wyred dot nu

On the last day of 2009, I lazed around the whole day. Lay down on my bed and read manga, played FF13. During the last few hours, I watched all 3 “Back to the Future” movies. Loved them back when I was a little boy.

On the first day of 2010, I lazed around too. Just didn’t felt like doing anything.

I’ve been looking forward to 2010. It has a cool futuristic feel to it. :D

Gah, just realized that back when I had a bad harddisk crash, my January 2009 entries went poof as well. Can’t recall what new year resolutions I’ve made and whether I’ve fulfilled them or not.

Since I’ve got my iPhone now, I’ve been contemplating getting a Mac mini just to learn how to write software for this phone. However, I am totally clueless on what software I should code out because there’s probably a software for everything, anything, out there on the app store already. It has to be something interesting enough to keep me going.

For career, all I can think of is finish up this CMS system I’m working on for my company. This should look good on my resume.

Acquiring a few more new skills are good too. Knowing lots of things broadens one’s opportunities. And by skills, I mean ones that can potentially help me in earning my bread and butter. Not like having the top driving skill at Initial D at the arcades.

Photography is an ongoing thing. I find that I’m bad at framing for portrait shots. That’s one area I need to brush up.

Japanese too, I’m still far from being able to have a proper normal conversation in Japanese. Although my previous Japanese teacher says there will be a lot of speaking in Pre-advance level, because my class has about 10~15 people, I only speak 1 or 2 lines each lesson. That’s fine. I can always do image training myself. :d

Ah yes, I’m going to try and get back into jogging now… Must make it a weekly thing!

A friend organized a paintball game last Saturday at Red Dynasty. This would be my first time.

It was pretty fun. And I love how it was drizzling, adds on to the mood.

But getting shot at isn’t fun, lol

Someone shot me from the side. First shot slid off my chest but left a bruise. The next 2 shots hit my side and hell they hurt. I thought we would be provided with vests but they didn’t. I regret wearing just a thin T-shirt.

I was so sure I was in a safe place before I felt the pain. Yea, they should call this painball.

We had 12 so we were split into 3 teams of 4, each team gets to play twice. Each round didn’t last very long. The objective is to bring 2 pieces of items back to base while dodging the other team’s bullets and preventing them from doing the same.

I think my bullets got stuck a few times. Like out of 10 shots, I could only see 2 coming out.

There was one occasion I saw a bullet flying towards me and I managed to duck in time.

If there ever was going to be a next time, I’m definitely going to wear thicker clothing.

After that all of us went to this friend’s home for a early Christmas party.

We played Cranium, good party game. Some of the activities involved having to sculpt something out of dough to get your friends to guess what it is. I did most of the sculpting and drawing for my team.

Some of the things I sculpted, and managed to get my team to guess correctly was: rocking horse, solar system.

There was once I had to sculpt out “holy cow”, so I made a weird looking animal, and held a halo over it, hahaha. My team couldn’t guess but a rival team member got it.

For sketching, some of the cards require you to sketch blindly. I got a card that says “seasick”, so I quickly drew a boat and a simple face with wavy lines coming out of it’s mouth. My teammates got this pretty quickly.

The only hard category was the one which require you to act out characters and hum out songs. As this game was initially designed for the US market, a lot of the characters and songs have never been heard of by many of us.

Later that night, I opened a small bottle of Otard cognac that someone brought. Drank like half of the bottle without mixing. I wanted to get drunk as quickly as possible. I did end up comfortably drunk and it was all good.

And I queued for over 6 hours for it.

I should’ve checked how long the queue was. And should’ve given up when it’s going slow.

But I stayed all the way just because I’m stubborn and optimistic. I thought I could go home by 3am.

I ended up leaving the place at 6am. I started queuing at 11.30pm. I didn’t expect such a huge crowd because the phone has been on sale in Singapore for at least a year?

The first part of the long queue ends when you arrive at the customer service counter (bottleneck #1) and you submit your details for a ticket number. A sales person immediately called for my number once I got the ticket. I thought my ordeal was finally going to be over when she directed me to another long queue which is for payment (bottleneck #2).

Then somewhere along the queue, there were 2 M1 girls helping customers apply the screen protector to the newly bought phones. So I too bought screen protector when making my payment and joined the queue.

And there weren’t seperate queues for those who pre-ordered and those who didn’t. I’m assuming there were people who didn’t pre-order in the same queue.

A friend of mine posted his honeymoon photos on Facebook. They went to Spain/Italy for around 3 weeks.

While browsing through those photos, I remembered how 10 years ago, both him and me were studying for our O level exams together.

Warm afternoon but windy. At the study benches. After all our classes have ended. Sometimes we would take a nap and I still remember him drooling over his textbook.

Fast forward to present time, he now runs his own design company, happily married and owns a vehicle. While I still work for someone else, live in a small house, no car and have accomplished nothing worth boasting.

I know it’s silly to compare other people with oneself but I feel that only applies to pessimistic people. I’m a mix of both.

I began to think about the differences in our lives which lead to our current situations. The things we’ve done and how we’ve spent the last 10 years.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what he’s done in the last 10 years but I’m going to guess anyway.

For him. Back in our polytechnic days, I remember he switched courses and sort of wasted 1 year, then finished it in 3 years. Then he has to serve National Service for about 2 years. Which leaves him 4 years to establish what he is today, a boss of his own company. I’ve seen some of his work and they are really good.

For me. I finished my course in 3 years, thereafter I took a 6 months break living a Hikikomori lifestyle. Learned a bit of PHP, then went job hunting. Worked in the same company for the same boss for 6 years for average salary.

Throughout my working years, most of my spare time went into FFXI instead of learning new things. Turned down social gatherings with friends and colleagues. All that’s in my mind at that point in time wasn’t about my future, it was all FFXI.

I’m currently reading a Japanese book about “Net game addicts“. Bought it for reading practice. Reading about the lives of different Japanese people who were addicted to online games. Some dropped out of university. Some neglected their health so bad they got hospitalized.

There’s one chapter about a young addict who says he lost all his youth to net games. All he does now is work random part time jobs. Has low income but enough to meet his daily needs.

Recently, I can’t help but wonder if life would’ve been better if I’ve never played FFXI. Could I be drawing a higher salary, driving my own car, living in a larger apartment now?

Some good things have come out of it though. Friends from all over the world. Having fun while saving money. Acquired natural reflexes when seeing the word “Radiant” somewhere else outside the game.

Still, if anyone asks me if they should play MMORPG, or show interest in one, I would advise them not to. Unless it’s someone with no ambitions at all.

P.S. I still play FFXI, and I don’t see myself quitting at all. However, I’m no longer as addicted as I once was. I have control over it instead of letting FFXI control me.

Just came back from watching this movie.

If you’re an MMORPG player or Ghost in the Shell fan, you’ll immediately recognize where 2 of the concepts came from.

The part where the blonde chick turned out to be a fat guy, I saw that coming. Ancient MMORPG IRC joke. lol

Reason I watched it is because my friends wanted to watch a movie. They wanted to watch some Hong Kong (HK) movie and I don’t like to watch HK movies unless it’s as epic as Infernal Affairs. And sadly, there hasn’t been any HK movie as good as Infernal Affairs since it’s release until now.

So to make the most out of my money, I requested that we watch Surrogates. And also because I was curious what the whole story and plot would be about.

So since the concept isn’t new, the plot turned out to be something that’s been re-used, the only thing left that made my money worth were the action scenes.

Had a short chat with a JP friend in-game in FFXI. I’ve not spoken with him in a long time besides exchanging “good night!”s.

He says he’s going to Tokyo next year to work as a programmer.

And so I said to him, “Shall we meet in Tokyo next year?”. To which he agreed.

So yea, I’ve begun making plans for another trip to Japan next year!

I’m going to invite a few more people who’ve been in the same Sky LS as me, a few years ago, and who also stay near or in Tokyo. Want to try and form a party of 6. Haha

I’m thinking of going to the Tokyo Game Show 2010. But I also want to go there on a season that’s cold like my first trip there back in November 2007. I think that was just the beginning of winter?

This time, I’ll make sure to visit a “real” maid cafe!

If there’s one thing that FFXI (11) has taught us, it would be how to pre-empt things.

At every version update (VU), many people want to speculate things and make guesses at what Square-Enix (SE) will implement. A recent example I can think of is the materials needed for the new gobbiebag quests.

Many people bought up potential quest item materials before the VU and if they get it right, they make a quick fortune from selling those materials after the VU. Because the demand for them is so high it drives people to pay huge sums of gil to buy them.

Basically, at any possible money-making event, there’s always someone there finding a way to push up the cost of getting something done.

As FFXIV (14) draws closer, and as SE slowly release more news about the game, there’s already quite a number of people out there preparing for it. Forums and blogs, domain names and all have already been setup and prepared even before the game’s beta has launched.

There’s also groups of people forming end-game linkshells (clans) also. And look at me, I’m here criticizing 14 before I’ve even played the game!

I have this feeling that once beta launches, while most people spend their time enjoying the game, there will also be a lot of people finding ways to monopolize the economy in the game. There would be so much competition at various things that it would become stressful for me instead of fun.

I forsee a lot of people farming certain monsters for quest items making it difficult for myself to finish the quest. If SE makes a certain quest item sellable. Even more people would be there farming them so that they can earn gil from it.

Even though I’ve said all this, I won’t say that I will never move to 14 for sure. The bloomy (lol bloom) graphics sure look a lot better than the current Vana’diel. However at the moment, I don’t have the slightest desire to play 14 unless everyone in my end-game linkshell in 11 decides to move over. Love those guys.

Lots of work, to the point I had to work overtime till 9pm.

Somehow I feel that a lot of work was pointless because of the way some of the people in my office do things.

Inefficient, outdated.

Silly stubborn people.

However, I’m also in the process of forcing some changes into our workflow. For the sake of making work easier.

Each website we do, we have to copy our CMS system into it. It’s a lot of work to set it up. We have to create a MySQL database, etc.

So now I’m working on a new system where we just use 1 database for hundreds of our sites that run on our dedicated server.

From my experience in editing wordpress templates, I’ve come up with an single php file that does all the work. So all we need is to just call functions to get the data we need, and not write copy paste a long bunch of PHP codes and SQL statements that retrieve those data.

Once this project gets finished, I can cut down the effort needed for us to produce a CMS-enabled site by half.

Last weekend, after a mid-term Japanese test, I went down to Suntec to attend the Singapore Toy Games and Comics Convention. All I can say is there’s nothing much to see or do there.

Haven’t had time to slow down and laze on my bed. Hopefully I can have a break tomorrow…

My company just gave us a small bonus. I might go buy that 24″ widescreen Dell LCD monitor, that I’ve been eyeing for a long time, today after work.

PS3 Slim was announced recently. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time so it’s another good reason to get that HD  LCD monitor.

I’ve decided to sell off my old computer parts for some cash. There’s a bunch of stuff I want to buy by the end of this month.

As some of you already know, my secondary computer which I let it run 24/7 because I use it as a web server, had it’s core harddisk die. I suppose it’s because of poor ventilation which made the disk too hot.

So I’ve decided not to use it as a 24/7 computer anymore. It’ll just be one which I’ll use to learn Linux or maybe for lan parties.

I plan to get a new computer soon, an Intel i7 CPU with 3 sticks of 2GB RAM, to replace my primary computer which I use for gaming and photo editing. I’ll re-use the WD Raptors and HD4870 graphics card from my current PC.

Then the current one will become my 24/7 computer which I use for bittorrents and stuff. I’m used to having a computer ready for use. Always connected to the net, with my IMs and IRC running so I can stay in touch with my friends. A computer which I can remote control from work in case I need to access some files or test server connection.

Each of my computers have a 17″ LCD monitor. One of them has begun having problems which might indicate it’s going to expire soon. If I switch it off and on instantly, the graphics on the screen would go haywire. It needs to stay switched off for about 20 minutes before I can use it again properly.

But until it’s 100% malfunctioned, I intend to keep using it for as long as possible. My mum borrowed a huge sum of money from me recently to start a small business so I have no spare cash to go shopping.

And if it ceases to work, I’ll be getting a Dell 24″ LCD. The huge resolution is going to make post-processing my photos a lot more comfortable.

2 months and 18 more days till my contract with my existing mobile service provider ends and I’m going to switch over to Singtel simply because they have the exclusive rights to distribute iPhone 3G in Singapore.

Finally uploaded every single entry from my backup 1 year ago. I’ve lost about a year of memorable entries and treasured comments. I’ve managed to recover some FFXI related entries from TTTO too. But silly wordpress somehow doesn’t export the full entry in the RSS feed and I end up having some of them chopped off.

This blog is now running on my paid webhost which I purchased for TTTO. At least it should be safer in a data center right?

Right????

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BRB, MAKING BACKUPS AND THEN BACKUPS OF BACKUPS.

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This has been a painful experience to me. I’ve been wanting to get a NAS server to back up all my data before this shit happened but I kept pushing it back because of financial challenges. And then shit really happened.

Hate Murphy’s Law.

Once again, thanks to all my friends for all the concern and well wishes.