Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

Sorry for the long delay in posting, its been almost a month since I last posted. Been really busy with the final year project, and the prototype was only submitted last Friday - hope that the assessment would be a good one. On top of that, my subordinate got into a minor motorcycle accident two weeks ago, and as a result, I had to run around like a madman for the last two weeks, preparing equipment for others, checking staff clearance forms and solving the usual technical problems.

Thankfully, last Saturday was a day of just fun & games at my workplace, although the final game was so wierd that I refused to play it. Then got dragged out by my ex-platoonmates to watch The Dark Knight, which was well worth the price and time spent in the theatre. Absolutely liked the Joker’s genius. Had dinner at Tao’s at Paradiz after the movie, and my impression of the food was good, and with excellent customer service as well.

Well, it’s been a busy two weeks - most of the time spent on either calling vendors, surfing the internet to check out product specifications, and also budgeting at work, and in my spare time, PSP programming and doing the project proposal for my FYP, amongst other things. Its amazing how fast new stuff can come out in times of economic growth.

Just had a major event this morning at my workplace, and I’m glad that it’s over. Somehow the confidence level in IT doesn’t seem to be high, as compared to my previous one - perhaps I can make a change in the coming months. Met new people as well, and they’re really friendly, much more friendly as compared to my previous workplace. However, due to my work, seems that I will seldom get to interact with them…sad.

I finally managed to get my D-Link DNS-323 NAS to run Transmission and Clutch yesterday night, so that I can power off my PC while my NAS box does all my hard work for me. Hopefully this month’s electricity bill won’t shoot up so high.

I ordered a capacitor on Farnell’s website to fix my x51v’s capacitor last week, and I made a major mistake - I used too much force when removing the capacitor, and the solder pad came off the PCB. Looks like I need to spend money on conductive paint to fix it, hopefully.

I’m planning to get an Asus eee PC, but I’ll get a hands-on on the two units this weekend before deciding which one to get - the 901 or the 1000H.

Caught Get Smart last Tuesday with EK and Seansean, and had a real good laugh over the show. The wit and humor in the movie was really enjoyable.

Yeah I know I’ve not been updating my site lately - tied up with work and my final year project in school.  In fact, I just came back from a meeting with my project supervisor at Plaza Singapura today, and there’s still lots of work to do in order to properly finish our project.

Anyway, so far the new job is quite alright, its the waiting for the action to start that kills. On top of that, boring stuff have to be documented for the end-users (as more often than not, their computer literacy is quite bad), as well as local system documentation for whoever takes over my position in the future.

Its kind of amazing to see that most people do not know that there are free alternatives to expensive products that can do the most of the job that they need - for example, Audacity versus Sony Sound Forge, OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, Ubuntu Server versus Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Its even more shocking to realize that 99% of an organization’s primary and secondary servers run on Windows Server 2003. Especially for server operating systems - the more simplified they become (through GUI), the weaker the future generation of server administrators get. Although simplification is good, it is also important to have a strong foundation in using the command line as well.

Well, after a hectic schedule in May, I am now finally leaving my current workplace for one nearer to my home in 2 weeks’ time. Will miss the times spent here, and the interaction with friends and fellow colleagues there.

The last month has been extremely tiring, as the school assignment workload was very heavy, and coffee is the staple drink in the morning for the last two weeks of the month. Added to that, the job interviews at different places, and the crazy stuff that I have to do at work is enough to make one feel very frustrated and stressed. On a brighter note, Battlestar Galactica is now shown on Arts Central, but I think borrowing DVDs from the library is faster than waiting one day a week for the show to run, and even then there are censorship issues.

My PSP died on me last week, I’m not sure when though. I took it apart and read through a few guides and found out that my PSP’s power switch seems to be spoilt, and on top of that, the backlight fuse is spoilt. Right now, I’m using a Pandora’s Battery to power on my PSP, with the help of despertar del cementario v5, and a custom configuration file for timemachine that will boot the NAND when I don’t press any button on power up, and Despertar del Cementerio v5 when I press the left shoulder trigger button. Until I get the switch or power board replaced, I have to rely on taking out the battery and putting it back in to power on the PSP.

Nothing much to write about this week. My intensive lectures are finally finishing, and now that I have slightly more time, I can finally start on my school assignments, which are piling up very fast.

I read with disgust at the recent “technology” news reported in the local papers. Movie files containing viruses/trojans? What a joke. It’s more of the media player being poorly coded rather than the movie file.

Went for a BBQ on Saturday night at my friend’s place in the Hillview area. We talked about our experiences in life, had alot of food, and reached home near 1 am after sending home a few of my friends.

I finally decided to take the plunge and modify my K800i’s firmware, since the 1 year warranty is near expiry. I added custom light effects, display driver and camera driver to the internal filesystem. So far the light effects and display driver are fine and are a big improvement from the original one. Now I’m left to test the camera driver, as there isn’t much incentive for me to take pictures with my phone. Will need to upgrade the EROM as well so that I can load a newer firmware rather than just modifying the current one.

I’ve been slacking on the blogging front, it’s a new semester and I’ve got lots of things that I need to settle these few days, including university assignments. Not to mention, handling the insane amount of things happening at my workplace. Anyway, my CrossRoads XB were spoilt since the start of school, and only now after two weeks then I could get replacements for them, the X3i, as Jaben had recently re-stocked their X3i, which seem to be quite popular.

I’ve recently been addicted to my PSP lately, due in part to “evil” game designers who did Monster Hunter Freedom 2. This is bad, because I’ve got tons of videos to watch on my PDA, and I don’t want to waste time converting them to the PSP video format.

On school matters, seems that everyone is rushing to do the assignment, as evident from our experience with the crappy game engine that we’re using. It’s a love-hate relationship with it, especially with C++. Heard that the other module is about algorithms and compression for multimedia stuff. Hope it’s not a killer, from the looks of the lecture notes and lab handouts. There’s quite a few new faces in class also, hope to get to know them better over this semester.

Well, another week goes by quickly, and thankfully there wasn’t anything big happening this week. Went to celebrate CheekyHan’s pre-birthday party at K-BOX Marina Square on Friday evening - the buffet food was alright, but the real grouse is the lack of free-flow drinks (unless you consider the soup). Took a train back home but dropped off at Buona Vista due to the fact that the train was packed like sardines, and took 198 so that I could sleep a little.

Had a real hot morning on Saturday, and then had the unfortunate event of being mobilized. Shared a cab to camp with 3 of my unit friends, did our equipment check, and checked out of the camp in a cab back home. Cab trip costed about $5 per person per trip.

Finally, I just checked my university results slip, and was as expected - one Credit and one Distinction. Wish I could have more time to improve the Credit though. A new semester starts tomorrow, and the usual “Hell Week” begins anew. Just have to endure the torture for one more semester after the June break, and I will graduate.

I have been playing Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on my PSP quite a lot this week, due to the fact that two of my colleagues at work dragged me into playing it, and we had a fun time with the game in multiplayer mode. There seems to be a way to play online via the Internet, but I will need to research on that - in the meantime I’m trying to improve my character’s weapons and armour, but the material needed is quite hard to find in the game.