People are strange creatures

I bet you’ve heard this a thousand times on human beings being strange creatures. We behave differently depending on the circumstances.


Anyway, I’m pissed and stressed. Boss is pushing me around to rush this project I’m on. Firstly, this CRM program requires ASP.NET, C#, VB6 knowledge to customize. I have little exposure to these 3. Even though I’m comfortable working with new languages, I still need time to learn more about them. And time is what we don’t have.


May stop blogging for a week. The deadline is next Thursday for there’s a demo for our client next Friday. The demonstration is supposed to be today but the client had some stuff so it got postponed to a week later.


Busy busy busy…

Hong Kong – Day 4

Ahhhhh, today’s topic is damn confusing. Can’t wait to get back home. Did some shopping yesterday at HMV. Bought some DVDs and a Nirvana audio CD. Cheap. Bought an old Japanese movie for $15HKD, “The Last Emperor” at $20HKD.

By the way, there are Giordano stores everywhere!

5pm: Waiting for my flight back to Singapore. I’m at a lounge at the Hong Kong International Airport. Only for people with exclusive privileges (my boss). The snacks and food are free. Even the Hagen Daz ice cream and a variety of alcoholic drinks. I’m gonna keep this short as the keyboard is noisy and disturbing the others. My flight’s at 6 and I expect to reach home by 10pm.

Gonna go grab some ice cream now.

Hong Kong – Day 3

Resumed training. This time, some programming related topics. I suppose I’m
prepared to work on the actual project now. Good news is, the demonstration my
boss had to do for this project to our client got postponed to 1 week later. I
now have more time to code.


4pm right now and we’re debugging some unknown problem. Boss is out
for a short meeting, I’m stuck with the tech guy who’s debugging VB6 code
in front of me, I’m blogging behind his back.


I just checked with the other guy and their office network blocked all
outgoing ports except 80. I can only surf the net but not remote-control my
computer. This basically sucks.


I hope I have some free time tonight to go explore Hong Kong on my own.

Hong Kong – Day 1-2

Day 1:
My plane left Singapore around 11am on Sunday and arrived in HongKong 3 hours 20 minutes later. During the flight, I watched The Anchorman. Tried playing a few games, they’re all Gameboy Advance games. Meaning, most of them sucked.


The first scenery that greeted me when I stepped out the plane was a huge mountain, grayed out by mist/cloud. Impressive. Then the rest of the day, boss brought me around places sightseeing. We took the ferry across to the Hong Kong island, visited Times Square and Star Avenue. The thing I like about Star Avenue was the view of Hong Kong island and that the road had little LEDs that slowly change into a different color. This is also a place where people, hoping to strike big in the entertainment industry, start out by performing here.


Day 2:
Anyways, I’m writing during my lunch break. The food here is nice. The weather is cooling, it’s like whole of Hong Kong is air-conditioned, unlike Paris, where it’s in a freezer. Some places remind me of scenes in both Ghost in the Shell movies. First thing I get back is watch again the first movie.


Continued…


Lots of confusion among my boss, me and the 2 guys assigned to help/train us. Basically, we want to import 2 sets of records into a database and link them up. But there’s no link between the both of them. We ended the discussion by just agreeing to come up with dummy data just to start programming and continue.


After work, we met up again with my boss’s friend, who was happily married to a very rich person. They bought their home up in the mountains of Kowloon, about 1.8K square feet, $18 million hong kong dollars. [X|]


Long story short, she brought us to her home where I helped to set up her printer on 2 computers and troubleshoot her internet connection. Then had a nice home-cooked dinner, and she brought us out for desert at a famous small restaurant and then up to The Peak. The top of the tallest mountain of Hong Kong I think. It’s freezing up there.

Let me tell you about the Gil Farmers

Long long time ago, in the southern province of China, there lived a bunch of
people who take shifts so they could camp a Notorious Monster 24/7.


Why did they do so? Because this NM drops an Archer’s Ring which can be sold
at the Auction House for up to 200,000 gil. And why do they seem to need these
gil desperately? So they can sell it to a company called IGE for food, and IGE
then sells those gil to other desperate people for real life money.


This results in farmers getting greedy and jacking up the prices to a
possible 500,000 gil. Then desperate people who are lazy to earn that amount of
gil then buys them from IGE, and frustrates a huge population of FFXI players
who refuse to pay
real-life money every month, just to spend in-game money that are again, bought
with real-life money
.


Anyway, knowing the fact and even though I had been warned, I attempted to
camp Stroper Chyme for those Archer’s Rings. I needed the accuracy boost so as
to land more hits during fights. Upon reaching the area where it spawns, there
was a gil-farmer, easily identifiable by his weird name and another Japanese who
probably shares my purpose.


Last night together with Evasama, out of about 10 spawns of Stroper Chyme, we
only managed to grab 2. The ring didn’t drop. I heard it had a fucking low drop
rate, perhaps 1-2 a full day’s worth of Stroper Chymes. I was mentally prepared
so I didn’t end up too frustrated from losing the NM to the gil farmers.


Moral of this blog entry: 24/7 NM camping for the purpose of earning real
life money is bad mmkay?