Daily misery

I must have lost like half of my regular readers from my consistent array of hiatus periods. I’m sorry.

When I traced back all the people that has been bookmarking me or linked me to their blogroll a couple days earlier, I’ve seen some pretty nice stuff written about alvinwoon.com in there. Tyler wrote ‘nice layout, intereting entries too’. Su Ann just IM me and said I’ve like the kind of heart that most of the other guys can only dream of. And all those emails that came from people that barely knew me yet still cared about me just took the toll out of it. Since I’m pretty very drunk right now and most of the time I said honest things when I’m drunk, those words meant a lot during time like this. I just feel bad that you guys (and all those 2500 hits per day) have to read through all the craps that I’d been writing for the past couple of weeks.

I think I owe everyone an honest apology. You all should probably go find another blog and spend your spare time off with them. I literally mean exactly that. Alvinwoon.com is just another blog written by a childish blogger who is too emotional to maintain a constant flow of entries to keep visitors from coming back.

Well if there’s anything I can help to make you, the readers feel better, or if you really want to know what my life had been for the last couple of days - it sucks. All because of one girl.

Being with you is like the best thing that have ever happened to my life. No, it is the best thing that ever happened to me. EVER. Then you just take it all away and left me crawling to find the remaining pieces of my broken heart. So fcuk you, just fcuk you.

But that deep down inside my heart, I still miss all the little gestures you once made to me - the frustration that you showed when you couldnt finish your extra-point-quiz (you would punched me like it was all my fault), the time when you said yes when I asked you to be with me like right at that moment, the day when you told me no one had ever treated you like the way I was treating you. Oh my, if i only have like half the chance, I just want to gently squeeze your chubby face and tell you everything is going to be allright….and treat you the best that a girl can ever be treated by a guy (all guys said that so I’m just reiterating what a scumbag I am right now). I just want to be given a chance to do the best I could, like the very best that I could, to care and be there for most likely the most precious person in my life to date. Well I never meet someone like that before and I certainly wasnt trying half as hard with my previous gf’s as I’d been doing with you, so now just fcuk it.

The alcohol must have made me looked pretty ridiculous right now.

For all of you that still stick around with Daily Misery, well, get a new blog to read.

Man, that drunken reasoning of mine blows. But I think I need to kick the habit of deleting entries I’d written prior. So everything stays from now on.

I have received some heartwarming, interesting and in some cases, odd emails / forum messages about the ‘4 flavors of love’ project I put up couple days ago. They range from “p/s alwin, love ur short-stories. love the bright colours. can i not love you?” to “dude, this rocks, have you ever think about turning it into a book?” to the simple “keep writing, I love it.”

K, to clarify one thing - I didnt write those short stories.

So please kindly pass all your questions, word of encouragements and compliments to her.

You can still visit the project page at http://alvinwoon.com/404/teng/

Have any of you tried peeing in an airplane’s cabin restroom while the plane is shaking wildly in the midst of a turbulence? It was not fun at all.

I swear Tiger Woods has a higher odd in hitting a hole-in-one down a par-3 hole in the Masters than me trying to pee straight down that freaking small toilet bowl’s hole.

From an interview with director Paul Haggis about the film Crash (I’ve waited for so long for this movie to open):

It’s an odd life we live in Los Angeles, a city that uses freeways and wide boulevards to divide people by race and class. We spend most of our time encased in metal and glass; in our homes, our cars, at work. Unlike any real city, we only walk where “it’s safe”-those outdoor malls and ersatz city blocks we’ve created to feel like we’re still part of humanity, if only humanity could afford to shop where we do. We no longer truly feel the touch of strangers as we brush past them on the street.

This sort of subtle human touch is something I am going to miss so badly should I leave this cuddly little city called Lincoln in the near future. Its a rarity in many towns I can tell you. Lincolnians dont just brush past people, we stop and say hi and bug you with our general point of view on how f*** up the world is before we let you go.

I am a pretty laid back guy with a big heart for placidity. Lincoln fits that pretty well actually. We just need more mountains and lakes and waterfalls and cliffs.

We do have tornado….wait that’s a totally different thing.

Ok, all my future girlfriends will have to read this before thing can get too serious between us.

How many times have we told ourselves thing will changes for the better next year? The very fundamental structure of a society will collapses when merits are worthless and the thought of cronism, preferential treatment and hypocrisy filled the minds of people, rendering the image of a corrupted institution guarded by many layers of funny looking leaders with screwy policies.

Something is bounded to be lost bit by bit in the heart of many when this kind of headlines make it to the media this time around every single year.

I lost my sense of duty to go back and serve my country.

Via The Star today:

Two months ago, Ng Ee Liang, Desmond Chee and Teoh Wan Ying were feeling on top of the world when they each scored 13 1As and were named Penang’s top SPM scorers.

But all their dreams and hopes came crashing down on Monday after finding out that their applications for Public Services Department (PSD) scholarships had been rejected.
[...]

“There are 25 top scorers nationwide and I am in 14th position. All of us had lunch with Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and received certificates from both the Prime Minister and Education Minister for our achievements.

“Yet, the certificates do not seem to be able to support my scholarship application,” said the former student of Chung Ling High School, Butterworth.

More about the news.

A woman called to make reservations, “I want to go from Chicago to Hippopotamus, New York” The agent was at a loss for words. Finally, the agent: “Are you sure that’s the name of the town?” “Yes, what flights do you have?” replied the customer. After some searching, the agent came back with, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ve looked up every airport code in the country and can’t find a Hippopotamus anywhere.” The customer retorted, “Oh don’t be silly. Everyone knows where it is. Check your map!” The agent scoured a map of the state of New York and finally offered, “You don’t mean Buffalo, do you?” “That’s it! I knew it was a big animal!”

Reminds me of one of my friend who went to the Omaha zoo the other day….

*Alvin smiles wide wide wide*

After working on it for a little more than a week, I am happy to announce a new addition to Daily Misery’s family - Pixels of my life. Oh cut the dramatical crap, its basically my photo gallery.

I hope you guys will enjoy it. I will put more pictures as time goes but I really need to organize all the photos in my PC right now before anything can be posted. I will be adding albums of my new car and work place soon (Mom and Dad have been bugging me on this…).

Here’s a couple more things I wish to touch on hopefully by the end of next week.
1.) Once I find suitable, soothing and non-intrusive background melodies, I will add them (with control buttons) to each different albums, hopefully to better narrate the slideshow.
2.) Some of the photos are without caption. I will try to put more caption on it when I have time.
3.) Still not satisfy with the buttons.

010010100100111001001010010101000101010000100000010110100101000001010110
01010100010100000010000001001110010101100100010001001001010101010010000
001010000010100000101011001001111010001110010000001010000010100110101010
1010101100100111100100000010000100101010101000110010011010101101000100000

I hope someone can decrypt it and embarass me by writing the real message in the comment box since I dont have the courage to say it out loud.

Hint: I use primitive and ridiculously simple encryption scheme. Dont think too hard. Its a double encryption sequence though. But with little knowledge of cryptography and binary or even if you’re an avid Dan Brown’s fanatic, it shouldnt take too long.

Update: Huinee just broke the encryption. I will post a short dissection about the process later tonight. :)

Next time before I post another cryptography puzzle, I should probably check on my schedule to see whether I have the luxury of time to entertain all the IM messages that have been flooding my desktop screen ever since I posted the entry. But it was fun nevertheless. Some of the messages were very hillarious too. For some of you, this might have been your first exposure to the fundamental theory of cryptology and I’m so happy you enjoy it.

K, now back to the dissection of this encrypted text. Not all, in fact most of my readers are not computer science centric or tech savvy to start with. Some read text-manipulation thriller novel and some dont. Some love puzzle and some dont. We have a little bit of everything here. So I’m going to try to be as detail as possible.

At first, I gave you these 1’s and 0’s

These are binary characters. The binary system (base two) is a representation for numbers that uses only zeroes and ones as digits.

For example, the number 2 if being represent in binary of bit 4 would be 0010. This is because (0)+(0)+(2^1)+(0) = 2. Another example, the number 7 would be represented as 0111 because (0)+(2^2)+(2^1)+(2^0) = 7.

Also, every alphabets from A-Z is represented by a number called ASCII values. The full table of ASCII values for all characters is shown here.

Now here’s how we convert an alphabet to a number of just 0 and 1. Lets take capital A for instance. From the table you can see that it is represented by an ASCII value of 065, or 65. 65 in binary would be 01000001 because (0)+(2^6)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(2^0) = 65. So if you convert each one of the binary back to alphabet characters, you will get the following:

JNJTT ZPVTP NVDIU PPVOG PSUVO BUFMZ

This doesnt look like a sentence, does it? Now here’s the fun part. Each alphabet in the row above is shifted by one alphabet position to the right meaning alphabet ‘A’ would equal to ‘B’, ‘B’ equal to ‘C’, ‘C’ equal to ‘D’ and so on. So we just need to switch it back one position to the left and see whether the resulting sentence make any sense at all. This kind of alphabte shifting is called caesar cipher in cryptology. You can shift by 4 or 20 to the left or right should you choose to do so.

By shifting all alphabets above to the left, we get:

IMISS YOUSO MUCHT OOUNF ORTUN ATELY

Just rearraging the spaces a bit, you will get

I miss you so much too, unfortunately.

There you go ^_^

Life seems to settle down bit by bit lately.

• 1.) Phone minutes usage drops to normal level after two month of consecutive hikes of 1200 minutes.
• 2.) Less time spend in front of pc (at home).
• 3.) Sleeping schedule is adjusting nicely to a heathy 8-hour level.
• 4.) Get to finish books in a steady pace.
• 5.) Rediscover my passion for cooking again. Wee!
• 6.) Found out I was actually not a homosapien-phobic. Or rather a large concentration of homosapiens gathering in one small space.
• 7.) Also my ultra-messy coding style with undocumented spaghetti codes is making a come back!

As I was driving home from work today, I had my roof top opened and the wind blew in gently. It smelled like a beautiful summer is coming this way. ^__^

Smell like geek spirit.

[http://alvinwoon.com/art/whatwillido.mp3]

I must have replayed this song for like 10 times while on my way to work today. It’s from one of my ancient cd collection and I almost forgot how much I digged this song a few years back. I totally love it to bits!

Somehow I couldnt find the name of the singer (I know she’s a Japanese) or any info about the song on the web, be it the chord or lyric. Bummer~

But I tried my best:

I’m not really sure of the words to say
If only you knew that I feel this way
I want to give my heart to you
Show me the way that you want me to

what will i do?
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
what will i do? (x2)

My name is Alvin Woon and today I am going to show how you can live a life with strong faith but at the same time not being a religionist scum bag.

My parent raised me as a Buddhist, and raise me well they did. Then I started going to church when I met my second girlfriend. I still go to Buddhist temple whenever I get the chance to go back to my hometown where my parents currently live at. For the past few years, I wore a grey stone-age Christian cross necklace and did my Sunday’s prayer every now and then. It’s not that confusing but I know how it can appear to be so. The only reason I brought this up is being in my position of having the privilege to grow up as a Buddhist, then converted to a Christian and all of this while I was living in a country where Muslim is the majority and Islam is the official religion, it’s a proven fact that people of different religions can in fact share the same bathroom and play on the same playground, listen to the same music and swear ‘f***’ the same rude way - all under the same roof. Most of us even use the term ‘God’ in the same unfortunate way - from prayer sessions to roadside swearings to those pleasant bedroom moanings.

Rest assure we do have differences but somehow those differences appear to serve as a warrant of right for aggressive acts in many events in other countries, rather than being embraced as an unique element in the theology world like in ours. Then there’re always extremists lingering around trying to break things apart but so far we manage to live well, well enough to be termed as harmony.

Thousand of years of human civilization history has proved that the so called higher-thinking species of homosapien for some reasons has developed a sort of ‘dysfunctional mental-reasoning capability’ when they come across something ‘different’. We are scared with people or things that we have little knowledge of, if any. So scare we wont feel sorry should they be perished or vanished from the face of existence. We probably wont take it to our own hands, but we wont feel sorry, much less prevent it from happening. Suspicious eyes, religion/race-centric behavior, biased media, faith driven political avenues and well,you get the picture .

Never mind the Koran flushing thing. Never mind the anti-semitic vandalism in certain part of eastern European countries. Never mind the anti-Christ taunting by certain middle eastern columnists. Never mind all these sad souls because the average John and Doe, Ali and Baba, Ah Ming and Ling Ling, Duku and Daka like those around you and me are still feeling threatened or at the very least feel uncomfortable with the presence of other people who just so happen to have a different religion than theirs. Extremist is scary, but subtle insecureness among the mind of commons is even scarier, and proved to be deadly at times. Hmmm that might be the reason why civilians are the ones who carry out most of the suicide attacks in those countries, that’s might also be the reason why hate crimes skyrocket each and every year. And maybe, just maybe, that’s probably why President Bush got reelected too.

All of these even starting to make living a life as an atheist look like a feasible and wise choice right now. (And I have no problem whatsoever with atheists either.)

It’s really not that hard. Idealists and liberalists said we need more tolerance and love for everyone to live together in harmony. I will say - chill, dont be afraid of the things you dont know about. ^_^

I wish I can call all of you up personally but for the combination of some peculiar reasons, it’s written here. So three different pages for three very special people due to three different reasons.

Dad, Happy Father’s day. I will skip the corny part. But I want you to eat well. And live well.

Click here for more pictures. You might need to clear your browser’s cache to reload the gallery ^_^. Click! Click! Click!

[http://alvinwoon.com/art/uselessguy.mp3]

Click to play ‘Useless Guy’. Click! Click! Click!

Walaaaaa. lal a la laaa laa la la laaaa. Walalalalalalalala lalalalall allaa la la
La lalla lalalal al lal lwa w al lwa wawa waaa
Ha ah ahah hhaaaa haaa
Bo eh yong ke lang…….

Didnt I always tell you guys those unknown entities from the galaxy millions light years away are reading my blog? They do, they really do! Here’s the proof from DM’s latest weekly web stats.

We’re not alone.

Image from SimpleBits by Dan Cederholm (Dan, I’m gonna borrow this for a while :) )

Strawberry shortcake to Huinee, Sin Yee, Micah, DannyFoo, Charles Bump, Joyce and Leh Tieng for keeping my recent after-work’s life in check, and that helps to prevent the upside-down ‘LIFE’ from disappearing altogether from the picture.

It was already a very hot day - 98F. When I got back from work, I bumped into Joanne in my driveway and I knew its going to be a hotter day. She’s this girl who would never stop talking unless you tell her to and it’s impossible to do that in a well manner way without hurting her feeling so most of the time you just let her goes on. She wanted to browse through my dvds collection as she was supposedly on the brink of falling into this deep creek of insanity with all the heat and dullness that had filled the gap of her summer life.

Then suddenly out of no where she started to complain about my hair and how brunette it looked under the sun and also how ridiculously long and messy it was. I shrugged and she - thanks for asking for permission first btw - just grabbed my camera and asked me to stand beside the window where the sunlight was oh-so-Godly flaring and I sweared if I would have stood there for one more minute, I would die instantly either from an incurable skin cancer due to the emitting UV ray or dehydration due to the scorching heat.

Then she started to bitch what the hell was I wearing a long sleeve collar shirt for in the middle of the summer. Apparently people just dont work for a living anymore. You know what, this is exactly what I need after a day of work. Noel was like “who the hell is she? I’m taking a nap here, lady!”

So she started to lay out a couple of options and I added two more because I didnt think I needed a hair cut at all! But I will let my dear readers to decide. Look at these pictures, it was taken without flash for crying out loud. It was that hot, you slimmy wimp!

Finally get around my weekend schedule to fix DM’s menu bar. As some of you might have already noticed, the previous menu was built around the sifr image replacement technique. Apparently some visitors (especially those using IE) complained about having to refresh the page a couple times just to have all the menu letters fully load up. There’re also the problem with css alignment and a weird image overflow bug when viewing with resolution smaller than 1024×860.

So, using this excellent yet somewhat buggy javascript from Aaron Boodman, I put together a simple drop down menu to better accomodate visitors’ requests. There’s still one bug need to be fixed for safari users. I am also preparing a css drop down menu that will alternatively be loaded if javascript is disabled in the user browsers.

Ah, sometimes I wish I can reduce the number of hacks just so that everything would appear the same cross-browsers wise. It can be such a time-consuming process. However, I do believe strongly that cross platform/browser compatibility, defensive design, accessibility and usability can coesxist with aethetically pleasing design concept. Even if it’s going to take me one day to flush out the bug, or align one extra pixel. This is afterall, one way to make the web a better place.

I watched these two awesome movies in the space of 36 hours!

First is ichi the killer.

Nevermind that I had a nightmare last night after watching it.
Nevermind that I will not let Huinee puts movie into our Blockbuster queue anymore.
Nevermind that I am starting to look at sex the different way.
Nevermind that I almost puked from bottom up.
Nevermind that this is just so freaking wrong!

Second - The Cinderella Man

I found myself praying with tears during the movie. Five words - Best. Movie. of. the. Year. And this is coming from a hardcore Star Wars and Batman fan.

Another awesome Ron Howard-Russell Crowe work. I will write a full review about the movie soon.

So I brought my camera to work today. Manage to take a couple of pictures. I can hear some people shouting ‘Its about the freaking time!’ from the back. Sorry, these past few weeks have been really hectic and busy. I even had to take these pictures near the end of my shift where everyone but one of my co-worker had left for the day. I got stuck most of the day with datelines and projects and now I’m dead tired. I could really use a cheesecake and back massage right now.

Oh wait, Sin Yee just bought me a cheesecake yesterday. *Alvin runs to the refrigerator*

Ok, someone please give me a back massage…..