Dear Dreams – Page 111

Christmas Eve 2008 – BBQ and Movie

Christmas Eve fell on Wednesday and this time was something different from the usual staying-at-home or hanging-out-with-volleyball-buddies. My family had a barbecue session at East Coast Park in the late afternoon but things did not go smoothly.

I was lazy and it was never my intention to join in the fun if not for my younger brother preferred the family togetherness and that it was a fresh experience. My brothers did the packing of equipments.

The weather was a total disaster. When the dark clouds first sent a warning, we defied proceeded with plan. We boarded bus 196 and alighted at Parkway Parade to shop in the NTUC supermarket to get the food and some other items. It cost me nearly fifty bucks.

Next, we strolled across the underpass and decided on an empty barbecue pit since all the sheds were taken up. I did not feel secure at first and I knew I was right when a group of youngsters came over to tell us they had booked the pit. We quickly evacuated to one of the empty tables.

It started pouring and we set up the tent before moving the lighted tray over to the entrance. My elder brother’s gears were enough to set up a tiny tentage to house the fire and food. I was glad that I did not bring the better ground map along because the current one was pierced at the four corners. We started mocking at the group of youngsters who “snatched” our pit away.

Soon, we realised that we had made a wrong move of setting up our big ground sheet below our tent. The cheap tent was not waterproof and even though it was good enough to block the rain, any contact with the cloth would cause heavy water diffusion. Our pants started to get wet and it was yet another underwear-wet-wet experience.

I was yearning to get home but it was good enough that I was simply enjoying the serving of food with my mum. The amount of food was just nice for the five of us. As the rain got smaller, my mum, elder brother and his girlfriend went to the MacDonald’s and they got back with another ground sheet to put inside the tent and a new pant for me. Then we started to finish the remaining delicious food.

We waited for the rain to stop before packing everything up and walked back to Parkway Parade to catch bus 196.

We started taking shower once we got home. They planned to catch a movie and eventually managed to persuade me to join in. My main hesitation was the problem of taking a cab home after the movie since we had five persons. They proceeded first to Tiong Bahru Plaza to get the tickets while I accompanied my mum over after taking my bathe.

The Yes Man was quite a good movie. It somehow reflected on my life on the number of opportunities I had given up. I said “No” more than “Yes” in my entire life and I had missed out a lot. I did not have a choice anyway.

After the movie, we tried to get cab but none of the drivers was daring enough to house in five of us and thus we decided to walk home.

Probably Last Volleyball of 2008

Tuesday night’s volleyball was a last-minute call-up. It was just nice for me to enjoy the game before my school’s commencement.

The night could be much better if my stomach did not give problems. The digestive system was on strike again and it was far worse than ever this time. The stomach stitch made me feel so sick. I dozed off in the evening a few times, as my body felt weak. I could have made it on time for the volleyball but I was sent to the toilet a few times before that.

I was coughing throughout the game and simply strengthless to do my brain’s bidding. Weitat was absent because he had lesson in his school and he reminded me of my next busy year. In the midst of the game, not everyone was friendly, like usual, and it was a great turn off to receive “black face” from the same side. I hated heroic dramas, which happened whenever there were “outsiders” around.

We lost all games and everyone was quite irritated over Jianhui’s comments to his NUS team even though he was quite right.

After the game, we went to Cineleisure to meet up with Weitat at the Hong Kong cafe. I did not take any food since the three PM’s lunch was not digested yet. The curry pork they took was very tempting.

Reinstall Windows

I reformatted my operating system around twelve hours ago after more than one and a half year. The old Windows was far too slow and did my system wrong. It did not help no matter how many registry cleaners and anti-spywares software I tried since windows systems were designed this way.

I left the computer running while I went to sleep and when I woke up at eight AM, starting to configure everything before realising I had two operating systems. Immediately, I realised what had gone wrong and had to reinstall the windows again, but I made sure I did a clear reformat before that. I went back to sleep but it was not easy even though I was very lack of the rest. Many weird dreams accompanied me throughout the two hours of nap.

The new operating system looked cool with many preinstalled software even though I was quite afraid that they might slow the system down; but everything seemed to work well.

The only problem I faced was the MSN Live version 2009, which I had tried a few days ago could not work after the reformatting. Everytime after I logged in, it would display error and if I were to close that window, MSN would log me off.

After surfing around, I realised there were some bugs with this beta version of MSN. There was no luck with solving despite downloading some updates stated in forums. When I tried to switch back to MSN 8.5, I realised the groups that I had set were messed up, probably because the latest version had its own “favourite” and “group” categories.

The most tedious software to install were PHP, SQL and Textpad and that was the main issue I did not want to reformat the system since half a year ago.

Reinstallation of Mozilla Firefox was not so bad with the use of the add-ons, FEBE and Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, and things were back to usual.

A Weekend on Websites

My weekend was spent mainly on websites.

Saturday night was rather busy with emails to reply while debugging of a blog problem; removal of Google AdSense eventually caused problem with a tagboard, and it took me hours to find a solution, however, not able to debug it. The aching on my right hand from badminton game a few days ago made the night even more tedious.

I had a few games of Condition Zero (Counter-strike), which was my only mode of pressure releasing source.

On Sunday, the touching up of the property site kept me awake until near sunrise.

UOW Timetable

My UOW’s timetable is out. First day of school does not start on 15th but 5th January 2009. It is ten days earlier than what I have planned and I’m so not-prepared.

Full packed week will definitely exhaust me since normal work is resuming on the same days.

Ten days is enough to accomplish many things and I probably can resume my work only a year later.

I need to do as many things as possible within this week!

Property Site for Portfolio

After hours of debugging, with countless brain cells being massacred and butts sweating like having fever, I managed to fine tune the property website, which was done around two years ago.

Since I started off with complete blue background and later, decided that visibility was better with white background, the borders of the pictures were yet left untamed. I did some improvement on the favicon and the bottom edge of the page. One thing which took me lots of time was smoothening of the contents’ frame; since it was made up of different slices of my original Photoshop design, piecing them up nicely somehow had to sacrifice some spaces. The most sickening portion of the campaign was the alignment of the contents when Internet Explorer behaved differently from Firefox, and it took me many trial and errors to find a perfect solution to display the site properly in both browsers.

Alas, I could confidently add the site into my portfolio even though many more improvements could be done.

http://property.sillydumb.com

Lunch at Anchor Point

On Friday, Jennifer, Daniel, Jingkun, Weitat, Elvin, Kevin, Mahani and I lunched out together. We went to IKEA but it was too crowded that we decided to switch over to the opposite building – Anchor Point.

The food court did not sell halai food and thus, we proceeded to the small banquet at the centre. I had a plate of chicken briyani and it tasted good.

Jennifer could not wait to find a place to sit down for tea but Elvin and Daniel had to hurry back to office. She decided to grab some buns from the cake shop but both of them had taken a cab back. The rest of us spent some time at the Billabong outlet to glance at the cheap stuffs but I did not get anything since my wardrobe was already full. Jennifer was very impressed by Weitat’s knowledge on shopping.

After reaching office, I continued with my website but realised I did not bring my thumbdrive at the end of the day.

Never Allow Jokes to Turn Sour Again

Some jokes are meant to be told directly. If you have someone else to relay the same jokes to another person, the effects may be opposite.

I have had it once and I would never want the history to be repeated.

Sometimes, things cannot be helped and we can only hope for the best that none of our friends has “itchy” mouth; it also takes some brains to convey words.

Do we have to guard against friends? Sometimes, we cannot deny phobia and jokes have to be filtered.

Orientation at SIM

On Thursday, Daniel and Jennifer went outstation; Kevin met up with his friends while Weitat had pizza with his students. Jingkun and I went to Tradehub21 for lunch together with Mahani.

We had the Muslim’s mixed vegetable rice and it cost me four bucks with the syrup drink. The food tasted okay. We went to Bukit Batok for Jingkun to vacuum his car before going back to office.

Badminton commenced as early as three-thirty PM. Dorothy brought her son, Joseph, along. We had Weitat, Jingkun, Meihoe and Mr Neo. Mr Ng arrived later. We had some problems for two rackets were spoilt when the strings decided to let go. Like usual, I had my last game with Mr Ng and the exhaustion extorted sweat from me. I went to bathe before waiting for a long time for bus 52.

After reaching SIM, I proceeded straight to the administration office to pay for my school fee. I was late for the orientation at level four. My name was not in the list since I did not pay up the fee earlier.

The lecture hall was small to my liking. There were only a few girls around. I noticed there were quite a number of groups around and somehow, I regretted not finding any friend to join in the fun. My greatest worry was when it came to group projects, I might not be able to get good team members. Alas, the FYP group was going to be selected by the school.

The briefing was dry and there were parts which I could not catch properly. There were people who reached later than me and one of them seemed to be a babe.

The talk ended at around nine PM and I had to cross the road over to wait for bus 75. It seemed like the same babe was taking bus at the same bus-stop. I was not luckier than that.

The journey home set lots of thoughts in my mind. The time spent on blogging each day and the number of blogs I had to update were far too time-consuming. There was somehow no time for my new projects, which had been delayed for more than a year. When school started, I might have to give up most or even all of them.

Nevertheless, another worry was my sleeping habit. I was used to sleep at late hours, which I had failed to kick the bad habit over years. Usually, I got sleepy during the evening after work and could take some naps, however, it was impossible when school started. It was impossible for me to take a nap at home since I had no bike or car and hopefully I would be able to find somewhere to catch a nap in the afternoon when there was no work.

At night, I reinstalled my MSN to test for the webcam and to my amazement, the latest version of MSN, MSN Live version 2009 was out. I would not have noticed it if the layout was not changed into a cuter style, but everything was larger than the previous one I was using. Anyway, I used to crack the MSN and thus, I was not very certain of the changes and improvements. Another obvious change was the status, which only allowed “Online”, “Away”, “Busy” and “Appear Offline”. Where was the “Out for Lunch” status? They could have taken out the last status, “Appear Offline”, so that the contact list would not become a deserted place like the olden days’ ICQ.

The Website Feeling is Back

Jingkun was on medical leave on Wednesday due to his ankle’s injury. Daniel, Weitat and Kevin joined me for lunch but since we had no car, there was some hesitation at first. The canteen’s only opened stall was the one which I had condemned and thus, I advised them to lunch out instead. Since the weather was hot, I was quite guilty over it.

We walked to Clementi hawker centre and the western food stall was on business for me. I ordered chicken cutlet for Kevin and Weitat while Daniel went for chicken chop. I prepared my coins to pay for my lunch because my wallet was “exploding” but the auntie collected the notes from Weitat when I insisted I had to pay for my meal first. The coins were shared among Weitat and Kevin and it made me guilty again.

Back to the office, I continued with my work. The boredom from doing George’s website design threw me into my own PHP project. I got addicted once again. Ajax codes were improved to “post” instead of “get”, which improved a lot on the security. Alas, time restricted my enthusiasm.

I spent the night with the website after clearing emails and dragged till quite late before going to bed.