Wednesday, June 30, 2010  

[Buffy vs Edward]

^^^ by Locksley @ 8:33 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Sunday, June 27, 2010  

[Robinsons Warehouse Sale]

I went to Robinsons Warehouse Sale at Expo yesterday. I like warehouse sales. You never know what you're going to find.


Because it was a Saturday, it was quite crowded. Lots of people, although I've experienced worse. I didn't really expect to buy anything, but ended up with three shirts.

The thing about such sales is that people tend to put a lot of items into their baskets and when they're lining up to queue, change their minds and leave their items all over the place. We saw snacks, dehumidifiers, and other stuff being left behind along the route to the cashier. This item, however, made me laugh a little...


Panties wrapped around one of the poles guiding the queue. Haha!

Anyway...I ran into an old friend at the sale. I haven't seen him since we graduated from Poly, and he hasn't changed one bit. I guess he has one of those faces that never grow old.

^^^ by Locksley @ 8:47 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Thursday, June 24, 2010  

[Fixed!]

I fixed my router last night. The only thing I changed was the SSID broadcast. It used to be disabled. Now it's enabled. My philosophy when I bought the router was that I wanted to enable every security feature there was, even if they were easily broken (like MAC address filtering, SSID broadcast, etc). Disabling of SSID broadcast for security purposes is crap as the network name is still revealed via four other ways (if I remember correctly).

Anyway...I have heard of cases where devices are unable to connect to the router when SSID broadcast is disabled. But I never had any problems for the past five years. I don't know what changed.

In any case, I managed to use WPA2 again. I downgraded the encryption on my wireless network to WPA because my sister's new Dell laptop didn't seem to support WPA2. Under the wireless options, there was an option for WPA but not WPA2. I've always thought that this was very odd. Looking up this issue online didn't provide any hints. I finally decided to read the Help section and found out that the WPA option is actually for both WPA and WPA2 - the laptop will use the corresponding standard depending on what the router is using. So it's back to WPA2.

Can't believe that had me stumped for six months.

^^^ by Locksley @ 8:41 PM. 1 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Wednesday, June 23, 2010  

[Hardware woes...]

I can't remember the last time when I had so many hardware problems in such a short span of time.

I was using a 3rd-party software to copy something from a DVD earlier and the software alerted me to the fact that the DVD drive I was using was no longer DMA-enabled. I checked, and sure enough, it was reported to be operating in PIO-mode.

I did the natural thing - rebooted the machine. It didn't work. I did a search on Google, to be honest, I didn't expect to find an answer. I was surprised to find a few articles on this topic.

As it turns out, when WinXP has trouble using a DVD drive at DMA-mode after a few tries, it would switch to PIO-mode permanently. Doesn't matter what settings you choose after that. It will remain in PIO-mode. There are several ways to recover from this issue, one of which is to uninstall that "channel" and let WinXP install it again. When it does (after a reboot, of course), it would be working at DMA-mode again.

It worked. But still, I hope nothing else goes wrong. I still haven't fixed my wireless router. If things go as planned, I would be buying a new one tomorrow after work.

^^^ by Locksley @ 9:41 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Tuesday, June 22, 2010  

[Losing it...]

I wonder when will I finally lose my temper at work.

I spent the entire day putting together the damn slides for you. If you don't like the formatting, is there any reason you can't change it yourself? You created a email, noted down the slides which you wanted the formatting changed, sent the email, and waited for my response. Wouldn't be it faster if you did it yourself? What's so difficult about dragging the margins? How the hell would I know how you want them? I can't read your fucking mind. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to. Reading your mind would probably make me stupid.

One of these days...

Let me win the $3M on Thursday night and I'll tell everyone to go fuck themselves.




I managed to book the zoo pass again. And this time, I didn't even have to stay up till midnight. I chanced upon it and saw that the quota hasn't been reached yet and decided to grab one. Lucky me.

^^^ by Locksley @ 8:40 PM. 2 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Monday, June 14, 2010  

[Butt on fire...]



Epic.

^^^ by Locksley @ 9:37 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Sunday, June 13, 2010  

[The gods of hardware are angry...]

All my hardware equipment are failing one by one.

First, it was the PSU in my computer, which I only just recovered from. It took me a while because I took the chance to change a hard disk and reformat my system. In the past, something like this will take me three to four days to complete (which includes installing back all the software I regularly use). This time, it took me about eleven days because I could only work on it a few hours a night when I'm back home from work.

Just as the dust settled on this, my phone died. Actually no, not really. I have two phones. A regular phone, and a non-camera one for work. It took me a long time to find two phones that ran on the same OS and could sync with each other. This was important to me because I organise my life using my phone. And it worked. Until this week.

It's complicated, but the phones are now no longer able to sync correctly with each other. I tried updating the firmware of my regular phone, but it didn't solve the problem. I was unable to update the firmware of the non-camera phone because it's pretty low-end and didn't have this option.

And I did a rather silly thing when I updated the firmware. I installed Nokia's software on my system. I shouldn't have done that. There is a "spare" laptop in the house now. I figured that this laptop would be useful when I needed to test software, or install something I would only use once. I don't like installing software on my own system that I may only use once or twice, because there's no real way to really uninstall it. You can uninstall it properly using the application and delete the left-behind folder, but you'll never know if something else is left behind, somewhere deep in the system folders. It's not a big issue, but I'm just irritated by the thought that there may be some bit of rubbish somewhere in my system and I don't know where it is.

Just when I'm trying to resolve this issue with my phones, my wireless router sort-of died. The wired connections are fine, but wireless doesn't seem to be working. Both laptops in the house are unable to connect. So I figured it should be an issue with the wireless router. There is no immediate urgency to fix this, but I will have to look at it sooner or later.

And then, while minor, the watch I was wearing when I was out last night died on me. A battery change should take care of it. But I still think I'm cursed by the hardware gods or something. Everything's breaking down.

^^^ by Locksley @ 10:28 AM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Tuesday, June 08, 2010  

[What's IE?]

I attended a meeting at work this morning. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce to everybody a new software package which was going to be deployed soon. The following conversation took place:

(We were asked to log-on to the software via the web interface. There were issues...)
Presenter: Okay, for the people who are having problems, restart IE...
Colleague: What's IE?

I'm not kidding. Someone was actually brainless enough to ask what's IE. Considering the fact that this person uses the computer everyday for work, and that IE is the only browser installed on our work laptops, I find this to be completely unacceptable.

From my previous interactions with her, I knew that she was a bit of a dumb-ass. But this really takes it to a whole new level.

What's IE?

^^^ by Locksley @ 9:21 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Sunday, June 06, 2010  

[Hooked...]

I'm totally hooked on this game. Used to play it a lot when I was a kid. I could blaze through the game from start to finish without losing a single life.

That was then, this is now. Now I keep dying at the snowfield stage.

^^^ by Locksley @ 10:29 PM. 2 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

Tuesday, June 01, 2010  

[Troubleshooting...]

I always eat breakfast in front of my computer in the mornings before I leave for work. Last Wednesday, I turned my computer on when I woke up as usual and then went to brush my teeth. When I came back, it was stuck with nothing on the display and both the Power and Hard Disk LEDs were lit.

I didn't have time to fix the problem, whatever it was. I turned it off, and went to work, hoping that the problem will go away by itself by the time I return home from work. But just to be safe, I took leave on Thursday, in case I was in for a long session of what-the-hell-went-wrong.

The problem didn't go away. On Thursday, I took everything apart and brought my CPU, motherboard and RAM for testing at Commonwealth. Everything passed, there wasn't anything wrong. I went home, took my display card, and sent it for testing at Albert Complex, next to SLS. There wasn't anything wrong with it neither. By then, it was about 3pm and I have an evening appointment, so I couldn't bring the only component that was still untested - the PSU - to Ubi for testing.

Friday was a public holiday, so I couldn't send the PSU for testing.

On Sat, I went down to Ubi with my PSU. I've been there before, but this time, I found a much quicker way to get there. It used to take me 90 minutes, now it took me only 45. Anyway, I was praying that the PSU was indeed faulty. Otherwise I was going to tear my hair out - every component has been individually tested and they were all working.

Anyway, as it turns out, it was my PSU. I honestly didn't think it would be the PSU - the fans were spinning, the hard disks were humming along, and the DVD-ROM can open and close. I managed to get a one-for-one exchange on the spot. I also managed to get a free motherboard speaker.

Remember in the past when there's a buzzer on the motherboard that would beep during POST so you'd know if something was wrong? Over time, as motherboards got more and more complicated while the ATX standard remained the same (ie. less motherboard real estate), so the buzzer became a bunch of jumpers and the speaker moved to the casing. Nowadays, most casings no longer come with the fugly speaker. Which means, you wouldn't know even if POST discovers something wrong with your system. I never realised this until the guy who helped checked my CPU/motherboard/RAM pointed it out to me. If you're in the same situation as me, I suggest you get the speaker for your motherboard. Google it. It's a small device for you to connect to the jumpers on the motherboard.

I took the opportunity to change one of my hard disks, which I suspect was dying. Kinda disappointed with Western Digital. Anyway now I have a total of 4.32TB of disk space. Pretty amazing how far we've come. My first computer, which I bought 13-years ago, had only 1.2GB and it was considered to be huge at the time (most hard disks were 500-800MBs then).




I've been with M1 for 10-years. Ever since my first mobile phone when I was in Poly. Starting today, I've switched to SingTel.

I'm not really a fan of SingTel. All the three telcos have a $25.68/mth plan which I believe is their mass-market plan. I believe the plans from M1 and Starhub are exacting the same. SingTel's is slightly different. Truth be told, SingTel's plans are kinda outdated. They don't include MMS as part of their plans and don't have per-second billing. I would not consider Starhub due to their poor reception (is this still the case?), and frankly, M1's mass-market plan beats SingTel's hands-down.

However, I think sometime last year, SingTel came up with something quite clever. If you sign up for their plans without buying a mobile phone, and hence not being tied to them by a contract, they would double your outgoing minutes and SMS.

This changes the ball-game. This means, for the same price, I can get a total of 1000 SMS. This is more suitable for my current lifestyle, and I decided to switch over to SingTel. There's really no risk neither, since I couldn't buy a mobile phone from them, I am not tied to them by a contract and I can switch back to M1 if necessary.

So for those of you who exceed their 500 free SMS every month, you might want to consider SingTel's no-contract plans.

^^^ by Locksley @ 9:46 PM. 0 comments.
[Read Comments] [Post Comments]

RSS