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.

 

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.

Bought a 6-pack box of Alpen energy bar for $7 yesterday, and realized that chocolate is the “in” thing now for this type of bars. Basically this should serve me for the rest of my RT phase 2 days (at roughly $1 a bar, you could potentially save $4 per RT day after transport), and probably for my evenings at SIM as well. Only caveat is to drink water and probably eat something small and light (like a croissant or something) so that your stomach doesn’t feel empty while the energy bar is being digested.

Monday’s tutorial was interesting, in the sense that when our tutor showed the class an e-mail from our lecturer, stating that as third year students, we are supposed to know how to do our assignment, and if not, look up for the relevant information ourselves instead of badgering our lecturer. Well, that’s not surprising. It’s hard to get your friends to look for the information themselves, because if you know the information, they will flock to you for the direct answer. Talk about independence.

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.

Yup, caught Transformers at Yishun. The reason why me and my friends watched it at Yishun is because one of my friends woke up late today, so the only place with good seats were at heartland cinemas today. Anyway, it really is “more than meets the eye”, contrary to what the newspaper reviews say. Overall it was a really good action-packed movie to watch, as expected from Michael Bay. After the movie, we went off to Chong Pang Nasi Lemak beside our old camp for supper. We then dropped by the camp gates to see if we recognize anyone we know on guard duty that night, and it happened that it was our juniors doing duty. We chatted for a while, and found out that they are due to be released from military service very soon…times flies really fast.

If I told you I were near you, would you greet me, or pretend that I’m invisible? Would you be happy to see me, or sad? 

Well, it was a fun time at the RSAF Open House 2006 yesterday, as I met up with my platoon mates who are on duty, bumped into my CWO and saw the ex-Comd ADSD there. The aerial display was really fun, and you get to see F16s fly close to the exhibition area (like, 20m above the ground), conducting a mock bombing of the runway, various exhibits from aerospace manufacturers, visiting the flight simulator and grabbing freebies like stickers, bags and others. One thing bad though, was that I forgot to bring my sunglasses, and my skin has a nice red glow after an entire day at the exhibition area.

I just came back from a trip to Bukit Batok Central to print my POSB Savings book, and I dropped by the M1 Shop to see what new phones and plans are on offer. Although the new phones are tempting (Dopod 585 for $98 for a 2-year contract!), they come with 2 year contracts, and I already completed half of my existing one when I changed my ancient Nokia 3310 to a Plucky Pink Sony Ericsson J300i (they only had that colour left) with a new 2 year plan. Furthermore, in the fourth quarter of next year, the mobile operators in Singapore will have full number portability, so switching operators will hopefully be pain-free (due to network/system problems and administrative charges). By then, we should see some interesting offers and events happening. Will more M1 customers switch to StarHub or SingTel? Will more mobile phone telcos come into play? Let’s wait and see.

With the clearance forms signed, items dekitted, stores returned, certificates collected, well-wishes accepted and handshakes shaken, I am now officially an NSman of the RSAF. However, its a half-happy and half-sad event for me, I guess. Knowing that you have been through tough and good times with other guys of your own age, and disbanding our little band of brothers makes me feel uneasy about the future of each of us. Will we see each other again? What interesting things will your platoonmates do? The world suddenly seems like an intimidating and scary place, compared to the sheltered confines of a camp and seeing familiar faces everyday. It’s as if I were an uncivilized barbarian who left his home in the polar north of Faerun and headed down south to the temperate lands where civilized people and claustrophobic cities are found. What happened over the past 26 months of military service now seems like an old film playing in Technicolor. The greens of the grass and trees, the browns of the soil and sand, and the blacks of the roads and waterlogged grass now all seem to lose their colour. Some things that are still clear in my mind are the reddish orange hue of dawn breaking and dusk setting, the pitch-black darkness of the night being colorized by the grey moon, the feel of the cool breeze as it blows past your wet face and sweaty body, the merciless hot yellow light during the day and the freezing pale grey world of the night. Not having to feel these for a long time suddenly makes me feel detached from something that feels familiar - it has been replaced by a sense of strangeness and wierdness about it, an imbalance that must somehow be corrected.

Additionally, it happened today that things didn’t turn out normally as well. My friend’s brother was keeping his elder brother’s MSN session open so I could send him a photo (which is what you don’t see everyday), and a Malaysian (whom I have an inkling of the notion that he is a “colleague” - no, wait, its more like “coursemate” for the job that both of us signed up with HP for) just added me to his MSN list just because we happen to be in the same group of people who are going for an on-the-job training course tomorrow. Sheesh. Can’t today be an uneventful but joyous and normal day for me?