Tell me, does it make sense that you find yourself pining for a (not so old) flame on her birthday, even though the only communication you had with her were a mere few MSN chat logs since the breakup? Or was that just the pent-up libido talking?

Yeah. I thought it is the libido too.

hello from beyond the cyberspace grave!

Ahem. Now I know I haven't been writing since....June? Oh God, this blog isn't just dead. It has been buried and decomposed and disappeared into the darkest corners of cyberspace, and I shouldn't even bother trying to resuscitate it in the first place.

But I'm bored, and I got an extra hour free (woohoo!) because of the daylight saving time. Having a 25 hour day is awesome, I can tell you, and it couldn't have come at a better time too, at the end of a long week. You might be surprised to know that against all odds of me using this wonderful 25 hour day to sleep/watch porn/go shopping/drink myself silly/complete mindless RPG quests where you have to kill the naughty, naughty wizard holding a (usually big busted) damsel in distress, I have decided to curl in bed with a novel. The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. If you are looking for something as thrilling as Dan Brown's novels, this is what you are looking for. It is a mystery thriller that is both intelligent and gripping with a really macabre twist, I assure you. Most importantly, will keep you so engrossed that you will forget about the 10 degree temperature nibbling away at your balls. However, please bear in mind that the suggestive book cover has absolutely nothing to do with my impulsive purchase of it.

Oh, and I bought myself a simple little digital camera to take pictures of the beautiful autumn scenery, so there will hopefully be more pictures on this blog. I would LOVE any generous tips and tricks on how to tweak digicam pics into something that would even remotely resemble whatever those £400 DSLRs can spit out. Xinxian, I'm looking at you, that is if you still read this zombie of a blog. You and your ridiculously blue (but beautiful!) skies that could only be created by sliding Photoshop colour panels and other wizardlike whatchamacallits.

Apart from that, nothing much changed in these few months, except that my four years of crunching numbers have come to fruition in the form of a piece of paper that is supposedly an engineering degree (um, whee?), my Masters course still holds me a slave to the education system, and that somehow I have once again landed myself in a fling, one which eventually evolved into a long distance relationship which I have no idea on how to go about with. I need help. Advice. Stat!

the only thing a man with a plan needs is a determination to see it through come hell or high water

Yesterday while I was in the waves of alcoholic delirium I glimpsed a little bit more of my 10 year road-to-riches plan. Because you know, alcohol makes everything clearer, and we are talking about five near-consecutive Jagerbombs right here into a bloodstream already infused with beer and vodka.

russell peters was SERIOUS!!

Here's a quick survival tip for you guys who may or may not one day find yourselves fighting to get across an impossibly packed dance floor at the club on a Saturday night with a tray full of empty glasses in your hands. If you were to ever hear the piping trumpets of the opening YMCA tune, drop that tray and get the hell out of the dance floor even if it meant punching six-foot angmohs in your way because if you don't you can, and you will, inevitably get slapped by the countless hands that shoot up when the Village People goes "whYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY".

White people seriously love their anthem.

three weeks

Last Saturday it suddenly hit me that I am now thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away from home and hey guess what I have to work for my moolah now and there is this thing called financial planning because no I can't call my mom to bank in some money or expect my big sis to drop by with a few greens everytime I run out of cash so welcome to the life of an adult's responsibility now if you will excuse me I must unload the hissing dishwasher and try not to burn my hands oh did I mention that I have an assignment due on Monday? Because I do, and it is proving to be a real bitch.

On a lighter note, the lecturer praised the assignment highly, I am so getting that oversized Zara beanie now that I am earning some quids, and last night at work some busty blonde who probably has a fetish for Chinese boys actually rushed over (I kid you not) and tried to dance with me. Like, yeah okay I am really flattered but the idea of getting fired after only two shifts isn't very appealing.

Also, now that I find that my pictures always brighten boring, nonsensical rants, here is a one of me in York, once again reaffirming my manhood by placing a World War 2 artillery cannon between my crotch,

Admit it. A WW2 era, gigantic phallic cannon between my legs? I drip with so much manliness that even Rambo would turn gay for me.

york!

Hello people! Tomorrow I shall be going off to York!

Actually the only reason I'm tagging along this trip is because pretty much everyone else I know is going, so what the heck. The Gothic cathedrals over there seem pretty cool, and since I've always wanted to visit Amsterdam Vatican City for the cathedrals I figured that this would be a great trip to warm up my pilgrimage as a God fearing Christian.

Just kidding. I just wanna take pictures of me pulling faces at the gargoyles. Ooh. They have some sort of a haunted house too. Now that would spice things up. Heh.

hello from uk!

I know, I know. I should have brought a camera with me, or at least a phone equipped with one so that I could camwhore left and right and put up pictures of my room on Facebook for the pleasures of whatever weird voyeurs that might lurk out there, like every other Joe in my course. So much for me and my basic phone eh.

Oh, and if it wasn't obvious already in that picture my balls were slowly dropping off from the cold. Summer my ass. When I heard that it was summer in the UK I went "Oh that shouldn't be too bad perhaps a cotton hoodie will do. After all, summer is all about the FUN IN THE SUN and PLEASANTLY WARM temperature, right?"

Wrong. We actually had hail yesterday. It felt like God was pissing kidney stones on us.

It had been two weeks since I landed in the UK, and well, despite my complaints about the weather, I am really starting to call this place home. Oh suuure, there were that two major assignments we got on the first week itself, or that series of vaccination we were subjected to (I am extremely terrified of needles, because they seem to go into the flesh like a hot knife through butter okay how could you not be terrified of that), but Sheffield's charm is starting to get to me.

And what charm, you may ask. Well, first of all, 7 out of 10 women here are HOT. And I mean Megan Fox hot, not the Malaysian (meh) Dreamgirl hot. When I dropped by one of the clubs I actually felt intimidated by their sheer number and hotness. Like okay ohmygawd she looks like Emma Watson meets Kate Beckinsale okay okay act cool why the fuck are you holding your beer like that stop crossing your legs ACT COOL you wuss!

(For those of you who might make the likely conclusion, I swear that is not the reason I'm getting a job at the clubs. A senior offered me that job, cross my heart)

And the lecturers! They are so friendly that it scares us okay. Back at TARC the typical engineering lecturer would be a balding old man with inch thick glasses walking about with a frown. Okay lah there is one guy here who is something like that but he keeps on giving us tips on how to increase our marketability as engineers next time so that makes him pretty alright.

I have another lecturer who brought in a football during the first lecture, declared that she (yes, a she) is a Sheffield United fan (whooo Sheffield!!) and then started tossing that ball at us so that the person who caught it would have to stand up and introduce themselves. You know lah TARCians all damn shy wan so some actually ducked in their seats to avoid catching that ball. Damn funny. Then there is another guy who has a killer CV, ex-Boeing engineer and all. He actually calculated how much we are paying for a minute of his time, which is 20 pence btw, and then triumphantly declared that, and I quote, "For every five minutes you come late to class, you wasted £1."

I think it had some effect on us, because everyone is penny-pinching here and £1 is a big deal to us because you could actually buy a can of baked beans and live on it for half a day! I survived on microwaved food for a week (do not attempt that because I found out the hard way that a diet of irradiated food is extremely bowel-unfriendly) before I summon up the guts to go within a five feet radius of the oven and cook something by myself without burning the entire building down.

I ended up with a reasonably edible chicken sandwich and omelette. My skillzzz has greatly improved since then, because I just made an awesome chicken and egg salad for dinner! And the day before I made grilled chicken breasts and scrambled eggs! Ha! The best chefs in the world are men, didn't you know?

...

Okay lah maybe I need to use slightly more diverse ingredients. The pork shoulder at Sainsbury's look really, really yummy :)

lonely nights once again

I am writing this post with a whirlwind of mixed feelings raging within me. My RM331 last minute transit flight down to KL to UK is in less than four hours and still I sat here tapping away at the keyboard to convey whatever that is on my mind, only to delete them because I think that my writing skills, which had been sedentary for months are no longer capable of pulling out those emo mumbo jumbo as beautifully as before.

I would probably regret the decision not to sleep when I keel over at the KLIA departure hall. Oh well.

She sent me a message just now, the girl whom I was with in one of those bizarre off-on-off-on relationships again which I used to think are really amusing until I got caught in them. It was like one of those sappy, semi-unhappy endings you see in a chick flick. Boy meets girl, boy and girl falls for each other, boy and girl does the birds and the bees, boy has to go off somewhere far, far away for a long time so he, reluctantly, calls it off. Girl, also reluctantly, takes it in stride and seals it with a three-paged message, complete with a kissing smiley.

Sigh. Even till the end she remains as the girl who turned my world upside down.

I think the hardest part about leaving Malaysia was me wanting so much to return to KL to see her and not given the chance to because, well, it's either that or risk my parents' wrath for leaving them before it is time.

Okay. Enough of this lest I lose possession of my balls. =/

just a passing thought

We all have our ugly sides, regardless of whether we are conciously aware of its existence or not. I did somehow acknowledge these personality scars deep within, but it wasn't until recently when driven by pure boredom at work, I read this certain #1 worldwide bestseller self-improvement book that thrusted an unsuspecting me into a face to face confrontation with my version of Mr. Hyde.

I should lay off those psych books. Seriously.

that little bank book

I never thought that love could be expressed in numbers…until now.

My parents have always been secretive about the family’s financial status, always telling us that we have no money and no we can’t have the cool stuff your rich friends have because we are broke. I do smell the occasional rat when on certain rare occasions they drew out a large sum of money from seemingly nowhere, like the time when they paid RM 27,000 for my Proton Saga in cash. “But it was just a Saga! Besides, it was on sale,” they had insisted when I grilled them about being able to make the payment in cash and not in installments as everyone else would have normally done.

To be frank, I have always somewhat resented the fact that we are financially inferior, or so as I was led to believe. Money was almost always an issue, and when you have an expensive hobby like bodybuilding it strains the pockets even more. I know this sounds childish, but the resentment probably stemmed from the fact that I didn’t get to party as much as I would like to with my other rich friends in Penang, or that paying for fuel for the car seriously bit into my spending (someone actually expressed shock that I managed to last for two months on a full tank…well now you know. Not everyone could gallivant all across KL just like that, you know), or that I have trouble maintaining actual relationships because I could not pay for dates that often (pretty much an oversimplification of the previous relationships, but that’s an entirely different matter).

In a nutshell, yes I do sometimes resent the fact that I didn’t get an unholy allowance as I would have liked.

So I have been busy gathering the documents and information necessary for my UK visa application during the past week, the visa requirements demand that I show financial evidence that I am capable of sustaining myself in the UK, tuition fees, living costs and all.

Boy, I thought. This is going to be tough. In late 2008 my parents bought £10,000 when the UK currency dived, but a closer review of the costs involving the top-up degree and subsequent Masters course calls for a staggering £20,000. Of course, working part time while in the UK could contribute a lot to that number, but the bleeding visa officials nevertheless demand that we show evidence of such financial capability or risk being rejected for a visa. Fuckers.

I made a call to my dad regarding this matter, who listened quietly while I explained.

A short silence.

Fine, he said. I will have the documents sent to you soon.

True to his word, I received mail which contained the necessary financial statements two days later. I shook the contents out of the envelope, and two items dropped onto my lap.

A bank statement from CIMB, confirming the £10,000 in fixed deposit, and…an Amanah Saham Malaysia bank book with my name neatly printed in a typewriter font. Funny. I didn’t even know I have an Amanah Saham account.

I flipped the book open and…oh God. The numbers, they just pounced at me. I stare in disbelief at the pages, marked with numerous transactions printed across the pages which dated back to the year 2000. I was only Form 1 in the year 2000 for chrissakes.

Words fail me. All these years of saving up with the security of my future in mind. All these years of denying not just me, but themselves of little luxuries that they could very well afford just because they wanted to fortify that little bank book a little bit more. All because they could one day hand that little bank book to me and proudly tell me here you go, here’s everything you need to build yourself a future and make sure you make good use of it.

The day that little bank book dropped into my lap I grew up a little bit more. My unfilled desires for material goods; the one terabyte external hard disk, the top notch gaming computer, the Vios, the seemingly bottomless fuel allowance, the dinners at fancy cafes, they all seem so painfully childish now that the little bank book lay open in my lap, its seemingly insignificant numbers dancing across my line of vision. Whaaaasup, they seem to say. It’s good to meet you after all these years hidden in the back drawer of your mom’s closet, so let’s get down to business and prove a thing or two to the visa officials, shall we?

How do you express love in numbers? My parents did it through a little bank book, saturated with the years of transactions that was made in hopes of buying me a future they never had. Something tells me that they got a few more of those stashed somewhere in the house with my other siblings’ names printed on it, waiting for the very moment when the numbers in them are needed.

UK, here I come.

The relationship started out as just another fling but yesterday after yet another argument fuelled by her decision to leave college I realised how much she had grown on me when I spent that night wide awake and bothered. It has been two weeks since we last saw each other and I am already sorely missing her schoolgirl giggles and Colgate grin.

Groan.

all I want is to find an easier way to get out of our little heads

And I can barely look at you
But every single time I do
I know we'll make it anywhere
Away from here

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice

It is almost 5 in the morning, and still I sit here in front of the computer with my fingers poised over the keyboard, frozen. Not because of a lack of thoughts to communicate, but rather an overwhelming volume of them to a point where it bottlenecked itself and leaving me at a loss for words.

What are you thinking about? Someone asked.

The missus, I replied. Friends. The past. UK. Masters. The future. How it all seemed to be linked together by the invisible web that is the butterfly effect. And how Leona Lewis's rendition of Run always makes everything seem alright.

when I least expected it

The girl I am dating just told me she wants to drop out of college. I am still speechless.

vegetables and sex. who would've known?

Despite the apparent stick in their ass, you have got to love PETA for their creativity in coming up with highly suggestive commercials to get people to quit eating meat.

Oh, and Whoopi Goldberg made a spoof of the commercial. I dare not click the link lest I have my already fragile eyes vaporised at the very sight of her straddling a cucumber in her undies.

another tirade on exams and our bright sunny future, just to keep the 'Geek' in the blog title relevant

...I should learn to summarise my blog titles.

Anyway, hello! Now I know I have been absent from this blog for weeks, but you would have to forgive me for placing my final exams and the many, many exciting nights I spent crunching numbers and the wide wonderful world of trigonometrical calculations at the top of my priority list. I somehow held on to my sanity by indulging in a perverse sort of pleasure by using my thesis draft as rough paper for my calculations. Yes, my thesis draft. I like to think of it as an indirect fuck you to the college that put me through hell writing a 100-page thesis. In case you are wondering, I do see the humongous flaw in defacing my sweat n' blood covered thesis for the sake of the exams that the same effing college that I am trying to spite put me through, BUT REALLY! I need a reason, any reason, to hold on to my sanity.

Still.

It has been a while since I've walked out of exam halls smiling, eager to compare and discuss page-long calculations that still rattles in my head, every fucking symbol of it. Perhaps it is the fact that it is my last examination, perhaps I just wanted to go out with a last hurrah and a bang, perhaps I finally pulled myself together since my first fuckup at the dawn of my Advanced Diploma, perhaps it is the good karma surrounding me as of late, perhaps it is merely God 's way of apologising for a shitty 2008, but boy did I kick that examination's ass.

While we're on the topic of education and our bright futures and all that, my parents have just acquired the email of a cousin who is working in UK. Now, said cousin is some bigshot electrical engineer earning big bucks like nobody's business there, and it's pretty hard to ignore his existence even though he lives tens of thousands of miles away mainly because of his tendency to purchase local real estate as though they're like kuihs sold at the random roadside, something that his mom who is also my aunt would trumpet to the entire satellite family with every million dollar bungalow he buys.

Needless to say, my parents placed their shining hopes on me to follow his footsteps and buy houses left and right too, hence their insistence that I do some sort of Masters and park my ass in the UK for a few years. Nooooooooo pressure at all, people.

So I was thinking like how hard could it be? Because seriously, I was actually told that a friend's housekeeper who merely services an entire Nottingham hostel drives a frigging Z3. A Z3!! Or how another friend's friend who is working as a translator at a hospital could earn enough dough to start buying LV and Burberry shit left and right. Now being the sunny bright optimistic me, I concluded that saving up to buy millions of ringgit of real estate in Penang couldn't be rocket science, so I decided to look Google his company, MyMeth.

(Perhaps it is just me, but did anyone notice ANY form of weird, illegal-sounding wordplay in the company name? MyMeth? As in Meth Saya? As in saya punya METHamphetamine? Just wondering. Hmm.)

I saw the company description on their website and immediately started doubting my sunny optimism about making enough to buy houses in Penang like kuihs.

MyMeth specializes in both hierarchical and flat methodology which covers both physical and timing convergence aspects of sub-130 nanometer design and verification: design partitioning for floorplanning and placement; workable methodology for clock-tree synthesis; congestion analysis and prevention; sub-microns process geometry effects.

I am not from an electrical engineering background, so hey who knows these bombastic jargon could be really just ABCs to the average EE engineer and that my rainbow bunny optimism may be right after all but then they just had to write down shit like nanometer design and sub-microns process geometry effects. Okay it is fucking rocket science. Sigh. So much for my dreams of waltzing my way to bigass bungalows in Penang.

Oh, and on a happier note, Happy Chinese New Year everybody!

(Despite the apparent trend I absolutely refuse to replace the 'New' with 'Niu' because please, people! We already have enough butchered English phrases without adding the cheesy, painfully uncreative ones. Replace 'New' with 'Niu'?? Ohmygawd you're so clever how is it possible that you thought it up you should be on Jay Leno's ohmygawd.)