Tag Archives: laptop

The Auntie, My Neighbour

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My auntie-neighbour brought her young foreign relative over with a laptop and woke me up from my nap. She spoke to me in both Chinese mandarin and dialect. As the elderly was completely IT illiterate, I had problem understanding what they wanted.
After some time, I thought the little girl wanted me to change the setting for her in order to connect to the internet. So, I asked them in Chinese to confirm. The auntie, upon hearing the word “change”, kept telling me they didn’t want to change the hardware. Yet, she kept repeating “change” in dialect.
I explained to them that when I brought my laptop overseas, I needed not change the configuration, which I assumed laptops brought over from other countries, such as Indonesia, needed not any special configuration as well.
I asked the auntie if she had internet connection at home and she answered no. Alas, I guessed the little girl just wanted to tag onto my internet network. I explained to them that my wonderful M1 network was down and would be down for only-pig-knows-how-many-days and thus could not help the little girl.
The auntie simply replied “You don’t know then it’s okay” as usual.
In fact, when her relatives came over, my family was always more than happy to entertain them…
I wasn’t sure of her actual thought but it kind of sounded like I was either stupid or unfriendly.
I think if you don’t know what you really want or can’t explain the problem, you shouldn’t just blame or think lowly of the person who can’t understand what you want.

Met up with Irwin

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[Saturday, 13 March, 2010]

Irwin finally returned on Friday and I met up with Irwin at Sim Lim Tower. After purchasing his books, we left for a big tour around the building, crossing over traffic junctions to realise we had made a wrong turn each time. Eventually, we got to the correct bus-stop and waited very long for bus 851 to go to Funnan Centre.

There was a mechanical robot car competition and the fact that all the students owned nice laptops made me envy them. We settled down at TCC for coffee before going to the Challenger. After walking around for quite some time, he decided to get a mouse and external harddisk. It was a long moment of relaxation with jokes and opinions.

The Swensen restaurant seemed to be replaced by Pizza Hut and therefore, we decided to hit on KFC. Next, we strolled to Central and rested at the Burger King restaurant. I could not detect any wireless network at all and we tried for quite long to see if there was any problem with my laptop. After giving up, I started showing him my work progress for the new site.

Next, we strolled all the way to my house where he boarded the bus at the bus-stop opposite.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com

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New but Not Really New Laptop

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I went to the IT fair at Expo yesterday with my younger brother, elder brother and his girlfriend. My stomach was bloated after the lunch at the Tanjong Pagar hawker centre. I regretted not being more determined to resume the visit to the Chinese physician.

There were many sweet salesgirls over there, which was quite distracting.

We were looking around at all brands such as Fujitsu, Acer, HP, Dell, Sony, and Toshiba… etc. In the end, my younger brother was captivated by a HP tablet laptop and a light weighted Acer normal laptop. He chose the latter since my elder brother advised we should just focus on getting whatever we wanted instead of being tempted by other interesting features. We chose the Acer one.

I wanted to get a simple laptop since I had to return the current one to my office after end of the year. My younger brother was using a powerful system he bought from NUS and he offered to exchange it with me for a lower-end laptop since he would only need one for his science report and surfing net.

肥水不流外人田，自家有水要珍惜。

I wanted to get the Acer laptop from a net friend who I realized was working there but somehow she was too busy to reply me the night before. I could not recognize her in the big exhibition hall and thus I gave up the idea because I would not want to go all the way there again.

After that, we walked around a sportswear warehouse sale where I saw a nice black Deuter back pack, compact enough to hold a laptop. It cost $79 and I gave it up, feeling the ache.

The MRT was crowded with people as well. We chose to go to the opposite direction instead, to the airport. My elder brother and his girlfriend decided on the Xin Wang Hong Kong Café and we had a long queue outside.

The waitress was cute and impressive on her memory. She had memorized the entire menu and thus, once we gave her the number of the food item, she could double confirm with us using the names. I ordered a plate of luncheon meat noodle for my throat was not feeling well.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com

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Hangover at Zaki’s Place

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Staying over at Zaki’s place, at Parc Emily, over Friday night was great. Basically, he made me realized true friends were always there to help no matter what. He was not even scare of me puking all over his place like how Hirman did the previous time.

I slept early on his bed. My head was spinning with pain and my mood was unstable. I woke up around twice at nine plus and three plus due to my phone. Other than that, it was one of the longest duration I had slept for the past few years.

He walked me to the coffee shop nearby to have roti prata together. Afterwards, he cleaned up the house while I played with his cat. Then, we walked from his place to Funnan Centre and I finally got to know how centralized his place was. I was tempted by an Acer laptop Aspire 4736 at the price of $1200.

Next, we went to Raffles’ City to do his groceries, where I picked up a few skills from him in selecting food and fruits.

I probably needed a few weekends of staying over there in order to recuperate from all these years’ fatigue, especially the recent stress. The tranquility was tempting.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com

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Tempted by Mini Laptop

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There are many things to worry about if you are living in a poor family. The lack of financial support poses great restriction in things that you want to do. Let alone that you cannot have a desired working environment at home, spending on essential items is sometimes refrained as well.

There are times you wish to help others but you have to look into the mirror at your own image and consider how shabby you are. Do you have the ability to help? Will reaching out your hands land yourself in greater trouble than ever?

Often, I wonder how most people of my same age would survive in future. Unless they are making big bucks, the normal spending trend has been too big. Standard of living has improved too much over the years that everyone is actually spending much more than ever. Overseas holidays, computers and cars are liability to financial status.

The recent temptation from Daniel and my lecturer, Dr Loo, to get a mini laptop is great. I will not receive a new laptop to replace my snail crawling one in the office and that new design work will come in soon, while the old freak has not passed me the recovery CD for the desktop on my desk after a month of polite request. I would need a laptop to do my assignments during lessons with guidance of my classmates and I just need one badly to work away from home.

Daniel’s new system cost around $600. It is much cheaper than what I have expected and is definitely within budget if I were to continue to work after March. The size is small and thus not bulky nor heavy, which is very portable. However, the small screen would definitely affect design work and that the system can never match a normal sized laptop. Would I get sick of working with a tiny screen?

I hate making big decisions. I hate the fact that everything I do now will affect my life greatly in future.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com

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Slow Laptop

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I was ready to sleep at three AM but Irwin seemed to be troubled and thus I accompanied him to chat downstairs my house until around six AM. I had two hours of sleep before getting up for work.

One of the most sickening things was that the office’s software was not updated enough to configure the new EHz-link card, such that I could not access into the office by myself until when the headquarter was ready to move on with the government’s trend and technology.

I received another two ang bao and I actually felt quite bad since I was already a grown up.

I tried new lunch together, which was the long-wanted nasi pataya but I was very turned off to the fact that inside the egg, it was plain rice instead of fried rice. The sauce almost made me faint. Other than that, the food was quite okay.

I had a pathetic day because I uninstalled the Photoshop CS3 from the laptop since the resource could no longer take the load. The system drive was actually too small; the free space had to have more than a gigabyte big in order for the entire windows XP to run at normal speed.

The research on my presentation was a disaster since the topic on cryptography was very dry for case study. I tried my best but with the slow system, keeping my eyes open was helpless.

I was quite tempted to get myself a laptop to use in office, for studies and to get out of my house to work at one of the cafes or fast food restaurants in future.

There was no badminton even though I had brought my stuffs along.

Weitat, Daniel and I left together without Jingkun. However, before we leave the gate, Jingkun had driven pass us without any signalling and we could see how rush he was.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com

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Give Me the Laptop and I Would Run Away

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It is amazing to work without a laptop for a person who is in the IT line. When the shared computer is being used, which happens often, you are left totally helpless.

Another big problem is that you cannot leave your work area to in search of a quieter place when you are actually facing bombardment every now and then. You may not be a professor but there is always something extra you know or do not know – they will just ask you questions.

However, the problem with some organisations is that they are too disorganised and things can never get done fast. In the end, everything drags and it takes more than three months to anticipate the soon arrival of your essential equipment.

Skai Chan @ http://sillydumb.com