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October 2004

Viewing posts from October , 2004

Sigh

The feeling of being grounded, when you’re 25 years old.. is really.. it can never be put in words.

At least I can affirm that I’m still young. A little too young though.

Well, time to get into the religious binge.

Anyways, the guys were still willing to drop by to pass me the stuff Fish helped me buy. Thanks, guys, for not being too hard on my case. 😉

Installing Windows XP on old PC as we speak. And it’s going to be loaded. With censorship programs. He may be 14, but his mind is a wee bit left behind.

A few more techie projects at hand:-

  • Setting up Ayin’s VAIO to play video via the TV (reqs: a video cable that goes into that funny looking port), or
  • Setting up this PC to play video via the TV (reqs: something that can tranceive AV signals without wires), and
  • Getting new drives to replace the old ones.

Having so many hard drives die at the same time has made me realised that hardcopies are still the best way to store you stuff. Since coming home, I’ve had 3 hard drives crash on me, losing years of photos and assignments I’ve worked on. Now the only proof I’ve been to the States are my transcripts. Which are ironically on hardcopy.

It’s time to visit the photo shop.

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A nice, long day.

Just got back from my cousin’s wedding banquet at the Mandarin Oriental. But let’s start from the beginning:

Surprisingly woke up early this morning, thanks to the noisy neighbors. At least that got me up to getting some work done with the computer.

First thing I did was to remove a drive from my current PC to an older one given to me by another neighbor. This older box is to be used for the lil bro’s ‘online education’ programme. At least this’ll get him outta my hair for some time.

While getting the parts together, only then I realized that I needed a few more parts to get things done. One being insignicant but essential, was a power cable. Cursing myself, I then proceeded to put my PC back together after removing another drive that just crashed (without warranty, darn).

That was when I noticed something was amiss with my connection. The network router seemed to be lagging, even for connections between LAN addresses (stupid D-Link). No problem, checked the cables to find the modem unpowered. Doesn’t seem to be trouble, but still no connection.

Could be that TMnet thinks I’m still connected, I thought. Called them up immediately to find out that I’ve been deactivated for owing them 500 ringgit. Oops.

Wanted to make payment immediately, but how was I to do online banking without being online? Only later I realized I could’ve called my good neighbor to borrow her connection, but we decided to go shopping instead for Khairil’s wedding clothes.

Procured a second hand power cable from Pineapple in Section 14. Had a nice long chat with t’s parents about ATM and online security. 😛

Reaching home, I wanted to get lil one’s PC up ASAP. Everything seemed OK to go when I had to plug in the keyboard.

There was no PS2 port. Only 4 USB ports.

Arghhh that means I have to buy more things to get this thing to work! A USB mouse and a USB keyboard. Sometimes I wonder why I even bothered. Kids don’t need computers, just game consoles.

At least I was saved the trouble when Fish called asking what I wanted from the regular PS2 (PlayStation, mind you) shop, with the intention to drop by Low Yat afterwards. Thanks, pal.

So, after paying up 50% of my Streamyx bill, I’m pretty much broke for the month. Fortunately, I still have some cash to keep myself alive till payday. Looks like fixing up my car will have to wait.

Luckily I didn’t have to worry about wedding presents this time.

Now, on to the wedding. The Grand Ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental was huge, fitting 90 tables for the night. As a favored relative, we got to sit right next to the main table, which was cool.

The dinner fare was a standard X-course meal, with every dish being served one at a time. Can’t say it’s spectacular, but when you’re sitting on silk, all’s good.

The band who played tonight was also pretty good, being able to improvise with suitable commentary whenever the need rose. There was also a special appearance by Amy of Search, who sang two songs, one song whose title I forgot, and he sang Isabella with the groom, which was supposedly very nostalgic to the newlyweds.

And as per every wedding you go to, people start asking you when it’s your turn. No answer from here.

Hypnotuned: Sarah Brightman & Jos̩ Carreras РAmigos para siempre

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Horrifying Horror Shows

If you still think horror movies like the 1979 ‘Amityville Horror’ still has the same effect, don’t bother. Scrapped that one about 45 minutes after starting.

A true horror movie must contain tangible things to fear. Something identifiable, yet with a fuzzy background. It loses meaning if you tell the audience right up front about how a pair of parents and their 4 children were killed and then mysterious stuff starts happening in their house.

Dawn of the Dead was not as bad. Yep, you have dead people trying to take a good chomp outta you, but why? What’s causing the disaster? Is there any hope for mankind? These kind of questions keep you going.

On the other hand, maybe older movies simply didn’t have the quality of current day ones. 😛

Or I just like undead zombies.

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Food!

Congrats to Hemlocke for her safe migration to WordPress. Looks to be something that many people will be able to use, but I’ll stick to MT cuz I like the challenge. 🙂 I wonder if MT trackbacks are compatible with WordPress ones.. We’ll see the results right after this. 😀

The first day of Ramadhan was pretty good. Managed to get few things done at work, and we had a meeting with our new team leader for the next phase of our project. So that would make me a team leader and an assistant team leader. Add the two roles to my current support role for the old HR system, you’re looking at a 3d matrix.

When I say a few things, not all are work-related. 🙂 Fish has graciously sent me the pic you see in my previous post, and I also discovered Open GET!, a French site with tons of anime info. It also has excellent screenshots of various games, which I spent a little time harvesting, especially the animated Taiko no Tatsujin pics.

Came back from work early to take a nice nap; woke up just in time for breakfast. My uncle LG invited us over to his place for dinner, cuz his Thai in-laws were around for his son’s wedding, and they were willing to cook us up authentic Thai cuisine. Thai green curry would be the best tasting curry I’ve had in my life so far. :D~ Tomorrow night’s the actual wedding banquet, so I won’t be joining the gang for any of the routine activities. Maybe Sunday, bringing my just-finished-a-semester sister along.

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Sin before Ramadhan

my precious~

In other news, I’ve managed to schedule future posts for my “Events” section with help from some MT experts’ websites. Not that it matters, looking at how you’re laughing your heads off. 😛

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Religious Affairs

Tomorrow marks the first day of Ramadhan, the month in which Muslims all around the world will make fast each day from dawn to dusk. There are other significant values, but I won’t dwell on those here. If you’re interested, I think Maxis has an SMS package for that.

I’m already super skinny, so I hope it won’t affect my weight much. Only thing that bothers is the sleep schedule. I’ll have to start tucking in early, to be able to wake up in time for an early breakfast. And to watch the sunrise. Not so romantic from here though.

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Hmn?

Hmm.. I pretty much forgot what took place yesterday… except for the later half.

Came home slightly earlier than usual to get my hair cut at QB House at IKANO. Lil’ bro came along for his too. I’m quite happy with the results, my old hair being very 70s-ish. Some of their hairstylists should be avoided however, cuz they’re either new or incompetent. The ones we’ve identified as pros so far are one girl in glasses and another with long straight hair.

Rushed home straight after to prepare for Sue Ann’s b’day bash. Since the others took care of the prezzies, all I had to do was show up. 😀 As always, the food arrangement was excellent, and I especially enjoyed the beef and the chips w/ salsa. And the dessert, bread pudding in caramel sauce, was to die for.

And the rest of the night was spent playing mahjong. :O It first sparked when I asked quietly… ‘when are we going to open table?’. Then the rest obviously egged me on, announcing to the whole world how I’ve become a mahjong addict. Oh well, they should thank me in the end for having the guts to spell out their own inner desires. 😉

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IPv6

Spent the entire night trying to tweak IPv6 for my local area network. I managed to get it working on the first try, at least for the wired computers, using the default settings from freenet6.

The problem however, lies with the autoconfiguration. While it makes life a whole lot easier, the way it works is something like DHCP. That’s great, but having an entire 64-bit subnet (that’s more than 18 billion billion IPs, if there’s such a term) for that purpose makes it tough for me to assign reverse DNS for each and every address in that subnet.

So the main task was trying to limit the autoconfigured part to just a small portion of the network, say 8-bits. This is what I slaved for, and yet haven’t achieved so far.

At least I got to see the dancing KAME.

And why did I start all this? Just to get a nice bot on IRCnet. And guess what? There aren’t that many IPv6 servers on that forsaken network.

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Yearning for the Dead

Besides slaving to get my site back up, the rest of the day yesterday was pretty slow and quiet. My standby was cancelled, so I didn’t have to worry about leaving the house.

So I took the time to watch some of the movies I have outstanding. One being The House of Flying Daggers which Merv lent me. Zhang Zi Yi is hot, as usual.

Rewatched Resident Evil the night before. Milla is hot, as usual.

And the fruits of download reaped: Dawn of the Dead 2004. I just love horror movies. No one as hot, though. I still haven’t satisfied my craving for these kind of shows, so hopefully some of the torrent downloads I started will be done by the time I get home. 🙂

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