Thoughts...

Talked to R today about LP.. about the stuff that I've been through.

His feedback. For weeks he's been seeing me go around this cycle looking for an answer to a non existent problem.

I've been feeling pretty shoehorned for this entire course. Why do I have to behave like this? Why .. why blah blah. For some people, I guess it works for them. They feel the breakthrough, they feel like they have done something different, and it's great for them. But people are different. What is important to them isn't necessarily important to another person.

In a way this course has been pretty beneficial. I did learn stuff, and to me, found my greatest breakthrough which will take me through life. But to other ppl, no it's not a breakthrough, etc etc. .. Duh? We have different ways of judging..

I've been judged by a person who said less than 50 words to me. Based on that quick analysis, he can say I don't make creative input at work. But R, being boss and all, said no. Well ya I guess so, that was what I answered then. And that person said even louder. You don't.

So well I gave up. I realised then if I continue fighting, I will be labelled as defensive. But yet if I just let it slide, I'm not being true to myself.

So was kinda blah.

And that happened again by that coursemate who said I don't have my breakthrough yet. Babe, we have different kinds of breakthroughs.

I know, there are various ways to look at this. To do something different, to try out different stuff. Ya .. I agree. But I'm just not wired that way. I like saying "I don't have that plugin installed" etc. It's just a quirk of mine. Then they say, don't think! Use your heart!

But ... well .. er the heart is silent leh. If you wanna listen to the heart... That's not the way I'm wired.

Then the same coursemate was saying that people want the same things. (Well in a very basic way I guess). And the fact that I want my car to be neon light, door lights .. etc etc, is cause somehow not open at all etc etc. That people are the same .. blah..

I dunno. I just like my car to have lights... flashy shitz.... No particular reason.

I dunno

Now feeling rather negative about the whole thing.

It has its merits.

But... I guess it's not for me.

Blatantly obvious .. To some

Regarding LP...
These few days I've been feeling resentful about the time needed, and my logical mind kept finding excuses to quit.

But last night, in bed, I was thinking when I solve problems like computer probs, fixing bugs ..
I never dwell on the "why did this happen!?!"
I just think of "It's .. ok .. It happened already. What can I do to fix it?"

Can't I just let the heart (or mind .. depending on subject matter) decide..

OK I want to do X and put the power and energy of my logical mind behind THINKING how to make it work rather than whining about it.

Gah

Been feeling rather depressed these few days. Frankly if really pressed for an answer, I wouldn't have one.. it's just .. blarhgz.

I realise that one of my difficulties is to trust people. Well, I can do things solo and all's fine, but rely on someone to do stuff... That can get quite difficult. And almost everything that happens always shows that's a correct assumption.

Maybe I'm a control freak :P

Anyways I've been talking to DA, asking him if he sees a possibility where he can shift too, and be well .. warmer, more trusting, closer to people and stuff like that.

He is cautious about it ... Not like totally unwilling to try, but kinda approaching this with a 1000 foot long stick. Frankly, I cannot imagine DA being like this. (Similarly I cannot imagine myself like this -.-). But well DA has his LA which he is completely 100%+++ devoted to.

But I guess I should try and sit down with him and see if we can work something out..kinda like .. get out there... be er .. I don't know =.= I don't even really know what's supposed to happen.

It's kinda silly actually, since well.. that's DA, and this is me. That's .. that.

Shifting

No, this is not shifting house or what. It's a term in Asiaworks about shifting yourself. It's pretty interesting so far. These few days I've been feeling cautiously optimistic and actually cheerful these days. Usually everyday it's kinda of a blah mood, but it's been ^_^~

Not too bad I guess.

Also going to volunteer for the first time in my life >_> Omg. I actually signed up for 2 things at this current time in writing. Signed up for Cheshire Home and NLB. Tomorrow will be packed, gotta go for team meeting in the morning and then 10 - 12 is the NLB orientation and 4pm need to go to the Home. Add to that I need to get some work done! Zomg!

Looks like Sunday will have to work quite alot liao. Actually the NLB thing is abit extra, but it's quite cool, I've always liked libraries ^_^; Would most likely have to scale something back, depending lo.

Need to work on my project plan later.. Time is going to be tight, and I can't overcommit..

But .. bottom line .. I feel cheerful! ~ woo.

rawr!

Wah so long nv blog here, the new UI is slightly different! Pretty interesting.

I have been so busy these days, going on courses and such. Been doing this course by asiaworks.. Up to now I still can't really categorise it, except that it's for self awareness and living your life fully. Lol. It IS pretty good imo, although I have a friend in the States who took it and didn't feel so good about it. I guess it's individual experience and stuff bah. So far my mates are pretty cool, would love to keep in contact with them always.

Well, it's time to start rolling up the sleeves to speed pick up Ruby on Rails, it's going to be an interesting 3+ mths ahead. MUSTTTTTT be able to do well in this!! Will have to be super hardworking liao.

Was reading about the election news yesterday. Omg. Dudes, if I had to vote, I wouldn't vote for the girl next door. I'd vote for the smart dude, who can THINK and actually do shit rather than someone who's exactly like me. WTF would I vote for myself to lead a country? (Well in this case, I can do a pretty good job!). But seriously, what's with the, "Oh she's just like me! Therefore I shall vote for her!" or "Experience doesn't matter! It's your ethics that do!" ...

Stop dragging religion into politics man. Just because he's/she's a devout Christian/Buddhist/Muslim/whatever, doesn't make him/her a good politician/decision maker etc.

Looking back..

So today marks the next chapter of my life... Today is the day where my ties with muvee are severed. Poofed.

It's kinda sad actually, I felt quite sorry ... kinda regretful ... etc.

Looking back at my work experience... I guess the years in muvee were the most fruitful.

In Converscient, I learnt to be a peon, learnt that SI was shit, and I didn't really want to do it, learnt what kind of projects I should avoid, learnt server setups ... etc.

In muvee, I learnt how to not be a peon, how to think about things. Not just listen blindly, but to think for myself. I must say I leave muvee a changed person.

But I still don't know what I really want. Maybe the workshop next week will tell me ...

Digital art

Went to the digital art exhibition last sat. It was pretty bad imo... Most of the time I was thinking wtf? What's the point of this shitz? Either I didn't understand it, or it just didn't .. well make sense to me.

These few pics are fun though. We saw this the moment we stepped into the museum lolz. Again I was thinking wtf.. the description totally is very lame.. Like David .. examined under the female eye.. blah blah yawnz IMO it's just .. stupid looking .. -_-;

owww...

Result of langaing with a bicycle =.=; I've always known at the back of my head that that place was rather dangerous, cos it was a T junction and ppl travelling on the _ side can't see the ppl approaching from |.. I've always told myself to look before heading out of the |, but I usually don't...

So well today it happened.. I walked out... and langa a bicycle =.= At first I was thinking not too bad, he didn't knock into my body, didn't crash anywhere... was ok. Then later in the bus I felt some pain at the toe, looked down and it was zomfg blood!!! =.= Pain ....

Underneath of the nail is purplesh liao.. Going to replace the name.. I think the bic didn't run over it, but more like maybe the nail hit it and was pushed to 1 side (as you can see it's a bit \ to 1 side...)

Urgh.

Personality Disorder Test Results Paranoid |||||||||||| 42% Schizoid |||||||||||||||||||| 86% Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||||| 82% Antisocial |||||||||||||||| 66% Borderline |||||||||||||||||| 78% Histrionic |||||| 30% Narcissistic |||||||||| 34% Avoidant |||||||||||||| 58% Dependent |||||||||||| 46% Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||| 38%

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How to make money... lots of it

So I went to a talk today about $$ planning. After the talk (which was pretty entertaining ... I was worried that I might /thud /snore /drool), I was mulling over it...

So basically, here are some of the ways to make $$
1 - Business
2 - Investment
... Got some other lah but I can't remember..

Out of investments there's
1 - Property
2 - Stocks & Shares
3 - Wine
4 - Zurich ..
5 - Other weird shit....

So I was thinking ... how best for us peons to earn the most $$? To me, it's either business or property... Stocks & shares depends on your capital (and/or how much you leverage it), and it depends on your trades..

The speaker succeeded (initially) on property. It pretty much seems like the way to go, but needs knowledge and timing .. and balls I guess. Take a huge loan to buy a flat... especially if you're not buying for your own. And if you're buying purely for investment, you'll need to buy private unless you're >35.

Business need risk taking ... But nowadays it's not hard to open a business? Just require bigger balls. Lol.

Time to do due diligence....

Dumb shitz

So .. after a long agonising period, I finally threw letter. Woo. You cannot imagine the relief... and the release I felt. BU said "you cannot imagine the sense of loss I felt".. Well, I'd like to say to him, you cannot imagine the relief and release I felt.

Lolz

Anyway the moment I stepped home just now, my mom was saying .. I dunno what you're so busy doing outside, but if you're not interested in him, don't give him chance. (+ other sundry comments about guys and marriage and such)

My knee jerk reaction was what the fuck are you talking about?

Duh. Does she only see things like this? -_-

wtf.

Who knows? God knows? Nobody knows!

We were supposed to go to staging this week.

Didn't happen.

We are supposed to go live next week.

There has been 0 testing.

Are we going live?

Who knows? God knows? Nobody knows!

Life with an MBP

As some of you may (or may not!) know, I bought an MBP last week :D What's an MBP? It's a Macbook pro of course! And being the poor peon that I am, I went for the 24 mth interest free installment, and being the poor peon that I am, I bought the cheapest 15"er, souped up to 4gb ram :P

Her name? Imperator! At first it was a tentative name, but I guess it grows on you. Somehow Imperator seems to be masculine, but my fleet is always feminine.

So far I've alreadby bought a 110$ bag for her, but I haven't taken her out yet. Been mainly computing on the bed with her.. Thinking of buying a Belkin cooling pad, bring down her temperature. She usually runs at 71 on load.. Kinda hot huh. So far haven't done much programming on her.. Don't really have the right ergonomic environment for a laptop at the moment ..

But she's fantastic!! :D

The power of options

No.. I'm not talking about the trading derivative. Rather, I'm talking about options as a whole.

What are options? TFD defines options as thus (irrelevant ones removed):
op·tion (pshn)n.

1. The act of choosing; choice. See Synonyms at choice.
2. The power or freedom to choose.
3. Something chosen or available as a choice.

So .. how many of us have options, in terms of working, lifestyle? What kind of options do we need? Well I'm going to focus more on working options, since that's what I'm primarily concerned about these days.

Your boss is mean to you. His demands are unreasonable. You feel so angry and want to piak him/throw letter/etc. But can you? Do you have the capability to? How will your car/house/education loan get paid? Can you get a job elsewhere?

Nay, that will never happen to me, I hear you say. My boss is very nice.. sure he's abit mean sometimes but mostly he's nice.

Ah, but then again... some things are unforeseeable. What if he suddenly gets replaced? What if the company poofs? (It does happen! Well the example I've seen isn't really a company, but there was this kopi tiam which I walked past everyday at the old company. And one morning, when I walked past it, it was closed, with OCBC notices on it. Apparently the owner had been defaulting on payments and such. So imagine if you're one of the stall owners.. You wake up, prepare your stuff and go to your stall, only to find it closed. Who'd knew?) If shit happens, do you have the ability to escape relatively unscathed?

Having options gives you leverage. If you're underpaid, you can either walk, or show your boss the options (ie job offers) you have and negotiate for higher pay. Else? Sit around at lunch/dinner with friends and colleagues and bitch about it? I realised that I have no more patience for such crap. Don't bitch about stuff, not unless you're ready to make a change.

You need to anticipate and prepare for change. It might not be your doing, but it would most definitely affect you.

-----
Mindsets, this slightly digresses from the topic, but mindsets must also be changed. A lot of us (well I used to be like that too) always just think .. well okay, I'm just a peon, I do what the boss asks me to do. I obey his every order. He want me to go East, I go East..

That's the makings of a good peon. But do you want to just be a peon? You will just be a fixture in the office, the obedient one whom the boss can depend on. That's nice, but is this it?

I was talking to my ex line manager the other day, and he was saying, if you want to distinguish yourself, you need to show initiative. Similarly, the books I've read say roughly the same thing too. Don't go to your boss with a problem. Rather, go to him to notify him of the issue, and suggest solutions. In this situation, you can influence his decision to pick the solution that you want.

Mindsets about salary and money issues have to change too. Alot of people just go, well I'll save $X every month, and when I finally have enough, I'll be able to buy Y item. Why? Why try to save? What about turn it around (as wont in Phoenix Wright games)? Instead of saving the money, what about telling yourself that you want to EARN the money to afford Y item? (Admittedly it's hard.. I'm still trying to learn this). Why scrimp on your salary? What about think of ways to INCREASE your salary so that you can afford Y item (faster)?

And lastly... negotiate. Try to learn that (I'm learning too! ><) Nothing is truly cut and dried. Humans are not 0 and 1. You can always negotiate (and to do it better, you need leverage!)

Whoever reads this, please ponder over it. Don't just be a peon with no leverage. Improve yourself, anticipate and prepare for change!

Two things

Happened today.. (3 if you count this blogging event!)

1 - I received my first cold call. Woot.
It was for an SI position.. and she didn't bat an eyelid when I quoted my price. However.. sadly I had to decline the offer.. Why? Well cos I don't really want to do SI anymore. I have the (mistaken!?) belief that I can do more, better, than write custom apps for users... Well unless I'm designing the user experience... then that's another thing.

2 - I have found .. I believe.. my light.
Yes! I think I've found my career direction!
Sadly.. I'm still at novice level for that.. . hopefully I can find the opportunities and work towards it... ^^v

What I learnt today

Is .. that sending emails to my boss.. is the same as not sending emails to him at all. I've been made aware that I'd have to go up and poke him, but... seriously. Do I have to fucking handhold someone to do something/request for input?

Well I guess the usual "If your boss is late.. it means he's been working late the whole night. If you're late, you're lazy" thing works here. He may be super busy... but .. busy until cannot even ever reply? Does he even read the emails I send? /facepalm.

Whatever. I just send the email. That's my duty.

Over the years.. My MO has changed to be somewhat of a "If I tell you something which I think should be corrected, and you don't ever do it, the most I do is tell you a few times. Then .. whatever. It's your onus."

That's not to say I'm right. Before people say I too arrogant =p

For eg. I've been helping my friend work on his website cos his FL is bloody irresponsible. My method has always been teaching the person how to do something, rather than doing it for him. I can do this once or twice for you, but don't think you can rely on me (unless you're paying me!). If you don't want to learn.. then that's your business. (Not to say that he isn't!!)

So, I (will try) never nag. At most I'll mention it a few times. Like, have you done this and that? Didn't you say you were doing it? If you still don't do it. Then too bad. I won't bother anymore. It's your life. Your choice. Your onus.

When I wait for you, don't expect me to wait forever. You say okok after this game .. but then play another .. and another. Screw that. I'm going home.

Hmz, if I sound angry, well that's cos I am.. I'm always angry :@ There's this strong latent anger and impatience which throbs inside.

Basically I keep feeling that there's no more time. And well actually there isn't! It's always marching onward and onward, and I still feel like a fucking entry level dude =.= urghz

There are people who prefer to do the same job day in day out... Get pay, increment, bonus and they are happy. They aren't wrong. But somehow I don't see myself doing that. I don't want to be Faceless Peon #2451511341. I was reading on CNA about the Mas Selamat case. A few peeps got fired cos of that.

So a bad thing happens, and they become the fall guys. Naturally no one wished for it to happen, but shit happened, and they were axed. What happens to them? Do they have enough money to pay for the housing loan? Their kid's education? Their car? Would it be easy for them to get another job? Would any security firm hire them (well since they are dealing with security, I'm assuming security firms)?

I don't want to be in the mercy of that..

Well sure, you can say .. hrm My job dun have any Mas Selamat lah, surely won't axe one. But .. you never know what happens. What if your company gets bought out? Or too low profits (or losses), and like Sun, to make the shareholders happy, just axe a bunch of employees? Shareholders are always happy when companies X ppl, but are the ppl happy? What are their plans?

So yeah .. time's running out.

Too many people just prefer to live everyday as it is. Go to work .. get paid... go home .. eat.. sleep .. whatever. Next day.. same shit. It's not wrong. Just.. BLAH. I don't want to live like that. I believe I can do more than that..

Hopefully.

Yes we can.

New Shoes!

My Capitaland card is actually (finally) useful! Old shoes were opening their alligator mouths and I had to buy new shoes. Thank goodness I didn't buy them last week when I saw them cos the sale just came this week. And lo DBS actually mailed me that my Capitaland card can get 15% discount, even for discounted items..

In the end, I bought 2 pairs of shoes, and sadly .. none of them were discounted items.. The discounted stuff are too cheesy...

But at least.. new shoes!

And did you know .. Bata is actually an international company .. lol I always thought it was just an SG company .. =x

Failed wannabe yuppie?

So today, I learnt that members is pronounced as memberls. Highly irregular, since I don't remember seeing an L anywhere in M E M B E R. I don't care what you want to sound like, american, british or singaporean.. But there's NO L IN MEMBERS.

That is all.

Stop the presses!

Omg! She's actually home when I reached home. Amazing. However I'm willing to bet everything, including my future munni, that she'll be out and will be probably back (probably? lol) by 3 or 4am

So I've been asked this question by a smartass. Eluding to the lateness in which dinner was made available.

The question was thus: Ask yourself, what time did I eat yesterday?

So the answer: Well at least I've never eaten FIRST then bought dinner back at my own leisure pace for you. Whereas you can happily be eating first with your friend (yes friends sure are important) while your sister is waiting at home starving for food.

Ask yourself another question too: Is it too overwhelmingly hard to drop an sms or something if you suddenly decide to stay overnight at some random place?

Get married already.

$200

So today, I spent 200$... on a keyboard and mouse.
The most expensive KB and mouse I've ever bought. The previous mouse I had was like 70ish $, my MS Laser mouse.

Finally bought into the Razer hype and bought them. So far not too bad, the keyboard feels pretty good, nice click sound... The rubber feels weird for typing though, as though my nails will slowly wear them down, cut into the rubber and such. The mouse feels slightly too big for my hand at the moment.. can't really reach the scroll wheel comfortably.. Guess will get used to it in time.

Well now I have 2 Razer stickers... not sure where to stick them to.. Resurrection's casing..? On the Keyboard itself? Hmm... Iono!

Here's a pic of the mouse and keyboard, and part of Resurrection's casing. All blue! + Black casing and monitor! Kinda matches huh.. But actually I wanted the mouse with the red lights.. but they didn't carry it .. =(

Drat, the keyboard's supposed to have blue lights on its keys too, but somehow it isn't captured in the picture.. Oh well just imagine it has blue light!

Buh

So .. I started yet another blog. But this time it's supposed to chronicle my endeavours in extra money making. http://lfmoney.blogspot.com hopefully it'll chronicle more green stuff than red stuff =p

Also set up adsense on these blogs... maybe can hopefully make some money? But they don't seem to be appearing. zzz. But not likely, given the extremely low traffic of these blogs.. hehe

I was checking the stats of palindrone, and sadly it's empty! Zomg. But I haven't finished my story yet.. need to pick it up again and finish it, it's meant to be a short story anyways, about 3 - 4 parts. Will have to read it up again and start composing, since Snooks doesn't seem to be able to save emails once they are sent out.

How I (finally) got my stupid PHP to work

/configure --with-apxs2 --with-pear --with-gd --enable-pdo --with-pdo_sqlite --with-zlib --with-mysqli --with-mcrypt=/opt/local/var/macports/software/libmcrypt/2.5.8_0/opt/local --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-curl --enable-calendar --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-ttf=/usr/X11R6 --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-jpeg-dir --with-xpm-dir --enable-soap

-_-

Hope these are all the extensions needed

Installing RRDTools on OSX

Phew.. Finally got the darn thing to install...
I better put this in here for posterity.

sudo cp /usr/X11R6/include/ft2build.h /usr/X11R6/include/freetype2/
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig"
CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/X11R6/include/libpng -I/usr/X11R6/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/lib -I/opt/gtk/include/libart-2.0 -I/opt/gtk/include -I/usr/local -I/usr/X11R6"

LDFLAGS="-L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/local/lib"
CFLAGS=-O2
export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS CFLAGS PKG_CONFIG_PATH

Your paths may vary

Blah

Yes! Finally back to blogging. Been too busy to do that (and expand on my story). Phew.
Hmmm where shall I start? Thailand mayhaps! Went to Bangkok during the Good Friday weekend. Was the first time there. So fun! Both G and I are slackers so no omg it's 7am we need to wake up now, kind of crap :p
We'd only sortie out at nearly 12pm :p
Did lots of shopping there. Totally no sightseeing. 1st trip where I spent almost all my money, even changed an extra 50$ over there.
So much variety there! Hardly any repeats at all. The sunflower seeds are fantastic too. Will need to ask people to buy for me if they go, heh.
Then it's back to Singapore and back to work again... Had a release due 1st April and there was lots undone. The front guys were overtaxed, the service guys were clueless. Sigh. My colleague and I volunteered to help out at QA, since there was only 1 person doing it. Zzz the staging server was so slow. Many things which were working didn't work, and many things which weren't working still didn't work. But finally, after burning the entire weekend plus Monday (getting home at like 2 to 3ish am) it's finally out! Seems fine so far...
But still feeling rather blah at the way things are done (and not done). I can't even get a database schema... Sigh
Ba must continue ebony's adventures soon! Dang!

OT: Leopard's icons for networked Windows PCs

Looks familiar? =p

Back from Thailand! From Happy Fun Time!

Yo!

Finally got time to blog (in the midst of testing)

Back from Thailand liao, was pretty fun ^^. One of the few trips where I spent all my $ .. even after changing 50SGD more in BKK. -_-;;; In the end, I ended up with 170 baht hehe

The amazing thing was the variety! Tonnes and tonnes of stuff! I've been to the Chinatown of KL, the pasar malams of Vietnam, HCM, and well SG, and you'd go through 50 shops and see 5 unique items. In BKK, you HARDLY ever saw any repeated items... most of them were different! Not every item was nice though but .. @@ The variety!

We also had a massage every day =p, well except for Friday, but other than that, Every Day! Woo

!

... Bah guess I'll continue later, just suddenly remembered I have to do up a presentation .. urgh =x

To know when to quit

Yes I need to do that. Lost all I made and more just because of that. I knew it wasn't good to go in but I still did. Note to self. Don't. Unless I've got a good feel of where it's going

There and back again

I realised, yesterday, that dentists are very good at conversations, one sided ones. Where else can you find a profession where you (actually) have a captive audience? And the best thing is your audience can never talk back at you, so you can say anything you want =p

It was fairly traumatising actually, getting my poor teeth mishandled like that (She was good, but my teeth! ><). The top one, understandable, but the bottom one .. :S Halfway through the entire procedure, I had visions of myself getting up and saying NO! No more!! Leave the teeth alone!!! ><. The rational side of me helpfully pointing out that it was impossible, she had already sawn through like half the tooth. Haiz, why did I remove that poor tooth.. it was fine! It was huge! It was merely impacted >
So now I'm 2 teeth short, with 1 week MC... Well at least I can use this 1 week to learn something I should have learnt some time ago...

Unexpectedly, I just spent 2 hrs plus spying on blogs. I haven't done such a thing for a really long time, but the mood suddenly hit me, and I remembered what Hogy said about CH, so I decided to take a peek at his blog. Hmmz seems like a lot of things have been happening in the old place. Well, the problems were already latent, I remember mentioning a few of them last time, but as usual nothing happened. Their 'pattern'... very obvious heh.

It was reading these blogs that put me in a more introspective mood, so far my blog posts have mainly been about work, nothing much on what's inside. But that's just me, everything inside.. is, well... inside.

I met up with Hogy on my birthday, had a very nice dinner at this Brittany place. Yum~. We talked about a bunch of things, and he was saying I am too rational. Hmm can there ever be too much rationalism?

Actually it's kinda scary, the level of rationalising I do (which is too much). Somehow relationships are mainly viewed in + and - terms and their final value is calculated from some secret formula... Hmmz this didn't quite turn out the way I wanted it to, but it's probably the self protection mechanisms =p

I think, what I'm trying to say (obliquely) is the level of openness. Of course, I don't try to leverage on people, I try to be open. If I'm recommending something, I lay it all down, play it straight. Never going to play it otherwise, just not my style. But on the more emotional level, it's pretty much restricted zones everywhere. Highly irregular.

I'm not sure if I'll ever reach a high level of openness with anyone, it's just not programmed into my circuits ><; Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Thinking about the old place, I guess I'm glad to have left. To think I almost would have stayed. At that time it wasn't really about the $ (Well NOW it would be heh), it was more of principle, more of the work that I did. It was (and is) sad that the Product that we spent so long developing, and pretty feature complete, would probably never see the light of day, just because Someone wants it to be omfg! Splashed on macworld the moment it's released. The Tool we've all been waiting for! To release the oppressed masses! Everything AND the kitchen sink!

Have they done focus groups for that?

Haha

Well that aside, it IS a pretty useful tool for certain jobs.

Moving on with focus groups... It's been a rather .. interesting week last week, many changes. Some kind of abrupt. But hedging safely I guess. Kinda traumatising to be yanked from a team and stuffed into another, although they were quick to reassure us that yes! We still want you guys! You're not entirely useless to us!

I guess I'm kind of blase about the whole thing. Basically, I know my direction, although I'm not sure if I can get there.. But HEY! If Daxx can do it... I can too! >< maybe? But of course I need to hedge my bets too. Daxx's route isn't the easiest either. But at least it gives the power of Choice. As I told Hogy on Saturday, Choice is what I want. Choice is what's in short commodity nowadays.

Sometimes I feel like giving up ... it's too hard to learn.. not seeing any returns, keep losing .. But thinking about Daxx and Choice ... and Freedom of course... Gotta trudge on .........

Where is the exit?

Zzz

The Voice of Optimism is chirping again. Being greatly optimistic about stuff. Want to stare it down. What are you so happy about?
Been too busy this week to continue my story, if anyone's still waiting for the 3rd instalment. Part 3 should be out soon! In 2 weeks!
Every day, I go over The Plan and Motivation. It's been consuming my mornings and evenings, well any time when I have spare time. Hopefully it will work for me... Time to start registering for a real

Birthday present!

Hehe this might seem presumptuous but I thought it would be good :p Remember hogy's list last time we were in school. Well, worry not... I'll prob be getting it all myself anyways :p
1 book 4 of stephen king's dark tower. I think I still need book 6 too... Blain the train wants his riddles!
2 psp
3 ds
4 wii
Ha ha all sound pretty expensive hor.
5 >22" monitor! Now got good reason to buy liao. Soon!
6 more war hammer books!

Of exploding windows

So yesterday... Upon reaching home, I did the usual stuff... Locked the door, took off shoes, etc, and flipped on Resurrection. After I came out from my shower and went to her, what greeted me, was the wallpaper. That was all. No icons, no task bar, nothing. Ok... I thought, giving it the 3 finger salute. It's happened before, I'll just run explorer manually from task manager. Clicked run, and typed down explorer. Bing. Error. Can't find the resource. Blink. Huh. Typed down the whole path. Still the same... Typed in c: same error. Wth! Restarted... Also the same ... Was feeling traumatised now. Booted to last good config. No luck there. Finally managed to safe boot. Turned off all the services, no dice. Created new user, same... In fact, it actually got worse. I couldn't click on certain tabs in task manager. Doing that would cause task manager to disappear. Very traumatised, I returned to safe mode and poked arnd. No weird processes... Registry looks fine... No spy ware... Virus scan is clean... I had a gut feeling it was my firewall, as it was the most recent thing that I changed, but I've booted with the new version before, and I'd booted with both anti virus and firewall off... Well, I finally came across an article mentioning the same thing happening to Vista with the same anti virus (avast) and firewall (comodo). Nothing on desktop, can't run anything on task manager. So I uninstalled the firewall, and it worked! Yay! ... Now give me my 2+ hours and undo my trauma -_-

Databases and sessions

Haiz after some testing, having 1 session per user might not be such a great idea after all. It's fantastic in the sense that dirty checking is done automatically and such, but if there's any problems with the graph, you're pretty much screwed. Not sure how easy it would be to ensure that there are no errors in the graph. Technically speaking, there shouldn't be any errors at all, otherwise the app won't work. Also, is there a way to test first? Hmmm. Sigh. Going to work on 1 with mini sessions and detached objects and see how it is. But I'm not sure how the detached objects will function in a multi user environment. The Hibernate folk also say don use detached objects... Haiz... Hmmm...

Is it so hard...?

To find a free mobile offline rss reader? Well, I can hear you say, there's tonnes of them arnd! Yes I know, I'm using Nokia's widsets and it's pretty good. But what I want is a reader which will download everything and cache them for true offline reading. I want to simply launch the program, do my stuff, it downloads automatically, so when I'm on the train or something, I can just go through the articles. Just tried out news gator, which promises to be an offline rss reader. Well, I can launch it offline, I can read stuff offline, only problem is I'd need to have clicked on the items when I had a connection first, otherwise it's empty. Grrr! Don't tell me I have to really write one myself? Urgh

Of bugs and gory

Spent the day checking, checking, and hunting bugs. The Application does work, but if you were to liken it to a house, then it'd be ... Look there! An ant! Look there! A few cockroaches! It's always times like this where this sense of hopelessness comes in... So many bugs.. Tucked everywhere... Fix one, find another two... How do those professional systems get released? But then again, all systems have bugs. :P
Had a revelation on Tues while with Ad. The lectures teaches us, in software engineering, that many projects are delivered late, due to wrongful interpretations of specs. After some experience, I'd be more inclined to say (at least for gov projects) that the bulk of the delays are at client side. Ppl squeezing vendors, but sitting on their asses when they are supposed to input. But that's government for you... Haiz

The day before V day

Finally... After 2+ weeks of struggling and banging head on keyboards, The Application, with database support is starting to become meaningful. Monday and yesterday were the days of great battle. Finally sat down and wrestled with The Beast, The Connection Leak. Now she's running trim and slim.
But of course, there's still tonnes of work to be done... After so long, she's still far from ship shape. Still too many queries being run, a bunch of spurious save queries begging to be removed, bugs to be fixed, missing functionalities to be patched, and proper methods to be called at the proper times... The latter goes hand in hand with the first. But so many calls to trace through @_@ good thing she works even with these issues.
Well, at least patched a few bugs today... Will have to verify it tomorrow, but it feels right, logically. Just need to streamline the solution. Then at the end of it all... Still need to neaten things up and see if stuff needs refactoring. @_@ zzz
But I digress, this should be a V day post, lest the readers complain ü but hmmm nothing much to mention about it, just feel blase about the whole thing. I'm afterall, practical :p
Need to get started on entry 2 of my story soon... Was meaning to do it after this post, but apparently this took long enough for me to reach my stop. Heh

Palindrone and on .. and on ..

Created a new blog .. palindrone.blogspot.com.. for stories only!

Things I've learnt today

So today, I finally found out why The Application was hanging randomly. Oh it has been doing it a few times, but somehow either I get distracted by another pressing crisis or it just goes away. But today, it decided to rear its ugly head, and what best time to do so but at 6pm?
Sessions shouldn't be the problem, I thought. After all I AM closing the query session. The account with fewer contacts was fine too. After some debugging, I found the location of the hang, an innocent query statement which had been called a number of times with no problems at all. My initial gut feel was that it was a null pointer somewhere, but after staring at the innocent function, I decided, on a whim, close to 715, to increase the connection pool. Being the lavish sort, I bumped it up to 2000, from a meagre 10. Ran the test case again, and it didn't hang. Yay go home!
Of course... Still need to look into it. The solution is simple. Not enough Vespine gas. Well that belies a bigger problem. You're saying, 1 user with 20 over contacts can't survive using a connection pool of 10? I don't know how Hibernate manages its connections, but I think 10 should have been enough. Also, The Application is issuing a distressing amount of queries, repeated ones too. It shouldn't be doing that. Well I guess that's the penalty of designing without a database and tacking it on later... Whoever said grafting was easy?

Headache again...

As titled.....

Dinner!

Went over to Liang Court to have dinner. Look at that big plate of sashimi! No I didn't eat any of it, I don't eat raw stuff! The rest of the food was good though... Too bad didn't take pictures of the rest :p was totally ala carte for once. But deeply regret not ordering a bowl of rice at least, they serve good rice!

Urgh...

So... After a long time of head banging, I've managed to graft version 1 of the db. Tacked it on like the skin of a created Chaos Space Marine... Will need some optimizations but basic usage is there. So I decided to get some stress testing done, well at least if even if not a lot of stress, some reads and writes would be good. So I asked ck for his class, since he wrote a stress test package then.
Added it into the project and gave it a whirl... Single client was fine... But the stress test was horrible, exceptions here and there. And the horrible strange error of encryption, which was causing errors if too many clients connected at once.
Managed to fix that bug... Apparently a single Cipher object did not like being called in different objects.
After fixing it, I started to take a look at the mysterious exceptions which were coming from the stress test. To his credit, I probably patched some stuff which were lying dormant. After patching everything I could think of though, the damn thing was still giving off exceptions, and worst of all, it was at random spots. The worst bugs are them random ones, and I was partially traumatised. Why does this come up at this run, but it doesn't on another? Finding it strange, I looked at his logic. To my surprise... It was random... Apparently once the client had signed in, it could run any of a set of methods. It was pretty dumbfounding. Well, being random is fine.... But not when some methods have prerequisites. How can it be correct for a client to send a message to another when it hasn't even downloaded the contact list yet? The aim for this class, if I'm not mistaken, is to form an idea on how much load the server can handle. To do that, you need clients as close to real ones as possible... Gah! <_<

Headache...

Having a headache again... Urgh...

Misty Mountains

Ok... No more jioing disinterested ppl into doing things or watching movies. If you're not interested, just say no. I'll either catch it myself or via other means.

Edit: zz this was supposed to be the first post.. not the last .. damn emails!

Did I mention that I have a splitting headache ><

Anger Management

It's shocking to myself too, the depth of reaction. For a long moment my thoughts were clouded and I had a headache. Not sure what's going on too, it's probably yet another geyser of repressed stuff reaching its maximum pressure.
Someone remarked a few days ago that I always sound so cheerful. Ha ha, it's kinda funny. The exterior is completely out of sync with the interior. The typed words sound as bright as day, but deep in it's cold and dark.
The sense of loss is here again... Everything I've loved, everything I've lost... Hmmm so many things lost. So many which can't be regained.
Been feeling restless too... Feel like how Eldaris would feel, being trapped in a cage, how he would stretch his wings against the boundaries, chafting at his bounds. The sense of restlessness and entrapment. Feels odd.

Eye Poker

... Have you ever had the thought, whenever you held a particularly sharp pen or a screwdriver, of poking someone in the eye with it? <_< Thoughts like that always come to me when I'm holding something like that. Today's one was pretty vivid: I was looking over at the screwdriver I had on my table and it occurred to me... What would happen if I took it, walked up to somebody, said Hey, and then poked him in the eye with it... Would I miss? Would he be able to block it? Would it go into the brain? My mental picture showed me a ruined eye, with bits of stuff ... Flowing out. Then after that... What would happen? Shall I go back and sit calmly at my seat? Or just walk out. Keep walking till someone catches me. <_< kinda weird huh... Never thought of it go such a graphical sense before too...

So... Do I look like I care?

It's been something I've known for some time... Just, like many other things, not acted upon. The time feels close though. Almost everything has been boiled down to a professional level of detachment (I hope). Of course things will thought through and evaluated first. Remuneration will definitely play a big factor. Time's short, make as much $ as possible, no? $ first, satisfaction later. :P

About cks and cks

Seems like ck is a pretty popular blog subject. Hypothetical question. Suppose if someone, your colleague, asks you if you'd like to order drinks. You say yes, and name your drink. Upon returning to your seat you find said drink there. What's the first thing you do?
Most would probably say, ask who paid and settle. What did he do? He just sat down and started drinking. Yes I guess I should have asked him to pay. But I was feeling too incensed to do so. That action also reminded me to the fact that it has happened before -_- well I better remember it this time. Not going to help him buy drinks anymore.
Today was another ck suprise too. I was standing at the doors, waiting for ppl to finish their businesses so we could go for lunch. Ck was there too. I just stood there, fiddling with a new Snööks application, when he came up to me, and started flicking snööks' dangling hand phone strap. He flicked and flicked until it landed on the screen. Throughout this I was looking at him, with a totally not amused expression on my face. He chuckled, and on seeing that I did not share his mirth, wandered away. -_- so annoying.
In other news, I had to hard reset snööks. Installed the font package for oggplay, and contrary to the read me, snööks took an extremely adverse reaction and refused to boot. Had to totally reset him. Grrr
Been trying to find a good rss reader too, but cant really find any. Using widsets now, but it sadly doesn't download everything for offline viewing. Zzz. Mobispine's not bad, but you need a working connection for it to start. Zzz is it so hard? Blah

Back!

I'm back! Didn't have the time to post. Heh. Nowadays posting all done on snööks, hardly ever use the website anymore.
Anyways, twas a good trip! Went to vegas and sadly didn't make $... Next time sure will win! The hotels at vegas were super over the top type. I stayed over at Luxor, an egyptian themed hotel. Met a couple of friends there... Was fun :p
Then afterwards it was days on days of slacking in Tucson ... Haiz so good. Air super dry though. Even now... Legs and arm still peeling. Urgh. Cold too. I preferred the cold in England, at least the humidity was higher.
Oh and I'm not going to take United anymore man... So crappy one. My plane from LA to HK was delayed for 2ish hours cos of some technical fault... That time when I went to States in March also like that, though it was the Sg to Japan leg. Anyways thanks to that delay, I landed at Sg at 330 am, 3.5 hours later than appointed time. Service was so bad too. The hk sg one was better but the la hk one was so bad. Food was horrible too. Air plane food bad enough liao, but they had to over heat the rice, so it was crunchy... Not in a good way. The butter was completely melted too, one watery mess at the corner of the tray. Zzz. Yep no more United. Well maybe only for short distance flights. Thinking of maybe trying sia next time... But so ex. Haiz. If only can convert my United miles to sia... Zzz