Ian On The Red Dot

Chinese New Year is upon us. Dreaded family gatherings await.

I have prepared something to make the time more bearable. Fee free to use or modify.

Watching the Inauguration 2009 via hulu’s broadcast on kottke.org. Screenshot below.

Obama is amazing. Probably the first president with global appeal. Never interested in these sort of stuff until Obama came along.

And wtf. Why do people keep comparing him to Lincoln?

I mean, seriously, we know how that story ended.

In case you forgot, Lincoln got assassinated.

Someone apparently just killed himself. Someone in love. Someone who didn’t know how to deal with failure in the form of rejection.

A friend.

A brother.

A son.

And all most of us can focus on is that he is a scholar. And we use his death as some cheap evidence for an argument that we are all so desperate to make -

that good grades do not translate into common sense.

Gosh. A lot of things do not translate into common sense. Being poor does not translate into common sense. Having poor grades does not translate into common sense. Being rich does not translate into common sense. A lot of things do not translate into common sense.

People from all walks of life, all different kinds of backgrounds have done foolish things.

Even those who walk the streets don’t exactly all have street smarts.

Compare and contrast the reaction of the people online to the death of Lin Zhi Qiang, who blinded by love, did something foolish with that of Dave Teo.

Must we try to use everything that is tragic as an argument against the PAP and our government.

Must we use everything that is tragic as a form of vindication against our society flaws ( i.e. that we place a relatively irrationally high value on good grades ).

People. Fucking get a perspective.

Someone just lost a friend.

Someone just lost a brother.

Someone just lost a son.

Rest in peace Lin Zhi Qiang. And wherever you are, may you find the love and acceptance you sought here on Earth.

Some time last year, my Mac Mini’s hard-disk decided to die on us. As the Mac Mini had been sputtering along for a few weeks prior to the day the hard-disk totally gave up on itself, I had been kiasu enough to back up all my data.

So I thought.

In fact, I had forgotten to export my bookmarks from Firefox, my Stickies and some entries written using some journal software.

I first tried to start the Mac Mini in Target mode. No go.

Tried a lot of other things to get my Mac Mini back into commission. Sacrificed a bunch of virgins. Slaughtered a cow. Threw coins into a wishing well. Didn’t troll for a week.

No go.

I decided to put off the salvage and recover operations until I had finished moving to my new place.

So move to the new place I did and my Mac Mini set on my desk as an overpriced paperweight for the last 3 months.

Maybe it was time to buy Disk Warrior 4 and try to extract the data. Data which weren’t just bits on a computer hard-disk, but memories, recorded memories of the first 3 years of my relationship with my gf.

The thing about recording stuff down, be it on a blog, in a journal or saved in a .txt file is that it frees you to live your life. The past is important, and you want to remember it, but there is only so much mental capacity to keep all the stuff in, and properly organized.

Recording stuff allows your brain to just be the File Allocation Table. You just need to remember where things are stored. Not the exact details of the things stored. When, or rather if ever, you need to remember the details, you just go to the cluster to retrieve your data.

It sucks knowing that there isn’t a place I can go now to retrieve some information from that period of my life.

It is over.

Today, I decided not to initiate, or rather, continue the rescue mission. I decided to wipe the disk and try a new installation of Panther.

Not sure why … Maybe I think the situation is beyond hope. Or maybe there are some things I want to leave buried alongside the many things I want to remember.

A little of me is gone.

If you have no memory, did you ever exist?

A friend on Facebook shared about this movie:

Haven’t watched a movie for a long time (relatively speaking). I’ll reserve my next movie-watching-dollars for this one.