Southpark buffet

Piracy Online file sharing has claimed another victory !

Instead of fighting the losing battle against illegal downloads of their crazy cartoon, South Park studios just released every single episode in every season available by online streaming. The episodes are in good quality video and sound, not some lousy crappy junk.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/

Devil's guide to the movies : Rambo 4

This is the type of movie that you watch to try to count how many people died in bullet pumping action. It's a typically no brainer action movie, which unfortunately, isn't as action packed as I hope it would with the insane trigger happy movie Shoot'em up in mind.

This movie runs for 91 minutes but the first hour was boring. As I was pretty young when the first 3 Rambo movies came out, all I couldn't remember much about the Rambo movies. My impression of Rambo was of a garang muscle-white man who goes around shooting arrows, firing machine guns and knifing bad bad people. That's how the name Rambo became a verb.

"Don't be so Rambo lah! Chiong so fast for what ?"

"Yesterday which Rambo never flush the toilet har?"

As most action movie goes, the plot really sucks and lack depth. Why train so hard to convert his fats to muscles for only 1 movie when you can make 2 movies? Straight after training hard for Rocky Balbora, Sylvester Stallone used his freshly re-made muscles save a group of Christian aid workers who had lost touch with reality. With their noble causes high in their heads, they jumped right into the middle of a Burma war zone and winded up getting hundreds of people killed in the process.

So in Rambo 4, Sylvester Stallone did all the typical Rambo signature moves as John Rambo during the action scenes. Ok, let's go through the Rambo action check list.

1) Bow and arrows - Checked
While people fish using nets, he elected to use the bow and arrows to fish. After arrowing the poor fish, also passed the bounty to a boy on a boat with 2 Buddhist monks. Eh, that doesn't sound right. I thought monks are compassionate to all living things and killing animals should be loudly protested against. He also arrowed a couple of enemy soldiers in the movie for good measure. And guess what the enemy soldiers were doing? There were placing bets on a new sport. That's forcing villagers to run through a mine field and bet on who would die first.

2) Machine gun - Checked

This time round, he didn't carry the machine gun in his arms with chains of ammo that doesn't move an inch even though he was firing non-stop till kingdom comes. He was firing a machine gun on a patrol boat which had around 100 enemy soldiers as cannon folder. In an attempt to make the scene more realistic, he ran out of bullets and had to reload, and he got shot in the process. Unfortunately, he scene was still badly flawed. No one lobbed grenades at him and despite firing non-stop for 10 minutes, there were no spent bullet casing anywhere.

3) Knife - Checked
He knifed the gay enemy leader in the last scene.

4) Bare Hands - Checked

He killed a horny soldier who was going to rape the female lead, Sarah with his bare hands by ripping out the poor chap's throat.

5) RPGs - Checked
An enemy patrol boat was destroyed by a RPG attack from the rebels.

6) Big explosion - Checked
There was a big explosion with a claymore and a old WWII era bomb which killed several dogs and some enemy soldiers.

7) Burning enemy bases - Checked
Rambo burned down an pirate base after murdering them.

8) Lack of Sex - Checked
With only 1 female lead who was attached to a pastor, Rambo had no chance of getting lucky despite clearing an entire army camp to save her. We were compensated with an attempt rape scene where Rambo torn out the would-be rapist's throat and a suggestive scene where the apparently gay pedophile enemy leader close his hut's door with a young boy with him.

9) Lack of Chase Scenes - Checked
Rambo movies do not include chase scenes of any vehicles and this one does not make an exception. No car chase, no boat chase, no place chase what so ever.

10) New stuff - Checked
Mortar shelling and land mines are introduced.

As I have mentioned, the movie has it's boring moments. There was a scene where Rambo became the boatman who was sending a group of mercenaries to save the missionary folks which was terribly boring as it took them a very long time to reach their destination. It's one of those scenes that we didn't need to know how they got there.

The ending credits was just as bad. 5 minutes of Rambo walking back home. Give us a break. Just kill somebody. Oh, it's also the most violent Rambo movie yet.

The examination dates saga

After putting the horrifying experience of trimester 1 behind us, trimester 2 looked bright and was smooth sailing until March 13, when our course newsletter reached our email in the evening. By now, our program manager is no longer Christopher and the role is now managed by a new comer, Juliana.

In the newsletter, we were informed that our examination dates for trimester 2 will be changed. in the original schedule, there was one paper each on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In the new schedule, Murdoch had decided to reschedule a paper to Thursday, and two on Saturday.

This proved to be a total disaster and triggered a major backlash. We were outraged by their decision to do so without providing any reason apart that the Murdoch Examination Department made the changes.

Here is an email reply to our course mate when he inquire about the changes.

Hi [CENSORED],

The examination dates are determined by Murdoch Examination Department.

The moment I saw that ICT326 and ICT310 are held on the same day but on different timings, I immediately contacted the Examination Department. Although the Examination time do not overlap, taking 2 examinations on the same day is taxing on the students.

As Murdoch has many programs in Singapore, the Murdoch Examination Department plans the examination dates based on another school’s units offered.

From our experience, despite several appeals on behalf of the students, the examination department is unable to change the examination dates and times.

Once the examination board replies, I will let you know.

I am very sorry to let you know this… but… it is not likely to change…

Regards

Juliana

ICT 326 is Information Systems Management and ICT 310 is Operating Systems. Both of them are the trimester's killer subjects. To stack them on a single day is as good as forcing us to fail at least one of them or perform miserably at both of them.

Over the next few days, we wrote multiple emails for explanations and demand to reinstate the original examination schedules. And we were determined to do so. Granted that Juliana is new to her job, but due to the severity of the matter, we practically demand firm and prompt action on her behalf. With the exception of a person, our emails were still relatively on a friendly note.

I sent a reply of my own after thinking through hard on Friday. I couldn't resist the temptation of writing a devilishly long complain oriented email that will scare and stress out our new female program manager. I just have to do it ... albeit nicely.

Hi,

I am not pleased by the announcement the change in exam dates.

>> The examination dates are determined by Murdoch Examination Department.

We were given an exam schedule before the trimester started. It is great, evenly spaced out throughout the week. Were the dates determined by Murdoch Examination Department ?
I can understand that lesson schedules can be changed. But rescheduling examinations date is simply ridiculous. I had never had a exam reschedule or heard of one in my entire life so far, until now. I have made very clear during the feedback session before the trimester started with Christopher and Carol that any rescheduling must not be treated lightly. Is this necessary ? What is the rationale ?

>> The moment I saw that ICT326 and ICT310 are held on the same day but on different timings, I immediately contacted the Examination Department. Although the Examination time do not overlap, taking 2 examinations on the same day is taxing on the students.

I appreciate that. You did hi-lighted the change in red.

>> As Murdoch has many programs in Singapore, the Murdoch Examination Department plans the examination dates based on another school's units offered.

Frankly, I don't care about any other programs from Murdoch. My concern is only with the one I am taking now, BIS1. I don't see why our exam schedule should be changed due to any other factors. Is this really Murdoch or Kaplan ? Is some party unable to cope ?

>> From our experience, despite several appeals on behalf of the students, the examination department is unable to change the examination dates and times.

Then why is the exam different from the ones that was made known to us before the trimester started? Were the dates pluck out of midair by Kaplan or changed at will by Murdoch ?

>> Once the examination board replies, I will let you know.

With a detailed explanation preferred. This is not a feedback, comment or appeal. I will put it as a demand and i am sure that my fellow course mates will agree on this point.

I am a full paying part time student and a full time working adult. I do not have the luxury to change my leave planning to suit sudden changes to the exam schedules. My leaves are already booked and it is not easy to re-shuffle my leave schedule with 10 other people especially I am in a new job. If this is a decision made by Murdoch, they have better seriously rethink this change in exam schedule. In case somebody had forgotten that they are dealing with part time students with full time jobs, I must emphasize that this is totally unacceptable. We need time to prepare for the exams and the topics in this trimester are already devilishly hard. By stacking two difficult examinations in one day, it is as good as asking us to sacrifice a subject for another. This is unfair and unprofessional.I am protesting against this apparent act of mismanagement and sabotage.


In protest
Foong Jia Khang

Juliana didn't make any response to our growing flood of emails to her over the weekend. We didn't expect her to, as she is working on weekdays. As I had mentioned earlier, one of our course mate wasn't as diplomatic as the rest were. When the rest of us saw the email that he had sent, we were initially stunned, angry and then amused. So why is that ? Read on !

Dear Juliana,

I cannot accept your explanation regarding the dates, i do not believe that the school has intentions to purposely punish the students this way.
The original dates set by the school on 21st,23rd,25th April was determined at the start of the course, if they were set like the current dates we would
protest IMMEDIATELY at the start of the semester. The current exam dates are not acceptable by ALL the students in BIS1, I demand that it should be
changed back to the original dates or kaplan and murdoch will have to face the consequences by various authorities in Singapore including MOE, CASE and Strait times.
You have up to 20th March 2008 before i start notifying the authorities. I'm not joking.

Also please give me the email of the school director/ceo if you do not have the authority to change.

Regards,

Gary Tay

Apparently, this Gary Tay guy didn't understand the mechanics of the real world. In the initial phrase of any engagement, people start by clarification and negotiation not confrontation and threats. Not only he sounded childish, spoilt and mean, he made us sounded like barbarians. To add insult to the injury, other than breaking the rules of engagement, he tried to skip through the chain of command as well.

In a desperate attempt to communicate his demands to the highest authorities possible, he went on to send his email to ...

1. ceo@apmi.edu.sg
   
2. sales@apmi.edu.sg
3. help@apmi.edu.sg
4. support@ampi.edu.sg

by CC ... no less ...

and sent the email to the wrong person. Instead of sending to his intended audience, he sent it to one of our fellow course mate. This showed that either he didn't know how to send the email to the correct person, he also didn't know the difference between "to", "CC" and "BCC". This just shows that he is a noob when it comes to sending emails. Such embarrassment !

The kicker is ceo@apmi.edu.sg. Which organisation will be so lazy that it will use such a genetic name for their CEO ? CEO don't change everyday to justify this ! The rest of us couldn't take this shit and I decided to write to Gary.

Gary,

I disagree with your tone used in your reply to Juliana. She is new and to be fair, we should give her a chance to convey our unhappiness to Kaplan and Murdoch. Christopher was given one chance too many though. Let's watch their response to our emails. This is only round one and I see no reason to use threats. This will not help and only create a confrontational atmosphere. Should Kaplan provide us with an unsatisfactory answer, then we can directly demand an explanation from Murdoch. Of course, we should not just sit there, and do nothing while waiting for their official replies. So I recommend that we set a reasonable deadline for their replies in another mail. In additional, we can make a call to Carol to make sure that she is aware of this, and we should prepare a petition to Murdoch as well.

Foong Jia Khang

His reply however, was nothing short of disgusting.

I have my rights to show my dismay including demanding action. U can disagree. I dun feel like playing nice after they did that.

This prompted me to decide to draw a line between Gary and the rest of us by sending another email to Juliana. From his emails were simply demeaning and a total waste of time.

Dear Juliana,

The majority of the students will like to go for a more diplomatic route to work things out. Most of us have voiced out strongly against Gary strong arm tactics and it will do us no good to make the situation any worse than it is. I must stress that his actions does not represent the rest of us and we do not endorse them in any way, in the past, present or future.

Can you let us know by latest Tuesday, on what is the course of action that Kaplan will take to protest against this unfair change of examination schedule. If we don't receive any reply by Tuesday, we will be forced to take alternative and more dramatic actions.

Don't disappoint us again. We expect to see swift replies if not, actions..

Foong Jia Khang

With this, the students were officially divided into 2 fractions: Gary and the rest of us. On Monday, we were all anticipating Juliana's reaction to our flood of emails to her, which ran into a count of 20 odd emails. She didn't disappoint us for long. Very suspiciously, she took MC on Monday. Now that's smart ! She was probably shell shocked and had to retreat to rethink her options.

Dear All

I understand the examination dates that were recently released to you all had caused some unhappiness and upset majority of you. In particular, 2 units examination conducted on the same day.

The examination dates that were disseminated to you all previously were planned based on examination week and also following the same exam sequence for your previous Trimester 3. However, Murdoch came back to us recently with a fixed examination schedule planned by Murdoch themselves.

Please give me some time, I am working closely with Murdoch on this and hope to update you by end this week on the outcome. Hopefully with some good news! J

Thank you all for your patience & understanding.

Regards

Juliana

So we got her reply on Tuesday promising action on her part. That's a improvement for a start. We even tried to act friendly by using a J in her reply. But we were getting impatient by the day. That's because on Thursday, our option for any deferment would expire. That is important because should our appeal to reinstate the original examination dates fail, we will be forced to defer at least 1 subject each to save our grades. So on Wednesday, one of our course mate helped to call and arrange for an emergency feedback session in the evening with Juliana and Carol (Boss of Juliana and Christopher)

I guess Kaplan must have enough of our last feedback session which turned into a very ugly one-sided confrontation. They seemed to be determined to avoid another feedback session with us and Carol played her cards and excused herself from the session, pushing a new unknown person, Jacqueline into the fiery pits.

While we were busy preparing our weapons and methods of interrogation, Kaplan took the hint and worked harder and faster. As the evening drew nearer, we unearthed more inconvenient truths that would have make Kaplan looked like fools. For instance, we were the only group of students taking the subjects now, so our examination schedule is 100% independent from any other cohorts and the Australia side was trying to "moderate" our high assessment scores.

Dear All

I have good news!!! The Uni has listened to your appeals and they have agreed to revert the exam dates back to the original.

The examination dates will be remain as:

ICT326: 23 April

ICT218: 21 April

ICT310: 25 April

The examination will be conducted from 7pm onwards.

Regards

Juliana

So they took us seriously this time round managed to avoid another epic level thrashing session by convincing Murdoch to back down and reverse the changes in the examination schedule. We were relieved but nevertheless, our confidence in APMI Kaplan and Murdoch was shaken again.

During our brain storming sessions, we had came up with many options which would have made a very ugly ending indeed. Even though this chapter in our continuing saga with Kaplan had came to a close, we were now convinced that Kaplan will not put in effort to stand up for us without immerse pressure. In fact, if things continue the way things are, they will end up on the newspaper for losing an entire cohort of students because of repeated failures in administration.

This is certainly another bittersweet victory. And with this incident, I will reassert my claim that APMI Kaplan's BIS course sucks big time. I pity the 20 people who signed up for the 2nd intake. If only we could warn them before they starts...

BIS 1 vs APMI Kaplan / Murdoch = 2 - 0

> 34 emails were exchanged

Random recent photos

My Getronics helpdesk engineers at Power Seraya Power Station site. Naresh and Zheng Zhong.
Taken on probably my last visit to the site as the team lead.

Naresh's Proton is so small that it left plenty of unused space in the City Square parking lot. His superior parking skills forced me to exit from the right passenger door and take this photo as evidence. Oh ya, did I mention that this car does not have powered windows ? License plate is censored to prevent unauthorised 4D inspirations.

While filling in a form, I realised that multiple rebirths is now acceptable and must be declared.

Landed in hot soup again

Ya, my Johnnie Walker Black Label 12 years old limited edition landed in my mom's hot soup for the second time this year.

I could almost imagine 40% of the Scotch which is alcohol vaporising instantly when it was poured into the pot of soup that I did not managed to drink.

The reason for using Johnnie Walker is simple. It taste better than the competition, the Chivas I have in the shelf.

My supplier told me that the duty free store had ran out of stock and my order of 2 bottles could not be fulfilled. This means I have to ration whatever is left of it.

I wish my mom can catch a hint and stop vaporising any more of the Scotch.

The bimbo moment

My little sister asked me what she should do when she ran out of power points in her room, while trying to hook up her computer. I handed her a power extension bar and she started analysing what's in her hands.
After freezing for close to 10 seconds, she pointed at the power plug of the power extension bar and told me that she does not have any more power points to plug into. I was stunned. Then I gave her the WTF look until she got it finally.

For those who cannot get it, you are suppose to unplug an existing appliance and plug in the power extension bar's power plug into it. Then you gained more power sockets this way.

Helpless Helpdesk

Our friendly Lotus Notes Spell Checker explains why your IT helpdesk always seems to be unable to help you with your teething IT problems.

Every help desk engineer is different. Since there is no course in help desk support, the experience level and working attitude determines everything. This means that you can get anything from a good performing fresh grad to a under performing dinosaur with 10 years of experience.

Somerset -> Dhoby Ghaut -> Raffles Place -> City Hall

Singapore's quarterly computer shows are numbingly boring. Unlike the first few shows where companies were busy announcing their latest innovation, the shows today have evolved to a overcrowded bazaar. Nobody seems to be interested in new technology anymore. Everyone just want more special offers and discounts. The participating companies didn't care much, so long their cashers were kept busy.

I have already got tired about these quarterly computer shows, and no longer go to any of them unless there is a compelling reason to. Anyway, it came to tat I am suppose to sign up for a CCNA course offered by New Horizon at a cool $3000 discount, and the catch is I have to sign up at the dunno-what-name show. So I played along and made a trip to Suntec in the late afternoon.

I took the MRT to City Hall as usual. The trip was unremarkable and soon, the train started decelerate as it reaches City Hall station. Then the train came to an abrupt stop. The doors were not aligned properly and we were expecting the train driver to make adjustment as they always do. The train pause for around 10 seconds and continued to Raffles Place Station!


As the train moved towards Raffles Place Station, people started making noise. Apparently, the driver had missed the station by about 3 meters forward, and could not reverse the train to realign the doors. Then the announcement came, saying something about the train is experiencing a technical fault and could not stop at City Hall. What a load of crap. 99% of all errors are human error. No matter what it is, the passengers victims had to take a north bound train from Raffles Place to get to City Hall.

So much for a world class transport system. It's unbelievable that a MRT train can miss a stop. A bus yes. A train ? Give me a break !

This reminds me of the Mas Selamat Kastari case. A limping guy escaped custody during a toilet break. Wow. This is getting crappier everyday.

Woah, this lottery spam somehow got through the gmail spam filter and landed in my inbox. It features numerous typos, sentence structure problems and an insane number of details to make it look legal. Behold !

Email subject : YOU WON CONTACT (huh? contact?)

EURO MILLION NATIONAL LOTTERY (Euro and national ? Euro is for europe and that is not a nation)

This is to inform you that you have emmerge (wrong spelling) a lucky winner in the EURO
MILLION NATIONAL LOTTERY PROMOTION, with Reference Serial Number: M9-7II8-581 and Batch number 502/619/ESP (WTF is a serial and batch number doing in a lottery note ??).Your email address was attached (huh huh?) to the ticket number:70-97-34-32-67-01 (huh email?) which drew our lucky winning numbers, which consequently won the EURO MILLION NATIONAL LOTTERY PROMOTION(lottery need promotions ?)(1 000 000 euros) Jackpot in the first category(What's up with the commas?). You have been approved for a payment of 0NE(forgot to capitalise the 'o') MILLION EUROS only incash (spacebar not working?) credited to file reference number:ESP/09824588/02356/0010 (whose file?)

.

All participants (since when did i join?)for the online version were selected randomly from World Wide Websites (world wide web !) through computer draw system (what kind of system is that ?) and extracted from over 100,000 unions,associatons and co-oporate bodies that are listed online.To file for your claim. (might as well say that this is spam-ed to everyone in the world)

Please contact your fudiciary (wrong spelling)agent immediately via the email below and
provide him with yourpersonal (spacebar not working?)information.

FULL NAMES:...................COUNTRY:..................
TELE/FAX IF ANY:..........
MARITAL STATUS:...........SEX:................. AGE:......................
OCCUPATION:...............NATIONALITY:..............ADDRESS:..............

Mr. STEVE JOHNSON
EURO MILLION NATIONAL LOTTERY
Email:euromill2008@galmail.co.za
Congratulation Once Again
Yours in Service.
From Mrs.Mabel Rodriguez
Lottery Co.ordinator

Lottery coordinator for EURO MILLION ON-LINE PROMOTIONS.
Sweepstakes International Program.
Copyright © 1994-2008 Euro million Online Lottery Inc.
All rights reserved. Terms of Service - Guidelines.
www.euromillion.com (a link page to legal lotteries in Europe)

Eh, whoever wrote this should go back to school, go beg for forgiveness and say sorry to your English teacher. And also, there is something call a spell checker. Randomly trying to add some serial, batch and file reference numbers to make the spam more authentic is stupid, It's not impressive.

Come make yourself more scam proof by reading up here.
http://www.scam.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam

IT WTF : Help ! I cannot read my email !

It's very common for us to see Lotus Notes related problems on a daily basis. But this one beats them all hands down. Somewhere in January, a user logged a call that says the user was not able to read any emails after performing an archive operation.

Archiving is a bugbear that refuses to go away. In order to conserve server space, there is a upper limit imposed on the size of the mailbox. So in order to free up space, users can either delete or archive their emails.

My engineer couldn't find the root of the problem, so the case was escalated to me. I arranged a remote access session with the user and took a peek. The lotus client launched and the user cleared the authentication successfully. Then came the mystery of the day. the user's mailbox cannot be open.

I started asking questions. Ok, the user was trying to archive emails. Then he started bitching at how little mailbox space was available. As I was half-heartedly listening to him, I was trying hard to get more clues from his computer. Then it strike me when I was looking at the email servers. One of his mailbox was still intact while another was gone in another server. Oh ya, he mentioned something about deleting all his documents but still unable to send any email.

HE HAS DELETED HIS OWN MAILBOX

For some crappy reasons, the email administrator gave him full rights to his email account and the user in a over zealous attempt to free up more space, deleted his mailbox instead of deleting his emails. So he ended up with no space because there is no mailbox.

Please people, for your own sake, please stick to my archiving guide and stop trying to play smart. I don't need the extra work. Thank you very much

Introducing my IT WTF : The more bits the better, or is it ?

From today onwards, I will be posting short snippets of nerdy IT horror stories that occurs around me. For the IT professionals who actually read this blog, please learn from the mistakes of others.

Ok, let's start with a story about a wireless driver.

Last Friday, I asked "W" to update a driver for a wireless adapter driver for a notebook that is running on Windows XP Pro. The attempt failed and I took a closer look. Oops ! After browsing the contents of the driver folder, I realised that I have passed him the wrong driver.

I didn't have time, so I asked him to download the latest version from the vendor's webpage. Then came the stunner.

Me : This one sala driver. Go download the latest.
W : Why? I saw a 64-bit version of the driver in the folder you told me.
Me : 64-bit? You can't use 64-bit drivers.
W : Upgrade mah. 64-bit is faster.
Me : ...... you ... can't ... do ... that.

This is the point I realise that "W" don't understand the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit systems. I almost have this urge to ask him if he knows that 32-bit OS requires 32-bit drivers, Windows XP Professional is a 32-bit OS and the Intel CPU in the notebook is a 32-bit CPU. In the end, I decided to keep my words in my head and go off to do more urgent tasks.

Come on, this is not a case of the-more-the-merrier ! If the bigger number is the better deal, my decommissioned 33.6k modem's must be awesome at 300ms ping compared to my current cable modem at 30ms ping !!!

For those IT professionals who also didn't know, is suppose to know, or too paiseh to ask, come get your info from my favorite haunt here.


No amount of upgrading will get a real fireplace in your cramp HDB flat.

For non-IT folks like the rest of the 99.99% of the population, it's like installing a fireplace in a HDB flat because you want to cook a chicken wing. It's not compatible and it will not work without making a moron out of yourself.