Absence

I apologize for my long absence. I've been away from my computer for quite some time now. Check email quite infrequently. There are tons of updates to be made, from the mundane to the earth-shaking.

Jasper's birthday is tomorrow. I think Andy's one is the day after, I'll have to check with him. Work-wise, been quite busy, but not too busy, making it a point to go home on time. Working on the website, adding features here and there and I'm afraid I'll have to take stock and simplify the whole mass of code. Cycled my bike a couple of times to lovey's place. The chain slipped the last time I did that, and for unrelated reasons, I haven't rode back from her place yet.

Didn't play tennis on Saturday, so it was just gz and hb at Hume Park (near MINDEF) in the morning. Br Hd saw Sam at the Civil Service 1/4 marathon. Her team came in 2nd, I believe. Got a pewter cup for a trophy.

Went to see lovey's brother's place, it's nice, on a really high floor. Got a view of the tennis court, which is always occupied. More on homes and living spaces later.

Installing avast! antivirus for lovey. Looks very pretty. Made a big oops. Must always remember to uninstall other antivirus on Windows before installing new antivirus. Screwed up the system badly, couldn't start. Eventually figured out it was because I was installing a second antivirus, so went into Safe Mode and got rid of the old program. Took a bit of trouble getting into Safe Mode, because got BIOS password, but luckily when get to the Windows logon screen it doesn't freeze right away and can choose to reboot.

Planning on Wednesday to fix the linux installation I did for sy that day. We had lots of weird problems with his new motherboard (not to mention his new hard disk). It seems there's this "feature" that if the computer is improperly switched off, if you switch it on again without waiting like many minutes, it make a constant beeping sound and refuses to start up. Took us much head-scratching before we figured out that what we need to do is wait (and not open up the case and poke around).

The linux installation was sort of ok (though not very functional), but I think I screwed it up because I ran cfdisk from the hard disk itself. Simplest is probably to just reinstall, should be a breeze this time. Since we already know the answers. I'm updating my CD (to upgrade my system also), so can burn an up-to-date copy for him.

Some more his motherboard is 64bit one, and the hard disk is SATA or something even fancier (not IDE, which I guess is a thing of the past). So the installer initially couldn't find the hard disk, it was ultimately assigned as hde! So that was quite fun. One thing is he seems to have lost his Windows XP authorization code or whatever it's called.

Have hardly read the books I've borrowed from the library. Oh well. Busy busy. Just checked my email and have to send some emails to PSC by today. Going for psychologist interview tomorrow. Yinglan is on leave, in China for some thingy. Went to the gym at Gombak today, and last Friday. It's good, got a lot of interesting weights machines.

Met Yvonne at the underground City Hall place where she was juggling. I guess the weeks went by so fast in part due to the physics symposium we went for. That was on the 10th of August. Not bad. But all the way in NTU. But soon NTU will be home. Or at least, it'll be near home.

Latest and greatest news! PSC has agreed to transfer lovey's bond to NUS, so she'll start work there really soon. Oh, and we also made an "Option to Purchase" a 5-room HDB flat in Jurong West, quite near to Boon Lay MRT.

Got new bike, got a headlight for the bike, collected my sunglasses, got this resistance tube with handles on both sides. Got a new LCD TV at home also. Reusing an old wallet that I've patched with duct tape. My sis lost her wallet and handphone at arcade. New car should be coming soon.

Bought two CDs also, listened to one of them today. I guess I'd better sleep soon. The antivirus scan for lovey's computer is done, and the Debian ISO image is downloaded. Using jigdo of course, which is so cool. Looking forward to tennis this Saturday, hopefully it materializes.