Information Technology

Five JC students were suspended for three days for writing not so nice things about their students on their blogs. You shouldn't say not so nice things about your teachers because I'm going to be a teacher. No lah, some teachers not so good, but you shouldn't say not so nice things about them lor.

My PSC interview is today, I guess I'd better get ready to leave soon. Office environment nowadays is kinda interesting. The branch head has been away for a long time now, on course. It's a month long course, she'll be back soon. Another officer was gone for two weeks on honeymoon, back now.

The Ranking and Bonuses Program that we did last year is getting implemented MINDEF/SAF-wide, gave a tutorial session last Friday. Making some enhancements to it, the thing is that programs can always have more and more functionality, at the risk of bloat. But it's fun working on it.

One thing is that these macros now tie us to Microsoft Excel, and there's a MINDEF/SAF-wide push to OpenOffice.org. Not only that, they want to pull already-installed MS Office software from our PCs. So have to specially request to keep it. MS Access is missing from OpenOffice.org version 1, and we need to keep Excel if we want to use the macros. The pressure is definitely on to port the macros over to OpenOffice.org.

There's even talk of distributing the Ranking and Bonuses Program to the rest of the Civil Service, but honestly the fact that it's written in MS Excel is a huge, huge barrier. I'm not sure what the situation is like in the rest of the Civil Service, but I think almost everyone uses MS Office 97.

Been learning tennis from the internet, it's really quite cool. Techniques for the serve. Need to keep elbow bent otherwise you'll hurt the elbow. When returning the ball, the way to impart topspin is to brush up against the back of the ball, with the face vertical, rather than trying to brush the top of the ball with the face horizontal. The ball moves too quickly for you to have enough contact with it using the latter method. Looser strings impart more power because more of the energy transfer is done by the strings (rather than the ball), and strings are more elastically efficient than balls.

Alright, I'm probably going to be late. Might be able to have 2 tennis sessions this Saturday, hooray! It's children's day. Resuming reading The Messiah of Stockholm. Should try to find the time to learn more about linux. I messed up Say Yang's hard disk that time by running cfdisk from the hard disk itself, and as a result scared him off linux. I think.

Oh well.