random rants

working out a list of what software, tools, drivers etc that i'd need, so i can make a backup of everything on a dvd, instead of having them lying all around in 2 different hard disks. n then i realized that i really install a lot of stuff into my pc. which is probably why i seem to be always running out of disk space.

i kinda need to clean up my pc a bit. reinstall n stuff, since it's been in the same state for over a yr now, n the performance is dropping like mad. first up, get all the stuff i need collected n documented, then start the ugly part.
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i think i'm gonna get myself one of these:


someone's selling it pretty cheap online. looks like a pretty good mouse surface. 4x USB1.1 ports, USB2.0 uplink to pc. n it's got lights. :) just in time, since my old fellowes mousepad for 6 yrs is pretty much worn out already.
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god of war has been getting rave reviews from quite a few different sources, n ranks much higher than GT4. maybe it's time i consider buying the game. not getting anywhere with initial d. keeps losing on uphill battles. tekken 5 is still doing good. would really love a full fledge rpg for a change tho. it's been some time since NWN.
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last friday was a pretty good karaoke event. all of us screamed our hearts out, especially when the oldies n classics came up. we're not all that old, but somehow most of us knows more old songs than new ones.

tried to sneak some fries in cos i didn't finish my snack in McD before going in n got caught. the girl actually went real nice n said "we'll keep it for u. pls come get it back when u leave." i never went for the fries.
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went n got myself pissed drunk last sunday after a corp dinner. a bunch of us just wouldn't hear of going home so early, even tho we had to work the next morning. well, they had to. i'm on noon shift. :P so, a mug of beer actually turned into 2 bottles of brandy, which was gone in less than 2 hrs.

at least i still managed to get back, go up the elevator to my place n undress before i crashed n fell asleep. fell asleep, not passed out.

would've used lemony snicket's title but so many people are using it that it's became a cliche now

this has been a bad week at work.

got some pretty cheapskate but demanding customers that are asking for more than what they pay for in very rude ways. actually, they're not really asking, just demanding.

they'd buy a low end product with the lowest (read: cheapest) service level, then come demanding for more than they paid for. even screwed me over the phone just because they can't face the fact that they paid for the lowest (again: cheapest) service for a low end product that they think can be used for business-critical purposes. i'm not sure how some of those can be business-critical when they are new purchases and weren't even assimilated into the business yet.

some of them keep bugging me thru phone n email, as if they (each n everyone of the "they"s) are the only one that i have to deal with for the whole week. notably, half of them are from singapore, the other half are upstart taiwanese companies.

i'm not trying to talk crap about singaporeans in general, but hell, those are generally known as the worse possible group of customers, attitude- n behaviour-wise, throughout the whole team, n a few other teams at that. most will expect the worse when it's a singaporean woman on the line. (personally, all the singaporean women i dealt with at work screwed things up pretty bad for me.)

i was probably gonna be able to settle all of these really difficult ones by yesterday, but the whole damn company had to had a company-wise network storm, which resulted in all the phone, internal n external network lines going down for almost 12 hrs before the manage to fix them up temporarily.

when i finally got access to my email n the central system, i'm already screwed by 3 out of 4 of those difficult ones. can't really do much over the wkend. i'll just have to see how it goes next monday.

luckily, we planned a karaoke session last night, n it went great. the bad part is when i headed home, a storm just came outta nowhere. i was totally soaked when i got back. note: i should've bought a god-damned car.

now, today, it's fucking raining again. i was supposed to get groceries n food, but i'm stuck here getting hungry. the only thing i have left in the fridge is a half-finished 1L box of ice-cream. n 2 bottles of vitagen. i seriously don't think that's a good lunch. dammit.

work in 2 hr's time. dammit.

brain in bytes

i was pondering how convenient it would be to have a MMC card slot somewhere behind my ear, which connects directly to my brain, so that i can store/retrieve/share data or memories with people. u know, a la johnny mnemonic, or maybe a live jack like neo's. :)

n then it occured to me that if this was to work, then it'll mean that we have already devised a way to categorize each cell in the brain, and calculate how much storage they have. like, how many bytes each cell can store. or maybe, it's synapse's (the electrical pulse in ur brain) storage size, instead of each cell.

n then, there's the question of how fast the data can be transmitted, like ur average hard drive having 7200rpm or 10krpm with 8MB buffer. then there's the bus width of the interface n FSB... hhhmmm...

a search in google gave some pretty disheartening results:
link1
link2

well, they're obviously right. a human brain is not organized as computer storage is. we don't really operate by binary bits n bytes, but more in a fuzzy approach, without clear cut 1's n 0's.

recall ur first kiss, then recall ur 10th kiss. i bet u ur memory on the 10th one is probably not as clear as the first one. this is what the fuzzy part means - the quality of the data stored. if it's just simple binary, then both should be as easily remember an as clear as each other, if either can be remember at all. 1's n 0's. :)

i guess we're still a long way from johnny mnemonic. we'll all have to stick with the old, slow way of learning things for a while more.

oh my god, my roof's leaking!

who would ever think that this'll happen to a condo?

i mean, seriously, i woke up feeling droplets of water on my face early this morning. checked on the window just by my bed, nothing wrong there. then i noticed the tell-tale lines of water coming down from the ceiling. the little space between my bed n the wall is already getting wet.

i was too tired, so i just moved my bed(actually, mattress) a little further away from the wall n went back to sleep. when i woke up 2 hrs later, the side of my mattress closer to the wall is all wet. fuck. there was a whole puddle of water on the floor right next to it from the wall. so i ended up having to turn the whole mattress over to get it dry, all the while hoping that it won't start to smell bad.

i couldn't really take the whole thing out to my tiny little balcony, since it was still raining pretty heavily by then. there weren't any sun the whole day thru anyway.

one good thing is that by the time i got outta bed, i'm already hearing sounds of a few people fixing up the roof. lotsa heavy drilling n hammering. let's just hope that it's really all fixed, cos looking at my lil weather bar, it seems like more heavy rain early tomorrow morning.

feng shui & the likes

i helped a few friends by asking my mom doing this fortune telling thing for to more or less see how their life is headed n stuff. ended up one of them has a really fucked up life ahead according to 2 different fortune telling thingies my mom did - zi wei dou shu & cheng gu.

i dunno how am i supposed to give the bad news, or whether it'll just be better if i keep it to myself. actually, all of the stuff about this friend's past n also the current behaviour is sickly accurate. which makes me think that the rest of it might just be right.

normally, i don't believe in fortune telling shit. but zi wei dou shu is by far the most (scarily) accurate one that i've come upon, and the reason i'm saying this is that not only that it holds truth to my life, but also whoever's ming pan that i came across of people that i know of. at least half of these are people that my mom doesn't know personally.

so, when it's all sad news, it really worries me how much damage it'll do to the person receiving the news. especially when that someone believes in fortune telling n feng shui stuff so much. actually, come to think of it, people who doesn't really believe in that shit probably wouldn't just asked for a ming pan done out of the blue.

anyway, lillian too said my luck's gonna get a little better. i think she made the whole feng shui thing too commercialized. read thru her zodiac books n you'll see that she avoids telling you all the really bad stuff, n just simply go thru the motions of asking you to becareful. mostly, she just asks you to by crystals/charms that supposedly helps you out. conveniently, her shops sell these. meh~

seriously, the only kind of people that should even go for fortune telling is the kind that can take whatever news comes their way, n deal with it positively. this is the kind of people that do not turn to feng shui whenever things go bad. they shouldn't be the kind that ask for fortune telling, hoping to hear something good because their lives are currently stagnant or their in deep shit.

the power to change your life is in your own hands. fuck feng shui n fortune telling. it's your life. do something about it before you fuck it up.

-edit: fuck. can't get the chinese words to work. damn.