the indispensable course of momentum

the time goes by so quickly. it’s blinding, the speed of it all. i will attempt to summarize my experiences so far this season.

how do i quantify the value of this last month? so soon the pang of summer will be upon us. as is in most states of change, this spring has been a torrential series of mountains and valleys; no doubt that king pendopoo himself need prove to one and all our (in)significance, as we walk the precarious landscape of the long now.

of all the events that can change the course of life in any given direction, some stand out as president, its true significance only apparent to some. the first was known to me back in march. karin, alex and i received news from OMA in rotterdam that we were to join them for the summer as an intern “dream team” for the thinktank section of the company called AMO. since that time, i have been steadily gearing myself towards our eventual move to rotterdam to participate in arguably, one of the most exciting firms in architecture/urban planing today.

meanwhile, with the new spark that collaborative strategies offered, karin, alex and i did some great work with violeta houbenova and niki lampaski for the Argent/kings cross regeneration in the city of london. while working on this project, i soon re-realized the importance of the virtual domain and its blurring of perception and paradigm. as the real and virtual became unified, so do our online experiences collide with real life making our lifestyle that much more intangible, the two complimenting one another more and more by the nanosecond. this project was so well received that the director of my MA course in london has decided that the project is worth pursuing farther. this good news of course, excited me. along with our joint internship with OMAMO, i felt as if everything i have learned up to this point was being harnessed and directed towards a bright future.

then my grandma in singapore passed away. it wasn’t unexpected, as she was sick already for quite some time, yet it is truly miraculous what she has achieved in her lifetime, with the cultivation of such an amazing and loving family that spans the globe. as matriarch of our widespread clan, she was our living ancestor from a time when life was very different and proved to us the invaluable skill of adaptation. my relationship with her was sparse but never temporal – i would say timeless. i will miss her very much but know that her legacy will persevere in the people she has affected in her lifetime.

and not only did i loose my grandma this month but i lost my OMA as well. just last week karin, alex and i received a letter from OMA stating that they could not find an appropriate project for us (but we suspect it was actually for visa reasons). this unfortunate turn of events completely disrupted my plans for the summer, already giving notice to our landlord that we would leave our flat in london, not to mention losing the dream of working for a company that so inspires such as OMA. my collegue Myrto put it quite bluntly to me; as a young architect, from OMA, there is no where else to go but down.

not knowing what to do next, i reached out to my friend and mentor Dan Hill, of cityofsound.com and monocle magazine fame. he was the first person i turned to and his help and advice has been spot on and extremely supportive. seeing more in me then i have wisdom to even notice, he has taught me the genius of personal experience. after talking to him i pulled myself together and began to rearrange my outlook of the future. he also kindly posted on his enlightening weblog about karin, alex and me, even in the midst of organizing Postopolis! in NYC. because of his invaluable input and the inspiration of just witnessing his own practice, i realized the immense work and passion that one has to endure to be happy with what they do.

this morning i set out to find a new place to live since i am about to be homeless on the 6th of june. when walking out of the finsbury park tube station, i noticed that alex was trying to call me so i took a seat on the curb and gave him a call. he frantically conveyed to me that OMA wrote back and said they wanted us, after all. then i asked myself, how can this month get anymore thrilling?

j.

EYE LUV -= L o c o R o c o =- H@H@! LOL!!!

this game really makes me titillate like a japanese schoolgrrl.

i stumbled upon this wonderful game for the psp while doing my ritualistic combing of one of my favorite websites. innovative right from the getgo, loco roco fuses light-hearted gameplay, great music, spiffy character design, and some unknown addictive element akin to heroin to make a wonderfully playable journey through a curious world.

its quite easy to pick up the game mechanics. you direct your lovable, singing smiley blob through various obstacles, picking up pieces of your house and friends along the way. by pressing the left and right buttons on your psp, you are able to tilt and rock the entire environment (and sometimes the environments are the innards of snakes or intestinal passageways of penguins… maybe our sexless protagonist is some type of bacteria?) using gravity to roll your soon-to-be chubby buddy through the labyrinth-like landscape. its quite a nice concept, for game play involves using the environment to move your rotund hero and not direct manipulation of the character. No computer game slaves at the whim of a perverse gamer in this game!

another nice feature about loco roco is that when you grab particular flora and fauna within the stages, you can reproduce. that’s right. somehow the hero of the game can clone itself when touching special flowers. in no time at all, you will find yourself rolling and bouncing around 20 little communistically driven buddies of gelatinous cute-ness into one huge super blob (or mob) and vise versa.

in order to unlock certain elements of the game, you need a minimum number of blobby-fun-dudes. this mostly entails having enough of the little buggers to have a big enough chorus to sing parts of the landscape awake.

This game is addictive. “How?” you may ask? I am writing this review with the knowledge of only playing 2 stages of this super game until my psp was stripped away from me by a certain maedelmaedel. For someone who says they were never into video games as a child…

Here is a link to 1up.com, which has a nice interview with the game’s director and some nice media to get an idea of what loco roco is all about.

Technorati Tags: loco roco, psp, sony, smallcaps, video games, villainous.biz

the nonsensical political antics of a “neutral” country

on the 1st of october, austrians around the world will join in communion and vote in their new supreme overlord of the once great and prolific habsburg empire, which pretty much conquered the entire known universe (earth, heaven and all) by sending sons and daughters to various european empires to essentially sleep their way to the top of the euro-charts, in and around the 18th century.

like how most kookoo politicians around the world do, various tactics are employed to woo (that’s “to woo” not “tha wu” ’cause tha wu-tang clan ain’t nuttin’ to fuk wit) the hearts of the plebeian voters. this phenomenon is no different in austria. here is a song performed by the austrian educational minister from the 70’s. the title of the song translates roughly to “hands of my pussy” in english and is a testament to the sons and daughters that this fine nation has produced, and lays the stage for the next generation of austrian leaders who will be voted in next month.

my dad in china

my dad recently made a journey to the motherland (china) with some survivors of the Nanjing Massacre. here is an excerpt from his most recent blog entry:

Her story was one of horror and sexual terror; she has become sterile and barren, and has a fear of men. Unable to bear any children herself, she adopted two boys, one of whom (man on her right) is now looking after her in her old age. Surprisingly, she displayed no hatred for her oppressors; like all the other victims, all she asked for was an apology from the Japanese government.
Everybody in the audience was moved by her story. At one point, Flora, who was translating her story for the teachers, broke down in tears. By the end of her story, there was almost not a single dry eye in the room.

continue reading the weblog of eugene koh here.

loose 5 months of work in 1sec. (or, never quite fits the same like the first time)

*achtung! Before proceeding, please consider the possibility of eminent hard drive failure and back-up all your important data immediately. This is your third final warning in this particular post. As a side *achtung! I also promise to not get emotional.

A couple days ago I was waking up in the kitchen (I “wake up” by drinking warm, caffeinated beverages. No, flat room temp. coke is not considered a warm, caffeinated beverage and no, I did not literally wake up off my kitchen floor. I have the floor in my bedroom for doing that), and had a black tea and a bowl of lemon yogurt for that meal between lunch and dinner, dunch. As I was chatting to smarch on skype, I experienced an abnormally long wait for what is widely known as the spinning beach ball of death. Using macs and computers in general for a number of years, I decided to execute the best know fix for such a predicament; I pressed and held the power button to initialize a hard reboot.

Curious about what was going on behind the apple aesthetic facade, I decided to boot the machine in verbose mode (command-v) to watch the start up echo and analyze why my computer was hanging. While it was initializing the swap partition, I was presented with the first clue:

Disk I/O error. Hummm… ok. I let it run a little longer to see if any other errors came up in the boot process. Usually a memory error on a mac chimes a drum roll, or something like that at the boot rom faze. i did not hear this so I was fairly certain it wasn’t my ram gone rotten. After listing its’ failed attempts to create a swap partition, I was faced with this error.

Fairly straight forward so far. I suspected that it was a hard drive failure. I placed my ear up to where the hard drive would be on a 12-inch powerbook; on the lower left side of the notebook, under the left side of hand-rest, beside the battery, and listened. Fulfilling my fears, I heard a consistent, rhythmic ticking sound emanating deep from within the powerbook’s 1-inch body, which incidentaly reminds me of a techno party i went to in berlin. Anyone who has had any experience with rhythmic ticking hard drive sounds would know that this symptom was, colloquially put, totally fcuked up.

Ok. At this point I started to freak out a little, but only in the inside . It was 17:30 so I still had some time to run to conrad, grab the proper screw drivers (a torx T6 and a philips #0 40mm) and a fresh hard drive, stop off at the atelier to grab a couple external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures (6 pin firewire and a 4 pin USB2 one) and rushed back home to be with my ticking sweetheart.

Making a worktable out of a couple a-frame stands and an old door that uli picked up somewhere outside, I set up a quick and dirty workbench in our living room, looked up a howto on the internet, put some rubber gloves on (oh wait, techno party again) and proceeded to jump into the machine.

The procedure was a lengthy and trying process. I had to remove the battery, memory, keyboard, most of the housing and a sh!t load of tiny screws of various lengths and diameter.

After some digging I finally got to the heart of the problem, a 5 year old 30gb Toshiba hard drive. “You little bastard” I called it, as I plucked it from its cozy place. I wonder if heat affected its lifespan. There were quite a few layers of sticker insulating the area of the powerbook that the hard drive was contained in… hummmm… mental note…

Before installing the new hard drive I picked up earlier that day (an 80gb, 8mb 4200RPM fujitsu, for long battery life) I attempted a series of recovery methods to try to salvage any data I could from the hard drive.

I tried to connect the hard drive in question directly to a parallel ATA port on OS X, windows XP and debian GNU|linux machines. I tried again in firewire and usb hard drive enclosures, as target mode for os x, mounting in linux, even installed macdrive on my XP machine but to no avail. Tried a knoppix disk too. I tried to shake it a little. even tried sweet-talking. Nothing. i wasn’t able to initialize the drive what-so-ever. I guess the main problem was simply one of mechanical failure.

After putting the faulty hard drive in the freezer (some long lost, hard drive recovery mojo that smarch bestowed upon me, most likely found on some ancient tomb of a forum, babelfished from some eastern European server), I installed the new hard drive and screwed the poor thing back together with all the care a lover would screw that special someone, although it really doesn’t fit the same way like it did the first time.

Barring some magnetic storage forensics miracle (and boat loads of money) here is a list of the data I lost off the top of my head, forever.

Things lost:

80 or so high resolution photocollages / any photograph I took in the last five months, including new year / 4000+ emails / a whole bunch of new contacts / 2 new proposals for exhibitions in Germany and the Netherlands / all the music I ever made on gameboy and garageband, including all samples, recordings and loops / my CV / some freelance work for a fashion company masterpiece cleaners is working on / a whole buncha other stuff that will be sorely missed.

Things gained:

an ever increasing loss of faith in salvation through science and technology

*This list is more for my personal mourning, but i also hope it scares you into backing up all your stuff right now. That’s right. Stop reading and go back-up. Now.

let this be a lesson to me (again!). back-up, b a c k – u p , !!!BACK-UP!!!! Hope you get the message too. Please back-up regularly (as in, more then every half year) and safely (as in, mirror your hard drive and put it at your mama’s house, or wherever it would be safe from your own house burning). 30 gb of data is really a lot of stuff.

good luck!