I want a holiday too 28 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, For Him For Her, Slice of Life, Travel & Discovery.add a comment
I think I’ve frequently told me friends that I dun like to go for short holidays like those 7 days 6 nights Enchanting Korean by Chan Brothers. I think it’s simply a waste of time and money. First of all, u need to pay for air tickets, accomodations, run road, food and not to mention salary for the tour guides and company. And all these overheads for a mere 1 week stay at a foreign country. I think that’s hardly enough time to properly enjoy ourselves. Secondly, it’s the waste of time. I think the phrase frequently used in army and many other places also applies here: Rush to wait, wait to rush. The fact is that such 1 week trips try to pack as many tour locations as possible into a very tight schedule so that u will *feel* that the trip is very worthwhile. The end result is that we get rushed from place to place without properly appreciating the beauty and culture of the city we’re in. And the worst thing is, once they rush u out of the hotel every morning and into the travel bus, u spend half the day taking a bus ride to the next town or city. Meanwhile, u sleep half ur trip on the bus and thereby zzz away the precious dollars spent on this 1 week holiday itself. Not worth it ya?
My last tour group trip was to New Zealand last year. And these are all conclusion I drew from that trip. Yes, I did enjoy myself quite a lot, but I think it just isn’t worth the money. To me, a short trip should be cheap and incur minimum overhead cost to begin with. As such, short trips are best confined to neighbouring countries, for example, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hongkong. Also, do not go with any tour groups. Plan our own itinerary with a wealth of information on the internet and perhaps drop by the library or the local bookstore for a copy of a travel guide (with lots of coloured pictures). We did this for our simple Malacca trip. For far far away places like Japan, US, Europe, I suggest going for an extended period, say 1 month at least. This will help to even out the expensive cost of booking a ticket to fly there. But it’s still not really feasible as the accomodations will still cost a bomb, even if u choose cheaper lodgings. So then, what is a better idea? Work there, of course!
There can be 2 ways to work there. First, go there and find work. Second, find work here and get them to station u there. Haha… I personally prefer option 2. It’ll really be nice if my company would send me over to Japan to out station for a year or two there. Of course, I’ll bring Dear2 along with me and we get to live together in a foreign land. But then Dear2 have to start finding a new job there then. The opposite is also true, if Dear2 is out stationed, I will go along and find a new job at the new country. Haha… Lots of wishes and thoughts here ya? Back to reality. Can this so called dream be realized? I say yes. But it won’t drop from the sky. Gotta work for it, work towards it, find it. Dun wait for it to find u, cos it won’t. Lots of youthful dreams and ambitions. Let’s keep it that way. Cos when dreams start to fade, u know age is catching up.
Some heavy stuff here ya? Hehe… On a lighter note, I think I could use a short holiday. Feeling a bit drained these days. But then, I also think that holidays shouldn’t be used as a means of escape. We do not go for a holiday becos we want a break from work. We go on a holiday becos we want to visit that place. Yup. And there are some places I want to visit together with my dear. Taiwan is one. Hongkong is another. Bangkok maybe. Japan too. Gee…
-Dear1
Do we like to write blogs? 26 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.add a comment
This is the topic of discussion for today. Do we, Dear1 and Dear2, like to write blogs?
The simple answer: Yes.
The complicated answer:
If some of u have been regular readers of our blog, u would have realized by now that Dear2 has disappeared from action for quite a long while. This is becos of her new job. The job scope requires Dear2 to work pretty long hours and by the time she gets home, she is too tired and lacks insipiration to write any post. Simply put, the long hours at work washed away any spark of insipiration.
Another thing u would have noticed is that for the month of June, posts have been very very irregular and totally not following our one post a day rule. The truth is, work. To tell the truth, work hasn’t been going all well for me either. I think I’ve been very unproductive and really need to pull up my socks. However, I’ve been very unmotivated lately and can’t seem to pinpoint the reason for so. It’s just a bad habit to start pointing fingers and blaming the work environment, colleagues, boss, weather, blah blah blah. Somewhere deep in thought, I know the problem must have been more fundamental than my surroundings. It’s probably got to do with my lifestyle, my mindset, my vision, goal, values, etc, this sort of things. And I still haven’t really sorted my thoughts out. Maybe it’s something that I can’t see on my own, and needed the perspective from outside myself to objectively tell me what is my problem. Hmm… Let’s just leave my train of thoughts here for a moment.
I enjoyed writing posts too. Remember blog as a history log? It still stands. I enjoyed logging in to my blog account each day, writing something, looking through my statistics, finding out which is the most popular post entries, seeing who linked our blog from their websites, all so fun and interesting. But I guess life is not as simple as that. Putting thoughts into action are completely different things. And it always requires a conscience effort to do something. For now, let’s get our lives sorted out and maybe this blog will log our ups and downs in life which will become precious memories in time to come. So, yes. The blog will always be here and we’ll always be adding new things to it. Our life story continues.
-Dear1
Desktop computer bought 25 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Consumer Electronics, Dear1, Shop till you drop.1 comment so far
Haha… What a week! We bought both the desktop computer and the furniture for our study room. Really need to beat the GST hike here. Actually, we bought the computer last week and furniture this week, even though I posted about the furniture first before now the computer.
So, here’s the specs. Asus M2NPV-VM with AMD 64 X2 3800+. I had initially wanted to get the 4400+ or the 4600+, but a quick chat with the sales persons at Sim Lim Square revealed that either the 3800+ or the 5200+ is most value for money, bang for buck. This information was consistent amongst various sales persons so I believed them and chose the 3800+.
Let’s talk about some of the standard items first. 2Gb of DDR2 667 RAM from Corsair and 320Gb SataII from Seagate. This is to provide lots of space for recording tv programs. Okay, so maybe 320G is not really alot, we’ll do the upgrade when the time comes around. Samsung 18x DVDRW to all our burning needs.
Next, the tv tuner card. Reading some reviews from the internet, I decided to go with the HVR 1300 which contains a single tuner and can receive both analog and digital transmissions. The catch here is that u need to connect it to a proper antenna, which could easily cost another $20-$30 from Sim Lim Tower. I haven’t bought that yet, hence my tv tuner card is non functional right now. If I plug to into the SCV cable on the wall, I won’t be able to receive Over-The-Air digital transmissions like HDTV trial and Tv Mobile. If I use antenna, I can’t receive channel U which is transmitted solely through cable. Not too sure about Channel News Asia though. Hmm… Still thinking of a solution for this. Guess I have more forum readings to do. Do drop me a comment if u have a solution, to receive both analog and digital channels at the same time.
Finally, casing and power supply. We have 2 constraints here. First, it needs to be quiet, so that means getting a higher grader power supply. Second, the living room cupboard is rather small, that means getting a casing that is small enough to fit. I should really have gottena mATX casing that would fit into the cupboard with lots of space to space. But I was thinking of interior cooling and having more space within the casing for the components to cool, hence I opted for the ATX casing. After installation, then I realized ATX is just a little too big for my cupboard. It now takes a good shove to get all the wires and casing in and close the door. It’s really a very very tight fit. The motherboard temperature hovers around 42 degrees now with doors closed, so I guess it should be fine. Next, I need to run some computer simulations to test the ventilation performance at higher CPU loads.
Nowadays, Sim Lim Square also offers free installation, something I wasn’t expecting. But it’s great that someone helps me to install all the components, saving me about 2 hrs of manual reading time. Hehe… The shop we bought from is Cybermind. I have set aside a budget of $1000, but we got everything at a final price of $850 nett. Within budget, good! I also need to start testing the gaming capabilities to see if the on board Nvidia 6150 is up to my gaming standards. At least no First Person Shooters, just Role Playing Games, Real Time Strategy, Sports and Racing games for Dear1 and Dear2, so I guess it should work out fine.
-Dear1
Shopping at vhive again 24 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Reno & Furnishing, Shop till you drop.1 comment so far
Since buying our office chairs at vhive some months ago, our study room has more or less remained stagnent. But now, with GST going up soon, we may need to fork out quite a bit to pay the extra cost of the large items like furniture. Which is why, we decided to buy our furniture today, at vhive. Otherwise, our total cost of ~$1000 today would require us to pay an extra $20 in tax. On to the story.
This time, our bookshelf is bought from the Wall Street Series. The serial numbers are 8026, 8031, 8042 times 2 sets and 8044. Remembering that we have a ceiling fan in our study, we realise that we cannot have a full height casement bookshelf in the centre of the room. Eventhough the fan won’t hit the shelf, but once the casement door is opened, it will hit the fan. Therefore, instead of getting 2 full height shelves, we decided to get 1 full height and 1 half height instead. Full one in the corner and half height towards the centre.
The next item is a rolling chest of drawers, Boss Pedestal (3 Drawers) BP313. We needed this one because our study tables dun have drawers, so we need this one to put all the items that needed to be easily accessible. Hmm… the problem is to buy 1 or 2. At $168 each, it does sound a little expensive to buy 2. So, for the time being, we’ll make do with 1, until there’s a more urgent need. This chest of drawers comes with 3 separate drawers, so Dear2 will take the top drawer, Dear1 will take the middle one, and we’ll both share the bottom one.
The last item we bought is a night stand for our bedroom, serial number ZIT2NT Brown Oak. Every bedroom needs a night stand, to put all the little little handy items that u need next to ur bed. For example, an alarm clock. Also, the handphone charger, space to put ur spectacles, glass of water, watch, ring, and a whole load of other stuffs. My only concern here is that the night stand cannot be so tall that it knocks my head when I turn to the side of the bed. This night stand is good enough, not perfect, but I think fits about 80% of our requirements.
Wow! It has been a long while since we went shopping for furniture. It’s really fun. Hehehe… Of course, Dear1 and Dear2 are not people who spend indiscriminantly. I personally feel that vhive furniture are rather value for money. It’s not the cheapest around, but at least the quality and design aren’t bad. I’ve been to many showrooms, in the industrial areas or some of the ‘neighbourhood’ furniture shops and even some ‘branded’ shops. I think those furnitures exhibits a sort of mass produced aura that I cannot accept. Those designer furniture at those designer designer shops are most of the time very glam, very expensive and also impractical, more suitable for showrooms but not suitable for day to day living. I think vhive manage to strike a balance somewhere which is why I enjoyed shopping there.
Just to add, there’s a 5% discount if u pay by DBS Visa or Master card, which we happen to have. So, yeahhhhh! We got a $50 off. :D :D :D In additional, there’s free delivery and installation. Also, the glass door component seem to be out of stock. Nonetheless, the salesperson says that he’ll deliver and install everything for us this week and arrange a separate (free) delivery to deliver and install the glass door once their shipment arrives. Cheers!
I enjoyed shopping with my dear dear. Dear dear, I won’t moody anymore. Let’s perk each other up together. We choose to be a happy and loving couple. Muck!
-Dear1
Our Nokia 6288 21 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Consumer Electronics, Dear1, For Him For Her.27 comments
Dear1 and Dear2 got a pair of Nokia 6288 as our 9th Anniversary couple gift. We’ve always wanted to get a pair of matching handphones for ourselves and now we’ve finally got it. The Nokia 6288 comes in 2 colours, black and white. Hence, we bought both versions and Dear1 ended up with the black version and Dear2 is using the white one.
After using it for about a month, here’s what I think of it. Firstly, the 6288 is just a slightly upgraded version of the 6280 which was released some time earlier. Some ppl say 6288 is just a firmware upgrade of the 6280, but there are some other minor hardware changes, more info can be found from the internet. To some ppl, it may be more worthwhile getting the now cheaper 6280 and upgrading the firmware to the latest one, which 6288 is also running the exact same firmware. I think that’s a great idea to save money too. After all, the hardware changes are really minor. But then, we wanted to get a discounted purchase price from our telco, therefore we decided to get the 6288 from the M1 shop with line instead of 6280 from regular handphone shops but without line. 6288 also allows upgrading of firmware over the internet, which I did, and am using the latest v6.10.
The first thing that struck us is the 5 minutes free M1 to M1 video calls. We’ve tested out the feature a few times and found the video and audio quality quite good. However, there are some parts of Singapore (Dear1’s parents house) that doesn’t receive 3G network and hence cannot make video calls.
The processor on this phone is quite speedy, unlike my previous previous T610 which was really sluggish. As such, I enjoy using this phone quite a lot. I think some ppl out there may argue that 6288 doesn’t have a really fast processor. Yes, I agree, but it’s good enough for our usage.
Next, 2 megapixel camera. Hehe… Another great plus point. Now we can use our phone as a decent camera and go around snapping photos of places or of each other. Our previous phones, Samsung D510 and Sony Ericsson K300i just doesn’t sport a good enough camera for everyday use. Another great thing about 6288 is that it features 640×480 video, which is the largest I have seen so far amongst video phone.
Then there’s a miniSD card slot. The internal memory of the 6288 is just plain lousy. Even the free 64Mb card that comes with the phone package is just not enough for use. Hence, Dear1 bought a 2Gb card and Dear2 bought a 1Gb card from Sim Lim Square. 2Gb is the largest capacity supported by the phone.
Using the SUPER video convertor, Dear1 has managed to convert some video files downloaded from the internet to *.3gp files that can be played on the 6288. The conversion is good and now, I have quite a number of video that I can enjoy using my phone on long bus rides. The formats I’ve tried converting from includes avi, flv, rmvb and mkv. So far so good.
Dear2 is also very fascinated by the radio function. Actually, Dear1 too. This is because neither of us have used a phone that comes with a FM radio before. And surprisingly, the audio quality is actually quite good, both through the handsfree set and the built in loudspeaker. That being said, the loudspeaker is really not bad. No wonder u see so many young punks nowadays blasting loud irritating music from their handphones in public places.
Generally, I think this is quite a good phone. There are some complains though. First, the video and music player doesn’t allow fast forward and rewind. This greatly reduces listening and watching pleasure. Imagine being interrupted by a phone call in the middle of a 1 hr video clip, u gotta rewatch everything from the start! Second, the form factor is a little on the large side and slightly heavy. This could lead to some discomfort during prolong usage. Third, the organizer isn’t really well thought out enough. It works well, but sometimes it takes a little too many clicks to get from writing a note to taking a weekly view and back to monthly view. One more, there isn’t any realtime call summary for voice calls. This means that I can’t track how many minutes I’ve been talking and I won’t know when to hang up the call.
Nonetheless, this is the first couple handphone that we’ve gotten together and we just really liked it. :D
-Dear1
Simply Her Magazine 15 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, For Him For Her.1 comment so far
Yeah… We’ve finally received our Simply Her magazine. Remember Dear1 and Dear2 signed up for a 1 year subscription worth $40 in order to get our free gift mini steamboat? Wow… that was some time back. Well.. we finally received it. And I excitedly took a very quick browser through the magazine to see if it is worth our money.
First of all, it’s $4.20 per issue, so that means we got a good deal. But this is expected becos we ARE suppose to get a discount for subscription off the newsstand price. Now, on to the contents of the magazine.
I was pleasantly surprised. The magazine is filled with alot of different information. Yes! Information, not junk adverts. In fact, there’s quite a fair bit of articles which made me feel valued as a reader. Next is the diverse genre covered in the magazine. Alright, I agree that these are all women topics, but hey, this is Simply Her. Not really expecting gadget reviews now are we.
One particular feature I like about this magazine is that it reviews many products. For example, there’s an article on eyebrow tweezers, which Dear2 liked alot. In that article, there’s information on where to get it and how much. Also, about 5 to 6 products are reviewed and critics and ratings were presented. Finally, a recommendation is made as to the Overall Best, Most Value for Money, Best New Entry. Well, I too liked the way these articles are presented. And there were about 3 to 4 such (ladies) product comparisons in the magazine.
Buying a magazine subscription is something that Dear1 and Dear2 had thought about for some time yet never got around to doing. Partly due to financial reasons, and partly due to laziness. Now we finally got one, and are happy that one first subscription turned out fine. (*Note: Times magazine subscription during schooling days don’t count, cos nobody *reads* them anyway.)
Let’s see how this works out. Maybe we’ll indulge ourselves a bit and get more leisure subscriptions along the way. Good idea ya? We all need to pamper ourselves sometimes.
-Dear1
The words are too small 11 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Consumer Electronics, Dear1.add a comment
We didn’t buy any home theater system for our house, neither did we buy any stand alone dvd players nor vcr. Instead, we use a home theater personal computer (HTPC) setup in our living room. Or rather, we intended to.
So far, we haven’t gotten around to building the desktop computer for our living room yet due to 2 factors. First is cost. It’s a rather big spending, budgeted at around $1000. Second is the utilization. Since we haven’t fully move in to our house yet, most of the time, this equipment will just be collecting dust, hence the delay in buying it.
Currently, the practice is for me to bring my laptop whenever we’ve staying over. However, this does comes with its own restrictions. The first being, we have to know that we are staying over for the night before setting off for work that day so that I can pack my laptop to work. Second, it’s quite heavy and incovenient. Third, the frequently setting up and dismantling of the laptop can be quite a hassle. Fourth, the laptop comes with a fixed resolution on its video card. This coupled with the wide screen Lcd Tv that we’re using in the living makes for words that are stretched and quite unreadable. In addition, due to the further distance from the sofa to the tv compare to our study chair to a normal computer monitor, the words are really too small to read. We really need a video card that supports widescreen, making the words more proportionate, and hopefully enlarge the fonts.
There is a temporary solution to this. That is to set all the fonts in Windows to Extra Large. This option can be found in the display properties. However, this only enlarges the fonts of native windows and it excluded webpages. Hence, surfing the net and reading webpages is still a problem. There’s another temporary solution to this. That is to use the pagezoom extension for firefox that zooms in on webpages. The advantage of zooming in is that the aspect ratio and relative positions of all the page contents are maintained. This is oppose to just setting a larger minimum font in the browser options. This generally just makes typed words larger and often ends up with misaligned and distorted pages when there are embedded text or images.
As our usage becomes heavier at our new house, I think it’s time to get a new computer to install at the living room, realizing our HTPC concept. This is a great time to buy it, just before the GST hike kicks in. Luckily, the monitor (tv), keyboard mouse (wireless) and speakers are already in place. So we only need to purchase the main CPU. One important feature of this HTPC is the tv record function. Hopefully I can set up a sort of server in our house that is accessible securely via the internet. That way, I’ll be able to connect home and set the pc to record a tv program that I may miss even if I’ll outdoors. Great ya? Provided I can find a secure means of implementing it.
More reports when I finally set it up. :D
-Dear1
Bad exam experience 9 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Slice of Life.add a comment
Finally, after a few days of my dreaded exams, I’ve pretty much gotten over it and I’m here to talk about it.
Just last week, I had this exam, a very important one, one that I had to pass, and if I did fail, I can only retake it once more. Well, the difficult part about this exam is that it encompasses a very large field. From microelectronics to automation and control theory to computer architecture to communications theory. Even though all these fall under the wider umbrella of electrical engineering, the truth is that nobody can be well versed in all these topics at the same time.
The exam requires the examinee to answer 4 out of 12 questions in 3 hours, and it is open book. Sounds easy enough? Not! The problem is the scope of the exam. It has no scope. 12 questions coming from 12 fields and to answer 4 means that I need to be well versed in 4 fields. The scope of preparations is really big. Unlike a normal module exam for Neural Networks, you know that u r preparing for this topic of Neural Networks and u can just prepare for it. Now, the topic becomes Computer Control, and u need to read up on the entire field to answer 1 question.
I guess I was really put off by this. By not knowing how much to study, what to study, to what depth do I need to understand. Then it makes me question the true purpose of this exam, or just exams in general. How long have I been studying? How long have I been faced by examinations? Since 7 yrs old, primary 1. That’s nearly 20 years now, subtracting the time in the army, that’s at least 18 years. Wow! I guess after all these while, I really had gotten used to exams, the pointless effort of mugging 2 weeks before a paper to absorb all the details and only to forget all of them 2 days after. Where is the purpose? For paper qualifications? I guess so. After all, that’s how I’ve gotten my A’s so far, and that’s what’s going to land me a “good” job in the future.
I really wonder. I haven’t got much working experience becos I’ve been a student all my life, but how relevent is exams to the working work? Is there always a ‘right’ answer in the working world? Who is the grader then? Is the grader fair and unbiased? Is there really a way to ’study’ for and ‘exam’ in the working world? Really, what is the point of studying all these years? My grade A in Image Processing doesn’t say much about my skills in processing images. It doesn’t say which software I’m versed in. It doesn’t reflect my ability to analyze the process-ibility of an image. It certainly does not represent how abreast I am with the state-of-the-art. For the record, everything we study in school is classical theory. Sure, we learn how to derive the Fourier Transform on paper, but reality check, people use the computer to do it much faster in the industry.
I think I’ve really grown sick of exams now, seeing how repetitive and pointless it has become. I’m no longer interested in getting A’s. Now, I just want to get it over with the minimum possible passing score with the least effort and really move on to the next stage of life. I’ve already been exam-ing for the last 20 years, it’s time to end it soon. 1 more semester to go.
-Dear1
10000 visits milestone 7 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear1, Internet & Blog, Slice of Life.add a comment
Yeah… Dear1 and Dear2 blog has achieved 10000 visits after about 6 months of inauguration. Hehe… A point to note here is that these visits are all purely from search results link and linkback from other blogs or forums. On our part, we’ve not told *any* one about our blog, not even friends and family. Well, the reason is, this is our little world and not something that we want to actively publize. Just use the search engines on the internet and if our topic is relevent to ur interest, here u r. :D
Let’s have a short recap of the most popular posts to date. Hmm… looking at my stats page, I realize that I can’t find a button that gives me a table of the ‘Top posts’ of ‘All time’. It’s either ‘Last 7 days’ or ‘Last 30 days’. Hmm… This won’t be a good reflection of our all time top posts, but this is the only statistic I have at the moment. So let’s take a look at them. Counting down from 5.
4. Sakura International Buffet Restaurant
And the #1 top post of all time is……
1. Diner Dash Flo on the Go Tips
Below I’d like to mention some posts that I feel should rightfully in the all time list but just not in the last 30 days list. Here they are in no particular order.
a. Results of Toto Hongbao Draw 2007
b. Warbears Mission 2 walkthrough
As of today, I’ll also add a ‘Top posts’ section in the sidebar and it’ll display the top 5 posts in the past day or two.
The important thing now is to continue to look forward and continue writing great posts. This blog shall continue to grow together with us. Yeah!
-Dear1
9th Anniversary 3 June, 2007
Posted by dear1dear2 in Dear2, For Him For Her, Slice of Life.1 comment so far
Today Dear1 and Dear2 celebrated out 9th anniversary together. Wow, Dear1 and Dear2 have been together for 9 years already, but we are still discovering each other. Like, now that Dear1 and Dear2 have a place of our own, Dear2 is fascinated that Dear1 can wake up at 8am in the morning just to wash the laundry so as to catch the morning good sun for sunning clothes. And how Dear1 can help in sweeping and mopping the floor. Thumbs up for Dear1. Gee….
Dear1 and Dear2 have been very bogged down by work recently, so even though we remembered that 3 Jun is our anniversary, but we didn’t have the time to plan out a nice day to celebrate today. The only thing that Dear2 remembered to do was to buy a card to celebrate this occasion. Dear1 was so laddened that he forgot about this.
To save the day, Dear1 and Dear2 cooked a sumptuous breakfast of sausages and eggs. Nice attempt, being a first time we cooked our breakfast. Then we went to West Mall for some Sakae Sushi, sushi-buffet being one of the favourite outings that Dear1 and Dear2 used to have back in our school days, when the Student all-you-can-eat Buffet was really a value for money deal for my sushi-loving and huge appetite Dear1. Hee… Then we ’strolled’ into Popular and Cards & Such, to have Dear1 mysteriously emerging with a card for Dear2. Haha.
We had gotten our presents already, being the same Nokia 6288 phone which we changed last week. To own the same model of phone has been something that Dear1 and Dear2 always wanted to do, and we finally got them.
Overall, it was just another Sunday for us, but the main thing that marked today is that, Dear1 knows that Dear2 will always support you, and Dear1 will always support me. Together, we can achieve a lot more things.
- Dear2
