Just Sleepless

I was reading Hardus's blog and I found his pages look much more pleasant than mine. I was comparing ours and I notced because I always wrote a loooooot of words, it can really make readers' eyes feel painful, sorry for my previous visitors. Anyway I decided to use couple of hours to reorganise the pages a little bit so that they are just easier for readers. Also, I made my MSN space, or rather they call it WLS now, my gallery and guestbook. Welcome to visit. ^_^

The night is starting to get longer in England now. But my sleep doesn't come back with it. I have developed this very strange sleep pattern recently. Normally, I just sleep at random time for random length. So after another sleepless night, what shall I write? I think I really should give the sentiments of mine a rest and try to sketch some other beauties and ugliness around the world. It is 6:30 am in the morning. I hear birds singing for a new day outside. I am sitting on this very uncomfortable chair; oh my, I will have to do something with it at some point. My mind is blank. So I am not going to seek a topic today. I have something I want to write about but it is a little big that I think I'd better leave it for the weekend. The last long weekend before Christmas is coming, I can write something awfully long and boring. Good luck, my dear visitors.

So today I will just post down a picture here. The lady in the picture is the TRUE traditional Chinese beauty in Chinese eyes. Funny thing is that we find westerners sometime have a very different view of oriental beatuy. Lucy Liu is a good example that Chinese found very hard to understand. Well, if you happen to have trouble to recall her face, just look it up in google. But her in the picture is what Chinese class the traditional beauty. The picture is from a 80's TV series that were made from one of four best classic Chinese Novels: 红楼梦 (Hong Lou Meng), the English of which is known as :The Story of the Stone.

I have got to get a new chair!!!

New Life

It has been ten days that I haven't updated this blog. May I use that universal excuse again that I have been very busy? It is true that I have been literally living on Red Bull for a week. My room looks like a dungeon hole. Well, I have made the resolution that I will recollect myself and see Andy more often. Who's Andy? Well that will be a funny story. My friend, Yu, always suspects that people on the street are checking him out. He insists that there is a guy who works in the gym has been seriously checking him out for many times. Without his real name, we started to refer him as Andy. I don't believe Yu though. From then on, when we say "see Andy", we mean "go to gym". I really need some working out as I can feel that the fat starts to wrap me up.

So, what should I share today? My dear visitors, have you ever had the thought that at some point you will start a new-life, a totally new life. I have seen many of my friends had this ambition and I have seen many of them ending up disappointed. Hence, I can't help thinking that whether there is something as "starting a totally new life". When we say we want to start a new life, what do we mean? Do we mean we want to abandon all of our past? Do we mean we want to discard all of our beliefs? Do we mean we want to put ourselves into a new world and try to fit ourselves in for dear life? Do we mean we want to be someone who is not us anymore but a totally stranger?

Well, if you were a murderer, you might have those wishes. But when we put our sight to normal people, do those questions apply? Are those what we really want? Yes, we have to admit that sometime a new environment does help but is that all. Do we really want put our hope into something else and rely on it? I doubt the answer is YES for most of us. Questions I listed above are not an option for us to make a so called "new life". It is not that we have to change ourselves into new strangers. If we give up everything of ourselves, we will end up being a disaster with no doubt. Then what makes a new life?

When you wake up one day, try to think of things you never think of; try to speak to the people you never speak to; try to understand those you never understand; try to see the things you never see, and there you are off to something new. Will it be a new life? It might be. But the most important thing is: you are still you and you are off to something new and better. Maybe we should stop chasing the so called "new life" and try to explore something in our existing life. There is no such thing as absolute new life. Everyday is new. Every morning is the new beginning. Every second is possible for something impossible.

I was! I am. I will be?

I am really busy at the moment. I feel everything get so mixed up that I have got myself stuck in the middle of a spider web, struggling for a way out. However, when I was talking this to Jyri, he made it seemed like such a simple problem that all I was worrying about was no more than a high school student facing a coming exam. Is that so? Am I still that naughty boy who will only get active before the deadline? I thought I have been growing, a lot. I thought I should have had a very sensible and mature mind as a 24-years-old. All those things I was telling him were those I thought I had a reasonable knowledge of, but it turned out to be frustrating. Have I really been growing? Well, certainly my height hasn't, but even my mind?

Just today, I got a mail from a friend. It was saying something about how he was falling in love with the totally run person. This really reminded me of how I used to be the same. Those might be heart breaking but they are such precious experience. I got a flash back of those old times and then I try to get a mirror to look into. I want look into my own eyes and ask: how much have you changed?

I sit back and put on some music. I am dong nothing but trying to think through myself. I want to write down a lot about what I was and what I am. However I feel lack of words or rather lack of idea to do so. But I don't how and where I get this feeling that I am no more than what I was. With years of experiencing in this sophisticate world, I have been developing. I have developed many shells to wrap me up tightly and safely. Those shells protect me. But they are selfish, arrogant, aggressive and short-sighted. I tired very hard to rip off those shells and to find out what is inside and I saw it. It is the person I was. Inside, I have never changed. I was going to share more about that person but one of my shells grew back and cut off my mind.

There was a short tale in the internet telling people the story of how a young boy was falling in love with wrong people and how he got his heart broken and how he recollected them back again bitterly. It was telling the story of how a young boy was viewing the world regardless to all the devils. It was telling the story of how a young boy was picturing the fantasy of his life. When the world shuts in the midnight, when the moonlight goes through the window, when the cigarette extinguishes in the ash tray, the music brings up my old memories. At this very moment, I know that: the one I was, the one I am.

Who will I be?

Time

I am sitting here again, alone, in my room with a pot of instant coffee. I want to write some thing down but I hesitate. There is something in my mind that I want to share but I am afraid to do so. There is a fight in my mind, at which another me is laughing. Maybe I just need a little more time as they say that time is the universal solution of everything. It is the extreme truth in the human world, just as true as the energy conservation law in physical world. So I think I will just need more time and maybe I will find it easier to be open with it then.

So time, what is this thing? Why does it have this ultimate power that we all say that it is the cure of everything. 'Give it time and it will be fine'. Is it the advice we give to everybody but ourselves? Then what is time anyway?

Physically, time is still a very debatable concept. Many people believe that time is just a element as fundamental as energy and space in the universe. With the existence of time, our world becomes physically 4-dementional. With this cognition, time travelling will be just a matter of 'time'. However, the place I stand, like some of other people of us believe, that time does not exist independently. It is nothing more than a measurement of the change of energy. Thus no energy, no time, which means our world is physically 3-dementional and time travelling is just a matter of 'Sci-Fi'.

Ok, enough geeky stuff. Let's try to think about why time cures. It does not. Try to think a little bit more on this, you will find that it is not time which cures you. You do. When there is a problem, when there is a wound in your mind, time does nothing to it. It is you healing it. When you give it time, you are collecting facts that make you still good; you are thinking that makes you throw away the toxics; you are struggling against the pain to bandage the wound; or you are just being given other interesting things to fill up your mind so as to forget.

Time is a NOT rescue pill you can use. If you don’t help yourself out, time will do nothing but stand beside you and laugh.

Turn Left, Turn Right

Well, as I am having a break from the research at the moment, I think I should take the advice of trying to write something here more often. Actually, I have had something in mind that I thought I may write. I was going to argue something about if we should still keep write paper based letters to our friends or families in this MATRIX world where SKYPE and MSN have been all over the globe. A friend told me that it is so out of time, happy birthday to Lok by the way. Well I had a big speech prepared that I am so sure I will be able to take his idea down, but, again suddenly, something in me is triggered by a song, which I want to share.

I was cleaning my room. I have got a bunch of old CDs that left over by some of my Chinese friends who have finished their study and left. I just randomly put one in my CD player. They are really old songs now, from my college time I think. While I was still fighting in the battle field in my room, a soft and very familiar melody went to me. It was a sound track from a movie and sung by Gigi, a famous singer in Hong Kong. The movie is made from a well known city comic: Turn Left, Turn Right (also known as: A chance of sunshine).

It was such a simple story, a story that can't be simpler. There was a girl and there was a boy. They lived next to each other, where a wall is shared by the building they lived in. They lived in this small city and they went across each other everyday many times. But, she always turned left when she went out the building and he always turned right. She always turned left at the tube station and he always turned right. She always looked at left side in the bus and he always looked at the right side. Just like this, they have been there for on one knows how long but never meet. One day, just that one day, the joke in the heaven came down to the earth. The big shower made them know the existence of each other for the first time in the park. Maybe love did happen on the first sight. At least in their case it did. The shower stopped and they had to go. So they exchanged their numbers. But right after they parted, both of them lost it. Then, in the little city with nothing special, there were two people seeking their love. They were looking everyplace they knew of, everything they could think of. Every night, they were sleepless and sat in their room and listened to the same song. They passed away each other just in the same way while she turned left at the same place where he turned right. Two hearts had finally been broken and the pain made them unable to stay in their city of sadness so both of them decided to leave, in the same day. At that day, the girl left the building and went to the park for the last time and so did the boy. They stood there on the lawn where there was only a big tree separate them. Both of them didn't say a word, didn't know the existence of each other either, and at the end, the girl went left and the boy went right. They never meet again.

I am not going to start on the movie that made it to be a happy ending. Obviously, movie makers are stick to their directions of making money. We all stick to some directions, do we? Maybe they are not as simple as left and right, but they are still there. We take it so naturally and actually we judge others who are on the different tracks. But is that too naive to define people just because they used to turn right but we turn left? We are going in our way so we never see what they see, never think what they think. We will never know them and maybe never meet them. We may miss nothing, but we may miss everything. I am not saying that change whom you are and try everything stupid. However, maybe just one a while, try to walk to the side that you rarely walk, try to read books you rarely read, try to understand something you barely approve of, try to know someone you barely like, and there will be a big surprise waiting for you. Right or left, which way will you go tomorrow?

Dilemma

I haven't written anything here for a while. I was so busy at research for a while, haven't even been sleeping much, and now I have to take a break from all those AI stuff. So what should I write today? I have too many things in my mind that I even find it hard to put something down as a start.
Well, I will have a very relaxing week, no hard working and enjoy a long weekend. This PhD thing is certainly driving me crazy. I think maybe I should just marry the little dumb metal box I have got, by which I mean the little robot I have in the lab. But in another way, it is addictive. The feeling of success is incomparable very time I manage to finish something there. Ah, I guess life is all about dilemma. Every time we face one, we have to choose one side to go. It is gambling really. No matter how rational we claim ourselves choice to be, it is still gambling. Most of us will say that facing a dilemma is one of the things that they hate. But maybe deep in our nature, we are addictive to it, like many of us are addictive to gambling. It is the choice, by knowing choosing one side meaning losing the other side, makes this exciting. The ending is always unknown into a degree. Surprises can always double the happiness, and unfortunately, the same applies to the sadness.
So we all gamble in life. Things barely happen in the way that you can expect. Being random is the rule of the physical world and chaos is the basic of matter. A very interesting Finnish friend of mine claims that he can always find the optimistical sides in a dilemma. Well, I doubt it. If you can see the optimistical sides of both or all the choices facing a problem, it does not really do anything as it won't help to shift the weights among the choices but just give you a feeling that no matter what you choose won't hurt you. Does this have something similar to the so called "beggar's attitude"? A dilemma is a cross road where you have to and you can only go into one directions, all of which are one way road.
For thousands of years, human beings are suffering from the fact that they HAVE TO CHOOSE. In order to remove some of the pressure of deciding our own fate, we developed many tools. Tarot, horoscope etc. are all on the list. Why are we so scared of doing the decision of our own lives? Thinking that the right of doing our own choice has been a fight of every nation for so many years, the intention of asking some unknown force to help us while using such a right is very ironic. Personally, I do have a deck of TAROT and playing it is great fun. There are times that I wish those printed coloured cards can be believable. I am wondering the reason...

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By the way, how many of us have seen Windows 1.04? A friend of mine did a 5 minutes demonstration on his lovely old IBM 5160 XT which was launched 25 five years ago. Have a look of the ancestor of your Windows. Anyway, here is the link on YouTube, just click to watch it: Win 1.04 Demo

The picutre at the right is the picture of the PC. Cool piece, right?