September 2005

been catching up on my manga for the past week. that means re-reading 190 chapters of Bleach, 77 chapters of Death Note, and now 23 volumes of Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (HanaKimi).

needless to say, i’ve been rather sleepy these days. besides that, the only other thing i’ve been doing is playing BF2, which at times can be rather frustrating seeing how everyone seems to dislike chopper pilots. but overall, it’s been steady.

after HanaKimi, i guess the next series would be Shaman King (another 152 chapters there).

so what else do we have to talk about? hmmmm….

astro got disconnected cuz i forgot to pay the bill for 2 months. it was on autopay before but since my card got cancelled i have had to resort to maybank2u instead.

and my immediate supervisor has made departmental news by getting promoted twice in two years. and rumor has it that the next person would be… me. finally, some progress!

10am to 6pm.

scholl sale at jalan kemajuan.
sony malaysia sale at … jalan tanjung utama or something like that.

chose the sony warehouse sale. the first ever by the company.

the night before: got hold of a price list. my sister and i picked out what we wanted: an mp3 head unit and speakers for each our cars, a 10-disc cd-changer for myself and a T1 camera for my sis.

this morning: left home at 9.30am. mad jam around the bandar utama bridge at the nkve pj exit. arrived at 9.50am, and thanks to the kelisa parking was no problem. seemed that they opened the gates earlier, so it was already sardine-packed with people.

my sis and bro went off to look at cams. i went off to the car audio section. everything was gone. only the super-expensive head units remained. fortunately, my sis managed to grab hold of a demo T1. it was in good shape and was selling for RM499. despite not having some key accessories it was still a steal.

by the time that was settled it was already 10am. but due to the humongous amount of credit-card payers, we only managed to finish up by 2pm. yes, 4 hours of queueing! the situation was so chaotic; there was a mass of meat all squished up to gain the attention of 3-4 cashiers. and only one credit-card machine! people were gathered all around, opening up boxes of goods to examine them, and maybe even pocket them! they even ushered some of us out to the service center to make payment, and anyone could’ve just walked away at that point.

fortunately things seemed to calm down after a few hours, but we’ve already suffered the full brunt of it. hopefully they won’t be discouraged to have another sale like this, but they’d better learn from their mistakes!

guess i’ll still have to use my phone for in-car entertainment. :

what am i doing here? where am i going? ask me now and i’ll shrug my shoulders.

life has been rather mundane lately. work, bf2, sleep, work, bf2, sleep.

think i should lay off bf2 a bit. let the rest of the gang catch up. 😛 do something more meaningful maybe, like finding a house or a wife. hmm.. forget the latter.

been having a lot of yum char sessions lately though. tiff aka driver bum has been rather free and helpful. 🙂

just finished watching final fantasy vii: advent children, the sequel to final fantasy vii! it was great, having the movie done in full FFX-like animation. watching all the old FF7 characters do their thang during the battles is as exciting as ever. and man, Tifa is such a babe!

not having played the original game meself, i took the time to read the entire game script earlier. got the gist of the story, but it could never beat playing and watching it happen. *sigh*

oh well, time to change wallpaper. 🙂

while irc technology has progressed to offer conducive chatting environments, there is still a major problem: the human mind. a guy starts a channel. declares himself boss. threatens visitors who don’t follow his every whim.

that’s when it starts. autonomous rule causes hateful reactions, reactions safely curbed by the tech aforementioned. but the emotions and feelings still remain.

i’ll miss #japan-class on efnet. the malaysian guy in charge complained i was idling too much and didn’t contribute to the ‘liveliness’ of the channel. so i left. there was no real conversation anyways. just questions and answers. whatever chatter that happened was mostly high-level anyway, too much for learners to pick up without constant dictionary browsing. if that’s what he wanted me to do, then no thanks. i’m a passive learner, picking up from questions others ask. to pursue my nihon-go studies actively would kill my work and play time, which i currently cherish the most. well… the latter at least.

to force me to change my ways is unacceptable. so goodbye Hideki. goodbye pikey. i’ll just resume my mandarin lessons for now. gotta poke zoe to get a replacement teacher… or a refund. oh han dan.. where art thou?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7573

damn, where was i? i slave a coupla years implementing projects and suddenly i’m outdated!

wow… this technology would really be a great leap forward for humanity. a fusion plant could easily power a few third world countries altogether. mobile tokamak reactors would then be produced, allowing us to build massive spaceships and travel around the galaxy!

watched charlie & the choc factory last night with the gang. it was fabulous! i loved the oompa-loompas and the songs; grabbing the soundtrack as we speak. and soon after that, ringtone modifications!

i’ve been at the acm for the past two days, manning my company’s booth. i was supposed to be the subject matter expert on the hr system we use, but we weren’t really selling anything so we rarely had visitors. spent the time rounding the area picking up a few freebies along the way. the usual paper bags and pens though, as i didn’t have the courage to participate in the more crowd-pulling events. the DiGi booth had a challenge to build a Jenga tower 34″ tall to win a 34″ plasma tv. :O i only found that out 5 minutes before my stint there ended.

downloaded:-

full metal panic: the second raid 01-07: this is one great continuation to one superb anime series. yummy!
white noise: will watch this as i eat my dinner later. 😀
angela: you get to burning single: wtf is this angela and why is she ruining my memory of nadesico? omg.. she even redid ‘dearest’!

to splurge:-

benq dvd writer
tv tuner card
36gb western digital raptor hdd

i’ve installed an openid implementation for this blog. now, users of all sites identified by openid, like livejournal, can verify their identity when posting comments. likewise, i can post to livejournal sites using this site’s id. 🙂 read about livejournal’s openid support here.

i seem to have lost major points playing BF2 for the past two days. i’m guessing it has something to do with the 3AM reboot on EA Japan servers. sigh. i’ve posted a question on EA support asking why it happens, but i doubt they’ll be able to explain much.

while the entire setup was successfully implemented pretty much, there’s still some funny things going on.

i’ve just finished watching sin city on the pc. downloaded it via bittorrent on mario (my server)’s gnome desktop. superb quality.. makes me wanna get a bigger monitor (can you say, plasma? :D).

at least now i can rest assured that all the stuff i’ve downloaded via the server is ok. now the problem lies with downloading via phoenix, my windows desktop. a few posts ago i talked about samba and all that. samba lets my freebsd server act a little bit windowsy. so here i have some 200gigabytes of fat32 space mounted on mario, and then shared to the network via samba.

now here’s the funny thing: almost everything i download via phoenix directly onto mario’s shares become corrupted. movies and zip files alike come up bad… kinda like playing a bad record.

hopefully it’s something fixed in the latest release of samba, which i’ve yet to acquire. or if i could find a way to convert the fat32 partitions to freebsd native ufs2; that would even be better.

anyway, i was walking down from my office to my carpark in the next building (yeah, they shifted the lot of us to plaza pantai’s season parking), when i wondered if it was ok to rollerblade in menara TM‘s lobby. i was thinking maybe it wasn’t listed in their tenancy rules (well, who’d thought of doing something like that, was what i’d think they’d think). but either way they’ll probably stop me for sporting 2 quads of wheels. so then i thought: someone should invent leather corporate heelys! it’s time for the yuppie heelie invasion! 😛