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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.

Do you have the P-touch?

B00n T4t passed me the chapteh today, it's a little different from the one we used to play in RI. This one has pink, fluffy feathers and is weighted by 2 thin metal discs. The rubber base construction looks more solid, though. The one we used to play after school had stiff feathers of several colors, with a few rubber discs as weight, and a nail going through the discs into the feathers holds the chapteh together.

Used the Brother P-touch label system today, and it's really cool. It prints out text on a piece of laminated adhesive, and I wonder how they do it. I thought maybe it's like the ink is made visible in patterns by heat or something, but probably they actually print and then laminate as the tape is fed through. The thing is though, I don't know if there is an ink cartridge to replace... will have to examine its guts.

I used it to create a label to the effect that a good programmer must be lazy, and stuck it on my monitor. My boss saw it and asked about it, so I explained. I probably should have said that this wasn't an original idea, and is somewhat of a quote. But one can explain without disclaiming.

Ever wondered what dry cleaning is about? Basically it is "dry" because it doesn't use water, but it uses a liquid solvent instead (perchlorethylene). It seems now there's also a liquid carbon dioxide solution, which is more environmentally friendly. Whatever the case, it's still a washing machine tumbling process.

I've been taking taxi too often... sheesh... today I would have caught my transport if a taxi had come! But waited so long and still no taxi and by that time missed transport already so took a bus some distance then got a taxi in no time. I think the problem is that my place is just off the CTE exit, or maybe (and now that I come to think of it, more likely) it's that my place is just before an industrial estate.

One tends to take too much of something when one has the idea that one can never get too much of that thing. Had a huge serving of fruits after lunch, though that was because I thought B00n T4t and Andy would take some.

It's not so much that my stuff is messy, it's just that my information is messy. Scraps of paper here and there, stacks of undifferentiated material I should file and sort, but it's just so much work. So I leave the piles sitting on the floor, and let them grow.

Today at work I did some sorting out of the massive amounts of stationery we have kept in a cupboard. There are also lots of electrical cables and computer cables and accessories. Which is why I got to playing with the P-touch. As for the information I have in office, it's also a mess like at home, except that I can usually just junk it if it gets out of hand. But digital information I keep quite organized.

I think the underlying reason is that space is quite a limiting factor for hardcopy information. Or maybe because it just takes so much extra work, because pieces of paper all look so similar. It's not like staplers and pencils, that you can tell apart in a flash. To organize information, you need to create files and folders, and you probably even have to tag it using post-it flags or similar.

So I contend myself with keeping my table and wires tidy, and dumping paper into my drawer and locking it up and hope I don't have to find something in there. And usually I don't, because the information is in an organized, manageable, enhanced format on my computer(s).

I'm going running tomorrow morning, then going dentist in afternoon, going club on Sunday, then on Monday evening we're going to play basketball again. Before it's midnight, I shall complete this post and then head off to bed.

What a Day

Very interesting day. Felt a little high when I was by myself at J8 after having dinner after the run, going home, walking to the bus stop. Singing about the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

It was a royal pain getting up this morning, as it always is when I need an alarm clock. It's not as difficult when I'm seized with the fear that I've overslept. It's like I'm weighed down with the ridiculous robes of royalty.

But it's such a difference riding a bike with properly inflated tires. I just pumped the tires 2 days ago, and the pump is quite defunct now. When the tires are almost flat, pedalling is such a chore, I push with my legs but the wheels refuse to turn.

In the afternoon I got an unexpected call from B00n T4t, and more unexpectedly, he said he was being posted to MINDEF. Turns out B00n T4t and Andy are both posted to same unit! They commissioned last Saturday, and are attached here for 3 months (not in my unit lah).

Seems they were posted to Amoy Quee camp, which is very near my house, like gz, but they're now attached out. They both live in the west, which is where MINDEF is, I think.

I get to wear civilian and they don't get to knock me down. B00n T4t tried but I guess it didn't work, probably because I'm not tuned to that mentality. It seems B00n T4t saluted an LTC (he doesn't need to) and so Andy turned away. That's pretty funny, the two of them.

Going to meet them for lunch tomorrow and go running in the evening again (at least that's what B00n T4t wants to do, maybe we can negotiate... or it can rain), then probably go for dinner.

I went to a Mac shop in J8 just now, the Mac Mini looks cool. It's a really tiny desktop system, about the size of my external Iomega USB CD writer. Imported CDs from China are quite common, because Sembawang music store (in J8) carries them. Can get the Avril Lavigne CD for $10!

Been taking CO's car a lot lately, since I went for dinner with him last night and went running with him tonight. And he lives in bishan, so it's convenient if he drops me there.

Last night he asked me why I took up a scholarship (the primary reason was to study overseas, and it's a good deal because you get a job after that!), then tonight he told me about his experiences today in the board interviewing SAF scholarship candidates.

We discussed the reasons why there's so much difference between those applying for local scholarships and those applying for SAFOS. He wondered if it was that the education system in Singapore was so diverse, which I guess is so: some schools certainly have more resources than others.

I said I felt it was more upbringing, the influence of parents. For some reason, some people keep in touch with current affairs while others are more interested in neutrons and magnets, for example. And of course SAFOS is more competitive, so people prepare much more.

How to bring up kids? That's tough. Need to guide them and need to let them be. I think the general principle is to give them space to explore their interests and talents.

I'm taking off on Monday, going medical in morning. Also taking off the following Wednesday, again got medical in the late morning.

There's a WITs project I saw that basically said it'll cost X dollars to develop software to do this thing, and we don't really need to do this thing anyway, so let's not do it, thus resulting in a cost avoidance of X dollars. It won $500.

Did some coding for the website today. I might be done with the requested features in a week, though I was given a month; breathing space is always good. I'm glad I managed to reduce a lot of fragmented code duplication by storing the web server path as a variable. I guess I should have thought of it earlier, but at least I have it now.

Gave a brief overview of Excel macro coding to Sam and Yinglan. Ben did an attachment at IBM, remind me to ask him how that was like.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is in beta. I've installed version 1.1.4 for Jasper. It's really great that OOo has a one-touch conversion to PDF feature. I think that's awesome because it's very necessary.

Wah, got cute screensaver of a little ant with a little lamp that illuminates a small patch of my screen. The screen is warped like it is a flat surface in perspective, and the ant is shining its lamp on the ground.