Last thing you'll ever read…again
Archive for October, 2008
Idiot of the day
Oct 31st
From today I will be posting idiots that call up. Now remember, these people are not regular customers. These are employees at the company I work at (biggest networking company in the world…hint hint) and it amazes me that they are hired.
This one guy decided to email some personal documents to his email address. He doesn’t bother checking to see if they arrived or not and then DELETES the attachments off his computer. He has not done a backup or thought about putting it onto a removeable disk. I told him to check his Sent Box and he tells me that he was having Quota issues and DELETED the emails in his Sent Box.
EPIC FAIL
Feeling of Defeat
Oct 26th
Deep inside I believe everybody is a bit bitter and hateful. I mean I’m sure we’ve all enjoyed the sight of another’s failure or misery. It doesn’t have to be something like “Let’s point and laugh at that guy who just lost a loved one”. It’s on a much lower scale.
I think being more programming oriented in my studies, I’ve taken greater pleasure in other people’s programming failures. Or perhaps, it’s just more elevated since programming is something that I feel I’m good at. Likewise, I feel like utter crap when I fail at a task that I feel I should excel in. (Please do not mention the Database Systems 2 Assignment). Was I born this way? Or perhaps I was raised this way? Was it the school I attended? Not to be blunt or racist…Australian Primary schools…stink. I wasn’t sure what to feel when I first attended school here, joy at the fact that I could pretty much do all the work in my head as compared to the other kids of Western Descent having to use rulers to add. Or did I feel a bit disappointed at the lack of work? Nevertheless, I had to make up for it at home.
But seriously, growing up, are we ever happy at someone else’s achievement? Perhaps with a friend, sure, we like to see them excel but if it was just somebody we knew, wouldn’t you prefer to be that person succeeding rather than having to look up to their glory?
Something else that I’m particularly bitter about is other people’s relationships. Yes I know, I’m a cruel cruel person. But. I would just like to say…don’t you guys ever get sick of those lovey dovey stories you read or hear or witness? Yes, being in love is tremendously great. You feel this warmness, having this protective cover around you knowing that nothing will ever penetrate it…is WONDERFUL. But…aren’t the stories, the books, the films, a bit too over the top? Let me get back to my point. You know that “perfect” couple? (I personally *KNOW* that many people feel that way about Diana and I. I won’t burst your bubble, we are perfect. I am so vain). But yes…the perfect couple. Is it just me or do other people feel this sense of relief when you find out that the perfect couple had their first “fight”. I guess it’s like kicking a cute dog…it’s wrong but it feels so satisfying. (Just for the record I do not condone dog kicking.)
Is this all I have to say for tonight? I seriously have to design a script to automatically post this blog onto my Windows Live Spaces account, manually doing is becoming such a pain.
Also for those people who actually managed to read this…please drop a comment. And to the people who actually manage to drop a comment…please put in a name or alias. Kthnx.
Who’s the bad guy?
Oct 20th
I love watching/reading things that are unique in its own way…be it storyline (Heroes), perspective (Death Note), personality (House MD) or something that’s just plain awesome in which words cannot possibly describe (Matrix).
But…I like to focus on Heroes right now. I think…Heroes…has veered off course a little bit. To me the writers seem confused…they don’t know which direction to go, they’ve produced soooo many possible tangents of the future, we as the audience do not believe it any more. It’s no longer “*gasp* what will they do to prevent it?!?!” it’s turned into “meh, they’ll find a way around it”.
Originally, you have 1 evil guy, and 1 evil company. Now you realise that the evil guy isn’t evil on purpose, and he wants to be good, the evil company is trying to be good, the good guy is now evil, some dead guy which is meant to be dead is now alive…not to mention evil, the good time travelling geek kills his friend to “save the world”, another dead evil guy is now posing as an “angel”, however, despite all that, the cheerleader is still hot and her dad is still a prick.
Are the writers trying to produce this “You can’t trust anyone” feeling? If they are…they are failing. You cannot do this over 3 seasons and expect the audience to be captivated.
Nonetheless, I’m still going to watch Heroes religiously, just so I can get some eye-candy of the hot cheerleader and continue to be disappointed at the reason behind each cliff-hanger at the end of each episode.
Always check your email
Oct 15th
I’m sure we all have subscriptions of some sort. At first we read them enthusiatically, but as time goes by we don’t bother. But don’t you just get so frustrated when you missed that one seemingly insignificant email and wished you paid greater attention?
I got sent an email from Linkin Park Underground regarding a “September Sale”, basically they were selling ALL of their old CDs at rediculously cheap prices. This included LPU 1.0. They were selling LPU 1-5 for $10. Considering that you can sell LPU 1.0 and 2.0 on Ebay for $100…EACH, this is a HUGE bargain. However, I missed out. It wasn’t until last week that I saw a second email regarding an extension to this sale. LPU 1.0 was sold out already 
Although I did manage to purchase a copy of LPU 2.0 and 4.0.
Now my collection is almost complete, all I need is 1.0 to seal the deal.
I’ll know better next time.
Irony – Keeping Windows Clean
Oct 8th
I’m not religious about Operating Systems. All OSes have their advantages Linux for servers, Mac for multimedia, Windows for gaming…etc. But…let’s be frank here…keeping Windows clean is like keeping a toilet clean. You can buy your air fresheners and toilet duck but at the end of the day you will have to chuck a shit and start the cleaning process again. There’s really is no such thing as an auto toilet cleaner. You can do your best to keep it clean but you’re only delaying the fact that sooner or later it’ll get filthy. What’s worse is that you are the only one that can keep it clean. You can’t hire a toilet cleaner, you’re the one who’ll have to clean up your own shit.
I used to be a Windows whore. I was like one of those gym junkies trying to keep my body in shape except I was keeping my Windows in shape. I only downloaded applications that I needed and if possible used standalone applications. If I could choose between an app that had an installer with an app that came in a zip file, I’ll download the zip file any day. Who uses utorrent here? Most people these days do, but I was using it back when it promised to use “less than 4mb of memory”…during it’s beta stages. Every heard of Foxit Reader? It was a 1mb pdf reader. It substituted Adobe Reader. It got to a point where my startup processes was 16. I didn’t have any icons on my desktop and I ran registry cleaners regularly. I even took it to the step where I was modifying the Windows XP installation disk to minimize my install. Using nlite, I was able to bring my Windows XP installation down to around 550mb. I removed everything that I didn’t need, Accessiblity Tools, Games, Internet Games, Netmeeting, MSN Zone, random legacy device drivers…you name it.
It was pretty fun actually, whilst it lasted.
It all came crashing down when I installed Windows Vista. It tripled the number of starting processes and there was nothing I could do about it. But that problem went away when I installed Ubuntu…I felt clean again.
The problem with Windows is that…you install an app, it’ll leave traces behind, shit-stains on the toilet bowl if you will, sure you can wipe the stains away but eventually, overtime, you’ll find that these stains will clog up the extent you have to get down on both your knees and seriously wipe it with some heavy duty sandpaper. The only solution is to either upgrade your computer or reformat.
And that’s what I love about Debian based Linux Distributions. No registry. To install an app it’s one command. To remove an app it’s another command. Install as much as you like and you will hardly notice any performance issues.
I would also like to take some time to rant about the use of the Desktop. The desktop is NOT your workspace. Do NOT put everything on your Desktop. Make a seperate partition for your Music/Movies/TV Shows/etc. Create a shortcuts toolbar for all your shortcuts. The only shortcuts that I approve of seeing on the desktop are your local drives and the trash can. Everything else can gtfo. Sure…you can use your Desktop to temporarily store documents or folders but as soon as you’re done with it PLEASE move it to your home directory. I use the Desktop all the time for temp files these days, all my downloads gets saved there but once I’m done with them I move them elsewhere, there’s no point having them clutter my desktop. You want to keep your desktop pretty…what’s the poing of having a wallpaper when there’s all this tiny pieces of crap covering it?
I do not disapprove Windows. I disapprove the use of Windows.
More efficient procrastination
Oct 5th
I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 beta recently. Here’s what I’ve noticed:
The good:
- Network Manager has been significantly improved…although…the improvements do not affect me and I’m quite comfortable using the old version
- More applications are being supported by Ubuntu
- VLC 0.9.2 was included despite the feature freeze
- Better driver support, my iphone is now successfully detected
- Better xorg support, but doesn’t really affect me since I have it setup correctly anyway
The bad:
- There is a “sound” lag, where the welcome sound would begin playing when my desktop has loaded rather than in the process of loading
- The “shutdown” icon on the top right hand corner is no longer a “shutdown” icon but rather a “logout” icon, and I can’t seem to change it back
- The desktop loading time is noticeably longer
- Still the same old crappy NTFS support, I copied 40gigs worth of movies to my NTFS external hdd, safely ejected it, plugged it into a Windows machine and I had to conduct a detect and repair to be able to recover 70% of the files
Well, it’s still in beta so hopefully when the final gets released in 4 weeks time, it’ll be more solid 
I also developed a more efficient method of playing dota
The problem that I faced was that Compiz doesn’t support full screen games that well, it’s extremely buggy. So what I had to do previous was:
- Open terminal
- Type in “metacity –replace”
- cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
- Type “compiz –replace” when the game has closed to bring back compiz
The problem was that sometimes when I close down the terminal it would revert back to metacity…or even have no window manager running.
Eventually it turned into this:
- Open up compiz icon
- Change to metacity using the drop down from compiz icon
- Open up terminal
- cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
- Change to compiz using drop down when warcraft ends
It fixed the previous problem, has one extra step, but it saves keystrokes.
I recently added some custom commands to my Ubuntu box.
Command 1: metacity –replace
Command 2: sh -c “cd /media/sda1/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ 3 && wine w3l.exe”
Command 3: compiz –replace
I had shortcuts affiliated with the commands being “Shift F#” where # is the command number.
So now my steps to run Warcraft three is:
- Shift F1 to change to metacity
- Shift F2 to run Warcraft
- Shift F3 to change back to compiz when Warcraft have ended
All I need to do now is work out a way in script form to run metacity and then Warcraft and only run Compiz once Warcraft has ended.
Edit 6/10/08:
I’ve now reduced the number of steps to running Warcraft to 1.
- Press Shift F2
The main problem I was facing previously was the fact that Full Screen Games refused to run in fullscreen under Compiz. But recently I discovered that you could setup Window Rules through Compiz. I setup a rule that forces applications with the title “Warcraft” to run in full screen. I also decided to disable some plugins…namely “Expo” and “Scale” to make running of Warcraft “smoother”. I never really used those two plugins, they were there mainly for show. But yes. I guess I have achieved O(1) procrastination. Yay!
No Longer A Teen
Oct 4th
My first day being a non-teen started off pretty badly. I woke up at 5:55am (on time) and made the 1 hour trek to my workplace and got there on time. I approached my desk and…no chair. Great. It’s going to be one of those days. I like my chair, it’s adjusted at the right weight at the right angle. Why do people keep on taking my goddamn chair and not return it?!
I wasn’t too phased about the chair, I just couldn’t bo bothered finding and stealing somebody else’s chair. I placed my bag on the table and place my hands on the keyboard ready to key in my password…except there was only one problem…no laptop. The first though that came to my mind was that somebody stole it. Coming to my senses I realised I left it at home. I was on a trip to Hunter Valley recently and brought my laptop along just in case, however, throughout the entire trip I didn’t even take the laptop out of the bag, I was relying on my iPhone for internet access.
Basically, I had the trek back home to pick up my laptop and then trek all the way back. I spent the first two hours of my morning on the train travelling.
Luckily, I had organised something with my girlfriend and family for the rest of the day. After work I went to Pancakes on the Rocks with my girlfriend (Except it was more like Pancakes on the Darling Harbour 
). Had an extremely satisfying meal. We then went to Galaxy World and played a round of Daytona before heading to Greater Union to watch a movie. We bought tickets for Eagle Eye, but…it ended at 5:47pm and…she had to get to work by 5:30. We ended up leaving at 5 and I headed back for my family dinner.
Eating 4 hours after a fulfilling meal is definitely not good. I had Seafood Mariana Pasta and couldn’t even finish it, not because it was big or anything mainly because my stomache was still full from my previous meal. After getting home I proceeded to downloading Eagle Eye (although it was only a TS -_-) . I picked up my girlfriend at the station after she got back from work and we finished the movie together. It was a pretty decent movie, it was more “make belieavable” than “fake believable”. It more or less falls into the same old man creates AI, man gives AI certain rules to abide by, AI develops own perception, AI tries to dominate the world.
Now that’s fair enough, I love a good AI movie, but when you take a step back and think about it…
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER
- A computer that’s able to monitor EVERY cell phone, EVERY camera, EVERY network in the United States (afaik)
- Computer can communicate to people with a human female voice
- The computer is cooled by (only) two tanks of liquid hydrogen
- The “brain” of the computer seems to be this one eyed snake
At least it didn’t have much over-exaggerated jargon (thank god).
It is hard creating a “tech” movie, the Wachowski’s are probably the only ones who can do it well.
Well that’s more or less how my day went. I have this lovely FCUK bag now and also a new deck of “cards” hehe. As usual like with everybody else, I got a bombardment of Happy Bday’s from people on facebook…surprisingly, half the people I hardly see or talk to but it was nice nevertheless. Several people made the more noble approach of sending an SMS, I even got sent an email.
All in all, I’m no longer a teen. Don’t think anything’s changed, still the same me. Haha.
