Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

Went for a buffet at the Mushroom Pot at Orchard Point with CheekyHan and Ah Tham, and it was…very exotic. Ate lots of mushrooms, and had a few servings of meat as well. After that, we headed down to SLS to look for a USB thumbdrive header connector so that I can repair the spoilt thumbdrive properly. $1.50 for a USB connector sounds just right. Then we took a bus to Island Creamery at Serene Centre, where CheekyHan ate a slice of Alaskan Cake (Can’t remember what was it called), while me and Ah Tham had their Sundae. As expected, their ice-cream was done superbly. Hopefully CheekyHan can work here after he has finished his “pastry and dessert” course downtown, so that we can get discounts…haha.

(I did not vandalize the swivel table with a pencil, it was already there when I took the seat.)

The first week of my part-time university undergraduate life has begun, and it has been very taxing on me so far, since by the time I reach home from SIM, it’s almost 11pm and I need to sleep for the next day. Anyway, it’s only for one week, so it’s not so bad. First day of school a few people were in the wrong lecture theatre, and I had to be proactive and get the 10+ people in the room to go to the correct venue after calling up one of the course co-ordinators. Sheesh. 15 minutes of $6,000+ wasted. Anyway, DFS is a really cool lecturer (he’s 30 this year), and he never fails to surprise us with his jokes and sudden calls for volunteers for demonstrations by the audience. There was food and coffee/tea/water provided, too, so overall it wasn’t so bad.

I nearly got hit by a ladder this week, while returning the ladder to its proper place in school. Additionally, one of the teachers found my 4GB Imation thumbdrive (seemingly, ages ago), but forgot all about it until recently and she returned it to me. What a twist of luck.

Yup, this has got to be one of my best achievements so far. Got this broken thumbdrive from a teacher in school on Thursday, and fixed it up today. Thankfully the PCB is solidly constructed, because it was slightly bent when I soldered on the USB head I hacked off from a spare USB cable in school.

Yes it looks ugly, but I’m getting a replacement connector from Sim Lim Tower soon. For now I’m pulling out data from the thumbdrive as I speak, as the teacher’s data is more important than the physical item.

The thumbdrive in action. Looks pretty cool with the blue light and cable. Too bad the casing isn’t totally transparent.

A nice wrap-up of the week on Friday - the two UPSes in the server room was replaced, and (probably due to the school schedule of exams) the mid-autumn festival was celebrated about two weeks in advance of the actual day. For obvious reasons I stayed behind in school for free food and drinks. The 汤圆 and Chinese Tea made by students and staff of the school was really nice. Oh, and the red lantern in this post looks really good, but then it doesn’t have a holder for the candle. Ah well, at least this won’t give off a foul burning plastic smell (referring to the lantern made from CDs/DVDs), nor catch fire easily (as many of the lanterns made by students are easily flammable).Recently my bed was changed, and as a result I have trouble sleeping recently. However I’ve been getting used to the bed for the past three nights, so I hope I can sleep well again.

I’ve been thinking of you recently, and I’m starting to miss you. But I’m afraid of disrupting your pace now…hopefully we’ll talk again once everything is over.

Okay, I’ve been two weeks behind my latest post, I must apologize. Have been really busy at work for the past two weeks, so much so that I don’t even have much time to celebrate my birthday.

Anyway, a quick recap of what happened since my last post:

Went for Teacher’s Day dinner @ Suntec on the last day of August, had a wonderful (meat-laden) meal there…didn’t win any prizes there cause I wanted to save my luck for other things, haha.

Sent back my SteelSound 5H headphones for RMA (to an address in Taiwan, thankfully, so shipping it via Airmail costed $11 or so, and took 4 days) last Monday, and got the 5H v2 back as a replacement this Monday…how fast & nice of them! Oh, and Monday was my birthday. Mum cooked (or bought?) chilli crab for dinner. I was hoping for a Cheese Fondue family meal from Pizza Hut, but chilli crab is just as good, LOL.

Today there was a power trip, so the server and network went down. Ah well, so much for the UPSes. Tomorrow the school is organizing a pre-Mid-Autumn Festival celebration at night, so I need to clear a lot of work tomorrow (5 PCs to reformat, checking and resetting one network switch and compiling a list of spoilt LAN points) so that I can relax under the starry night…I’m overdue for some rest and recreation.

Yeah, I’m starting to procrastinate already. Maybe my brain (and body) is unconsciously trying to tell me that I need a break? LOL! Basically I’ve been counting down to a major event in September after the holidays, and that means no slacking until that week is over. Ah well, hopefully there’s nothing much to do after that big event until my university studies begins.

Anyway, just a quick update - Had dinner with my army friends beside our old camp on Friday night, and it was a real fun time chatting with them, catching up on what happened to everyone. The next day, I went for a briefing at my company’s HQ , and a friend brought me to the Adelphi to test try a new pair of earphones which he claims is really good, and it really is! The CrossRoads MylarOne XB (for Xtra Bass). To me, it sounds better than the current earphones I’ve been using and the sound reproduced from my mp3 player is absolutely right for me. Well worth the $75 paid.

Recently, two of my friends fell sick, hope they recover quickly, because I don’t want to be down with flu/fever these few weeks, especially with the big event in two weeks’ time. On a related note to one of my friends (who uses a Mac often), my company was kind enough to offer us training with Macintoshes, so I finally get to learn how to use a Mac properly, although I am a bit sad because there wasn’t time for me to explore Macs by myself - self-discovery is more fun to me.

I’ve been working on getting my universal Windows XP image to work on the new Core 2 Duo PCs, but somehow it fails to boot up. After racking my brains since yesterday morning, I finally found the problem - Windows was using the single-processor HAL, and could not boot up at all, since the master image was from a single core computer. By changing some options in boot.ini, I was able to boot into Windows using the multiprocessor HAL, and subsequently run mini-setup. This is wierd - all the other PCs are able to boot, but not the Core 2 Duo ones.

Finally, there is this pair of girls who have been disturbing me recently to the point that they even dragged “innocent party” into the picture (”Eh! Cher! Cher! This girl very pretty right? She admire you lei!”). Argh… immature kids.

Actually, I wanted to post this blog on Tuesday evening, but somehow my website had a problem, so now I’m posting it. Anyway, I got the Secret OST on Tuesday, and the auntie at the cashier’s counter told me it was the last CD in the store. Wow.

I bought the CD at Funan after I went to Sim Lim Square to get a Hitachi Desktar E7K500 hard drive, because my Western Digital 500GB seems to have a problem with partition editing. Hopefully its just an incompatibility problem with my motherboard.

Just yesterday there was one student who wanted me to help her recover her PowerPoint files from FLOPPY DISK. Wow…first time in my life I see oil on the magnetic disk surface, so I tore open the floppy disk (And saw scratches on the disk…bad, bad, bad) and tried cleaning it to no avail. Luckily, I was able to recover the file but only can get the text and a few pictures since its a partially-corrupted file, but she says its quite good already, so I left it at that.

Finally, a colleague of mine drew a comic on the company forums with my nick and another guy. Very talented artist, but I think he either is lazy or didn’t have time to draw the characters properly, so that’s why it looks so wierd.

Okay, this week’s been a pretty crazy week for me, due to the fact that I had to be on standby near two computer labs for the preliminary exams and following that, prepare them for the actual N-level exams. Anyway, it seems that I bring luck to people who need it? I helped a group of girls that were doing a website competition because they had problems embedding a video clip, and also had to chip in a hand to “submit” it because the thumbdrive containing their stuff could not be mounted on a laptop the teacher is using to burn to CD for submission.

I helped out another student today, due to the fact that she only had her hard copy F&N coursework (guess who. LOL!) which needed to be edited in Word and printed out to be submitted. Instead of re-typing out the text, I helped her OCR it into the computer and saved alot of time…luckily she asked me for help early otherwise it would be disastrous.

Finally I couldn’t help but notice that there were at least three anime blogs about KKnM holding a CharaFest, so I decided to join them and spread the word, since I do have hits from search engines. Hey, I’m just helping out, alright? LOL!