Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Whew.

After 1 and a half weeks of tinkering, configuration and troubleshooting, I've finally enabled a near-perfect Ubuntu cum Windows XP dual boot on my laptop. Lots of problems cropped up initially - No wireless, no sound (which was took the longest to solve), no youtube, no video, songs with screwed up ID tags.

Now its complete! The only buggy thing left is the viewing of certain videos with dodgy encoding. I was surprised that I could almost do the same things I normally do in XP, from using MSN to viewing Guitar Pro tabs, even more. The only thing I haven't tried is installing the games which reside on the XP half of my hard drive. At the very least I'll boot XP if I ever feel the urge to play Sonic or Starcraft =)

On the downside, I think I lost many hours of gaming time while trying to solve the linux problems. Its time to catch up LOL.

In other news -

I've passed my driving practical test! Finally I've got that coveted license-to-pollute-and-contribute-to-global-warming. I'll stick to my personal preference of driving only when absolutely necessary. I still relish the feeling of sitting comfortably (if I get a seat) on a bus or MRT with my Zen plugged in and just dozing off, waking up just before I arrive at my stop.

Now do that in a car and I'll prolly wake up in CGH, or even Mandai Crematorium. Touchwood.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Ubuntu for fun!

Weekends fly by so quickly, they barely even registered on my calendar before they're gone. Well I suppose I can attribute this to a well-spent weekend?

Saturday was spent in usual fashion, playing soccer in the morning (albeit with still-aching legs from the weekly dose of 10km runs at East Coast). Then I came home, intending to chill in front of the computer when Kheng Yong popped up with an offer of free tickets to Hellboy II. Hell, who can resist an offer like that? So I headed down with Wenyang and KY to Suntec for the movie. Free popcorns and drinks to boot lol. The movie was average, not as much action as I would have expected, but it was compensated for by the free-ness of it all LOL.

Then we headed to Marina Sq food court for dinner where we saw the fireworks for the NDP rehearsals. With each explosion goes our higher ERP charges. When the actual day comes our transport fares will probably end up having the same fate, as well as any surplus from that 7% GST.

Milled around the place before I went to meet XJ at her Yoguru workplace in Raffles City. We had supper/dinner at Brewerkz in Kallang (nice ribs man! tender, juicy and bbqy!). Then we sat along the Kallang river and had a nice long chat. Really nice place to hang out, away from all the noise and crowds of the city.

And when I woke up late on Sunday morning, I suddenly had this urge to either fix up my spoilt PC or condemn it to the scrap heap. So I stripped it up, randomly plugged components in and out until I reached a conclusion - the motherboard's fried. Then I had another urge - to install Linux in the old 20gig hard drive!

So I slotted in the otherwise-condemned hard drive into my other not-so-old Compaq PC.

After several hours of backing up and research and configuration and troubleshooting and installation, here I am, typing this post on Ubuntu Linux!



Cool right? Only problem is, its not compatible with a whole host of (Windows) programmes. The font is also kinda woozy (they don't support any "commercial fonts" like Arial). Right now I'm contemplating converting my laptop to Ubuntu, which would be a drastic move. Maybe once I've gotten the hang of Linux.

But damn, its so cool! With this I have reached another level of geekdom. *cue Final Fantasy Fanfare*

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

I. Have. Hydraulic. Oil. In. My. Hair.

And I can't get it to wash off completely even after 5 shampoos. ARGH. Just another non-typical day at work.

Oh well, guess I'll have to make do with perma-wax for the next 2 days. Hey, at least my hair looks spiky now.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

the fat green pipe is getting clogged

Torrent + TF2 + video streaming + peak hour

and you get this - 900ms ping on Team Fortress 2.

I die a second before I actually see it. Doors take 1 second to open. My screen flies everywhere during intense battles. I can actually miss a pointblank because the guy already moved when I clicked.

12mbps? more like 12microbytespersecond.

Too many greenies in my block man.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

I've just ran 10km at East Coast today as part of AHM (army half marathon) training. In slightly more than an hour, which is not too bad considering I've never ran any distance more than 6km, much less 10km.

Strangely running at ECP seems to take away muscle fatigue or something, I felt as if I could just go on and on (yes, my pace was rather slow, so it could be that). Maybe its the wind, the fresh air, the change of scenery (compared to boring army camps), and maybe another kind of scenery for some LOL.

Anyways my legs feel like agar agar right now.

These past few days were spent discovering some great new (and not so new) funky music from Japan! After much delay I finally decided to listen to Tokyo Jihen and Kimura Kaela, 2 very different and talented artistes with distinct styles of music. Jazzfunkrock for TJ, quirkyrockpop for KK. Can't get TJ's "Ringo no uta" and "OSCA", and Kaela's "Yellow" out of my mind for the whole of today.

At the same time thanks to some good people at a chatmonchy forum I unearthed some pretty solid indie J-rock bands and other musicians who didn't make it commercially, but really sound good! Bugy Craxone, FREENOTE and lots lots more.

"get over myself, so get over myself, so get over myself, so 1, 2, 3, 4"