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.

 My midnight blue Inspiron 1420 arrived on Thursday evening, and the first thing I did was “try” to use Vista, and found that besides the nice desktop wallpaper, everything else is pretty much the same as Windows XP, aside from a few additional stuff. After half an hour of playing around with it, I chucked in my Windows XP CD and did a full format of the hard drive. After installing Windows XP, I found that the resolution of 1440 x 900 spacious but is a little bit too small on the 14.1-inch screen - mental note to check out the notebook at Courts before ordering next time.

Am sick again (with the common cold) for some strange reason yesterday. Maybe I should spend less time around my colleague, who has recently fallen sick and still recovering. I have a feeling I’ll recover by Monday, with 10 hours of sleep a night in the past two days.

Will be heading out to Queensway Shopping Centre tomorrow to accompany my military buddies to shop, and hopefully I can find the Adidas Wanaka II GTX Gore-tex shoes, which I have been unable to find in Singapore so far.

Forgot to post about my pre-Chinese New Year shopping spree last week - spent a total of about $140 on shirts at Junction 8 and Wisma with my military buddies. I saw two interesting tees at the Giordano store in the basement, but it was near closing time, so we had to leave the shop.

Went to NP Open House on Thursday with 2 of my poly friends, and chatted with a few lecturers and tutors there… most of the time they were too busy advertising the courses to the prospective students. Mental note to come down on Saturdays next time.

Caught 周杰伦 in concert on Friday night at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. Altogether a very nice show, but perhaps its a Friday night, the screams from the audience wasn’t as loud as I expected. 听妈妈的话 and the on-stage 斗琴 prelude video was entertaining, as well as 南拳妈妈’s appearance on stage to sing the country version of 双截棍. Sadly though, I got a $30 parking ticket. Serves me right for forgetting to put coupons. On the other hand I can’t believe the amount of traffic in the city area, as well as the expressways leading to the city area. If it wasn’t for the traffic, I could have reached the concert slightly earlier and remembered to put coupons.

Finally, my 2-week intensive lectures at SIM have finished - side-effects from the 2 weeks involved lack of sleep and accelerated pimple growth. Just another 9 more months or so (and 3 more 2-week intensive lectures per semester) and I will graduate. Hope that my friend’s timetable’s not as bad as mine, cause she has a long way to go - 4 years in UniSIM.

Another week of the new year has gone, and I have solved lots of problematic issues that cropped up at work - faulty projectors, PCs, etc. and now my workload has more or less gone down to manageable levels. Thank goodness for automation, I can’t live without it. One thing that can’t be automated however, is physically moving equipment, but I take it as a form of exercise.

I just got back from a pre-Lunar New Year clothes shopping trip at Junction 8 with my buddies from the military. Spent a total of $97.80 on 4 tops, and will probably spend more tomorrow - My phone battery died on Thursday, and so I need to get it checked out at the service centre at Wisma, and get a replacement if they refuse to replace or repair it.

Also, today was the final 2 lectures of CSCI346 at SIM, and at the same time the UniSIM orientation was going on, and so there were alot of people buzzing around in the atrium. I thought I saw somebody familiar there, but then its a view of her back, so I can’t tell for sure…I hope that what I thought is correct if it is her.

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

Recently, I’ve been addicted to a extremely expensive hobby - cruising the streets of Singapore in a car. Just the other day I took a long drive down Jurong Road, and turned back up Jurong West Avenue 1 and into Jurong West Street 42 before heading back home. Don’t know why, but I just feel like it.

Made a trip to IMM at night yesterday, and the jam on Toh Guan Road is atrocious - partly because IMM is offering free parking for the first 3 hours and the 4th hour $1.07, which means lots of cars parking there. I ended up parking at a multi-story car park near IMM and then walking to the building to print my bank book and deposit a cheque. The neighbourhood there is really nice and quiet. Maybe I should one day jog there in the morning/evening.

Recieved the certificate of achievement for the New Balance Real Run in the mail on Tuesday…I feel that I am very slow though.

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…