subliminal

As usual, quite some time had passed since I last wrote anything here Currently, I had just finished my final exams and have a one week break before my 8 months internship period starts on the 3rd of December. It’s quite a pity that the companies that I applied for my internship near my home didn’t reply early enough before I accepted the offer from PETRONAS Carigali. So, I’d have to go to Miri for my industrial training which is located very far away from here. I’ll most likely be traveling there on the 1st to find a place to rent. A friend will be helping me with that but most likely the place we’ll be renting wouldn’t have an Internet connection ready. Subscribing and setting it up might take a few weeks during which I’ll be limited to being online from the Internet connection at my workplace if that is available to me.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the past semester had been a very busy one. All the courses I’m taking has a full-length project in its syllabus. One of them even had 2 big projects to complete by the end of the semester. This leads to the usual last-minute rush to complete all the projects before the exam week. Technically, there’s a one week holiday period before the finals start but for last semester, I wasn’t even able to study much during that time since I’m still hooked up with the various project that needs to be done during that week. Anyway, that had come to an end including the final exams and overall, I think I did an above average job on  my scale. Hope my results wouldn’t be as bad as my previous semesters especially since my scholarship provider had started to be very strict on our exam results since last semester.

On another note, Microsoft had just released its new suite of ‘Live’ products. I’m now writing this entry using Windows Live Writer and it certainly is much more convenient than writing directly on the blog itself. Even Microsoft haters can’t find much to blame with this piece of software and I highly recommend it to fellow blogger especially the more active ones. There’s a lot of useful features ranging from automatic spell checking to various filters and transformations to images uploaded images which will help you with managing your blog and writing entries. Documenting them would be quite a lengthy thing to do so I’ll leave it to you to discover them. You can get it from http://get.live.com/writer/ and the suite contains other notable products too such as Windows Live Gallery and Windows Live Mail. A special recommendation goes to Windows Live Mail as well since its another application I’m using frequently as a replacement to the much heavier Microsoft Outlook 2007 for checking my email and tracking my RSS feeds. Below is a screenshot of Windows Live Writer as I was writing this entry.

I think that’s about it for this entry now. For this one week holiday I’m having, I plan to switch the forums from the now commercial Invision Power Board onto a free open source alternative which we decided would be phpBB3. I had just completed the switching process successfully on my own server making me ready to repeat the process on the site once the other administrators are ready. The new Special Generation boards will be available anytime now so stay tuned!

Another sleepless night and some time to add custom contents to the About Me page It’s quite basic, so if anyone has any questions, or maybe want to know more stuff about me, just ask here through the comments and I’ll add it to the page. Relevant stuff of course

I just realized that my last post here, and maybe even at SGen was over 1 month ago, right before my holidays came to an end. It’s around 2AM in the morning now and since I can’t sleep (again..) I think I’ll just update what had happened to me during the past 5 weeks. This will be a long one, you have been warned

Week 1

I decided to come back early this semester, early being the Saturday before the academic week starts It helps a lot being one day early since the journey from my home to the campus takes almost half a day. That’s 2 hours by flight to KL International Airport, over 2 hours waiting for the bus to Ipoh, 4 hours bus journey from the airport to Ipoh, and another 1 hour from the bus station to the campus. The previous years, we were able to take a flight from KLIA directly to Ipoh Airport. Not anymore though due to the service being abandoned as it was deemed ‘unprofitable’. Arriving early gave me the time needed to rest after such a journey as well as to organize myself for the things to come.

The week started with the usual rush to secure classes with good slots for my timetable. Almost everything is on a first-come-first-served basis and it gets quite cutthroat at times. This semester’s registration went quite well with some friends helping me grab a place during class registrations Thanks to them I’m able to have no classes on Friday. In addition to the usual rush, I’m gonna be taking a course called ‘Engineering Team Project’ this semester. So unlike previous semesters, my first week is already filled with meetings for the course. Lucky though that the project we have is quite straightforward compared to the stuff other teams must do.

Week 2

Second week of the semester went by quite quickly. At least I didn’t get lost looking for my class venues unlike previous semesters. I’m very bad at remembering places and worse at finding them. Realized that I was neglecting SGen during the week too. Sadly I can’t do anything since this week is very hectic with all the meetings and class logistics. I think Britney PMed me this week asking how I was doing Everything’s fine though the days are tiring. I even forgot that BK released a new album at around this time.

Near the end of the week, I went out to Ipoh to get some computer parts I ordered. I got myself 2 XpertVision HD 2600 XT cards (4 actually, another two for my friend) which I set up in Crossfire mode. In addition to that, I also bought 2 sticks of 1GB DDR2-667 RAM and 2 Seagate Barracuda SATA2 hard disks, one 320GB and another 160GB for my system drive. Seems that I’m buying everything in pairs haha This will be the last big hardware upgrade for quite some time.

Week 3

Labs and tutorials start this week, almost doubling the normal weekly workload. Things didn’t really work out well this week as I (or rather my group) burned a 240 volt motor and its big power supply in the lab. The technicians didn’t seem to get angry though, maybe because it was a normal occurence as I was told later by the lecturer. I think this was the most tiring week to date because I wasn’t really sure which classes were on during the week and had to go out of my way to find out.

Week 4

Truth be said, I was spent both mentally and physically by this week. I escaped some classes, overpowered by sleepiness. Sometimes, I’d sleep into the afternoon which ruined my body clock again. It was fine before this week, sleeping at 12AM and waking up automatically at around 7AM. Now its all haywired once more. Might explain why I’m typing stuff at such an ungodly hour in the morning. This week I was a little motivated at starting my FYP programming contract work but couldn’t find the energy or the willpower to really get to it. Same goes for SGen. Klise PMed me about another ‘Japanese’ poser in the forums which made me went there and take a look for a while. I think I’m gone again right after that.

Week 5

Another lazy week. Quite the same as the fourth week, just a little bit more alert since ETP workload was at full swing. I planned for the group to finish this project before the mid-semester break so we’re actually rushing things a bit. Talking about the mid-sem break, the administration announced that it’s gonna be postponed by two weeks, so it’ll be around the 10th week of the academic calender now. That’s the only time I can guarantee some time for SGen and the fact that it was postponed means more delays for SGen’s programming.

It was this week too that one of my friend asked me to download YUI’s complete discography. He’s very lucky that someone uploaded the stuff he wants the day after in lossless FLAC format After downloading and listening to her music, I can say that I’m officially hooked to her songs too. From her TV appearances, she seems to be a soft-spoken girl and her music are also of the slow, upbeat and relaxing kind. I’ve converted the downloaded FLAC to WMA Lossless for better integration with WMP. Therefore, all the files have been retagged with cover arts inserted as well. You’ll find me playing her songs most of the time nowadays.

The end of this week, which is now, is marked by the annual University’s Convocation Fair (Convofair). I’ve personally given it a new tagline~ ‘Convofair - Season of mediocre food at luxurious prices’. A standard char kuew teow costs 3.50 when the normal price is only around 2.50. Nothing special I assure you, just the same old burnt stuff you get anywhere else. In addition to that, the Convofair grounds were turned into a swamp because of heavy rain that night making this the worst Convofair ever. It’s actually a good thing that I don’t have a girlfriend yet, else I’d feel very guilty bringing her to such a place Some parts of the field even stink of c** s*** especially with the ground swamp as soggy as it is.

That kinda ends my long report Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually reads this, especially with my rather lax updates. This particular post took over 1 hour of my time… Oh well, at least it’ll be something like my personal log as time goes by. Hope I can get myself to update it more frequently (again) Till next time~