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.

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.

Well, this week my PSP’s arrived from the States (just the system and the charger only), and I’ve flashed a custom firmware onto it, and at the same time while flashing the firmware for my two other colleagues at work, I bricked one, which I recovered back successfully (much to the disappointment of him). It wasn’t as scary as I thought, probably due to the maturity of the tools and packaged applications to do the flashing easily. Got a 4GB Sandisk Memory Stick Pro Duo with a 2-in-1 USB transfer and charger cable and a black slip-on case with strap at Comics Connection at Woodlands. Total cost: <$200 Singapore dollars. Currrently I’m playing Patapon and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. got I got to play with my colleague’s Dell x50v and flashed it to Windows Mobile 6. Seems that WPA-PSK is buggy in the current latest ROM, so he’ll probably have to use a third-party client to connect to a WPA-PSK network.

At work, it’s really been a horrible week, especially with the future rollout of the new in-house web-based “helpdesk” system, which I think is going to waste even more of my working time handling beureaucratic nonsense blindly thrown by the management. Additionally, I feel more and more like a personal assistant to someone on top of my own duties. This has got to stop.

Well, finally my exams are over - and I can  enjoy the short 1-month break before all hell breaks loose again. It’s been  raining these few days, and its especially cold in the morning, and as such, I cannot tell whether I have a cold or it’s just the my nose acting up. I have to resort to going home whenever there’s a lapse in the rainfall near the end of the day, for the sake of my health - I don’t want to fall sick during the exams earlier this week. Also, I’ve developed jaw pain for some strange reason, which started to hurt on Saturday night but was okay on Sunday afternoon, but Sunday night and Monday was pretty bad, and had to resort to see the doctor, who told me it wasn’t his field of specialization (obviously) since he couldn’t pinpoint the problem, and gave me painkillers. I sought out the dentist that same evening, and she gave me antibiotics. Combined together, I had a wonderful sleep on Monday night. Turns out that it was either a bacterial infection of the gums, my running nose affecting the tooth, or that the tooth is cracked and dental surgery is required. Hopefully its just my running nose or bacterial infection - I can’t afford the time (and pain) to do a dental surgery these days.

These few days I have a lot of things to do - checking the PCs and projectors for faults accumulated in the past three weeks or so, due to the heavy university assignment workload. Also, will need to set up 20 printers in one of the labs for the kids to print their coursework. It isn’t so bad, except for the dust and dirt accumulated in the floorboards and power socket connectors inside it. Thankfully one student gave me her drawing of Mickey Mouse during the last few days before assignment submission, which brought some cheer and brought me back to reality instead of staring at lines of code on the screen.

I’ve recently ordered a broken PSP online, and hope to repair it once it reaches Singapore next week. The time has come for me to pick up some knowledge of the PSP, with the growing popularity of this handheld gaming device. Additionally, I can now finally operate on my PDA to fix the irritating “battery latch is open” messages that have been bugging me - even a gentle knock on my PDA can cause it to auto-suspend itself. Took out the battery latch switch by force, and used the soldering wire to bridge the gap, as I fanthomed that soldering a contact that small (<1mm) with a piece of wire that is <3.5mm is insanely difficult without a Helping Hands station, and its back in business. Now I just need to find a replacement capacitor or battery to replace the corroded one.