A Better Title

Dear Diary,

Ok. So I hate to say the wrong things. Even when giving out testimonials for my friends in Friendster, or writing an entry for my blog, or even instant messaging my friends. Sometimes I would pause for a few minutes, revising what I just said, re-reading it again and again and again and considering whether I would really say that or not. These before deciding that yes, I would actually say that, only to click “Send” and then thinking uh-oh… did I really say that? Did I really mean it? Will I hurt him/her? Will I only make our friendship bitter? Will he/she get my joke? How will he/she respond to it? Will we lose a friendship which we’ve built for years just over this? Will we be able to still remain as friends then?

But well, those things that you’ve sent are already over, aren’t they? You can’t possibly prevent the vast network of the Internet to get the message back–not without a proper tool or utilities, that is, something which are not really easily accessible to normal Internet users like you and me.

Speaking about Friendster and blogging, those services require you to log-in in order to use them. There are some programs out there which you can buy or download that allows you to remember the passwords to these sites. Internet Explorer and Opera even come with this tool by default.

So are they really good in preventing you from losing access to those websites?

Now, imagine this…

You’ve been using this excellent password manager for months, and have no complaints at all. Not only does it store your password to a particular site, it also has a built-in support of multiple users of the same website, and can even store your personal identification numbers such as passport number, identification card number, credit card numbers, and even your Internet banking PIN! Moreover, this tool is open-source. Having ploughed through the source code, you were sure that this utility is trustworthy; it will not re-transmit your personal information to anyone!

For a while, you were happy that this great tool will save you from unnecessary troubles when connecting to any sites!

Then the nightmare happened. You were sitting in front of your computer and your cousin, being only seven years old, were running around, playing with his brother, an six-year old cute, bouncy kid who can never seem to run out of energy. You saw them approaching, nearer and nearer to you and your computer, and before you knew it, your computer toppled off the table and on to the floor. The monitor and the power got disconnected and everything went blank.

After scolding your cousins, you brought the computer back on the table, and tried switching it on. It did. Great. But hold on. What’s that “Disk I/O Error” on the screen? Something is wrong. You restarted the computer. Same thing. You restarted the computer again and saw that the hard drive was detected normally. Then you went to the BIOS, and did a hard drive check.

A full minute passed with the screen not making any changes before a message appeared, flashing a proud “Hard Drive Failure” on it. Bummer!

Well, it’s ok. You don’t have too much data on that hard drive. And anyway you’ve been eyeing that 120 GB hard drive that your friend had been proudly showing off to you. This would be a great excuse to ask for some extra allowance from your parents. So you went to the store, bought one, and installed every single program you could remember you had on the previous hard drive.

Then you went to Friendster, wanting to post a bulletin board message asking your friends if they wanted a broken hard drive. The nightmare turned for the worse.

You’d forgotten your password.

Extended use of the password management tool had cleared your mind of any passwords.

But not to worry. There’s still this frendly “Forget your password?” tool which will send your password to the e-mail address provided when you signed up. There you go, with a few clicks, a message told you the password had been e-mailed to your Yahoo! address.

Great! It’s just now a matter of retrieving it from your Yahoo! e-mail address. So you went to the Yahoo! Mail log-on page.

Hang on… What was your Yahoo! password?

So you went through the same process you did with Friendster, and was told that your password had been sent to your Hotmail address.

Very good, until you realised once again that you didn’t remember your Hotmail password either.

This story is obviously exaggerated. And anyway in some online services you can actually change your password on the spot by providing them with some legitimate, private information. But it almost happened to me once. I forgot the password to use for my FastMail e-mail account. I used the “Forgot your password?” feature and the password was sent to my Yahoo! e-mail address. Luckily long before I started using Opera’s password manager utility, I had always signed in to my Yahoo! Mail by typing the password every time, so it stuck in my mind.

Do you have any stories involving password managers? Share it with us!

Always remembers,

bcc

Dear Diary,

http://fridayfive.org/

None this week!
Bugger!

Friday Fiver,

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Dear Diary,

Given two choices on your career: One which you have a passion in but your parents object, and one which you might like and your parents don’t mind. Which would you choose?

According to an excerpt of a success tips book that I recently read, you can be successful if you work in things that you know you like. Plus, you’re having fun instead of being ‘forced’ to work. There’s no point doing something that you don’t like and stay there like an idiot. Not liking your job only means that you should change.

In my case, the first would be aviation, and the second would be taking engineering in university.

The problem is, I don’t know whether I like the engineering course I’m intending to take. It’s mechatronics stream under mechanical engineering. It does look interesting to me.

Or maybe I should take up aerospace engineering instead… But it doesn’t seem to be available in Singapore… An option if I were to take this is to go to Australia and join my brother there.

Sigh…

Confused,

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Dear Diary,

Sigh… Life is getting really boring again. I really have nothing to do here. Shall I go back to Singapore to get a job? But isn’t it a little too late now? By the time I get the work permit and stuff, it’s already getting near to the start of university term.

And I can’t get the same pleasure that I used to get the last time when I chat with my friends this time. Somehow…

Is it just me? Or is everyone else experiencing the same thing?

Why? Why? Why?

Upset,

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Dear Diary,

If you…
1. …owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
Indian food…

2. …owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Computer stuff

3. …wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Science fiction (had a dream of doing it a couple of times but I always gave up after three or four paragraphs. My record was three pages)

4. …ran a school, what would you teach?
Maths or Physics

5. …recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Fusion of classical and pop/techno

Yours truly,

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Dear Diary,

For a boring day at home, it was fine, just as usual. But for a birthday, it was boring… For the first time, my birthday greetings went fully online, either through Instant Message, or SMS. Maybe I’m like those organisations who go fully online for their admin work, something like JAE for NUS and NTU. Hehz…

And I didn’t even do anything special this time. No treating of friends. No celebrations. No weird stuff being done. Nothing. Just my usual flight on MS Flight Simulator (I tried going from Jakarta to Bandung via Puncak by following the roads), and my usual internet hanging-out. Anyway there’s nothing much to do here.

Sigh… Oh well… Here’s a song. Liked the catchy feel to it. Sorry, it’s in Indonesian… And no, I’m not in love yet.

Yours truly,

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Dear Diary,

I just found out that the character on my keychain (the one I called Japanese-cartoon-character-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten in my earlier post) is called Badtz Maru… Glad that I finally find out…
On the other hand, I read this article on Straits Times about three armed robbers who fled Malaysia and hid in Pulau Tekong. I think they’re quite stupid… What do you think? Click here for the article…

Yours truly,

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Dear Diary,

Here’s my cyborg name. What’s yours? Check it out at http://www.cyborgname.com/

H.E.N.D.R.I.: Hydraulic Electronic Neohuman Designed for Repair and Infiltration

Yours truly,

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Dear Diary,

My first Friday Fives. Fine, it’s not Friday today, but at least I’m contributing something.
1. What was the last song you heard?
Beyond The Sea - Robbie Williams.

2. What were the last two movies you saw?
Love Actually, Matrix: Revolutions.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
McDonald’s Cheeseburger Meal at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta McDonalds outlet, Tiger Balms and keychains as souvenirs.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
Finish up my Singapore travellogue, fly a couple of Singapore Airlines routes in MS Flight Simulator, complete last year’s newspaper cuttings, tidy up my belongings.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
Kresna (on MSN), Mum, Dad, Sis, Grandma.

Yours truly,

bcc

Dear Diary,

I hate computers when they start acting up… I was flying the Singapore - Frankfurt route on a 747 in Flight Simulator today, and it was just full of incidents! And the worst of all the incidents were caused by computer glitches!

On the first try at taking off, I realised I forgot to switch on the external flight tracking system. I use this system to automate my logging of flights. I could have used and did use manual logging before, but due to the number of information to be stored, I chose to let the computer do the work. Fair enough. My mistake.

On the second try at taking off, I used the autopilot to initiate the take-off roll. This is the part when the engine throttles are increased until the plane lifts off the ground. However, immediately after lift-off, the autopilot decided that the plane would go beyond the speed limit (which I have set at 250) at the current throttles setting. So the autopilot decreased the throttles, and therefore by the laws of physics, less force was generated by the engines and the plane settled back on the ground. This was detected by the external flight logging system as a landing. So the logged flight would not be the actual, full flight had I continued. So I decided to cancel the try, and do another take off. Fair enough. My mistake again. The plane wasn’t designed for automatic take off…

The third try at taking off was a successful one. So thirteen virtual hours later (which translates to approximately four-and-a-half real hours) I was on approach at Frankfurt airport. Everybody was happy until I attempted to land.

On the first try at landing, another plane could not clear the runway in time, so my plane had to do a go-around.

On the second try at landing, a 737 overtook (!!!) me during the approach to the runway. So I made a voluntary missed approach so as to give chance to the dumb computer pilot a nice landing.

On the third try at landing, the program crashed. No, the plane didn’t crash, I said the program crashed. That means Microsoft Flight Simulator crashed, and had to be restarted.

Unfortunately, this triggered something in the external flight logging system that caused it to detect a landing of the plane at the wrong airport! That means the whole flight I had done for the past few hours was not correctly logged in the system! I was so upset that I actually cursed at the computer for the next five minutes!

I hate computers when they start acting up… Don’t you?

Yours truly,

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