Last thing you'll ever read…again
Rant
Slurpty Slurp
Sep 22nd
I came across this youtube clip either on Digg or Reddit, most likely Reddit.
It was pretty mesmerising to watch. Generally I don’t comment on youtube clips but this time something perturbed me. Towards the end of the clip the guy says “Now as for slurping, well, it will just be plain rude not to”. Nothing wrong with that statement until I saw this in one of the comments.
“slurping is rude, i am Chinese.”
Excuse me?
I replied with:
“I don’t know what part of China you’re from but we definitely don’t consider it to be rude”
in which I got replied with (by an American):
“I don’t know where you’re from, but slurping is considered rude everywhere, especially China”
Especially China?!
I just had some ignorant American, trying to educate me on my own culture, yes I admit, I actually don’t know a lot in terms of our thousands of years old history but I know how to eat!
Yes I know it’s late and I really shouldn’t be up trying to prove somebody wrong on the internet, but I thought this would be pretty interesting for people of non-asian descent.
Slurping is rude in Western Cultures, sure, we all know that but it’s different in Asian cultures.
I was raised on the idea that you can’t enjoy a good noodles meal without slurping. Confused? So is this gaijin.They should seriously scientifically test it out. Do our taste buds react more positively when we slurp as opposed to biting into it without slurping?
For the record, we (Chinese people) actually invented the first noodles so we have the right to say it’s NOT rude to slurp! Ha!
Other common food etiquette involves double dipping with chopsticks (in family dinners anyway) and spitting food out.
Terrible Semester
Sep 19th
This semester is probably the worst I’ve had so far, ironic as I actually thought it’d be one of the best.
I mean…12cp major project, you finally get to do something that you enjoy doing, come up with something original but instead, we were lured into a project that seemed interesting at the time (robots, wiimote, opengl) but it’s turning out quite badly.
We have client deployment due next Friday and I’d say we don’t have as much done as we should have. At our current rate I’d be happy if we just got a credit.
I guess our lack of result is probably due to these sort of things happening.
Cannot tell
Sep 11th
I check the statistics of my blog every now and then it makes me wonder sometimes if a real person is going through my posts progressively or if it’s a web crawler. Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t track IPs so I can’t tell if it’s a bot. Funnily enough “someone” or “something” visited my Epitome post. The title is actually meant to be Epiphany although Epitome doesn’t sound too off-topic of a title so I guess that’s the reason as to why nobody pointed it out. In addition, I tend to have extremely random blog titles so people might have just ignored it like they have with my numerous other posts. However, the more likely reason is that they simply did not think too much into it.
I find that as the years go by the amount of things to write about decreases dramatically. Back in High School, I would make constant rants about anything that I found annoying or interesting. Then Uni came and it became somewhat more problematic as I had two different sources of readers, and my less than obvious references would generally leave at least one crowd scratching their heads. Now, I tend to get more visitors from strangers than I do from people I know. However, those visitors generally visit my “Tutorial” posts but even then, they might take interest in a typical post like this.
So the question is, what the fuck do I write about?
I’ll talk about something I haven’t talked about in a while.
People.
How often do you guys judge someone within the first few seconds of meeting them? You might judge them by their race, clothes and/or initial contact. How strong is the first impression?
I tend to react quite strongly depending on how the first impression goes. However, first impressions can change sporadically, might change during the second meeting, it might be a gradual change…it might even be a change after several years.
Not too long ago I was placed under a rather inconvenient situation (which I shall not mention as it may release the identity of several individuals), instead of attempting to help me figure out what to do, my friend of many many years decides to emphasise on my stupidity. It’s sort of like yelling at someone for tripping over a step, they don’t intend for it to happen, it just happens. What I found interesting was that this other fellow who I rarely talk to decides to go out of his way to help me. It’s moments like these where I tend to step back and conduct a bit of re-evaluation.
Varying circumstances also lead to re-evaluations. What does this mean? Well, have you ever been friends with someone simply because it benefited you? I cannot express the number of times this has happened:
Friend: I’m gonna tell you something, just don’t tell anyone else.
Me: Sure, why would I tell anyone? I mean…who’s there to tell?
Friend: Exactly, that’s why I’m telling you this.
It shits me so much. Might as well not tell me, not like I have any impact on the matter. As soon as your circumstances change, your so called friend won’t bother coming to you for anything. Let me ask you computer geeks this…if you never had any pro skills, would some people still bother talking to you? I’m sure you all have PLENTY of contacts who only talk to you when their “computer dies” or “internet dies” and you just want to scream at them for being such an idiot. On a side note, I absolutely HATE it when people come to me and say that their “computer is slow” when they really mean the “internet connection”. Not too long ago I got asked “So…can you hack into computers and stuff?” after I told them my degree is IT.
I’ll probably just leave it at that for today.
ML
Aug 22nd
When last semester began I was offered some job working for a start-up company that was interested in having “university-ties”. I thought it would be a pretty good opportunity. It involved using web technologies and python. A month after the offer, I still didn’t hear of anything, I wasn’t too phased about it. The excuse was “investing company haven’t put through the project yet”. I went through 4 whole months of unemployment, living off youth allowance.
Thank god for youth allowance and the stimulus package. Don’t know how I would survive uni whilst maintaining some sort of social life. Most of it went towards the ski trip and it was also meant to pay off my old iphone contract (which for some reason they still haven’t charged me for).
I applied for another job through the same job agency for Intersect (a not-for-profit organisation). I blogged about it as well few posts back. I was pretty hopeful, the Director of Engineering and Senior Developer seemed to be pretty happy with my performance. I thought “Finally, I can make some money and actually buy things without having to worry about whether or not I can afford it”. I got pretty excited when I got told that I would be starting work on 5th August. I even bothered to go shopping at Tarocash and bought myself 4 shirts, pants and a belt. All up around $250 (last minute sale ftw). I was pretty damn excited.
Days came and gone with no response. The excuse this time was that the HR manager is apparently “sick”. Well, fair enough. It’s flu season after all. I even caught the cold the weekend before I was meant to be working. Since I didn’t get any responses I decided to call them up myself. Apparently the person that’s coordinating my job with the company is also sick. How convenient. I had to call up somebody else that said will try and get in contact with me with the situation.
Days later, I got a call from that person telling me that the CEO of the company decided to not go ahead with the recruitment. At the time I didn’t really feel anything. I didn’t really care, I can’t get emotional on the spot when it comes to these things.
A week later, I decided to contact Intersect. They told me that because I was referred by SydneyTalent they cannot hire me. I thought fair enough., I’ll contract SydneyTalent instead. So I did. I got a reply the next day saying that I’ll receive a follow up email. I didn’t. A week went by and I sent another email asking for the status of the situation. I got a reply within a few hours telling me the same things that I already knew, however with one extra piece of detail, they told me:
“As with all students you are free to look for work as and where you see fit – SydneyTalent is only one avenue available to you.”
So I got in contract with Intersect again explaining to them they shouldn’t have any problems with hiring me. The person on the other end doesn’t seem to know what to do, she told me that the positions have been filled up but told me that I would be considered for future roles. Bullshit. There will be no future roles and if there are I won’t be considered.
What annoys me is the fact that I wasted one whole month chasing this up to find out that NOBODY can help me. The people who wanted to recruit me couldn’t any more. The people who was trying to help me get recruited wasn’t considerate of my situation at all.
I guess there is one thing I’ve learnt from this experience. Don’t sit back and let these corporate dogs shit all over you. Chase things up if you don’t hear back for a few days. Get both sides of the story cause chances are it’ll save you from losing a job.
Why anti-virus programs are useless
Aug 1st
This is a rant about the uselessness of anti-virus programs. My argument is that having one installed is no different to not having one installed.
Anti-virus programs serve one purpose and one purpose only, to prevent viruses from entering your computer. But in order to do that you have to be regularly updated and you also have to trust the anti-virus program in distinguishing viruses from genuine applications. AVG has been notorious for crippling machines by deleting critical system files. Once a host is infected with a virus the anti-virus program becomes useless. It alerts you that you have a virus but is unable to eradicate it. In fact, eradicating viruses from a computer takes more effort than reformatting. It can take up to 3 hours to format a computer and bring it to it’s original state (assuming you have all the necessary tools available) but it can take days of research in getting rid of a particular virus.
I mentioned in my first point that you must be up-to-date before they serve any real purpose. The problem with the cat and mouse game is that the mouse will always be one step ahead. It doesn’t matter how great your detection rates are, it’s only takes that 1% of viruses that’s not detected to compromise your computer. And it’s only that 1% that’s out there, for the other 99% of viruses that can be detected don’t even exist in the wild. When was the last time you heard anybody being infected by the “blaster worm virus”? So if you’re only capable of being infected by that 1% of viruses out there what’s the point of having anti-virus? You’ll be infected nevertheless.
So what do you do when you are infected? The anti-virus program usually screams at you that you have a virus, it asks whether or not you want to “fix” the problem. You select “Fix it” and nothing happens. 5 seconds later the same dialogue box appears. There exists online support forums that try and help you fix your problem but the turnover rates are usually 72 hours. Big companies invest millions of dollars into anti-virus protection but whether or not do anything is another issue. At CISCO they use McAffe. I used to get a lot more complaints about system slowdowns and what not than I get about virus issues. The productivity lost due to slow pc performance would probably outweigh productivity lost due to virus infections. When a user is infected by a virus, usually it goes to the onsite support team in which they conduct a laptop refresh. Like I said, it’s easier formatting than it is removing viruses.
If you have any opposing arguments as to why anti-virus programs are useful, I would love to hear them.
Don’t Feed The Trolls
Jun 29th
I used to “forum” regularly on neowin.net but then I stopped. It was mainly to do with the fact that I switched over to linux and neowin is a predominantly “windows” community (despite the fact that they have their own disgusting flavour of linux that is based on Ubuntu). Another reason was that I’m easily trolled. Yes I’ve said it, happy JP (if you’re even reading this)?
I decided to be more “active” in this other community. I’ve had an account since ’04 but haven’t posted in like 4 years. Only started to post recently and I got into these situations pretty quickly.
I think the key to “living” online is to just not care. Treat everybody’s comment as dirt and just troll back. That’s how you get dogshit communities like “bored aussie”. It’s impossible to have a decent online community that’s troll-free. Even on WebCT you have incredibly douchy people and this is a place where your full name is displayed publicly.
But I guess you just have to follow everything up with the word “lol” and everything is cool right?
…right?
Another rant at Optus
Jun 22nd
I’ve talked about how fail Optus is before, this will be another one of those rants.
Well, Optus released pricing and release dates for the upcoming iPhone 3GS but it didn’t say anything about upgrading from an existing iPhone plan. So I decided to call them up instead.
I was greeted by the usual computer. My question is this…why is it that Optus have 5 different numbers registered for different departments but they all get redirected to the same computer? I mean, I dialed the number for sales why the hell should I go through the process of telling the computer…again…that my enquiry is about sales?
So I was greeted by a technician called “Roy”. He sounded Aussie so I was rather relieved. I explained to him my enquiry, once I stopped talking, it was obvious that he wasn’t Aussie at all. Here’s my theory…these techs from India probably practices an hour each day on how to say “Hi this is the Optus Sales department, my name is <blah>. How can I help you?” in an Aussie accent just to trip me out. I know you’re trying to make the customer experience better…but you’re really not.
Anyway, the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hi, I’m John and I would like to make sure enquiries about the upcoming iPhone 3GS
Tech: mhmm
Me: I’m just wondering if there are any plans to upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS for existing iPhone 3G customers?
Tech: Yes there is, it’s already on the website. The website contains all the plans and prices.
Me: Yes, I know…I’m asking if there are any plans for existing iPhone owners which is not on the website.
Tech: You can already upgrade your phone. You just have to plug it in and then download the latest version.
Me: Okay sorry, I meant the iPhone 3GS not the software.
Tech: Yes…the iPhone 3GS is the software.
Me: (At this point I start laughing) Nonono, 3GS is the physical phone…not software
Tech: If you want to upgrade to another phone you have to wait until your contract ends
Me: Okay…that’s all I wanted to know
Tech: If you want to upgrade your iPhone you can do that already
Me: (Laughs again) Yes, I’ve done it already, anywho…thanks for your time, bye.
Hilariously…within 2 hours of making that call I got sent an email from Optus regarding the new iphone. It read…
Existing Customers
If you are an existing Optus customer, and you want a New Apple iPhone 3G S, make sure you open the emails we send as there is a special offer just for you coming soon.
Thanks Optus.
High Beam Madness
May 26th
What’s with people and using their high beam? I get so pissed off when the person behind me has their high beam on. I literally can’t see shit behind or on either side of me. It gets more annoying when it’s a red light. The light bounces nicely onto my rear and side mirrors directly into my face.
It happened to me twice today, once driving to Auburn RSL and again on the way back. If you have broken headlights, please go fix it before driving on the highway with your bloody HIGH BEAM. I honestly felt like changing lanes just to get behind them and flash them couple of times with my uber high beam.
That said, today’s AI lecture was about finding centroids, and something about how it can be used for image compression.
And our AI assignment results is still yet to be released. I’ve asked her twice over two consequtive weeks and she said “Next week” on both occassions. Just got an email from her saying that it’ll be released next week…our final week of UNI…that said…when will our Assignment 2 (that’s due tomorrow) be marked? At the current rate it’ll probably be marked after the exams are over…which leads to the question of when the exam will be marked.
On a side note, I’m getting A LOT of traffic from facebook. It’ll be more exciting if I can find out for sure who actually visited. From what I gather, somebody clicked my link from Jason’s and/or Terry’s profile page.
Oh also, some of you may have noticed the BIG FAT “DONATE” BUTTON.
If you have money…feel free to give it to me. If you have a job that’s paying more than $20 an hour on a part-time/casual basis…hire me!
Yes I’ve been unemployed for 3 months now, that’s a loss of around $5000. Man…I wish I had that money right now.
Oh lord what do I do?
Mar 6th
I really like Windows 7. Am I fanboy? I hardly think so. I mean…I’ve had Ubuntu installed as my primary OS for 2.5 years only to remove it after my harddrive crashed and decided to give windows 7 a go. You may even hear me talking about wanting to be able to afford a mac. The problem I’m facing is that Windows 7 RC won’t be released until April 10th. Ubuntu 9.04 won’t be released until April 23rd. The beta for Ubuntu 9.04 is still 3 weeks away and I have uni now so my need for Linux is ever increasing.
Okay, if I am a fanboy then I’m a fanboy of non-virtualisation. You may be thinking “What the hell is he talking about? Virtualisation is great!” Don’t get me wrong, stuff like VMWare is great, but it’s just the way that some people use it.
If you want to test an Operating System for fun…use a VM, if you want to create a development environment for testing purposes…use a vm, if you need to isolate multiple servers for whatever crap you’re doing…use a vm. DO NOT use a VM simply because you want to run an application that’s not available natively. If you’re using linux…then use Wine. If you’re using linux simply for the sake of “programming” please shoot yourself in the head. If you’re a developer and you don’t develop in DOT Net you should be using linux by default. If you desperately need to program using linux tools then just use cygwin.
I often see people running VMs on their laptop, the laptop probably has 2 cores, a shitty graphics card and 2gb ram tops, how the hell can they tolerate running Ubuntu in a vm?!
Learn to Dual boot. If you don’t know how to dual boot…using wubi. Don’t know wubi? Google it.
In the mean time, I’ll be using Wubi. No VMs or cygwin.
I also phoned my old workplace and asked them to take me back. If I do get back I’ll have my laptop back 
