hurmmmm~

suddenly, i feel insecure about you. 

one more

one more post from utm before heading up to KL for the holidays.

wow. ramadhan's almost over, and the month of syawal's coming. my departure to KL too, is imminent. due to the time crunch of breaking fast, i have two options of going to senai airport later (as suggested by the taxi uncle) : either i go at 6.30pm which is ULTRA early, or 7.45pm. knowing his style (7.45pm = 8.10pm), and my neurotic disposition when it comes to appointments, i chose the former. the uncle said that there won't be a traffic jam problem as everyone's already home for the raya holidays, but i would rather not risk it. besides, i need to confirm whether i still need to go to the counter despite having done web check-in. my subconscious is NOT helping either; i just had a dream that bad things would happen. i'll just bring something to read later. and music's good to have at these trying times.

it's times like these that i really, really am worried; so many unwanted things can happen; throw in an airline infamous for its delays and the fact that it's the eve of raya, it's akin to throwing a box of hairspray into a bonfire. flight delays i am prepared for, knowing airasia's annoying tendency. then there's the berbuka dilemma. i know there's a marrybrown there, so there'll be no problem. but i'll have to go in line, then i have to carry food, and then there's the task of finding a seat. ugh. travelling alone is just a pain. now that my friends have gone home...

the major things are all packed; my wardrobe is well-packed (hopefully). now there's the task of packing the little things - the laptop and the charger (last minute item; i need to be entertained until i leave utm, right?), toiletries (had to be last minute coz i still need to use 'em), aand of course, accessories. shades, mp3 player (charged), and chargers for phone and mp3 player.

about things in the room, i need to keep them safe and clean for the time being; the external drive needs to be stashed in the locker; bowls and cups need to be washed again before leaving. the plant will be watered before i leave later but it's hardy; it'll last a week. (or should i just put it out? it's a pain to keep anyway, and it's not doing what i expect it to do.) and then there's the ant situation. i just hope i don' come back to a room teeming with ants. i still have some apples left from my pre-KL stash; i wonder if they'd last until i got back.

this mouse is getting on my last nerve. watch out, you faulty bastard. papa's going to KL and you will meet your replacement you sucky asspain.

bye ramadhan. hello syawal.

selamat hari raya and maaf zahir+batin readers :)

** i  miss you so much!! will be leaving for KL soon...looking forward to have you  accompany me at the airport :P **

selamat hari raya everyone!!! :D

thoughts 7th sept 2010

Yesterday my laundry and my bag finally dried up. So I started packing. Thankfully my clothes fit into the brown canvas tote that I have. And I also planned an outfit for the flight. Domo-kun will not be joining me due to the cramped space. I won’t want to have a torn arm or squished face of cracked panel (the mouth part has a stiff paper/plastic paneling insert. Those are just some of the decisions that have been finalized for yesterday. What’s left is packing this laptop and my toiletries and any other extras into my backpack and I’m all set.

I am on the prowl for a moisturizer to help me clear this skin. But it ain’t easy. I can’t put just any gunk on my face – either I would breakout more and blackheads will surface, or it’d dry my face stiff. ANNOYING. And then there’s the cost issue – I’d like to have a product that won’t break the bank, thinking about it in terms of the whole range. Perhaps I could get a product range that works and won’t break the bank. There are too many circles overlapping in this Venn diagram. I’ve used products from the Nivea for Men range but it is just too costly in the long run. I’m currently using the OXY moisturizer. Moisturize, smoothen, oil-control, SPF 15 (important). It’s quite fine, although my face looks oddly paler after application; it’s not a tinted moisturizer. The blackhead remover wash is nonsense though; you can’t wash blackheads off with just scrubbing. When I finish this batch of wash + moisturizer + scrub, I’d like to try the oil-control range with Dermaflux.

Footnotes:

- Discovered some clothes that I intend to bring but forgot to pack in my locker. Crats. Now I have to take everything out and start all over again. Thank goodness I have another one and a half day.
- A bit surprised at the EIGHT friend requests I had this morning. What’s surprising is that there wasn’t even a red flag notifying me of the requests. And also by the fact that they're total strangers. Some of them don't have mutual friends with me. Some only by association.
- Kinda creeped out by a recent bout of coincidences and similarities. Perhaps there’s a breach of private information and evil attempts of defaming me (though I have no idea why people would do that to me – I’m not a celebrity, not even a local one).
- Enjoying this silence and privacy, and at the same time creeped out by it.
- Domo-kun! Will miss you for one week – hence I will hug you tight everyday until the 9^th :P

shots: 7th september 2010

taken en route to buying food for berbuka, and on the way back.

this is only taken with a camphone (a low-res one at that); imagine what i would have been able to achieve with a proper camera... i think i wouldn't have stayed in my room.

homes

A new thought that I got while mindlessly trolling in cyberspace is this – we all have LOTS of houses (per person) on the Internet. You may ask, what do I mean by that?

Well, technically it all started when I was waiting for my email inbox to load on Hotmail, and I stared on the word “Spaces”. It dawned on me that we all own some type of property in cyberspace. Facebook. Windows Live Spaces. Twitter. MySpace, Tagged, even Flickr, or Blogger, for that matter.  These are in some form or another, houses for us in the global village.

Why do I refer to these as our residential space? A house is defined as a personal living space. It is a place where we can seek refuge from the outside world or the ravages of weather and climate. It is a place where we can just be ourselves. These cyber dwellings are, in some manner, identical to the one we have in the real world. We seek privacy from prying eyes by putting up privacy settings on the sites we own. We personalize it according to our whims – put up cute GIF images in MySpace; apply themes in Tagged; put little widgets on Blogger to help us do or gauge something, akin to appliances and gadgets in a real home. We put photos on our Facebook profile. More importantly, it is there to DEFINE and DIFFERENTIATE us as individuals. Aside from entertainment, we also personalize these websites to help us in daily matters – for instance, SkyDrive is a file storage and sharing service that allows users to upload files to the computing cloud, then access them from a web browser. It uses Windows Live ID to control access to the user's files, allowing them to keep the files private, share with contacts, or make the files public. (Wikipedia, 2010) Uploading files to this place allows us to have access to some files when we do not have our personal computer to access anywhere and anytime, provided we get access to Windows Live. Twitter is not just for mindless updating either; we could post information, links to useful site, and even provide answers to someone else’s query when we have the answer to it. WOW, I sound SO damn technical.

What makes it more like a home, in my opinion, is that we could be ourselves in those places. Through personalization, it adds a touch of us to what could otherwise be a bland, carbon-copy page. Different backgrounds colors and patterns, font size, type and colors, widgets to be added on, these are just something that allow our pages to stand out from another person’s. But most importantly is the content that we present: we each have our own style of presenting information (a BIG exception to the copy-pasters out there), our style of writing, and our own voice. There is something more distinct than having different combos of colors and fonts and that is PERSONALITY :D

weird

i'm usually okay with being alone, but just now i was quite freaked out by the silence of UTM. i did not sleep until 11am just now. at 8am i went around the block, snapping the vista of a KRP almost devoid of humans. save for a cat, no one is here, at least not out roaming. then i went to sleep at 11++am, until 4.30pm. went to get food at 5pm.

all this odd-hour sleeping are giving me weird dreams. one was a dream about a world not unlike resident evil's but it has no savior; we lived in the suburbs of a Utopian world where there were virtually no zombies except for the occasional few who wandered into here. we were to live as silently as possible as to not attract the attention of zombies.

*****

and the other one (a recent one) features an I Am Legend-esque atmosphere and feel; no one is (alive) is around and we aren't supposed to go out after dark to avoid the hyperactive bloodthirsty zombies from getting us. and i could totally imagine unexpectedly running into an open door leading to a darkened room to find a horde of unsuspecting zombies; i should be slowly and stealthily backing off like in the movie.

*****

another one? it features an apocalyptic plot, where i seem to be the messianic warrior. this is how the story goes: an important character in my life suddenly comes up to me to present me with a big leather package looking like a cross between an enlarged prismatic compass cover and a guitar bag. then he (i would refer to him as my mentor now) presents me with instructions that requires to be executed at precisely the right time - the moment the great evil wakes up from its slumber. the great evil was a person also close to me, but she did not know that she is the great evil, though she did act like an evil entity in my life.

the instruction was for me to inscribe an intricate symbol (that i thought was a harmless, common one) that acts as an activation key to my destiny, empower my inactive weapon and then assemble said weapon that could destroy the great evil. the moment the latent great evil woke up from its unsuspecting human shell (it broke the human shell but reassembled itself into an image of her for disguise purposes), i was quickly instructed by my mentor to execute the said tasks. the mentor himself was a warrior who aids me in my battle against the great evil. the inscription gave me an extra boost of power, agility and some magical abilities. and another plus: turns some of my friends are already in the know about this, and are unique characters themselves. a magician, a fighter, and a healer.

i remember a part in my dream where i was scaling walls and jumping off them, parrying attacks from the great evil and her minions (also people in my life who are close but treats me badly) and having certain abilities useful in battles (accelerated healing, heightened power and agility, et cetera). somewhere along the way i got separated from my mentor, but not to the point where he dies off.

i cannot stand the pressure, suspense and horror of this dream, so i woke up, and pulled domo-kun into my arms. hugging domo-kun seems to make everything feel okay. my imagination is running wild. but i am glad that it's not dead - it WILL be crucial for my role as one-half of KAMIREKA ART's creative editor :)

p/s: is it too much to bring domo-kun along to KL for the holidays? :P

boring sunday

8am - boredom overpowered.

went walking around of my floor of the block. edited the pics with random features within photoshop.

the black cat featured here has been following me for three (non-consecutive) days now...

p/s: would it be too much for me to bring domo-kun along to KL?

missing you

i dreamt a bad dream.

subconsciously i pulled mr domo into my arms.

afflicted by insomnia again.

this time it's not about chasing deadlines.

it's not about finishing assignments.

it's not about doing paperwork.

it is because i miss you.

domo domo...~

1st day of utm loneliness

you've already gone back... things went back to being acapella again...

arrived in my room at around 10pm. the taxi ride back was rm10. usually it won't hit ten bucks, but it's close - so i decided to give the uncle something extra, to get into the raya spirit (akin to the christmas spirit)...

came back to an almost empty block. most of the rooms are already dark. only a select few (most likely to be occupied by non-malay students) remain. and i remembered that i left the computer running after i left on the evening of 3rd september. i also distinctively remember setting an auto shut down. but it didn't work, the computer was still running. so i restarted it. i need to figure out how to get it to auto shut down.

i have always liked the windows gadgets feature, allowing me to have a screen like one of those futuristic flicks (pity i don't have a touchscreen - any idea on how to change this regular screen to a touchscreen?) or another closer-to-home instance: the apple iphone/ipad/ipod main page. but the windows gallery online didn't feature many (quality) gadgets: most of them are third-party created. and i like to see the graphically-superior ones, with a glass-like texture like the apple apps tab.

quite disappointed with the windows' website offerings, i just typed "windows 7 gadgets" into google to find other sites with (hopefully) better-looking third party widgets. lo and behold, i am introduced to another alternative: yahoo widgets.

it has the features that i look for the most: functionality, aesthetics, and of course, light on the system as well as being FOC. after installing the widget application, i am presented with the starter kit. it consists of an analog clock, digital clock, email checker, stocks viewer, itunes player, weather updater, battery level viewer and planner. i deleted stocks and itunes, and i searched around the yahoo widgets website for a mini music player and system status viewer (another two widgets that i'm looking for).

these are the ones currently active on my desktop:

1 - microplayer: i love this. i've been searching for a miniplayer because winamp would make the system sluggish, and WMP itself is a sluggish player.

2 - digital clock: no more peeking to the small font of the taskbar. BAM! the time is here. changeable colors, and it even chimes every hour/half-hour/15minutes! :D

3 - weather: great one. i love the apple-esque glass graphics, the image of the current eather, and five-day forecast (though not necessarily accurate). it even features humidity, wind speed/direction and all that jazz!

4 - Y!Mail checker: it's turned on, but i don't use Y!mail often; would love to see one for MSN Mail though.

5 - battery status: not really required, but i turn it on for show-off anyways :P

6 - CPU status: LOVE this - the color for status and the shape can be changed!

there's still more widgets to find and install :)

if you haven't noticed, i've set the taskbar to a smaller option - i don't like small logos that are blown up to fit the big taskbar and thus gets pixelated. besides, i'll lose precious screen real estate :P

p/s: IMYA... thanks for the precious gift - can't stop hugging it! :D