thoughtless ramblings

went through my Friendster account out of sheer boredom earlier on. kinda surprised to see that my OC has actually added me to his Friendster account. i have to admit, it's not something you see everyday, but the gesture is rather touching, regardless.



finally gotten my arse around to formatting my laptop and am supremely pleased with its state of 'cleanliness' now. but its a real pain in the arse to have to re-install everything from scratch, though this means that many things that i used to need but do not need now are no longer there. double-edged sword.


*commits hara-kiri with a DVD disc*



ehm. well. have fallen in love with FireFox 2 after the format. not sure why it didn't catch on to me before, though it was already installed on my laptop. perhaps its one of those things that you don't realise you had until you no longer have anything else.



hm. that doesn't really make sense. but then again, it seems to. heck.



it is somewhat of a pain to back-up my stuff from the C: prior to formatting it. i've got oodles of stuff hidden all over the system drive that i would definitely want to keep (e.g. Inetpub, SQL databases, etc.). but thankfully, i keep them relatively well-organised and stored in central locations where possible, thus hassle is much reduced. but i can't get rid of a nagging feeling that i've missed out something somewhere. blimey.



important note: never eat Delifrance's Ham & Cheese Croissant after they're more than 4 hours old -- it makes your stomach run like there's no tomorrow.



new tv's here. has HD. considering buying PS3 once its released here. oooooog. the temptations of the material world.



joseph@bedok camp is really starting to bugger my nerves. the rascal is full of shit and his level 6 ultimate is called Cold Joke. guaranteed to freeze the nuts off polar bears.

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166 Days to ORD

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my mind's been wandering around asp.net quite a bit. not sure why either. but speaking of asp.net, i've finally finished up with the data entry portion of my new project, leaving only the displaying of the information entered by the users. but i'm kinda sitting around on my arse on that one mainly because i have not the faintest idea as to how i'm going to go around designing the interface on that one.



hrm.



sometimes i curse the the absolute lack of any artistic skills on my part whatsoever.



*dances to the tune of "Badger Badger"*

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177 Days to ORD

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procrastination will be the death of me.



my anime re-encoding skills have just levelled up. i've finally managed to figure out why my MP4s would not re-encode successfully, although my MPEGs re-encoded without a single problem. darned ffdshow.



ht has been a pretty spiffy weekend, with me being on the beach on both saturday and sunday mornings and afternoons. but it was rather dreary at Palawan Beach, with the skies being overcast and a spell of moderate to heavy rain for about 45 minutes. but if you're the sort who doesn't like the sun at all, you'd love it.



oh well. i think i'll go work on my new asp.net project a little more.



*types furiously on keyboard*

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194 Days to ORD

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wow. it's been two long months since i last updated this blog of mine. heh. well, lots has happened, and yet, nothing has happened. i'm a living contradiction.

anyways. like the orphans we are, we're now dumped to Bedok Camp II, attached to 7SIB for the brigade exercise, Ex. Voyager, next frickin' year. next year!

holy cripes.

and 7SIB is a Guards brigade (or mostly Guards). we're *so* doomed.

see, the exercise is scheduled to begin in the last week of January 2007 and will stretch into the first two weeks of February 2007. and the training is beginning in the middle of November 2006. exercising the 'ol Singaporean spirit of 'Kiasu-ness', eh?

this is just so wrong. we are being abandoned to a brigade which we do not belong to, and neither do we want to belong to, and being horribly and forcibly compelled to participate in an exercise which we have not the faintest compulsion to be in. and yet, we're here.

as the time-honoured SAF adage goes: 'LAN LAN SUCK THUMB'.

but since we are already doomed to be here, let me talk about the short time (approx. 2 weeks) we've been here, lest i overdo my bitching over spilt milk.

the upper echelon of commanders here are for the most part, fairly ok, with the grand exception of the OC (Officer Commanding) and the sniper PS (Platoon Sergeant). i shall try to devote some time to them, but do not get your hopes up as they are not much worth wasting my bashing of keys on.

the snipers here are very much friendly and chatworthy, them trying to make ourselves feel at home here (something we will never feel as long as we are in the SAF). one interesting point to note: although they are all part of the 'JC' batch, but they do not seem as... excruciatingly dumb and kill-worthy as larry seems to be. strange.

a brief synopsis of the two commanders singled out above -

OC - self-serving and somewhat discriminating
PS - sarcastic and displays an unwillingness to lose out to lesser people

we were summoned for a company cohesion activity at sentosa last friday and will try to post up pictures soonest.

blah. shoot me.

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199 Days to ORD

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whoopee. i'm finally done with converting the damned webby's database to SQL2005. everything just seems to fall perfectly in place now, though something tells me i'm just being biased against Access.

as a result of severe boredom while waiting for the SQL Database Engine Tuning Advisor to complete its job, the below pictures were born:

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267 Days to ORD

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Do While Monitor.Resolution = "1280 x 1024"

Me.Scream.InAgony = True

Loop

god. i miss my previous resolution to bits. it made coding so much easier without having to scroll from left to right to see the full line of code. grrrrr.

now currently burning my One Piece anime episodes onto DVDs. everything seems great, except that the re-converted (had to convert them from .avi to .mpg) files have two drawbacks:

1. they take up twice the space after conversion, although that doesn't matter much in the long run, since i'm burning them to DVDs anyway
2. each episode takes around an hour to convert, which is roughly three times the length of the episode itself; absolute insanity

my new burner is quiet though, far more so than my old CD-RW burner. hmmm. i almost miss the sound of the damned thing whining as it burned my porn data.

back to bitching about coding. been coding a new asp.net 2.0 project for the past week for so. its shaping up pretty nicely, with the themes now working properly and extraneous code removed. the only real gripe i have with it now is that i'm still using Access for the database and that pisses me off to no end. if i had my way, it's either SQL2005 or nothing.

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276 Days to ORD

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wow. i never imagined i could save this much real estate by switching to a lcd monitor.

sweet. bought the Samsung SyncMaster 931BF at Comex. performs pretty good, but i miss my 1600 x 1200 resolution. stuck at 1280 x 1024 now. argh. and i can't get my Trinitron to work in tandem with my lcd monitor. crappy graphics card. strong temptation to go get a better one.

must... restrain myself... -ackkk-

*burns debit cards*

anyways. been playing with asp.net 2.0 in visual studio 2005 and it seems pretty spiffy. life as a programmer seems to be getting better. hooah.

oh crap.

i forgot to put in the dvd burner i bought at Comex. now i've got to turn my pc off, AGAIN.

leaky memory. pfffft.

hmmm. writing out my blog while i'm in camp doesn't seem too bad an idea. at least it gives me a chance of keeping it semi-current.

though, i'd still have to book-out from this god-forsakened place in order for me to upload them.

augh. my ideas usually end up like stillborn infants. bloah. to hell with it.

after all, idle hands are the devil's workshop. as is very evident from the below photos:

major crisis. i was actually unable to achieve a silver during yesterday's IPPT. holy crap. talk about stunning achievements; this is definitely one, but of the lowest order. i'd managed to score four points or more for each of the static stations, putting me in pretty good shape for getting a gold, assuming if i manage to clock a timing of 9:44 and below for my 2.4KM run.

and i nearly made it. with huge emphasis on the word 'nearly'.

breakdown:

i needed to complete each of the three 800M rounds with a timing of 3:15 and below. at the end of my second round, my total timing stood at 6:04. but if you've seen cars running over spiked speed strips, you have a general concept of what happened to me on my third round: i deflated like a leaky balloon, leaving me with a less-than-decent timing for my run.

extremely saddening.

off-topic note: i'm not sure why, or how it was related to me at that particular point of time, but while i was struggling my miserable ass through the last round, i had this vivid hallucination of Darth Vader floating beside me, telling me that he finds my 'lack of faith in the Force disturbing'.

so i'm a complete nerd.

sue me.

yay. i've survived yet another series of torture attempts of the most gruelling and sadistic in nature possible to the typical NSF: lectures.

oog.

time for practical lessons.

whoopee.

woah. i'm must be bored out of my skull to actually write my blog down.

POI TTT (Train-The-Trainers) course = LCC (Lecture Confidence Course). oog.

lectures totally suck. most especially SAF lectures. if you're going to give a lecture, then at least have the damned courtesy *NOT* to read from the slides directly. a more ideal option would be to read from a prepared set or notes or something. anything but the slides.

and no, a printed hardcopy of the slides does not count.

jeez. the hypnotism of powerpoint slides.

i'm not even sure i want to be here in the first place. the impossibly stale lecturers are all repeating what we've heard at various points in time at Maju Camp, just that it's more formal in nature, but it still gives me the 'been there, done that' feeling. maybe i'm just ranting, but i'm sure the frustration stems from the helplessness i'm feeling while listening to them mumble on.

droning, more like it.

i initially thought that as long as we are able to escape from the dreaded COC parade, i would be more than willing to come for this TTT course. but i'm beginning to wonder if the parade would have been the lesser of the evils.

very much the devil or the deep blue sea, don't you think?

the spectrum of ranks here though is really broad, ranging from a minimum rank of 3SG all the way up to CPT. more interestingly, our next RSM is in this course as well. given what i've seen of him so far, life *MAY* be slightly better with him around. but i could be hugely and drastically wrong.

*shudder*

moving on: cookhouse food.

though the cookhouse here at clementi camp has an odd smell about it, but the quality of the food is markedly better than Maju's, though the default quantity leaves much to be desired. but the canteen... well. let's just say that it needs a little bit of improvement, somewhere, somehow.

yeh.

even as i write this, i've got this CPT up on the rostrum trying hard, but failing miserably, to capture his audience (that's us!) in some light banter as he so charmingly tries, with huge success, to hypnotise the whole lot of us into visiting La-La Land. he's absolutely amazing. wow.

off the topic of lectures for the time being. it's been quite a while since i last took a bus early in the morning. and i mean really early. probably around three years, in fact. i've totally forgotten how relaxing it is to leisure saunter to the bus stop and actually being able to carry out the physical act of boarding the bus instead of being forced to translate that act into an activity resembling a riot. some of our fellow human beings apparently seem to think that the bus would help them get reincarnated faster.

oh my. dear CPT Rosnan is encouraging us to get physically violent.

Mentos is very quickly becoming my best friend.

someone, please save me.

whoa. i slept through the entire saturday. entirely enjoyable and guilt-inducing. but i guess that's what you get for watching dvds from 10pm to 7am. but i'm not complaining. *grin* the latest remake of The Return Of The Condor Heroes is very much watch-worthy, although not many fans of the classic novel will appreciate the rendition of Yang Guo in this remake, as his portrayal comes across to many as childish and immature in many scenes. but still, i find him refreshing as it shows Yang Guo in a new light. very pretty Xiao Long Nu too. *swoon*

moving on. our problems with the 'dog' may or may not be over, depending on how things turn out in the days to come. after a few discussions with our PC finally culminated in a showdown with the 'dog' and frankly, nothing really came out if it. being the cynical bastard that i am, i don't really think that things will change for the better. well. i'll just take things as they come.

next up, our long-awaited promotion to 3SG. i'm rather dis-illusioned right now and i don't know if i really want this rank at all. after all that has happened, i really wonder if i'm just better off with being one of the men instead of assuming the role of a commander.

sigh. maybe i'll just get out of the house and get some fresh air to clear up my thoughts.

*pfft*

hooah. quite a few interesting things happening lately.

first off. my new mouse: razer diamondback (plasma). its sensitivity and performance is much better than any mouse i've ever used. the very first time i plugged it into my lappy, i had to turn down the mouse sensitivity by almost two-thirds of what it used to be. after installing the driver software i pulled from the razer site, i was very much impressed with the amount of sensitivity tweaking the razerConfigure utility provided. even more impressive is the ability to adjust the sensitivity on-the-fly, even when in-game.

it glows a pleasant shade of electric blue too. *grin*

finally booked out today after 3d/2n of FIBUA (or Fighting In Built Up Areas) training. quite fun, i would say, if not for the endlessly identical drills that we had to keep performing. but that was only on the first day and half of the second. we started off at Neo Tiew but later moved on to Sarimbun on the second day. Sarimbun was much more fun than Neo Tiew was since we were actually able to play out a mini-mission of sorts. it involved clearing a row of three 'buildings' in sequence and the team that performed the best would get to play the role of the 'enemy' in a later platoon attack on the same row of structures.

my team somehow managed to do better than the rest and we deployed in various positions in the structures. the platoon attack ended up with us, clustered in a container situated away from the main structures, holding the OC hostage.

extremely fun, while it lasted.

the exercise concluded in a live firing session in which we basically just fired a couple of rounds at figure. 11 targets at almost point blank range. very much a waste of time, in my sincerest of opinions. but it was done anyway.

i've been hard at work on HOMMV for the past few weeks and i'm loving every bit of it. well, almost every bit. the graphics are fabulous and the gameplay is great, but the scripted AI does seem somehow overpowered at times and can be ridiculously hard to defeat if you wait too long in certain missions.

it's time to go punish my new mouse some more.

ooog. no mood to blog the past few days. not sure why either.

it's been pretty boring, anyhow.

caught X-Men III on wednesday evening. pretty flashy show, though the storyline wasn't exactly thrilling. but things were pretty fast-paced, thus causing the show to end about 30 minutes earlier than its predecessors.

next up would be Superman Returns, i guess.

after that rushed back to camp for COS duty for thursday. ack. sucky. but at least it isn't on a weekend. that's something to be thankful for, in any case.

survived through thursday, it being a relatively quiet day as compared to my other days as COS.

literally rushed out of camp on friday morning and basically lobo-ed the whole day away.

Heroes of Might and Magic V finally finished and i'm glad to say i'm not disappointed with it. graphics are wonderful and the gameplay seems good.

on other fronts, Windows Vista is rumoured to be slipping further from its previously announced release date. if this goes on any further, i'm most probably going to end up with a Mac and install Boot Camp on it instead. pfffft.

oog. being sick is never fun, especially when it all comes together:

1. fever (38.1 °C)
2. sore eyes
3. sore throat, in conjunction with
4. cough
5. running nose

sigh.

food is now bland and tasteless, thanks to the fever.

my body feels like jell-o, no doubt due to a wonderful combination of my cough mixture and flu medicine.

but at least i get to come home instead of staying in that god-forsaken place, also conveniently known as Maju Camp.

i'm still pondering whether i should go for the Advanced Trainfire Package, a.k.a. ATP for those in the know. officially, i've got two days of ATTN C and thus, i'm medically exempted from tomorrow's ATP. but the idea of being attached to another company for my ATP is not very tempting.

after ranting about how my NUS application was not processed after eons, its status was finally changed to Application Denied.

crappy life, huh?

i'm in a state of shock, actually.

just watched Poseidon at Lido. it was... watery. i dunno. maybe it's not to my taste, but i'm surprised that i forked out $9.50 to watch a couple thousand people get drowned/burned/electrified to death. not my idea actually. i wanted to catch M:I:III, but my folks wanted to watch big-cruise-ship-sink instead. mehhhh.



but at least i got to see the trailers for X-Men III and Superman. on my to-watch list:

1. Superman


2. X-Men III


3. The Da Vinci Code

Silent Hill seems like a pretty decent movie though. i may opt to go for that too. depends.

i'm pretty nostalgic for old games now. i'm not sure why. been playing Red Alert 2 and Transport Tycoon Deluxe. i'm as happy as a lark now. but on its way is Heroes of Might and Magic V. yay.

you never know how wonderful sleep is until you try sleeping from 2am to 4pm on the same day. hooah. call me a pig; it just feels great.

spending the past two days at home drifting around, enjoying the temporary taste of freedom, mainly because the coming weekend will be burnt in the holy name of ATP. my ass.

on a totally unrelated note, i re-discovered the joys of DOS gaming today, specifically Major Stryker, a game which i totally loved as a kid. ditto to Alien Carnage.

sleepless at 1.40am. i know i'm tired, but i can't get to sleep. i'm not even sure i should be sitting in front of my lappy.

bah. all this anxiousness caused by the waiting for my NUS application result is getting to me. i sent in my application thingy in feb but until now, my application status is stuck under Application Received. well at least if you're going to reject me, can't you do it faster and spare me the anguish?

sheesh. i'm gonna go apeshit soon.

bed. here i come once again.

ooog. Blogger took heck of a long time to load tonight. three possibilities

1. knee-jerk reaction to blame blogger
2. my internet connection is on the blink
3. lappy needs to see a doctor (or undertaker)

sigh. the perils of spending too much time in front of the computer.

oh heck. it's officially over.

the 65th BSC is now a memory of the past.

yay.

never thought i'd take so much pleasure in saying that. our CO actually bothered to come down to our certificate presentation ceremony. i'm impressed. but anyhow, he was a general naysayer of doom. i think he took perverse pleasure in telling us that after we settled down back in maju camp, we would be soon deployed as POI troopers. he had the cheek to ask us why we were so tensed up. grrr.

after all was checked and accounted for, it was finally someone else's turn to watch us do our out-processing and leave SIW. mildly satisfying, to say the least.

on the tonner back to camp, i mulled over a few things, thinking back on the course itself and what would my remaining NS liability bring me. i'm usually the sort who leaves fate to work its own diabolical terrors, but i just couldn't help but idly wonder.

maju camp: a place of old buildings and old farts, but yet, a familiar environment. once the stores were all returned, i proceeded straight to punish my throbbing nose by standing smack in the middle of my dust-infested bunk.

i swear i came within an inch of taking a parang to my nose...

obstinately refusing to bow before the opposition in true PAP style, i proceed to burden my cupboard once again with my not-so-worldly posessions. it would seem odd that a smaller cupboard somehow seems more luxurious than a bigger one. don't ask me about that. i have trouble figuring out my thoughts while my nose is attempting to commit ritual suicide. spent the next couple of hours counting spiders scurrying about before finally getting the green light to change to civilian clothes.

as the wise ones say: out of the frying pan and into the fire. we gathered in the platoon office for a talk with our PC and new PS. goddammit. the two of them are a match made in heaven. they have the exact same gung-ho attitude towards army life. very depressing to hear the both of them tag-team and squash our freedom like a bug. in short: our life is not going to be good. argh. if i had known this was coming when i was back in SIW, i would have hope for the course to drag on longer.

currently, i'm on off till thursday, but since friday is a public holiday, gonna book in on sunday. next week, our weekend will be greedily consumed by ATP. urk. life sucks.

it's kinda dumb: them making us book in on one day, and booking out on the other. but then again, i don't think i would like to get stuck in SIW for too long a period of time anyway.

field ranges are... peculiar. they seem to be an exercise in expending rounds.

can't hit the target? draw more rounds and go again!

that seems to be the main idea.

went down to beach road today to get the 'SNIPER' tag sewn on to the left side of my jungle hat and my name on the right. the tag is fine, but my name seems a little bit too small. but at least it's not eye-catching: the guy before me had the words 'ARCTIC FOX' sewn on in bright orange on his jungle hat too. but i think he's from recce.

headed down to old airport road in an attempt to have rojak for my lunch. i swear it's a goddamned conspiracy. two times i've been there and on both occasions, the store remains stubbornly closed. i know that it's not there just to serve me solely, but... it's just spooky.

even the curry puff store uncle decided to go on vacation with the rojak ah pek.

*rants*rages*

ended up having pizza at Scott's Pastamania. i think the staff there are starting to recognise my face. oh woe.

at long last, my sniper course is coming to an end. it has been an ardous nine weeks, stuck at SIW.

contrary to my own expectations, i have actually managed to complete the course successfully and attain my sniper marksman badge. i do not usually believe in a higher being, but miracles like these make me wonder.

in any case, i'm finally returning to maju camp, and hopefully back to our old lifestyle. but with our PS gone, i guess it would be most unlikely.

won't stop praying though.

on an entirely unrelated note, i hate uploading pictures in friendster. darned php script keeps causing my browser (regardless whether it's IE or firefox) to time out. and thus i persist in uploading the same picture and i end up with a whole gallery full of the same picture.

*curses and swears*