thoughtless ramblings

i have no idea how they accomplished this, but it's abso-fricking-lutely amazing.



p.s. for the clueless, it's tetris.

at long last. after countless repetitions of bashing out python code and restarting the Zope server, i've finally managed to get my first ever Product to appear in the ZMI (Zope Management Interface).

well. one down, a few gazillion more to go. hurrah.

i'm not sure what to make of this. ever since monday, i've not been able to sleep past 9am without someone calling me to either arrange for an interview, or ask me for more details with regards to some information i requested from that particular company.

not that i'm exactly complaining, but it is somewhat of a stark contrast with my general lifestyle for the past few weeks or so where i lazed in bed till noon or sometimes even later, depending on what time i got into bed. usually somewhere between 4am to 7am.

so, sue me already.

moving along. plone.

what's it with wysiwyg tools for plone? till now, i've yet to see anything that looks remotely like a wysiwyg editor for plone interface designing. i really dread having to return to the days of bashing out html code in notepad.

*shudder*

dammit. the spider clan ninjas in tairon are highly irritating. they're like, even worse than anything else i've seen in NG:S thus far, including the level bosses. i mean, first off, they come in group of threes AND they're highly agile. granted, their sword attacks do not break your blocking stance, but they do have this move whereby they get past your block, grab you and stab you in the back.

ok. point noted. no more block-camping. fine.

secondly, they have incendiary shurikens. what kind of a ninja has incendiary shurikens? you deflect them, they hit a surface and explode there. what often happens is either the deflected shurikens hit a surface near you and explodes, or another shuriken does not injure you but sticks somewhere underneath or behind you and explodes. either way, your blocking stance goes down and you get stuck with a few more boom-booms or you get sashimied.

o-kaaay. lesson learned. listen for hissing noises that means you're about to experience a world of hurt. fine.

thirdly, assuming if you get stuck with a boom-boom and you go into a blocking stance, you take relatively less damage (but damage nonetheless) and your blocking stance goes down, during which you are HIGHLY susceptible to further attacks. if you JUMP however, you take even more damage than if the spider nutjobs carved you up with their swords. WTF.

some choice expletives would be highly suitable for this situation. levelled up; don't get stuck with boom-booms. fine.

fourthly, did i mention that they come in threes?

well, things are slightly turning up. managed to get a job, salary's not too bad, location's quite ideal as well. starting training on the 16th.

now, next on my agenda: get an MCSE and MCSA certification. they ain't cheap though. the MCSE course and exams alone would cost at least $4,500 and coupled with the MCSA? i'm definitely gonna go broke. and this on top of my plans to get a MacBook Pro...

purty, ain't she?

bah. tough choices, tough decisions. i'll have to rustle up some freelance website work if i'm to accomplish my plans. but then again, getting the MacBook will actually depend on whether i'm successful in my Big Application next year.

having said that, it's odd how those companies which provide the microsoft certification courses don't advertise their prices anywhere on their sites. only one company, New Horizons, actually does show the prices for individual certifications on their site. or .pdf, for that matter. perhaps i suck at surfing sites. i dunno.

but i was slightly surprised that HP provides certification courses. i was under this impression that they dealt mostly with hardware and software solutions. interesting.

on a different note: keyboard skills on new keyboard are, happily, levelling up. still lack the speed at which i bash out code on the traditional keyboards, but i'm getting somewhere there. thank microsoft for IntelliSense. without it, i'm, in a nutshell, fucked.

well. i'm off to go dig deeper into the enigma that's Plone. i'm definitely sinking deeper into geek-dom.

having been bitten by the reality bug more than once, until recently, it still did not factor into a lot of my considerations. i blithely went about my life as usual and made plans as per normal. but life has its own way of bringing a person back down to earth.

now that things are the way they stand right now, i don't have many options left open to me. with this recent setback, i've wasted yet another year, thus putting me another year behind my peers. a heavy price to pay for arrogance, for it is paid with one of the things in life that cannot be bought by money.

time.

a year.

twelve months.

three hundred and sixty five days.

eight thousand and sixty hours.

five hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes.

thirty one million, five hundred and thirty six thousand seconds.

i'm morbid, i know. but i tend to do weird stuffs in the wee hours of the night anyway.

on a lighter note, i seem to be getting slightly better with Ninja Gaiden: Sigma. initially when i started, i totally sucked at it. even the most basic of enemies could trash me to ninja heaven and back. took me a while to realise the importance and boon of using ultimate techniques. i'm still getting the hang of it, but at least i do not get horribly raped by creeps anymore.

- attempts to master wall-running technique but fails horribly and has intimate encounter with floor -

< mental type = 'note' destination = 'self' runat = 'mind' >

dim ramble as string

ramble = 'finish up work on blogger template that has been sitting in dreamweaver ever since it was in MX 2004 and now in CS3'

< /mental >

wow.

perhaps not the best word i could use to describe the movie 'Transformers', but it was the first word i uttered when i saw Barricade transform. i mean, having read both negative and positive reviews about this movie, it was with mixed feelings that i stepped into the cinema. but i left it with a profound sense of child-like awe and wonder. kudos to michael bay for doing a spectacular job of bringing my childhood fantasies to life.

Optimus Prime. Jazz. Rachet. Ironhide. Bumblebee. Megatron. Starscream. Scorponok. Barricade. Frenzy. Bonecrusher. Blackout. Brawl.

all of them, brought to life on the big screen, gratifying that inner child in me. the transformation from their vehicle mode to their upright robot form is nothing short of amazing and wondrous. you can almost make out where each part on the transformer belongs on its vehicular form and the amount of detail lavished on each transformer borders on the impossible. despite the autobots and decepticons being totally cgi-generated characters, they were dosed with near-human emotions, the most prominent example of this being displayed by Frenzy, when his attempt at hacking the defence network was thwarted at the last possible second and he bashes his head against the monitor in cyber-frustration. that takes the cake.

apart from the visual eyecandy, the script itself was no letdown either. interjected with humor and the right amount of emotions coupled with the spectacular pyrotechnics, it stands out from the usual gigantic robot slugfest that most people would expect it to be (not to say that you don't get all the transformers duking it out with each other towards the end).

apart from a few loopholes (how does bumblebee get his voice actuators to work again? what happened to scorponok? wasn't Prowl supposed to be the police car?) which are very much forgivable, this is THE movie of the year to watch.

bashing out this post on my new keyboard, Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, was an experience in frustration. fingers kept going to the wrong position after having received years of conditioning on normal keyboards. d'oh. punctuation is going to be yet another problem. commas and periods getting all messed up.

gah. if all goes well, i'm going to hafta learn how to use Plone and brush up on my Java skills. hopefully by then, i'd have mastered this keyboard. else my neighbours are gonna hear some very colourful swear words emanating from my room.

"Autobots! Transform, and roll out!"

ord.

the most eagerly anticipated event (at least for me) for the past two years.

looking back upon these two years, it doesn't seem as horrific as i once expected it to be. i still remember the trepidation and hesitation with which i boarded the ferry to pulau tekong for the first time. the unfamiliar surroundings and the stifling sensation of discipline and orderliness, not to mention the first taste of 'wayang', the oath-taking ceremony in the auditorium.

well. it is over and done with. pink ic retrieved and objective met.

- ff7 victory tone -

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.