Category: Personal

Feb 19 – Lost & Found Day

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@#$%&^ !!! Lost my wallet…. Nabei.. sai lah!!! And I wasn’t even drunk because I walked 7 floors up the blasted stairs to punish myself for being a careless fxxk.

0035hrs: I came home after midnight and discovered my wallet gone. Tried to call the cab company and they transferred me to their lost and found department that takes forever to for someone to pick up. Hung up and decided to try and find the number for Comfort Delgro’s lost & found department online.

0050hrs: Found lost & fund department number for Comfort Delgro. Called and it said it is Citicab’s. Automated machine repeated message that they are closed for the day and their office hours are 8am to… can’t remember whatever the shit time it was. Couldn’t find another number. So I filed lost item report online.

0055hrs: Make police report on line for lost items.

0100 – 0110hrs: Called Citibank, HSBC, DBS, UOB to uspend all my credit cards and ATM cards.

0110hrs: Jimmy (friend from Asia Friendfinder) told me on MSN to call their Comfort Delgro’s cab booking line again and insist they transfer me to a human.

0115hrs: Finally managed to speak to a lady in lost & found department in Comfort Delgro who promises me to try and contact the cabbie. The poor sod before that assured me repeatedly that there is someone who will pick up the line.

0119hrs: The same lady called back and told me that the item was not found. ” The cabbie said it was not in his cab after he searched. “

0119 – 0215hrs: Sorted out problems with Citrix Client on computer and managed to connect to my office email and sent my boss an email to apply for urgent leave.

0220 – 0224hrs: Showered. Said a silent prayer to God to get my IC back. Dropped dead on bed after that.

0740hrs ~ 0750hrs: Daily alarm went off. (Forgot to turn off. Hit the Stop buttons on all three and went back to sleep.)

0800hrs: Woke up and checked my Blackberry to see if my boss has given his approval for my leave. “OK” were the only two words in the email.

Around 1115hrs: Forward police report to Gary Ho, and asked him to help me to print out half a dozen copies in the office since I don’t have a printer at home.

1230hrs: Traveled to town to meet friend Gary for lunch and collect printouts of police reports.

1300 – 1330hrs: Lunch.

1345hrs – 1400hrs: Go buy myself a new wallet with Gary.

1410hrs: Replace ATM card at UOB. Staff told me $5 charge is waived because I had a police report.

1430hrs: Replace ATM card at DBS. Counter staff told me I can merge both my DBS & POSB ATMs into one and spare myself the trouble of going to POSB to replace the POSB card. Thanked the lady profusely for informing me of this.

1440hrs: Went Safra Clubhouse at Carpenters Road to replace Safra card. The lady at the clubhouse took a look at my police report and said it will be free. Suggested I renew my membership and got a ‘free’ Timex watch which has a label that says… $118. Well, I really hope it’s worth that much. She gave me a bag to put all my stuff in since I was juggling several items madly. Today must have been my lucky day – all these service people I have met so far are damned nice.

1455hrs: Crossed over to Central at Clarke Quay and sipped some iced lemon tea. It was damned warm today and I looked like I came out of a shower.

1505hrs: Boarded bus 61 outside Central to go to ICA at Lavender.

1520hrs: Asked the poker faced staff at ground floor of ICA where to go to get a replacement NRIC.

1530hrs: Settled all the administrative work with yet another poker faced staff at level 3, ICA. Don’t these people ever smile?! It’s not like I killed your entire family. Got my number and read my storybook at ICA until 1550pm when my number flashed on the notice board.

1605hrs: Settled the matter of my replacement NRIC. The last lady at ICA was the friendliest of the lot. Shocked that I came so quickly to replace it. Told me that if I found my lost IC by March 6th, I could get a refund.

1610hrs: Took MRT to City Hall. Nothing much left to do and decided to go GV Marina and find out what I can do to get my Movie Club card replaced. End up buying a ticket for CJ7 at 1655 since I can only change the card at Plaza Singapure. (I was simply too lazy to go.)

1655 – 1835hrs: Watced CJ7.

1850hrs: Boarded bus 97 outside Esplanade. (Taking the MRT at this hour is simply nuts.)

1940hrs: Reached Jurong East MRT Station.

1955hrs: Reached Boon Lay MRT Station.

2005hrs: Bought dinner from Jurong Point food court and walked home dejectedly.

2015hrs: Ate dinner and clicked mindlessly on my computer. Cleared some company mails and see if my boss has fired my ass.

2310hrs: Door bell chimed. Decided to check who’s at the door since it’s too late for door to door sales and hoping I could give whoever a piece of my mind if it is a salesman.

2311hrs: Stranger at the door: ” Ah… remember me? I am the taxi driver yesterday. Here’s your wallet. What? They said I said the wallet isn’t on the cab? They didn’t even call me… “

2312hrs: Puzzled. Still, I gave cabbie $20 to refuel his cab for making the effort to come all the way here. Still in shock while holding the wallet with everything intact inside it. What the… ?!

2315hrs: Jumping with joy and praising God. There are good people and miracles after all. Even though I had wasted time replacing some of the cards, I got the IC back. And that’s what I asked God to give me back anyway.

Now I need to find out… how I can cancel the police report. Making a false report is a crime… or so it says on the spf.gov.sg wesbite.

Feb 15 – Humble Pie Day

2 comments

Today I ate the humble pie twice, though the ‘cheese pie’ Edison Chen EdipR0n Chentuk ate would have been slightly more appealing…

Round 1
I have always thought I had a lot of knowledge about the automated workstation build and remote program installation process in the office. I felt there’s probably few things that I don’t know about after working here for a good 7 long years. And as they always say, “Pride goes before a fall” and “God opposes the proud.”

So it was a little annoying today when I failed to get a software reinstalled on the system by simply removing the registry keys at the usual location. For the better part of 15mins, I was fuming at the system and wondering what has gone wrong. Took me a long time to notice, that the FQDN [Fully Qualified Domain Name] of the applications package & system build server has changed, and I had * gasp * deleted the registry entry referencing the old FQDN. 他妈的，阴沟里翻船！！(Fxxk, it was a dumb mistake!!)

While that didn’t have any adverse effects at all, this is the kind of mistake I don’t expect myself to make. It was supposed to be a task that would take no more than 2 minutes, unless the system itself really had a problem – e.g. the kind along the lines of a broken MSI Installer.

I was wasting precious time doing a really simple task. I am glad I spotted the mistake and I reminded myself to always remain humble before I end up making a major mistake.

Round 2
And if you thought that was just a small episode in my usually mundane and boring life, it wasn’t over yet, because I had the cheek to tell my friend that getting hit by a malware is small matter and it’s easily cleared.

So I picked up my friend’s Lenovo X61 laptop at Change Alley some time before lunch. What I didn’t take into consideration was I had no clue what the malware was and as I have been in a well protected corporate environment, where malwares are a distant memory. In other words, I had not considered that malware has evolved and are now way more formidable than the last time I cleared them. To make matters worse, the laptop is loaded with Windows Vista and the elevated security along with the irritating system restore combined to give me one of the most annoying afternoons I have experienced for a long time. Consider it the second humble pie of the day, one that last long enough to serve as dessert for my tea break.

After sort of pulling my hair out for the better part of the afternoon, I finally managed to at least figure out what the malware was – File Secure and iedefender. It is also known as the unknown trojan. They are one and the same and they masquerades as an advanced spyware removal program.

I can only suspect where this might have come from… probably while someone was using my friend’s laptop to surf smut and to look for EdipR0n Chentuk pics, since I could see them all over the browser’s history. The most likely scenario would involve a false message popping up in Internet Explorer saying that the system is infected. No matter what the user clicked, be it ‘OK’ or ‘CANCEL’, it would have allowed the malware to be installed. The only way to avoid this would have been to close the window without clicking on any of the buttons on that message at all! Damn EdipR0n, Internet Explorer System Exploder and ActiveX to hell!

Either way, I also come to learn of some anti-spyware tools like Super Antispyware, which is quite handy and useful in clearing these kind of shits. While I wasn’t originally convinced that it is a genuine malware detection and clearing too when I looked at the website, I soon discovered that it is indeed legitimate, because I also find it available on download.com. (The current released version is 3.9 as of Feb 15, 2008. I personally won’t trust those so-called v4.0 beta copies found on Google, until I have verified that those sites hosting the files are trustworthy.)

So, after a combination of automated and manual clearing, the malware appeared to be vanquished as the symptoms are gone for good. However, I still decided to restore the entire laptop to factory default in the end as I am not quite convinced that the kind of defenses I am going to put on the laptop (the sames ones I have on my own system) would be sufficient for this laptop in its post-compromised state.

So, I conceded defeat and sourly boot the Lenovo laptop into recovery mode using that ‘Think Advantage’ button, and let it do a restore. I reminded myself I should humbly turn down any request for assistance with clearing malware in the future… as I realized I ain’t that great with dealing with this kind of problems at all.

But nevertheless, all glory be to God. At least I learn something today, and as it always goes, I know this experience is going to come in useful someday… soon.

Back to using Mozilla Thunderbird’s RSS reader again…

11 comments

I have grown increasingly disappointed with the postings making to Top 10 in ping.sg. The titles are either outrageous or borderline scandalous, or they would come repeatedly from certain bloggers whose posts leave one wondering why they generated so much interest or what makes the literary skills of the blogger so impressive.

I had a chat with Chillycraps over this and one of us have gotten disillusioned enough to consider quitting ping.sg entirely. The things we discussed were nothing new, such as the removal of the Top 10 entirely, as the most direct and effective means to downgrade the value of pongs, and reducing its effect in being some kind of click magnet for those money crazed ‘bloggers’. We talked about upgrading the search feature to allow searching by date, pingster name, and then sorting them by either time, or pongs. The idea was simply: to completely eliminate the importance of pongs and the side effect the Top 10 being a magnet for clicks..

We also talked about how the influx of new users to ping.sg – a testimony of Uzyn’s success – caused a drop in the standards of the posts made, and the possibility that some quality postings may now languish ‘unponged’ amidst the flood of postings. That was when we also touched on the matter of why a sudden deluge of postings at one go from a blogger can be irritating, especially when the postings are completely devoid of personal opinion or write-ups but just a redirection to certain links. The fact is that it simply just push everyone else’s post down to another page before they are even noticed.

So, we come to the conclusion that the Top 10 feature is as good as defunct, and the increase in pings may have in fact diminished the effectiveness of ping.sg as an avenue to access good blog posts, and completely eliminate it as a means to keep updated with posts from our friends.

Thus, I conclude that the situation has deteriorated to the point where I should revert back to the use of my trusty Mozilla Thunderbird RSS Reader. It’s definitely a far more effective way to filter out undesirables compared to clicking the [-] on them in ping.sg. The only people on it will always be the people I want to read. There will be no chronic payperpost bloggers, fiction writers wannabes, and warts of all sorts.

Anyway, we are anxiously waiting for Uzyn to release an upgraded version of ping.sg amidst his tight work schedule. We hope the new version will eliminate some of these annoyances. So, Chillycraps and I are not quitting ping.sg just yet. (I am sure that’s to the disappointment of some.)

Here’s my preliminary list of pingsters added to RSS so I won’t miss anything when these people have posted. I doubt anyone is (or would actually be) concerned if they are not on the list. After all my opinion is insignificant anyway.

  1. Aaron Peng
  2. Alice
  3. Bobo
  4. Chillycraps
  5. DK
  6. InsanePoly
  7. Malique
  8. Nicole
  9. Pink
  10. Ridzuan
  11. Rude Singaporeans
  12. Sheylara
  13. Simply Jean
  14. Tstar
  15. Xinyun
  16. Snowbiscuit

Cough Syrup… or Poison?

7 comments

It’s been a long time since I was sick. And I hate being sick because when I do fall sick it’s usually damned nasty. So since Friday afternoon, I have been coughing my lungs out and yesterday things took a turn for the worse after watching a movie at GV Vivo. My nose has started to run, and there’s this headache that’s so bad I can’t even sleep throughout the night.

So I just lie on the bed waiting for daylight and for the clinic to start operation at 0830hrs… since 2230 the night before. I must say it’s ten of the most painful hours in my life, though it isn’t the first time I had a flu this bad.

So, it’s $35 for a 10 minutes consultation, some pain killers, medicine to stop the running nose and a cough syrup. And the lady doctor isn’t bad looking though I must say I would prefer to meet her under better circumstances. (And the reason I like this clinic is they don’t normally prescribe anti-biotics.)

But hey… take a look at the cough lotion the doctor prescribed. It says poison. I just had some and it’s sweet. That explains why it has that poison label. Just in case you liked it so much you just down the whole damned bottle.

And now I am waiting for the medication to take effect so I can finally catch some much needed sleep. Not to mention that I am blaming SMRT for my being sick… on Friday night I came onto a train where there were 2 people coughing away and one of them were sneezing like nobody’s business. Thank you very much, SMRT!

Faith (I)

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I don’t normally write about my faith in Jesus Christ because there are many aspects of my life that do not stand up to the standards of the Holy God I believed in. I don’t talk about it very often because I would be quite a bad testimony myself – the vulgarities I use, and some of the hum sup jokes I crack from time to time.

Anyway, I recalled that when I was a teenager, I never believed in the Gospel. I once told a classmate over the phone that the Gospel is all hogwash. I will buy none of that virgin birth stuff. And to an old friend I said, “All religion are false. It’s because men needs idols that they believe in all these so-called gods or supernatural beings.” (And I got that idea when watching A Chinese Ghost Story II. [倩女幽魂 II])

At 17 years old, I used to go down to the Queenstown National Library branch at Margaret Drive to borrow and read books that I don’t really understand – books on astronomy such as the formation of the universe etc. I loved watching documentaries on TV talking about the Big Bang and how things come to be. I believed that the universe is formed by one big explosion and everything that came to be on this planet happened by chance. I held to the view that all religions are simply superstition – there is NO God, and what I am reading is a sign of an ‘modern, advanced, educated and scientific’ mind. Religion is for the weak and the stupid. I will not be another of those superstitious, stupid boxers I read about in Chinese history.

Yet in spite of all these, at 19 years old, I said my sinner’s prayer and became a Christian. In 2 years, I became what I had once despised.

What changed? I really do not know. But one thing I never understood when reading the New Testament, was why Jesus Christ went willingly to the Cross. No matter how many times I read it, I couldn’t see any account that Jesus was taken by force. He went willingly and then hang on the Cross to die a gruesome, ignominious death. I asked, “If you are the God you claimed you are, why didn’t you come down from the Cross? And if you are not God, why do you so foolishly die? The world won’t become better because you did this. Your death is in vain!”

And yet at the back of my mind, I keep remembering this: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” – John 15:13 ~ 14. To me, Jesus is saying to me, “This is why I am willing to die on the Cross. I am doing it so you will listen.”

Some people had asked me how I am sure that’s Jesus speaking to me and I can only say the verse popped in my mind at the weirdest moments. In a shower, when I am shitting, when I am day dreaming, and even when I am looking at girls.

I know this won’t convince anyone that it is God speaking because it really didn’t sound like much. Some might laugh at me and call me a superstitious bump. And for those looking for a story on how much God has blessed me in wealth ever since I believed, you won’t find any of that stuff here either. Go waste your time reading up some of those ‘Get Rich’ books instead.

Still, some may think of me as delusional, but to me, God is a friend who speaks to me whenever I earnestly asked Him for an answer. (I’ll share more of these experience as time goes by and I guesss some of you are going to hate my blog from now on.)

And no, I am not mad or going mad. When I said God speaks to me I don’t mean He pops ideas in my mind like ‘go cleanse the earth in holy zeal’ or ‘kill the infidels’ . If that ever happens to you, we are not having the same faith experience, that’s some kind of mental sickness. Go talk to someone about it, and get some professional help.

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