A Walk Down Church Street
July 17th, 2010 RaVPup | Bookmark
A walk down Church Street, Parramatta, on a lazy Saturday morning.
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July 17th, 2010 RaVPup | Bookmark
A walk down Church Street, Parramatta, on a lazy Saturday morning.
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June 14th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark
Hi, just a short update this time. I haven’t gotten to the stage in my projects that I’m ready to write about it in my blog. Save to say there’s a lot of stuff happening in my life now and I’m keeping rather busy. I wanted to talk today about something a little bit more substantial, so, “I’ll knock this one on the head,” as they say in Australia.
When you’re young and life is beaming there is not a lot you think about. The past is the past and that’s where it should stay. Someday, however, you get old and your death looks you in the face. Most people don’t question the purpose of their lives until they get to this stage. By then I’m afraid, you are what you were, and nothing can change that.
I managed to have a significant crisis in my mid-twenties that resulted in me asking many of the same questions that people ask when they’re nearing the end of their stint. I came to a lot of realisations very early and I’m thankful for the forces that be for the opportunity to resolve my issues while my parents were still alive.
If you don’t harness the opportunity to ask your parents about those questions that you have before they have passed away, you have lost your chance forever. It’s the punishment for not appreciating their struggles in life before they left you on your own.
I understand that my childhood was not picture perfect. In fact, it is a fallacy to expect your parents to live up to the ideals of the Brady Bunch. There is no parent in the world that has ever raised their child to such a standard that they can be considered the perfect parent. You can never be the perfect parent, so you should not feel that at the end of your life you’ve made some horrible error that has robbed your child of his or her future.
You can only do so much. The rest is up to the heavens and stars. Thinking that you can move it all for that one person that you value the most is succumbing to the fallacy of control. This piece is not really for the people that read my blog. It’s for an older audience. I’m hoping that someone will read this at those twilight moments and feel reassured that they have lived their lives to the fullest.
The journey of life is a complex and rewarding one, something that should be cherished when the full spectrum of your experiences are taken into account. I am not done with my life just yet but I feel very grateful that my parents chose to have me. Whatever issues I have with my parents, they don’t get in the way of appreciating what they went through to give me better opportunities. It’s not just my parents, but also my grandparents and their parents.
My last remaining grandparent died this year. She was a very old woman, but not disabled by her age in any way. She passed away with a quadruple heart attack. As she was lying in that hospital bed, a hundred miles away I was lying in my bed. I was thinking about things, when a voice from nowhere said, “Alright son, I’ll see you some other time.”
I heard it as clear as day, and 10 minutes after, the phone rang and sure enough the news was delivered that my grandmother had passed away. I wasn’t that surprised. You see, I have accepted long ago that religion might not be the outmoded relic that many people think it is.
I was struggling in my life, overcome by depression and despondency, when out of the goodness of my heart I donated my last $200 to a woman called Mary Stone who I barely even knew, for future earnings. That is to say, I paid my Zakat in advance to an American woman.
I’m Muslim, but the religion of Islam has been distorted in so many ways that what people practise and preach is so far removed from the core of Islam that it’s not even Islam anymore. Muslims are allowed to drink. They just cannot be intoxicated at a Mosque. Islam respects Judaism, far from what you’ve been led to believe. In fact, if things work out, I would like to marry a certain Jewish woman. The hate between Muslims and Jews is very unfathomable for so many reasons. The cultures are almost identical and the faiths are inter-related.
I thoroughly detest anti-Semitism in all its forms and would never take up arms against a Jew or a Muslim if given the opportunity. I am not a terrorist. My aim in life is to live to the best of my ability, respect my fellow man and make some lasting change in the world that benefits the human race. I strive to do this in my everyday existence, not just by focussing on things that I can control, but by extending my scope to the wider world and taking a view of what is happening in the long term.
These are my goals. I felt I should clarify for the people who know me on a personal level. Sometimes they involve questionable ethics. Peace sometimes comes at the end of a barrel, and I’m not afraid to fire the gun and let Allah guide my aim.
Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Social | 3 Comments »
April 26th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark
There we were,
Standing at port,
Talking of things,
I shall mention not,
She ascended without,
For I was too blind,
To notice that she,
Had left me behind,
Before I saw,
The ropes were called,
The sails were cast,
The planks were hauled,
It hath has not sailed,
This surly ship,
It floats on the shore,
And dances and whips,
I’ll pull it back,
One day I will,
I keep my hope,
For her still.
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April 15th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark
I’ve been calmly watching the evolution of Twitter. I recognise the potential of such a tool but I don’t know if it has the right kind of interface to make it worth my while. The updates are via SMS or directly posted on the site.
The issue is that SMS updates cost a lot of money and SMS is a stateless protocol. There is no way to know whether your Twitter messages were posted in time, in order and reached the right people. In that regard, there is no way you could use Twitter for anything more than myopic information about yourself for friends.
Blog entries take a lot of time and thought, possibly even inspiration. This is, of course speaking personally. The journey of having a blog could not be summed up in one, or possibly even a hundred paragraphs of writing for me. It has exposed me to all manner of criticism, from its last incarnation to its current one. It’s hard putting yourself out there for public criticism. When the opportunity presents, everyone is a critic.
The arguments are old ones and tried for many generations. The message is, “You should conform”, however, living in a globalised society means that there are so many ethos to chose from that the longer one delays their own suppression of ego, the more prone one is to rambling under the guise of trying to please everyone.
It’s hard to find an identity in an ever changing world and harder yet to solidify that entity when the people that you rely on for emotional support are over moralising in their own right. The goal for me was to free myself of my own distortions about life, and in doing so I have come to have the same distortions again, but now I understand them.
I am a product of my upbringing. I am the fruit of my indoctrination. I am who I was but a little more me.
So now, Twitter. Do I expose myself even further to critics? Do I feel so secure about my life and myself that I would choose to expose my everyday thoughts in real time to the world around me? Should I moderate my Twitter so as to shield myself from what others consider right or wrong? I have been thinking about these questions before I adopt the technology. What I want to know is, I can do something for Twitter, what can Twitter do for me?
Many of my friends have subscribed to my Facebook and I am comfortable with that medium. Even though I don’t have 300 friends, the ones that I do have are valued and of long standing. I feel no threat to divulge my thoughts on my Facebook status because the people that see it are not the ones that will come back and haunt me for it.
There have been instances of my Facebook status messages being censored but the people responsible usually curtail their friendship. Most of the people that are on there seem to have no problem. That is why I post my political and religious thoughts on Facebook and leave the blog for something light more light hearted than fundamental social schema.
I undertook a process after 2003, after returning from my visit to my homeland, to learn all I can about others because I felt confident about myself. The sad reality is that learning about others tortures your ego and you no longer feel as confident about the things you say as you once did. I cannot categorically deny Jehovah, Allah or Jesus and pursue my academic and scientific career without a care in the world. To expose yourself to public criticism is to weaken your ego for higher consciousness. I feel venerated that I am able to tell people close to me exactly what I am about. I am able to take on new challenges that I had never thought possible and I am able to achieve outcomes for myself that should be out of reach. This in of itself shows me that I am doing the right thing for my own personal development.
Will I use Twitter? I think I might try it for a while to see how it goes. You can see my tweets on http://twitter.com/ravpup
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April 12th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark
(11:07:15 PM) RaVPup: I was thinking of a poem
(11:07:20 PM) RaVPup: How does this sound
(11:07:29 PM) RaVPup: Jennifers quite quirky
(11:07:34 PM) RaVPup: Gorky Park
(11:07:41 PM) RaVPup: Her waters are a little murky
(11:07:44 PM) RaVPup: Gorky Park
(11:08:06 PM) RaVPup: How strong is your arm?
(11:08:12 PM) RaVPup: At least one sputnik!
(11:08:22 PM) RaVPup: opinions?
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April 11th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark
I’m a late starter. I didn’t get up for the blogger bus until April this year. I would like to boost the tempo on this blog and start writing about something other than undies, curious mathematical observations and the like but I’m not strategically placed at this point in time. So, instead, to satiety your appetite I’m going to write about my music collection.
I had quite a good music collection only back in December, 2007 which I deleted. Since then I’ve been rebuilding my music collection. I’ve only managed to get a few of the albums that I had before and none of the quality that I would like. The problem with the whole pipeline from my music to my ears is multifaceted. Firstly, I cannot get the full bit rate of 320kbps in my collection for every song that I have. This is not a problem in and of itself because the bit rate of a CD track is only 128kbps so the rest of the sample space is filled with noise. However, on a well produced CD the noise should be clean, without any white noise in the mix. This having been said, on acoustically recorded pieces there is a little thing called warmth that comes through on a well trained ear. I’m not saying this to shake my wood at you, I worked in the audio-visual department of a University for four years so I have some idea what I’m talking about.
The next problem that plagues me is that on electronica releases, there is the all too hideous gap between tracks which just kills the enjoyment of a nice trance CD. Trance is my favourite style of music by the way. I diverged from the genre at a turning point in my life but now I’m back to it.
Thirdly, the problem of categorising your music based on ID3 tags is a serious rectal assassination. The reason is that everyone has come up with their own convention for naming tracks on an album, myself included. This makes it difficult to say, engineer an electronic system to retrieve a playlist based on mixes that it can do by itself, and play those mixes back to you. Ideally, I am in the process of designing such a system. I’ve been doing it for about 8 years now so I don’t know if it will ever be completed but most of the software and hardware components are now quite readily available.
The final nail in the coffin is that I can only enjoy the sounds of my collection through an iPod, which disgusts me. The fidelity on the headphones of an iPod do not rival my 20th Anniversary Limited Edition Sony CD Player but it’s no longer convenient for me to carry around a CD player.
In essence, the only way to hear music is at a club or a concert with a professional sound system. I cannot believe how much I miss those days of clubbing and dancing, but I’m older now, and not quite as outgoing as I used to be, which brings me back to my music collection.
I’m in the process of rebuilding it. To give you picture of what I have in there, there’s the entire Gatecrasher series, Carl Cox, Derrick Carter, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Mozarts works and my personal favourite, Bach. Classical music doesn’t really give me that bump and grind feel but the quality of the recordings seems to be a lot better which is excellent for when I want to enter one of my creative phases and throw up a piece on this website, change themes, write some code or whatever.
Speaking of which, I was talking to Becy about getting back into producing my own tracks. I haven’t done that since 1997 and it would be fun to see if I’ve gained any knowledge or feel that see’s me producing better tracks. Anyway, it seems to be the in thing to fire up Acid and come up with some layered tracks to show off to your buddies on ITM. I might get Rebirth again and give it a shot. I hope I can get the sampler as well because that was the critical piece missing in the puzzle last time I wanted to molest my virtual ‘x0x’ device. Anyway, that’s my verbal refuse for the time being and happy Easter. A special mention to my friend Weev.
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November 26th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark
Beautiful woman
Emotions on the trendline
They wither away
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October 3rd, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark
Is my IQ 140 or 155 and above? Do I give an Irishman in a flying canoe worth of thought to it? There was a time when it was a problem for me, thinking that I had the acuity of a mollusc but that’s the difference between others and me. I work on myself.
Aside from a hearty discussion with Becy about her tridachia, I enjoy nothing more than grabbing a cup of tea, sitting back and punching keys. I like typing. That’s a very primal urge of mine that keeps these pages forming, like a grain of sand that turns into a pearl.
Enough talk of the fathoms, or you might think that I live in a yellow submarine. Sometimes, I wish I did because the humour just isn’t translating. With fear of penning another piece in the same style as I’ve done before, ‘Master of his Domain’ wasn’t about Amy so much as it was about getting someone to pick up a God damned dictionary.
I write because its fun for me and playing little word games on these pages of mine are quite entertaining. I do in fact know Amy and she is into bondage but that’s beside the point. It’s Jennifer. She did it to me again. I have the constant need to show that I’m smarter that I really am, according to her. Not surprisingly, my self-image differs somewhat because I was sure I painted my submarine red. I am racking my brains trying to figure out how a woman so beautiful has the personality of a goldfish
So the question still remains as to why I write in such a sesquipedalian manner. The truth is I’ve always done it. I’ve been subscribing to www.dictionary.com and www.oed.com ‘Word of the day’ since 1998 and I have so many words in my vocabulary that I forget what they mean sometimes. The blog isn’t about language, vocabulary, mathematics, physics, psychology or any number of other topics. It’s about making you think. I was prepared to get burned at the stake for it, but the flames are ever so hotter when you’re in them. Aesop, said it well, “Please all and you shall please none.”
I’ll cut the apologetics short and focus on lampooning. What should I lampoon, if not for a lamp and a… Well I did start this with some topical humour and I’ll end it there so I may return to my lucubration. If you digested this short verbalisation without the help of Webster, call me up and I’ll buy you a red to go with that smile of yours.
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September 28th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark
It must be the inaugural month of the lusty season. I met a submissive today. Well, more correctly, I met a submissive a few weeks ago but I didn’t know she was a submissive until she showed me a warm tanned picture of her in an evening dress with imposing pearls, and a black band around her mouth.
Curious, in a concerned way, I asked her if she was into bondage, to which she winked and replied, “Well. Yes.” Her steady aplomb assured me that she wasn’t emotionally scarred from the whole affair as I picture a lot of the sadism and masochism crowd to be. Bondage has always struck me as a sordid affair, something that takes place in the crevices of a seedy city existence, so it was with some surprise that the realisation dawned on me that perhaps my beautiful Singaporean princess was a little less then chaste in the whole affair.
I have not known her for long, but for many furlongs. She is an immigrant who plans to enrol in a nursing degree and she has been in the Western world neigh on two months. The sad situation with foreign students, and I know a few of them, is how to turn a dollar while they pursue their tutelage. Foreign students are always painted as the picture of wealth, with their expensive European cars, old money and hedonistic party lifestyles. I’m here to tell you that they are not all diamonds that glitter in the Sun, most of the time it’s tinsel.
I have known Amy for the better part of a few months. We met on some unmentionable dating site where she sent me an email. She was quite the aesthetic beholding, and naturally my hormonal urges took the better part of my reasoning and here we are. She has not been the most verbose person that I’ve ever met, but she certainly is on the more intriguing side.
In my short tridecadian life, I’ve met many people from many demographics and I can assure you that it’s not often that I am taken by surprise at the demeanour of a person. However, bondage is one of those things that I would never have pictured lay in the domain of her existence anymore than I pictured it would somehow find its way to mine. Let me be forthright in saying that I am not interested in the quirky pleasure of the sexual practise of pain. Through my own study of human psychology I am most sternly assured that both sadism and masochism are products of a malfunctioning pain pathway. I am indeed pathologising what many people have come to accept as a more esoteric form of sexual gratification, in the same way as homosexuality was considered a neurosis in the penultimate decade. Morally, I have no issue with what a person wishes to do in their own bedroom but I cannot participate in the ritual of acquiesced torture. Nevertheless, my curiosity begets me as it naturally has and I’m obligated to ensue with a full investigation of her personality. I would like to ascertain whether she does this for the coin or for the loin.
I have come across a study in my travels that states that a man and woman have a relationship based on the dominance and submissiveness of the courting pair. The extension of this study is that, in the copulative phase of the affair, the roles are reversed, and it is actually the most dominant of the pair that is submissive, vice versa. I do find the thought of bondage intriguing to some extent, but that interest stops well before the device of pain is administered. In essence, I am interested in women that are dominant in the bedroom. Perhaps, instead of a malfunctioning pain pathway, it is the exaggeration of the need to be dominant that drives Amy to engage in the acts of bondage. She assures me that she will not hurt me, but when your wrists and ankles are stretched to the posts it might as well be a rack that you’re laying on.
I had a professor once who told me that there are two primal urges of a human. One is the gratification of sexual desires and the other is the drive of aggression. These are Freudian ideas, and from his work in analytical psychology he also theorised that what is forbidden is attractive. In other words, is it trendy to be sexually deviant in today’s society, or is it another more pathological desire that drives a sweet and attractive girl like Amy to engage in this behaviour.
Although I would never engage in the administration or reception of pain willingly, there is something about her nonchalant admission of her atypical sexual escapades that I find worthy of discussion. It’s not often, and I doubt many people have had the pleasure, that you meet someone that is interested in such a niche area of salacious carnal expression.
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September 8th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark
Today was one of those beautiful days. It’s the end of winter and the spring sun hit us for the first time. I woke up to a bright and warm morning and it set the mood for the rest of the day. I am not one to be dissuaded by the winter blues but I absolutely love the warmer days of the year. In fact, I have built a life around the spring and summers of this country.
I haven’t really been doing all that much except catching up on some much needed sleep, hooking up with my old high school friends on Facebook and soaking in the sunshine as far as that goes. I have had a mind to quit smoking and go to the gym. Spring is that time of year that people start coming out of the wood work and I have been following suit, trying to catch up with a few old friends that I have missed.
I managed to catch up with a friend of mine from one of my old quagmires. He is doing pretty well for himself. He DJs and has his flat set up with an array of equipment and computers. It was interesting listening to the tunes that he was pumping out because they were fresh. It’s not often in the world of Electronica that you get to hear new sounds and it usually takes a shift in genre to get your listening pleasure back.
Conversation slowly turned to a party that was being thrown on the weekend and I agreed to come along for the ride. To be honest, I’m bored to the hilt of parties that carry on until all hours of the night in ennui of substance abuse but because the punters were in their early 20’s, I thought I could use it as a chance to check out my approval ratings with the ladies. I’m looking pretty good these days, maintaining a steady 23.4 BMI with no exercise or dieting, and that’s faring pretty well for me. I was hoping to see some nice young girls that I could hit on for ego preservation purposes, so I put on my little black number, high heels, power belt and padded bra and headed out for the occasion.
I was an instant hit when I got there, garnering quite a few looks from the ladies. In fact, the prime catch of the night looked straight at me when she walked in. Not to be vain, but that’s a boost in any mans language. I was smashing in the looks department. The problem arose when I tried to start a conversation with the below fair-age dating 18 year old girl. I have an arsenal of conversation home runners which I thought I would start with. With my deep and varied knowledge of the Sydney clubbing scene, I am usually able to engage a woman in a very animated fashion for a long period of time however, the animations coming from her were a little bit like Warner Brothers when she dropped the ball at a discussion of Tank at the Establishment. Not to be thrown off my batting average, I shifted a groove into the music genres. I did this at a huge risk to myself as I was surrounded by seasoned musicians and could have easily come off second best but that was not to be as she flew straight into the ground on that one as well.
I could only come to the obvious conclusion that I am now a seasoned man and have nothing to gain from dating hot, 18 year old girls. The only reason would be the very one that I wrote about in my last article, and having said that publically it would now be a complete conundrum to about face and date for purely carnal pleasure. Normally, the rule seems to be that a strike at an available girl from the group usually rules you out from a secondary strike at any other girl should your first salvo fail. This didn’t seem to be the situation that I was in, because as I was leaving before the 12pm party approval deadline that I had set myself, another girl asked for my phone number through proxy. I found this rather strange because we hadn’t talked all night and I barely even noticed her, but I was in the mood for having a flirt and said it would be okay if she got it.
I’m not sure how far I should take it with this new group that I have hooked up with, because after only just meeting them, they don’t seem my type of people. They drink a lot, which I gave up a few years ago, and tend to be a little loud with a few unresolved personality issues still meandering around. To be quite frank, having dealt with most of mine by now, it’s a little scary.
The first girl that approached me through the night decided to tag along with us in the car as I was going home, which came as no surprise since she’d been staring at me all night. On the way out of the car she casually brushed my hair in an indication that it was still a viable avenue but I thought that I better leave this alley-way alone given that a few more people were trying to squeeze down it and that even for an 18 year old she was a complete bore. As I said, the venture was strictly for ego purposes and to that end I had my fix.
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