Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

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.

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, 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.

Well, finally my exams are over - and I can  enjoy the short 1-month break before all hell breaks loose again. It’s been  raining these few days, and its especially cold in the morning, and as such, I cannot tell whether I have a cold or it’s just the my nose acting up. I have to resort to going home whenever there’s a lapse in the rainfall near the end of the day, for the sake of my health - I don’t want to fall sick during the exams earlier this week. Also, I’ve developed jaw pain for some strange reason, which started to hurt on Saturday night but was okay on Sunday afternoon, but Sunday night and Monday was pretty bad, and had to resort to see the doctor, who told me it wasn’t his field of specialization (obviously) since he couldn’t pinpoint the problem, and gave me painkillers. I sought out the dentist that same evening, and she gave me antibiotics. Combined together, I had a wonderful sleep on Monday night. Turns out that it was either a bacterial infection of the gums, my running nose affecting the tooth, or that the tooth is cracked and dental surgery is required. Hopefully its just my running nose or bacterial infection - I can’t afford the time (and pain) to do a dental surgery these days.

These few days I have a lot of things to do - checking the PCs and projectors for faults accumulated in the past three weeks or so, due to the heavy university assignment workload. Also, will need to set up 20 printers in one of the labs for the kids to print their coursework. It isn’t so bad, except for the dust and dirt accumulated in the floorboards and power socket connectors inside it. Thankfully one student gave me her drawing of Mickey Mouse during the last few days before assignment submission, which brought some cheer and brought me back to reality instead of staring at lines of code on the screen.

I’ve recently ordered a broken PSP online, and hope to repair it once it reaches Singapore next week. The time has come for me to pick up some knowledge of the PSP, with the growing popularity of this handheld gaming device. Additionally, I can now finally operate on my PDA to fix the irritating “battery latch is open” messages that have been bugging me - even a gentle knock on my PDA can cause it to auto-suspend itself. Took out the battery latch switch by force, and used the soldering wire to bridge the gap, as I fanthomed that soldering a contact that small (<1mm) with a piece of wire that is <3.5mm is insanely difficult without a Helping Hands station, and its back in business. Now I just need to find a replacement capacitor or battery to replace the corroded one.

Finally after a year’s worth of deliberation, I have started to work on the Macs at my workplace - firstly I needed to find the best Macs, which are the Power Mac G5s, and did a full clean install on the Mac, followed by the software updates and whatever the school can get for free and has already purchased. The initial plunge was a little bit difficult, but I eased into the Mac’s interface by using the help system to look for keyboard shortcuts. My overall impression - very easy to use and pleasing on the eye. The only bad thing is that it is getting addictive - the more I use the Mac, the more inclined I am to continue using it. And before any fanatical Mac user complains about the picture, let me explain - I’m using QEmu to run Windows in fullscreen mode when I took the picture, and later on found out that Windows runs like a snail, and subsequently trashed QEmu and the disk images.

One thing I learnt from this is that you can “cheat” the Adobe CS3 Production Premium installation complaint of not enough RAM (1GB for Mac, and 2GB for Windows) by “borrowing” RAM from another Mac/PC and then installing it, after which the RAM can be replaced back. Another gripe about CS3 is that the Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore cannot be installed on a PowerPC - thankfully their replacements can be easily found with iLife (iMovie HD, GarageBand and iDVD). The disk image takes up about 20GBs, and hopefully when I do the cloning from a G5 to a G4, it boots. Hopefully I’ll have some time to write an article on how to do disk cloning in Mac someday.

There wasn’t really anything much happening last week, besides from the fact that Team Singapore visited my workplace. Although I got the chance to eat clean food (cornflake and blueberry & wheat cereal with milk and fruits) for lunch, the entire school was thrown to chaos. In the end, some of the netballers had to clean up the library before they leave, and so they helped out the few poor councillors who were there in the library on duty for that day in mopping the floor, wiping the tables and clearing up the leftovers.

Had a gathering on Saturday - nearly all of the guys from my platoon came down to eat at Chong Pang Market in the afternoon. Had a bowl of fishball noodles and TY2PS (汤圆 $2 花生汤). Sadly, we all forgot to take pictures before we left, if not, it would have been nice to happen across the photo one day and remember the good times.

Due to the Chinese New Year celebrations at my workplace this Wednesday and the 2-day holiday on Thursday and Friday, I had to clear a lot of work on Monday and Tuesday, so that on Wednesday I could relax and basically do nothing.

I made a reservation for my name on an ice-cream stick with one of the students’ classes on Monday and collected it on Wednesday. Also tried out chocolate fondue at the Chinese New Year bazaar, where classes set up their booths to sell stuff. Wanted to buy lime ice-cream from one class but they were sold out. Sad. Saw another class doing a remote-control car racing track and the person with the best timing got a soft toy as a prize. Beside the stall was an empty booth, and some crazy students from one of the CCAs that were supposedly on “duty” to take video clips and pictures of the event tried to sell freshly-dug rocks from the school grounds.

After the event, some of the students asked me out for a bowling session at Orchid Country Club,  so I agreed. Got a lift to Northpoint Shopping Centre from a colleague and as usual, the students were late by 45 minutes or so. I took a walk around the shopping complex while waiting for them, and bought a $69 Kingston 4GB Class 4 SDHC card (which I feel I was ripped off), and a $2.22 T5 screwdriver so that I can ‘zhng’ my PDA, as the internal backup battery is spoilt, and the battery latch problem as well.

After finally meeting up with the students and taking the shuttle bus to OCC, we played one match there, while I ate my $5.50 curry rice. Not bad for someone who rarely bowls, I spared one rack and striked two. However, I ‘longkanged’ two as well, so overall my placing was 3rd out of 4 players.

I left OCC via the shuttle bus at about 2.30pm, and bumped into another student I know at the bus-stop. Since she was waiting for the rest of the students (who are waiting for a car driven by the aunt of one of the students), I accompanied her until they reached the bus-stop. They accompanied me in turn to wait for 852 at the bus interchange, since I wanted to see the route that 852 travels to reach Bukit Batok, and reached home at about 3.50pm.

As usual every year, went to visit relatives on 初一, and slacked at home on the second day, trying to figure out how to finish my university assignment. The most irritating part about the software is that there are not many tutorials which are updated to use the latest game engine, and also the documentation in the help file does not help much. If I can’t even figure out how to code properly, then what will become of the rest of the course, and my team? This does not bode well for everyone.

Finally, I went to Mrs Wee’s place on Saturday, and got tricked by the weather in coming to her house early. However, arriving early was good - Mrs Wee highlighted that her son’s computer has a problem whereby it will automatically power off by itself randomly. I suspected that the thermal paste between the CPU and the heat sink has dried up, so I tried running Orthos Prime and SpeedFan to monitor the CPU temperature. Once it exceeded 72 degrees, it powered off by itself. By this time, my secondary school friends had arrived, so I put the thought of going online to check the specification for the thermal limitation for the AMD Athlon 64 till I get home.

After the visit at Mrs Wee’s, we went to West Mall for our dinner at Mayim. Thanks to the Chinese New Year goodies eaten at Mrs Wee’s we only ate about $10 worth of food. After the dinner we headed to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for coffee, while three of my friends went up to get tickets for 功夫篮球. We chatted for quite some time until it was 15 minutes till the movie started, and headed up to the cineplex. Overall it wasn’t such a good movie. Although direction, pacing and story were good, there’s too many subplots, which the movie failed to close, and thus, I felt that it was a bit rushed.

Hopefully, next week I won’t be so busy, as the major assignment due date is approaching, coupled with the irritating lab-based assignments for another module. Its going to be an important week as well, as my future job prospect is going to be decided. What a way to start the Lunar New Year, eh?