[Hindsight's 20/20...]
I bought my laser printer about 3 weeks ago. It was retailing for $499, and I bought it (brand new) from a guy online for $350. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Fast forward to the present. The PC Show starts tomorrow. As it turns out, they are selling the CLP-300 at $299! Granted, you need to purchase a set of toners for $244, but that suits me fine, as I'm looking to buy new toners anyway.
And to think that I bought the printer from that guy knowing that the PC Show was coming, and thought to myself that "there's no way I could get a better deal than this at the PC Show".
[Who wants a lemon?]
The annual PC Show is coming. I was looking at the event preview at HWZ which listed some of the bargains, when I saw these:
Who the hell would brand their products as "Lemon"? I guess not many people know what it means outside of the US (I think it's a common term in the US), but still. I mean, seriously?
[End of semester review...]
I haven't talked much about this past semester on my blog (I think). Mainly because...I'm tired. Of the whole thing. Results used to be of utmost importance to me. I don't really feel this way anymore. Now I think it's the process that's more important.
I took four modules this semester, plus my HYP which I totally neglected. I saw this coming. In all the previous semesters, I always took five modules, spent time on four of them and coasted through the last one. The last one was always either on S/U or it was a crap low workload module to begin with.
I'm a lot less worried about my results this time round. In fact, I was more concerned with my HYP (12 credits as compared to the usual 4 for most modules). I did not get nervous until 15 minutes before the results were due to be released.
I already knew that I got a "B" for one of my modules. It wasn't unexpected, I knew I screwed up both the project and the exam. What I didn't expect, was that the results for my other modules more than made up for that. My CAP actually improved. Not by much, but an improvement nevertheless. Anyway, after five semesters, your CAP couldn't improve/fall by too much unless something dramatic happened.
[Engrish...]
My Dad bought a new door-bell today to replace our old busted one. The old one lasted us 25-years. Not too shabby.
The new door-bell was made in Japan. And yes, the packaging provided loads of laughs.
Here's what it says (comments in red):
JAPANESE TECHNOLOGY LEADING THE WORLD Daiyo brand doorbell combines the Japanese electronic technology with "IT". (what's "IT"?) Bring you the powerful function and dependable performance providing the perfect life quality for human (oh yes, my problems are over now)...
ELEGANT PRODUCT, INTERNATIONAL CERTIFICATE (international certification for a door-bell?) We understand that customers don't just want the voiced doorbell only. What they need is a kind of culture, a kind of fashion (geez...all I really want is just the door-bell), so we have been developing the product to make customers realize the safe (how dangerous was your previous model?) and dependable international quality.
FACILE (they made so many mistakes before, but they know the meaning of "facile") INSTALLATION SYSTEM Daiyo brand doorbell is not only an environment protection product (a door-bell that protects the environment..hmmmm...), but also easy installation. Anyone can do it, it is suitable for dwelling house, tier building, multiple apartments, hotel, factory, hospital or any other places.
You can click on it to see a bigger version.
The two greatest contributions of Japan are sushi and Engrish. I enjoy them both.
[More idiots...]
Yesterday I took a picture of a guy who stopped halfway in the pedestrian crossing. Today, someone did one better.
This happened at Bukit Batok. The traffic light for the vehicles was red, you can see it for the vehicles in the other direction. The green man was lit as well. It must have been flashing at this point, since it wasn't captured in the picture. So yes, pedestrians have the right of way.
Instead of stopping behind the line, this joker stopped his van right smack in the middle of the pedestrian crossing. Yup, he did one better than the guy yesterday. I immediately took out my phone to take a picture of him (good blog material, no?) and when I was done I was actually rather close to the driver (I was walking while waiting for my phone to save the picture). I noticed he was glaring at me. I didn't think much of it at the time. Whatever.
It was only when I uploaded the picture to my computer that I realised that...He seems to be giving me the finger.
What do you guys think? You can click on the picture to see a full-sized version. I didn't scale this one down, unlike the rest.
Moving on. Why do parents think it's okay for their kids to do this on the bus?
They dirty the window seat with their shoes and may fall off and get injured if the driver had to brake suddenly. Not to mention the fact that there were not enough seats and people were standing around.
That's the kid's mother.
These guys were doing nothing worth mentioning. I just thought he looked like a fashion disaster. I would never wear a shirt like that. Then again, that's just me.
[Driving idiots...] Saw this today when I went to Plaza. Look at this idiot driver. He can stop at the junction, just not where he was supposed to. Best of all, he did not reverse even though there wasn't any vehicles behind him.
Incidentally, the girl in white in the picture is a friend of mine. I didn't see her till she passed me as I was busy with trying to take the picture. She didn't recognise me neither. Probably due to my cap. Anyhow, I didn't think it was a good idea to stop and say hi to a friend while we were crossing the street in opposite directions.
[Unfit parents?]
I went to collect my new passport today. On the bus to ICA, I overheard this woman in pink talking about this "pui aye" (fat person, not pictured) taking up two seats instead of one. Truth be told, the person she was referring to was way overweight, and did in fact take up two seats. But really, there's not much he could do about it, and it wasn't as if because of him, you didn't get to sit down (she did). I'm sure if given a choice, that guy wouldn't have wanted to be that...huge.
And it's not as if she herself could be a poster child bitch for anorexia.
At the ICA, I saw a series of incidents unfold that made me cringe a little.
This woman was there with her two kids. One was a toddler, still wearing diapers and the other couldn't have been older than 8 or 9.
When I arrived, the woman was changing the diapers of her toddler. You can see it above, next to the pink school-bag. That white thing. It's over-exposed. This is about the best you can get with the camera on a phone. That's not really what I want to mention, so moving on...
First thing that happened...Her older daughter wanted to pick up the sweet wrappers they dropped on the floor, and her Mum told her not to. Excellent parenting skills. The wrappers could be seen in the photo above.
For the longest time, her older daughter sat there with the school-bag on her chest and holding the diaper (with a toy surprise inside). I guess she told them it was going to be their turn soon. But it wasn't. It wasn't their turn, for a very long time. What kind of mother would make her daughter hold a diaper (with fudgie) and not tell her to throw it away or something?
When their turn finally came, she swaggered off to the counter, leaving her older daughter carrying the school-bag, holding the (used, if you haven't figured it out by now) diaper with one hand and herding her toddler sister with the other hand. The distance between her and her children was widening and she did not even look back once, leaving her older daughter to play trash-man, nanny, and bell-boygirl all in one. My sister said the older daughter looked like a maid. I said the mother looked like an unfit parent.
[Colour pencils...]
I was going through some of the things in my drawer yesterday when I came across these:
Pencil leads. They're colour on the outside, but writes like normal pencil lead in black.
I bought them when I was in primary four. That's when I was 10. 15 years ago. I bought a whole bunch of them, and haven't finished using them and it doesn't look like I will, seeing how I am nearly at the end of my academic life.
Maybe it's kind of lame...But seeing them brought back memories of primary school. There were good moments and there were bad ones. I'd like to think that there were more good ones than bad, unlike in secondary school which I was sure had more bad than good.
I've completely lost touch with everyone I knew. I only meet up with one friend from primary school, once in a while, because she's a mutual friend of mine and Cindy's. The only reason that happens is because Cindy is a social butterfly and never runs out of friends. I wonder where everyone is now and what they're up to. I did work with a friend from primary school this past semester and he's kept in touch with a few of them. The topic came up, and he told me what some of our friends were up to. The girls were mostly pretty accomplished, some getting their Masters, some getting married, some already married, etc.
And here I am, all alone and getting my butt kicked by my HYP.
[New printer!]
My Canon iP3000 has been giving me problems for the longest time, being unable to print cyan properly. I was on my third print-head, and all of them had the same problem.
I was deciding between a new ink-jet with easy to refill cartridges or a colour laser. I was leaning towards a laser, seeing how they were supposed to be cheaper in the long run. I thought of getting the Samsung CLP-300. It was their lowest-end colour laser and it was small enough to fit on my computer table (colour lasers tend to be a lot bigger than monochrome, because they need to fit three other toners in there).
The paper were advertising the CLP-300 for $499. I went to a local forum to ask owners about their experience with this printer, and someone offered to sell me a brand new CLP-300 that he got as a free gift when he bought a LCD TV.
I managed to haggle the price down to $350 (someone mentioned in the thread that NTU was selling it for $399 really helped drive the price down) and I went to the redemption centre with the seller today. So here it is, my new printer:
It's big compared to my previous printers, but small for a colour laser. So far, I'm pleased with it. While there's no auto-duplex and print quality isn't as good as an ink-jet, I can live with it. I can no longer print photos either, but I don't really care about that since I seldom, if ever, print photos.
I have yet to find out the price of the toners. I hope they don't cost a bomb.
[So you had a bad day...]
Had a bad day today. Or rather, yesterday. It's tough to get bad news, and it's even worse when you have to deal with three pieces of bad news at one go.
In the past, when I led a more carefree life, whenever I hear someone say "talk about your problems, it makes you feel better," I always thought it was bull. You can talk until you're blue in the face, but the problem would still be there. Talking about it doesn't make it go away.
I was wrong. Talking does help. Friends can give you a different perspective on things and sometimes after talking about it, you realise it's not really that big a deal. Writing about it helps too. Not this time, though. It's long, boring and I've already talked it out with people I trust. Maybe next time. Hopefully, never again (yeah, right).
Watched Spider-Man 3 today yesterday. I watched it at Cineleisure. Someone once told me (Cindy: Was it you?) that when at Suntec, you're bound to run into at least one friend due to the small size of Singapore and big size of Suntec. Well, Cineleisure now falls into the same category for me. I saw my group-mate from Labour Law (she didn't see me and I didn't call out to her, we're not all that close) and I saw David from SoC. Incidentally, David and I ended up watching the same movie, and he was seated in front of me. Small world.
The rest of this section talks about the movie. I'll try not to spoil the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, so here goes. If you have some basic knowledge about Spider-Man, what I'm about to say probably won't come as any surprise. Otherwise, skip the rest of this section if you haven't seen the movie. I gave away one surprise (although it wasn't a surprise to me).
I thought Spider-Man 3 was okay. They shouldn't have included Sandman. I don't think of him as one of the "major" villains. He might be one in the comics, I don't know. All my knowledge of Spider-Man came from the Sunday morning cartoon...The one that was never completed. Spider-Man lost Mary-Jane in that series, and it stopped just as Madame Web was going to lead him to her.
I thought it would be better if they concentrated on Venom. Venom was way cool in the cartoon, although he had a real shitty weakness. And it was difficult picturing Topher Grace (of all people) as Venom after watching him on That 70s Show. Wasn't it ironic...He played a comic-book-loving geek on That 70s Show, and his character mentioned reading/learning fighting moves from Spider-Man and slept on Spider-Man bedsheets, and here he was, playing Venom in Spider-Man 3.
For those of you who were wondering, no, there isn't a happy ending for Peter Parker. That's one of the attraction of Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He's a loser and there's a loser in all of us. He doesn't get a happy ending because really, how many of us get a happy ending in real life?
The end of the movie said something about choice. How you always had a choice. I thought it was rather fitting for me, considering the situation I was in. I had a choice. I could mope over things I couldn't change, or look forward and do something about things I could. Sounds silly, but that helped.
It was nice being a fly on the wall. It's even nicer when people decide to use speaker-phone when you're in the room with them. You get to hear all sorts of juicy gossip. For instance, this person didn't think too highly of my friend. Yet when this person met my friend at the bus-stop, this person acted all surprised and pleased to see him again. What a load of crap. I wonder how that person would feel if he/she knew that I was there, listening to what he/she said earlier, and observing his/her behaviour now.
Then again, how many of us are guilty of this? I dare say, all of us. Yes, I do it too. I think if we were all to show our true feelings towards one another, especially when we didn't think much of someone, would lead to the breakdown of society as we know it. Think about it.
Never under-estimate the value of seniors in school. They could give you advice no one else could. And you know that those who do, those who took time out from their schedules to do so, that they are the ones who really cared. Thanks guys. It helped. I probably need more somewhere down the lines, but everything today really helped.
[Fishes - Dead or Alive...]
Went to Qian Hu today with James. For those of you who don't know, Qian Hu is a fish farm that mainly deals with export of ornamental fish. If you're not in Singapore and you keep fish, the next time you go to your LFS, ask them where their fish is from. If they say Singapore, chances are, they are from Qian Hu.
I took a ton of photos, but I won't be uploading all of them.
Guppies!
An oddly shaped Arowana.
I've been in his hobby for a while, but I've never heard of funny wood. None of the wood on sale (*sniggers*) looked funny to me.
One of their planted tanks. I like the "step" effect.
James and I had sushi for lunch. From looking at live fish to eating them. Anyway, we had the buffet and after doing some maths, I realised that we need to eat 11 plates each in order to make it worth our while. I was pretty dead after the seventh plate, but I forced myself. The last plate I had was a yellow one, which costs more, so I still had my money's worth. James out-ate me, which was a surprise because he's smaller in size compared to me. Anyway, I think he had another 3-4 plates after the photo was taken.
After that, I went to James' place to look at his new aquarium. He originally got into the hobby after seeing my aquarium, but his skills and knowledge has vastly overtaken mine. Looking at his planted aquarium makes me want to try giving it another go...
[Why?]
I'll never understand this. Why do people, who's in a project group, repeatedly ask for outside help to complete the group project? What does this say about this person's level of trust for the people in his/her group?
I'll never understand this. Why do people, always need to find a reference for every damn thing? If it's not facts or figures and something a reasonable person can reason for him or herself, is there really to cite a damn source? I talked about publishing an article with the department head in my previous post. One of the guidelines to prepare an article for publication was to ensure that there are no more than 12 references. He, too, said that references to matters that could be logically reasoned by a normal person should be left out. So there.
I'll never understand this. Why do people move back (read: recoil in horror) when others sneeze? And it's not as if this person sneeze openly. He had his hand over his nose and mouth. You think your shit don't stink like everyone else's?
I'll never understand this. Why are people so openly racist? A friend of mine in secondary school once said that everyone's racist, it's just to what degree. I thought that was an interesting insight. All the same, living in a multi-racial society like Singapore, we really should be more sensitive. Why put racist messages on your MSN? What are you trying to prove?
[Random thoughts...]
Had my final exam today. Or yesterday, since it's pass midnight. I'm going to take a breather for a couple of days before restarting work on my HYP. My final vacation period as a student, and I have to spend it working on a project as well as taking 2 weeks out for ICT at the end of June. Oh, joy.
Met with the head of the Information Systems department today. I took a module conducted by him last semester and he felt that our project (it's a group project) was good enough to be submitted for publication in CACM. From what we've been told before, it seems that there was still a great deal of work to be done if we were interested. But as it turns out, all we really had to do was just cut out the less important parts of our article and perhaps rearrange our contents a bit.
It's a bit of a gamble because there's no way to guarantee that the article would be published. It could all be for naught. I don't care though. If it gets published, I think it would look good on my CV, regardless of whatever my job will be.
Incidentally, I believe if the article gets published, either the faculty member or the school gets paid quite a tidy sum. No mention of this at all by the department head. What? No profit sharing?
Manchester United was knocked out of the European Cup last night. Damned it. Of all the times to under-perform in Europe, they chose to do so during the second leg of a semi-final. Hopefully they can do the domestic double. The ball is round, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Went to SLS today after my exam and meeting with the department head. YQ wanted to get a new rig and I needed to get a new keyboard, external hard disk enclosure and some blank DVDs.
My current Logitech keyboard has lost about half of its printed letterings. Yup, it's a Logitech. Aren't they supposed to be good?
Take a look at your keyboard. Chances are, the letters are not "exposed". They are actually under a sticker of some sort. Mine doesn't have that layer of protection, so the letters got worn off after a while. It didn't even last one year.
I bought a new keyboard...Another Logitech. This one came with the sticker on the letterings and was a steal at only $16. Cheaper than my current one with more shortcut keys. Granted, my current one was bundled with an optical mouse. But I wasn't switching to a bundled mouse when I bought one for $56 that comes with three additional shortcut buttons.
Not all the shortcut keys on my new keyboard work though. Probably due to a bug in Logitech's SetPoint software. But I don't care, I use only the volume up/down and calculator shortcuts and they work fine. I'm still not used to the keyboard though. It's harder and "spongy-er" to work the keys. And there's also very little noise. I happen to like the "tack tack tack" sound when I type. Yeah, I'm weird that way.
After my recent hard disk upgrade, I'm left with an 80GB IDE hard disk lying around. I bought an enclosure for it today so that I could use it as an external hard disk. It wasn't easy looking for an enclosure as I wanted one that could accept either IDE or SATA hard disks (for future-proofing). I finally found a decent one with YQ's help.
Getting it together was straightforward, and it worked without a hitch. Problem was, after that, I realised I didn't really have any use for it. Neither does my sister, since she back-up her files to my system. It's not really practical for use on a regular basis too, what with the additional power-point required (my sister and I have so many electronic items in our rooms, we don't need another since we're both out of power points) and the untidy wires.
So I packed the enclosure back into its box...Which wasn't easy. I could never figure out how to pack items back into their boxes after I've taken them out. It took some doing, but I finally did it. It's now on the top of my bookshelf. I spent $69 on an enclosure I had no immediate use for. Jeez...
Broken for now. :( If anyone knows of a good way to display tweets without using Twitter's awful looking widgets, please let me know. Preferably something that allows me to retrieve my tweets in plain-text format.
What's this about?
Anything and everything under the sun. I write about my day, my thoughts, things I see in public, things to get off my chest, or sometimes just some senseless rants that make sense only to me.
About Me
30 year old male. Always with too many ideas in his head and too little time. For my 15 minutes of fame, I want to be a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Interests
Movies, TV, cycling, computers, planted tanks, cherry shrimps, P2P legal issues, Manchester United, WWE, TNA, UFC, etc...
Disclaimer
Best viewed @ 1280*1024 or above. Views are expressed are mine and mine only, and are not meant to offend or influence anyone. Designed for readers with a sense of humour. If you can't laugh at yourself, you probably won't like my style of humour.
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