A book
I finished reading a book in about 6 hours... in between giving tuition to my cousin :P Was bored from waiting for him to finish doing his sums, so I took a book from his shelf and started reading. It was his supposed Literature book... supposed because he dropped Literature and took up D&T not long after school began this year.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
Yep, that's the title of the book. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year. Written by Mark Haddon.
I've not read his books before, but I found this book to be special in its own way. The book chapter numbering was refreshing, the mixing of fact with fiction was refreshing, the story in itself was refreshing... and it all began with the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
The two meetings today I had were enlightening... and I am surprised at the amount of work that has and will be done in 2008. Two more meetings later... and probably more surprises awaiting.
Some back-dated stuff
21 December 2007
Hmm... I shall start with last Friday, when I met up with a good friend of mine (whom I haven't met for more than a year?) for dinner. It was a rainy evening and I got my sandals wet before I managed to reach Jurong Point :/ Well... fortunately for me, sandals dry rather quickly.
We couldn't decide on what to eat, so it was off to Délifrance. The decision was made based on the fact that my friend couldn't eat much, and I wasn't really hungry. She had Fish and Chips while I had a Chicken Steak thingy. I tried eating parsley for the first time as well... took a nibble only lah. Ha. Erm, doesn't taste as strong as chinese parsley though. I totally dislike chinese parsley.
We spent some time shopping before she left for home while I went to another friend's place.
23 December 2007
A KTV gathering with my #Justblog kakis... Tammy, Elaine, Victor, Vince, Boon and Yvonne. Well, I didn't sing much for the 3-4 hours that we were there. Only sang three songs... and they didn't really turn out well :P I think I'm not able to sing like I did in the past. Perhaps it's the lack of practise... perhaps it's just me.
Dinner at Wheelock Place's Fish and Co... didn't have to wait too long although there were quite a number of people there. Hmmm, food was ok, but service was a bit slow though, probably due to the lack of waiters/waitresses ba. It was a good gathering, with many photographs taken by Elaine. I'll put the photographs up if I don't procrastinate so much... together with the photographs that I have from the past six months :P
24 December 2007
Boring Christmas Eve... I spent almost the whole day working. Yep, I've finally finished my Sec 2 Express Maths SOW for 2008 (it's one week late though). 22 pages in all... and I visited all the website links that the publisher provided. There were some dead links and one wrong link though. I'm so proud of myself... Haha. I had initially thought that it would be a simple and straightforward task... but I was wrong. It's super tedious lah. Zzz.
25 December 2007
Christmas Day... went to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks. Nice show... I like. Heh. Heartwarming and very apt for this holiday season. I like the Witch Doctor song... with it's "ooh ee ooh ah ah tang tang walla walla bang bang" chorus. Heard the song before... and it's nice hearing it again, with a "techno" feel to it. The Christmas Don't Be Late song was nice too... with a simple tune and simply lyrics.
Well, four meetings in two days... starting later at 8.30am. Meanwhile... enjoy the songs =]
New Desktop!
I'm thankful that my previous desktop showed signs of senescence, so that I could have taken the necessary precautions before it died. Yep, it died this morning, after refusing to start-up for the dozens of times that I tried. A surgery revived it for a fleeting moment, giving me ample time to send a document that I had typed yesterday to my Gmail for safe-keeping. It has served me well over the years... from 28th August 2003 till now, with quite a few upgrades.
It was a hectic afternoon... savaging whatever I could from the dead system (actually I think it's just a faulty PSU, but I can't be bothered to waste time figuring out what the exact problem is, so I pronounced my desktop PC dead). Well, the motherboard still looked very new... quite a waste :/ After saving what I could and cleaning up the place, it was time to visit Sim Lim Square.
After three hours at Sim Lim Square and feeling a little grouchy over the service that was rendered, I was back home with the new system, clean... without any software installed (75% of the time was spent waiting... waiting for my turn to be served, waiting for the system to be assembled etc). Total damage... SGD1395.
Here's a breakdown of what's re-used and what's new in the new system:
Re-used:
- Samsung CDRW
- LG DVDRW
- WinTV card
- Maxtor 160GB SATA II HDD (now used as secondary HDD)
New:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz
- Asus P5K-SE P35 Motherboard
- 02 x Kingston 5300/667 DDR2 1GB
- WD Caviar 320GB SATA II HDD
- Leadtek PX8800GT 512MB GDDR3 PCI-E
- Cooler Master Centurion 5 Casing
- Cooler Master 450W Real Power PSU
- Microsoft Windows XP Home OEM
It took about 1.5 hours to just format the new harddisk and about an hour to install all the basic software (drivers, anti-virus, firefox, thunderbird, etc). Will now have to spend a little more time installing other useful software.
Had initially planned to get some work done if not for the death of my desktop PC. Will now have to work through the night. Lalala...
A post for December
Eh, didn't realise it has been almost three weeks since I last written an entry :/
I'm now doing a back up of all the data in my PC... because it has been behaving weirdly the past few days and my intuition tells me that I should procrastinate no more, or I'll be left with nothing should the feared day arrive. In order to make full use of my time, I'm now writing this entry while waiting for my file transfers and DVD burnings to complete.
Anyway, the first two weeks of December was spent in camp for reservist. The first week of the ICT was rather relaxing. It was the second week that was dreadful because we had to spend three rainy days out in the field, drenched to the skin most of the time. As a friend put it, this was the worst ever out-field we had... never in my NSF time have I encountered weather conditions as bad as this. Oh well, a new experience. Not that new actually because I experienced something like this when I was posted to ATEC during my NSF time... only this time, the duration is much longer.
The last day of ICT was 403 SAR's Family Day... and we were treated to a day at the Singapore Discovery Centre. Brought two of my cousins along. My friends left earlier because they wanted to go catch a movie. I left with my cousins at 6pm, after a quick tour within the Singapore Discovery Centre. Brought the two of them over to Holland Village's Sushi Tei... and left the place about SGD90 poorer. Yep... my cousins can sure eat =]
Had initially planned to go to the dentist and tailor new pants for the new year, but fate has it that I am destined to not wake up in time... so I will just meet a friend to go down to The Chevron's e-mart to grab some stuff at 4pm. My reservist camp's e-mart is horribly "un-stocked". It was empty since the raid by many of the NSman on the first day. Bad bad service.
Oh yar, not sure if I've mentioned that 4th Job is out for MapleStory... erm, quite some time ago actually. My priest is now a bishop, equipped with essential skills such as the Bahamut (a big red dragon), Resurrection, Infinity, Genesis and a few other skills which I do not use much of. Christmas town was out yesterday, with just a week to Christmas. Asiasoft is also making use of the festive season to earn some money, introducing four 4th Job MapleStory A-Cash cards worth SGD32.10 each as well as the 5 El Nath Monster Series MapleStory A-Cash cards worth SGD10.70 each. As a card collector, that would be a total damage of SGD181.90, not including the new Xmas MapleStory A-Cash card worth SGD21.40 each >.<"
As the end of the year draws near, it's always good to make a wishlist, for the new things that I want to get for myself in the new year... so here goes:
1. Running shoes (not SAF-sponsored)
2. Spectacles
3. State-of-the-art Desktop PC4. Sony PSP, DS Lite or even Nintendo WII?Eh, the list seems short... will add to it as time goes by ba :P
