Two days ago saw the first solar eclipse in 10 years for Singapore.

10 years. Man, it’s like I’ve waited my entire adolescent life for this.

It was a partial-annular solar eclipse, meaning — 1) the Moon will appear to be smaller than the Sun, 2) the Moon does not cross perfectly into the line of the Sun.

Still, it was a promising treat for the people like me who have nothing much to do on Chinese New Year.

Yet, at about 3.30pm, an hour before first contact, the sky looked terrible. Clouds loomed overhead from horizon to horizon.

I was at my relative’s house at Punggol. At about 5pm or so, a little hole in the cloud cover allowed me to have a peek at the eclipse. I used a solar viewer that I’ve kept since Venus Transit back in 2004. The eclipse was at about 20% coverage if I’m not wrong.

And then the clouds rolled back in. A while later, approaching 5.49pm, the time of maximal eclipse, I had a photography setup waiting. I mean, who knows? Maybe a pig will fall from the sky and clear the clouds in its way.

The clouds didn’t clear. Mainly because no pigs fell from the sky.

So at 5.49pm, I took this and dwelled myself in sadness.

In happier news, I returned home and came online. No big surprises there.

But I stumbled upon this:

They’re graphs of page loads and visitor counts from my website at Astronomy.sg. A massive jump!

Quite strangely though, because the site is rather new and is ranked lowly in search engines.

Now let me continue to be in state of pathetic glee that I am in. Don’t mind me.

My computer usually doesn’t get infected with a malware easily. I’ve been using NOD32 since the days when it was still an industrial-grade anti-virus product, and I have a few anti-spyware softwares covering each other’s flaws.

Well, today, I admit that a malware has finally defeated me. Well… almost, but I’ll bow down to my new Malware Overlord.

It looks worse than this in real life.

It has taught me that some of these virus writers are some of the most gifted minds on the planet.

It turns out that I was infected with a Zlob DNS Changer trojan. It’s quite possibly one of the most mischievous malware out there.

To begin with, you probably wouldn’t notice it at all.

I’ve been happily surfing the Internet for some days before I notice that, ocassionally, a Vimax advertisement appears. Now, Vimax is an… uh, enlargement pill. Y’know what I mean?

It wasn’t anything too obscene, just some suggestive pictures and wordings. It looks pretty normal for an ad.

Some days past and I notice that it appeared too often. It didn’t appear everywhere, but it definitely was appearing too much that it caught my attention.

It’s a really smart trojan. Instead of randomly throwing ads, it replaces the ads found on websites. It even found its way into Windows Live Messenger and replaced the ad at the bottom!

And I thought: now, isn’t it a little weird for sites and services like MSN and BBC showing such ads?

I realised, soon enough, that the virus has also been causing random occasional pop-ups. It comes up exactly when you visit a new page, making you think that the pop-up belongs to the page. And yes, pop-up blockers don’t work.

So I decided to run some Anti-Malware scans to get rid of it. I started with Spybot, then Ad–aware, then Spyware Doctor, then SUPERAntiSpyware, and finally NOD32. None did anything to solve the problem.

And there was something else — the virus cripples these Anti-Malware programs! I couldn’t update in any of these programs. So I decided to manually download the updated definition file from the main website… blocked! Visiting the homepage of any of these programs comes up with a ‘failed-to-load’ page.

Of course, after some hours of searching around, I found the special removal procedures for the virus. It’s a common one it seems, but many people are stuck with it. Some have even reformatted and reinstalled Windows, only to find the same problems.

Anyway, for people who stumbled upon this site while searching for a solution, here’s it:

1. Download this relatively unknown program, which apparently works better than any of those super branded Anti-Malware programs. SmitfraudFix

2. Uncompress, open the folder and double click on smitfraudfix.cmd

3. When you reach the menu, key in 1 and press Enter to start the search.

4. When it’s done searching, restart your computer, and repeatly press F8 before Windows starts up to enter Safe Mode.

5. Run the program again, and key in 2 and press Enter.

6. When it’s done, you’ve got a cleaned system!

I’m lacking good content, so I’ll just do with a little update about everything.

Things are moving into place pretty well for me. Some may say that they miss the schooling days, but I prefer the life that I’m having right now. School has never been my thing.

…

I’m trying to get my driving licence as soon as possible, but the driving school doesn’t really facilitate that. I’m enrolled as a Private Candidate under Bukit Batok Driving Centre, and I just completed my Basic Theory Test. I’m not driving anytime soon until I pass my Final Theory Test. So I proceeded to book the earliest testing date for my Final Theory Test immediately after passing my Basic Theory Test, and it turns out that the next testing date is in March.

Which translates into, you have to wait 4 months in total to complete your driving theory tests, which just takes 10 minutes each. And only then I can start learning to drive, and wait another 6-8 more months for the practical driving test which would get me my licence.

…

In other news, I’ve gotten my first job at BPGHS as the Astronomy Team’s trainer. Really good pay, at $50 for 2.5 hours. Of course, it isn’t everyday since it’s BPGHS not some torture camp where CCA is nearly everyday. It’s very good supplementary cash I guess. For the same pay you probably need to work a full day, 9am to 5pm, for other jobs.

I’m also negotiating to train the Science Quiz team, which may possibility add another $50 for another day. But we’ll see how.

I’m very mercenary indeed, but I do promise results.

Of course, I’m not the dumb guy who earns $50 a week by working for 2.5 hours and gets contented by it. $200 a month hardly covers the inflated adult public transport fare that I have to pay now.

From Science Buskers, I won a one-year contract to perform for Science Centre on a per demand basis, but I think they won’t be calling me anytime soon. So I approached them for a proper job, on top of the current contract.

I suppose Science Centre is quite possibly one of the best places for me to work at. It’s not that far from my house, has a nice environment, and may really help for my resume. I’ll also be working under Lingzhi, quite possibly one of the best bosses you can find, who believes in "flexible working hours". Which means I can keep my trainer job at BPGHS.

Prof Lit Tit Meng, the Assistant Director of Science Centre and also the guy who’s in charge of SSEF, was quite impressed with my Science Buskers finals performance so he was more than willing to accept me. Pretty lucky for me I guess, so I was somewhat approved.

And then Lingzhi contacted the HR Department, telling them that of my job scope (specifically: no admin work) and how much I can expect to get. HR quoted $6 an hour, which is something like the average pay you get anywhere else. Easily.

So we changed our approach and this time we’re taking a private freelance approach. I won’t be working for Science Centre, not really at least, but I’ll be contracted as a private party to help them.

Negotiations are under way, but I’m pretty happy so far. Will update y’all when the contracts are agreed!

It’s probably a little too late for this, but I needed to clear up all the old appointments in my mobile phone’s calendar, so I just saved screen captures of everything from 2008.

I thought it was slightly interesting so decided to share.

Well, I’m the kind of person you’d quote as evidence in your essay about how Man is becoming over-reliant on technology. I use my PDA Phone heavily, especially to keep track of what’s going on. I note down almost all my appointments, homework, to-do’s and other little things in the calendar so that I can access it easily.

So after a year of experimenting with this, I got these. These pictures show my calendar from January 2008 to December 2008. See if you can guess what each icon represents!

I think I need to start blogging more often. Just sayin’.

After a slightly busy week, I’ve gotten my first job. We’ll go into that another day, because more importantly, Science Buskers is finally over!

Shaun and I made it into the Finals of the inaugural Science Buskers Festival competition. Even though it’s their debut, the whole event generally surpassed my expectations. Being a competition jointly organised by the Science Centre and A*STAR, it was pretty much on the same level as SSEF and SYSF. Like, y’know, the amount of effort and funds put into everything.

Anyway, we emerged 2nd out of the 10 finalists today. Not bad I guess — I’m contented — but like all other competitions, I’m always gunning for Gold and I’ll feel slightly disappointed that we’re so close to winning it.

$500 and a one-year renewable contract with the Science Centre to perform Science Shows. I was more interested in the latter. I didn’t really think that the additional $500 for winning the 1st prize was such a big deal, but I just thought it’d be nice to win 1st.

In fact, as of lately, I’ve been getting more 2nd-placings than ever before. My competitive form is off. I’m losing it. I think my competitive days are over. I think I should find better things to do.

So, well, I’ll take you through our 5-minute performance. Using photos.

Our staged volunteer. Rong’en. Who had difficulty wearing a shirt.

‘Little accidents’ of disappearing ink on him.

This photo made me happy. It’s taken during our performance!

Erm. Rong’en. Disappearing ink (alkaline). Carbon dioxide (acid). Fire extinguisher. ‘Nuff said.

The lame liquid-nitrogen-in-warm-water setup.

…Upsizing the liquid-nitrogen-in-warm-water setup. 10L of liquid nitrogen!

Yup. That’s pretty much it.

Many thanks to Kok, DW, Kenneth, Shaz, XJ, Benjy, Siek family, Damian and Rong’en for coming down to support!

For the past three days, I quietly made my way to Science Centre for the inaugural Science Buskers Festival competition from 9am to 5pm daily.

The competition attracted me in many ways, but it’s flawed equally as much.

It’s basically a new initiative by Science Centre to have people demonstrating and busking about Science. Well, it suited me quite well with all the home laboratory projects I have. I never like to venture into these new experiences alone, so I got Shaun to form a partnership.

Anyone can join the competition. The only criteria is age 7 to 70. The top 3 prizes include a one year renewable contract with Science Centre. And so we registered and got pass the Audition Round with a very simple show-and-tell on the Coke-Mentos experiment. We weren’t really trying.

We made it to the second round — the Busking Round — where things started to get serious and the flaws come in. The Busking Round is simply 3 days at Science Centre where each of the 25 teams have a booth to busk at. Basically, we needed to get as many votes as possible from the visitors to Science Centre. And, of course, you can get your own supporters to visit Science Centre and vote for you. As an added incentive, free Science Centre admission tickets were given to supporters.

We worked hard alright. The amount of time we put in was up to us. We don’t even need to turn up. But we were one of the few teams which came at every single timeslot available for busking. We badly needed to do everything we could to maximize our votes.

It was painful.

On the first day, I saw a Primary School girl gain more votes than me, when she spent a mere 2 hours busking and I did 6 hours. Reason? Her Primary School got one truckload of students coming down to support.

Primary School teams topped the table at the end of the day. That’s also the day that most of my friends enlisted for NS.

On the second day, NUS High decided to level the playing field by sending down two truckloads of students.

Without a school, we were at a serious disadvantage and relied purely on public votes to get us anywhere.

Anyway, to keep the story short, only the top 9 teams would move on to the Finals. By the 3rd day, we were still outside of the top 9.

And finally, after the 3rd and final day, we managed to clinched 8th with 170 votes. The top teams had figures like 400+++.

So, well, we got in. The finals is next Saturday, and it is almost necessary for us to get about 45 supporters — because once again, a large percentage of the score will be based on the audience vote. Also, the best group of supporters will get $500 in cash. Hell, do we even have 45 friends who are not in Pulau Tekong currently?

Another component of our score in the finals will be an online video. The Rating and View Count will be taken into account, so I really appreciate your help if you could just go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk4GSSF_RGo and watch the comedy we made. And also, please drop a 5 Star vote! ^^

Many thanks to Rong’en, Damian, Kok and Isabel for dropping by during the Busking Round!