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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.

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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.

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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?

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Struggling

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!

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DRKs aren’t given up on yet!

Last night, as I was about to change my Job to a level 10 Thief in Windurst,
I received 2 tells from different parties, both interested in having me for an
exp party. [XD] I’m happy because I wasn’t even in Jeuno and I didn’t have my
“Looking For Party” flag up.


The first one came from a Japanese player and with my meagre understanding of
Japanese, I was able to understand that he/she was asking how much exp I need to
level up. But she had to reject me because I was close to levelling and if I
did, the experience points gained per kill would drop significantly because the
monster would be of lower difficulty once I levelled.


The second one was from an American, who mistook me for a Dragoon. This is
the second time I got mistaken for a Dragoon in a week. Probably because the
acronyms for Dark Knight and Dragoon are DRK and DRG respectively. Anyways,
I got invited into the party and because at that time, we were
desperate for a tank so a level 57 Paladin was invited. We had a huge exp hit
but it didn’t matter to me (since I was close to hitting level 55) nor the
2 Japanese players already in the party.


Before we set out, I bought a Royal Knight’s Chainmail for 70K gil, thinking
I could finally get out of my Brigandine this evening. But alas! Our Bard
disconnected and without her Madrigal’s, my attacks keep missing. Absorb-AGI
helped only for a short duration and weakens as time passes.


Everything ended with me, 240 exp points to next level. T_T


Still, the fact that I got 2 invites despite being in a different place and
no intention for an exp party that night made me glad. I might hold back
levelling Thief for a while and see how it goes.