The Antique

Back to the LED's.

It turns out that coloring the outside of a mini LED can actually change its hue, but unfortunately, this is only true for "cool" shades. I can change it to blue, purple, or green but not to reddish or orange light. So the next question I'm dying to answer is, how do you change a 5 V dc voltage to alternating voltage? The aim is to make the lights gradually go from dim to strong and back to dim in a cycle. At my disposal, I have the very basic ingredients of electric circuits class - resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, BJT transistors, and a MOSFET.

One way that I know is by using diodes. Any other creative answers are welcome.

A random question: what fun things can you do with a motor (indoors) that's a 1990 build, used originally to drive floppy disks (remember those?).

I am thinking of doing something with rotating lights all around my room. I haven't tried it out yet. I will definitely have to make use of gears and other simple mechanical rotation to linear motion devices.

The Wi-Fi Question

I wonder if the cost of setting up universal Wi-Fi or worldwide (or nationwide) broadband outweigh the subscriptions of millions of mobile phone subscribers who have to pay an outrageous amount of money every month for service they don't even use? In USA for example the least expensive voice plan is $39.99 (not inclusive of tax) by Verizon Wireless and Sprint. According to NY Times, an average family spends about $1000 every year on cell phone service. But a decent ISP such as comcast will charge $400 every year, again, for each household. You already can make phone calls from one computer to another using a variety of softwares such as Skype, and text messaging is simply IM'ing. What is higher, the cost of making every highway, every street and every house like the insides of Starbucks, or the $1000 each of a hundred million has to pay every year for cell phone usage, roughly $10 billion?

LED question

Q. Does anyone know why a single christmas tree mini LED will light up with only 5V? The entire rope will need the usual input of 120V from the mains, ofcourse, just as you would plug it in. But only 5V for a single LED. I thought they were connected in parallel. Then again it doesn't make sense that a single LED would ever use 120 V. I haven't tried hooking it up to the mains with a 120 V adaptor for obvious reasons, but I was wondering if anyone knew.

Edit:
Turns out that the mini LED's in christmas light ropes ARE actually connected in series. There are 50 of them and they share the 120 V from the mains. I was not sure about this because when one of the LED's blew up, if they were connected in series, it would break the circuit and so the entire rope would stop working. But the rope still continues to work because there is a shunt inside each LED, which doesn't break the circuit even after a bulb fuses.

So with my 5 Volt adaptor, I would be able to connect two LED's in series, instead of just one really bright LED which would blow out pretty soon. It's been two days, though.

Q. With a whopping 8000 K color temperature that's typical of most LED's, I was wondering if coloring over the exterior of the bulb would be able to warm up the light given out (This is a misnomer: "warm white" has a lower color temperature than the bluish "cool white"). What I'm asking is, what is a good handmade filter (not GAM filter) that can reduce the CRI of an LED? I'm thinking about using regular sharpie markers. Any warm ideas?

girl [n.]

Why me?

I'm just an ordinary girl, who swallows loneliness like a bitter pill. I need my medication.
I am destined to be alone and I know it; it's not my choice, it's my make.
I know I will be alone again. I don't want to be dreading the nights all over again, and stay up each time, just so I wouldn't have to wake up in my emptiness once again.

Before you came, oh I was ready!
I was ready like a plane-crash survivor: canned confidence, preserved dignity, salted career plans and parachute restlessness.

Why crash and burn this heart again?
Why mine?

What do you win out of this?
You already know you can win anybody's heart. Why do you care to stir into this charred, bruised and bandaged piece of crap? Does it exhilerate you, make you feel like a winner?
I already told you I can't love. Did you take it personally to think I can't love YOU?
I told you I want to be alone. Did you take it personally to think I want you to stay away from me?

Why?
Leave me alone.
Believe that I don't have any human emotions left in me. I've been drained. Emptied. Shaken. And then wiped clean with a steriliser.

I'm bones. There's no blood or flesh on me. No pulsating muscle. No moist tenderness. No enduring embrace.

Leave me alone.
Don't look at me again.

Mother said it's all in your head

It doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes something as simple as the smell of a new book, or a particular perfume, or the wet smell of mud, can trigger sharp memories like a childhood day in nursery, or the new year's night in 2000, or rain that you wouldn't hesitate to drench in - that no photos can. Despite the heartrending fact that everything disintegrates into memories sooner or later, we still have to go on creating them, even though memories are just memories. The pulse of cicadas and crickets is very soothing to me. Although not much, it's all I can connect with and make memories with, and hope to feel nostalgic about years later. I keep a soundtrack of night sounds on my laptop when I go to sleep. Other sounds that I love are the rustle of dried leaves in a gentle wind, the horn of a distant train, the howl of winds through windows before a storm, the pitter patter of rain on the streets, the fall of footsteps on gravel, the rumble of clouds before a storm. Because memories are all we really have.

Cicadas

5.45 am.

Cicadas and sparrows chirp together under a purple sky. A train comes to the station in the small town of Lafayette. There comes the piercing note of the horn, the roar of the diesel engine, the decelerating clack-clack of the wheels on the joints in the rail and finally, the squeel of steel wheels on steel rail as it comes to a stand still. It will start again, in a minute, to another destination. It strongly beckons a lonely non-passenger to hop on and come away with it. The non-passenger thinks for a minute, "Birds are shining, sun is singing, life is good here". The train doesn't wait a minute longer and the moment's gone..

Maybe I could start writing my thoughts and feelings again, without the cringing jealousy at the idea of anyone else but me reading them. Platitudes are not a valid currency in my life anymore. Because life is difficult without ready-made templates, it makes me green with envy to see anyone wanting to trade in that currency, when I have to pay with my own hard-sought words. Perhaps I should write "although my words are not that great" over here and punctuate the nouns with "lowly", but I don't want to apologize for being myself, just to accommodate the indigestibility of others. I write my first words in a long time, at the break of a new day - my associate none other than my shadow, my muse none other than the cicadas, my inspiration none other than a sunrise. Translating one last time: Please don't express your pity, dismay, congratulations, thank-you's and hate-you's. I won't accept them.

Commentary

All I have to say is, Ah-HA! Who's the stalker NOW? Since you've visited this page, I already know you have come here, and I know that you know that I know you've come here. Do you realize how kind of me it was to ignore the very pertinent issue, when somewhere in March, the stalker called the stalkee, a ...wait for it... Stalker?? A pretty blogsome case of kettle calling the pot .... no no no, a patient treating a doctor. I mean really, you wrote, quite haughtily - I believe that's because you were getting a bit defensive there - that why don't I delete my blog, if all I do is hunt my readers down, which would scare my readers away? If you didn't want to be revealed, then you could have just chosen not to reply to my blog entry "Who are you?". The fact that I requested to know, "asked a question", therefore requested, --- is proof enough that I wasn't hunting any readers down. I simply saw a repeated visit to my blog, that stuck out like a sore thumb, and wanted to know - can't I be curious about something that was so *obviously* ODD? - and wanted to know who might the visitor be, again, I wanted to know, therefore I sent out a request to the unknown visitor, giving him or her the option to say "Nay". It was a request, and you *chose* to answer my request, for which I thank you, but then.. wow, the stalker who has been coming to my blog for hours at a time everyday for one month (until my birthday) writes, yes he writes, he condemns me to blog!, saying that I should be deleting my blog, because I erred, I violated, the Act of Stalker's Privacy.

Dear stalker, I would recommend you choose a different career since the first thing about stalking is to not reply to the stalkee when he or she asks "Is anyone following me?" I mean isn't that what I asked? I asked, "Who is watching me?" and you replied, "I am!" Do you see any violation of any rights here? Did I force you to answer me? Did I reveal you, put you in an impossible situation? No! I asked, you could have declined to answer, but you did anyway! My fault?!? You blew your cover, soldier!

Wouldn't life be boring if you could have stopped at that?

You decide that the only way you could make a graceful exit out of this is to call me what I called you, of all the things in the world. This is what people do when they get defensive - they lose their head a little bit - basic diplomatic error, the kind children make when they are in fights... really disappointing. So anyway, I mean you could have taken a stab at my writing skills, said that it was backdated, badly written, poor English, immaterial, uninteresting, bland, repetitive ---- any number of things. Because if you HAD criticized me on one of these grounds, it wouldn't have sounded THIS retarded. I mean, I would have understood that you were being defensive, but it would have disguised your secret a little better. But calling me a stalker??

Really?

Saying that I ........HUNT my readers *down*?

!!!

Hunt them down?? Really??! You resented being revealed. You thought, in the great scheme of the universe, I was violating the rule, that bloggers blog, and readers read, and while the bloggers reveal things about themselves on their blog to the Internet, readers may not. Alright, so you were saying that if I am going to be interested in who my readers are, who are interested in who I am, then this whole cycle stops, right, there. Doesn't it? I mean if all my blog does is serve as a URL on the internet, and if anyone steps on it, I ask "Halt! Who goes there?", what's the point? I understand, but it's my choice whether I want to write or not, since it's my blog afterall, and I am, infact, not feeling creative enough to write everyday. I forgot what made me write in the first place. And your saying that I shouldn't blog because I am not writing, and just asking who is coming to my blog, calling me a hunter of defenceless Stalkers, is an overreactive outburt, really it is! You could have simply asked me to write something already. I know you feel revealed and accused and many other things (although you revealed - okay *half* revealed - yourself), or you may be feeling frustrated/disappointed that I don't write, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't ask who is coming to my blog.

And yes you have been promoted to being a Stalker from a reader because an ordinary reader would not come to my blog everyday and spend hours on it - although, I would go back to school and brush up on my stalking skills if I were you.

F to the U to the C to the K

What? Can't I express myself anymore? Live a little? Do I always have to make sense? It's happened. It's the era of reacting without thinking, of sleepless nights, of being "too tired to fall asleep", of political correctness. It's the era of feeling old and jaded, of feeling like you don't have the balls to do something, of saying to the heck with metaphors and taking everything literally. It's the era of panic for the sake of panic, not because you have to meet a deadline or catch a train. It's a time of efficiency and exactness, of precision, of hurry. I finally understand how people feel when they say "I can't bring myself to do that" or how they have to turn down listening to a song or looking at something or meeting someone because the emotions can't be dealt with. Welcome to the era of not being able to deal with things. Surprisingly, it makes me curse more. Isn't cursing one of the most un-creative ways of expressions?

?

Who are you? You know who you are. You've been coming to my blog everyday since Feb 14th. How did you know to check my other blog after three years of inactivity? Please let me know.

Reunion

After three years of sabbatical, Doctor [INSERT NAME HERE] is back doing her research on all things crazy and wonderful.

I am studying in engineering!

I am not studying engineering in any university I thought I would go to. My sister's clairvoyant admirer did know about it, though. In an attempt to impress her, he medidated upon her and then was able to predict the first letter of the university the sister-in-law would go to. And, it worked! Let his unique approach to courting 15 year olds be an inspiration to all.

Back to me. I will try to write something interesting next time, though I can't promise anything coming out of my hard-wired bored little brain. The other day I came across this site which made me laugh really hard. Take a visit.