9am on the alarm clock was the first thing I saw today & guess my plans for a morning swim are kinda dampened by some heavy showers. But whattheheck its a perfect morning to do some site coding and finish up some doodles. Did some “CPU spring cleaning” installed my aerogate’s thermal probes & reapplied a fresh coat of thermal paste on the graphic card & CPU. Now everything seems more efficient and quiet in there. 
Beautiful Saturday
1st Driving lesson
Woke up at a dumpy 6.30am today, (only had 6 hours of sleep) as my driving lesson is one this morning. Had one at 8.30am and the other at 12.55pm in the afternoon. Through these two lessons & being my first time “singlehandedly” driving the car, managed to learn the following stuffs in circuit:
Start/stop/reverse the car
Changing up/down, to/from 3rd gear respectively
Wide and 90 degree sharp turns
Lane change left/right
Turning in/out, from/to, main/side road
Target stopping
My 1st lesson slot didn’t ring me much good impression as the instructor by the name of Mr Quek (couldn’t find his name on the instructor board anyway) obviously, having his first work of the day as rather quiet & dull (not to mention old- bad combination) & its a challenge trying to squeeze out whatever info I needed from him just to make my $58 for 100mins worth. On the other hand the 2nd instructor for the day (by the name of Mr lee, was rather funny and… not too old) was definately the better one of the day, always chatty and giving hints here and there, not to mention (and most importantly) having trust in your trainee. E.g. not stepping on the secondary footbrake at any slightest mistakes- as if your car might go runaway & smashing up everything & mincing up every predestrain in sight. Haiz… some people.
Moreover, a more positive instructor does bring up the in their students too- Mr lee said that I would be on the public road the next lesson if I could carry on the today’s performance, sounds rather assuring, although I was still rather jumpy on the moving off on 1st gear part.
Overall, the lesson(s) today do definately crave a better impression I have on BBDC, though theres always the cheaper.. private alternative. Moreover at BBDC, instructors will always change for me as I just dun find it worthwhile to pay additional surcharges for a fixed instructor, what really matters lies within and mainly yourself. Instructors good or lousy will serve their purpose as ballast on the passenger seat anyway…
Starsky & Hutch
Caught Starsky & Hutch at cineleisure with my cousin today, not a bad, “the 70s” crime bustin’ show. Had lunch at taka before that where I finally got the SIGG bottle with a design and colour I wanted (naturally being black). You can try checking out the variety of bottles there, far better than any I’ve seen at hereen annex, L2 and most 77th street shops.
Brought my phone for another DARNED repair again. This time I finally managed to convince the technical assistants that the problem the phone has lies in the phone’s MMC READER and not my darned MMC CARD which they had been trying to push the blame to. I mean what could either be the problem be after testing the phone out with 3 different MMCs, on all my devices & the phone being the only one corrupting the card? Irritating! Threw the phone there for a good 3 hours only collecting after the movie. Finally they’ve gotten smarter by replacing the phone’s mmc card reader. And after lots of vigorous testing on the phone, (the salesgirl was rather good company thou) finally I can conclude that they got it repaired & hope that this would be the last problemt he phone give me (haha why am I bluffing myself on this?).
Moreover, privacy would be a rather controversial issue in the SX1 community now, given some feature on my phone I didn’t know about! woot! talking about minority report to the maxes…
Took an MRT from orchard to bugis, went to simlim & the nearby bugis junction to check out the Sony clie (PEG-TH55) I was interested in, retailing at a helfy $769. Noticably Sony seldom allow prices of their PDAs to drop, & they are often being discontinued even before the prices are given a chance to do so. The good old PEG-UX50 is still going at a strong $1k+, so I would steer clear of that for quite awhile. While the PEG-NV80 is showing some reassurance, going at $600 now…
Grabbed a coolermaster Aerogate II & a RAH-66 commanche 1:48 kit-model while I was at the area. Installed the aerogate once I reached home. Moreover my debit card was mailed in today waiting at home, *flips* whee.. spending power powerup x10. armm umm, maybe I would start building the commanche tomorrow afternoon.
On a sidenote, Bugis kino comics is selling the McFARLANE’s Matrix APU model at $79 and the Sentitel at $89, so ex.
My first driving practical lesson will be on tml at BBDC. At 8.35am.. whee its so late now…
So what went wrong
Well, actually wanted to post this before booking in for camp last night, oh but what the heck. 🙂
First off I would like the highlight the terrible gallery crash which happened last weekend, it kinda corrupted all the .htaccess files in the site, therefore creating lots of complications beyond repair, a new reload and setup is the only way to solve it, together with the chore to reformat and upload the photos. But fret not thru this, its rather a learning process for me, esp for not touching the rather useless frontpage feature in the site’s control panel (frontpage you dumb ass you caused all these corruption). On a brighter side, despite spotting captions all newly uploaded pictures, my desperate attempts to find a quick and efficient way to upload photos to gallery led me to gallery remote a free java program to manage and upload pics very very convinently indeed, a farcry from the old days of selecting one pic one by one to upload.. daamn was that painstalking! 😛
Moreover, gallery 1.4.2 have some conflicts with wordpress when the blog-header.php file is being required.. gotta check out on that bug..
Secondly, accessing the site’s .htaccess file was abit of a problem, as I have some rewriting on mod_rewrite, besides turning on frontpage ( which I most prob won’t try again). I just would like to carrify on creating a folder called .htdocs in ya root directory in throw ya .htaccess in. Is that so, would it work? give me a ring on the comments if you do. 😉 (the server is running apache redhat linux with hsphere cpanel)
Site problems
Please note that the site is undergoing some major debugging session, please note that certain sections such as the gallery may not be accessible, so please bear with it for a while 🙂
Photos
Strangely enough, I am feeling very sleepy now, almost nodding off a few times lately and its only 12midnight. My sister is off for some long partying trip with her classmates, partly because both my parents are away on a relaxation trip, so literally the whole house was mine today. Spent most of my time today coding and ironing out bugs around the site, on top of that, added the pics of yesterday’s BBQ. They are of camera-phone quality so they are kinda shitty, furthermore in low light conditions…
Anyway, check it out in the Photos-NS section. Captions will come tml or so when I find time to throw ’em in. Otherwise I guess its Macdonalds for breakfast tomorrow cus no one’s home, even dinner’s out today for me, damn I hate being lazily independent…
Attack of the metrosexual
Woke up at 9am today where I had to pretty much ready and heat up a very simple american breakfast my mum prepared before leaving for work earlier. Also theres a facial appointment my mum so happily booked for me today at 10.30am orchard midpoint, (the army really knows how to degrade one’s hygiene levels) to me its another chance to spruge and spend money as usual. With the facial chore done and feeling no better than a stiff stick after almost sleeping out throughout the process (with the excpetion of the irritating blackhead squeezing part), zipped down to OG orchard opposite to grab some bev hills 90210 and Lee jeans they had on sale there, on top of a y-paks black casual bag which I always need on outings.
Went around 77th street @ annex to check out the sigg bottles, hoping that they have the design I wanted.. as usual darned no- even L2 at cineleisure don’t stock the ones I want. So after a spending spree of about on dumb facial products only my sis and mum would use, clothes, bags, games and computer accessories at PK herren. Setting me back bout $0.2k, its not that bad after all…
Ok Having packed all my clothes, entertainment and food, only to rush for the chalet at changi later at night will indeed be- a rush! even if I am not typing this blog… going into 10mins late into overtime, I guess the best I could is to start moving to meet my friends at Pasir Ris now.. chaos! see ya tml afternoon after the chalet.
Life of a commander
I guess the army do really open up the world and perspective I have of people- like meeting all kinds of people from all walks and backgrounds. Namely a few outstanding ones like the rich and successful, the poor, the brokened, the orphaned, the sick, the rejects. Meeting up with such people is really very much a daily routine, I guess I didn’t really take time to appreciate & reflect the immediate community around me. And when you come to think about it yea, its rather an interesting world out there. Personally I’ve never seen so much at one go, even back to civilian life (which most of us take for granted before enlistment), miltary life do have its own set of challenges and sadly problems too.
After taking my newly reruited privates for 2months. I guess the real and most challenging part of taking troopers do not come from the training and coaching one recieves while he’s still in specialist school- training for his field of expertise, but instead the moment the very troopers hes gonna lead into battle are handed to him. Not to mention the ordeal of getting the rusted gears in my head to start spining ahead after being a trainee in specialist school following orders for almost a year. Now I am pretty much left alone with my fellow commanders, armed with what we’ve learnt into preping us for this eventual appointment. The sudden feeling of having the shackles of training freed from your legs, allowing you to bark orders & give command is indeed unreal, but something we utilmately look forward too upon graduation. The biggest challenge is enimently responsibilty, “bringing up”, catering and caring for them. As the saying goes respect is earned not entitled, being a relatively new NCO as a military specialist, I guess a junior commander like me do have a long way to go in this learning journey, which had only just begun.
Before payday blues…
*sigh* guess its pretty much the month-end (or in this case month-start) blues, just say its the blue period before payday. Due in 6days time, even as a specialist pay is a dull low $750 per month. As the army song goes they pay you hundred dollards, they take back 99.
Some spotlights these few days: life firing on saturday with carbines, very shiok initially but the thought of coming back on saturday afternoon for range suxs big time. Next week would be hell week, mainly lots of outfield and hello earth and sleeping under the night skies. Dang! for one week Plus! even I won’t get to come back next weekend.. grrrr….. army life. 😡
Anyway, wishing my old secondary school friends all the best as they enter a new transitition from school- army. gd luck and embrace the journey ahead!
Friday!
Friday, TGIF! but for today its aka chore day- dropped by the bank to apply for my debit card and get a new bankbook, lucky the lunch crowd is not there yet, very smooth and empty… The thing about visiting service side shops in the weekdays where everyone is at work or school does make a big diff in terms of crowds and waiting times, even the Siemens service center is very much queueless where I dropped my Sx1 for some repairs and updates, only to collect it later in the evening after meeting my friend at BBDC to apply for our Provisional driving licenses and take the Final theory test evaluation, which kinda actually took a large chunk out our afternoon.
Hope the service center settles the MMC card problem, yet to find more bugs in the phone since I’ve upgraded to firmware 07.
Since I was around the orchard area why not drop by hereen to get some stuffs? got some stationary at popular, finally being able to find something to buy with my $5 popular bookstore voucher *pathetic* and Simpsons hit and run game from PK computers together with some comp accessories, the game is kinda cool, a GTA gameplay styled game in the simpsons world, neato! brings back the memories of the old 2D “virtual springfield game”
Chaos for now dudes 😉
SX1 Mods- virtual keyboard
Well, I always wanted one of those Ibiz laser keyboards for pdas (Official Site), but didn’t know that they might be so good into hearing my prayers and making one for the sx1. Yes there is one for the phone, recently revealed at Cebit. On a personal note text entry do take sometime getting used to, even after using the phone for one month+ or so, its still a good phone with very buggy OS and an under used 175Mhz Texas instruments processor inside. What more can make it better by throwing in the Ibiz laser keyboard into the phone? Check out this article on it. (more eyecandies here)
As quoted, said that its an add on by siemens, whether they are selling it as a whole new phone or as an addon realy depends on them, but I really do hope they are, and release them pronto too!.