A dream...and plane ticket woes
I had a somewhat chilling dream this morning. My father told me that he had just been visiting a young man in his factory, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer with a very grim prognosis. The young man was married, and they tried to be cheerful and talked about choosing a name for the baby that the young couple were expecting. It was, of course, a very sad story, and I walked with my father silently, thinking of the fragility of human life...
Then I woke up. Everything in the last paragraph was merely a dream!
Maybe I have read entirely too many stories and should not have put JoJo and Meggie and Margaret O'Keefe in my mind before going asleep. But--how can the brain associate and mutate things like this? It's a bit too much.
Actually there was a final part in the dream that I left out. It appeared quite normal then, but I began to grasp its strangeness after I woke up. My father and I were returning home at the end, which was on the 4th floor. Maybe it was too dark, or maybe I walked upstairs too fast, but anyway I got confused about the floor I'm on, and for a moment was even unsure whether I was going up or going down, so we reached the 6th floor (the topmost) by mistake and woke up the neighbors. The neighbors were quite kind, even laughing, so the situation then was not a bit fear-inducing. It was after I woke up from the dream that I discovered the strange thing: I was standing on a platform halfway between the 5th and the 6th floor, but both staircases were going up! And why would I have got confused whether I was going up or down? I remembered distinctly that I never turned around, so the staircase must be behaving really strangely. Maybe the parts that were not being walked on could dynamically rearrange itself? But what if it malfunctioned and trapped me on the platform below the 6th floor?
Back to real life. I have been feeling quite inspired in the past few days, and have hopefully obtained some nice results, but plane tickets are almost driving me crazy. The prices listed on the ads are so incredibly low: a two-way ticket to SFO seemed to cost only 3k yuan and something. I felt very relieved for one moment, then I telephoned the agencies and knew about the bleak realities of various additional fees and the often unavailability of discounted tickets. The true price is more like 7k yuan--that is, provided that the price doesn't go much higher after my visa application clears (which is unlikely), and indeed, that there is any economy-class ticket available at all then. It seems that air travel is several times more expensive than travelling by bus--per kilometre!
On a side note, I found a CPU time rental site www.picknwork.com in the google ads where they give you an ssh account to a Linux/Xen system and allow you to use the CPU at about $1/hour. I guess I'd rarely if ever need this, since most of the time I can find some idle lab computer around, but this can be handy if no machine happens to be available and some simulation absolutely, positively must be done in time. I also wonder if similar services are available in China that do not require a complicated application process. We do seem to have some supercomputing systems at school, but their use still requires the submission of a human-processed application, usually required to be associate with a project. Such a process does not appear to be very friendly to me, who often requires some CPU time on-demand that can rarely be scheduled beforehand.
Then I woke up. Everything in the last paragraph was merely a dream!
Maybe I have read entirely too many stories and should not have put JoJo and Meggie and Margaret O'Keefe in my mind before going asleep. But--how can the brain associate and mutate things like this? It's a bit too much.
Actually there was a final part in the dream that I left out. It appeared quite normal then, but I began to grasp its strangeness after I woke up. My father and I were returning home at the end, which was on the 4th floor. Maybe it was too dark, or maybe I walked upstairs too fast, but anyway I got confused about the floor I'm on, and for a moment was even unsure whether I was going up or going down, so we reached the 6th floor (the topmost) by mistake and woke up the neighbors. The neighbors were quite kind, even laughing, so the situation then was not a bit fear-inducing. It was after I woke up from the dream that I discovered the strange thing: I was standing on a platform halfway between the 5th and the 6th floor, but both staircases were going up! And why would I have got confused whether I was going up or down? I remembered distinctly that I never turned around, so the staircase must be behaving really strangely. Maybe the parts that were not being walked on could dynamically rearrange itself? But what if it malfunctioned and trapped me on the platform below the 6th floor?
Back to real life. I have been feeling quite inspired in the past few days, and have hopefully obtained some nice results, but plane tickets are almost driving me crazy. The prices listed on the ads are so incredibly low: a two-way ticket to SFO seemed to cost only 3k yuan and something. I felt very relieved for one moment, then I telephoned the agencies and knew about the bleak realities of various additional fees and the often unavailability of discounted tickets. The true price is more like 7k yuan--that is, provided that the price doesn't go much higher after my visa application clears (which is unlikely), and indeed, that there is any economy-class ticket available at all then. It seems that air travel is several times more expensive than travelling by bus--per kilometre!
On a side note, I found a CPU time rental site www.picknwork.com in the google ads where they give you an ssh account to a Linux/Xen system and allow you to use the CPU at about $1/hour. I guess I'd rarely if ever need this, since most of the time I can find some idle lab computer around, but this can be handy if no machine happens to be available and some simulation absolutely, positively must be done in time. I also wonder if similar services are available in China that do not require a complicated application process. We do seem to have some supercomputing systems at school, but their use still requires the submission of a human-processed application, usually required to be associate with a project. Such a process does not appear to be very friendly to me, who often requires some CPU time on-demand that can rarely be scheduled beforehand.