Fat Fingers

So at this point I’ve got pretty much all that I’ve wanted for my bicycles.

Campy Record? I’ve got the hubs.
Dura Ace? I’ve got the whole gruppo.
XTR? I’ve got them from nine hundred to nine-five-two. And both five-arm cranksets no less.

Three months ago a friend mentioned the classic pearl white Sante crankset, apparently quite rare. Three nights ago I bought a bicycle with it. It’s a rather numb feeling when I’m finally holding in my hands the very thing that I might have pursued for months. The chase is over; the fun has ended. Owning the item isn’t quite as exciting as trying to get it.

I’ve got six frames and almost twenty wheels; lugged, TIG-welded, steel, titanium. My room really looks like a shop now. The question is: Where do I go from here? What else is there for me to get that I haven’t already got?

A 1964 Rene Herse mixte? A Toei? A Mercian?

Let’s wait and see.

If there is one thing I have a big problem with, it is that of a person not speaking his mind.

Too many people keep secrets; too many faces are facades. You never know what another person is really thinking or feeling; You never know if what you see is what you get.

This breeds plenty of ill feelings, especially when the truth is eventually made known.

From a multitude of conversations with a multitude of people over many years, I have come to realise (and I am sure everyone else too) that a great deal of people do not like a great deal of other people.

Yet when I go to lunches and dinners and meetings and cocktails and weddings and family sitdowns, I see plenty of happy facades. Bullshit.

This should not be the case. People who have issues with one another should talk it out, face-to-face. No intermediaries, no letters, no e-mails, no messages.

SMS as a form of communication is by far the worst way to solve personal problems. Parties have the option of hanging an issue by not replying a message. The sender never knows what is really going on, and the issue at hand never gets resolved.

In my opinion, there is no room to be wishy-washy in interpersonal communication. You always say what is on your mind, you are always open and honest, and you do not hide your thoughts and feelings from the party you are communicating with.

It is precisely the act of deliberately withholding and concealing information, or the lack of drive to address and close an issue that creates suspicion and uncertainty.

I do not like suspicion or uncertainty. I do not want to make time to mindread and decipher hints and clues. I like an overt, frank, and direct communication of ideas and intentions.

Perhaps I do not live up to my own expectations of other people’s methods of communication, but I am sure as hell working on it.

There is a new catch phrase in town. It’s "strong mandate".

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, "strong mandate" is an arbitrary point on the popularity rating scale. This has now been defined as 66.6 percent.

By this definition, anything that reaches 66.6 percent or more, is good by Singaporean standards. It’s a mark to be proud of - a sign of a capable student, a popular trend, or a competent government.

Our new grade scale now looks like this (with a revision suggested by Tinky):

A+ and A is an absolute mandate (80%)
B+ and B is an overwhelming mandate (70%)
C+ is a just a strong mandate (66.6%)
C is an average mandate (60%)
D is a poor mandate (50%)

Of course, absolute should really be 100%, but who gets full-marks for anything?

From the looks of this, I’m doing pretty well in school!

I walked to the bus stop last night and was blocked by the exiting members of the PAP rally. There is was, stuck because Chok Tong and Boon Yang and the guys were walking to their cars. I had no choice but to wait, surrounded by crowds of supporters who were cheering "PAP! PAP! PAP!".

I would have been excited, but for the fact that I was in a hurry to get back to school, on a Tuesday night at ten, carrying a bag that weighed about eight kilos and very irritated from reading a textbook about marketing.

I ended up snapping at my friend on the phone and also missing my express bus, which cost me a half hour wait (testament to the lousy bus service). To me, a good bus service is always freshly air-conditioned, smell-free, teenage-chatter-free, drives very fast, and arrives every four minutes.

I arrived in my room the find the water heater still leaking, sink still choked, and the lights blown. Beautiful.

Internet connection, slow as always. I connect to more than four sites and the MSN goes down. If you want to stay in NTU, drive your own car and susbcribe to SingNet broadband for your room. Bring your own portable air-conditioner and fridge, and bring your own washing machine too.

The shittle, sorry, shuttle buses here run an average of five times less frequently than the SBS services, drive at about two-thirds the speed, and carry half the passengers. I don’t know why we are paying for it at all, or that the school is desperate enough to subscribe to this shuttle bus company.

I don’t know why the administration can get away with supplying hall residents with dial-up speed connections, especially when deadlines are always looming and thousands of students need to download billions of bytes.

I don’t understand how residents can put up with machines that leave layers of lint on the washed clothes, and washing cycles that take more than an hour to complete.

In short, I don’t see how this jungle can live up to the world class image that it is trying to portray. It is only world class in its absolute rurality, and the fact that you can be buried in the next door cemeterial complex if you get killed by a stray mortar bomb from the live firing area, also next door.