Category: Life

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…

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.

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.

I’m getting stressed out by the CRM software I’m trying to re-customize. It’s
initial purpose was for sales people etc, and now I have to customize it for
hotel organizations to manage their properties, bookings, etc.

So far the API manual has been helpful and I’m starting to remember my VB6
basics. It’s weird how the web portals of this system are done in ASP.NET, and
the main program is also coded in a .NET language (just an assumption), but
the plugins have to be coded in VB6.

Anyway, I just finished a conversation with them (people who sold us the CRM
and supposed to provide training and support) and I made a fool of myself.
We spoke over skype, sort of a voip program. There was lag and I was caught
unprepared, so there was a long silence after the call was initiated and I am
left struggling to find my notes. I could hear giggling and laughter in the
background. Sigh… It’s gonna be fucking awkward when I meet up with them in Hong
Kong next Monday.

Somebody save me!

Sitex, IT and consumer electronics exhibition, has never interested me ever
since my first visit to one. There’s never any worthy promotions and stuff to
buy. But I went down yesterday just to accompany a friend to a Quake 3 match
with this supposedly, world’s number 1 female Quaker. It was a 10 minute match
and whoever beat her to 12 frags first will win S$1000.

Before the first round of challengers begin, we walked around the place and I
got to play Soul Calibur 2 on the XBoX. Used my favourite character, Isabella
Valentine (Ivy) and completed the game! Well, that’s because someone set the
difficulty to 1 I guess. For the first 5 rounds, the AI was practically standing
there not doing anything.

Buzz, the guy I went with, used to be Singapore’s number 3 quaker. I don’t
know how his skills would rank him now. By the way, skinny man just received his
enlistment letter. Good luck!

Back to this competition thing, he was the last person of the first group of
challengers. Unlike the other challengers, he greeted Ms X during the warmup
round. Ignoring the rules, he pulled down the console and made sensitivity
changes. Players weren’t allowed to change the controls in “the fucking interest
of time”. It doesn’t take forever to change the controls to suit the
player.

Anyways, of the first group, he’s the only one who survived longest, 8
minutes, and almost fragged her. Score is Ms X 12 – Buzz 0. Organizers awarded
him with a Razer Diamondback mouse. Worth about S$105. Check link 2 for
the thread at HTGK forums for some photos and info on later groups, where
someone managed to frag her once.

Link 1: The challenge.
Link 2: Thread discussion in HTGK Forums.

Photos, taken from Link 2.

Buzz

Ms X