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So in a couple of hours time I'll be going off.

I'm more nervous than excited, because its a change of environment and I'm going quite alone. Quite because I'm going with two colleagues but I don't know them very well yet.

I don't know why I should be nervous actually, since I should not be doing anything more than 'shit jobs', but it may be because of the uncertainty of what I will be expecting there that causes the anxiety. There's nothing much I can do; I just hope life there will not be too bad.

Sayonara! See everyone soon!

F5

Refreshed.

Its one of those default templates; a little lazy to create one. Will see about it when I come home.

This week was xiong arhhhh. A new boss came, fresh from the oven school. I guess either he is not used to unit life yet, or he was instructed by the new big big boss; there was SOC training ["in the last 600m, you will be shagged beyond all imagination."], and alot of PT after the usual live run.

"PT IS FUN UNDERSTAND!", exclaimed him.

I'm pretty sure nobody minded some PT, but his tone could have been better. Now nobody likes him haha.

I skipped yesterday and today's training, because of that, otherwise I could have been completely knocked out. It was an unanticipated move actually; now everyone envies us. As for me..half of me wants to go; but the other half of me wants to stay. Not that I can change anything anymore though.

Last weekend was a busy one. Class chalet at Aloha Loyang, where the major event was cycling overnight to Changi Village. Saw the distintive feature that made Changi Village (in)famous. Haha.



Sunday was wedding lunch at Aranda. Had already gone there twice for chalet, but it was the first time I went there for a wedding lunch.

As mentioned the containers came home last Friday. Monday was spent unpacking everything. It was a huge mess; kudos to the store guys because of the number of things they had to clean.

Wanted to show this to everyone but was reluctant to do so in the first place.

During Wallaby doodling on the vehicles were very common, because of the large amounts of sand being kicked up onto the bodies during travelling. Using oil [I think] its possible to make the sand stay:

Alas, the containers came as we had our dinner. So next week I will have to help with crate unpacking.

Weekend will be a busy one. Besides a class chalet on Saturday and a wedding lunch on Sunday, I have my own stuff to pack, thanks to a stunt by a specialist to have a inspection on Monday.

I will be missing alot of things because of that. Damn.

So it was the Orion constellation that watched over the soldiers throughout the exercise in Australia. Unmistakable because of the three stars in a row, equal distance from each other. No one who went Wallaby would have missed it, because the clear skies there meant we could see it, every single night.

I spotted it again on Sunday night while doing my guard duty. Nice.

Besides being the new year day today is also the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP. Haha very interesting. Thanks to Google for the reminder.

Through Facebook I realised I have primary school friends who are now friends with my JC friends, either they met somewhere throughout their education years, or are now colleagues in army. Small world indeed.

Sad I have to book in tonight. The containers are still nowhere in sight, which is a good thing. Best case scenario will be for them to come only after I have left. Heh. Highly impossible though.

Good week ahead to everyone!

As I await the arrival of the new year I do something which I do every year - recap, reflect, and resolve.

This year, just like the last, was an eventful one. I had my first work experience at a convenience store. I went through one of those 'rites of passages', National Service. Suffered under Gryphon Company in Basic Military Training, learnt alot in Signals Institute, and saw alot as I serve in my unit. Went overseas on an aircraft for the first time, to Australia. Was not on a holiday there, but I was happy I finally got out of my little well.

Below is my resolution for the year 2007:
1) Get into army in one piece, and survive in it until the end of this year in one piece.
["Come out in one piece" is 2008's resolution haha]
2) Enough money to support my [slowly increasing] gaming expenses, with enough to support myself, and also enough for university expenses. [That sounds difficult.]
3) Learn something useful and thereafter, build up a portfolio perhaps. This is really difficult, given that I have not much time left. But I definitely need to do something if I want to have some form of a "bright future".
4) Keep my brain alive. [Two years inside the camps can apparently make people lose all forms of thinking skills.] I may restart solving programming problems.
5) Seriously, the world a better place.
6) Peace and health and happiness for everyone around me! Including myself haha.

Reflecting,
1) Haha I got the year wrong. That aside, I have survived! Done!
2) I was spot on. I spent hell lot of money on gaming haha, namely graphics card to run the ever demanding games, with a power supply box to power that card. An additional piece of RAM, and Playstation Portable. After supporting myself there wasn't much money left for university. Oops failed. Consolation was that I did not end the year with lesser money than I started the year with.
3) I did learnt useful things, but I don't think the amount of effort I put in was enough to warrant a pass. Failed.
4) I helped a friend with programming problems through a couple of months, but in terms of ACM UVa problems I did not do anything more than registering a new account with their new server. Brain is half alive I guess.
5) Nope. Still a f* up world as ever.
6) From my own perspective I guess everyone is still overall happy ba; everyone has their ups and downs, but at the end of the day I think its still a bright day for all. Pass ba!

I admit I have neglected my little resolution, chucked it aside and deep into the archives not long after I came up with it; hadn't been a great year. Having said that, I have another year of contract with the government, so I have decided to give myself a second chance to fulfil it; a second year to turn those fails to passes. Its the same resolution for year 2008!

Resolution for 2008:
1) Survive in it till the end of the year, in one good piece, alive and kicking and able to make my own logical decisions. 'Come out in one piece' is 2008's 2009's resolution.
2) Save money!
3) Learn something new, and not procrastinate anymore.
4) Keep my brain alive.

And I realise I have confused resolutions with wishes. So,

Wishes for 2008:
1) The world a better place.
2) Everyone, including me, to lead happy lives.

The hand on the clock has crossed twelve; I sincerely hope year 2008 will be a much better year than the previous.

Happy new year to every single person on this Earth. May everyone achieve what they set out to do.

Last but definitely not the least, one year, one month and twelve days to ORD!

I was early New Year feast to the mosquitoes residing in my camp. At least twenty mosquito bites on me, and three deaths for eating without permission from the food.

The guard comd 'did not want to see anyone sleeping in the TV room', ordering all those who wanted to sleep to sleep on the beds. He himself took a pillow and went in to sleep.

One fine day you were at a very, very, crowded food court, about to die of hunger and eagerly searching for a seat and a table to sit down so as to fill up your grumbling stomach. Unfortunately all seats were filled up with hungry patrons induldging (slowly) in their meals. Then you spotted a table where the occupants were about to finish their meals, so you decided to stand beside them and (in)patiently wait for them to get lost (haha).

Just at the moment when they stood up and were going to leave and you were about to conquer their land, suddenly out of nowhere came a tray with food down onto a table. Irritated you looked up to see...an old woman.

You tried to argue that you had been standing there for a very long time, but she refused to listen to you. She asked, where's your food, where's your food.

Where's your food.

Leave is like school holiday. They are always gone before you know it.

Instead of reading up on Ubuntu I spent the remaining two days gaming. Wasted my time away, wasted my life away.

The latest winner of McDonald's contest is yet another female. Haha the forummers are complaining that the probability is not adding up.

New year is coming! New year means new hope!

Hope tomorrow will be a good day.

UPDATE: I finally got Compiz Fusion to work. The guides I found did not quite work, but they gave me some ideas where to look into, so I went deep into the lib folder, made intelligent guesses and created symbolic links around.

But I was very disappointed to find the special effects, and the entire computer, very, very sluggish. Effects were at most around 10fps, and even web surfing was a little of a chore.

Well at least its working. I think the effects are sluggish because they are no longer optimised by the graphics card. Shall take a rest for now. Perhaps spend tomorrow tweaking Ubuntu for better performance.

END OF UPDATE.


Another day of dirty work.

Today I tried to setup my graphics card, in order to get the infamous cube spinning on my computer, aka Compiz Fusion, the special effects which are way more cool than those on Vista.



Its one problem after another. The installation of all packages went fine, but the special effects did not come up, and worse my entire computer became very sluggish.

One thing good about Ubuntu is the large number of users, so there is bound to be someone who has the same problem as me. This time, unlike the SATA harddisk driver problem, I did not take long to find out what the problem is. Its quite a common problem.

Turned out ATI's proprietary drivers have no support for this new OpenGL extension, something which nVidia has done long ago =(. The solution is to either use ATI's open source drivers, or link up to Mesa's library.

I am taking a break now, hopefully I can solve it by tonight.

Yay!

After almost a day of dirty work, Ubuntu 7.10, or Gutsy Gibbon, is finally running perfectly on this computer!

Since the day I got this Pentium D I have wanted to install Linux on it, but when I tried 6.10, or Edgy Eft, many months back, it stumped me with weird errors, which I suspected had something to do with my SATA hard disk, but I had no idea how to solve it.

Today I got the urge to try again, so I downloaded Gutsy Gibbon, burnt it on a CD, and installed it. Yay it booted into the desktop; the SATA error was gone!

But it was not a smooth sailing trip. For unknown reasons my network adaptor could not work. Ubuntu detected it fine, but it could not be activated, and the light on the router did not light up.

Combed through one entire night of forums and articles, tried countless ways, switched between Vista and Ubuntu a million times (because I could not surf the net on Ubuntu), but could not get it to work.

Just as I was about to give up, it miraclously came online. I have no idea why, although I suspect its because of the update to the latest drivers.

There's still alot to be done, but that's all for tonight.

Early Christmas morning I did one of the dumbest things one can do. I took a train down to Jurong East, pass two passport-size photos to a specialist, then took the train back.

The station was packed with communters commuters, because train service between Yew Tee and Woodlands towards Marina Bay was disrupted. Communters Commuters were everywhere, on the platforms, at the control gates, on the escalators, not knowing what to do. Announcements boomed over the PA system every few seconds informing, and apologising, of the disruption.

Quite oddly, by the time I reached Tampines, the displays read the disruption of the service was from Woodlands to Kranji, towards Jurong East, which was, the opposite direction.

I have yet to know what happened, since the announcements did not say anything more than "an accident". Hmm lets hope its nothing serious.

UPDATE: So I see. There were two accidents.

Back at Tampines there were dark clouds hovering over the sky. I made a gamble that it would not rain until I reached home, so I decided to walk home from the interchange.

Unfortunately I lost.

The moment I stepped into the corridors of the sports complex the rain came down heavily. This was one of the few times that I really apprectiated the efforts of our government - sheltered walkways linking up the flats. So I was relatively free until I was at the closest possible distance from the clock tower erected in the middle of the park behind my house.

Alas! There were sheltered walkways on this side of the park, and there were sheltered walkways on the other side of the park, all the way to my house. But there was no sheltered walkway across the park!

Some small event, but over-exaggerated by me. Ha.

Christmas eve was spent waiting to book out. Haha. Our kind boss let us off at noon, although all I did was to follow a few friends to an Egyptian restaurant for a little meal, after which I spent the rest of the day rotting at home.

Hurray for the next few days! Clearing my leave all the way till Saturday night, and I wish they will leave me alone. Sunday will be my second (and hopefully my last) extra, and also praying Monday, New Year Eve, will be another half day.

Merry Christmas again to all!

The past four days was a nice little break for me. A proposed outing to Ubin for biking was cancelled because of heavy rain, so we ended up rotting at Suntec instead. Still not that bad, spent time catching up with each other.

It has been a very, very, very long time since I went to Sentosa! The last time I went was in primary school, and I have completely no memories of the place, save for some photos. Then again the place has changed so much that even my friends could hardly recognise it.

A little letdown in the morning, when only half of us turned up, but the day changed for the better when we bumped coincidentally into four colleagues from our unit (very, very, coincidentally, considering how small my unit is and how big Singapore is.). Ended the day with cycling, something which I have not done for the past year.

Saturday was watching National Treasure and attending a choir concert, in support for a friend. I was there to make up the numbers, because I can't really apprectiate choir music. Haha.

Going out for the past three days pissed my mother off, so I was grounded today. Spent the day resting and getting my energy back, before booking in tonight.

Some people think taxi drivers earn more now that fare prices are up. Ya right.

Someone realise that so far the winners for Mcdonald's Ring, Eat, and Win contest are all females. Haha so interesting. Conspiracy theory, according to a few.

As I have said in my tag, I don't really have anything to say. Past two weeks we just sat in our workplace and waited for phone calls to come. Phone calls meant work. Once done, back into the room, and waited again.

It was not a happy week, then again. Wearegivenofftomorrow,andallthosewhohaveappliedforleaveorofftomorrowwillbegivenhalfadayoffincompensation.

To top it off alloffdaysawardedbeforewewentoverseashadbeenwrittenoff,whichmeansmytwoandahalfdaysofoffaregone.

Sometimes its not because of the people one meets inside that turns one into a vulgarity-sprouting, middle-finger-pointing machine. Its really because of all the shit that one gets inside that he really needs either or both of those mentioned to get all that off his chest. Otherwise he will simply go crazy by the time he comes out.

You see how your boss pesters you to finish your work quickly, because he is rushing off to a chalet organised by the big boss. So you run around on an empty stomach trying to complete the task.

You see how everyone comes back to attend an important event, because the boss of the bosses says that everyone, except those overseas, must come back. Then on that day you see your every own small boss missing, and you know very well he's somewhere here in our motherland having fun.

I may have exaggerated a little, but its more or less there.

Don't say time will pass very quickly, because it is not. I really can't wait to go back to studies.

Nothing can be more demoralising than having to go back to camp on a weekend. For the mistake I made in Wallaby I have been "awarded" two extras, which I serve tomorrow and on the 30th.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is very fun! Very intense, really took me into the game. The cinematics and special effects made me felt like I was watching a movie, yet involved in it as well. At the last part of the game the entire team was injured after the bridge they were standing on was bombed. I was on the ground, the surroundings blurred, then the bad guy appeared. To my left the leader of the team, also injured lying on the ground, slided me a pistol, for me to pick it up, and shoot the bad guy, ending the game.

The screen tilts when you reload your weapon, because you have to retrieve a magazine from yourself. It tilts left and right repeatedly when you run, because thats what happens when you run. The smoke from the smoke grenades were so realistic, during one mission I threw too many of them that I myself could not see the way forward. Haha.

Besides playing as an infantryman there was also one mission where I played as a gun operator onboard the AC-130 Gunship. Three guns for me to use, the 25mm, 40mm and the 105mm O.O. And the screen was a thermal imaging TV, so everything was black and white, with friendly forces imitating faint IR beacons on themselves.

I guess the only bad point about the game was that the game was too short. But overall, very fun game!!

My short weekend ends here; hopefully tomorrow will be a good day.

Years back I subscribed to Starhub's 1.5Mbps broadband plan. Through the years they doubled the bandwidth to 3Mbps, then to 6Mbps, and soon from 1 Jan 2008, to 8Mbps. The price had however remained the same (in fact went up due to the rise in GST).

And now they launched a 1Mbps plan, at about half the price -.-'.

Wouldnt it have been better if they had kept the bandwidth the same, but reduced the fees we paid every month?

At the start of the year DDR2 RAM was selling at $160 for a 1GB piece. It dropped to around $100 in a couple of months, which was the time I bought a piece to increase my system RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB, because then I thought it would not drop furthur.

Fast forward to now, it cost $30 a piece >:(

Too cheap to resist, so now..

Heh.

External hard disks were also hard to resist. Maxtor and Western Digital were selling 320GB hard disks at $129, which was about $0.40/GB. I very almost bought one yesterday. But in the end I didn't.

I still need one..two hard disks containing four computers worth of information had failed in the past years[because I always transferred my stuff over whenever I changed computers], so I lost quite alot of stuff, some memorable ones. So far I have not done any backup for this computer I am using, and although its a new computer there is no telling just when the hard disk is going to fail.

So much for those 0s and 1s.

My five days of off-in-lieu has come to an end, and tonight I will be booking in again [although I have already went back last Wednesday to do guard duty :(]. The store are still on sea making their way home, so I don't know what is in store for me this week. Hopefully nothing more than some moderate physical training.

Like companies out there, this month being the last of the year, is the month of clearing leave and off. Some people have fourteen days of leave to clear, but I only have a pathetic four days of leave, which I have applied around the Christmas period. Then again my big boss says the stores will come home right after Christmas, if that happens my leave will be converted to off-in-lieus :'(

Good week to all!

I still have more to say.

During our R & R we stayed in a motel which was directly opposite a ceremetry. Nothing happened throughout the night; i was dead asleep, but my friend whom I shared the room with saw a white light went across the room.


Done by some homesick guy I guess

It was the eve of the Australian elections, so I guess its no surprise to see..

I was a member of the computer club back in secondary school (last time still got very zai name one - Advanced Computer Applications Club, or [AC]² heh).

Sec 2 days were the days we spilt into the respective groups. I went into Multimedia, where I learnt how to use Macromedia Director to create animations and games. End of Sec 2 there was the annual National Software Competition, and that year we were supposed to create a ten minute animation on telecommunications.

Well back then the club was rather poor to afford expensive graphics design solutions, so when we needed a picture of a "wildman", we couldn't find any (back then our source of graphics was Microsoft's Clip Art gallery)

We consulted our senior (one who inspired me alot), and he told us to modify ourselves, using Microsoft Paint! I was in charge of getting that wildman. Haha.

The "wildman" was afterall, a man, so first of all I needed a picture of a man.



I used Paint and edited it, until it became....



The wildman was to fan a fire to create smoke signals, which was a form of telecommunications in the past, so we needed an action of fanning.



Lastly we used a software called GIF Construction Set (which was already available in the school computers back then), put both pictures together, and....

Ta-Ta!

I'm very proud of my work ok! But in case if anyone is curious, we did not win anything. Lol.

Something to share, hopefully cheers readers up. Secondary school days were so fun then.

(In case Microsoft wants to sue me, we only used it for educational purposes! No commercial purpose! And we never claimed it to be ours!)

Good day!

(I wrote this halfway one day after I came back, but never found the energy to complete it until now.)

I'm home! After 23 days in a foreign country.

Before all, happy (belated) birthday to my blog!

Sun, sand, sand, sand, alot of sand, rain, mud, sweat, shivers, shooting stars, kangaroos, cows, horses, 18 wheelers, beer, wine, chlorinated water (really aqueous chlorine), bathing with 6 men together in one room; been there, done all that!

I breathed sand, ate sand, drank sand, wore sand, bathed sand; I touched more sand in 23 days than in my last 19 years. In fact some of us joked we would die from excessive sand intake soon.

It was my first time I work in my unit, and now I have a clearer view of my job scope, what to do, what not to do. I have also better understood the personalities and characters of the people around me, just how @#$%! some people can get, so I now know who to look up to, who to ignore, whose tails I should not step on.

Then again who knows? Maybe to the others I am @#$%!, and should be ignored.

It was during outfield that I realised handling long entangled cables really sucked. Especially when I was trying to untangle them and someone hollered into my ear to hurry up. We really should go wireless asap.

We used to think camouflaging ourselves was horrible, until we had to camouflage our vehicles.

Right now I (may) have at least three extras waiting for me, because of a mistake I made. Hopefully it was only a threat my name was not sent in.

Two things I regretted not bringing to Wallaby: Camera and gloves.

We were told then that if we brought cameras we would have to surrender them, only getting them during our R & R. It turned out instead to be free-for-all photo taking, although a warning was given during one of our ROs to take note what photos we took.

On some days the weather there got really cold, so while my uniform and jacket some warmth, my hands were freezing away. Terrible feeling.

The afternoons there were very hot. So hot that sometimes I just could not stand under the sun for one more second. After the sun set the weather got drastically cold, really balls shiver. The sun started rising at 4am, by 6am the sun was high up in the sky shining brightly at us, yet the air was still so cold then we had to wear our windbreakers just to walk from our tentages to the toilets.

I saw the biggest night sky I ever seen in my life. In the outfields of Australia it was total darkness at night and on some nights where I was deployed on a huge open ground, the night sky I saw could not be contained in my vision, and the number of stars I saw was simply uncountable. That was also when we spotted shooting stars. Especially the last night of exercise where four of us laid a groundsheet on the ground, and slept under the stars.

I only spotted kangaroos near the end of the the exercise, when a family of four hopped past us. Some of them followed them all the way down the hill, where they saw an entire pack of about ten of them. I could only regret not following. There was a cow farm and several pony farms along the route from camp to town, thus I saw more cows and horses than kangaroos.

No luck with koala bears though.

Rockhampton was a little similar to the Singapore heartlands. I guess its sort of a transit town between large cities, because of the large number of motels there. I guess they valued family more than we do in Singapore; most of their shops closed after 5pm, with late night shopping till 9pm on Thursdays, and were totally closed on Sundays.

During R & R we went on a trip to the Capricorn Caves. Nothing much to see actually, its simply caves. Or maybe its just me who don't know how to apprectiate those flowstones and such.

I drank a grand total of three cans of beer, from brigade, company and platoon happy hours, plus several more mouthfuls from losing at some dumb games, and a couple of cups of wine. I still don't like beer. At all.

After spending almost a month there, most of us agreed that we have actually gotten quite used to life there. Living conditions was much better than we expected, except that place lacked entertainment, and we somehow got that extra bit of freedom compared to Singapore. In fact we wouldn't have mind staying there for a longer time. Great experience!

***

After coming back home I had a two hour sleep (actually three because I overslept by an hour), then met up with my friend to go back to Anglican High for its open house. Nothing much has changed; it felt more like CCA orientation day when I was back in Sec 1. Alot of new and unfamiliar teachers now, though a few ones from my time were still there. Didn't get a chance to see them unfortunately.

Poor country pumpkin me is going out for the first time! I'm quite excited actually, although I know there's the hundred crates waiting for us there. [Secretly I'm hoping the half of the people who have already reached last night will have unpacked everything by the time we reach there today. Heh.]

Alright, I'm off to



See everyone soon!

Something interesting for everyone to see:

Anglican High School Open House
Saturday, 24 November 2007
8.00am - 11.00am

I wonder what do they have to show. Hmm.

I'm seriously hoping I will come back alive and kicking in one piece.

Back in trainee days the people around me were, sadly but frankly, all hi-bye friends. We spent a few weeks together going through training, then thats it, they go east, I go west.

In unit its totally different. We stay in our respective units permanently till we ORD, we hold permanent positions, so basically I eat, sleep, shit, bathe, suffer, with the same bunch of people for at least a year. Should some happens, they are the ones I work alongside with.

Perhaps because of that the unit realises the importance of us knowing each other well, and it goes to great lengths to achieve it. Last month I had platoon cohesion, where my platoon booked out early on a Friday morning to have lunch together. Today was company cohesion, where the entire company booked out yesterday night (except for poor me and my friend who had guard duty), gathered at The Chevrons today and had a little inter-platoon bowling competition.

My platoon narrowly lost to another platoon, so there goes a half day off tomorrow for us.

I do wonder if cohesion really serves its purpose. Last month when we helped the other platoons packed their crates under the bloody hot sun the bosses encouraged us on with "Company effort! Company effort!". Then now when its my platoon's turn I don't see any company effort anywhere.

Nevertheless I still enjoyed myself. At least its something different from the routine PT and regimentation everyday. Nothing beats sleeping at home too.

Kitbag has finally been inspected and sealed. Now we are all just waiting for the big day to come.

"Not many people from this company gets confined, so there are not enough people to do saikang during the weekends."

The downright stupidest thing one can ever hear coming out from a mouth. Its like saying there is nobody to clean the jails because there are not enough criminals getting thrown in there.

Seriously. Really. Very. Stupid.