And school is starting soon.
Yes I have yet again feel I have ‘wasted’ my holidays. Still so many things left unachieved and even untouched. Maybe dont plan for the holidays would be best :P
Starting to have doubts about my FYP (final year project). I’m thinking I would have liked it if I got my first choice. Maybe it’s just me being lazy and not wanting to work or maybe it is true. Anyway back to reading and brainstorming about my FYP, the thing that will probably make or break my first class honours. Hmmmm.. first class honours, is it really worth it?
I want to LEARN things. I want to enjoy school. I want to rest and not feel tired. I want me time. I want to stop typing now. What do I learn?
I’m selfish. As everybody is sometimes. Selfish. I need to learn to live my life and enjoy it more. I need to enjoy life more. I need to enjoy the finer things in life and not worry too much. God help me I pray

Since I’ve been back to Singapore about 2 and a half weeks ago I’ve had little rest. Out everyday except for 2 days so far. And not only that but recently I’ve been coughing alot with phlegm and stuff :P
Life’s been pretty good I guess since I got my room in PGP!! :D:D:D YAY!!!!!
Its right opposite the management office and I can even get wireless from here :D
The reception is not ‘that’ great but still a nice thing to have. Today was Matriculation Day for new engineering students in NUS so I had to man the IES booth. Funny thing was my duty starts at 1630 so I went a bit earlier and just as I got to the IES booth I hear an announcement saying something about all booths having to pack up at 1645 :P The hardest part was moving the stuff we brought down for the matric fair back to the clubroom. We took a trolley all along the road side and up slopes and a step :P Yes ‘A’ step.
Didnt sleep last night as I was trying to fix a problem with the IES Game server. Finally fixed it at like 1000 and left the rest of the day a sleepy blur. I did sleep an hour before going to the matric fair and that 1 hour did a lot of good. Perhaps the lack of sleep would explain the disorganised mess in which I am typing this. Anyway I better go do some work. Still got quite a bit of work to do not to mention a final year project. aaaaahhhhhh
Night people

For some reason the Cisco Aironet 350 card that I got when I bought my laptop from school doesnt seem to work with the DLink DSL-G604T ADSL modem/router that I got for my friend. My other friend’s card, ie also a Cisco Aironet 350 works fine. I upgraded to the latest firmware but it couldnt seem to connect. It would detect the network but I couldnt connect at all, ie no DHCP request and no IP was assigned to my computer. So I decided to use my SMC wireless USB dongle in the mean time.
So I decided to downgrade the firmware last night and what do you know it connected!!!! Mind that this was with the USB dongle plugged in. So after that I removed the USB dongle leaving just the Cisco card it. Worked fine last night.
So I switch on my laptop this morning with just the Cisco card in it and I happily see the DHCP request / IP resolving icon in my taskbar and suprisingly enough I got “Limited connectivity” with only an private 169.xxx.xxx.xxx IP assigned. So no net connection :| Strange.
I tried plugging in the wireless USB dongle and that works and suprisingly the Cisco card connects!!!! The freaking card connects only if the USB dongle is connected!!! WTH!!!!
Man Cisco doenst like me. I want a new laptop: with inbuilt wireless, a Pentium M processor, USB 2.0, firewire and a dedicated miniumum 64mb graphics card :P
School starting soon. Final year. I’m feeling old now :| Packed week next week. Somebody named Koh Chia Shin is coming to Singapore for a week and also this Sunday off to buy a game server :D Next Thursday is NUS matriculation day for new engineering students so I should be there promoting IES :P Next Saturday is freshmen orientation day for IES. Busy busy busy. This does not include my project which I shall now go back to work on :P

** Updated at 4:10:15 on 2005/07/12 **
****Edit 1 – Tuesday 12th July****
Called NUH and it is true. But they said they have enough donors at the current moment but it would be good to give them your contact if you can donate just in case :)
****Edit 0 ****
I don’t see any possible scam in such a mail except for the fact about the payment is carried by the parents and the inconsistency saying to text them your name and contact but dont supply their own. A person could be doing this to make an unsuspected victim pay expense for something they know nothing about or possibly it may cause people to donate money to them.
As I’m not currently in Singapore I can’t exactly call NUH or something to confirm this. If anyone can find out I suggest you do and help this little girl out.
Hematology & Blood Disorders: Aplastic Anemia: Some information about the said disorder.

Mail content as follows
——————————————————————————-
Dear Concerned Fellowmen / Students,

We are the parents of a 2 year-old girl, VANESSA NICOLE LEE LIM, diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a blood disorder
where her bone marrow fails to produce blood for her body’s normal function.

Because of this, we are in desperate need for DONORS for PLATELETS with A+ BLOODTYPE for the next 9 months.
Vanessa needs to be transfused with platelets every 2 days on the average.

For anyone who is so kindhearted and willing to extend help to our daughter, kindly proceed to NUH (NATIONAL
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL), Blood Donation Center, Level 1. Please inform the staff that you are a donor for VANESSA
NICOLE LEE LIM. They will screen your blood and if you pass the test, may we request 1.5 hours of your time for
platelet extraction when the need arises. The lifespan of harvested platelets is only 5 days.

Please leave your name and contact number to the statff so that they can contact you for platelet extraction when
the need arises. Please also text us your name and contact number so that we have a way to reach you and to thank
you.

Donors must be 18-45 yrs. old, at least 52kg., healthy, no history of hepatitis, tuberculosis, or other major
illnesses, no HIV, not on long-term medication, must have good veins on the arms for the procedure, and must
bring and ID or passport during registration.

We will shoulder all screening and platelet extraction expenses. Your body will recover the platelets in 3 days.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH. We are fervently counting on your support.

Sincerely yours,

WILLY and TIFFANY LIM
——————————————————————————-

Well just be careful if you wear it with the collar up
Greenlighting: Do You Know What a Green Shirt with Upturned Collar Means?
Greenlighter FAQ: The gist of what you need to know.
Man its a strange world to live in. I have quite a few green polo shirts… Just a strange strange world. man….

** Updated at 19:46:33 on 2005/07/05 **
I hope. Finished work on a CS plugin that I hope to use soon. Man I can’t sleep well back home. I want to go back to Singapore…
Can’t sleep so end up going through the day without a particularly (spelling?) good mood and I don’t take afternoon naps as threw screw up my sleep timings. But then again as if my sleep timing aren’t ackward enough as they are already huh?
Yesterday I finally finished sorting out my folder which stores all the applications and stuff I’ve downloaded but never installed. Phew what a relief to see only 2 columns worth of files compared to like 20 :| All thats left to be done is transferring them over to my external hard disk.

Sigh… Dear dear’s computer is dead?
  _____
 /     
|  RIP  |   ?????
|       |
|_______|
Chinmay went over to take a look at it (thanks again man) and it seems like the hard disk is dead :( So no nightly chats with my dear online until I go back to Singapore :'(:'( Miss you darling. Take care of yourself and love you
Speaking of that I was supposed to call the travel agency today but I forgot… Better remember later because I’m trying to get the Saturday flight.
On a sad note my laptop no longer just flickers anymore. The screen kind of fuzzed out!!!! Thank goodness it was only for a little while. Man whatever they did the last time my screen flickered doesn’t seem to be enough. They said they changed the graphics card. Wonder if they’ll change the screen for me, which is what I’m hoping for as there are a few stains of Soya Milk with Jasmine Green Tea on the lower left hand portion of the screen :$ :P

Anyway

** Updated at 8:36:48 on 2005/07/02 **
I thought I killed the old desktop computer last Friday or was it Saturday. Bought a 256MB RAM stick to add to a 128MB 933MHz P!!!. Ended up detecting only 256MB, so after playing around with the position of the sticks I decided to do a BIOS update after all the motherboard supported an option to update the BIOS throught Windows and it even had a backup option. Everything was easy especially since it detected that there was only 1 possible option for the update as it was an Internet BIOS update where it retrieves the latest BIOS from the Gigabyte servers. So thinking I had nothing to lose I decided to format it.
Flashing and programming went fine though I was nervous being the first time I ever flashed a BIOS and hoping the power wouldnt cut out leaving a useless BIOS chip there and thus an almost useless computer. So reboot the computer to be greeted by a few BIOS beep codes. Thinking “oh crap, now what’s gone wrong” I go look for the translation of the error code. It corresponded to a graphics error, so I check that the graphics card was properly in place but still gave the same beep code. Worse part was that it had 2 extra beeps that did NOT seem to be mentioned in any website that I referred to for the BIOS beep codes. Even tried changing the graphics card with an old 1. So I thought that maybe the BIOS update compeletly screwed up. So obviously I was in a bad mood.
So kind of gave up on it and decided to start looking for parts to build a computer for my bro. So when he converts over to that computer I can get his 80gb laptop hard disk for myself :P So I can finally dual boot Windows and Linux in peace, hopefully :D Anyway realising I don’t really know much about building a computer I go research up on it. The hardest thing is custom building a computer here. First of all most of the prices are so high compared to Singapore but what do you expect? Then looking at which graphics card to possibly get. Bro said he wanted to be able to upgrade the computer later on so I was planning to get a P4 with a motherboard based on the latest 775 Socket. Pondering over DDR2 support as well. PCI Express graphics card obviously as well. Then looking at the prices… ahhhhhhhhh
Tom’s hardware helped be a lot and I especially liked the following articles
Benchmarks: PCI Express Graphics Cards | AGP Graphics Cards. These are pretty good comparisions for a whole lot of graphics cards, based on the standard GPUs.
The Mother of All CPU Charts Part 1: Basically telling the history of how the CPU and its sockets changed over the years.
I admit I should know most of these, as I am a Computer Engineer but I guess my main dislike for reading gets to me… Aaaaaahhhhh. Well anyway its not too late to learn now is it? :D

Anyway back to the story. So it was Thursday night that I actually dawned on me. I thought that the BIOS was dead, but then why was it giving beep codes!!! That must mean that the BIOS was alive just something was wrong. Then another light bulb lit up and thought that it could have been trying to display the video on a PCI slot as the graphics card I had installed on it was an AGP one. Found a graphics card courtesy of my dear dear :D She gave me her old computer after I got her sister a $200 laptop (P4 1.6Ghz 256MB). No I did not buy this laptop at a black market of anything, my friend was willing to give it to me but I thought I should at least pay him so $200 it was. Anyway put the PCI graphics card in and viola the computer booted up to display an error message!!! One of the rare times I was happy to see an error message. The BIOS was still kind of screwed up based on the fact that it did not boot the computer as it was supposed to so I decided to flash the BIOS back to the working version. After doing that now I hesitant to even flash another BIOS.
Man what an experience. But my learning of computers did not end there. After my bro started installing a few things he wanted he tried to see if Sims 2 would play on the computer. It did play though slightly laggy. So I thought I would try use my ATI 9600 pro on main house computer to see if it could perform better. This is when I found out there are more to AGP slots as well. 3.3V slot on the old computer with my new ATI graphics card which supports 1.5/0.8V (AGP compatibility). I tried to use the new computer RAM on this old computer as well thinking it was backward compatible just to realised, just like the graphics card that it would not fit. Man I should really read more.
So read more I did and found out that the RAM I got was a double sided RAM that was not supported on all motherboards and apparently not mine either as it was detecting only half of the value. So I finally just went back to try to change my RAM only to find out there is no single sided RAM in stock so ended up getting 512MB RAM for the main desktop computer giving it 768MB RAM which should be good for my gaming :D If I get the time to actually play…. Ahhhhh
Anyway I better go off to get the PROPER PC133 256MB single sided RAM for my bro so I can get my 80gb :P

So far since I’ve come back I’ve fixed or repaired or (re)installed OS’es on 7 computers. None of the computers are mine :( :P
I admit I’m no expert when it comes to computers let alone computers with pre Windows XP OSes. Win XP is an ‘easy’ OS to deal with, the 1s before them are a bit :S All is done now except with 1 fickle scanner on a Win 98 computer. The thing is the scanner is connected via a parallel port, and the scanner itself has an input and output parallel port, so the input port is connected to the computer and the output port is connected to a printer so that both devices can work. The thing is, the printer works but the scanner doesnt. Windows doesnt even detect the scanner when adding new hardware and when trying to manually add the printer, the CD that came with the scanner doesnt seem to have the drivers for the scanner :S
Ahhhhhhhhhhh
Anyway hopefully now I have time to continue my mod I hope. AAAAhhhhhhhh
Tired and I just want to code….
I should sleep, have to go to the office later.
Sleepy and tired and want to program: thats my current mood and I bet that will be my mood for the coming days. So dont get angry if I snapped at you, its because I’m tired and/or sleepy.
Good night (morning) people

Been pretty good back home. Renovating the house though, so was rudely awakened yesterday morning at abt 9am :'(
Got the wireless working with my card, it was the firmware that needed an upgrade. Previously it was acquiring network address but then CPU load would go to 100% and never connect but just lag the computer bad. Problem with my wireless card is that it cant be recognized by my kubuntu distro even though it is supported. The funniest thing is that my friend loaned the same wireless card from the computer centre and it works both on Windows and Linux. The only differnce in the cards is mine has ‘Singapore’ on the back while the card that works on both platforms has ‘South Korea’ on the back. *Shrug*. I even tried with another ‘South Korea’ card from the computer center and it works on Linux. Possibly firmware problem? Could be I guess. Maybe try that out later.

The wireless here as problems though :( Some due to the ISP some due to the configuration I think. Sometimes the wireless needs to be restarted when DHCP supplies a new IP to the computer and sometimes the main ADSL connection just goes down and the modem has to be restarted. Worse thing is that since the modem cum wireless router we got is NOT the modem bundled with the Internet package it doesnt connect as fast as the orignal modem does.. Sigh… But when the connection works its pretty good minus the fact that if you torrent ANYTHING surfing comes to a complete stand still. Brunei’s Internet infrastructure really needs to be upgraded / overhauled to make it reliable. Heck they dont even give out ADSL modem configurations probably just because they want the customers to buy THEIR modems.. WTH

Anyway I was supposed to go to work but since I was up playing UT2k4 until about 1am I woke up at 1030 :P So I’ll just go after lunch. Nice to have a family business so I ‘can’ slack a bit :P

Just had lunch and having an Internet ‘blackout’. The modem doesnt seem to be connecting properly. So anyway links here that I got before the connection went AWOL
Bluetooth hack shakes mobile security: Guess bluetooth isnt as secure as it used to be. Exploits exploits, what are we going to do?
World’s fastest inkjet printer?: 170 pages per minute!!!! I want one!!! Not only that but “Apparently this technology also features the lowest power requirements of any inkjet head on the market”
Japan unveils “robot suit” that enhances human power: This is cool. Reminds me of Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit from Half-Life :P

Anyway need to go to the office but need to drop a few things at sis’s work place 1st. Save this post to Opera’s notes function and continue later….

Continuing the post :P Its 2210, back from Ya Chee’s aunts place, fixing their computer. Guess what was the problem? Our ‘good’ friend spyware…. :P PS Picked up an insecure wireless access point there :P

Rail Guns Closer to Reality: Now I want to play some Quake :P
Windows to Have Better CLI: More command line interface’s :D
Hand-made Web Server, Built From 200 TTL Chips: Next wire wrapping project? :P “…out of 200 74-series TTL chips wired together with thousands of individually wrapped wires” :|:| Ok… Maybe not :P

Anyway back to eating supper then slack a bit before going to sleep.
Have a good night people!

Using ubuntu right now =D yay!!!!! Couldnt get the wireless adhoc network connection using kubuntu (which is basically ubuntu with KDE as the desktop environment). Despite having the same base, ubuntu (which has GNOME as the desktop environment) was able to connect to the wireless adhoc network that I configured at my friends place =D

So I guess its ubuntu for now. Whats happened recently? Results out yesterday. Got an A for my EE2001 project =D But that was my only A :'(:'(
CAP gone down a bit so I guess I cant really relax in my final year which is to come :| I’m old…. Speaking of FYPs, I have an FYP interview on Monday, hope it goes well even though its for my 2nd choice topic. Just wait and see what happens on 15th July when the results are out.

Anyway I better go off to sleep. Meeting tomorrow for my Biofuel project… Good night world from ubuntu!! =D