comic strips overload

Let The Music Heal Your Soul
Bravo All Star

Oh if someone writes a song with a simple Rhyme (Touché)
Just a song where is feeling show (N'Sync)
And if someone feels the same about the simple song (Moffats)
oh sometimes you can hear them sing (Gil)
music gives you Happiness and Sadness (Sqeezer)
But it also, also heals your soul (Nick-BsB)

[chorus]
Let the music heal your soul
let the music take control
let the music give you the power to
move any mountain

If someone plays piano with some simple chords (Touché)
So melodic and endearing, too (Aaron)
Oh if someone plays guitar with the old piano (Brian-BsB)
And maybe you can hear them sing (The Boyz)
Music gives you Happiness and Sadness (Nick-BsB)
But it also (N'Sync)
it also heals your soul (Blümchen)

[chorus]

(Brian-BsB)
Let the music heal your soul
let the music take control
let the music heal your soul

[chorus 4x]
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while listening to the song above, i've noticed two things. number one, i'm attracted to this song because of the first part of the second verse (in bold). i just realised that now. really. the song isn't that fantastic. in fact, i'd gladly skip most of the second half of the song anyway. not to mention that this song actually has a boyband roots. well, it was, after all, sang during the boyband era of the 90s. (sigh. i feel so old saying "the 90s", heh.) well, anyway, i didn't even notice that this song was playing until the second verse. when the piano and guitar verse (that's how i refer to the 2nd verse) started, i just got this strong urge to google the lyrics, rewind the song, and sang that part. well, privately, of course! mind me. you wouldn't want to hear news of people getting multiple injuries due to some shattered window panes or toilet mirrors.

well, then, we come to the second interesting thing about this song. while reading the lyrics to this song, i noticed a familiar name. gil. yep. gil. it's an old name really. but it rang a bell! why? because i used to like one or two of his songs. if that was it, then there's nothing much. but the thing is, i couldn't recall the titles of the two songs! i mean, wth! if reading his name alone brought memories, the songs should just pop up out of nowhere, right? well, i guess not. wait a minute. i'm really curious now. shall be doing some google search on this guy.

ah, googling such a short term is always a disaster. i mean, THREE letters! imagine how many things would come out when you search for Gil. everything from small companies, unknown singers, the simpsons, and all the way up to brazil's minister of culture. but nothing on the gil that i was looking for. so i did my usual clever google search optimization. ahh, don't mind the clever word, i just made them up. what i did was typing this in Google:

gil site:lyrics007.com

that did it. what i basically did was to scour this website that put up a lot of music lyrics to find the term gil inside. there were still quite a bit of hits. but the Gil i was looking for was in top ten of that search term. so now i know which song he kept reminding me about. it's this song called "if i only knew", sang together with the moffats. believe it or not, i used to like most of the moffats earlier songs. in fact, i could play three of their most famous songs in recorder. imagine! a recorder! i bet you don't even know what's a recorder. hahaha! kidding, kidding. but then again, it might be true. i'm a little bit lazy right now. so i'll just refer you to this wikipedia page on recorder.

have fun reading.
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have you ever heard of the term comic strips overload?

well, for most, no. but for me, i just experienced it. i've been reading comic strips for days now. practically locking myself in my room all these while, only to finish gpf and phd. you know what? this morning itself, i've been reading these comics from 2am! at 330am, i thought to myself that i should stop reading at 4. but no! before i knew it, it was 430! and by 6am, i was still reading. but there is a threshold, and i hit it. i hit my comic strips threshold (again!). i'm overloaded now. i still want to read more strips, but i know i won't be able to take them in properly, and thus i won't be giving these comic strips their dues. so let's wait until i sleep enough and am refreshed.

that's what i called comic strips overload.

as you might have noticed, i used my ever so frequently used phrase "(again!)". yes! you're right. this is not the first time i have comic strips overload. the first one was with beaver and steve. the second one was with Ctrl+Alt+Del. well, i'm not doing justice by not telling you more about these two comic strips. but well. i'm tired! and breakfast is in 15 minutes. and i haven't bathed! so yea! scram! and read them yourselved. chances are if you like the first ten strips (the whole archives are available online), you'll like the rest of the strips. trust me! it always work!
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i can't resist the urge.

i can't resist the urge!

i can't resist the urge!!!

public class Projections {
  public int[] count(String front, String right) {
    int filledFront = 0, filledRight = 0, i;
    for(i=0; i<front.length(); i++)
      if(front.charAt(i) == 'x') filledFront++;
    for(i=0; i<right.length(); i++)
      if(right.charAt(i) == 'x') filledRight++;
    return new int[] {
      (filledFront>filledRight) ? filledFront : filledRight,
      filledFront*filledRight };
  }
}

heh heh heh. sorry for that! it sure was a disaster to most of your eyes. and it could be damaging to some of you who have encountered PE in the past. ah yes. the scary PE. it's an abomination for me to mention that, the PE. the infamous CS1101 PE (discount us, the CS1101/2S people out, we don't have PE. -evil, maniacal laugh here-).

anyway, we at CS1102S forum was discussing about how the professor should have given us more workload. so we actually suggested some interesting measures for next year batch. one person suggested introduction of PE (or practical examination, a gruelling two hours exam where you were supposed to program something according to some specification given). another suggested increasing the number of homework that's required to be submitted. i, myself, suggested more design project, similar to our LEGO robotics project last semester (which, contrary to my popular belief--and most people's popular beliefs--at that time, i enjoyed very much).

well, of course we were joking! don't worry folks. CS1101/2S are already far more difficult than other CS1101/2 streams as it is now. making it more difficult will just reduce the intake from about 80 (which drops to 55 after the first semester) to probably 10 or 20. i mean come on, the other CS1101 streams combined together can boast about with their combined cohort of engineering students and the rest of computing students that don't take CS1101/2S. that's a lot of people! holy shit! i just realised that that's really a lot of people. i thought there were only about 300 computing students in CS1101/2 java stream and a few more engineering students in CS1101C--the C/C++ stream. that's when i realised that "a few more engineering students" are more likely equivalent to about 1,000 students a year. that's when i went "holy shit!" and all just now.

holy shit! what a revelation . . .
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seriously, time to bathe and eat some breakfast. i'm getting hungry. (and more importantly, i need to go to the restroom, some big business. ;))