Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

Yeah I know I’ve not been updating my site lately - tied up with work and my final year project in school.  In fact, I just came back from a meeting with my project supervisor at Plaza Singapura today, and there’s still lots of work to do in order to properly finish our project.

Anyway, so far the new job is quite alright, its the waiting for the action to start that kills. On top of that, boring stuff have to be documented for the end-users (as more often than not, their computer literacy is quite bad), as well as local system documentation for whoever takes over my position in the future.

Its kind of amazing to see that most people do not know that there are free alternatives to expensive products that can do the most of the job that they need - for example, Audacity versus Sony Sound Forge, OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, Ubuntu Server versus Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Its even more shocking to realize that 99% of an organization’s primary and secondary servers run on Windows Server 2003. Especially for server operating systems - the more simplified they become (through GUI), the weaker the future generation of server administrators get. Although simplification is good, it is also important to have a strong foundation in using the command line as well.

Just got your driving licence? Wanna rent a car? No problem!…as long as you are above 23 years old, that is.

Let me explain. After scouring numerous local carsharing sites, most of them require you to be 23 and above, most likely with 1 to 3 years of driving experience as well. Now the problem here is that “streetwise and smart” people will start learning at the tender age of 18, and will not reach 23 in 5 years’ time. what can they do? They can get their own car, or wait for a chance to drive their parent’s/relative’s/friend’s car.

Either there is a spastic problem with their target audience based on data collected from their marketing research group, or they assume that (for most guys) we will finish our NS after polytechnic and then start learning to drive - or they could be plain old kiasee. Most of these carsharing companies will think that you’re out for Carmageddon with their company asset, committing Grand Theft Auto: Singapore, doing a Initial D on corners, or having a Need For Speed on the highways. There is some truth to this however, for I have seen a few P-platers screwing up their situational assesment on the road before. However, this is mainly a minority - most P-platers are no more harmless than an egotistic driver whose car has been “zhng-ed”, just that they signal alot more often and hardly ever speed, cut into other lanes, or do high-speed corners. Another “strange” thing that most P-platers are more patient and road courteous than older, more experienced drivers, although they stall their engines sometimes or wait just a little while longer at a junction.

One other aspect which carsharing companies like is your driving experience. I personally agree on this, as I personally believe that experience is the most important aspect in driving - experience teaches you skills and choices to make when you encounter a similar situation again on the road. However, it’s a vicious cycle for carsharing, even though you are of eligible age to join a carsharing company - because you have no experience you can’t join the company. But in order to get experience, you need to drive a car, which you can’t because you don’t have a membership. In order to get a membership, you need to have experience, and because you have no experience…you get the idea.

In short, if you can get frequent access to a car without going through car rental, by all means go ahead. Otherwise, be prepared to wait an eternity to be “eligible” to apply as a member of a carsharing company.

My last day of work was on Friday, and I left my workplace slightly earlier before knock-off time to go to my company HQ in Alexandra. When I reached there at 5:15pm, sadly, office was closed, so have to go on Monday. So much for “Human Resources”. Will miss my colleagues there. Suddenly, for some strange reason Westlife songs suddenly become nice.

Went out for dinner with some of my army friends at Jack’s Place at Marina Square yesterday. Reached MS slightly ealier, and chatted for a while with Peiling, Jamie and Xiping, from my old workplace as they happened to be there for a street netball competition. Wish them all the best in their endeavours. Most probably the last time I see them in person, though.

Bought the D-Link DNS-323 NAS from the PC Show (temptations, temptations…), and currently figuring out how to set it up. The strange thing is most people buy a NAS and then get stumped figuring out how to configure it. Even then, assuming you have the technical skills to do it, you will also need to consider the following factors:

1. What is the primary use for this NAS? Power-savings? Storage? Sharing?
2. How to secure the box? Which network shares to create? What users/groups will be created?
3. What is the backup strategy? JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1? “Off-site” backup on top of RAID 1?
4. Any disaster recovery procedures? What do you do in case of hard drive failure, or worse, NAS hardware failure? Will you use an UPS with the NAS?

Right now I am on a different kind of problem - I don’t have any hard drives to spare (since the manual states that plugging any drive in will result in the drive being formatted), and I’m currently imaging data off one of my hard drives for use in the NAS.

Well, after a hectic schedule in May, I am now finally leaving my current workplace for one nearer to my home in 2 weeks’ time. Will miss the times spent here, and the interaction with friends and fellow colleagues there.

The last month has been extremely tiring, as the school assignment workload was very heavy, and coffee is the staple drink in the morning for the last two weeks of the month. Added to that, the job interviews at different places, and the crazy stuff that I have to do at work is enough to make one feel very frustrated and stressed. On a brighter note, Battlestar Galactica is now shown on Arts Central, but I think borrowing DVDs from the library is faster than waiting one day a week for the show to run, and even then there are censorship issues.

My PSP died on me last week, I’m not sure when though. I took it apart and read through a few guides and found out that my PSP’s power switch seems to be spoilt, and on top of that, the backlight fuse is spoilt. Right now, I’m using a Pandora’s Battery to power on my PSP, with the help of despertar del cementario v5, and a custom configuration file for timemachine that will boot the NAND when I don’t press any button on power up, and Despertar del Cementerio v5 when I press the left shoulder trigger button. Until I get the switch or power board replaced, I have to rely on taking out the battery and putting it back in to power on the PSP.

Nothing much to write about this week. My intensive lectures are finally finishing, and now that I have slightly more time, I can finally start on my school assignments, which are piling up very fast.

I read with disgust at the recent “technology” news reported in the local papers. Movie files containing viruses/trojans? What a joke. It’s more of the media player being poorly coded rather than the movie file.

Went for a BBQ on Saturday night at my friend’s place in the Hillview area. We talked about our experiences in life, had alot of food, and reached home near 1 am after sending home a few of my friends.

I finally decided to take the plunge and modify my K800i’s firmware, since the 1 year warranty is near expiry. I added custom light effects, display driver and camera driver to the internal filesystem. So far the light effects and display driver are fine and are a big improvement from the original one. Now I’m left to test the camera driver, as there isn’t much incentive for me to take pictures with my phone. Will need to upgrade the EROM as well so that I can load a newer firmware rather than just modifying the current one.

I’ve been slacking on the blogging front, it’s a new semester and I’ve got lots of things that I need to settle these few days, including university assignments. Not to mention, handling the insane amount of things happening at my workplace. Anyway, my CrossRoads XB were spoilt since the start of school, and only now after two weeks then I could get replacements for them, the X3i, as Jaben had recently re-stocked their X3i, which seem to be quite popular.

I’ve recently been addicted to my PSP lately, due in part to “evil” game designers who did Monster Hunter Freedom 2. This is bad, because I’ve got tons of videos to watch on my PDA, and I don’t want to waste time converting them to the PSP video format.

On school matters, seems that everyone is rushing to do the assignment, as evident from our experience with the crappy game engine that we’re using. It’s a love-hate relationship with it, especially with C++. Heard that the other module is about algorithms and compression for multimedia stuff. Hope it’s not a killer, from the looks of the lecture notes and lab handouts. There’s quite a few new faces in class also, hope to get to know them better over this semester.

Well, another week goes by quickly, and thankfully there wasn’t anything big happening this week. Went to celebrate CheekyHan’s pre-birthday party at K-BOX Marina Square on Friday evening - the buffet food was alright, but the real grouse is the lack of free-flow drinks (unless you consider the soup). Took a train back home but dropped off at Buona Vista due to the fact that the train was packed like sardines, and took 198 so that I could sleep a little.

Had a real hot morning on Saturday, and then had the unfortunate event of being mobilized. Shared a cab to camp with 3 of my unit friends, did our equipment check, and checked out of the camp in a cab back home. Cab trip costed about $5 per person per trip.

Finally, I just checked my university results slip, and was as expected - one Credit and one Distinction. Wish I could have more time to improve the Credit though. A new semester starts tomorrow, and the usual “Hell Week” begins anew. Just have to endure the torture for one more semester after the June break, and I will graduate.

I have been playing Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on my PSP quite a lot this week, due to the fact that two of my colleagues at work dragged me into playing it, and we had a fun time with the game in multiplayer mode. There seems to be a way to play online via the Internet, but I will need to research on that - in the meantime I’m trying to improve my character’s weapons and armour, but the material needed is quite hard to find in the game.

Well, this week my PSP’s arrived from the States (just the system and the charger only), and I’ve flashed a custom firmware onto it, and at the same time while flashing the firmware for my two other colleagues at work, I bricked one, which I recovered back successfully (much to the disappointment of him). It wasn’t as scary as I thought, probably due to the maturity of the tools and packaged applications to do the flashing easily. Got a 4GB Sandisk Memory Stick Pro Duo with a 2-in-1 USB transfer and charger cable and a black slip-on case with strap at Comics Connection at Woodlands. Total cost: <$200 Singapore dollars. Currrently I’m playing Patapon and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. got I got to play with my colleague’s Dell x50v and flashed it to Windows Mobile 6. Seems that WPA-PSK is buggy in the current latest ROM, so he’ll probably have to use a third-party client to connect to a WPA-PSK network.

At work, it’s really been a horrible week, especially with the future rollout of the new in-house web-based “helpdesk” system, which I think is going to waste even more of my working time handling beureaucratic nonsense blindly thrown by the management. Additionally, I feel more and more like a personal assistant to someone on top of my own duties. This has got to stop.