Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

It has been touted to be the south-east asia’s first fully automated rapid transit. What the world doesn’t know is that it is also bloody expensive to construct and run, and that it also breaks down quite a lot.

Of course, I’m talking about the North-east line.

It broke down on the first day of operation, and then multiple times throughout its years of service. Interestingly, it would almost always be a different problem each time the system breaks down, but the end result is always the same: the staff stationed on the train proper has to open the compartment of manual controls, and over-ride the automatic system.

In short, they end up driving the train themselves.

How do I know? The train accelerates and decelerates irregularly, and slams to a stop at the odd station, while for most of the journey, the train stops behind the actual alignment with the platform doors, and has to inch forward bit by bit to match the screen doors. Other times, the train overshoots the stop line, and has to be reversed. Unlike the carefully math-controlled acceleration and deceleration, a human driving a train shows up like a light bulb in a dark room.

To give credit to SBSTransit, they’ve done a remarkable job of keeping the trains running, for a line that breaks down so often. But it’s like taking consolation in the grand scheme of bad things: it defeats the purpose of making the MRT line driverless if you’re going to employ people to stand inside the train to be ready to drive the train when it breaks down. And since lower labour costs was one of the original argument put forward for investing in the huge cost of automating the line, I feel cheated.

Just imagine how much lower the cost of the line would have been if it had been built as per the usual MRT lines? Less breakdown means less workhours lost, and thus lower economic damages. Labour costs would remain the same, since the employees standing around on the train would instead be inside the driver’s cabin. And the upfront investment would have been a lot less.

Of course, it is easy for me to criticise with the clarity of hindsight, but being made to be guinea pigs to a new, unproven system is a lot of unneeded expenditure, and brings a lot of inconvenience. I hope that the government has learnt its lesson. Public transportation in Singapore is a key infrastructure, using it to test unproven technology is going to bring a lot of problems for the commuters. That just isn’t worth the bragging rights for being first.

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It’s late into the evening, and I’m at the school’s air-conditioned food court trying to get myself to do work.

I got quite a bit done during the day, but right now I only feel like doing anything other than my work. All around me, groups of people are jabbering over mouthfoods of dinner, and a rather rowdy bunch from some CCA or what sort are screaming at the top of their lungs.

So I plugged in the earphones, and played a little Osu!.

Which made things kind of worse, because right now I’m blogging instead of working on my assignment. Motivation is like a fly: really, really tough to catch. And even when you do, something you can always see other people doing fun stuff.

It’s tough to get things done in school.

But it’s even worse if I were to go home: I won’t get anything done at all, because I would be lazing on my bed. The strong attraction to beds is still there in 2009, more than 3 years after I finished my full time National Service.

So school’s my chosen poison, at least I get something done. With a lot of leg-dragging and cursing. And since it has been scientifically proven that swearing does make a person feel better, you can be sure that I won’t go down without a few hundred descriptions about human reproductive parts.

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It’s been 3 years since I took the plunge and paid for my very own web hosting. SgBlogging came live on DreamHost in 2006, during a spate of outages after Google bought over Blogger. My blog, which was hosted on Blogger, went down ridiculously often, so I decided to go professional on my web hosting, and at the same time learn about hosting itself.

At that time, I was still serving out the last few months of my National Service, so the migration came one Sunday morning, after reading 30-40 articles on hosting a website. It was hard for me, because concepts like FTP and file permissions were foreign concepts to me. Thankfully, DreamHost has a really simple installer that sets up everything nicely for me, no messing around with the database or script files; with that, SgBlogging in its first incarnation on WordPress appeared.

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No pictures, because I was obsessed over the many “what-if”s.

What if the user is using a browser with images turned off?
What if the user is using a browser that can’t run Javascript?
What if the user can’t see the videos?

What if I stop worry about all the what-ifs?

Well, despite its boring outlook, I enjoyed using the theme a lot. The fonts and overall colour scheme mesh well together, so it didn’t violate the sanity of anyone who was reading the posts.

But I wanted to take things further, which of course led to the crazy 2-day site re-design I did in 2007. That was barely half a year into my return to school. Even though I was a total noob when it comes to creating themes for WordPress, the burgeoning number of articles about that topic alone was enough reference for me! Whatever problems I ran into, somebody else had already asked that question somewhere. All it took was a Google search to retrieve the answer.

The end result of those 2 days of frenzied hard work is this:

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The theme looks quite modern (by 2007 standards anyway), but I ended up with only a few graphic files in the theme folder. Even up till now, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a compliment or a curse; but I was happy to have written a Wordpress theme right from scratch. I learned a lot from that experience, of which the top-most take-away had been:

Never to do a 2-day frenzied coding spree right in the middle of the assignment crunch period.

But I managed to get it done anyway, so I’m pretty happy with what I’d done.

And so, the site has always remained this way, even through its first migration to SliceHost in 2008, and then to Linode in 2009. No change to the theme at all. Today, I don’t really have an urge to change the theme immediately, but the thought has flashed across my mind, like the tempting little devil that it has always been.

Right in the middle of my final year project. Now, the question is, should I succumb to that pressure?

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Music videos from the 1980s can look totally random, and make sense at the same time. But what if Bonnie Tyler actually sung what’s happening in the music video instead of the actual lyrics?

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There’s a lecturer in school with no hair. Just a shiny chrome atop the forehead of a really friendly person. I know that because I’ve met and talked to him on a few occasions, and he’s almost always smiling, even during the one time he barged into the classroom mid-lesson to conduct that one-off spot-check for unruly hair.

Thing is, each time I see him, my stomach would seize with fear, the cold emanating from a terrible thought that I might one day lose my hair too.

And my fear isn’t ungrounded. Whenever I get to breaking point in debugging code, I have an insane Hulk-like urge to rip apart my shirt, and then start dancing around the room like a mad rabbit. The trouble is, my brain retains full control over myself, and I end up clutching at my hair in utter frustration.

Now you know why a lot of IT developers no longer have their hair with them in this world. The concentrated power needed to solve weird complications in seemingly straightforward execution sucks the lifeforce out of the follicles, which is then harnessed into brain-juice to turbo-charge the brain, causing the person in question to either start singing Aaron Kwok’s songs like some sports dude high on endorphins, or to start disturbing his other classmates.

And since disturbing classmates also disrupts their ability to effectively troubleshoot their codes, they too need to harness the hair-lifeforce and in turn go similarly nutty. Which explains why in Singapore Polytechnic, most of the top students in school are also similarly off their rockers.

What happens to the hair then? With its lifeforce fully harvested, the strands fall off, leading to premature hair-loss. Somehow, the limited amount of hair on a person’s head seems to be enough to power the brain for the rest of his life, because he still remains productive way long after he lost his last strand of hair (otherwise affectionately known as the “Dipsy” strand).

This phenomenon is not just limited to developers in the IT industry. You can see this immediately when you get to university. Just look at all the bald professors in the faculties.

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