September 2006 Archives

This is exciting times for the computing world. Apparently Intel is harbouring some exciting tech developments for a while, and now in a span of a less than a year, unleashed the Core chips, Core 2 and Core 2 Duo chips and soon, the Core 2 Quad.

I brushed up on the tech specs of these little babies, and most importantly, a jaunt to check out the latest going price for the top of the line Core 2 Extreme (65nm, 2.9Ghz, 2 MB Shared cache, and apparently as silent as a mosquito sneeze). It's RM3000+. For a processor. Sigh.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: the sexy names Intel is coming up with for the multicore chips. Apparently it as to be technically correct, but not a term that is too technically accurate to put off the masses. Lowest common denominator crap, geddit?

With Intel going Solo for single-core, Duo for dual-core, Quad for quad-core, I'm going to take the leap and guess Intel's gonna call the 8-core processor the Core 2 Octo. Octal is just too long - sounds silly too. 16-core processor? Easy. Core 2 Hex. I won't bet against some politically correct groups going up in arms over that one. "I won't use a machine that implies it's powered by otherworldly forces! No Sir!"

Do you think they'll pay me money since I went online with the names first?

It's amazing. Just when you think you've come up with a brilliant idea, there are already a lot of people who've thought about, mulled, analyzed, regurgitated, and re-digested again the very idea that you thought was pretty damn bleeding edge.

No. I resent that. I will come up with something that nobody has thought of before. Yes, even though recorded history has gone on long enough to pretty much rule out anything that I may think of, but there must be that obscure idea that nobody even realize could exist.

Without resorting to asinine ideas, I must add.

Why, you ask? I want to do something. I want to contribute to people in some way that's tangible. Not philanthropy, well not *just* philanthropy. I want to generate useful things for other people, and not just belong to a society that consumes content, spewing them forth with the mistaken assumption that it's an original idea, without giving something back. I want to create content, not just consume it. Oh, and try to make some money while I'm at it too.

In this day and age, I notice the vast majority of the people just consume content, and consume some more. They read syndicated news, see feeds from global media conglomerates, use software from select number of companies that increasingly gaining control of our lives as our virtual world becomes more real everyday. The Internet is ubiquitous. I want to jump on the bandwagon.

And no, rambleville is not my contribution to society.

Somewhere I read, "leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it." Somehow that stuck to me. I don't think of doing something grand that will make me appear in Encyclopedia Brittannica. Something simple, and yet not simple, if that makes sense (don't answer).

Ok.

Having missed the recent Pay Less Books sale, I was dishearted. My walk was dispirited, my smile felt like a contortion of muscles on my face, devoid of any feelings or pleasure. Many a friend expressed concern over my obvious lack of energy.

But joy! Times Bookshop ran it's warehouse sale, and I was ready to go. The obvious strain on my wallet is forgotten, I was ready to get some serious books. Here's what I got:

The place had a lot of books I wanted to get, but there were simply too many, and I had to sacrifice a few that I had already added to my bag, namely:
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
Wild Swans, Jung Chang
Saving a Fish from Drowning (something like that), Amy Tan
A Song for Susannah, Stephen King
A Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde (I had inadvertently lost this - I wanted to get this one)
The Rice Mother, Rani Manicka (written by Malaysian living in UK, based on recommendation from Abecedarian, dear forum mate)
The Harmony Silk Factory, Tash Aw (written by Malaysian living in UK, based on personal personal curiousity)
The Dain Curse, Dashiel Hammett (I put this away, but I went back looking for it. Couldn't find it. Darn!)
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova.

Imagine if I had bought all of *that*. Shudder.

The trip was also filled with frustrations - mainly the sale of books at rock bottom prices that I bought for the full price *recently*, most notably David Michell's number9dream (which was RM8! Arrrrrrggggh! I paid RM36 about 1 month ago!)

But I am very happy, especially at the wonderful capture of M John Harrison's Light, which at every bookstore I found was priced at RM60+, which is exorbitant to say the least. I paid RM8)

Sometime ago I actually wrote a piece about lovely chess players who added a touch of glamour to the game, but then the damn thing got buried under the sea of unwritten materials lying around in my brain.

Then something like this comes along and revives my interest in it. The story's about a British Grandmaster who punched the World No 3 Men's chess player for dancing with Australia's No 3 woman chess player. Yeah. When you read someone's just walloped somebody else over a chess player, you know you wanna check it out.

I'll spend some time to really write about this, but a quick background - many a moon ago, I was in a chess reacquaintance phase, I actually came across the lovely Alexandra Kosteniuk, the Women's Chess World No 3. I thought it interesting that it never occurred to me before that beauty and brains (well, chess anyway. I know a lot of idiots who plays good chess) can combine, and in Alexandra, combined well.

I hope Alexandra doesn't whack me for this, but seeing that there really are only 2 people who read this blog (yes, mom, you too), I think the Russion beauty wouldn't mind me posting by far my most favouritest picture of her.

Just a quick update on my uncontrollable book buying habits - I was walking around a bookstore looking at the Politics section when I came across a book with a rather strange title. I picked it up, read the back bllurb and a couple of pages, and I was hooked. The book is The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by J. A. Abrams, and it talks about how this chap, who is the editor of the Esquire magazine, realizes that he knows more about popular culture than hard facts - facts he used to know while studying. To cure himself, he subjects himself to a regiment of reading the ultimate tome of human knowledge - the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The result is this book, and it is hilarious. I usually don't buy books on a whim, but this one looked very interesting.

I've finally figured it out.

Actually, not true. I've known about it for a while now. But there is a palpable sense of 'knowing' that hit me recently that tells me the answer to the most pressing question that is plaguing all our minds, messing with our sleep patterns, and generally causing us general discomfort.

The question is, of course, what does it take to make a champion? (See? Doesn't this question bother you?) By champion I don't mean some evangelist or something that IT companies nowadays keep tagging their most enthusiastic personnel i.e. Java Evangelist, Microsoft Vista Product Champion, etc. No. I mean the ultimate in sporting excellence. Champion with a capital C.

I mean, take a look around you. Roger Federer is at the top of his game, and nobody comes close within touching distance of what he has achieved. Tiger Woods is another prime example. Now him I'll talk about a bit later. And in my favourite sport badminton, the top dog happens to be a rather arrogant chap named Lin Dan. Women's golf - Annika Soremstam. All these people have something in common - they win. And they keep winning.

You see, I'm baffled by the inadequacies of the Malaysian badminton team. The Malaysian hockey team. (I'm tempted to say Malaysian football team, but let's be honest here - whom are we kidding? I'd sooner pay more attention to MyTeam than to bat an eyelash at what the national team is doing).

I simply do not understand. For years I've been puzzled by this weirdness. Take the badminton team. Our players are brilliant. Let's face it - they are actually pretty damn good technically. They have all the strokes, footwork, wristwork, skills, shots, even the damn t-shirts down to pat. I'm of the opinion that our best players are as good as or even better than the top players of the world. Actually, I believe this to be true of all head-to-head sports - the top players of the world are separated in the skills department by a factor of less than the width of a molecule. They are so close it doesn't bear mentioning.

HOWEVER. However, there are people like the ones I mentioned above who keep on winning. What is it that keeps tipping the winds in their favour?

The answer: mental toughness. Champions simply think differently. They have a different mindset. They don't exist on the same plane of consciousness as lesser players (okay, that was stretching it a bit. I'm rambling okay, stick with me).

I believe that the difference between a champion and a wannabe champion is the way they think their way through a match. It can be very simple - the champion focuses on the prize, and blocks everything out except the prize. Like Rand Al-thor in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, they focus on the 'flame'. Or it can be the ability to withstand pressure - especially when matches come down the wire. Or it can be more complicated that that, although I can find no examples for complicated champion thinking because I think simply and I'm not a champion of anything yet. But you get the point.

Tiger said something recently at World Golf Championships Bridgestone Invitational 2006 that resonated with what I was feeling: "My body took me out of the tournament and my mind will bring me back in it," he said, when asked what his attitude had been after a very bad second round. "I didn't hit the ball good and my [putting] speed wasn't good early, but the mind is powerful enough to tell the body what to do." He went on to get within 1 shot of the leader the next day, and won it eventually.

And I just (just! The power of the Internet...) found out that he has won his fifth straight golf tournament in the Deusche Bank Championship, bringing his total to 53 career wins thus far.

In fact, I think the very definition of a champion is how he/she can overcome difficult or almost insurmountable resistance to rise above it all and win. I can't count in my hands how many times I've seen Roger Federer dig a whole so deep for himself (or the opponent digs it for him) that he is sure to lose, but somehow he finds strength from deep within to still come back and win it. Lin Dan can surely come from behind for a famous win. He's done it so many times.

Champions don't sweat it when they are behind. They *know* they'll catch up. This is what's missing from the Malaysian badminton players. They think 'oh, I'm losing, but it's okay because the person who's whipping my ass is better than me, and I'm already in the semi-finals'. That's not the attitude to have!

Granted, there are those who focus on the flame so intently that it may as well be a freaking bonfire and still not win anything. Now that is the skill of the champion mind. I acknowledge this happens - sometimes not everyone can simply 'think' like a champion to be a champion. That is the conundrum of the situation, and a secret I know no answer to. If I knew the answer to that you'd be watching me wipe the smirk of Lin Dan's face, I kid you not.

But truly the key to greatness is in the mind.

I think there should be fundamental trainings on the mind for all our atheletes, especially our badminton players (because I love the sport and they break my heart everytime. I hate that feeling). They should be trained to think like a champion (yes, even though I said they may still not be champions even after such a training, but training is better than no training). They should learn not to buckle under the pressure.

I'll talk about Tiger and the power of his mind later. I'm supposed to go to sleep. Champions have to sleep too, you know.