Saturday Quickies

I really wanna go to Singfest but still have yet to decide.

Why I want:

• One Republic
• Travis
• New Found Glory
• Jason Mraz
• SImple Plan

Why I don't want:

• Ticket costs $273
  

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I don't usually eat at Maccas, but have started eating there once again due to the Olympic glasses. I have collected Archery and Volleyball and am now patiently waiting for the next three to be released. Too bad they don't have one for Diving. :(

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The FiiO amplifier is currently a hot gadget on the net. I have placed an order for one (at only US$8.50 including shipping) and apparently it has been shipped, so I would expect it to arrive within the next two weeks.

Why did I buy it? Well, my Sansa E280 is rather weak and doesn't go very well with anything larger than an earbud. Although my pair of Grado SR-80s are pretty efficient, they don't go very well with the Sansa, so I hope this cheap FiiO amplifier will make the combination of my Grados and the Sansa much more palatable.

Fun With Farecaps

Once again, I did my fare cap thing today and I found out something interesting. Below is the listing of the trip I did.

31 - 9846T @ 1448 (15.5) - 1530* (28.0) - $1.19
157 - 9032A @ 1539 (01.0) - 1657* (28.0) - $0.71
254 - 9058B @ 1710 (01.0) - 1824* (33.0) - $1.29
179 - 9049C @ 1837 (01.0) - 1909* (13.0) - $0.94
154 - 8486E @ 1944 (01.0) - 2107* (38.0) - $1.58

Times with asterisks are the times recorded in my EZ-Link card. The automatic farecap between 31 and 157 worked, but if you notice, the farecap between 254 and 179 did not work (but I got the expected $0.25 transfer rebate). At first I thought this could be due to 254 being a Jurong Industrial Service bus and not part of the fare cap system, but according to the Transitlink Guide 2008 - JIS, Feeder, Town-Link and Trunk services are considered basic services and that SBS Transit offers a $1.90 farecap for their basic services.

This goes to show that the JIS services were not configured with the automatic fare cap system and that claims have to be made the following month. I wonder how many commuters have lost out on the $1.90 automatic farecap without realising it.

SBSTransit/SMRT/EZ-Link needs to fire the idiot who programmed the EZLink system and employ someone more capable.

Anyway, two days ago, an incident occured that examplifies the need to check the Fare Stage before tapping the EZLink card. I took 7 from my usual boarding place (Stage 5.5) to Capitol (Stage 12.5). However, at my place, the GPS was not working and the fare stage was set to 2.0 (which is the stop after Bedok Interchange). If I had tapped without checking the stage, I would have paid $0.30 more, or $1.19 instead of the expected $0.89. I pity the lady who tapped her EZLink card barely a second before me. :(

Quickies

US dollar dropping like mad. Time to buy from American Eagle? Amazon.com? I should do a shopping spree!

Another quick walk round the estate this morning. Less lethargic now. Maybe a run tonight.

Highly likely I'll be heading out to Parkway Parade later.

I wanna go to SingFest, but $273 seems a bit too much to pay for a non-airconditioned venue with no seats in this country.

Lethargy

Was feeling very lethargic a few moments ago. Didn't feel like going for a run, so went for a walk round the estate. Back at home and feeling better now.

I'm thinking of walking to Parkway Parade tomorrow to get some new shirts and then start my $1.90 gunzelling trip to Boon Lay and riding a few JIS services before heading back home.

Nothing In Particular

I have been using my EEEPC for almost two months now and I am finding the installed Xandros-based operating system very limiting. I'm probably going to install some sort of Ubuntu variant soon or change to the advanced KDE-based UI.

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If things go as planned, I might be able to move out in September. Hopefully, no housemates from hell. It will be in Queenstown, not far from my planned workplace in Redhill, which means I could cycle or run to my workplace and back. Nice!

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I had a nice catch-up dinner with friends last night and I realised that straight people are very proud of their sexuality, more so than gay people but many straight people don't realise that. They talk about buying HDB flats, proposals and marriages without batting an eyelid. But when gay people dream of that, all hell breaks lose. Ironic, isn't it?

As a friend once wrote, people venture overseas not to look for greener pastures, but to look for grass that is more suitable for their lawn. I totally agree.

Wubi

Since reformatting my Ubuntu-powered Compaq notebook back to Windows, my seriously underpowered 1GHz Duron has been my main machine. But coupled with a 1600x1200 resolution and a pretty weak Geforce 2 MX400 without any accelerated 2D drivers, the screen is refreshed really slowly and 1GHz just doesn't cut it.

Therefore, I have been using the Acer Core Duo T2300 notebook, which, this morning, I upgraded to 1GB of RAM from its former 512MB. But this thing runs Windows XP which I just can't get used to. But thanks to Wubi - Windows Ubuntu Installer - I was able to install Ubuntu without having to repartition the disk. What it does is to install Ubuntu in a disk image file on the Windows partition and use the Windows XP boot manager to boot this image and then Ubuntu mounts it as a loop-back partition. Pretty ingenious work I must say.

It works perfectly so far, but seems to have a problem activating the swap file. I will investigate this further tomorrow, but I am super glad to be able to run Ubuntu on the notebook which has a lot more grunt than the desktop.

Starhub Re-Writing Problem............ Again!

Well, this is the season to rewrite URLs once again.

Starhub's proxies are exhibiting the stupid URL re-writing problem once again where URLs like http://www.apple.com/iphone/ becomes http://iphone/ .

More information in an earlier blog post.

Doctor Visit

I went to the doctor just now to get a potential diagnosis on my skin condition.

For the past three weeks, part of my right cheek has been drying up, peeling off revealing baby smooth skin and then the process repeats itself. The affected area seems to be enlarging too.

The doctor suspects it could be a post-infection hyper-pigmentation and I was given a cream to reduce the swelling, redness and itchiness. It is also anti-bacteria and anti-fungal in case there is any remaining bacterial or fungal activity. I hope it clears up soon. It looks pretty ugly having a reddish dry mark on my cheek.

Slowly Back To Normal

Things are slowly getting back to normal for me.

I have migrated data from my 200GB Seagate to my 1TB Western Digital and managed to move most files except for some old games a few photos from my Panasonic digital camera.

In addition to the loss of some movies, I realise that I have also lost my collection of photos from my Sony Ericsson W880i camera phone. It is no biggie though as I didn't use the phone camera to take important stuff.

In any case, it seems like there might have been a secondary cause for my Seagate HDD to fail. The pimrary reason was the major fall it experienced sometime earlier this year. The secondary cause seems to be a potential cable failure as you can see in the photograph on the right. Seven wire strands seems to have had their shielding torn and this could potentially cause corrupted control signals and data to be written onto the disk.

Once things have settled down, I will start reorganising the data on the disks. Things are pretty messy right now due to the cutting and pasting of many folders from my Seagate, Samsung and former notebook drives.

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The new M.A.N. 18.240 HOCL-NR demonstrator was supposed to appear on route 6 with crossovers to route 354 and 403 today, but seems like it is still hiding in Bedok North Depot.

How sad.

No Fucking End

There seems to be no fucking end to all my fucking problems.

It looks like I have just lost around 5GB of newly downloaded movies. Now I have to fucking figure out which movies have been lost and redownload them.

FUCK FUCK FUCK!

Unlucky With Hardware

I seem to be particularly unlucky with computer hardware nowadays. From the looks of it, another piece of hardware I own will be dying very very soon - my 200GB Seagate HDD. It has a lot problems reading data and I am currently migrating all the data stored on it onto my Western Digital HDD. I hope I will be able to back the data up before it totally dies.

It still has another year of warranty and therefore will be going for an RMA very soon. I guess that is the only good thing about this.

I hope no more of my hardware dies over the next few weeks.

Dead Graphics

Well, it seems like something about my flat kills graphics card. First my GeForce 6600GT died, then my ATI Radeon 9550 and now it seems like my GeForce 4 Ti 4400 is dead too. I can't find my GeForce 3 Ti 200 and therefore my desktop is running my ancient GeForce 2 MX400.

I am also having troubles with the accelerated binary drivers for my graphics card. They don't seem to want to load and therefore I am using the opensource 2D-only driver. Not much of a lost, but OpenGL support does improve video scaling performance, which does put a significant CPU hit for 1600x1200 resolution on a 1GHz Duron. Granted that this desktop has 1.5GB of RAM, but that's gonna do shits if processing power is what is required.

I'll probably reformat the PC later after backing up my home folder.... I should have put /home in a separate partition, which will make it easier for me during reformats.

1 TB

I have been too busy to update the blog for the past week or so save for my lone post of a K230UB on route 154.

Anyway, I finally got myself the 1 Terabyte WDC My Book Essentials external hard disk for $286. Not particularly cheap, but cheap enough. I think this model runs on the WDC Green Power hard disk drive which sells for $299. So for $13 less, you get an external USB2 case to go along. The fun of economics.

I also got myself a new Samsung-branded DVD writer - the cheapest one at $37 which I could find in the whole of Sim Lim. My desktop now runs on a Teac 40X CDRW drive and I seriously need a DVD writer for it.

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I finally managed to get a ride on route 128 yesterday from Anson Road (Stage 1.5) to Ang Mo Kio Avenue 6 (Stage 21.5). Apparently, if you ride from the first stop to the last stop on route 128, you are charged $0.67 instead of the expected $1.39. That didn't matter to me as this trip was part of my grand $1.90 fare cap trip which incorporated a visit to Sim Lim Square.

I have also noticed something interesting. Apparently the last trip of a transfer always records the boarding time instead of just $0.00 fares.

13 - 3822B @ 1430 (20.0) - 1456* (30.0) - $1.09
48 - 1982K @ 1458 (01.0) - 1534* (17.5) - $0.81
166 - 480Z @ 1558* (15.0) - 1656 (35.0) - $0.00
196 - 9460Y @ 1702 (01.0) - 1811* (19.0) - $1.29
128 - 8459J @ 1818* (01.5) - 1928 (21.5) - $0.42
076 - 9827Z @ 1946 (01.0) - 2037* (17.0) - $1.29
154 - 9047H @ 2038* (37.0) - 2042 (38.0) - $0.42

Times with asterisks are the recorded times. I'm going to try to do this with two $0.00 trips one day and see whether this holds true.

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I received this book on Thursday morning, but I have yet to read through it. I'll probably spend the next week or two reading through it and fixing up my bike in preparation for the 08/08/08 East Coast Park - Changi Village bike ride organised by fellow bus gunzels.

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For the rest of today, I'll be busy backing up my data off my notebook and reorganising my computer systems. My current notebook needs to be reformatted back to Windows so that my brother will be able to use it. I will take his notebook and reformat it to Linux, which I will use.

I still have to configure the Acer notebook which my mum will then use for her email and Youtubing. She is hooked on Youtube. Ha ha.

Then there is still my desktop which needs some hard disk reorganisation. The data 80GB drive will now need to be the OS drive and my former 200GB drive will be the desktop's new data drive.