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.

I throw letter today

I just sent my resignation letter by email and SMS to my Project Manager today. After I have failed to get a pay raise in January, I have decided to look for another job. I sense a recession around the corner, with all the signs pointing south, hence the urgency to scout. Not that I didn't give Getronics a chance, but if they didn't value an employee who bring value and offer good performance, so be it. I am not the type who will work for peanuts. I helped them secure re-contracts after re-contracts, fixed a sinking ship abandoned by the ex-teamlead, and I am paid lower than some engineers. With my studies killing me, worrying about money is the last thing I need.

Boy, the job market is indeed good. I have sent 5 emails to the usual job agencies and got 6 replies. The job agencies were more excited than I am, with 1 particular agency came to my current working area during lunch for an interview.

I signed up for the sweetest deal of course, the one with the best pay, prospect, experience, package and environment. To those who didn't know, your employment contract is negotiable. You can push for a better package, so if you feel that you deserve better, give this a try.

After signing the offer letter and sending my resignation letter, I will start my 1 month count down today. Being a hard working bastard, I still have 4 days of off-days, 5 days of leave from last year, and 4 days from this year to spare. Judging from the looks of things, Getronics is likely to buy out all of my leaves which I certainly don't mind.

I hope people will miss me, for I have put in a great deal of effort to bring the smile to my users. I am quite sure that they will go back to the days where the helpdesk is more interested in looking good on paper than to deliver actual results.

"Refund" from Singapore Pools

After a year of buying Toto, Singapore Pools decided to give me a "refund" for the draw just before the hong bao draw. I got back almost as much I have put in for the year, which is not too bad, considering that I can't even get 3 numbers right most of the time on 3 rolls of system 7 quick pick. Although I missed my target by 3 zeros, I can't complain if I managed to get back something at all.

[INSERT WINNING TICKET PCITURE]
Woah !!! I have forgotten to scan my first winning ticket !!! I can't remember what numbers were involved either !!!

However, most of the cash was blew a few days later, because my sister wanted to ditch the Celeron 2.4D. It couldn't do 4 open tabs in firefox and winamp was throwing fits. I don't think I can keep throwing my old PC to my sister, so I bought her a Athlon 64 x2 6000 with 500GB harddisk, 2GB RAM and slap my GeForce 7600GS with a new Razer Krait for good measure. She can now 打包 her Logitech mouse and a Barracuda mousepad for office use.

Not expensive but surely speedy. So now I got a grand total of 3 PCs and 1 laptop at home. I just hope that they will stay in good working condition or I will be very busy spending time on maintenance for sure.

True Horror Stories By Taxi Uncle

This morning, while I was doing Google search on taxis, I ran into this interesting post in sgClub. A poster going by the name of Taxi Uncle wrote a series of short "true" ghost stories in a post. It's quite a fun read given that I had just completed a nightmarishly long database assignment and I have not read Russell Lee's True Singapore Ghost Story for ages.

Here is an tidbit from the first story.

"hi there, this is my first but 100% non-fiction story, hope u like it...:mellow3:

This incident was happened many years ago on a public holiday that fall on a
Sunday in 1998. I was then sleeping tastefully and was suddenly disturbed by
a phone called from the ki tong 乩童 ( medium ) of my temple. I was told to
rush down to our temple for an urgent session. I knew only later that it was
because of a spirit that has possessed on a young lady and a deity dee ya
pek 二爷伯 ( hell deity ) was appointed to take the job. By the time i reached
the temple at about 11am, i saw a young lady already sitting inside our
temple just beside our 'yim tua' altar ( altar setup with hell deities statues ). i
walked near to her and hurriedly setup the altar for preparation to invite the
deity dee ya pek. That was my virgin experienced coming so closely with a
human body that is now possess with a spirit inside her. And it was still inside
her. My feeling then was very tense. She keep staring at me becos i was just
standing beside her. she looked lost but calm and could be wondering what
are we trying to do to her. I presume 'she' was not a Taoist."

Come and scare yourself !