It’s all the bag’s fault :P

It’s not fully done but I don’t have any more floppy disks. The idea came from here. I need smaller fasteners (what exactly do you call those things? :P) or need to drill bigger holes or just do it the way as instructed in the original article :P. For the rest of tonight fingers shall rest.

While trying to install a fresh copy of Windows yesterday I noticed something odd. My 80GB hard drive where I keep practially ALL my data was showing something like 30GB which was disconcerting but I went ahead and installed XP on another partition. After the first part of the XP install the computer reboots and I got a check disk warning due to possible filesystem inconsistencies so I let it do the checking and it was having alot of problems. In fact it took more than 12 hours to finish running the check!!! So finally let XP finish installing then I checked my hard drive listing and found my 80GB hard drive which was originally formatted as one big NTFS partition was now a divided into a FAT32 partition and an unallocated partition. Obviously no data could be read from the drive.

So I stuck in RIPLinux (Recovery Is Possible, NOT Rest In Peace :P which was the first thought that came to mind when I first saw the name) and started TestDisk. It found the partition information from the backup sector and restored the partition and now it seems to be perfect =D Hooray for linux and hooray for free and open source software. The only reason I did this straight away was because I was trying to recover another hard drive (my old laptop’s 30GB hard drive) that seemed to just have it’s partition disappear. Sad to say that I still can’t recover that drive. Tried using TestDisk to restore the partition and PhotoRec to restore the file I want but still can’t seem to get it =( PhotoRec is a nice file recovery tool but it does not show you the files it can recover before hand, it just does a bulk recovery which is something I hope they work on in future versions. Even after a few changes I did to the drive from TestDisk data recovery was still no where to be found. For what it’s worth NTFS Recovery from DiskInternals was able to find the lost files (before I made any changes to the drive) but the free demo does not allow you to recover/save the file. And I’m not willing to pay $99.95 (US$ should be) to purchase the program nor am I willing to find a crack for the program because that would just be ethically wrong =p So as the drive lays here on my table I shall wait patiently until the day I want to take some more of my time to try to recover that 1 particular file I want, though I could go back to Singapore and borrow the DVD from a friend and rip it again but I’m just lazy and also I want to find out more of any other free data recovery software and see it work wonders like TestDisk did for my other drive.

Thank you guys for the song guys. Well appreciated it. Was kind of expecting it but still was quite speechless after that. Sorry for making you guys wait so long before your performance but the service was a wee bit longer than normal. And just to let you guys know I was incidentally wearing my present you guys gave to me last year. It didn’t even come to mind until I was like half way through the day at church. I remember the day so well when it was given to me. “Fishball” was the event at Jo’s http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266543/Tavern on the day I was “sabo’ed” (Singlish for sabotaged) to dance like a chicken, sing like Mickey mouse and get myself creamed (whipped cream of course). We watched Finding Nemo and it reminded me of these

Hmmmm memories. As I turned 24 and celebrated my time of getting older in my new church and new friends, I was reminded of my old church and friends of 1 year ago. And I just wonder where I’ll be a year from now. Could be back in Singapore, could be still here in Brunei but at the end of the day as long as God is with me I’ll be happy.

Saviour
He can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save
He is mighty to save

Forever
Author of salvation
He rose and conquered grave
Jesus conquered grave

Shine your light and
Let the whole world see
We’re singing for the glory of the risen King

Jesus, shine your light and
Let the whole world see
We’re singing for the glory of the risen King

You know, one of the good things I thought I would have when I came back home was a more laid back life. But as it is almost nearing the 3 month mark since I’ve been back I’ve learned that that is not true. Life is what we make it be it being busy with work, errands, responsibilities, commitments, etc. Just remember that in the busyness there is can be no hurriedness especially when seeking the Lord. Then it comes down to discipline which I lack. But day by day I hope to be more like Him. Less of me, more of Him. Amen

Contemplating of writing this post for quite a long time actually. Well I don’t think I was a talkative person. Growing up in an International School during my primary school days where everybody spoke the same language was a good experience I guess but after that and continuing until this day I don’t really think was learnt how to communicate. When I went to secondary school (aka high school in some places) there was 1 side of the class that would talk among themselves in Malay and some that would talk among themselves in Chinese. Being a ‘banana’ (yellow on the outside and white on the inside, i.e. being Chinese but speaks only English) that I am as well as struggling with the Malay language I had to deal with few people conversing in English as it was probably their 2nd language. So in the process of communication where one would learn from how others communicate, I was severely handicapped. So through secondary school all the way until before I started University I lived a life where I could not effective learn how to communicate with others. I guess all this comes out when sometimes you meet people that you want to communicate with but somehow you just can’t seem to find the words to say or how to relate. Matters become worse when the other party’s interests and mine seem to have very little / nothing in common. It’s one of those times when you’re in the crowd and yet you feel so much more alone. But then again I would always like to think of myself as being the observer. Looking at how things are turning out around and not wanting to be bothered. Kind of not wanting to be noticed or possibly being afraid of being noticed and not knowing how to react, what to do or what to say even. Guess it’s just something to deal with and something to learn.

P.S. Let me congratulate my brother on his recent ‘appearance’ in the local papers. Congrats bro!

P.P.S. I know that practically most of the people who I know are smart in their own way. I guess I’m jealous because I know I’m not the kind of smart that they are but I will admit I’m hardworking. I guess it’s all about being recognized. Everybody wants to be known by others. Part of me wants to be while the other part shys away from any social activity. Leave me be with my computer and I’ll be a happy camper. Now back to learning Palm Programming….

THAT was annoying. A few days ago I tried out Kubuntu Edgy the new version of the OS and it was pretty nice until I tried to watch some podcast/netcasts/whatever-you-want-to-call-it I downloaded. It was throwing up an error. So I thought it was due to the new OS version and since I couldn’t find any posts related to it I decided to downgrade the OS. To cut the story short the downgrade didn’t work and so I just backed up and reinstalled the OS. After that I tried to play the files again and I still couldn’t, so I thought I didn’t download the proper codecs so configured them all up and it still didn’t work. So I tried to download the file again and it worked! GAAAAAHHHHHH Downloader for X which I used for d4x screwed me up ='( So now its just ‘wasting’ life away reconfiguring my system.

And now on about life and such. I’m very sure I don’t like change because I still haven’t adjusted back to Brunei life and surprisingly to me no matter how slow life is I still find myself short of time to do the stuff I want =( I guess it’s just a learning process of how to live life when the time I have is not in my hands…

On a brigther note I had a car treasure hunt last Sunday. It was fun but tiring driving around looking for clues and treasures =p At the end of the day was tired and sleepy the ‘perfect’ combination to get me all cranky which I still kind of am. Need more sleep… Need more rest…

The resume sending. First 2 went out this morning and a slew more to come. Went to Serasa beach yesterday and thank God that my car didn’t get wedged in the sand, when it almost did… twice. From this day forth I will refuse to drive to the beach. Give me tarred roads not sand. I don’t like beaches. Beaches don’t like me? Considering the last time I went to the beach my car did get stuck in sand. On 1 of the days in Chinese New Year none the less. Anyway I’m off. Bringing mom to see the doctor…
*Goes off to start the car engine*