Yesterday was Vesak day, thus it was a public holiday in Singapore. I slept almost 1 AM, and only 5 hours later, yeah, 6 AM in the morning, Suwanto called me !!! He woke me up, a morning call to ensure I'll join in the cycling fun in east coast with a big group. I answered his call, mumbled a few words that I couldn't remember, and continue to sleep, hehe.... 15 minutes later my alarm rang (I intended to really wake up you know haha...), I turned it off and continue my sleep :p Another 15 minutes later Rachel called me, yeah yeah, again to wake me up. Slightly awake now, but I still mumbled on the phone. Well, thanks to three disturbances so early in the morning, I dragged myself into the bathroom and get myself prepared. Walked to Jurong East, took MRT to Eunos, took bus number 13, and by 8.30 AM, I've reached McDonald's at East Coast, not bad eh?

As my stomach was growling, I had to have breakfast. I asked for $2 breakfast which was not in the menu, the cashier told me that it was not available because yesterday was public holiday, bummer. Fine, I'll get a sandwich and milo, for $5.50 !!!! so expensive sia ....

Anyway, soon, a group of 22 persons gathered and started cycling away. We cycled towards Changi Airport direction, stopped at Bedok Jetty, stopped along the way to take photos. Once, when I was changing my bicycle's gears, the chain somehow got stucked between the gears and the metal body, and I couldn't pedal it at all anymore. With everyone already in front of me, I had no one around to help me. So, I tried, I pulled, I pushed, luckily about 3-4 minutes later, I managed to get the stucked chain out, and "assembled" them back to their gears, albeit with my right hand now so black and dirty from all the grease from the chains. After I managed to it up and running, I chased the group in front of me, with only one hand steering my bicycle. So long after I managed to chase my group of friends that I found a toilet, washed my hand, and chased my friends again hehehe....


Everyone who joined in the fun, and those who are willing to wake up 6.30 AM in the morning on a public holiday!!

After the calorie-burning exercise, it's lunch time to re-fill all those burnt calories hehe... We went to Marine Parade for lunch. I ordered a HUGE $3.30 mee rebus that I couldn't finish. I think the portion would be just nice for two.

I was planning to go straight back home after that, but in the end I went with few of my friends and new friends to Suntec for PC Show. I have been planning to get something this PC Show, and mission was accomplished hehe....

My Sony Ericsson K800i came with a measly 64MB memory card when I bought it, and 64MB in 2000 may seems a lot, but in 2007? C'mon, we're talking about GBs now. I scouted around for the best deal for M2 Memory Stick card. I was only planning to get 1GB card, but when I saw they are selling 2GB card for $69 whereas 1GB card cost $42, I know 2GB cards seems to be better buys. Next challenge was the queue. It was unbelievably long !!! I've done a simple diagram to illustrate the queue. If you were me, which queue will you be queuing at?

Crazy queue

If you queue at Booth A, that was exactly what I did. My extra time spent worth more than $1 lah ....

 
My two latest acquisitions, Sandisk M2 memory stick 2.0 GB and Jabra A320s Bluetooth USB Adapter

After I got my memory card, I thought, considered, and finally decided to get Jabra A320s Bluetooth USB Adapter. The difference between this one and those cheap ones you can find in Simlim is this adapter supports A2DP profile, in layman terms, means you can stream STEREO sound to a Bluetooth headset.

The memory card was a no-brainer to use, but the Jabra adapter? I admit, I strugged to get it working, and it is not the USB Adapter fault, and for once I'll say this, Windows Vista Bluetooth Stack is PATHETIC !!! This is one of best-known brand in mobile connectivity, and yet when I plugged it in, Vista told me something like: "Wow, your adapter looks cool, can do a lot of things like A2DP, but sorry, I can only give you file transfers capability. I don't know anything about giving you stereo sound via Bluetooth, nor any keyboard or mouse via Bluetooth, basically I can't do all those fancy stuffs. Maybe next service pack." Bluetooth has been in the market for years, since I was still in university, it's almost obsolete now, and you tell me the latest Windows Vista can't even give me a stereo sound. PATHETIC !!! Someone told me Mac's Bluetooth are much better, but I have no Mac to test, so I can't atest to that. Maybe Mac fanboys/girls here can testify?

After a couple of hours and many many steps after steps, I managed to get it working in Vista, following the guide here.

Remember Minority Report? How about having that in your house?
Watch the whole video, you won't regret it.

According to ExtremeTech article, DRAM prices have more or less hit their bottom price and are expected to rebound back in July/August time frame, so if you are still waiting to get an upgrade to your RAM or you have been wanting to get a memory card, I guess now is the best time, with PC Show still going on until Sunday, impending 2% increase in GST, and expectation of RAM prices to rise in the next couple of months. Of course I know as always, if you are willing to wait for another year, you'll most likely to get a double capacity of whatever thing you want to get for the same price now, but that if you can wait that long

I was intrigued after reading Cyla's blog post titled People Need Us. It kinda reflected what I am thinking and struggling with right now. Allow me to try to summarize what Cyla wrote, especially the part that is relevant to this post. The first paragraph says: "In this world, many people need a friend who listens. A friend who has the time in the midst of the busy-ness and tons of errands to run." I agree. Everyone need help.

I would like to side-track a bit by telling a fictional story:
A man was lost in the middle of the sea, on his little boat with no more water and no more food left. He prayed to God for help. Well, no later than 30 minutes, he saw a ship passed by. The crew on the ship spotted his boat and offered to help. He rejected the offer of help, saying, No thanks. I'm waiting for God's help. Then the ship went off. Soon, the second ship passed by, offered another help, which he promptly rejected again, citing the same reason. Third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh ship passed by, offered help, and got rejected. Eventually, he died, went to the court of judgement and met God. He blamed God, said: God, I've cried for help for so long, why didn't you help me?. God replied: I've sent you seven ships to rescue you, whose fault is it to reject help?

Another friend, Cindy, just shared her story to me about a person who constantly asked for help, again, again, and again without realizing that he/she is disturbing other people's lives. Everyone need help, yes, but you need to know your limit also when asking for help. This is one extreme.

The other extreme is like the ship story above. So many people are willing to help him, but he rejected help, with his wrong assumptions about God, with his pride, with his cockiness, with his own fallen mind thinking that he know what he is doing, he think he know how to get out of the trouble. Wrong!!! First step to solving problem is to identify a problem. Next, and this one is hard for some people, is to admit that we need help. After that, pray to God, and identify God's answer. God won't send his angels to rescue you, he send ships, friends. Next, accept the offer of help, and lastly give thanks to God. Arrogant people don't get pass admitting stage.

On one extreme, a person who constantly asked for help, even for some small trivial matters, unwilling to do anything about it himself. On the other extreme, a person who no matter how deep, how complicated the problem he find himself in, refused to accept other's help. To me, both shows immaturity. Mature persons will know when to ask for help when he need one, and not to ask for help when he don't really need one.

Mary Jane once said to Peter: "Everyone need help Peter, even Spiderman."

Chloe Sullivan said to Clark Kent in Smallville: "Look, I understand that you feel all the trouble happened are your fault, but you can't keep it all inside. You feel the need to carry the world on your shoulder and that's noble, but there are other people out there who want to help you fight the good fight and you need to let them in. Because sometimes even heroes need to be saved."

Comments, experiences to share, anything? Share them in comments

My sister and brother-in-law just arrived to Singapore to run some errands. They brought me our family Canon camcorder. I have been wanting it for a while now. I brought TONS of miniDV cassettes that was used to record our big family lives so far, be it our family travel, videos of my niece growing up, virtually every thing that my dad, my mom, my sis, my bro-in-law, and myself took over the years since we bought the Canon camcorder a couple of years back. I brought those cassettes when I went back from Chinese New Year holiday early this year together with another Sony camcorder that we have. This Sony camcorder is of newer model, provides driver for Windows when plugged into USB, so I thought this should do the job of converting those cassettes into MPG or WMV and eventually into DVDs. The goal is simple: convert all those miniDV cassettes into DVDs. The journey of converting them was much more challenging than I thought.

So, I brought back the Sony camcorder along with me back to Singapore. The first two cassettes were played and converted fine using WinAVI Video Capture (simply because Windows Vista Movie Maker could not recognize Sony camcorder that was plugged in). The next 47 cassettes, that was recorded using Canon camcorder, somehow when played in Sony camcorder, the video was jerky with visible boxy pattern on the side. Later I found out, the reverse is true, play cassettes that was recorded in Sony camcorder in Canon ones, the effect showed up as well. So, my home project of converting all those videos were stopped at that point.

Now, I have the Canon camcorder, I found out that the USB port provided by the camcorder only connect the SD card that was in it, but not the video. Later, I found out that, for Canon camcorder, you must use its Firewire/IEEE1394 port for videos.

Okay, that was a very long introduction to the background of this post hehe...  Since my home desktop didn't have any Firewire port, I went to Simlim and buy a PCI-card add-on. It costs $19 for a PCI card that has three Firewire ports. I plugged in the Canon camcorder, Vista installed the necessary drivers (amazingly the camcorder was recognized) and this dialog popped up.


Windows Import Video
Windows Import Video? hmmm.... that's new, I thought . Apparently it is part of Windows Movie Maker. I launched it, and I can tell you, this is one of the easiest application I have ever used to convert videos. Here are what you need to do and click to get those cassettes into digital format.


Select the name and where you want to save the file. Also, the file format. Only WMV and AVI are offered here. I chooses WMV for the obvious reason, size (2GB for WMV vs 12GB for AVI)


To convert the entire videotape, select the first option, click Next.


It'll rewind the cassette to the beginning automatically, then start recording. It'll stop recording when the cassettes has reached its end.

That's my niece doing her usual stuffs, opening drawers and cupboard, and took out everything that's in it, very cute. The time taken will exactly be the same as the length of your cassette. For mine, it is 60-mins cassette, so the recording took exactly 60 mins. Note that during this process, it is recommended NOT to do heavy task on your machine, or it'll affect the resulting video, like dropped frames. It IS a processor-intensive process. My processor is peaked at 100% all the time for the whole capture and processing.


Processing time of 60 mins cassette took ~50 mins on my computer with Pentium 4 - 2.8GHz. It should be faster if you have the newer Core 2 Duo processors.

When it's done, you have a WMV video, ready to be burned into DVD. It's so easy it's unbelievable. I never knew converting videos can be so easy. Now, I'm at my seventh cassettes out of 50 I have. For 60-mins cassettes, I need 60 minutes of capturing, ~50 minutes of processing time, and 2GB of hard drive space. At the current rate, I'll probably need another three-four months to complete all these.

Currently feeling: thankful

This is hilarious

Ruth Graham died Thursday at age 87 following a lengthy illness. Her husband's closest confidant, she was remembered as a spiritual stalwart and modest mentor who provided a solid foundation -- both biblically and geographically -- for her globe-trotting husband.

"The mama that we saw at home was the mama that the world saw," said their son, Franklin, who is now the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Read more ...

This morning, when I was in the MRT on my way to work, I saw this pregnant lady (looking at her tummy size, about 8 months I guess) entered the train. She stood quite near to me (I was standing also btw) in front of a few guys (late 20s and early 30s) and young ladies (late 20s) who are sitting. One guy was sleeping (he was sleeping since I boarded the train, so he was not pretending to sleep), another guy was busy flipping his morning paper, and another lady was playing with her handphone. I was looking at them, to see if they would give up their seat for this pregnant mother. Can't do anything about the one sleeping, the one reading newspaper clearly saw this lady. I saw him saw the lady, then continue reading his paper. Man !!!!! I was quite upset. You know, just feel like asking him to give up his seat, politely of course.

Few MRT stops after that, the lady moved to the center, this sleeping guy woke up for a few seconds, looked at her and continue sleeping, TWICE !!! Then, this young lady who's playing with her handphone conveniently ignored the lady as well. You know, I was that close to asking one of them to give up their seat when someone else from five seats away gave up her seat. The three who ignored this pregnant woman looked very professional in their office attire whom I expect to be well, professional, and socially mature. Whereas, the one who gave up her seat, like this blog post said, this young girl fulfilled all the criteria of people who won't give up their seats - young teenager with iPod, very loud SMS tone,  and very alian outfit (okay, i'm stereo-typing here, but you get the idea)

Do you think it's wise to politely ask someone who's sitting to give up their seat for another person who need it more than they do? Note that all are strangers to each other.

As for each of us, don't get caught red-handed like this man, k?

Taken from http://www.indrani.net/2005/02/36th-week.html

There have been lots of discussions and opinions that Mac OS X is more secure than Windows by far, that Windows is a sinking ship with too many holes. Well, the truth is out, for the first six months Windows Vista is in the market, it is proven that it is more secure than any other major OS out there.


Operating System Vulnerabilities - First 6 months Full packages


High severity vulnerabilities - first 6 months - all packages

Let me skip all those Linux distros, but concentrate on just Windows and Mac OS X.
From the graph, we can see that although Windows XP has less vulnerabilities compared to Mac OS X, but out of all those vulnerabilities, Windows XP has more that are categorized as High Severity, like those that can allow hackers outside to gain control of your machine without you knowing or do anything.

The good thing is, with Windows Vista, the outlook is so much brighter. It has less vulnerabilities, even for High Severity levels. Coupled that, if you agree, with the fact that Windows gets more security scrutiny than any other OS, makes the result even more impressive.

Now, why do we "feel" that Windows is more insecure? The answer lies not in the operating system, but with the users. yeah, you and me. We, humans, are the curious bunch of creatures that will click on anything that comes our way, right right? including fishy message like: "Click here to know who blocks your MSN", or "Download latest here", or "Screensaver with Jessica Alba photos", or "Watch dancing baby" etc. You get the idea. We click on those links, we download attachments from people we don't know, and with that, we infected our own machine, and we blame our system for it. The system is responsible for it, but we have to at least share the responsibility as well. The answer to security lies in user education. Just DON'T click on "funny" links and you'll be safe. Just DON'T.

The full research article can be read from http://blogs.csoonline.com/windows_vista_6_month_vulnerability_report

My teacher never taught me this.

Last night was my full night using Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.8) without touching Windows Vista at all. So far, my impression of this OS is quite good. It's solid, lots of niceties being built-in, things which I hoped would be built-into Vista. As much advanced I am in using Windows, I am a total n00b when using Mac. After I boot it up (oh yeah, the boot up to Mac OS X is super duper fast), I was left sitting there, don't know how to use this new OS facing me. The first thing I installed was Microsoft Messenger for Mac, followed by Firefox 2 for Mac. After that, I don't know what else will run in Mac. Frankly speaking, I didn't know how to do basic things that I can do with "my eyes closed" in Windows, like taking screenshots, safely remove hardware, so embarassing.

So, I read a couple of "switching-to-Mac" guide on the Internet, 10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know, From Windows to OS X, Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in OS X, A Guide to OS X Software for Switchers, and The Tao of Mac. As there are many software I usually use in Windows are Windows-only, I have to find its Mac OS X-equivalent that can do the same tasks. The software guide to OS X really helps me going, from there I knew about Flip4Mac (to play WMV files in QuickTime), Adium (a wonderful and cute instant messaging application, supports popular MSN, Yahoo, GTalk until never-heard-before of Gadu-Gadu and QQ), and some other applications that I have installed.

Speaking about installation, it's a no-brainer in OS X. A guide I read said Windows users like to complicate things, searching for installers and uninstallers, kinda true. There's no such thing per-se in OS X. Just drag the downloaded application into Applications folder, and good you go. To remove the application, just drag the application into Trash, and it's gone. It's so simple I was skeptical at first, hehe.... Maybe the guide was right, Windows users like to complicate things :p How to take screenshots? I clicked on Print-Screen, then looked for Microsoft Paint equivalent. It's not available. Now what? Later on I found out, by Cmd+Shift+3, it'll take whole-screen-shot, and automatically save the resulting PNG onto desktop. Weird combination, but much less steps than in Windows for sure.


My Mac OS X desktop now, still quite bare.


Keyboard shortcuts are different and takes time to get used to. Instead of Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, it has , , , and Shift. Home and End are Ctrl+left-arrow and Ctrl+right-arrow respectively. To move files, instead of Shift+drag files, it's Command+drag files. Instead of Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+V for Copy, Cut, and Paste, it's Cmd+C, Cmd+X, and Cmd+V respectively. Different, but not that hard to get used to.


Mac OS X System Preferences Search. Note how it tries to "spotlight" the potential icon you are looking for based on your search terms

Also note how wonderful application like Adium uses the Dock to its maximum potential, showing you who messaged, how many unread messages, and that duck icon is quite animated, depending on your status, very cute indeed. Download manager shows the current download speed (200+KB/sec in the screenshot considered quite slow. At one point, I managed to hit 670KB/sec ) All in all, it has been a positive experience the last few days with Mac OS X, and am looking forward to using it more for my computing usage. I know I'll still need to boot to Windows Vista once in a while to use applications that are not available for Mac OS X, notably Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe. We'll see how it goes

This morning, I turned on my office's laptop, and saw this screen.


I was like "huh?" So I clicked the first option "Activate Windows online now" and all goes well. Strange.