NDP 2007

Posted by HELiX

My holidays are rotting away on the Tesla Coil. Sure it is fun stuff, but after slightly over 5 months on it, the novelty sure is wearing out. I’ll build finish it over this National Day holidays, and also finish tuning it to maximum performance. Then I’ll keep the project once and for all. My Dad insists that I should stop all the experiments, but I’m dying for a 3rd attempt at the High-Power Laser.

On top of these, 3 common tests next week, on 3 of my… not-so-well-off subjects. Math, Economics and Chinese. And Class BBQ tomorrow!

…

Okay so today’s National Day. What more can I add?

However, many people are failing to notice that it’s…

42

Which is, least importantly, the age of our Nation.

But most importantly, it’s the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Whether you get my point or not depends on how much you know Douglas Adams.

…

My family has become extremely predictable. When I got home today, Kok was like “how’s the fireworks??” and I was thinking “WTF how’d you know? U stalkin me???”.

So, yes, like every other fireworks event, my family just had to watch (we’re on our way in becoming professional fireworks display reviewers).

Headed down to the City Hall area despite the road blocks and jams.

As we walked through Suntec Convention Centre, these little creatures came down from the Halls.

Their full glory is not expressed well in this picture, but up close you’ll be in total awe by their cuteness.

Come on. You put lotsa of kids in an inflated colourful suit, squeeze them in a convention hall for storage while waiting for the Parade to start — the thought of this makes you go “AWW SO CUTEEEE” except that I can’t express myself well enough in words, too. Dammit.

Then the Guard-of-Honour’s had to spoil the fun.

So we walked around a bit, arrived at a crowded open spot at Marina Square to see the Parachuters.

Before finally moving to a place far, far away (almost 20 minutes walk around the road blocks) to a nice isolated spot we thought nobody knew about.

From here, quite a good free experience of the Transformers [lookalike] that come by:

For example, the ridiculously large National Day flag accompanied by 4 Blackout transformers.

I like it how my camera manages to capture the rotors as though they were stationary.

The deafening Megatrons and their afterburns.

More Megatrons! Oh wait, that’ll be… Starscreams.

We were directly in front of the Singapore… whatsitcalledagain? Big Eye Ripoff? Overwhelmingly Large Farris Wheel? And you can see the sneaky bastard Blackout hiding there.

It was so boring waiting for the fireworks.

After an hour or so, just before my eyeballs were about to dro-…

Nothing happened. Idiot.

…

…

-Few minutes later-

…

LIKE WTF?? WHERE DID THAT CAME FROM?

There was Blue.

There was Orange.

There was Green.

There was Red.

There was Pink.

There was my family + Aunt.

=___=

…

In the mood of National Day.

Some shops offer 42% discount?(Like are they serious? How to earn profit? Must be bull-.)

Over 90% of the people in the city area wore Red (I always wondered why Singapore is the called the Little Red Dot until I found out the answer today. Wooohooo.)

And many people decorated their houses, apartments, dogs and Manchester United Action Figures in red. But some people, maybe only this taxi owner, over did it.

I counted 13 flags. I think 29 of them dropped.

…

Happy Independence Day People!

Comments(0) 2:26 AM 8 August 2007

Adobe Installation Horror

Posted by HELiX

I think everyone here knows Adobe.

Listed as one of the top 100 companies to work for by Forbes. And their revolutionary product, Photoshop, has spawned a new verb in the… um… unofficial… English language.

Perhaps some of us might already know, about a month or two ago, they released their latest version of softwares.

The CS3s. 

We have the Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3, Premiere CS3, and probably more catchily-named softwares that I have no clue about. Like, just what the hell is COLD FUSION about?

So being the Internet pirate user that I am, I downloaded obtained all the new softwares.

What horror descended upon me goes like this:

…

I proceeded to installing. What happened 3 hours later was that, well, it failed.

It was disappointing like that. Let’s just skip the first part ‘cos the second part is just more fun.

I googled around for a bit, and realised that I have to remove ALL my CS2 softwares before installing. Awesome, so by now I’m like “screw this” and went on to uninstall my CS2 softwares.

About 2 hours later, my system is cleaned from CS2 softwares, and I went ahead with the installation feeling like something’s gonna happen. Something did happen, if you considered making annoyed grunt something that happened.

One question that popped into my head at this point. Why the hell are the [failed] installations and uninstallations taking so freaking LONG? I have to wait over half an hour for the Installer to report that it has UNSUCCESSFULLY installed Premiere CS3. And because some partial components of Premiere CS3 are already in my computer, which Adobe says that will affect the installation, I have to UNINSTALL it already, and yeah, another half an hour gone.

So again I head to Google, run a search based on the error and find a few things to try from one of the Adobe technotes regarding the CS3 installation problems. I have to admit to being a bit caught off guard by some of the suggestions (albeit in the “advanced troubleshooting” area) that suggested that I actually “Reinstall the operating system, or run a system restore” to get Photoshop to work. ARE THEY F%@#ING SERIOUS?

I wasn’t about to go through all that hell again, so I found myself a tool appropriately called the… CS3 Cleanup Script by Adobe. I bet you couldn’t guess what it’s use is. Apparently, the computer has be to cleaned from CS2 softwares to install the CS3 softwares at the very least, but they’d like you to try cleaning away ALL the Adobe softwares as well. The script has “2 Levels” of cleaning. #2 being more… thorough than #1.

Now, I ran the script at Level 1, and run it over and over again to clean whatever rubbish it can find. By now, I lost count of the number of sickening hours I have spent on this. Proceeded to try the installation again, nada.

Back to uninstalling, and it still likes half an hour [like WTF]. Ran the script at Level 2, removed whatever nonsense it could remove, and installation again! Ditto.

I check my Program Files folder. Why are there still CS2 programs there? Didn’t I just uninstalled them? (again WTF) So, I manually deleted them, stuffed my recycle bin full of Adobe nonsense and INSTALL again~!

Idiot. Failed again.

Crap! So I uninstall… again… and back to Google!

So cool! I found out that the CS3 Cleanup Script has SECRET UNLOCKABLE FEATURES. Like WHOA. OMG do those programmers at Adobe play too much video games or something? Because… I realised, there’s Level 3 and Level 4 cleanup as well, although they don’t say so in the program itself.

Ran with the more thorough level 3, again again and again to make sure nothing else could be deleted from the system, and ran the installation of CS3 again. FAILED!

Back to uninstalling the partial installation, and decided, for once, to read what the cleanup script does. Level 4 is the most 1337est of ‘em all. It even removes Macromedia softwares! POWA!

So I ran it, a couple of times I must say, and tried the installation which failed, followed by the repetitive uninstallation. And then I checked Program Files, and realised… WHY IS THERE STILL AN ADOBE FOLDER WITH SUPA POWERFUL CLEANUP UTILITY FROM ADOBE?

I tried to delete the Adobe folder manually. They won’t let.

I booted into safe mode. They won’t let.

I booted into another hard disk, and tried to delete it from there. They STILL won’t let.

Like WTF?

So, in conclusion to all the entertainment of my misery I have provided, there are still Adobe files leftover in my computer, which isn’t supposed to be the case because CS3 won’t install as long as there’s other Adobe softwares in the computer.

…

Adobe just screwed up an installation process like this. The conflicts are with THEIR softwares. How dumb.

The Adobe installer team should be buying the tech support team breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, cars, condos… for the next few years for completely screwing up the most basic part of using any software. They’re amazing.

Comments(0) 12:28 AM 8 August 2007

WCG Aftermath

Posted by HELiX

WCG Nationals and Asian finals just concluded yesterday, and there’s quite a bit to say.

…

The Nationals was quite predictable, with previous years winners picking up all the championships.

CS1.6 won by Team Titans; DoA won by Tetra; Warcraft III by Gosubay; Need For Speed: Carbon by Phenic; and so on.

But it was the least bit exciting with new blood in the game representing the zone between RPG and RTS, also known as DotA. Here, long time reigning champs Clan Zenith was finally knocked out in the finals by long time rivals Micronology.

Despite this, it was all-in-all, well, boring.

…

Asian Championships were there to make it more fun. So, we were hosting the Regional WCG, and for some reason I have yet to comprehend, we decided to invite China and South Korea. Yes, the land of Mao and the land of gamer-dies-from-excessive-gaming.

I pretty much blogged about my experience at WCG when I visited it on the 3rd day, but I still have more to say.

Fashion at WCG was refreshing. Look at it this way. The guy/girl who conceived with the shirt design for the WCG participants deserves to be shot, trampled by horses, and shot again. I was trying to find a word to describe the design, until I found someone’s comment about the shirts matching exactly my thoughts:

They looked like medieval bras.

I don’t think it was purely a coincidence that I was spared from awful fashion among the pro gamers by the Cosplayers outside. Thank God.

…

It’s so scary. China has spent billions on sports in view of the Beijing Olympic next year, as reported in yesterday’s papers, but I didn’t know they meant cyber sports as well.

As WCG Asian Championships came to a close yesterday, the gold medal holders were:

China: 3
South Korea: 2
Rest of Asia: 0

Everytime you visited WCG Asia website, you were greeted by a medal tally of last year’s competition with Singapore topping the table with two Golds, DotA and DoA. China and Korea weren’t far behind by winning CS and so on. We smart-ass Singaporeans weren’t to be outplayed in our homeland, so we decided to act smart: We freakin’ left out major games such as CS, and stubbornly included DotA, which still isn’t an official game at any rate.

So, the capitalist-communism Red Flag was being flown right in the middle of our democracy (near Monarchy under King Lee’s) state.

 There ya go.

The Chinese pwned us inside out in our two niche games — DotA and Dead or Alive.

A world-class clan and the top RTS clan in China, Clan World Elites, buried our DotA players so much so that I hope they’re back down to Earth, and start playing WC3 instead.

Our one and only world-class gamer, Tetra (who once humorously quote how he breezed through last year’s Asian Championships without using his best character), got Silver.

So we would ask:

Why though, is China coming up so strong? There’s three reasons behind their world domination plan (and excuses why we lost).

#1 

This is China’s DotA team looking badass. ‘Nuff said.

#2

Hell, 100 USD gets you 800 Yuan.

The Chinese winners brings home their few thousands dollars of prizes, converts it to their own currency, and that alone will feed them, their parents, their dogs and their dragons for the entire year. And mind you, they eat snakes.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s top gamers’ winnings are just enough to cover the GST hike and minister’s pay rise.

#3

Hundreds of millions more hiding in those trees.

1,200,000,000 people is much more than 4,000,000 people.

1,200,000,000 people is so incredibly, mind-boggling, humongously huge that you believe how huge it is.

1,200,000,000 people is HOLY TEN DIGITS. A typical primary school child’s reaction to do math with this figure is to the effect of “Are you f@$king serious?”

Every Tetra you find in Singapore, you find another 300 more in China. That’s according to simple possibility, lower the chances a bit because they’re a developing country, but you’ll still end up with a figure comparing Goliath and David.

…

…

…

Here’s the Chinese team looking like winners. They have more nukes than toes you can count in the pic.

I shouldn’t leave out the South Koreans though. The only place on Mother Earth where you can find teenagers dying from gaming straight for 54 hours, and also the Republic of Starcraft where over $1.4 trillion dollars in invested in professional gamers, should be acknowledged as they do what they should do, showing the world who’s boss in RTS games.

You could almost hear them go “kekekekeke” and “lolololololol” as they leave our sunny island for the Land of Jin Soo Kwon.

 The biggest threat to Chinese Dominance.

Comments(0) 10:03 PM 8 August 2007

World Cyber Games 2007

Posted by HELiX

[PHOTO SPAM. IF YOU HAS LAGGY INTERNETZ, VISIT ANOTHER DAY K THX.]

I found it strange that WCG Nationals/Asian 2007 started on Thursday. Say, if I actually DID join the main tournament, how would I be able to attend when my school days end at 4pm? I don’t think it’ll be easy to get an excuse from your school, explaining that you wanna take part in a professional gaming competition.

Okay, that’s so not the point here, but it’s just worrying because with UT3 coming out in November this year, I’m near certain it’ll be in WCG next year. Which also means that I’ll be in WCG next year.

After Bowling training today, I headed down to WCG at Suntec Convention Hall with Kok alone ‘cos the SBoners were busy having class outing. Bowling ended at 3pm, so reached there pretty late, about 4pm.

The main stage area was unwelcomingly crowded but the atmosphere was awesome.

Match ongoing on stage.

In contrary to what Kok thinks, that WCG is all rotten and bad and all, I thought it was pretty alright. Perhaps better than previous years.

A few possible reasons why Kok feels that way, and why he really shouldn’t:

1) This year’s mini-tournaments featured CS1.6, Guitar Hero, NFS: Carbon, Colin McRae, DotA, PC building and some quest card challenge. None of which we can play on the competitive level, so we didn’t join to avoid public embarrassment.

2) That alone is 5 times more competitions than last year’s. Last year’s one didn’t involve the audience much. I’m glad they changed that this year.

3) There’s a model of MASTER CHIEF.

4) We came at the wrong time. This is evident from:

Empty computers.

5) “Let me play!” “NO WAY!” “ARE THOSE TREES WE’RE DRIVING INTO?”

6) Kok nearly lost his handphone. In fact, if we left a few seconds earlier, instead of hanging around the Xbox booth, he would never see his $0 handphone ever again. I think he’s disappointed to find it.

7) We have completely no idea what was this basketball machine doing there:

8) COSCON!

Which, to us, was now the main attraction for WCG this year, because there wasn’t anything else for us to do.

So we decided moved to outside where the cosplayers were hanging around waiting for their competition results.

As I came quite late, most of the cosplayers were… tired. Or bored. Or both. But either way, most of them stopped photowhoring and retired to sitting down along the railings, so I couldn’t get much shots.

:((

Not exactly of professional quality, but it’s my first time OK!

Here are some of the better ones I took~

Tried a bit of Soft Focus effect here.

A suitable caption here would be “AH ZOMG JESUKE LOL“, in the words of Hazel. Although I have little idea who that is, logically it should be the one on the right.

This explains why you’ll find the same picture everywhere else. Today I learned that photographers are KS-ers.

Isit just me, or did anyone else, for a second there, thought they saw a hint of Michael Jackson??

Luigi.

Dedicated to Kok, who aspires to wear a Mario costume one day. 1-UP MUSHROOM!

I didn’t know Naruto likes watching TV adverts.
No one else who sat there bothered to watch the Plasma TV except him.

So the announcement of the results came, and all the winners went on the Stage.

The Force got them 2nd.

See the Harry Potter team? They got 1st.

Group photo. My comments are getting dry.

Like, Who Is KIPI??

EDIT: Okay, I googled. She’s some cosplayer from Japan. Like everything Japanese, she’s famous.

Aaaaand, the Haruhi dance we all thought was possible only in the anime.

 Totally irrelevant here, but there was NDP rehearsal  as well so I got this as we headed home.

That’s all! No copyright, steal for all I care!

Good night.

Comments(0) 2:05 AM 8 August 2007

MSN- I mean WLM

Posted by HELiX

With Microsoft dumping its old boring branding of Microsoft Networking, the term MSN now exists only as a stupid dumb website which all Internet Explorer browsers have as their default home page.

They have introduced their new Live thingy. Live search engine, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Live this Live that, etc.

So I shall propose dropping the usage of the term MSN, which usually meant MSN Messenger, both as a noun and verb. Like, ‘I hate MSN’. Or, ‘I’m gonna MSN you’.

Instead, we shall call it the… WLM. Because Windows is… Windows. Live just isn’t right because… ‘I hate living’ or ‘I’m gonna live you’. Which sounds either severely emo-ly angsty or obscene.

Comments(0) 7:33 PM 8 August 2007

Hard Drive Recovery

Posted by HELiX

Over the past few nights, some would have noticed me signing in and out pointlessly on MSN Windows Live Messenger, as though I’m were some attention grabbing guy of some sort.

But no, that’s just a theory.

What really happened was that my hard disk drive was spoilt. I’ve been through enough hard drives to be immune to the painful hours of recovering data, formatting the drive, reinstalling windows and all other programs, and even sending it in for warranty.

This time though, it was rather unique. Usually when my hard drive crashes, it just does so suddenly. Like, one morning I wake up, turn the computer while I’m half-awake, and the unfixable error message telling me that the drive has failed to boot into Windows hangs on the screen.

Over the past few weeks my hard drive’s performance was evidently dropping. My MSN Windows Live Messenger crashes every now and then, the display lags whenever I’m browsing through my documents, and generally everything was slow. Just a few days ago, my drive, for the first time I’ve seen, reported using its S.M.A.R.T. technology thingy (that’s what they call it at least) that it’s status was… BAD.

Incredibly, I could still boot into Windows, run everything well, plus the lag.

Having the computer bugging you repeatedly to change your drive isn’t a good sign, so instead of going through the pains of transferring to a new hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch, I decided to clone the drive. While it sounds absolutely stupid to clone a spoilt a drive, apparently the error is hardware-related, so shouldn’t be a problem. Just that it’ll have to go for warranty.

I tried the most famous and trusted hard drive backup solution available, Acronis True Image. It detected my hard drive having an error, and didn’t let me clone. How retarded.

I moved on to the second most famous backup solution, Symantec Norton Ghost. Oh boy, it didn’t even make it pass the installation. Lame.

Seagate Discwizard looked promising, but my hard drive wasn’t seagate and it’s just a rebranded Acronis True Image. Next.

Then came in all unknown softwares no one has ever bothered to try out before.

7tools Partition Manager didn’t work. R-Drive Image was interesting but once again, nada. Most of them knows my hard drive is spoilt and won’t let me clone.

Paragon Drive Backup was the most promising, because the cloning process managed to finish. However, after more than 16 hours, 3 runs, the closest I got was that all the data managed to clone into the new drive, but somehow it won’t bootup from the new drive.

When I thought all was lost…

DriveClone, listed like on the 4th or 5th page of Google search saved my ass. It worked perfect. Cloned every data, and I’m running the exact copy of the spoilt hard drive right now. No more hangs so far. Perfect.

It’s funny how small business’ softwares can perform better than the most famous and developed ones.

Comments(0) 7:24 PM 8 August 2007

HTC Cared

Posted by HELiX

Surprisingly, my Dad received a call from HTC Care today, updating him about my phone’s status. I’ve read online on how terrible their service is, sometimes taking up to 5 weeks to call, so one week’s quite… fast, so to say.

But seems like, all isn’t well.

They quoted my Dad a price of nearly $300 to replace the LCD touch screen. $200+ for new screen, $80 for service. And my Dad’s not interested in this kinda price for a phone that’s still under warranty.

So now he intends to:

1) Take back the phone with the cracked screen. Repair somewhere else, possibly even overseas. Basically cheaper. If not, just sell it to one of those repair shops. But he’ll take his own sweet time to do it.

2) Buy a new PDA Phone. I told him I’d like an equivalent phone. So $800. And he said… … … Ok.

Which, to me, isn’t worth it.

I mean, when I get a new expensive phone, the guilt sinks in pretty deep into me, so I’ll stick with it for a while to come. Like… 1 year. And yes, that’s long.

So if I were to get a new phone right now, it’ll probably be around the same as my current one, so… not much benefit, and I have to bear with the same technology for another year.

And dammit, I wanted the iPhone. It’s probably gonna come sometime before March next year, which 1 year isn’t up yet. Of course if everyone’s gonna buy the iPhone then I prolly won’t cos I just like to be different >.>

Ah, what now?

Comments(0) 11:46 PM 8 August 2007