BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Friday, February 27, 2009



I won an office computer.

well, it's not free. i won a draw to buy it at two hundred sultans along with about a gazillion other colleagues, all of whom are vying for half a gazillion beat up dell pcs. i'm chuffed.

there are exactly four reasons why anybody would want to bid for an old office computer. they are as follows:

(1) they want to give it to their kid
(2) they're getting it for their sister-in-law's uncle's half brother's mongoose
(3) they want a dedicated all-downloading all-pirating machine
(4) they want to hack it and install mac osx on it.

i did some church work with this cool couple last year, whose coolness took a major spike when i discovered that they (actually he) had hacked their pc to install mac's operating system, the osx. i googled hacking pcs to install osx and all the easy three-step guides look like ancient hebrew to me, but i'm inclined to think that i can pay my way into some snow leopard love.

ram is still hot d*mn because the pc comes with only 512 megs of it, and all the hacking sites have pcs with like four gigs. (four gigs?) here's hoping i can get away with less. the pickupability of this pc stands at five hours from press time. then, it's off to the diligent search for someone who can help me hack it. until then, well, i guess i could do with a dedicated all-downloading all-pirating machine.

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Genusfrog [ 10:17 am ] | 0 comments

Thursday, February 26, 2009



Fergus walks up to roger's desk and thumps his fist in the air.

Roger: congrats

Fergus: i distinctly remember someone saying it was gonna be 6-1

Roger: yeah, actually i wrote 6-1 but my 6 looped too high, it ended up looking like a 0
messed with the stars

Fergus: ahhh. well, thanks, thanks. i'll have you know that i also wrote 10-0 for man united
but my 1 didn't really come out

Roger: right. there's always the return leg

I love my liverpool like this. up against the best in the world, tagged as the perrenial underachievers and written off by most as an underdog. that's when my liverpool stands up. i love the character they show when nobody believes that they can do it. give liverpool the toughest opposition and talk about it like a walk-over. that's how we wake up.

all my liverpool fandom, i've never known the giddying heights of topping the table and bossing the league. all i've ever known has been romantic cup runs. i fell in love with liverpool over their 1995 fa cup run and my first real taste of victory came in 2001 when we won three cups in three months. in 2005 we had that unbelievable european cup run that resulted in instanbul (and what is now the notorious account of me weeping on my knees) and since then, it's still been cups, cups, cups.

i don't know if i'm just escaping the sorrow of league mediocrity again, but it's a very comforting escape. it's comforting to know that while man u and chelsea have traded league titles in the last five years, there is one thing liverpool do better than anyone else in the world - come up against the giants in cup competitions and send them home.

all this will be moot if we don't get a result next week at anfield. but i'm thinking not. onwards to the quarter finals.

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Genusfrog [ 9:18 am ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
WEDNESDAYS

Full-time cell leader days.

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Genusfrog [ 11:11 am ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
DEEP FRIED CARBS

Second only to deep fried animals.

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Genusfrog [ 10:01 am ] | 0 comments

Monday, February 23, 2009
DANNY SAUNDERS

I want to be a geek too.

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Genusfrog [ 10:02 am ] | 0 comments

Sunday, February 22, 2009
THERE WAS LIGHT BEFORE SUN

Genesis 1 is weird.

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Genusfrog [ 10:03 am ] | 0 comments

Saturday, February 21, 2009



I need to get with the times. and so, today, allow me to confess to my limited online community that i have been keeping a shameful thing for a long time. i've tried to change it before but i've never found the right impetus to make the change happen. but i'm going to now, you see. i'm determined more than ever.

i've only got 384MB of RAM in salvador.

yes, it's true. you know all those new programs that need 512 megs of ram? i don't have them. you know football manager 09? i bought it. i can't install it. you know apple's iWorks 09 that i blogged about yesterday? i can't buy it. i know i know it's embarrasing. stop making that "tsik-tsik-tsik" sound with your tongue.

i've previously gone to machines to ask them about dumping in new ram. they're fronthouse is actually quite savvy and nice, but they took my number and never gave me the callback that they said they'd give. out of convenience, i'm gonna give them one last shot. after that, it's elsewhere. jack's beloved epicenter or something. anything. anywhere. i just want my ram. it's been too long, too slow.

maybe this weekend. maybe this weekend, i'll go out there and power up salvador so he doesn't plod along like the 2004 machine that he really is. and then after that? software heaven. first iWork. then, this.

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Genusfrog [ 12:02 am ] | 0 comments

Friday, February 20, 2009



Today is word processor day. i've done nothing today but compare online reviews about word processors for macs. how did it start?

thay's got a mac friend called leroy (yes, mac people have cool names like leroy) and leroy asked her today if she'd like to be one of five people sharing iWork and iLife. when i caught wind of this, i knew immediately that i needed to dig to the bottom of the iWork well and see how Pages (the iWork version of MS Word) stacks up against the other word processors in its weight division. so here are the challengers.

ms office for mac
the most poweful, the most expensive but also the most familiar of all word processors. what constitutes power in a word processing world of course is beyond me. maybe it can lift trucks while accepting track changes. point is that office is the tried and true and if you're not up sticking one of the pasar malam versions into your virginally white macbook, then it's either look elsewhere or pour a gazillion dollars down bill gates' throat to go with the other gazillion dollars that you've previously poured in.

openoffice
so if gazillion dollars of dollars matters to you, then welcome the open source rivals. openoffice, originally dredged up by sun microsystem geeks is about as plain and straightforward as they come. it's used across platforms, which made it hard for me to find good screencaps of it running on osx. which sucks. on to the next one.

neooffice
neooffice is built on openoffice but fitted to work best on osx, which makes it a very dandy option indeed. it looks quite alright and supposedly integrates well with other mac programs. i tried this once myself, and actually have the dmg file on salvador. unlike the ms office or iWorks, it's one program from which you launch your word processors and spreadsheets, etc. compact. best thing is, like openoffice, this one is open source, which means it's free. if you can access my blog and read this, you can download it completely.

iWork
showoff. ok fine. i have no idea why i ended up rooting for all the underdog open sourced word processors because a true machead will fall in love with iWork and for good reason. it's prettier than scarlett johanson, it's got templates that make me want to use templates and best of all, you can drag in songs from itunes, pics from iphoto and videos from imovie to add to your iWork document. you can do this even on Numbers, which is their version of Excel. showoff. i know.

so that's how it's stacked up. one whole day researching on word processors when the one word processor that i'm supposed to be using (epic editor) has been left on idle since morning. my verdict? if you can find the money, go iWork. if not, open source. actually no. if you don't have the money, how da heck have you afforded a mac in the first place?

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Genusfrog [ 3:01 pm ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 18, 2009




Athalia: anything on tomorrow?
Fergus: nopes. i make it a point to be unexpectedly tied up on alternate days.
Athalia: -_-

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Genusfrog [ 5:26 pm ] | 1 comments

Tuesday, February 17, 2009



Because lampard, ballack, deco, anelka, drogba, ashley cole, malouda and mikel will never be as badass as this little girl and her dad.

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Genusfrog [ 4:05 pm ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 11, 2009






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Genusfrog [ 3:12 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 10, 2009



When someone says "I crashed a couple of cars last week", did that person crash two cars or something like two to five cars?

i say two.

i'm quite liberal with my language rules but for some reason, i cannot seem to see past this one. a couple of anything is two. not three. not four. because you can say "a few" or "some" when referring to an undetermined small number, you really shouldn't be using "couple" for anything other than two.

so i took this little query to the two dictionaries on my working desk. first, the macquarie dictionary, my official rulebook for australian english usage. the macquarie gives 14 definitions of "couple", in all its permutations, and makes no room for anything other than two or a pair. the second dictionary is a personal favourite of mine, the somewhat candid collins advanced learners. their first definition for couple says "two or approximately two".

i love my collins, and i respect it dearly, but i'm going to have to disagree with it today. what on earth is "approximately two"? it's either two nor not. or one. or three. there's no such thing as approximately two. maybe for some things but not for most.

i'll be fair. you can be approximately 2km from your local donut shop because you're actually 1.8km away from it. that's fine. maybe it's fair for you to say you're a couple of kilometers from the donuts. but you can't have dinner with approximately two guys. you can't dig approximately two holes and you can't hold approximately two ideas. there are some nouns in this world for which there can be no approximation, and for these nouns, you just can't use "a couple" to mean anything other than two.

if the thing can only exist in whole or not at all, a couple always means two. if the thing can exist in a variety of minute degrees around two, then yes, a couple can mean approximately two.

in fact, i think now that that's what the collins advanced learners means. and yes, now i'll stand by it. and stand by the macquarie. you can't use "couple" to mean three or four things.

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Genusfrog [ 9:18 am ] | 1 comments

Monday, February 09, 2009



These aren't fantastic days to be a judaeophile. god knows i've never been one. 

(click here for a hillarious spoof of the jaws movie poster)

we had a jewish pastor preach at church today. he preached what i always imagined was the quintessential jewish christian sermon, ie the jesus-is-so-very-the-OT-lamb-he's-not-kidding sermon. about half way through, when he told us that he'd done pesach with about a hundred plus singaporeans in traditional jewish style, i wondered, to what extent should we be judaeophilic? (right now, i'm also wondering two other things: firstly, if they had any checks in place for the lamb's blemish rating, and secondly, should 'judaeophile' be spelled 'judeophile', without the 'a'?)

i know enough christians who are convinced that a truly authentic expression of their christian faith involves flag dancing, blowing weird-sounding horns during worship, knowing their hebrew root words and wearing tassled clothes. others either have their brains configured to judean geohistory or have one eye on the israel situation everyday. 

i've always been a bit iffy about this one. we're the gentile world right? i'm evangelising to and living among what is essentially globalised malaysians with our own ethnic hang-ups. what really is the relevance of an israel fixation in my world? but doesn't the bible say that i'm adopted into the bloodline of abraham, isaac and jacob? isn't that fundamentally the grandfamily of the jewish people? oh but wait. maybe i want to trim the fat off all the stereotypes of churchisms and seek an expression that's less culturally saturated and more kingdomlike. 

i don't know. idon'tknowifiwanttoknow. 

i wonder, what happens to us if it really does matter?

i'm reading this book right now called the chosen, by jewish fiction writer chaim potok. i'm sure that's worth at least 50 judaeophile points. let's see. my favourite meat is pork. that's gotta be something like a minus 10,000. maybe if i pray hard enough, God will let me grow a beard. that must be worth at least 2000 points. nevermind the fact that i'd look way cool.

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Genusfrog [ 3:17 am ] | 8 comments