Rain On My Parade

The rain has been horrible these days. It's made me miss at least 2 tennis sessions this past week, and in addition I also rescheduled my dental appointment because it was raining so hard.

It's made me feel pretty sluggish these few days. Probably combined with the fact that my classes are more or less done, and I don't really need to go to NIE anymore. Last class tomorrow.

But I got my fix of tennis this morning at NUS, and if nothing goes wrong with the weather, tennis tomorrow morning at NIE is on.

The NUS tennis courts are currently under renovation. They were supposed to be finished with the first 8 courts by mid November, and then work on the other 5 until the end of December. But they screwed up, citing some technical problems, and were actually thinking of renovating all courts until the end of the year! They finally decided not to renovate the last 5 courts for now. And the good news is that they are actually done with one of the courts, and they made it available for booking! So there are 6 courts to play with, one of which is spanking new!

Federer's record has been amazing...

Oh, and if it doesn't rain on Tuesday morning, will probably be doing dragonboat racing! We're having a camp for some kids as part of community service. And Bryan's wedding is on Tuesday night too.

Get Your Funk On

My Kogi L4AX-NA 14-inch LCD monitor (which is actually my wife's, bought from Best Buy in USA) pretty much gave up on me. No dead pixels, but the entire screen is white and washed out, can hardly see a thing. It actually started off by flickering quite badly, and in its final stage it was washed out and flickering. What I don't understand is that when i shut down my computer, the screen says NO INPUT SIGNAL in perfectly formed red capital letters, as if to mock me.

Had to use my laptop for a few days, my Toshiba Satellite 2800-S201 that just celebrated its 6th birthday several months ago. It received a new 20GB hard disk about 3 years ago, after the 6GB drive that it came with started crashing a little too often, and was running out of space. Couldn't afford for hard disk problems to plague my senior thesis!

Especially in comparison to my desktop, my laptop was horrendously slow at times, so 'twas a good thing that the monitor didn't die out on me much earlier, while I was desperately battling assignment after assignment. But generally it was quite ok, just that one time it was really crawling. Not sure why that happened.

I got a nice screenshot out of my laptop running Debian, though, which I themed to look like a Mac. Played around a little in both GNOME and KDE, but I prefer GNOME anyways, so the screenshot was taken in GNOME. Even got the "docker" on the bottom that zooms in under the cursor, and the icons bounce after being clicked.
I got a Dell E177FP from Sim Lim, S$255 is not bad for a 17-inch LCD monitor. Pretty much the cheapest reputable deal I could get. The 3 year warranty is not from Dell, though, but from the distributor. By the way, the response time of 8ms, quite typical of LCD monitors these days, is a full 42ms less than that of the kaput Kogi monitor!

I spent some time fiddling around with my system after the addition of the new monitor, and realized that the driver I was using for the integrated graphics card was sub-optimal (to put it mildly). Changing some options was as good as buying a new graphics card because the integrated card is actually quite powerful with a proper driver!

Basically what I did was change the graphics driver, set the desired resolution to 1280x1024@60Hz, and finally got power saving working (monitor switches off after 10 minutes of inactivity), which had me stumped for a long time, since I bought my desktop actually. It seems the generic 'vesa' driver I had been using was incapable of triggering DPMS to the monitor through the graphics card.

Spent some time playing LinCity-NG and TuxKart after that. It was also very fun to play Cannon Smash, a table tennis simulation. Still can't quite get used to Free Tennis, a tennis simulation.

Holidays

It's been about three weeks since I last posted. Happy Thanksgiving!

The busy period was supposed to be over in the end of October, but i guess it actually spilled over quite a bit. Can finally take quite a good breather now, last assignment was due on Monday.

My ambitious goal for the holidays is to do some programming, be it learning to develop code in C++, Java, Perl, etc., or perhaps even contributing to open source projects like Debian or Gnome.

There are some possibilities. One is developing a visual interface for GNU Robots, another might be learning to write dynamic web applications using the Google Web Toolkit. The Google thing seems rather appealing, since in many ways the web is becoming an operating system, with programs written for it. Everyone could use a proficient web designer.

Also thinking of perhaps generating lesson ideas for teaching physics and maths, and putting them up at those websites I've just created. In case anyone is interested, I've also put up rather amateurish videos of stuff burning: matches and cotton wool.

And I could continue reading what I was reading, or perhaps start writing again, for example, writing on this blog. But there will be a lot of writing next month, just a matter of what kind of writing.

I have lots more to write about here, but will conclude this post now. Need to publish. Cannot write and write without publishing. Otherwise I'll keep having to edit the time-sensitive content.

Anyone notice that I'm now using Blogger beta? The look of the site has changed slightly, and the interface I'm using now to write this is quite powerful. I can even upload photos seamlessly. And there are post labels. And I'm logging in to it with my Gmail account.