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Another big video game music orchestra concert arrives in Singapore, just slightly under a month after Distant Worlds was here. This is a very different concert for a different crowd – or it could be just the Friday Night Effect. People from all walks of life were at the show, compared to the mostly teenage and young adult crowd at the Distant Worlds concert. At the stadium, there was a pre-show festival with companies giving away free stuff – Razer, Infocomm Asia Holdings and New Era were there, along with other companies which seem somewhat related to games – Cristofori was there to promote themselves, and AXN and Animax promoting their channels. A Guitar Hero competition and a cosplay competition were being held as well. There were a few video arcade with classic games loaded there too, like Pac-Man and Street Fighter II. Due to space constraints, the festival had to be split between the North and South entrances, which made a few people quite confused.
Before entering the Indoor Stadium, I was in queue at the priority queue as I had my SIS Star Pass on me, but the ushers directed me to the premier entrance on the ground floor below since I also had premier tickets, and thus, I wasted quite some time in queuing twice to enter the stadium. Additionally, why are premier ticket holders not being admitted ahead of people with SIS Star Pass? Who has more priority? I sincerely hope that SISTIC improves on their service regarding the issue of premier tickets and SIS Star Passes.
There were quite a few cosplayers hanging about in the festival area after the competition – to name a few of them – King of Fighters, Team Fortress 2, Final Fantasy series, Link, Patapon, Macross Frontier and Advance Wars. There’s even an “official” cosplayer dressed up as Enzio from Assassin’s Creed 2, which came from the New Era booth.
Before the show started though, the Starhub, AXN and Animax commercials were being played and repeated quite a few times, which was kind of irritating – couldn’t they have gotten more sponsors? Thankfully, they were being shown for a short time, and there were two video clips shown on the screen before the emcee came on stage – one was a Flash animation titled “Yuri and me”, and the other was a video clip of Ms PacMan running around in New York, with a funny poem opening the video. The emcee then introduced the finalists of the cosplay competition and announced that the guy cosplaying as the Patapon won the competition. Finally, the concert started proper with Jack Wall as the conductor. The programme:
INTERMISSION (20 minutes – with “LOADING ACT II” video clip which was really 20 minutes long. Also, the usual Starhub/AXN/Animax spam)
There was a part whereby a member of the audience went on stage to play Space Invaders, and it was fun to watch and cheer him on, even though he didn’t win the prize. Two finalists for the Guitar Hero came on stage as well to play Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion with the orchestra providing backups. The NUS Symphony Orchestra was somewhat okay, with the exception of One Winged Angel. Its also hard to tell if the orchestra was good or if they were winging it, because the sound system in the stadium was terrible. In choosing the NUSSO, quality of the performance might be affected, but I believe that they can improve their standards in playing video game music, since most of them are young people who most likely have played games before (hopefully NUSSO organizes a local video game concert so that its cheaper to attend…). The NUS choir was passable, but somehow the volume of the choir seems to be drowned by the orchestra occasionally – perhaps another sound system problem? Additionally, Norihiko Hibino only came on-stage once to play one piece, and the audience didn’t have a chance to interact with him, compared to the PLAY! Symphony two years back. Pluses:
Minuses:
Final Grade: B+ Have moved through two hosts during the changeover period from Dreamhost. The previous one’s support was atrocious, coupled with dodgy caching settings for their hosts (although hosting with them is dirt cheap at $1.66 a month given the current exchange rates), so I moved over to a local server now for $8/month. Was struggling to get the photos up online and its finally fixed now. Back to life, as usual, for it calls for my attention more and more these days. Yes I know, the pictures aren’t loading. I’ve changed web hosts and got there’s lots of things to re-configure, but I don’t have enough time to fix them all. Perhaps the week after the next. I’ve been real busy recently, juggling work with studies and its a really fine line balancing them. I’ve not played with hardware in a long time, so I decided to get an OCZ Apex off eBay, since local stores are selling them at jacked up prices.
Although the shipping costs could be lower, it is still a lot cheaper than buying it locally (note to self: get the retailer to ship them in a smaller box). Anyway, here’s another shot.
After popping the OCZ Apex into my system, the first thing I did was to format it in NTFS (which, in retrospect, is unnecessary since HD Tune runs benchmarks using raw disk access) and run HD Tune to get information on this drive.
Let’s run the read benchmarks, since the write benchmark is going to take quite a while:
Doesn’t look too different from other sites, and so does the random read speeds:
Well, that’s all for the read tests. Now here comes the torture test – sequential and random write speeds:
That’s quite bad. Let’s take a look at the IOMeter benchmark, which is the main problem with all SSDs using the JMicron 602 controller, as reported by Anandtech. However, IOMeter is able to do benchmarks either by using raw disk access, or using the filesystem access. I did both tests for 30 minutes each using the latest stable version with queue depth of 3 and 100% 4K random writes, using various filesystems:
At this point, let me explain the ext2 benchmarks – I installed the ext2 IFS driver for Windows originally for my (sucky) Transcend 32GB SSD last year, and now that the SSD has been put to better use elsewhere (which I can’t say or I’ll be arrested), I figured, why not just run it just for the heck of it. As for the initial and second run results, I decided to put them up because I came across this problem whereby after benchmarking in IOMeter, I accidentally clicked on the “start test” button in IOMeter, and found out that the results were drastically different. It seems that on the initial run, a file is created by IOMeter on the disk, and once that file is created, the 30-minute benchmark begins. On subsequent runs however, the file is not deleted and re-created, and it is re-used for the benchmark, hence the reason I had to include the two runs. Raw disk benchmark is pointless as its not a filesystem, and running the NTFS benchmark twice gave me results that were close to each other.
Again, more strange results – ext2 is actually alot faster than NTFS and raw? This is weird!
Disappointing response times on the initial and second runs, but the write speed is pretty weird:
Finally, CrystalDiskMark using the two different file systems:
With this mixed bag of results, is ext2 or NTFS the ultimate winner? It’s pretty hard to say right now, though I can fairly say that ext2 “feels” much more faster than NTFS right now. Stay tuned for more parts of my review of the 64GB Super Talent MasterDrive OX, RAID0 results and mixed-media results.
Once again, Arnie Roth returns to Singapore to wow the crowd. Previously, he was in town to conduct the Play! orchestral concert in Singapore 2 years back, and now he comes back with a special guest – Nobuo Uematsu for the Distant Worlds – Music From Final Fantasy orchestral concert at the Esplanade. I consider myself lucky to get the tickets, because on the day the tickets were sold to ArtsFest members – who get priority booking – I was too tired to decide which day to buy. When I woke up the next day, the Saturday evening show was sold out except for single seats, and so I bought the Friday evening ones. Before the show started, there were a few cosplayers of Yuna and Aerith that I spotted near the entrance to the concert hall. One dude even had his hair done up like Cloud’s. As usual the merchandise sold is way cheaper than buying them online – T-Shirts for $20, Distant Worlds CD for $25 (sold out) and the Art Book for $40. What is even more amazing is that some people bought not just one CD, but a stack of them! The programme:
INTERMISSION
Liberi Fatali, Fisherman’s Horizon and Distant Worlds was sung well with the Victorial Chorale and The Vocal Consort providing excellent choruses. The Singapore Festival Orchestra has improved alot since the 2007 Play! orchestral concert. Dear Friends and Vamo’alla Flamenco was a bit of a letdown on the guitar, but given the titles, they’re hard to play, judging from the guitarist’s hand movement along the fret, and I applaud him for being able to perform with grace on stage. The Opera “Mario and Draco” was excellent as well, although the mezzo-soprano could have put a little more emotion into her voice. The video does not seem to synchronize with the orchestra sometimes, but overall its bearable if one doesn’t pay too much attention to it, and additionally the video does have its funny parts as well. Overall, it was a really astounding performance, despite some rabid fans shouting out the titles in advance and spoiling some of us. Some of the fans even approached Uematsu during the intermission for an autograph, but while the early birds caught the worm, the rest were ushered back to their seats near the end of the intermission.
Nobuo Uematsu was present from the start till the end of the concert, and he came up to the stage to sing for One Winged Angel as the second encore – the first encore was Terra’s Theme. Between the encores though, they let us vote for which battle theme piece to be arranged and written for future concerts – we (meaning the Friday crowd) voted for Jenovah and Dancing Mad. Judging from the response however, it seems that we were leaning more towards Jenovah.
There was a long line for Uematsu and Arnie’s autographs as well after the show, and while some people blindly rushed to the queue, some of us stayed back in the concert hall for the 20-minute Q&A session with Uematsu and Arnie. I am saddened by the quality of the questions asked, but there were one or two gems in the audio recording that I saved on my MP3 player. Amazingly, this concert has drawn fans from Malaysia and Indonesia to Singapore to attend the concert, and I have no doubt that the Video Games Live concert will draw them as well, though it does not have a large fanbase as Final Fantasy fans. Downloadables: Audio recording of Friday's Q&A Session - Downloaded 93 timesHave you seen the leaked e-mails? Game for some CSI work? Just google the e-mail usernames listed and all will be revealed…
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Went out on Saturday to pick up this hard disk drive at Sim Lim Square after a lunch buffet in Marina Square with my ex-colleagues. The food was so-so (and so is the service), but it is cheap, provided you don’t order too much drinks, as the drink is quite expensive. This hard drive is to replace my old 750GB Seagate Barracuda ES external hard drive which I got off eBay. Although its enterprise-grade, I have no idea why the write speeds are atrociously low, even compared to other hard drives of the same generation. Thus, backing up data is a painfully slow process, and I decided to get a new one, and use my existing 1TB hard drive as the backup and using this as the secondary drive in my computer. Next step would be to clear out my cupboard of all my old CDs and DVDs that I have accumulated in the past 10 years or so, and consolidate all the data to a hard drive, as I’ve realized that most of my cupboard space is taken up by them.