Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

Last week, I cloned 40 tablet PCs for use - however great the tablet is, it doesn’t work because of the poor wireless infrastructure at my workplace, the wireless Zerg rush ultimately caused a few access points to hang (since they’re not enterprise grade access points), and thus required manual resets. I always push the point that no matter how fast is your computer or how good is the software, rule number one is to have proper infrastructure in the first place - a few rooms here are not set up properly for power and network access points, thus giving us headaches in setting up computers for the various departments.

I’ve also managed to do a GUI-based comparison script which takes in a CSV file with usernames and compares them to the Active Directory server - I’ve managed to get the comparison working, now I’m left with the user home directory comparison and reverse comparing the Active Directory users with the CSV file to see if there are any unused accounts not deleted on the server

These few days are so calm, it feels like its the calm before the storm - alot of my university assignments are due next week, and I have not even finished them all -this means that my Chinese New Year will probably be burnt on doing the assignments.

Seems that I’m more or less confirmed to go in as an ICT Executive by my new workplace…problem now is to prepare the letters to be sent to HR and colleagues at my current workplace.

The yearly ritual of academic pursuit begins anew, and this means everyone is busy - busy waiting at the bus-stop for the bus, waiting for the bus in front of you in the car, waiting at the MRT station for the train, and waiting for the taxi before the 35% peak hour surcharge. As a techie, this means we are busy too. Yesterday’s and today’s work consisted of resetting passwords, calling up vendors and chasing their asses to replace spoilt hardware, getting the server people to fix the login script for users (which has been broken for almost 2 years), imaging laptops, and settling itsy bitsy stuff (e.g “No internet? Reboot.” 5 minutes later: “Hey, it works!”). And as usual, when school starts, office politicking begins - and this, unfortunately, has the IT department caught in the crossfire. Let’s just say that automatic mass deployment of Adobe CS3 is not possible with on-site people like me due to computing policies, tablet PCs are not a precious resource to be clamored for, and one man doing PowerPoint, Word and Excel teaching resources for 8 subjects for sec 1 to 5 students is insane.

Speaking of Adobe CS3, we finally got our hands on the site licence, and I ended up spending quite a few hours getting the deployment XML file to work. Sadly it’s still not done, but hopefully by tomorrow it should be up. And my experimentation with MsiExec.exe to silently install an application and its corresponding drivers actually worked, and that trick is now in the bundle of software that gets installed whenever an image is loaded onto a system.

You smiled at me with your perfect lipstick

Went out for a K-Lunch session with my buddies from the military on Thursday at Marina Square, and we caught The Golden Compass (Serafina Pekkala is equivalent to Legolas in archery and melee combat with a bow), followed by a hawker dinner at Bugis, and after-dinner 豆奶 with 油条.

I fell sick on that same night - consequently, I couldn’t report to work on Friday. However, due to the fact that it was sec 1 registration day (and from the amount of people and parked cars at the secondary school next to my house), I was more or less “forced” to go to work, thus resulting in a cab fare of $20.05 - had I taken a taxi 15 minutes later, I could have avoided the 35% peak hour surcharge. Thankfully nothing big happened, so I went to the clinic opposite the school to get medication - painkillers does wonders with your brain, faxed my MC over to HQ and went back home shortly after (free) lunch. Although it was a pretty bad day, somehow I feel that something new has started?

Saturday was an entire day of sleeping and waking up repeatedly, with a few hours use of the computer just to check e-mail - today I’m fully recovered, and I’ve just completed FEAR: Perseus Mandate (trainers and cheat codes do wonders if you’re short on time and just want to know the plot). Tomorrow’s gonna be a very busy day for me - hopefully I can finish what I’ve set out to accomplish tomorrow…

Yep, title says it all - I’ve been busy rushing for assignments the past week, and am still rushing for assignments till the end of the first week of December. From two simple assignments, it has ballooned to three, and two labs are dependent on one assignment, so its pretty much tight. Unfortunately, this is also a busy time at work (for some strange and unknown reason), so the pressure is on. Just today I had to help a teacher with converting her CCA video to VCD (for speed purposes, its a waste of time to do a DVD on a really slow computer, moreover the deadline is in 3 hours), and I finished just in time for her to show it to her students, despite the blackout happening during transcoding to VCD. Not that it’s a bad thing though - this sort of stuff is like tying shoelaces to me, and she has an easygoing personality, so its not really stressful.

Recently, StarHub’s internet speed has slowed down to a terrible crawl to the point that I am almost frustrated at the speed at which websites load - as bad as 56k access. Wish they could do something about it - as much as I’d like to complain, I’d doubt they’d do anything about the complaint, since they seem to care for their profit margins more than customers.

At work, I’ve found a nifty open source software inventory & deployment solution, and it is compatible with both linux and Windows. The solution to my insanity is now here. I can deploy applications en masse by simply packaging and deploying the software installation down to all the agents installed in the PCs. Can’t wait to try it out - looks like I’ll have to wait till the end of the university semester to play with it.

Recently I’ve been busy with RT at Maju FCC (nothing much), and with this wonderfully good book as well, so I couldn’t blog. This book is a really good read (and most copies are on loan at the National Library, so I had to reserve it - there goes my $1.55), and I can’t wait for the movie to be released. Following C.S. Lewis’ style of alternate worlds, Philip Pullman’s rabbit hole is apparently quite deep - I thought it was a single novel, but it turned out that its a three-part series, so I had to borrow The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass from the National Library this evening. On a sidenote, I saw BioShock available for loan at the National Library - way past cool.

RT at Maju FCC is proceeding as normal as it is, with the exception on Sunday and Monday that the OC came down to debrief us on what happened to one of their regulars (only an NSF until recently) who had passed away only the day before Sunday. Life is fragile, and we should treasure life for what it is. Anyway, next week’s the first IPPT and I’d better pass it, or else I’ll be dragged into Phase 2.

I’ve been addicted to a new game, World In Conflict recently, and I’ve been playing it since Sunday (or was it Saturday?). By far, I think it’s one of the rare few RTS with an interesting storyline, especially in the way it turns the usual “Soviets invade USA” story (Red Alert 2) into something very intriguing (the overall story is more like a side-story) and personal (the backgrounds of the main and supporting characters in the game). Hopefully I can finish it as soon as possible, this quarter’s game releases are too much to play - Splinter Cell: Conviction, Clive Barker’s Jericho, The Witcher, Crysis, Hellgate: London, Assassin’s Creed and who knows what other games will be rushed to the shelves in time for Christmas.

Finally, I’ve sorted out 95% of my old blog posts…I’m left with a few posts that need to be fixed - mostly missing images. I discovered that I used GBK2312 encoding on my old blog, so my chinese characters are toasted and I have to fix them by hand, searching through my archives. Will probably spend the weekend doing that, while preparing for Sunday’s REAL Run in the morning and RT in the evening on the same day (hoo-ah!).

Guess who I saw on the bus today?

The one, the only, Legendary Rare Character, Lui JY!

Seriously though, it was really good to see him, since the last time I saw him was like, around a year ago? We chatted awhile on the bus while I was on the way back from SIM tonight. Looks like he’s doing fine with his architectural work, and with the currently hot real estate industry, I expect him to be very busy recently.

Recently the lectures are 2 hours long, and I don’t know if its a good thing, or a bad thing. Good, since I get to go home earlier, and bad, since this means that the focus will be on lab and tutorials…and I’ve got 2 more weeks to finish two assignments, which is another strange thing, because I don’t know whatever that I am doing is correct. Also, today, we found out that our tutor is actually sitting in lecture for the module. Again, good thing or bad thing issue here.

I’m left with a year’s worth of blog posts to sort out, but I have found out that some of my blog posts have lost their original text in chinese, and some posts were cut short. Therefore, I will have to manually scan through all my past posts again in order to figure out which ones were cut short. So far only one post was cut short, but I won’t know until I have fully checked all my posts up till January 2006. Sigh, more work for me.

Friday is the day that my direct supervisor will be leaving his position, and I will be giving a little presentation on how to work effectively for the guys under his charge at the “Changeover-cum-Farewell Ceremony” at a school near Khatib MRT. All the best for him and his future endeavours.

I’ve been sorting out my old blogger posts recently, and boy, has it been a real fun ride into the past. Consequently, this has led me to sort out my photos as well. I’m almost done with the sorting, and should be probably finished by end of the month…I hope.

This week was quite an average week, except for two days where I had to be on standby for the sec 2 & 3 CPA/EOA exams in the lab. Despite what was taught to them for their lessons, I can still see some really funny things being done. For example:

• Sending more than 5 print jobs consisting of 4 pages to one printer when it is offline, resulting in a lot of paper wasted
• Not using “Find and Replace” and manually searching the document for the words to be replaced
• Saving a document on a network share that is read-only when they are given a floppy disk to save their work on.
• Some students apparently, are more interested in knowing how I “fix” the printer during their exam time when they should be focusing on the exams at hand.

Finally, I found this super old PC at my block’s lift lobby (could be spring-cleaning for Hari Raya?) - its quite an old system, due to the slow CD writer drive speed, so I guess should be late 2000 to mid 2001 model? Anyway, it was more or less stripped of its essentials - motherboard, hard disk, etc. except for the CD drives, floppy drive and the power supply unit. Feels kind of weird that people actually scavenge for parts whenever a PC is thrown away - it’s like a velociraptor cutting open your torso and ripping your intestines out.