December 2005

blowin’ dro, 24’s, that how all my niggas roll!

today’s the last day of work for the year. woke up with a splitting headache, and i couldn’t get out of bed a while. fortunately, despite having idiots on the road, i managed to rush to the office in time (dropping myself off at the lobby to clock in and park the car properly right after).

gonna have a barbeque at zoe’s place this sunday, and i was chargred with picking up some stuff from the local hypermarkets. so my sibs and i went to the curve for dinner and some shopping. the main road between the curve and ikano was closed for decorations, so there was a pretty long line of cars waiting at a particular junction to get into that road (because somehow they didn’t realise it was closed).

luckily my sis was there earlier, and she knew that there were 2 lanes (not 1) that turn into that junction so she didn’t have much of a problem then. she also knew of the back way in, which we took to bypass this mass of jam.

we had dinner at marche movenpick. although it was my idea to go there, looking at the rib-eye stick that my lil bro ordered, i can’t help but think how expensive kids’ tastes are nowadays. i had my usual plain rosti and sausage. beef rosti, and lamb sausage weren’t available. 🙁

after dinner, we made a short stop at borders, and moved on to tesco. got us plates, mushrooms, spoons, forks, drinks, foil. were supposed to get a few other things, but they were either out of stock or missing from memory. had to make a few calls to the food and bbq maestro merv to confirm a few things, since i’ve never really shopped for a bbq before. what can i say, there’s just not much opportunity when you’re living in an apartment.

got home. WoWed for a while. slept. end of story.

getting a new monitor, no matter what it is, is definitely worth every cent.

especially if it’s big, wide, doesn’t emit radiation, and doesn’t strain your eyes. 🙂

only problems now are the nagging, and not being able to move the mouse cursor across the screen in a single wrist motion. will post some pics up later. angelina jolie never looked so good.

well, here i am, back at work again. very hard to get up today, having been away from work (for only 4 days though) with the dark skies and pre-rain humidity. was even 5 mins late cuz the cars were not parked in their usual positions and i had to go back up to get another set of keys.

sigh, working during the holiday season is tough!

(edit 30/12 1:00pm)

pics are up! 😀 and, did i mention that the monitor comes with a variety of inputs, as well as 4 usb ports and card readers? i was looking up and down for my camera charger, but when i couldn’t, i just popped out the CF card and slotted it into the side. works like a charm! 😀

doh, just realised all WoW realms are down for weekly maintenance. 🙁

taking a break sure is nice. will still be on leave till tomorrow. hope i don’t forget how to work 😀

by the way, merry christmas, and a happy new year to all! 😀

was planning to to go town today, but WoW kept me home all morning, so whatever was left of the afternoon was spent repairing the two rear door handles of my Waja. can’t go tomorrow either, since my new ‘view’ is coming tomorrow. :DDD

hm.. hope i can just steal away for a bit. need to get some cooling for my [southbridge], which i think is causing some usb and filesystem problems.

maybe i should just trash this MSI motherboard and look for a second-hand Abit/ASUS one.

arghhhh stop the splurge already!

well anyway, time to start rearranging the furniture.

forgive me god, for i have splurged. i have spent my $ away.

3.5k on a wider view,
1k on some computer brain, and
170 on a bondage to virtuality.

forgive me god, for i have paid. donated some part of my life away.

31 hours, this week alone,
exploring worlds on the computer mone.
living quarters full of stuff,
and all my savings, never grow.

forgive me.

looked out my office window today to witness a fire at one of the neighboring setinggan communities. it was spreading rapidly, helped out by the strong winds. can see tiny masses of people congregating at one area, and lotsa motorcycle lights heading away.

heard sirens, and saw one engine on the federal highway. didn’t seem like it was going fast enough.

hope no one is hurt.

this entry is a work in progress. more snapshots to come.

(edit 18/12 11:25am)

the shots look very dim on my computer, since they’re saved without the gamma adjustments. but they should appear quite alright on anyone else’s pc.

yay yay money in the bank. time to splurge!

1300 to RAM.
150 to HSBC Visa.
the rest to Maybank Mastercard.

then it’s
a 12-month installment on a Dell 2005FPW monitor!
and maybe the case-modding tools.

anyway, i almost started world of warcraft last night. i would’ve, if it weren’t for the 287MB patch i had to download. they have their own torrent client, and that basically messed up my network connection (darn d-link!), so i had to disable its peer-to-peer feature and leave it on overnight.

at least i finished resident evil 4. 🙂 now to play haunting grounds! it’s so scary, i love it! well, not really scary scary, but the fact that the main character is a helpless girl without any weapons is intense!

basket! i just realised i’ve been in a perpetual overdraft loop on my Personnel Current Account (PCA)!

ever since maybank2u and autopay, i’ve rarely had the need to issue any cheques. seems i only do that when i want to pay my car insurance. so i thought, we leave any credit in that account? not getting any dividends from it anyway.

so i leave the balance at RM 0. however, maybank charges me RM 10 twice a year for heck’s sake, so the last charge brought my balance into negative. then they say i’ve overdrawn my account!

so i top it up back to zero.

then they charge me RM 5 interest. overdrawn again!

so i top it up back to zero.

then they charge me RM 5 interest. overdrawn again!

and again, and so on and so forth. gawd. think this has been happening since june! that comes to one oldtimer at chili’s. 🙁

sigh. the customer service rep told me i have to go back to the branch if i want to try to get these charges waived. don’t think i’ll even bother though.

anyway, anyone got any dell coupons. i wanna get a new monitor to soothe my ailing eyes. 😀

just got meself a 10-day guest pass to world of warcraft, courtesy of az^1. installing it as we speak, but i’ll only be able to start messing around with it after tonight due to maintenance.

hope i don’t get addicted. 😛

everything is somewhat in order now. brb. sleep time. 😛

(edit @ 9:02pm)

if you missed my quickie, here’s a background of what happened: was planning to upgrade to freebsd 6.0 over the weekend, but after putting it off quite a bit, i only did the cutover on sunday night. suffered some graphics problem during boot, but managed to bypass it via the boot loader. the rest of the subsystems were a bit of a pain though. the gnome upgrade script pretty much rebuilt every single ported application i had, so along the way it also disabled my web and email.

that wasn’t the tricky part. thought i’d upgrade to apache 2.2 while i’m at it. turns out that some of the 3rd party modules i was using were not built for 2.2. so i went back to 2.0, while having to redo the build a few times to make sure my security settings were ok.

this post was made right after rebuilding php. and suphp. and suexec. 😛

so in conclusion, my apologies to everyone dependent on this site. obsessive readers = 0. scratchboard users = 3. may future upgrades be without pain.

so….
i’m now planning my finances for the month. it’s good to have access to payroll results. 😀 payday is early this month, and there’s some debt that needs clearing. but aside from that, i’ve already placed orders for new RAM (crucial ballistix z503) and the case-modding plan is still on.

one thing that concerns me are all the recent crucial deaths. seems that the last few batches would die after at most 3 months of use (within their rated limits). some even die after a day or two. scary. but hopefully i’ll be getting a batch that’s fixed. otherwise, my supplier dinster@lowyat has promised to help in any RMA process. even if it has to be every 3 months.

well, that’s a huge chunk of cash there. another thing that’s tempting would be a nice LCD monitor. haven’t been able to focus on text on bright colors lately. gotta get my eyes checked. there’s a thread on lowyat.net for a pretty good 19″ one (listed here) for RM 999. aaaa temptation!

as for my case-modding, the first step is to check out the kind of work people have done on their own computers. some of them are very very impressive. breathtaking even. but they probably have the DIY experience and their own workshops to back them up. at the moment, i have neither, so i won’t concentrate much on aesthetics; much attention is needed on the basic need of good airflow.

i also wondered what people have done to cases similar to mine. i bought my case years back, and the only thing i could remember that it was either made by InWin or Enlight. after browsing some pictures found via [google], i discovered that mine was an InWin Q500, one of better full ATX towers back in the day. based on that info, i find myself a few interesting links:-

http://www.benchtest.com/way2cool4.html
http://www.overclockers.com/tips196/
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/articles/q500/index.shtml
http://pc509.tripod.com/guides/mod.html
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/articles/q600/index.shtml
http://www.overclockers.com/tips191/
http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU4

this following one made my jaw drop:-
http://articles.pimprig.com/featured_pimprig/the_caffeine_machine.php

since i’m not a coffee fan, i won’t be going that route. 😛