The PUNisher says...
It's been a rather jarring weekend. I don't really know what to say.
So WHO IS this guy ANYWAY?
I'm GEISTHUND and this is my homepage. (Well.. DUH) This is *NOT* a tribute to the PUNISHER® and if you came here hoping for that, GO AWAY and get a life. You should be out there searching for tributes to Vivian Chow and Sandra Bullock. If you're wondering how it is you ended up at the Text Only version that's because you obviously did something very wrong with your browser settings. Incidentally, I was thrilled to note that someone actually DID blunder into my page whilst questing for news of the Punisher of marvel comics fame. He mailed me a complaint too... something about my foul nefarious attempts to mislead the public. :)
All about me
There isn't much to know. Anyway I wouldn't want to bore you with lots of trivial details about my pets and friends and hobbies etc etc etc. I'm a healthy happy 21 year old Singaporean male who just completed National Service and am currently waiting with bated breath to fly off to medical school in London (14th Sep 1997) at the University College of London. The SAF is giving me a little trouble about an exit permit though. Hmm. For all of you out there who know me, I'll be taking this homepage down in September when I terminate my email account with Pacific Internet. I'll send you lot my email address in London when I reach there.
What I look like
Pages from the Past
Well, I've decided that since my pages are so small and take up so little server space, I'll just leave them all on the server to get my money's worth. Also, you may have noticed that I don't really have a proper "links" section and some of them make brief one-time appearances. So, I'm really doing this for your sake (yah right). Maybe I'll actually put a links section up next week. (thoughtful silence)
Week 1 - Where I did my little rant and ended up with my concerned friends calling me up to ask if I was OK.
Week 2 - This was the one about Jacquelyn Choy. If you haven't already seen it, PLEASE do.
Week 3 - Insensitive
My wonderful Friends' homepages :)
Quek Tsui Chiang's page - Check it out! He's got a couple of poems he wrote himself... and he's funny too.
Tammy Yap's page - She's small but fierce... don't ever insult her typing speed. Highly recommended recipes on this page.
Ho Su-Wen's page - She's not small but she's fierce anyway. Sigh. All my female friends are fierce. :(
Bernard Gao's homepage - Old friend. Greets you with a nicely disturbing picture right out from the start. Cool guy. Also see Su-Wen's page.
Hummer's page - Um no that's not his real name. It's an IRC nickname. This guy's got lotsa really cool links to sites like the Homepage of God and other fun stuff.
Galapogo's Carnasuar page - Another IRC friend with a fetish for dinosaurs.
IRC utilities
Tired of getting nuked/ICMPd? Try downloading these two files :
VIPUPD.EXE - a Win95 update from Microsoft that supposedly patches the s-ping bug (that's ICMP).
ICMPWATCH.ZIP - this utility by Rhad (who also produced Click, the IRC nuke programme) detects IRC nukes and ICMP attempts. I've managed to successfully detect IRC nukes with it, but not ICMPs.
For more info on the various types of nukes you could try the Darkening which has info on winnukes and ICMP. As for IRC nukes, those are pretty simple. Basically the nuker sends messages to the server or to your PC telling it that you've been disconnected or that there's an "invalid protocol" or a host of other errors, and so the server / your PC kicks you off IRC.
Incredible Links
Abandoned Places - Actual archived and downloadable All Time Classic games.
Abandonware - Abandonware Central
The Homepage of God - Self explanatory.
X-com patches & editors - for all you dirty low-down cheats out there...
Well, it's certainly been a week for revelations. Some of you may recall me putting up something about Jacquelyn Choy needing platelet donations some weeks back . She just passed away on Saturday night. I didn't really know her all that well; as well as neighbours know each other I guess. Occasional hellos! on chance meetings outside our houses, natterings about JC life and 'A' levels over our moms' flowers. This was all of course before she got sick. I wish I could have gotten to know her better. But that's always how it goes, isn't it.
For those of you not in the know, be it for reasons of geography or just plain lethargy, Jacquelyn was a national gymnast when she was younger. She recently (end of last year) contracted leukemia and had a bone marrow transplant some time later. She'd already passed the 100-day "window period"... in fact she was well into the 150th day (about 3 weeks back) when she contracted CMV (a virus) and succumbed to it. The New Paper and Straits Times put up short articles about her naturally, since she'd been a sportsgirl before. I've always wondered about these articles. Rather unfairly of course, but I've always felt they're more a last farewell, a sort of "put-it-out-of-your-mind-forever" tribute. Perhaps that's just the cynic in me.
I attended her wake with my parents. It all just seemed so Wrong somehow. The picture before her casket wasn't the typical severe, yellowed photograph of an eightyish-old kind and gentle grandmother. Instead there was this fresh-faced, pretty eighteenish teenager smiling brightly from the wooden frame around her. People hugging her parents and offering condolences. Her PARENTS. Unreal.
The New Paper did a piece about her mailing a friend a birthday card recently, several weeks in advance because she wasn't sure what the future held. I guess that was the kind of person she was. Friends she certainly had loads of. I live across the road from her, and have been seeing a steady stream of them going into her house for the past 3 days. She'd had a lot going for her, a wonderful family, friends, a place in Oxford Law school waiting, a warm, caring and bubbly personality, charm, eloquence and an ex-sportsgirl to boot. Somehow it's just so unthinkable. "Unfortunate" was the prevalent word that night. Another putting-out-of-mind line. Conversation immediately pauses for a while at this point, then changes to the bougainvilleas so-and-so is growing, or where there's a sale etc. It's almost an Erase command.
I know that after today, all this will begin to fade. Everything will just become a distant memory and perhaps even be forgotten by everyone. Except of course her family and closest friends, who God willing, are recovering as well as can be hoped. "Moving on" we humans call it, and I guess it's sort of a sanity preservation measure.
Don't really know what to say. I'd always personally thought she was so Alive. And so young. Never for a moment did I doubt that she'd recover. It's hard to believe any of this.
I guess by now some of my more practical friends will be fuming, and if this were a conversation, would say "you're rambling, man, what's your POINT?" and I admit it. I'm rambling. It's all so More than Words, but yes, I do have a point. You know how it is when you're young and feel invincible, and that nothing could possibly happen to YOU or your friends. It's simply not true. Life is fragile and unpredictable. CMV is a common virus. Many people are infected by it; only it's an ongoing process and you'll probably never succumb to it. It's a sort of dynamic and perpetual battle your immune system wages and invariably wins. Usually. If anyone were to fall to it, you'd imagine it'd be a frail, stick-thin and bedridden invalid on the brink of death. But my mother remembers seeing her up and walking about just a few weeks back . Everyone was so optimistic about her prospects. A fighter to the last. That's what they said in the papers, and even at the mass today.
There was a chain mail circulating some time back. It seemed
cliched at the time, but now it's somehow become so very apt.
Somewhere within it is the gist of what I'm trying to say.
Around the
corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.
And I never see
my old friend's face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell.
And he rang mine if, we were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.
Tired of playing a foolish game,
"Tomorrow"
I say "I will call on Jim"
"Just to show that I'm thinking of him."
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.
Around the
corner!- yet miles away,
"Here's a telegram sir" "Jim died today."
And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend.
Truly, God works in mysterious ways.
148 accidental hits to date!!
please don't email me