Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

What’s more interesting than working, sleeping, eating, and then (work) again?

The answer: Reservist training!

Firstly, you get to force yourself to go running in the middle of the night, because you have been working from dawn to dusk, and have only enough time to work and re-fuel like a emotional machine. Yeah, I’m writing this at approximately 1.30am Singapore Time, and the work never seems to stop rolling in. It’s like a cement truck taking a dump that wouldn’t end.

It’s not that I’m drowning in assignments (though the in-camp training would probably push me into a state of utter desperation [yet again] after squandering 75% of my school holidays). Rather, it’s club matters that have been occupying my HMA (High Memory Area). I’ve been thinking about how to rejuvenate a one-year old school club that hasn’t been actively recruiting members to its ranks.

The lack of fresh blood means that when the current club management retires from active service, there’ll be barely any new people to take over the controls. That’s like running a ship aground right at the end of your watch; I’d really hate to pass on a shipwreck to the next generation, because it’s way too irresponsible a course of action.

In certain ways, I kind of wish that somebody would tell me what to do in order to set things right; because that’s what I’ve been doing these recent years. Teachers would tell me to complete an assignment, and I’ll complete it. In the army, I was told that I have to protect my country, and so I did.

Then came this opportunity for me to break out of being a perpetual reactionary puppet. This, coming after a long while of not having to think about what to do next, is refreshing yet a frightening thought at the same time. There are no paths set out for leaders — the trailblazers burn a path through the dense vegetation for the rest to follow. I’ve been following a path until now, and that path has ended here.

How now shall I burn a new path through the forest?

Scribbled under:
General

Yesterday, a few of us went to Sim Lim Square to build a custom system for one of us. The system was going to be solely for rendering videos and post-processing pictures. Since it was going to be a white-box, which means that we could choose all the components that made up the system, the buyer picked the following:

• Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4 GHz processor
• PowerColor HD 3870 x2 DDR4 graphics processing unit (GPU), also known as the graphic card
• 3 X 1 Terabyte (TB) hard disk (I forgot the brand)
• 2 X Kingston 2 Gigabyte (GB) (I think it was the DDR2-800) random access memory stick (RAM)

I took the opportunity to upgrade my notebook’s ram to 4GB. Unfortunately, it turns out that my laptop BIOS has been limited to use only 3GB, so I’m out of luck with the last 1GB. I can’t even install PAE extensions for the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux operating system on the computer, since it’s a lower-level part of the system that’s the limiting factor. I wasn’t totally out of luck though, because dual channel for the RAM started working properly again, because the 2 new pieces of RAM installed were very similar pieces (a crucial step in making sure that dual channel works properly).

The graphics card is a super-zhnged piece of monster, with pipes running around the body. The fan blade is an angry buzzer whining when the system first starts up. Or it could have been the exhaust fan at the casing’s rear. Or the processor fan. Wait, was it the air-intake cooler at the front of the case? When the assembled system ran, it was hard to tell, but I do know one thing for sure: it is going to be hell to have to sleep in the same room with the thing running video renders overnight.

Thankfully, it isn’t going to be a problem because the buyer is going to put it in an air-conditioned study area, so the noise bugbear isn’t going to be as bad.

A friend successfully installed a hacked Macintosh OS X operating system (commonly called the “Hackintosh“) onto the desktop, but for some unknown system, the graphics card would refuse to go into 3D accelerated mode. As we all know, it’s a humongous waste of money to spend $200 over dollars on a monster graphic card, only to use it without its touted features! So we spent the entire night over at the friend’s place to try and hack up a solution to the problem.

For me, since I’m not really into OS X and Macintoshes, I resorted to surfing the Internet while the other 2 of them tried to coax the thing to work.

At around 11pm, we ordered delivery from McDonalds. 45 minutes, a subtly disturbed looking delivery person knocked at the door with our meals. He would get to make the same trip half an hour later when my other friend placed his order after the delivery guy left, and return he did, a dark expression on his face, and my friend thought he felt a strong murderous intent when I suggested that we make another order an hour later.

The Mega McSpicy turned out to be the old discontinued McSpicy Double with an artificial price hike, and gave me a hellish toilet trip the next morning at 7am. It broke a record in terms of meal turn-around time, because my toilet trips usually come 8 hours after the meal.

At around 2am, I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I laid down on the couch in the living room. In the quiet Boon Lay night, my laptop blared music from an Internet stream from the bedroom where my friend was busy trying to hack OS X, to the living room, where I knocked out, figuratively speaking.

It was like finally succumbing to a comfortable black hole in my eyes. No dreams though; somehow I’ve become unaware of my dreams. Either I was forgetting them when I wake up, or I was seriously too dead-beat to be able to remember them.

Thus ends the report on what I did on Friday. It was an unintentional sleep-over that resulted from an over-extended geek pilgrimage, which would have bored any normal person to death. Therefore, I want to congratulate you for having managed to finish reading this. Extra credits if you can understand half of what I typed in the first few paragraphs.

Scribbled under:
General

These 2 weeks I have been concentrating my mind-blasts on 2 reports for my assignments. There’s a business operations management module that required us to identify problem areas facing a specific company, and another one about online gaming.

The trouble isn’t in finding things to write about. Singapore’s so hooked up on to the Internet that it’s easy to just open Firefox and search for the information on Google. The hard part comes right after you’ve gathered everything you wanted to write about. It doesn’t help that I’ve been over-trained by the JC system, and have a writing standard tighter than the school requires us to.

I fretted about using the appropriate words to convey the exact situation as I read in my sources. If anyone wants to blame my pickiness on something, try the hundreds of nuances that exists in the English language, which allows you to control the strength of your essay. It’s like making coffee that becomes expressos, or lattes (as well as the few hundred subtle variations in between).

I was quite satisfied with the fruits of my endless meddling, but I can’t help but notice that in the process of picking at nits in the reports, I had paid very little attention to the general scope of the essays. That’s something which can hurt a lot! Like a real General Paper essay, getting your little details right isn’t going to matter if the paper doesn’t answer the question asked in the project brief!

Also, I would have enjoyed the experience a whole lot better if I didn’t have other things to worry about simultaneously. A project for a programming module that’s worth 5 credit units is coming up. Deadline for the monster isn’t due for another month, if not for the fact that I have to go for my reservist that’s going to happen in December.

Two whole weeks of in-camp training is going to take away a lot of time from my school projects. The good news is that I won’t be missing a lot of school, since Mindef has kindly scheduled the obligation during the term break; but I can’t help but feel that this is another chore.

This blog post feels like a report of my situation in school, and I think it is a true reflection of my current state of mind right now. Now I’ve got to learn how to task-switch between report writing mode, and blogging mode.

To sleep now.

Scribbled under:
General