Wise words often say, "Choose your battle wisely, pick the battle that you can win." So, does that mean, when you keep losing a battle, is it a sign to hold on, to persevere, to wait, to be patient? Or is it a sign to accept defeat, step back, let go of that battle, and pick another battle that you can win?

When 3-megapixel Sony Ericsson K800i seems like the best in market for camera-snappy user like me, Nokia launched their latest 5-megapixel N95, and here are the comparison on their camera super-prowess I tried in office this morning.


Taken using Sony Ericsson K800i


Taken using Nokia N95

For the positive side, it has dual slider design, 5-megapixel, GPS (read not GPRS) with Singapore and Malaysia map (need to buy separately I think), and all the latest goodies from a phone. It is also surprisingly very light considering all the features that it has. Help yourself with all the good stuffs to read.

On the negative side, it IS SLOW!!! Loading the picture taken took ages to load. The first time I tried the camera, when I pressed the shutter, instead of taking picture, I saw black screen for a few seconds followed by a white screen with NOKIA word on it. Well, apparently, it hung, and restarted itself And last but not least, it IS EXPENSIVE. $1,148 with contract in Singtel or $1,220 without plan in MobileSquare.

Honestly speaking, how many of you EVER key in the WRONG PIN when you visit ATM to withdraw money, raise your hand Okay, this evening, I wanted to withdraw money from ATM. So, as per normal, I slotted in my bank card and keyed in my PIN. We all know that DBS ATM PIN is six digits long, let's say my PIN is 041203, so I keyed in 0-4-1-2, and *bam*, before I key in my fifth digit, before I hit any Enter key, suddenly the screen loaded up with the menu containing withdrawal of $50, $100, $200, and other menu items on the screen. So, I pressed $100, seconds later, my card came out along with 2 pieces of $50 notes. Now, something seems wrong here.

I tried again, slotted in my bank card, key-in 0-4-1-2, and *bam*, the same menu appeared. I cancelled, slotted in my bank card again, this time I keyed in 1-2-3-4, and I was greeted by the withdrawal menu screen again. Curious, I tried Account Balance Enquiry. It said my PIN was incorrect. Okay, not so bad. I didn't have time to test further as people were queuing behind me and my colleagues were waiting for me, but this raised a few questions on ATM PIN security.

First, I *hope* but not totally convinced that I can't withdraw money after I key in 1-2-3-4. That's the scenario I haven't tested. Second, even if the ATM validated the first four out of the six digits of my PIN, the fact that it didn't do TOTAL validation was wrong. In the world where security in banks are supposedly exemplary, where two-factor authentications are implemented everywhere, but if the day-to-day stuff of validating ATM PIN are not taken care diligently, my confidence on bank security is shaken now.

If you happen to be part of DBS ATM-Security team reading this post, please look into this urgently. Thanks.

It's hard to forgive, no matter who the person is on the other side. Let alone if the person is someone who have hurt you so much, it makes the "giving forgiveness" action so much more difficult, if not impossible. Jesus has taught us that, He has shown us how to do it, to pray "forgive them Father as they do not know what they are doing" when the whole world has hurt Him, has rejected Him, and had nailed Him to the cross. That IS true LOVE.

In one sermon, it was mentioned, the true test to our character is not when we do good to someone who is good to us, it is when we do good to someone who repeatedly do bad things to us. It is not when we trust someone who is trust-worthy, it is when we trust someone who repeatedly disappoint us and betray our trust. It is not when we love someone who is loveable, it is when we love someone who repeatedly hurt us and reject us. It is the true test, the ultimate test, because if we do good to others who are good to us, if we trust someone who is trust-worthy, if we love someone who is loveable, what difference we are to others out there?

Now, that brings me to the last point I ponder two nights ago, if we do all those, are we being faithful? or simply being stupid? Is the line between those two quite thin

Currently feeling: sick

It has been more than a week I had this sore-throat, and the day before yesterday I started to catch all kinds of "common" sickness, flu (quite bad now), cough (a bit), heaty-inside (panas dalam, apa seh Inggris-nya?), and yesterday probably a bit of mild fever. I have been drinking lots and lots of water whole of yesterday and today, because every 15-20 mins, I will feel that my throat is very dry. It has a known side effect usually known as going-to-toilet hahaha.... I left office close to 9.30PM by train (it was ridiculously impossible to get taxi at this time). This morning, I woke up feeling not very well, so I stayed at home for a while. 11 AM plus, I went out from home to office and met Esther for lunch. It was a busy day as usual in office, talk after talk, discussion after discussion, email after email, and I did find a bit of time in between to help my team-mates to fix some bugs. This latter exercise has many advantages: it helps team-mates to clear their bugs faster and hopefully to leave office earlier, it gives me an opportunity to read their codes and make sure that they are up to the high standard expected, and finally it helps to keep my analysis and coding skills sharp hehehe....

I'll try to sleep earlier today, and get prepared for Good Friday tomorrow.

Update: I almost went to bed just not at 12AM, but it's now 2.30AM in the morning, and I'm still chatting on MSN with Cyla. Ok lah, time to ZZZZzzzzzZZZzzzz........ This time for real ....

As part of my whole computer backup plan, I went to Simlim to get a Western Digital MyBook 320GB for $195. The cheapest available I found was the one sold by Laser Distributor at level 5. Other shops I went to generally sell at $199 or $209. There were many options I considered before I decided on this one. There are Seagate External Storage and Maxtor Basics Personal Storage editions, but both covered only by 1-year warranty. For the price, 300GB Seagate External Storage costs $179 and 320GB Maxtor Basics Personal Storage costs $188. To add less than $20 for Western Digital MyBook in order to get extra two years warranty, I thought it's worth the price Of course, there are always DIY options available, with hard drives from Seagate generally backed by five-years warranty, but the warranty for its external casing was a mere six months. There are better casing with up to one-year warranty, but the casing itself cost $79. After much consideration on all my options, that's how I decided to get Western Digital MyBook Essential Edition 320 GB.

Now, with all the artillery ready, it's time to devise a solid backup plan for my computer to ensure that should disaster happen (like hard drive crash), I won't lose much of what I have.

First, the drive came pre-formatted with FAT32 file system. It has limitations such as 4GB-file size limit, so I formatted using NTFS file system.

Second, not-so-important step, I like my hard drive to have nice big icons. So I found large enough image of MyBook and convert it to icon file using online ConvertIco. And here how it looks like in My Computer.


My Computer Hard Disk Drives

Third, I downloaded SyncBack (free) to take the responsibility of backing up all my stuffs automatically. It's a superb freeware, and was highly recommended by lots of people in the forums.

Fourth, plan for the best backup timing. After thinking through few options over the 90 minutes I watched Manchester United lose , here are the tentative backup timing plan. All timings are suited to my lifestyle, so your timing may vary.
1. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 12.30 AM, it'll start backing up, and after it has finished, it'll Hibernate my PC. The idea here is on weekdays, I should be on bed by 12.30 AM, and after finishing its job, it should save energy by turning off my PC.
2. Every Saturday and Sunday, at 12.30 AM, it'll do the same thing, with the exception that it will NOT hibernate my PC. The idea is because on weekends, I generally use my PC beyond 12.30 AM, and I didn't want my computer to suddenly hibernate at 12.40 AM when I'm busy playing games :p
3. Every Monday at 12.30 AM, it'll still do the same thing, it will NOT hibernate, but for different reason. I do expect myself to be on bed at 12.30 AM Monday morning, but I scheduled my PC to do two things on Monday. First, every four weeks on Monday at 1.30 AM, PerfectDisk will defrag my disk to ensure that the performance of my disk is in tip-top condition. At 5 AM after that, Acronis TrueImage 10 Home will take over to image my Windows Vista partition and store it in MyBook. The time given should be sufficient for each process to finish, one hour for backup, 3.5 hours for defragging disk, and 2 hours for system image until I wake up the next morning at 7 AM to simply turn my PC off, then go to work hehe...

It seems like a complicated plan, but with $200, a freeware, and 15-20 minutes of my time to plan backup timings, if everything goes as planned, the most I lose from my data is 24 hours worth of data, and one-week worth of changes in my operating system. Hardly a disaster that I cannot recover from

Hopefully this guide will help you to do your own backup plans, and with small one-time cost and time, you can be saved from those disastrous days when your hard drive just crashed without warning, and save yourself from anxieties of losing all my photos, documents, files, anything you may have on your PC, not to mention the days and nights needed from rebuild your machine from scratch.

There are two kinds of persons in this world: The first one, no matter challenged by how many problems, will say "There will be a way out". The second, even when shown a way out of problems, will say "There will be other problems there too".

Which one are you?

Remember the Samsung phone that I brought to Melbourne end of last year, and it decided to just fail on me, refusing to connect to any network? I was testing it for a while after I came back to Singapore and it seemed okay, I could use it as per normal, until shortly before Chinese New Year time, I tried it again. I was thinking if it works well, I'll bring it back for my mom to use. Well, that night, it refused to connect to the network again. So, two weeks ago, I brought it to Samsung for service. Yesterday morning, I collected it and tried it for the whole of yesterday (while still bringing my Sony Ericsson K800i out, in case). They told me they replaced the Power Amplifier, the Radio Frequency IC, and a Crystal (not sure what the latter means). My phone doesn't seem to be the only case, I had a friend whose Samsung phone also lost signal intermittently, I overheard a girl talking to Samsung customer service on the same problem. I latter approached her and told her "hey, I got the same problem too."

All in all yesterday, it was working fine, I could make phone call, receive call, send and receive SMS, but but but .... as one problem was solved, another problem cropped out. The phone rebooted on me, no warning, no hesitation, for at least FIVE times just yesterday alone.

And that's it for me, I'm not going to test it again, I'm going back to my trusted Sony Ericsson K800i, and this Saturday, I will bring the phone to Samsung service centre again, and I think I'll make myself heard there. I was so so so so dissapointed with Samsung now. For handphones, Samsung goes into my black-list together with Motorola.

I put my Sandisk Cruzer Micro 4GB thumbdrive into the pocket in my jeans last week, and the jeans was subsequently thrown into washing machine for laundry, along with my thumbdrive in it.

So, after going through water, spinning, rinsing, detergent, etc., luckily my thumbdrive came out the washing machine okay. It is perfectly fine, working as expected, with no sign that it has been "washed" before, well, maybe except that it looks a bit cleaner now haha....

I told ya it'll be okay

Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat Macavity after it has started using the No 331 several mornings a week.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings - he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.

I didn't know cats are that smart haha.... then, do cats need to pay bus fare? hehe... :p

Read more ...

I have been reading lots and lots of reading materials today and yesterday, online, articles, PDFs, books, tons of stuffs, and today I learned quite a couple new words:

Atrocious: –adjective
1. extremely or shockingly wicked, cruel, or brutal: an atrocious crime.
2. shockingly bad or tasteless; dreadful; abominable: an atrocious painting; atrocious manners.

Bushel: –noun
1. a unit of dry measure containing 4 pecks, equivalent in the U.S. (and formerly in England) to 2150.42 cubic inches or 35.24 liters (Winchester bushel), and in Great Britain to 2219.36 cubic inches or 36.38 liters (Imperial bushel). Abbreviation: bu., bush.
2. a container of this capacity.
3. a unit of weight equal to the weight of a bushel of a given commodity.
4. a large, unspecified amount or number: a bushel of kisses.

See what more will I learn tomorrow.

Peter asked Jesus: "How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Peter was erring on the side of magnanimity, for the rabbis in his day had suggested three as the maximum number of times one might be expected to forgive.

"Not seven times, but seventy-seven times" replied Jesus in a flash. Some manuscripts have "seventy times seven", but it hardly matters whether Jesus said 77 or 490: forgiveness, he implied, is not the kind of thing you count on abacus.

[excerpt from a Philip Yancey book - What's so Amazing about Grace]

Many of us uses Winzip for archiving solution in Windows. Winzip has never been a freeware, and it's good to see Winzip giving out free copies of Winzip 11 Standard now. You need to do certain things, signed up with another company, or register yourself or buy something. I registered myself, and chose eBay, made a bid (here's the good part: you don't have to buy anything. The terms mentioned buy or bid), and few days later I got the registration key for Winzip 11 Standard worth US$29.95 in my mailbox.

One more licensed application in my computer, and one more small step towards 100% licensed software in my machine
Hurry, while it lasts!!!

Get Winzip for free.

Currently feeling: pusink :S