my Briefcase of zeroes and ones

Yes I live in the past too; I think my days of secondary school were the days I had the most fun, and definitely one major contribution came from my involvement in my co-curricular activity, the uber cool computer club. Haha.

As mentioned before I was in Multimedia group, creating animations and games using the then Macromedia Director, which was a forerunner to the now-so-popular Flash from the same company [now all bought over by Adobe].

Unlike my good friends who did programming or micromouse, where source codes were in mere kilobytes, Director files could go up to megabytes, easily balloon-ed up as we kept adding in elements.

[Flash uses primarily vector graphics, thus file size can be kept small. Director takes in anything from bitmaps to MP3s to AVIs to entire Flash files.]

Well the word 'megabytes' doesn't raise any fear in anyone today anymore, since space is now dirt cheap and redundant. Back in the good old days of secondary school, however, the only form of storage I had came in the form of...


Image koped from Wikipedia

...where all it could take was 1.44MB worth of things [its really 1.38MB only]. CD-rewritable drives were expensive then thus I could not afford them. Not to mention external hard disks or USB thumb drives, if they were already in existence then.

To bring a Director file simply from home to school or from school to home was one big headache, especially once the total space required exceeded the size of one floppy. Therefore we had to come up with all sorts of methods to circumvent the lack of space.

One method was:



Yes its WinZip, used back then when Windows did not come with its own compression software. I would use WinZip to compress my files to squeeze into the floppy, but when even the compressed file was too big for it, it had the ability to span the compressed files over several floppy disks!

Another method I could use was via the Internet, after I just got my 56k modem haha. Back then there was neither Megaupload nor Mediafire; there was no Gmail yet, and Hotmail only provided a miserable 10MB[?] of space allowing only 1MB[?] of attachments.

In comes [Finally at the main topic. I sincerely apologise for my long-winded-ness] Yahoo Briefcase! It provided a generous [by standards then] 30MB of space, and had no attachment limits.


One that I created together with my friends. Brotherhoodofevilhelldeath. Haha.

With space constraints gone, my Internet speed became my limiting factor. With download speeds at 56kbps and upload speeds at 33.6kbps[?], one upload could take hours!

Anyway the reason why I talked about this is because Yahoo sent me an email yesterday, that they will be closing down Briefcase soon, asking us to save all our files inside.

With the abundance of USB thumb drives and external hard disks running into the gigabytes and terabytes, and with new startups like Megaupload offering gigabyte worth of space, Yahoo's 30MB 'briefcase' isn't that attractive now, and its closing down should be seen as a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'.

Nevertheless Yahoo Briefcase has played an important role during my days of fun; more than just providing me the ability to bring my things around, it has also become a time capsule of sorts for me. Even now I enter the username and password of this Briefcase it still gives me a good chuckle.

Thank you Yahoo Briefcase!

Last but not least some other little graphics I did back then:






Can you see which part of the world this is? Lol.




For the above two pictures, I drew the arms [and the bird] myself. It was also a modification from a ClipArt picture like the 'wildman'. It was meant to show 飞鸽传书. Haha.

ORD LOH!

[I typed this out on 230209.]

And yes, I have reached [and passed] my Operationally Ready Date; is officially a NSman now. Unlike my peers in various fighting battalions where ORD is celebrated with parades cheered by families and friends, my ORD was more like a chore for me to complete. Nearing my day of freedom I wrote my transcript and testimonial and submitted them, got various signatures for my clearance, got my dental and medical checkup done, and handed over everything to my understudies.

On the day itself I proceeded to S1 Branch to retrieve the pink IC which had eluded me for the past 1 year 10 months, and my Certificate of Service. Before taking home the remaining personal belongings, I recorded my final book-out in the book-in/book-out book, where the unspoken rule was that we would scribble anything we wanted on the book under the columns for our next book in date and time.

My consolation was that I walked out of the gate with three other friends, at least better than my bed buddy who ORDed alone a few days back. Haha. And as the day itself was a normal working day for everyone else, we were still able to see all our friends, though this time with a little 难分难舍。 Haha.

When people talked about National Service, most would talk about how they bashed through thick vegetation, leopard-crawled through mud, or climbed up steep slopes. For me, however, National Service had been about servers, computers, routers and LAN cables. Doesn't really fit into the picture of 'army' huh? Haha.

On the other hand I was still very much a soldier; defending the nation [or so they say] was the very reason why I was conscripted in the first place. I had my fair share of firing weapons, sitting in tracked vehicles [not every vehicle that has tracks is called a tank! Haha.], and close combat fighting.

The difference came in when I was out in the field. Instead of running from tree to tree taking down 'enemies', my peers and I set up systems within the shortest time possible.

Because of my vocation and appointment, I have learnt quite a fair bit about networking. The servers, routers and the expensive softwares used are luxuries that I have never touched before, coming from a junior college where A Level Computing means C++ programming haha.

My 1 year 10 month stint brought me out of my previous comfort zone of education; back in school the closest one could get to having bad experiences with people was during projects when some people seemed to do everything while some never did any work at all. Coming to army that was rather mild. I began to meet people whom made one wonder how they could have survived for so long.

[Out in the field where everyone slept on cold hard benches in the training shed there existed one who asked "WHERE IS MY PILLOW AND BLANKET!" while sitting on his safari bed.]

There are too many for me to recall now anyway; have already forgotten all the bad experiences. If I try to recall and write all that I can write a book.

To be fair I met many good friends in the army too [I don't think there's any other place where one could start hugging another after knowing each other just three days ago LOL]; last time in school friends usually meant those of the same age, those older were considered seniors, those younger, juniors. But in NS, rank, and not age, decided who my friends were. In the bunk I slept in, I was one of the youngest among all.

I met people with backgrounds that were very colourful. I met people who had went to jail, to boy's homes, to detention barracks, to exotic countries like Mexico and Turkey. I met people who had received public caning in school before, people who had stolen before, people who smoked like there was no tomorrow; met a swimmer who once held local youth records, and even a Taoist priest.

Coming from schools where everyone around me never did anything more than skipping lessons and cheating in tests, each of them had an interesting story to share.

[On a side-note, I think I have breathed in enough cigarette smoke to shorten my life by two years.]

And thanks to NS, I the mountain tortoise finally had the chance to fly in an aircraft for the first time in my life! I went to 2 countries for 3 separate events on a total of 8 flights; my 23+49=72 days in Australia and ~3 weeks in Taiwan will be major unforgettable highlights of my life; if my life had anything worth highlighting in the first place haha.

All in all, National Service had been a memorable experience. I am glad I'm finally out of there, having tolerated the lack of freedom, but kind of sad that I have to leave the friends I have literally lived with for the past year. After going through NS, my conclusion will be: Defend the country, definitely yes. Do National Service, definitely no.