released. Planescape: Torment (in fact, only Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2 remains in my harddisk to this day!) brought my PC to it’s knees. It was time for another upgrade. This year my PC was upgraded to a Pentium II 233Mhz with 32 MB RAM. This marks the beginning point where I didn’t rely on begging my dad for a PC upgrade. It was the time when my parents were sick of my gaming all day or staring at the net all night. They refuse to upgrade the PC in an attempt to curb my addiction. Little do they know, I already have the technical know how to build PCs from scratch.
Through the next few years, my PC was slowly evolving without my parent’s knowledge. They tried taking away my keyboard and mouse. But I had spares lying under my bed. They cut off the internet, but I hacked/stolen dialup logins from school. By the year 2003, my PC was a Pentium III, Geforce 4MX, 384MB Ram, 4GB total Harddisk space (1.2GB Harddisk was leeched from school’s demerit system PC ^.^ I’m such an evil bastard).
In 2004, I moved to Australia. This time, I was using a laptop. It was the Dell Inspiron 600m series. It was a badass laptop capable of running most of the latest 3D games out that time. Hell I managed to complete Prince of Persia: Sands of Time at High Settings in the middle of summer with no problems at all! Although design flaws resulting in overheating issues later crippled it. As of 2008, my laptop is my experimental machine and is currently running Ubuntu on it.
In 2006, I purchased a new PC (due to my laptop now in a non-gameable state) and combined it with salvageable parts from my old Pentium III into a hybrid beast of a machine. My PC then was an AMD Sempron 2200+ (1.5Ghz). By mid 2006, I added in an Ati Radeon Sapphire 512MB x800XL graphics card to cope with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
In 2007, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes went life and again it brought my PC to it’s knees. In a bout of desperation, I upgraded it to an AMD Athlon X2 processor. This marks the beginning of my foray into multi-core processors. By April, Lord of the Rings Online was released, though I started about a month or two after it was released.
The Lord of the Rings Online fried my graphics card. I replaced that with a XFX GeForce 320MB 8800 GTS. Right after I purchased my Playstation 3 in 2007, I began saving up cash for my next major PC overhaul. In 2008 i began to perform intense surgery on my PC. First was the Antec 900 Casing.
The old casing was very old and very compact, leaving no space for upgrades and providing very bad airflow. It is because of these two reasons, my PC was making extremely loud sound and producing lots of heat. It doubled up as my heater during winter 2007 and barbecued me during summer 2008. With the new casing and a couple of fans, my PC was silent and cool.
Then came the motherboard and processor upgrade. I upgraded to an eVGA 780i motherboard with an Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad (2.4Ghz) processor. Soon after I added in an Auzentech X-fi Prelude 7.1 soundcard and a Logitech Z-5500D 5.1 THX speakers. Running a couple of benchmarks, I find that my CPU idle temperature at 60ºc and hits 80ºc at normal use.
This is no good. So i got a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme heat sink and idle temperature drops to 25ºc. Then I did a simple overclock to 3.0Ghz and idle temperature is at 30ºc and about 45ºc when gaming. Am very tempted to overclock it to 4.0Ghz but 3.6Ghz will be my next step. Looking at my Frankenstein of a PC, I realised that the Cabling is an utter mess. Looking through the side window of my casing, all I see is wires. This is bad for airflow and making access to parts a nightmare.
So I began another project. I started disassembling most parts of my PC and did some cable management. I managed to hid most of the cables to the other side of the casing and my PC has better airflow now (and looks a tad bit tidier too!). Though it was an improvement, is it not by much. At the moment, I’m thinking of replacing my Graphics Cards with a Dual-SLI or Tri-SLI options (i.e dual or triple graphics card) and replacing all my harddisks with six 1 Terrabyte harddisks.
Currently, I’m saving up for phase 2 of my overhaul and will redo the cable management from scratch this time (i.e. removing everything instead of partially).
The Dark Knight was simply awesome and I must say, Heath Ledger’s performance is simply top notch. It is sad to see him go but he’ll always be remembered for his talents. I really love the dialogues as well. Some are very thought provoking, especially Joker’s lines.
