Friday, June 18, 2010

I hate numbers, especially the floating point kind

One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints, and were stuck in the thick head. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer, and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink, held it out over the beer, and started yelling, "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT YOU BAS***RD!!!!"

Ah British humour, my favourite kind of humour. Many days I sit in front of my television and only see blunt and stupid jokes of which there is no depth, no racism, no inventiveness and most importantly, no ability to create laughs. The greatest ability of humour and jokes is the way we can laugh at ourselves and everyone around us of which can also be used as a form of reflection(this is of minor importance).

More importantly I am about to sit the most excruciatingly annoying and erroneous exam tomorrow.

It has a lot to do with numbers. Big numbers, small numbers, fat numbers thin numbers. Real numbers, floating point numbers, numbers of single precision, numbers of double precision binary numbers, bits, hexadecimal numbers and the list goes on. I always thought accountants were bad enough with their over 15 ways to count a dollar but when I came into engineering science OH BOY did I realize that I only caught a small glimpse of the world.

I think this is due to the fact that engineers, believing that they are a superior life form(me inclusive) decide that in order to segregate ourselves more from modern society, we need another counting and storage system. Not just one system in fact but several hundreds more of these cryptic data storage and arrangement methods which will leave many befuddled and unaware of their present self.

There is also the part we have to nitpick our own errors in these very so-called ingenious methods we have designed. And, as compliant with engineering characteristics, these errors cannot simply be defined as simply "mistakes". Instead, they are given sub-categories to promote and isolate them from the other errors.

The whole flippin' thing is an error if you ask me.

Anyway, I had a lot to write about before but I seem to have forgotten all of it in about the space of approximately 1010 seconds approximated using Lagrangian interpolation with a time step of about 0.001.

If you don't see me after tomorrow, just assume I got lost in the land of numbers.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I'm a genius

After 3 years of procrastination and almost 1 failed paper I have finally come up with a solution to get my work done.

Procrastinate BEFORE I study, not WHILE I study.

I feel smart right now. I just wrote 2 hours worth of pure bullshit into my engineering design exam and I'm quite pleased with it. A combination of lots of computer games coupled with the occasional 10 chapters(200 pages) of manga every 5 minutes and having my books open in front of me seemed to have worked this time round. However, through superior understanding and certain powers of prediction I have also deduced that this ingenius strategy may not work so well in the future.

That's because my future soon-to-be-in-the-past exams are HARD.

Well hard for me anyway which is, in the end what matters. To me. Yes. Even as I write this I look at my ever decreasing time left til my exams and wonder if I should lock myself in a soundproof box with only my mechanics books and a bottle of vodka. It could be the birth of another drunken master, only with less on the master part and more on the drunken part.

Okay the vodka is a bad idea, forget I mentioned it.

But back to the topic at hand, some isolation could be seriously good for me. When I want to study I can study around noise, girls and even Koreans but I can't, no matter how desperate I am, study around a computer which has the capability to play dota. There should be a DotA/WoW quitline because I think that this problem right now is quite a bit worse than smoking or drinking or doing drugs through glass elephants. Our generation is having our minds depleted, sucked, immobilized, frozen, shaken, maybe even annihilated through the onslaught of gaming and information which grows daily like an unseen plague. Even as we speak or type, millions of kids are playing Grand Theft Auto and smashing people's cars and shooting mafia bosses in that virtual reality. Is this really the sort of experience people should be letting their children go through?

I have no idea as I don't like Grand Theft Auto.

I don't get what others see in that game. All that comes across is senseless violence and degenerated graphics with the occasional virtual prostitute and lots of animated blood and broken glass. I find it absent of class, enjoyment and skill unlike DotA which is the epitome of strategy, skill and experience.

Enough of that. Time to study.

How long has it been... like 3 hours? Did y'all miss me?

This is getting serious.

What started off as procrastination is now turning into a phenomena that is encroaching the depths of my mind. Okay, maybe that's going a bit far but how long has it been, like 3 to 4 hours since my last blog post? I initially started this blog so that my grammar and writing skills don't disintegrate after long hours staring at a computer screen and analysing shear force diagrams(of which still make no sense to me) but unfortunately this seems to have created more problems rather than solutions.

So here I am, writing a blog post at 2:36am because I REALLY REALLY suck at studying.

I think I have a disorder. I name it the "OMG I HAVE AN EXAM TOMORROW and let's play some dota guys" disorder. I'm sure there's other names and other instances for this problem but this was the most specific name I could think up of. Other variations of this disorder include: "F*** IM SO SCREWED FOR EXAMS let's check my facebook" and the infamous "SHIT SHIT IM SO DEAD FOR MY EXAM IN 4 HOURS come to think of it I'm really hungry let's get a big meal". Symptoms may vary between person to person but the general gist is the same.

We as humans love to procrastinate.

Well, most humans anyway. Those that don't tend to be quite outstanding as they don't spend 99.5% of their time on Restaurant City or Mafia Wars and instead go running or play sports. I believe we should all take a note out of these people's books and start exercising as a form of stress relief. You get a fresh supply of oxygen and spend your excess energy while you don't destroy your eyes staring at a dull screen which also has a tendency to freeze and cause more grief. It makes you think, or it makes me think anyway that if the person who invented the concept of the computer really knew what kind of parasitic contraption he had just conjured. My studies show that using a 95% confidence interval, I can approximate my time spent in front of a screen to be most of my time. Maybe that was not very helpful. I'll give a brief example. I wake up, go on the computer. Eat breakfast, watch some TV. Eat Lunch, go on the computer. Eat dinner, play some DotA. Get the picture?

The day my self control kicks in is the day I become successful, or so I hope.

I'm screwed

I have an exam tomorrow and I just played 2 hours of dota. I'm an idiot.

I completely blame Sam and his korean buddies. They should know better than to tempt my poor self control but instead I spent 2 hours clicking across my screen and going: "Oi stun him!". And since I don't think I can be even more screwed for my exams I might as well make another blog post although I think it's a good idea not to make a too frequent habit of this. If I get drunk one night the world might get exposed to some unneccessary information.

I played some basketball today and was blown away by just how much asians push and shove. I think we compensate for our lack of upper body strength through sheer force and aggresiveness and a lot of luck. Take me for example. I fluke about 10% of my shots. The other 90% just don't go in which gives me on average a 10% field goal rate. Also, after applying some very basic maths to this, 100% of my shots are luck.

I should study.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

One of those days...

It’s one of those days which you dread every moment of. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and then there’s me stuck inside on a lovely day with a heap of books piled in front you and exams looming in roughly 1 day and 17 hours. Studying through relaxation weather is really not my idea of fun, or even relaxing. It grinds on me and feels like a chore. The more pressing problem would be that it would help if I could actually understand what I was studying but as I read through Fourier series and incompressible fluids modelled by a weird equation I began to wonder if I was actually meant to do engineering in the first place.

Getting into this degree was kinda like an impulsive thing. "Oh look I have enough points for the highest point requirement degree, let's do that." Well, 4 months into this and I wonder whether I made the right choice. I spent a good part of my day downloading random crap that I will probably never use and looking at youtube videos of basketball highlights. I also googled fail cosplay of which if you have not done, you should have a look. It's interesting.

My first career idea was to be rich. Later on in life I realized that being rich was not a career, it is but a mere side effect of the career you choose. Having learnt that, I decided to choose the career which would give me the greatest magnitude of this side-effect narrowing my choices down to an investor or a white collar man wearing glasses who worked in an office.

Give me a break, I was about 10 at the time.

Since those blissfully ignorant days, I have learnt that there were these main areas or jobs that people go into. Engineers, accountants, doctors, professional sportsmen, sewage workers and Presidents were the categories that I made. I didn't know what engineering was apart from civil which involved a lot of rocks and beams and buildings. My mum is an accountant which eliminated that option for me. My mum also had a Bachelor of Medicine which eliminated that option for me as well. I REALLY didn't want to be a sewage worker. Presidents looked appealing but there were only a few of them. I passed on that. Then I learnt of architecture. "Ah-ha, I think I know what to do now." I then spent a good 7 or 8 months fantasizing about all the monuments and structures that I would design and the money I would make. Then I realized I was crap at drawing.

Ironically, it was back to the DRAWING board for me on professions. My horizons had broadened by then or so I thought and I decided I wanted to become an engineer. Nothing interesting to say about that apart from the fact I liked maths and physics despite how badly I was doing in physics.

Maybe that was an indication that of a reason why I shouldn't have done engineering.

One year later I wanted to be an actuary. For those of you who don't know what being an actuary is, just think of it as a VERY advanced bean counter who decides that counting beans is not enough so they go to counting grains of sand instead. Very productive and interesting.

Now at this moment in time I find myself in front of the computer staring blankly at equations and crop-circle like diagrams which make no sense. I've decided that I will persevere and stop PROCRASTINATING like I am doing right now. Good Night to you all.