165 -> 166

Argh!! I don’t know how I managed to pull this off… This morning, I mistook bus number 165 for 166. 166 is the bus number I take to work every day. Damnit. During the first 15 minutes of the ride, the route both buses take are the same. After that, they both go different ways. By the time 165 had taken a different route from 166, I had already fallen asleep!! [X(]


I woke up and looked around, fucking shocked to find myself in an unfamiliar place. Quickly boarded off, crossed the road and waited for a bus back. It was 8.30 already. I soon gave up and flagged a cab. The driver had to top up his cash card and so he stopped at a petrol station. He was kind enough to lift the $1 peak hour surcharge. But I had to pay $3.50 for his entering into the CBD area. The grand total was $12.00. [:(]


While reading php-Mag, I came across another interesting blog and from there, I learned about GeoCaching. From what I’ve read, GeoCaching sounds like “treasure hunting”. People would store stuff in containers and hide them in suitable places, most of them in the wild but safe location. They would then submit the GPS co-ordinates of the location of the item to GeoCaching.com. I’ve found out that there’s quite a number of hidden caches in Singapore (Click on the Seek button in the link.). I’ve read that even a foreigner who was probably here on vacation, participated. Click here for a sample of a hidden cache somewhere in Singapore [:)].


It sounds like a healthy hobby to pick up. My ex-tutors advised me to pick up a hobby just to spend less time on my computer. The only problem to this is I need a GPS device. A simple one costs around S$150 if I buy it from amazon.com. I was wondering if Pocket PCs are GPS compatible. Getting a Pocket PC would be better since I can do lots of stuff on it [:D] . But it’s very very expensive [:(] . Hmmmm…. I might consider monthly installments…


Oh yea… KDE for my Gentoo installation is still compiling… 36 hours already. Hope it finishes before I leave for the lanparty.

Lan Party!

I signed up for an upcoming lanparty that’s to be held at Funan IT Mall. It’s called: “eXe” – The DFI Singapore LAN Party 2004. The registration costs S$18 and each person is given a goody bag. I’m more interested in Transpo. It’s used to strap around the tower to make it easier to carry around. There’s also a SurgeArrest and a eXe lan party t-shirt. The maximum number of people they’re accepting is 50. I feel that’s too little.


Just 48 hours ago, Monday, I began installing Gentoo Linux on my Pentium 2 233MHz machine. Last night, I was finally able to complete the installation. Right now, I’m trying to set up KDE (Click on the link for some screenshots). Sort of like a graphical user interface. The machine’s still compiling the software! I’ve heard that if you try to compile Gentoo from scratch, it will take 3 days on a modern machine. What about an almost-antique machine like mine? Weeks I say. Haha.

Einstein

I came across a quote by Albert Einstein “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”. Which led me to here.


I had always known Albert Einstein as a scientist. Little did I know who he truly was till some googling was done on the above-mentioned quote. I randomly read some of his quotes and most of them are very provocative. His words may change the way I perceive. I feel another wave of confusion flooding my mind. [X|] And I have a whole new respect for Albert Einstein.

Sigh…

Finally recovered from a scary harddisk problem. Woke up last Friday morning to a whirring and clicking sound from my main harddisk. Never had I woke up with so much fright. It worked well after a restart. But then started to fail again and the clicking came back. Then I had to shut down everything and leave for work already.


After work, I went down to SimLim Square and got myself a new 80GB harddisk and a better Power Supply Unit (PSU). I hoped the new PSU would fix the problem I have with my AthlonXP. Sadly, it did not. I had made a copy of all the important data on my dying 40GB into my new 80GB. I’m still using the 40GB harddisk. It seems to work fine now.


I bought a new router too. A Netgear DG824M. The best feature I liked was the firewall rules and site blocking. I can now block ads from appearing in websites simply by adding the name of the server hosting the advertisement into the keywords list. All worm and virus attacks are blocked at the router, which now eliminates the need for me to have a software firewall running and eating up all my valuable CPU cycles. [XD]