Tuesday, April 18, 2006
The Return of the King
You know it's been a while when you can't remember your own blogger-login moniker...
Sure, I've felt like writing - loads of times - but I just haven't had the time. Work, unwork, alien invasions, yadda yadda. And somehow when I have had time, I haven't had the inclination to write. You know how it goes.
The End came shortly before my first-ever call-up for national enslavement (reservist "training"). There's a lot to be said about that in itself, but I'd best leave that for another day. Again, I'm pressed for time as I write this.
Bang. Two-and-a-half weeks of real-life-time obliterated just like that. It was eerily reminiscent of the bad old national service (full time) days, except that particular episode lasted an agonising two-and-a half years, not weeks.
So I made friends, and the assorted bunch of guys gelled together as well as could be expected. Big deal. The people on survivor do it just as well (sometimes even better!) except when they're busy killing each other and stuff. Oh wait, that was Lost.
The uneagerly anticipated Homecoming to Work was marred five minutes in by being handed a presentation to sort out five days and an on-call later. On calls, for the uninitiated, cost two days of real-life-time, because re-minisce is getting on in years and the Need for Sleep has surpassed his Need for Speed, since, oh, about ten years ago. laugh.
Another five sleep-deprived days erased from memory without a trace.
And then it gets even blurrier. Lots of on calls later, I'm sitting here in the airport home-free and heading out of town.
It doesn't sound nearly as impressive as I'd hoped.
Somewhere in there I found the time to upgrade a friend's laptop, and to try my hand at reprogramming a windows-98 / 2000 inf file for windows XP (Intel website - all further support for this product has been discontinued, Windows XP ships with a built-in driver which is compatible with this product and hence no driver has been developedd. Ha. Tell that to windows XP, which is still to this day stubbornly refusing to see the device...)
I also revived and refurbished Xena's old pentium III till it was purring like a cat on steroids, and then in a fit of drunken stupidity tried to work on it while it was still switched on. Never, ever try this at home kids. One slip of the finger, metal on metal, and your motherboard has just gone up in a shower of... okay, no sparks. No flames, no smoke. Just... dead. Welcome to real life.
After the initialy huge disappointment (I never even got to play a game on that antique!) I was fooling around with all my old dead computers (coming from a family that never throws keepsakes away, between my brother and myself we've acquired a museum of decrepit computing devices, including a fully-functional 486 DX-2 66... anyone remember those?) and being somewhat distracted while talking to the significant other on the telephone, inadvertently swapped one processor with another (sometimes my hands go on autopilot while the brain is hard at work)
And voila. Suddenly for some reason I now have an athlon-XP 2800+ on a 400 FSB motherboard working again. I can't understand why, since all it used to do before was whine softly then sputter to a stop... very bizarre. But I'm not complaining.
Now if only I could find a way to repair my old Geforce 4 Ti 4600 I'd be a happy camper. Unfortunately nobody seems to write anything about component-level repair of buggered video cards, and I doubt that asus will want to replace a last-generation video card when they can rip me of for a current generation card to the tune of a thousand bucks. Sigh.
Ah yes, I've also read all about hacking wireless LAN WEPs. It's surprisingly easy, provided you have a PRISM chipset. Gods I sound like a technogeek already. Must stop wasting time reading interesting articles about wardriving and hacking into neighbours' networks... I will not hack into the hospital network. I will not...
So here I am, on the brink of flying far, far away.
Oh yes, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.
I may not have said it much - time has just blurred into one long on-call and post-call for me, somehow.
But yes I couldn't wait to go.
And yes, I've missed you very much - much more than I've said.
Hello. :)
******
Hongkong, 19/04/06 1109 hrs
As always I completely forgot to write about what I meant to, last post.
So during my long silence, several things have been bugging me.
One - did anyone check out those thingies about the government sharing its dividends with the people?
I logged on, to discover that the website already knew my name, ic number, and date of birth. And probably my bank account number too (which it pretended not to, and asked me to input... but honestly all they have to do is cross reference the SAF computers)
Which beggars the question : If the government is handing out pay supplement packets to EVERYONE...
... why to we have to login online and fill in a form to claim it? Shouldn't it just be credited directly into our bank accounts? Or is this a measure to catch out the few computer illiterate procrastinators that lurk out there?
Secondly... has anyone called for a cab recently? I'm sure you all have. Aside from the usual grouse about skyrocketing advance-booking and call-in fees...
... whats with the automated service that lets you know every one minute fifty seconds (I timed it) that no taxis are available, press two to continue holding or nine to end call (sic)
Surely someone taking the time and effort to hold on to the line is still interested in flagging down a taxi, barring unexpected exceptions like sudden myocardial infarcts of sleep narcosis. Or a flash fire, or perhaps a flood.
Okay, so I reckon maybe the powers that be are afraid of people abusing the system with autodialers, and *gasp* multitasking and doing something else in between. Perhaps the operators don't like waiting for people to get back to the real world from their storybooks or their sexual partners or whatever.
But one minute fifty seconds? Sheesh. Who comes up with these dumb ideas anyhow.
ps - iMacs suck ass.
Sure, I've felt like writing - loads of times - but I just haven't had the time. Work, unwork, alien invasions, yadda yadda. And somehow when I have had time, I haven't had the inclination to write. You know how it goes.
The End came shortly before my first-ever call-up for national enslavement (reservist "training"). There's a lot to be said about that in itself, but I'd best leave that for another day. Again, I'm pressed for time as I write this.
Bang. Two-and-a-half weeks of real-life-time obliterated just like that. It was eerily reminiscent of the bad old national service (full time) days, except that particular episode lasted an agonising two-and-a half years, not weeks.
So I made friends, and the assorted bunch of guys gelled together as well as could be expected. Big deal. The people on survivor do it just as well (sometimes even better!) except when they're busy killing each other and stuff. Oh wait, that was Lost.
The uneagerly anticipated Homecoming to Work was marred five minutes in by being handed a presentation to sort out five days and an on-call later. On calls, for the uninitiated, cost two days of real-life-time, because re-minisce is getting on in years and the Need for Sleep has surpassed his Need for Speed, since, oh, about ten years ago. laugh.
Another five sleep-deprived days erased from memory without a trace.
And then it gets even blurrier. Lots of on calls later, I'm sitting here in the airport home-free and heading out of town.
It doesn't sound nearly as impressive as I'd hoped.
Somewhere in there I found the time to upgrade a friend's laptop, and to try my hand at reprogramming a windows-98 / 2000 inf file for windows XP (Intel website - all further support for this product has been discontinued, Windows XP ships with a built-in driver which is compatible with this product and hence no driver has been developedd. Ha. Tell that to windows XP, which is still to this day stubbornly refusing to see the device...)
I also revived and refurbished Xena's old pentium III till it was purring like a cat on steroids, and then in a fit of drunken stupidity tried to work on it while it was still switched on. Never, ever try this at home kids. One slip of the finger, metal on metal, and your motherboard has just gone up in a shower of... okay, no sparks. No flames, no smoke. Just... dead. Welcome to real life.
After the initialy huge disappointment (I never even got to play a game on that antique!) I was fooling around with all my old dead computers (coming from a family that never throws keepsakes away, between my brother and myself we've acquired a museum of decrepit computing devices, including a fully-functional 486 DX-2 66... anyone remember those?) and being somewhat distracted while talking to the significant other on the telephone, inadvertently swapped one processor with another (sometimes my hands go on autopilot while the brain is hard at work)
And voila. Suddenly for some reason I now have an athlon-XP 2800+ on a 400 FSB motherboard working again. I can't understand why, since all it used to do before was whine softly then sputter to a stop... very bizarre. But I'm not complaining.
Now if only I could find a way to repair my old Geforce 4 Ti 4600 I'd be a happy camper. Unfortunately nobody seems to write anything about component-level repair of buggered video cards, and I doubt that asus will want to replace a last-generation video card when they can rip me of for a current generation card to the tune of a thousand bucks. Sigh.
Ah yes, I've also read all about hacking wireless LAN WEPs. It's surprisingly easy, provided you have a PRISM chipset. Gods I sound like a technogeek already. Must stop wasting time reading interesting articles about wardriving and hacking into neighbours' networks... I will not hack into the hospital network. I will not...
So here I am, on the brink of flying far, far away.
Oh yes, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.
I may not have said it much - time has just blurred into one long on-call and post-call for me, somehow.
But yes I couldn't wait to go.
And yes, I've missed you very much - much more than I've said.
Hello. :)
******
Hongkong, 19/04/06 1109 hrs
As always I completely forgot to write about what I meant to, last post.
So during my long silence, several things have been bugging me.
One - did anyone check out those thingies about the government sharing its dividends with the people?
I logged on, to discover that the website already knew my name, ic number, and date of birth. And probably my bank account number too (which it pretended not to, and asked me to input... but honestly all they have to do is cross reference the SAF computers)
Which beggars the question : If the government is handing out pay supplement packets to EVERYONE...
... why to we have to login online and fill in a form to claim it? Shouldn't it just be credited directly into our bank accounts? Or is this a measure to catch out the few computer illiterate procrastinators that lurk out there?
Secondly... has anyone called for a cab recently? I'm sure you all have. Aside from the usual grouse about skyrocketing advance-booking and call-in fees...
... whats with the automated service that lets you know every one minute fifty seconds (I timed it) that no taxis are available, press two to continue holding or nine to end call (sic)
Surely someone taking the time and effort to hold on to the line is still interested in flagging down a taxi, barring unexpected exceptions like sudden myocardial infarcts of sleep narcosis. Or a flash fire, or perhaps a flood.
Okay, so I reckon maybe the powers that be are afraid of people abusing the system with autodialers, and *gasp* multitasking and doing something else in between. Perhaps the operators don't like waiting for people to get back to the real world from their storybooks or their sexual partners or whatever.
But one minute fifty seconds? Sheesh. Who comes up with these dumb ideas anyhow.
ps - iMacs suck ass.
