[AJ Styles...]
This is one of the best AJ Styles tribute videos I've ever seen on Youtube.
Most of the people who make such clips put some silly rock song in the background that doesn't have anything to do with the clips itself, but this guy actually mixed the clips and the music such that some parts of them actually sync.
It's a pity that he's no longer in the X-Division and is mainly used for comic relief now against guys who have no chance in hell of keeping up with him.
What I wouldn't give for a Styles-Daniels-Williams-Senshi Ultimate X match...
[Genuine (Dis)Advantage...]
I've been a PC Magazine subscriber for several years now and one of the articles I look forward to reading are the columns by John Dvorak. His views on the direction of technology, the Internet, and sometimes social issues are always interesting and presents a different view of looking at normal, everyday events.
His latest column was about how Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers crashed over the weekend and thousands of users who have certain versions of Windows installed on their systems were locked out because their systems could not "dial home" to check if that copy of Windows was genuine.
I thought it raised several interesting points. Such measures are put in place to thwart piracy. But the thing is, people who use pirated software (or the release groups) would have found some way to disable this little measure. So really, the only people these measures work on are the people who have paid for legitimate copies of Windows. Does that sound right?
The same goes for the entertainment industry selling DRM-laden MP3s and what-have-you. People who download them for free elsewhere would be able to enjoy totally unrestricted use of the file. People who go legit have to, instead, deal with files that were restricted and couldn't be played on this or that, cannot be burned, copied, etc. Why place such restrictions on people who actually paid for your product?
[Thank you, Solskjaer...] Ole Gunnar Solskjaer announced his retirement from football today. Or yesterday, depending on which time-zone you're in.
In some ways, it's been a long time coming. He's 34 now and has been struggling with a knee injury for the better part of the past four years. It's a little sad, that he had to end his career due to injury instead of going out on a high after cementing his place in United folklore after the goal he scored in the 1999 Champions League Final.
For the record, United were down 1-0 from the 5th minute. Sheringham and Solskjaer scored two goals in second-half stoppage time to snatch the title from Bayern. Some people said that Liverpool's comeback against Milan was the greatest comeback in a Champions League Final, but I disagree (although what Liverpool did was pretty amazing). Nothing beats coming back from the brink of death, with the final attack/shots of a game to win it all.
Solskjaer, scoring the goal:
Celebrations:
Thank you, Solskjaer.
Bought a CO2 reactor for my aquarium today. After finishing dinner at 8pm+, I installed it in my aquarium. It took me a while because it was meant to be used with a canister filter but I was using an overhead filter so I had to improvise. The thing is, if used with a canister filter, water would be pushed through the reactor but because I was using an overhead filter, water entered the reactor with the aid of gravity and that was it.
It wasn't fast enough and water started accumulating in the overhead box. I had to shut it down and "reset" everything, putting back the ceramic diffuser I used before, etc.
Bought a test kit to test the amount of dissolved CO2 in my aquarium. There were two bottles in the package and only when I reached home did I realise that one of them was empty, and I needed both to run the test. I went to two LFS in Clementi today and both of them were selling the same CO2 test kits and the test kits at both places were very old. It was obvious that stocks haven't been moving for a while.
I bought a CO2 cylinder on Friday for my aquarium (wow, 3 sub-entries about my aquarium already). I bought a manual regulator and so far, it's driving me crazy. I'd adjust it to the BPS I wanted but over time, it would slow down. I wonder if this was normal.
I took a photo of a tissue box on a table in the Business canteen today. I was going to joke that someone had raised the bar when it came to reserving seats. After dealing with my aquarium for about 90 minutes, I sat down and transferred the photo to my computer but deleted it by accident after that.
Today's not my day. The great CO2 reactor experiment went wrong; bought a crap set of CO2 test kit; CO2 cylinder's regulator isn't regular at all; deleted a photo by accident, and one of my favourite Manchester United players retired.
[Some people shouldn't talk...]
I don't understand why is it so hard to get a routine matter done.
All I wanted was a form for me to fill in and claim from NUS the money I needed to pay the respondents who took my HYP survey. Sounds simple, but wait, there's no such form.
My supervisor wasn't much help. He told me to "get the form from the admin". If you ask me, that's the same as not saying anything. He did mention asking a fellow student who had already taken it.
Problem was, the other student took it before SoC moved to Law. So his directions now were not very useful. The place he told me to get the form from sounded like the Undergrad office but as it turns out, it wasn't.
At the Undergrad office, no one knew what I was talking about. And it was lunchtime so there wasn't many people around. The Malay lady that was in the cubicle behind the counter helped as best as she could and she was probably the only helpful person in the office. I think that the course manager should never be allowed to speak with anyone. She may be helpful when you email her, but when she opens her mouth, all the "positive points" she's built up before gets erased immediately.
When I finally figured out where I should go to and who I should ask, I called her before going down to make sure there's no cock-up this time. This person was very impatient on the phone but much nicer in person. Finally. All this, just for one set of forms.
Why was it so difficult to get something like this done? Most students who are doing their IS/EC HYPs would need to do this. We need to pay our survey respondents and experiment participants. How can the people at the Undergrad office not know what I was talking about? The course manager, no less.
But the main reason, I feel, was because strictly speaking, SoC did not have the policy of paying for a student's HYP. The form I got and filled out was a salary claim form for part-time teaching. This was why the form "didn't have a name" and no one seems to know what I was talking about.
[You know something's wrong when...] ...it takes 11 men to set up the equipment for your Cybercrime (read: computing/technology related) lecture. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in students when they see such a sight.
This module has four different lecturers, each of them in charge of three lectures each. Today's lecture pretty much stank. Here's what I think:
The (guest) lecturer sucked. His jokes aren't funny. It doesn't help when everyone laughs at him when he starts chuckling. He thinks we're laughing at the jokes, we're really laughing at the way he's talking. But he tries, and I'll give him credit for that.
While I understood all the material that's covered, I'm sure that students from other faculties did not. I think it's challenging to teach a "general" computer security module because it takes a lot of background knowledge in certain cases before you can truly appreciate/understand the topics covered. He was jumping from here to there and everywhere else in between.
He over-dramatised most of the security threats. Hollywood does that on a regular basis. While most of the things he said today were, in theory, technically possible, it would be incredibly difficult to pull it off in the real-world.
His assistant couldn't even demostrate a "script kiddie" level exploit properly. He did this thing where he stole some userids/passwords by simply inserting a thumbdrive. It's really very simple, Windows' Autorun feature will kick in and a script on the thumbdrive will run....and you know the rest. Once again, they over-dramatised the whole thing and probably made a few people fearful of inserting thumbdrives into their computers now.
But what do I know? I can't even get my HYP going on the right track.
[Random snapshots...] I know some people don't remove the tags on their clothes until the first time they wear it. Please don't. Remove them before hanging them in your closet, lest you wind up like this girl.
It's not very clear, but the guy has long (for a guy) dyed/highlighted hair, ear-studs, and was wearing a loud/funky belt. I don't know what image he's going for, but whatever it was, it's totally ruined by wearing SAF running shoes in public.
At first, I thought this was an ad for a loan-shark. Then I realised it's probably one of those MLM schemes or just a scam. Lousy grammar aside, the message put across in the two languages seems quite different.
[The final semester...]
It hit me today. This is my final semester. The final stretch of my life as a student.
I've had this feeling before when I was in polytechnic. Back then, I didn't know if I could further my studies. I know now for a fact that I won't be furthering my studies (there is an extremely small, outside chance that I will...but I seriously doubt it).
Today's the first day of the new semester. SoC's moved to a new location. I'm looking at everything with a different perspective now. No longer am I just rushing through, trying to get from point A to point B. I look at my surroundings and try to appreciate the environment a little. Sounds lame, but truth be told, I rather like student life. Working sucks, everyone almost everyone will tell you that. Personally, I did not particularly enjoy the time I spent working before I entered NUS.
[IVLE...Or the lack of it...]
I've never been particularly impressed with the IT-related services provided by NUS. I can never understand why they felt it was necessary to have the whole CORS site running on SSL, or why every connection made from home to SoC's servers requires tunneling through VPN, or why, of all places, it is the hardest to get a wireless connection in SoC.
And now, we can add IVLE to the list.
They started revamping IVLE a while back, I believe it was at the end of last semester. Anyway, lectures begin tomorrow and some parts of it are still not functional. My biggest grievances:
The Communities function is gone. What we are greeted with is a long and mindless essay that says nothing, really. You need to read all of it to find out that the Communities function is still under development.
The powers that be decided that students needed a "mobile blog" or "mobile community" or whatever. I didn't care to remember the name. I think students now can post materials via handphone/SMS. And guess what? I don't think it's free. Instead of working on what students need (Communities for project-related work), they decided to work on something no one will use. And decided to charge students for it if they actually did use it.
The "What's new?" feature is gone. In the past, clicking on that will tell you what has been changed or updated in the different sections of the modules that you are taking, so that students did not have to click and check every section. That's gone.
Now it takes an additional click to open up the sections of a module on the main site. In the past, every section was listed out and one click was all it took to access it. Now we have to manually "open" each module before we had access to its sections.
I give the new IVLE 0/10. I'm serious. It's so bad, if I'm in charge, I would have fired the developers.
PS: If the Communities and What's new? function is available but instead buried somewhere, please let me know. Thanks.
EDIT: One more thing the new IVLE lacks - letting you know if you have already downloaded a file. In the old IVLE, you can see if you've already downloaded a file. It can be hard to keep track after a while.
[Allergic to alcohol...]
I've never been much of a drinker. I have drank in the past without any problems. Beer and watered-down vodka, mostly. But I've never had enough to get a "buzz" or feel any different.
Recently I thought I'd try red wine. The alcohol content of red wine is much higher than beer or watered-down vodka. While I didn't get wasted or anything, I had enough to turn my face red and was able to sleep like a baby. That was nice...It lets me forget my troubles and fall asleep quickly.
Until the rashes came.
I didn't think much of it and had more red wine two nights ago. Yesterday the rashes got worse and tiny bubble-like blisters started appearing on my hands. One of my fingers was completely covered with them.
I went to see a doctor and was told that I should not have alcohol ever again. I'm allergic to alcohol. Most people with this allergy only get rashes. Getting the bubble blisters means it's fairly serious. He gave me some pills and told me to return today if it didn't get better so he could give me a jab.
I googled the topic and it seems that this was fairly common in Asians, which was weird because I don't recall any of my friends ever saying they have it. Maybe they were like me, having never drank enough for the allergy to manifest itself. It seems that 50% of all Asians are affected one way or another. We lack a certain genetic thingy that deals with alcohol (which is toxic in our body and has to be broken down). I only found out that I'm affected now because I've never consumed a large-enough quantity of alcohol in the past. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, seeing how both my parents were allergic to alcohol as well (I only found out about my Dad's allergy yesterday).
Oh well. So now I have two allergies - shellfish and alcohol.
Running a bit of a temperature now. Not sure if I'm falling sick or it is because of the medicine working against the allergy. Either way, school starts on Monday and I can't afford to be down.
HYP's going to hell. I finally got my survey up and everything. Even paid for a SurveyMonkey account. But I can't find anyone to take my survey.
I'm looking for people with the experience of selling on eBay. I tried posting messages on local forums and the response was extremely poor. I tried messaging eBay members directly. Zero response. I'm not surprised, I'm basically spamming them.
I tried posting messages on eBay's community boards. Got my message posting privileges revoked for 10 days and moderators removed my messages. I've emailed them and asked what was the proper channel for what I'm doing. Yet to receive a reply. Did I mention I'm paying S$5 a piece for the first 100 respondents? No one's biting, still.
Time is running out.
School starts on Monday. Last semester, I had a lecture on Wednesday from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. I told myself to never take a module with lecture hours outside of the "regular timings" of 10am to 6pm again. It's tiring and I can't do much work during the day.
For some reason, I can only work on stuff at night. Or at least, I work better at night. Having lessons so late takes away the time I could use for working on whatever needs work (assignments, projects, etc). The ideal timetable is for me to have classes in the day and then I could work on stuff at night.
This semester, instead of having one late-night lesson, I have two. Wednesdays from 6pm to 9pm and Fridays from 7pm to 10pm. Yes, that's right, 10pm. At least the workload is supposed to be light, especially for the Wednesday one.
[Random stuff...] I don't understand why anyone would hang a big-ass lantern such that it obstructs the view of their menu. (pointed out by my sister)
Someone in my block threw away a fish-tank today. I took it home without really having anywhere to put it. To be honest, I really don't have place for another fish-tank in my home. Maybe I can sell it...Should be worth maybe $50? Part-time karang-guni man.
The tank is made of glass (as opposed to plastic) and basically, it's just five pieces of glass stuck together by silicon. The edges were pretty sharp and I cut myself while bringing the tank up.
Had dinner at NYDC earlier. Order the Three Amigos and Lime Shivers. Burnt my finger when I touched the insanely hot plate because I wanted to shift the serving plate on top of the normal plate.
[My my...Aren't we exclusive?]
Most of the emails I receive everyday gets deleted. That goes for both my personal as well as my school email accounts.
I get the NUSSU (NUS Student Union) newsletter in my school email account once in a while. For the past 2 and a half years, I've not really read any of the newsletters nor clicked on any of the links in it. Why? All unions in Singapore are toothless. That includes student unions. So, why bother?
I received a new copy of the newsletter today and I clicked on a link for the first time. Which brought me to this (you can click to see a bigger version):
Login? Where?
Oh, at the bottom of the page.
Here's what I think:
The genius who put the login form at the bottom of the page should be shot.
One of the concerns of a school newsletter (especially email) would be whether or not students even read the stuff they put out. And here they are, wanting you to register before you can have access to the articles. What's an additional step to people without a life who reads school newsletters, eh?
The dead genius should be shot again. Just in case. The gene pool needs chlorine as it is, let's not allow someone to pee in it.
White words on black? What are we? 12 and using the Internet for the first time? Look at me, I'm so emo I need to have white words on a black background instead. Society wants black words on white backgrounds but I would have none of it.
[Rage dreams...]
I had another one last night. I don't know what they're called. I call them rage dreams.
I have them somewhat...often. Maybe it's because when I wake up from them, I tend to still be in a rage and hence I remember them more vividly than I do my other dreams. I would usually be in a foul mood for at least the first half of the day when I wake up from such dreams. I don't know why. Maybe it's finding out that all that all the venting...wasn't real.
Sometimes these rage dreams are due to accumulated stress over something or someone that I have had for a long time. Sometimes it's due to something that happened during the day. Last night's rage was probably due to something that happened yesterday.
There was a reason for me to be angry yesterday. But I suppressed it. I didn't get mad. Maybe that's where all the "mad" went - into my dreams.
It feels good during the dream when you're taking it out on something. Or someone. Feels like crap after because I realise it wasn't real.
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.
