The PUNisher says...
Ok... for those of you *STILL* following this page, yah, I'm one week late again... but I have a REASON this time, namely that my computer power supply mysteriously shuffled off its mortal solenoid last week so I obviously was unable to put anything up onto the net. It didn't help that my computer casing was so old the power supply was no longer available on the face of this earth. Anyway, I'm on a new casing now; it's a baby tower and I've managed to fit all the junk from my old 286 onto it too. I've got 3 HDDs, 1 16X CDrom, 1 1.44 MB floppy and 1 double floppy 1.2/1.44 drive. Pretty cool.
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. 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. A friend of mine asked me whether I would be transporting this page to the UK with me. Ans. No. What on Earth for, it's so crummy, and hopefully they'll have photoshop over there in London and I can *ahem* put in pictures. Pls disregard prior vow. Heh. She also asked why on earth I was putting up a homepage so late. Ans. I just want somewhere to rant and rave about things in general that won't land me in jail. That rules out the Straits Times and chain emails...
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).
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
Weeks 4 & 5 - No description
Weeks 6 & 7- On X-com Apocalypse, the bestest computer game on Earth ever, and walking around in other people's shoes.
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. Note : needs winsock release 2 to work. Winsock 2 is available at This Microsoft Link.
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, these 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 Other-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, I've just (sigh) completed X-com 3 and suddenly life's gone back to being all empty and meaningless. Hee. Oh, by the way, it's official, my email account will cease to exist wef 010997. Anyone wishing to contact me may wish to try my parents account, lingteng@pacific.net.sg but you are advised not to mail anything to it after 14 Sep 97 which is the date I'm flying away. Unless you want Santa Claus's reindeer to visit your house every night and tap-dance on the roof that is. If any of you feel like seeing me off, give me a call and mebbe it'll happen. I wouldn't mind the company. *sniff*
Just this morning I had this awesome, really major, earth-shattering revelation while I was waking up... I knew it was something really, really important, something that just HAD to be put onto the net for all to see... but upon waking up it turned out to be the sound of my mommy cleaning my window from outside. Heh. So that pretty much means nothing really fantastic happened in the last 2 weeks. I *did* find out that I will after all have a fellow Singaporean with me in UCL med, and that was a real relief. :) . We also attended the UCL Singaporean Society meeting last Saturday, which could have been singularly unpleasant since there was a certain unique individual there with an alternative lifestyle (those of you who know bits of my checkered past might have a faint idea of what I'm writing about) present, but fortunately I proved to be very good at ignoring people and my fellow-coursemate and I could always engage in animated and enthusiastic cannot-tear-my-eyes-away-from-yours conversation everytime the bloke wandered anywhere withing eyeshot. So much for exciting huh.
Hmm. I just bought my medical textbooks. I have no idea how the 'plane is going to take off now.
OK. In keeping with tradition I suppose I'll have to write something personal or really thought-provoking before I end off. Ever notice how much harder and harder that is to do as time passes? Perhaps I'm growing old.
Ok. The first of my two minor revelations is on NS. Yes. NS and the SAF, THAT topic that guys simply MUST bring up at dinner and laugh over. I can hear feminine groans already, but before you switch off that computer and hurl it across the room in fury, let me assure you that I'm not going to talk about the SOC the other day when my platoon sergeant was breathing down my neck (hooah hooah hooah grunt grunt) but instead I'm going to talk about how NS affects us guys, and maybe even a few of the um logically challenged or scholarship-needy females out there. There are those who postulate that NS matures people, and changes "boys to men". That it instills keen leadership abilities and eloquence, and clears the minds of youths of frivolity before the grown-up business of university. In my opinion, the "those" in question are probably under the employment of the SAF or PAP. Just a wild guess. On leadership abilities (I won't even begin to touch on eloquence) well, from what I saw the SAF was an obvious meritocracy, with two distinctly demarkated strata : Officers and Others. Officers of course were the cream of the crop and deserved the best, the cream of chicken soup and the creamer in your kopi, for the rest of us, well... you get kopi-o. (that's coffee black for all you misguided foreigners who accidentally chanced across my page and are actually READING it for some strange reason) Naturally, most of the programmes aimed at developing leadership were directed towards the Officers. Select WOSEs (which stands for Warrant Officers Specialists and Enlistees or otherwise known as Others) are chosen for leadership appointments too... probably to pacify the individuals who signed on as regular non-officers. These would include platoon sergeants (who basically run alongside you during SOC and yell obscenities at you... huh just kidding) and tank commanders etc. These provide the missing link between officers and enlistees... but in truth they're just that middle-class who are slightly less hated and respected among the men than the officers. In short, well, if you did pick up something on leadership during NS... you probably had a traumatically boring childhood. :) There were certain enterprising individuals who managed to earn themselves part-time degrees from NUS during their stays in NS. These were few and far between, and I have take off my hat to these motivated individuals. Rare is it to find someone who doesn't just rip off the uniform and go get stone-drunk or boogie till u drop after working hours. Studying is usually not on the top-10 list of Remotely Conceivable After-work Activities. For the most part, I suppose we just decayed academically and intellectually and passed the two-and-a-half (and perhaps someday three?) years in NS; the proverbial Brain Rot syndrome. Yeah, you do learn fun and interesting stuff like weapons handling and shooting and unarmed combat... all the dreams of teenaged hormonally-charged adolescent males I suppose, and yes, I admit, it can be fun at times. But did it MATURE us. Well I suppose NS specifically did not mature us, but rather, the 2.5 year duration is such a long time that things invariably happen during NS (not necessarily related TO the stint itself) that mature the guys. Not necessarily true for all of us of course, some guys will remain two years old till they die. Me, well, I did some things I never imagined I'd ever do, and I didn't do the things I'd resolved to like learning to play the guitar, flute, to blade, skate, brush up on my German and all sorts of other trivial things. And yes, somewhere along the line I aged. If you're a guy who just ORDd like me and are reading this page, pause here for a moment and reflect. Did you actually DO anything worthwhile during NS? Did it give you anything useful? Haha... ironically enough I did learn useful stuff from the SAF. How to use Adobe Photoshop to manipulate photographs, Winword, Excel, Powerpoint and the rest of Microsoft Office, and how to administrate Novell Netware networks. Will do you know, I'm qualified to earn $7000 a month as a system administrator. Perhaps I'll moonlight after I graduate from med school. :)
My second minor revelation is on the Meaning of Life.
When I was just a kid I used to fantasize that there was a Concrete Meaning of Life spelt out somewhere on an obsyddian stele in the middle of some dark void which would be a breathtakingly obvious and simple Single Word placed there unimaginably long ago by the Forces that Be. Too many role-playing computer games I guess.
Shortly after (maybe around 9-10ish) I became rather cynical and began to wonder *IF* there was a meaning to life at all... what if there WAS no reason why we were here, what if the scientists were right and that the world orignated in a Big Bang and there was no maker after all. What if... what if... it was just an accident after all, a chance, a fluke of nature. That was pretty depressing. Why Live in that case. But thanks to someone's quote on the nature of molecular structures, which was that they were so beautifully and precisely engineered with every molecule so symmetrically located that there HAD to be a maker I moved on a little.
I still don't really know the meaning of life, and hey, if any of you finds it out (say if you do an archaelogical dig and chance upon a dark void yadda yadda yadda) I'd be most grateful if you could let me know, but from what little I've managed to figure out, the meaning of Life IS life. It doesn't have to be the way you do it, ie study, find someone, marry, grow old with that someone, work, gripe every day about work and die... it's the fact that you DO it at all, and you enjoy doing it. That you cherish every dang moment of school, and the time you spend with the whoever-it-is, that you stop every now and then during your work and marvel that you're doing whatever it is you're doing and actually enjoying it (whoo, that should be fun for me to do... imagine... operating theatre... surgeon suddenly freezes and says, I'm a Surgeon, Thank God, Hallelujah! Give me a hug then, nurse!) and basically realise that you ARE alive after all. Life isn't just about living. Anyone can do that. It's about living with a zest... that's why people with "Life in their eyes" are so special and radiate that X-factor that charms the whole world and makes everyone cling instinctivly to them (haha... if YOU're reading this... you know who you are... yes, the world DOES that to you doesn't it... guys and gals both :) ) So What if you end up dying eventually. It happens. All that counted would be that you were happy along the way... and not just too caught up (cliche cliche) making moolah that you never really noticed how the rest of the world, or for that matter, you felt. That you led a full and happy life. Heh. Having lots of children optional (too many italian godfather movies for me... thank TCS for that) but sure as heck enjoyable.
Carpe diem, never diam, seize the day and blaze the way.
To life.
203 accidental hits as of 25 Aug '97!!
please don't email me