... notable events : Rats? or perhaps the computer mouse making holes in our walls

Castle Wolvenstein, DOOM, Descent... this was the time of the initial explosion of 3-D first person shooters. What could we do? We were mere university students. Resistance was futile.

I remember playing Castle Wolvenstein back in the late 80s, early 90s so imagine my thrill when DOOM came out. It was an event rapturous enough to drive the likes of us catatonic in our excitement. DOOM was light years better in graphics, sound effects and game play compared to the already ground breaking Castle Wolvenstein.

Promptly deleting space from the harddrive of my awesome kick-ass i386 1.5Mb RAM personal computing machine bought from Future Shop in downtown Vancouver, and lovingly carried home in an overly priced taxi driven by a chatty pakistani with lots of head swaying to accompany his accented english, I installed DOOM with great anticipation and fanfare. The world we discovered within the confines of the computer screen was breathtaking. With surround sound speakers, playing in the middle of the night, nudging your computer self along with your keyboard in the eerie glow of the monitor, the experience was so real you jumped in fright every time one of those brown imps with fireballs jumped out at you from around the corridor, or a darn pink pig-monster rushed out of the dark at you with gnashing teeth.

Computer games were the mainstay of campus residence life, the life blood of our community, and the bane of our existence. Long before DOOM, back when I was still a first year student at a dormitory type residence, we had discovered the wonderful world of networked computers! A short walk from our residence was the Macintosh computer lab, open to all students to use. This was a time when personal computers weren't exactly very personal as yet. There were still more students without their own computers than there were students with one.

The game we played at the Macintosh lab was a simple tank programming game. One would write simple programming commands from a fixed set of available commands for your tank to follow. You then, sitting back to watch, set your tank loose into the virtual arena against other tanks to do battle, pitting your programming against the others to see who had written the best and most robust programme to win. It was a simple game but yet the very novelty of actually playing against another player was..... uhhhhh.... yes....mmm.... addictive doesn't even cover it.

We spent days and nights working on our tank's programming, tweaking it, adjusting it, re-coding it to anticipate the changes also being made by the guys to their tanks at the next computer terminal. Over and over we would pit our tanks and then go back to the drawing board and tweak it yet again. I started naming my tanks with each increasingly elaborate revision, the first was called "Tune", the next "Song", going up to "Concerto" and my final masterpiece which I must proudly say, pretty much trashed everyone else's tank, was called "Symphony". My good buddy Steve ran through the Macintosh lab after classes on two consecutive days and found us still busily tapping away at the keyboards, having not left the lab except on emergencies to eat and for toilet breaks. This was what set the scene for DOOM and the next big thing to hit us with the true 3-D engine, Descent.

During the summer was when we really went wild. Most of us stayed on at Fairview Residence which were the university's summer residences as most of us didn't go back home for summer. With hardly anything else to do, except for a few summer classes or make up lessons, the monsters of DOOM ran riot through our rooms.

Steve moved into an apartment with a few other guys, and armed with their latest i486s, their walls vibrated to the haunting tunes, hellish screams and unearthly sounds of a nightly full scale battle royal. Running cables through tiny round holes in their walls which they swear were made by rats, they linked up their computers into one big virtual world.

As for me, my poor i386 was simply too slow and too obsolete. As the games got progressively more elaborate, my little computer couldn't keep up, and besides, I was in an apartment across the courtyard from Steve and the guys. Instead, while the daylight hours would find me spending time with my girlfriend, by night I would be over at Steve's room to take over his computer while he slept between games. Immersing myself into the gore-splatted corridors of DOOM I would run around with my chainsaw in some of the most insane 4 way deathmatches and frag-nights. The guys would create their own maps and challenge each other over and over, racking up kills or frags as they were called, as they go. DOOM was our world. We would get so involved with the game that the eerie music and monster sounds emanating from the surround sound speakers in the dead of the night would sometimes scare us so badly that we would need to log off, turn on the lights to take a look around the now silent room for a reality check, heart beat racing, completely spooked.

We weren't complete geeks however, we played ice-hockey in winter and ball-hockey in summer, we cycled through the university's endowment lands, went camping, chased pretty co-eds, watched movies, partied hard (just minus the beer for me), joined in the Engineering pranks that my university's Engineers were infamous for, and generally had a great time but none topped the computer as out main waste of time. Whatever activity we did in the day, the nights were the sole domain of DOOM and its denizens.

However, insufficient sleep and a lot of missed 8:30am classes soon took its toll on us. Grades suffered. Going into 3rd and 4th year, the credit courses became increasingly critical. No longer would we have the luxury of summer make-up classes as we were running out of summers. No one wanted to do a 5th year. I even started getting a recurring dream of impending exams. In my dream, it would be the end of the semester with exams around the corner and I would be endlessly searching the corridors trying to find my class in a last minute attempt to at least attend the final few classes having not attending any yet, panicking with each passing moment as it dawned on me that I didn't even have an idea where my classes were. So persistent was this dream that years later, long after I had graduated this dream could still wake me up in the middle of the night in cold sweat to ask myself, "I graduated... right?", and fall back to sleep in great relief when the answer thankfully came back... "yes".

We never really stopped playing our computer games, but we did stopped being so crazy about it. Steve and the guys yanked out the cables, giving the holes in their walls back to the rats that made them to focus on studies and graduation. The monsters, imps and pig-demons of our nights were put on hold till we were safely past the finish line, degrees in hand, mortarboards on our heads.

We grew up somewhat I suppose, because graduate we did, much to our own relief. I left for home after graduation, returning to Singapore to start the next phase of my life, but I understand that the guys still in Canada, now fully-fledged working adults and productive members of society, restarted their games, rejoining the monsters in that unending struggle for supremacy.

... notable events : Ragging, hazing and puking

"Look at how Kit wears it. Follow him." the seniors yelled at the struggling group of first year students, or "Frosh" as we were known. I spied a few smirks and not a few annoyed faces. I smiled impishly, half amused at their efforts to mimic my "diaper", half indignant thinking how they must already assume I knew how to tie a loin cloth because I was Asian. Tugging at the cloth for like the umpteenth time, making sure nothing embarrassing was showing past the edges, I re-adjusted the knot, wondering whether what seemed to me the most logical way of wrapping a loin cloth around your bottom was really the actual way Gandhi would have done it. It was my first time wearing one afterall.

It started early one Saturday morning. We had been forewarned a few days earlier that this weekend would be the day the Frosh would be "initiated". I was dreading it and my mind scrambled to find a way to duck what was obviously going to be nothing but an embarrassing day of humiliation, drinking and puking. All the horror stories of ragging and hazing ran riot through my overly active imagination in technicolor.

*knock* *knock* "Get to the TV room" I heard a yell outside my door. "Strip to your underwear and bring your bedsheet." the obnoxious voice added. I kept quiet, hesitating...

"NOW!" he yelled.

Heart racing I half considered not replying and pretending not to be in. But if I was to stay here and face these guys for the rest of the year... fine. Suck it up and let's just do this, I told myself. "O...K...." I mumbled, just barely loud enough to be heard, the banging outside my door already moving on to the other room doors. Yanking my bedsheet of the bed and stripping down to my briefs, I just knew this was going to be painful. The scrawny body of mine would only add to the jeers. Just recently, my neighbour in the room across the hall from mine had already remarked, accompanied by a lot of headshaking, "How the hell can someone (alive) be as skinny as you?" Sigh. This WAS going to be painful.

Assembled in the large TV room was all the Frosh of Cariboo House, the only all guy house in Place Vanier Residences of the University of British Columbia or UBC for short. I apprehensively joined them.

"Mumble *Mumble the low rumble of excited but muffled chatter... "Stop talking!" *grumble *grumble the low rumble of excited by annoyed chatter....

With our loin cloths tied, or rather as the seniors insisted I should say, with our diapers tied, we lined up into neat lines as numbers were painted onto our foreheads and onto our shoulders by seniors with silly grins plastered on their faces.

Suddenly a ragged cheer started from the front rows. Now what, I thought, the drying paint already making my forehead itch but not daring to scratch it in case I smear it and incur a senior's wrath. "Beer!" I heard someone say. Oh right. They did promise as much beer as we could drink all day long as a reward for us if we meekly submitted. Not much of a reward for me though, since I hate the taste of beer.

Large white plastic cups of beer started making the rounds, handed down the lines. Groaning inwardly, I braced myself, knowing this would be hard to avoid. I wondered if I could get away with nursing just one drink the whole day.

"Hey you! DRINK UP NOW FROSH!"

Sigh. *gulp gulp gulp gulp

I was on probably somewhere between my 2nd and 3rd cup of beer when the order came to run down to Wreck Beach, Vancouver's local nudist beach. We were all standing by then outside on the grass field next to Cariboo House. It was a little chilly, me being Asian from the tropics, this being Canada not in the tropics and in Autumn to boot. The beer helped I grudgingly admitted, but I was already getting very sick of the taste and smell of the cheap diluted beer they were drowning us in.

Down to the beach we went. The trail in front of Cariboo House was one of the largest and best frequented trails down the 50 odd metre high cliff to the beach at the bottom of Point Grey, the spar of rock that my university was sited on. Already feeling a little sick from yet another cup of beer thrust into my hands "to stiffen us up" for the run, we pounded single file down the steep slope, the headalong mad rush only made safer by the many trees and tree roots serving as speed bumps and steps. What made the run interesting however, was a parallel line of girls in bedsheets running down the slope with us from Tweedsmuir, our sister residence house! Mmmmm nice. I wondered if they too had to strip to their underwear underneath that white linen. From the many grins and catcalls from the guys, I suspect I wasn't the only one holding that thought.

I cheated. The order was for us to run down the trail to the beach, run all the way to the water, take a gulp of the Pacific Ocean, or more accurately, the Strait of Georgia, then run back up the cliff again, back to the house. Well, who's ever known me to completely obey anything. Run, run, run, then around the tree about midway down the slope I went, like the big bossomed Indian actress in a Bollywood movie, only I wasn't singing Hindi love songs, high pitched or otherwise. Back up the slope I went, intentionally slowing down, easily done since this was now UP HILL, and allowed some of the faster guys on the return trip to pass me. Up we went and back to the grassy field and... yup, another rewarding cup of beer! Oh yay, and all this before breakfast. Oh what joy. *Gulp *gulp *gulp

By then I was really feeling sick and my head was spinning. The lack of food, the alcohol coursing through my veins, coupled with the slight shivering from the chilled air and not to mention the oxygen deprivation of my brain from the run... I bulldozed through the seniors blocking my way and ran up the steps to my room, thinking to laydown and rest, but only managing to get there just in time to puke all over my nice carpeted floor. Ewww... That was and still is the very first time I've ever puked from drinking alcohol. I don't think I was drunk although for the rest of my time at UBC, my good friends never failed to tease me and remind me of the time I got so "drunk" that I puked all over my room.

I used it as an excuse to stay out of the next "festivities" and armed with a few tissue rolls, started cleaning up my carpet. A few resident advisors (RA) came by to check on me, I waved them off, saying I'm fine, secretly happy to be able to skip whatever joyous activity the other Frosh were going through but not relishing having to smell the puke in my room for the next couple of weeks especially with winter approaching and with it the ability to adequately air the room without turning it into a refrigerator.

One of the seniors came by later and asked if I was ok and if I was up to rejoining the group for lunch. Nodding my head, I re-tied my diaper and off I went, back into the TV room. I didn't really have much choice since they had already taken all our meal cards that morning, but I was feeling much better, and not a little sheepish from having puked after only 3 or was it 4 beers. Everyone was in good spirits, jovially laughing and chatting away and drinking still more beer. This time however, I successfully declined the offer for another cup of beer. Yay!

In single file we marched out the house door to the cafeteria where the very lovely sight of Tweedsmuir girls greeted us, already in line at the cafeteria and like us, still in their bedsheets and a little drunk. Not for the first time I thought it a little unfair that we had to wear loin cloths and bear the cold while the girls get to wrap the sheets practically over their whole bodies, and following up on that thought, letting the mind wander to ponder again over that most serious of questions, as to whether they were also equally in their underwear. Grinning, happy with those thoughts of gender equality in my head, I followed the herd up into the cafeteria to get my food.

Lunch was a little awkward, each one of us seated as it was facing a Tweedsmuir girl. Speeches were made, and like in a 3 course meal, we were to eat our food in sequence and with the right utensils.  My lunch partner ate quietly, not saying a word to me and I reciprocated, happy to just get food into my tummy but feeling a little self conscious from having the girls in front of us as well as from the very obvious grins and giggles from the little group of familiar Singaporean and Malaysian students watching me from the next table who had drifted in with the usual lunch time crowd.

We dispersed after lunch, allowed to dress and wash off the numbers written in permanent ink on our foreheads, the "initiation" over, the beer kegs all empty. There was a distinct change in camaraderie after that. The seniors more friendly, the other frosh with more ready smiles. I was one of them now, a full fledge resident of Cariboo House.

All in all, that was a rather tame ragging compared to the horror stories of ragging I've heard, some of which ranged from the obscene with unmentionables tied to ceiling fans with strings, to seniors dropping freshmen naked in distant parts of town for them to make their own way home. It was however, my first and I dare say, I'm happy I went through it, not so much that it was relatively mild but that it seemed to bring an added skip into our steps, adding a couple of inches to our heights whenever we looked out at the residents of the other houses. Ours, with the Tweedsmuir girls were the only houses to hold such public and elaborate initiations. It did wonders to my confidence, like a rite of passage into the life of a university residence student.

The house bound together well after that, its members sharing in movie nights, room parties with way too many people crammed into a tiny residence room and dancing/bouncing on the bed to overly loud heavy metal music, guitar jamming sessions that literally shook your walls till you learn never to place anything breakable in contact with certain walls, all night RISK gaming sessions that usually saw players screaming themselves hoarse for nights on end, undeclared competitions to top each other building "mysterious" sofa-henge formations in the TV room in the middle of the night, ball hockey games or "gymnastics" jumping off the 2nd floor at the old Armouries building, public service activities helping the RAs carry in drunks who fall asleep outside so that they don't freeze in the night, to simple riotous shared laughter when indulging in our favourite spectator sport of watching people with one too many bounce off walls all the way down the corridor.

Ragging, hazing, and puking. That was my first experience as a Frosh, living on a campus halfway around the world from home. It set the tone for what was to be some of the best fun filled years of my life, years fill with the smell of stale puke on the weekends, classes on the weekdays and lots of new experiences in between.

S301 SCR6 Baby Stroller

The next coolest thing to a Lamborghini. ;)

Mid-Autumn Festival @ Bayshore Park 10th October 2009

The Demise of the Dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk, The Independent

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Draconids meteor shower

The Draconids meteor shower occurs every year in early October.  It will peak this year between October 7-8 when the Earth passes through the debris left from the comet 21p/Giacobini-Zinner.

In 1933 and in 1946, this meteor shower produced 200-1000 mph (meteors per hour). While this shower is usually much quieter, it peaks during evening hours (rather than early morning hours unlike other meteor showers) so it's more accessible.

Everyone try and catch this!  (pity about the horribly bright Singapore city lights though, making our clouds and sky orange)

From the September 2009 Scientific American Mind

Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late

Night owls belie slacker reputation by staying alert longer

By Siri Carpenter

NIGHT OWLS: It's even harder to know now whether we should go to bed early or burn the midnight oil.

Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner.

An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Early Risers Crash Faster."