A Better Title

This song’s play count in my media player has been shooting up ever since I put it on repeat yesterday. It’s such a happy song, with a happy tune, with happy lyrics.

It sure brings a smile to my face, even as I face the last battle that I have to go through in approximately 9.5 hours time from now. It sometimes even made me unconsciously sing to myself when I’m studying, which puts a big question mark on my sanity.

The next time you see a guy going “la lalalala, lala lalalala, lala la lalalala” in NTU campus, you know who he is.

Read more for the lyrics.

(more…)

How I wish that human beings can be blessed with unlimited, selective memory, where only the nice things are remembered, and the not-so-nice things can be forgotten as easily as a click of a button.

I do wish to remember all the memories, maybe even write about everything, but for now, this will suffice: two nice songs I used to listen a lot.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - The Police

You To Me Are Everything - The Real Thing

Well actually, I found that the nicest arrangements of the two songs were “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by Flying Pickets (which also happens to be one of the best a cappella groups out there), and “You To Me Are Everything” by Budak Pantai (a local a cappella group).

Too bad I can’t find them neither on IMEEM nor YouTube. Buzz me if you want them.

In the perfect world, this is what is supposed to happen last night up to the two-paper combo I have this evening and tomorrow morning.

Monday, 21 April 2008

• 6 pm: Wake up
• 10 pm: Reach school
• 10 pm-5am: Go through character list for Chinese paper

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

• 6 am: Go home
• 6 am-12 pm: Sleep
• 12-4 pm: Go through book one more time
• 5-7.30 pm: Chinese paper
• 9 pm-3 am: Sleep

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

• 3-8 am: Revise Embedded Systems one more time
• 9-11 am: Embedded Systems paper

Of course, nothing is perfect. I finished going through the characters list by 6 am, but by then it was raining heavily and I didn’t bring an umbrella along. So I stayed in school, had breakfast, and by the time I reached home it was already 8.30 am.

I set my alarm clock to 12.30 pm, half an hour later than planned. Then from 9-10.30 am, I just lay awake on my bed, tossing and turning, trying to sleep but couldn’t. At 10.30 am, I decided to postpone my waking up time to 1 pm instead.

From 10.30-11.30 am, I still tossed and turned. For some reason I was really sensitive to external interference. Like when I put on my blanket, I felt warm, but when I took it off, I felt cold. When I raised the air-con temperature by one degree, I felt warm again, and so on so forth.

Even the slightest sound of my flatmate hanging his clothes in the bathroom (the sound is caused by the metal hanger hitting the wall which is adjacent to my room) put me in an alert state again.

Finally at about 11.40 am, I was just about to fall asleep.

Just about.

Then my handphone rang.

!#$&@&!&.

And from my experience, once I’m awakened when I’m just about to fall asleep, I won’t be able to fall asleep so easily afterwards.

I might as well don’t sleep now. Besides, my experience with the English language has been that my linguistic abilities performing better when I don’t have enough sleep. For some reason, the creative side of me is able to string together more complicated and intricate sentences better when I don’t sleep enough. I hope it’s the same with Chinese.

Now the only problem is that if I were to do that, I would be awake for more than 24 hours by the time Chinese paper ends. That will leave me in a severe shortage of sleep, and I doubt the 6 hour sleep I catered to give enough time for the last-minute Embedded Systems revision is enough.

Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

The good thing is that I can sleep all I want after the Embedded Systems paper, since my last paper will be on 29 April.

Meanwhile, I’m off to mug Chinese again.

Stumbled upon this while surfing randomly.

The reporter said:

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s all the news headline this afternoon, and after these messages, we will join our colleague [colleague’s name] in MetroMini, we mean Metro TV studio at Jakarta Stock Exchange. Stay with us.

This is Metro TV.

And this is MetroMini.

This is what she said (in Indonesian):

Pemirsa demikian headline news siang ini, dan setelah pesan-pesan berikut, kita akan bergabung kembali bersama rekan [nama rekan] di studio MetroMini, maksud kami Metro TV Bursa Efek Jakarta. Tetaplah bersama kami.

Now we know what mode of transport she took to work.

I was searching for scratchpad in Wikipedia for my EE4455 Embedded Systems revision. Unable to find it, Wikipedia suggested “dance pad” instead. It’s one of those multidirectional pads you dance on in the game Dance-Dance Revolution. Being a distracted Pisces, I clicked on the link, and saw that home-made dance pads can be made of PMMA, also known as acrylic glass.

Here’s how one PMMA molecule looks like.

And here’s a chain of them. Does it look familiar?

Does it look familiar now?

And this too…

It’s no wonder that they said home-made dance pads can be made of acrylic glass.

I’m not exactly a big fan of astrology. I tend to think that personality traits associated with astrology were invented to make profits for astrologers, because some of the so-called traits are so generic that it can apply to anyone. So people are practically paying astrologers to tell them something that can be applied to just anyone.

Just for the fun of it, I checked out the article on Pisces on Wikipedia, and see if the so-called traits apply to me. My comments are in bold. The traits are in bold as it looks nicer that way.

According to Wikipedia, Pisces people have these good traits:

• hypnotizing charm - *stares out of screen to hypnotize my blog readers*
• flexible - Not at all, I can’t do sit and reach…
• nurturing - I like to teach, though the reverse is not necessarily true
• free-spirited - Of course I’m free! Need to pay meh?
• romantic - Nope, never read Romance of the Three Kingdoms before
• happy - Yatta!
• sensitive - Don’t criticize me can?
• mystical - Nah…
• enchanting - Haha, seriously? *starts chanting instead*
• smart - No comments
• emotional - Who doesn’t have emotions?
• reverent - Nah, not at all
• creative - I prefer Apple iPod nano
• loving - Maybe
• easygoing - Quite easy lah
• fun - So fun meh?
• spontaneous - *combusts spontaneously*
• sympathetic - Pathetic? Yes. Sympathetic? Not very sure
• compassionate - To my compatriots? Perhaps
• intuitive - Common sense? Think so
• unworldly - I’m a god?
• wise - Haven’t removed wisdom tooth yet
• open minded - Not too bad I think
• caring - Yes, sometimes too much
• devoted - Too much for my own good
• liberal - Looks like it
• humorous - I’m that funny meh?
• shy - Too shy
• innocent - Of course I’m innocent!
• imaginative - Let’s see, what would happen if I don’t study…
• understanding - Really?
• perceptive - Perhaps
• tolerant - Too tolerant
• benevolent - Am I?
• self-sacrificing - Too much
• artistic - A bit here and there

Pisces people also have these bad traits:

• distracted - I’m supposed to be studying, for goodness sake!
• detached - I’m not having exams! What exams?!
• illusionary - There’s no exams, right?
• impractical - I need to print my notes if I want to study for exams, now! (4.46 am)
• gullible - My flatmate said there’s no exams for him… Means there’s none for me too?
• escapist - Let me just blog for a while…
• lazy - I think I’ll continue studying tomorrow
• erratic - Or should I study now? Oh look, nice game…
• aloof - I don’t care, I want to finish blogging before I start studying I thought aloof meant stubborn…
• moody - Why oh why does the library close so early and my CashCard expire at this time when I need to print my notes?
• fickle - Should I print my notes in the library, or the lab?
• confused - Library? Lab? Library? Lab? Or don’t print at all?
• depressed - Crap, exams really coming soon, how? I cannot finish studying like this lah… Die lah die lah, might as well don’t study at all…
• complicated - I don’t want to study anymore… But studying is fun. How?

What about you?

Pisces,
hendri

Ever since Tuesday, I’ve been having problems connecting to the Internet using my mobile phone. Being someone who is addicted to the mobile Internet, imagine my frustration when applications that require Internet connectivity stopped working, and websites that I could normally surf to were then broken.

Opera Mini gave out a “Failed to connect to the Internet” error. I was sure it wasn’t Opera Mini’s fault, since it worked flawlessly the previous day. It was confirmed when Google Maps gave out a similar error. I could surf “normal” websites (such as blogs) on the phone’s default browser, but those that require authentication (i.e. username and password) didn’t work. Outlook Mobile Access for NTU’s webmail kept on asking me for my username and password without letting me in, and Twitter refused to let me send an update.

One thing I noticed at that time was that there was a header and footer added to the pages. These belong to MobileSurf, a so-called enhancement for M1 users, which according to the website “intelligently customises webpages to fit different mobile screen sizes. It can also handle flash animation and multi-languages.” It “provides a friendlier way to browse the Web on your mobile phone, making it easier to go online wherever you may be.”

Friendlier way my ass.

First, I must admit that larger websites now load up much faster, and the feature no doubt will be useful for people who have older phones which can’t load normal websites (i.e. those not designed with mobile phones in mind) using the default browser. It can also be useful when the website is so large that it can’t be loaded in the phone.

The thing is that I don’t need these features, since I am already using Opera Mini. And judging by the way a lot of websites are now broken, it’s more of an annoyance than it is useful.

My hypothesis was that since the header and footer are added on-the-fly, these interfered with how the websites work. Not only that, Opera Mini and Google Maps require their own specialized data format to be transmitted correctly in order to work. Adding the header and footer might modify the data in a way that can’t be read by the applications.

It’s like trying to open a Microsoft Word document in Notepad. Yes the text is still there, but it will be garbled for any practical purpose.

I called the customer service hotline on Tuesday at 10.15 am, and immediately requested to disable the service. The customer service officer told me that the service was only launched at 9 am that morning, meaning that I was probably one of the first to complain about the service. At first she couldn’t pinpoint the problem, and promised to call me back. She did in the afternoon, and advised me that she would send the Internet connectivity settings to my phone.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem, and as I was busy doing other things, I didn’t bother to call back.

Until morning today, when I realised that I couldn’t Twitter from the phone, even using the default browser (reading Twitters is not a problem, which was all I did on Tuesday).

I called the customer service hotline again, and after being redirected twice to the technical support officer, I described the problem and he immediately walked through with me steps to rectify the problem. He adviced me to use the Sunsurf internet profile instead of the default Mi_World_GPRS in order to bypass the MobileSurf feature, and lo and behold, all the problems were solved.

Opera Mini, Google Maps, Outlook Mobile Access, and Twitter work again.

In case you’re having a similar problem, here’s the walkthrough to rectify it. I am describing the solution on a Sony Ericsson K618i. Adjust to your phone accordingly.

1. Go to Menu > Settings > scroll right to Connectivity > Data comm. > Data accounts.
2. Check that “Sunsurf” exists in Data accounts. If it doesn’t, go to New Account > PS data, and name it “Sunsurf”. Fill in the following data in the subsequent page:
   1. APN: sunsurf
   2. Username: 65
   3. Password: (blank)
3. Edit the “Sunsurf” profile, and verify/fill in the following:
   1. APN: sunsurf
   2. Username: 65
   3. Password: (blank)
   4. Login request: Off
   5. Allow Calls: Automatic
   6. IP Address: … (yes, those are three dots)
   7. DNS Address: …
   8. Security/authentication: PAP only
   9. Data Compression: Off
   10. Header Compression: Off
4. Go to Menu > Settings > scroll right to Connectivity > Internet settings > Internet profiles and select Sunsurf. Also go to Settings for Java and select Sunsurf.

The connection should now work properly. Note that if you like the MobileSurf feature, you can enable it only for the default phone browser by selecting Mi_World_GPRS under Internet profiles, while selecting Sunsurf under Settings for Java.

I hope this helps M1 customers having problems connecting to the mobile Internet after they introduced the MobileSurf feature!

Still an M1 customer,
hendri

I’ve just had a long talk with my supervisor. Basically, other than the relatively good news on my FYP (which I’m not comfortable with sharing), he also offered me an opportunity to do a PhD with his team.

On one hand, I have an option of taking scholarship, even be paid to take PhD, so financially it’s not so much of a problem. On top of that, PhD is like a gateway to higher paying jobs, those which utilize as much of whatever brain cells left in my head before they die. PhD is also one of the options that I’ve considered, albeit admittedly one of the last.

On the other hand, I’m currently feeling a bit sick of studying, so adding another 3 years seems to be quite a torture. And, knowing what happened during my FYP, there’s no guarantee that I can complete PhD studies satisfactorily. And… the biggest issue here is that I think it will be a waste of my 3 years if I don’t end up staying in academia, either as a lecturer or researcher. It also brings up the issue of overqualification, where my certificate may be too advanced for the type of job that I really want to do.

I have until next Friday to decide… Any inputs, anyone?

Ah, it’s 9 hours to my meeting with my FYP supervisor and I can only hope that he doesn’t screw me up down left right square square L1 R1.

Next week I’ll be having 2 project assignments due, Chinese quiz and oral test, and the following week is the start of exams. *stressed*

Let’s see if my Chinese is up to expectation…

你好！我姓温，叫温振昌。我是印尼华人。我会说印尼话，英文，马来话和一点儿中文。我今年二十三岁了。我住在裕廊西，新加坡。我的专业是电气电子工程。我念四年级。我将来想当工程师。我的电话号码是九九九。

我家有五个人:爸爸，妈妈，哥哥，妹妹和我。爸爸，妈妈和妹妹住在印度尼西亚。我的爸爸是商人。我的妈妈是家庭主妇。我的妹妹是学生。她的专业是建筑。我的哥哥住在澳大利亚。他是科学家。昨天是他的生日。

中文不好学。很高兴认识你。谢谢。

Geez, that was extremely difficult, even with the help of my lecture notes to verify the characters! Let’s see if I got it correct. According to Google Translate, what I typed was:

Hello! I surnamed Wen, called Wenzhenchang. I Indonesian Chinese. I will speak Indonesian, English, Malay words and a little Chinese. I am 23 years old this year. I live in Jurong West, and Singapore. My specialty is electrical and electronic engineering. I read the fourth grade. I will want to be engineers. My phone number is 999.

I have five family: father, mother, brother, sister and me. Father, mother and sister live in Indonesia. My father is businessman. My mother is housewife. I am the sister of students. Her professional construction. My brother used to live in Australia. He scientists. Yesterday was his birthday.

Chinese bad school. Very pleased know you. Thank you.

Hmmm, not so bad I think, though I still need a lot to brush up… It doesn’t help that I could only type the above because I know the Pinyin and I referred to my lecture notes. If I had to write all in Chinese characters, I’ll die… If only there’s such thing as Pinyin to Hanzi converter that we can use during exams… but chances are I’ll end up using all the wrong characters. Haha… Luckily we can write Pinyin for the exams.

Let me know if I got anything wrong k?

wenzhenchang,
hendri