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.

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?

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!

I’m blogging just before meeting my friends for dinner @ Pepper Lunch. Well…another interesting week for me. I fixed a HP keyboard with a missing PS/2 connector at the end with one from an unused keyboard (with keys plucked out by some unknown idiotic kid). It would have been a better fix if I had a soldering iron, but the best that I could do was twist both ends of the wires inside the cable together and then tape it up after each twist, finishing with duct tape. And it works!

Also, just yesterday night the sec 5 F&N girl told me over MSN that she cried on the way home because she did not save her coursework when the computer automatically shutdown at 7pm for energy conservation (Time to put up a warning notice in the computer lab…) I was able to retrieve her document this morning, but sadly, the file was the old version. Sigh. Nothing I can do but to encourage her to re-do the coursework.

On another note, I met quite a few interesting students in school. Yesterday there was a group of girls wanting to play a game with me, with the stakes of me pretending to be a cow for their story-telling “show” next week if I lost. I also met this crazy girl who happens to have the same surname as me, LOL.

I’m wondering why so many students feel sad nowadays, yet I don’t seem to be affected by them? Maybe it’s because of the workload from their studies, I guess. I feel sad for them, they seem to be pushed to the limit at times. Sigh, all I can do is to wish them the best of luck in their schoolwork.

I guess this is really the end…we both had finally let go of each other.

I know. I forgive you. I’m letting you go now. All that matters is that at the end of the day, you still love me

Found this on my desktop when I came in for work this morning:

Must remember to get them something for their work

While I should be at home, eating grass (i.e. saving $) for a new computer, 17 (or 18?) people from #SGAnimeBloggers on Rizon were in the process of celebrating DarkMirage’s birthday. Instead, I found myself driving in the rain to pick up HSK at Clementi (it stopped raining when I reached, grr). Then I proceeded to Ngee Ann and rendezvoused with another friend of ours, and we proceeded to visit the School of InfoComm Technology. Well, it’s been such a long time that I have been there - the eGarage has changed alot, and the IT support personnel have been relocated elsewhere which I don’t know. Saw Ng Poh Oon at the eGarage, and he told us to check out the 4th floor, as there are more interesting stuff to see then the eGarage.
When we took the lift (still unchanged, besides the walls of the elevator being changed) up to the 4th floor, we found that the entire floor of block 27 has changed drastically - the MMTC on the 6th floor has been dismissed, and the furniture and other stuff in the room has been separated. There were 2 computer labs, a few tutorial rooms, a sound recording room, a photography room with green screen, a “classical” animation studio (as in, real-life models), and a few other smaller rooms for students to work in. THEY HAVE MACS NOW. Well, what can we do? Time moves, and changes are made. Oh, we ran into Melvin Tan and Jim Ang there, as they are managing the whole floor. After visiting the 4th floor, we proceeded to the Convention Centre, where the “main bulk” of our past tutors and lecturers were.

At the Convention Centre we ran into Hwang Wan-Lee (”Where is my HSKos?”), our school Director Ms Angela Wee, Mr Seow, Mr Terence Choo, and a few other tutors/lecturers as well. We spent quite some time chatting there, and got invited to the Ngee Ann Timesharing Alumni Clubhouse for a look. It was an interesting place, where the swimming pool appears to have no edges (following the “infinity” idea for swimming pools in several condominiums). It also had a gym, restraunt, reading room, function room, card room and a KTV lounge, as well as an outdoor bar. I seriously don’t think that the membership is worth it, given that you have to shell out $180 a year, not including a one-time non-transferrable entrance fee of $500. Transferrable memberships cost a whopping $2,100. SAFRA beats this hands-down, though the networking feature of SAFRA is not as good as the NAA. Ah well, I’ll just wait and see how it goes.