wyred dot nu

So the Intel i7-860 CPU I bought 3 months ago performed very poorly with FFXI. It’s good on other games but just not FFXI. It performed worse than my E6600 at stock speeds. I had to disable HT and then overclock it to around 3.2GHz just to get it to perform the same as my E6600.

The main reason for buying this i7 is just so I can enjoy smooth gameplay on a game that I play the most often. Frustrated, I sold it away. It’s just silly that I paid so much for a CPU and didn’t get any performance boost at all.  The motherboard, CPU and ram all sold at a loss of around SGD$180.

With the money I got from selling those, I wanted to buy a Q9650 but it seems that the i3/i5/i7 CPUs are replacing the previous generation CPUs which makes it near impossible to find one anymore here in Singapore.

So I went and got myself an AMD Phenom 2 x4 965 (3.4GHz). And now I finally enjoy smooth framerates in crowded areas.

However, there were 2 minor problems.

Firstly, the stock heat sink fan (HSF) that came with the CPU ran at 6000 RPMs making it very very noisy. I had Cool n Quiet (CnQ) enabled. The fan plugged into the CPU Fan plug on the motherboard. The processor speed clocked down when idle. But still the fan ran at full speed.

So I went down to Sim Lim Square again on the next day to buy a 3rd party HSF. Got those huge ones, a Coolermaster Hyper 212 plus. A little troublesome to install. But once I got everything set up, it’s working good. I think the CPU got 5 degrees cooler with this new one.

Next problem is, the CnQ is pretty buggy. The CnQ clocks down the CPU in areas where there’s less load and when I move into an area with a lot of characters around, the CnQ then powers up the CPU back to full power. During this powering up/down transition, I get a noticeable lag in-game.

I did a bit of googling and found that I wasn’t the only one who noticed this.

Fixing this is as simple as disabling CnQ which I will do so tonight. Besides these 2 minor problems, I’m finally very happy to be able to get good framerate out of my favourite mmorpg.

I know the photoshopping on this is poor. But you get my point right?

After AFA09, K-on seiyuus, May’N and Danny Choo, each had their autographs up for auction.

I’m not sure if you can call it an auction because you can only bid once, and you cannot find out what’s the current highest bid.

But just for fun, I bid SGD$50 for K-on seiyuus’ autographs and SGD$20 (USD$14.20, JPY1308) for Danny Choo’s. I already have May’N's.

I bet if the organizers announced the current highest bid for those autographs, they could fetch higher prices for the autographs.

Because I actually won the bid for Danny Choo’s autograph, lol. But I’m going to assume there was a higher bid for it but that person didn’t show up to claim his prize.

"Identify and live your passion. The rest will always follow"

My colleague says the costs for framing this autograph is definitely more than SG$20, lol

As I spend more time with my iPhone, I love it more and more. So once in a while when I have enough real life stories to tell about my phone, I will share it on my blog. Stories of how it has made my life convenient.

Firstly, my iPhone is not jailbroken. I do know that only by jailbreaking this phone can I unlock it’s full potential. But due to warranty reasons, I shall hold back on the thought. Yes, you can still restore the phone to a non-jailbroken state and Apple will not be able to detect it. But what if the data cable port is damaged, or if some hardware on the phone fails and prevents me from restoring it? That’s one of my concerns.

But anyway, on with the story!

The other day I was at Liang Court. A friend was on his way to meet me from Funan mall. Although Liang Court is quite close to Funan, he forgot where it was. He too had an iPhone.

Instinctively, I started the Maps application on the phone. Dropped a pin on Liang Court on the map and proceeded to see if I could send this location someway, somehow, to him. And sure enough, I had the option of emailing him or sending him an MMS. I chose the email option and sent it to his gmail.

I've set my phone's language to Japanese for practice. The small button in the middle, right at the bottom is the one that allows you to send this location via email/MMS.

I then sent him an SMS to tell him to check his gmail. He did and the pin that I dropped on my phone showed up on his.

I did not know that this could be done. I just felt that it should be possible knowing how Apple can make good software.

And here’s another tip for those who regularly buy manga and have a lot of series to keep track. This can be done on any phone with acceptable camera performance.

Oftentimes I forget what’s the last book of a series I’m following. So I started keeping a list of manga of all the series I’m following and the next book I should be buying.

Which creates another problem, I forget to update that list sometimes.

So to remedy this, each time I buy from Kinokuniya, I arrange my books and take a photo of their sides with my phone. Then in future when I need to confirm if I’ve already purchased a certain book, I can refer back to these photos. It’s easy to take a photo, and it’s not that often that I will need to check back on my purchase history.

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.

Next on my shopping list is a PS3. I decided I will get one when they announced a slim version, but thanks to past experiences, I decided to wait till a special edition comes out. And I didn’t have to wait long until they announced a Lightning edition, which is the FF13 edition.

Bought it from Gamescore. Thank god they offered to bundle a HDMI cable with it. I didn’t have one and it didn’t occur to me to get one. If not I would have to spend a torturous night staring at a PS3 slim but not being able to play it.

Before I started playing the game, I went exploring the PS3′s home interface. God it’s beautiful.

Those sparkly things kept me staring for a while.

So did iPhone really change my life? Perhaps I overexaggerated because everything’s still the same.

However, a lot of things have become a lot more convenient for me. Here’s a few stories.

The other day I was shopping for manga at Kinokuniya. I decided to get I”s manga after eyeing it for a long time. But the thing about Japanese manga is that they don’t indicate if this is the last book in the series so I don’t know if this is the full set. I went online on my phone and googled for info, found a wiki page which indicated how many books there are in the complete set.

Next I wanted to know what was the issue of Macross Chronicle that had a very nice Sheryl Nome poster in it. I went to check out my anime club’s forum. I had earlier posted the issue number there but forgot what number it was. Sadly, it was sold out.

I have this little app that shows the estimated bus arrival times for bus stops in Singapore. I’ve bookmarked the 2 stops that I take to work and from work to home. I use this to determine if I have the luxury to walk slowly or not.

Having twitterific and facebook apps help me catch up on what my friends are up to while killing time.

I also now have a proper email reader, with push email by google. And I can also type in Japanese and email my friends in Japan now. Though Google’s sync seems to have problems with Japanese text. I have a silly workaround for that for the moment.

The calendar app also syncs with my google calendar.

There’s a nice and free pdf reader called Aji Reader. So my phone is also a “book” now. I can read while on the bus but right now I’m trying to break this frustrating sudoku puzzle at extreme difficulty.

Downloaded Japanese and english dictionary apps. Now I can look up words during my Japanese classes.

One of the default applications, a map, proves to be useful should I go to Japan again.

So far there aren’t any phones out there that meet my requirements. A fast, smooth and responsive UI, ability to type Japanese, check emails and surf the net.

To prove that I’m not an Apple fanboy, the next best phone I would recommend to friends would be the HTC Hero. 2 of my colleagues own this phone and it’s pretty smooth and good. I didn’t choose this because it didn’t support Japanese input, the screen size is smaller than iPhone’s and when I try to type really fast on it, it couldn’t catch up.

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.

The long wait is finally over.

My telco is finally selling M1 tomorrow, a midnight launch party. I think I’ll go grab mine and hurry back home because I have work the next day.

Now for some silly thoughts of mine.

1. I somehow believe using a smartphone will change my life. Which is why I’ve been desperate to get one. But several things happened which has delayed me until now.
2. Women who use smartphones (iPhone, HTC android phones) appear smart to me. Guys, just guys.
3. I’m going to set the UI to Japanese (if it’s possible). So most of my curious friends will have a hard time using it and then give up.