Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

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?

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.

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

I know I haven’t been blogging for almost a month now, but it can’t be helped, since I miscued my assignment datelines and thus, leads me to a two week mad rush for assignment completion, and finally another two weeks for exam studying. The curious thing about university exams is that in the 3 hours given to you, some people will start walking out of the exam hall as fast as 30 minutes to 1 hour after the starting time. I speculate that it could be that these people are really good, they have no idea how to do the paper, they just want to pass the exam, or they have no time to finish the paper since they’ve got appointments that clash with the exam timing.

I’ve got to reformat my laptop soon (because its getting more and more slower, as I install and uninstall stuff regularly),  but my parents are heading to Taiwan at the end of this year and the temptation to ask them to buy an Asus eee PC is running  high. Oh, I’ve got to get a pencil box with stationery for the next sememster of school as well.

Finally, lately, I’ve been dreaming of a person for  a few nights already, wonder if it means anything.

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.

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.