Play balls

For the bored cubical folks, here is the latest distraction from your stale life. There is no fanciful graphics, just plain white balls. It's simple but strangely addictive. Give it a shot ! I got to level 23 before losing all my lives. Can you do better ?


It's all about balls, lots of balls, so do you have the balls to play this ball game ?

Incredible Singaporean Parking Skills !

While trying to look for Singapore bicycle trails to try out in a vain attempt to lose some weight, I came across an interesting site that showcase our local parking experts who managed to drive their vehicles into all sort of weird positions.



Invisible parking lots, parking on double yellow lines, double jagged lines, misaligned parking, double lot parking, on kerb parking, motorbike lot parking and the list goes on. It's incredible. Just fantastic ! You name it, you will get it !



I haven't got my license yet, and I am already inspired to contribute to the photo collection at http://pleaseparkproperly.blogspot.com, in the right way of course. My miserable 1.3M screwed up O2 Atom camera might actually get some work to do.



So my dear friends out there, please be more considerate and please park properly !

Utter disappoinment with APMI Kaplan

WARNING ! SUPER LONG COMPLAIN POST AHEAD !
THIS IS LONGER THAN THE STARHUB-HP SAGA

Glancing at my invisible crystal ball many many moons ago, I foresee that I have a dire need to get a degree in order to further progress my career. 7 years after getting my diploma, it had depreciated to the point where it is as common as toilet paper. Although reluctant, it's time to throw money, time and energy into education again.

In April 2007, I signed up for a degree program from Murdoch University, (Perth Western Australia) offered by APMI Kaplan. Murdoch University is a top 50 university in the region, and I went for their Bachelor of Science in Computer & Business Information Systems. There were several reasons for choosing the course, with the primary reasons being the location of the campus in the city area, the more revelant syllabus and the exclusion of any forms of mathematics (I am terrible in maths). the fact that APMI Kaplan has good reputation as a education facilitator, was also an important factor. Although it's their first time doing a IT course, their expertise in business courses should been sufficient to see them through,

The first intake was suppose to be May 2007, but it ended up dragging till late May before they asked for payment for the first installment. I was surprised that I got 2 exemptions for the first trimester, when none was expected. Lessons were finally scheduled for September and orientation was set for October. It must be a lack of response for the course which caused the delay, given that it is the first intake. During the orientation, the first intake was a surprising low number of 12. Disappointingly, there were no girls in the intake. You can check out my blog entry on the orientation. This is also a boon, since we will have a lower lecturer to student ratio.

During the orientation, I recalled Gary (?), Melinda (ops), Christopher (program manager), and Michelle (sales) were there. They went through with their great promises and grand visionary talk which actually got us hyped up in expectation for the world class education that we are buying. They were wearing business suits and had those confident smiles that got us sold. Unfortunately, things started going wrong in many ways more than I would have imagined.

I was suppose to log on to the Murdoch's webpage as a student to activate my account but I couldn't. Somebody had screwed up with my personal information and had to be rectified. Starting with Michelle (Sales, APMI Kaplan), a game of taichi send me to Christopher (PM, APMI Kaplan), Henry (IT service desk, Murdoch), and finally Lynne Green (Enrollments, Murdoch) who liaised with IT service desk again to get things done finally.

The lecture schedule was also changed in the eleventh hour during the orientation. We were given a schedule earlier in august when we collected our textbooks. I found it quite strange that lectures schedules could be changed at a whim's notice. I only realised the change when I went on the first lecture to find that it was actually swapped with another lecture. It was updated on the new schedule passed on to us during orientation which I did not notice the change.

I took on 1 subject for the first trimester, Data structure and abstractions in C++ (ICT209). The surprises sprung all over the places thereafter. Being in a IT degree course, I was expecting to have computers provided for us to do a programming subject. To my horror, computers were indeed provided but without a network account to login with. That makes the desktop computer a lame piece of decoration in the computer lab. Without a network account, we cannot log in to the computer and use it for our lectures and workshop. Attempts to get a IT personnel from APMI Kaplan to rectify the problem at hand failed because stunningly, there wasn't one for months.

Since there was no printed course material given out, we have to take notes by inserting comments into the powerpoint slides downloadable from Murdoch's website. It was a pure stroke of luck that the whole class brought along their personal laptops, so we could go without the school's lame decorations. A useless computer is less useful than a broken vase to me. Even then, the challenges kept coming. There was no internet access available. The school's wireless network was password protected and we were not given the password. The LAN cables were fastened too tightly to the desktop computers to reach our laptops. The wireless@sg network from outside the school, probably Centrepoint, was too weak for use. A frustrated course mate managed to get the password and we managed to get online to download the much needed course materials. As the lecture went on, our laptop batteries couldn't sustain our power consumption and we had to use our power bricks. Since there wasn't any free power points available, we had to pull out the power cords connecting to the desktops.

I ended the first lecture with a bitter taste in my mouth. The IT infrastructure was useless and things should have been a lot smoother than this. I almost torn open all the cable ties with my Swiss army knife so I could use the LAN cable for my laptop. I was stopped in time only because my course mate managed to get the wireless network password.

The other subjects which I was not taking also ran into problems. Commercial computing (ICT208) assignment 1 scoring scheme adds up to 90% instead of 100%. The lecturer, Noel Ong also turned out to be unprofessional and unqualified. He couldn't answer questions satisfactorily, played games during lessons, cut classes short and did personal things during classes. He was supposed to be counciled for this, but the improvements was not good enough and his image was already damage beyond repair. Since dumping him midway into the trimester would have resulted in a delay to the course, my course mates endured this character and let things slide.

The Murdoch's webCT system which we were suppose to get course material and submit our assignments was also very unreliable. There were outrages, undeclared downtime, poor compatibility with my favorite Firefox browser and even if it indeed work, it's as fast as a snail. It took me 45 minutes to upload a few files to the system. When I was trying to submit assignment 1, I had no choice but to email Dr Loo with the files as the system died before I could submit everything. The webCT is sadly broken and unusable that the problems continued to resurface during subsequent assignments submitions as well.

Our wireless network woes didn't end with the procession of the network password. Sometimes, the wireless network will go down completely. Fortunately, we had our slides preloaded on our laptops, so I didn't have to threaten the cable ties with my Swiss army knife.

The allocations of the classrooms was bad too. It was given to use month by month, and could still be changed without informing us in the last minute. I felt that we were being push around like a unwanted lot, taking whatever was left over to us.

There was also an unhappy incident where lecture was being held a classroom on the third floor. It had practically no wireless network coverage and no male toilet. Whoever allocated us that classroom did not take into account that the BIS class is made up of 100% males and that includes the lecturers.

Another unhappy incident occurred during one of our Saturday lectures. It spanned 6 hours and had a lunch break in-between. We went to the counter staff and requested for them to lock the doors to the classroom so we could go for lunch with a piece of mind. Remember that we brought our own laptops for the lab because we were not provided with our network accounts. The counter staff flatly repeatably denied us even as we tried to explain our situation. The unhelpful staff didn't try to help us any further than saying no. APMI Kaplan might as well fired the whole bunch of the counter staff since they can only say no. There was no desire to help us at all. As usual, we had to go through name cards, and phone lists, but no one could make a decision or help us. Eventually, we reached a lady who was not working that day. She arranged the facility guy to help us with securing the lab while we were out for lunch.

The scheduling of the lectures itself was also prone to changes. The lecturers could say that they could not make it and had to make changes. Again, I felt that we were secondary in comparison to their day job. Being less important, it's always better to ask for changes to our schedules to accommodate changes in their day job. Back in Nanyang polytechnic, our humble local educational institute was able to fix the classroom and lecture timings and this disappointing world class institute could not. APMI Kaplan should not have forgotten that the students in this course are all working IT professionals, not 16 year old kids, and we deserve better than this. We are paying full fees out of our own pockets, and we do have expectations which are not being met. The scheduling of the lectures are important because we have to arrange our working and personal lives around them. Any changes to the schedules means lost time in rearranging and disruptions to our own schedules. Any rescheduling should be used as a last resort, and not as a easy way out.

All these problems were raised to the management throughout the duration of the trimester, but we often received fairly slow useless generic responses. There were little acknowledgment to our mails and the replies were often indecisive and inconclusive. We had to keep chasing for updates and this is handling of our emails is so unprofessional. Our primary contact is suppose to be the program manager, Christopher. However, he was virtually useless, and we were left wondering who can be actually perform as the point of contact for all our woes. With no one to turn to, there can no be accountability to speak of.

There were also constant bugbears which plague the entire duration of the trimester. Since there were insufficient power points in the classrooms, except for the computer lab we used for ICT209, my course mates had to bring their own power extension while the request to provide them finally went through. The pain didn't stop there. It was arranged for the students to pick up the power extension from the front counter before the lessons but that could go wary too. The front desk staff would deny such an arrangement had been made because the staff manning the counter were not aware of the arrangement. Some of the counter staff are plain rude and unhelpful. They did not try to verify our claims, simply stop there, and gave us short answers in a irritated tone when we asked them to do so. We ended calling people on our own, managed to get their mobile numbers and bugged them unfairly ever after.

Another glaring problem is that they do not even have white board markers provided to the lecturers. I observed this on a constant basis in Dr Loo's lectures at the very least. He could not get any from the front counter since most of our lectures were on weekends, and so he had to bring his own. My course mates told me that this sadly also occurs in the other lectures too. It was so bad that one of the lecture actually went without the use of any markers.

If we encountered any problems during weekend classes, we didn't have to bother to seek help. There wouldn't be getting any. Not without a frustrating search and hopeless fight at least.

By the end of the trimester, despite constant reminders, our network accounts were still not provided. If they cannot put their act together to create the accounts after 4 months, I have to wonder if I have been paying handsomely for a third world education. Creating network accounts do not take days or months. It's amazing how a few minute's work was delayed and lost to the voids in the end despite repeated reminders.

Needless to say, for both the APMI Kaplan and Murdoch's satisfaction surveys, there is not enough time to write my long story on the small space provided.

We demanded a feedback session on the 10 Jan 2008 with Carol (Christopher's boss) and Christopher (PM) as our things were still not being done. Our examinations results were not out, despite being 1 week to the start of the next trimester. We have no collected our textbooks yet. The invoice of the next trimester was delayed from December and finally reached our mailbox on 4 January. It is demanding payment by 9th January, with a miserable 3 working days for us to get money for the payment. One of our course mate had repeatably chased for the invoice since December and nothing was being done to speed up the process. It was revealed that our names were not in their customer records and work was being stuck in in-trays after in-trays, resulting in the massive delay. An entire month was lost in their bureaucracy and they gave us 3 working days to talk to the banks. Not only that, we were all paying different amounts for the same course.

The lack of feedback since December naturally lead us to jump to conclusions. I was gravely concerned whether if APMI Kaplan is even planning to continue to complete the course. This is not laughing matter as time, money and energy is at stake and the consequences is extremely heavy. I was quite appalled that we had to chase APMI Kaplan to pay ! Only an uninterested business will do that.

They have also allocated Room 212 to us permanently despite that we still have lab lessons. It dawned on me that they thought that we love to bring our non-light weight laptops from home, to work, to school and back home so much that we don't need their lab computers. Apparently, they have completely forgotten that we are only using our own laptops because the network account was never given to us all along ! I was on the verge of demanding a discount for having to provide our own IT equipment. This is so insane and frustrating, APMI Kaplan is selling a IT course without proper IT infrastructure. I am not even talking about enterprise level IT infrastructure, I am talking about bare basic equipment and network availability here. Is there even anything at all resembling a service level agreement here ? You can't smoke through an entire class of IT professionals with the sub-standard quality here.

It was only just before the feedback session started when we received our textbooks, go our lecture schedules (which contained 2 mistakes) and examination results. Was that a coincidence or were they forced to work doubly hard as we were coming in for the feedback session in the evening?

We were reassured and promises were made during the feedback session. Deep down inside, I am just wondering what will go wrong next. This coming trimester, I will be taking 3 subjects, not just one. I don't think I will hesitate to harass APMI Kaplan or go public if they continue to deliver nothing but empty promises. Carol didn't have a complete picture of the situation until 1/2 way through the session. From there on, it was a one sided game. Christopher and Carol stopped trying to provide answer and were reduced to apologetic mode. We didn't want to spoil anyone's day but something has to be done before we have to force them to go into damage control mode.

So much for world class education, proper facilities and staff service. My expectations are now forced to be pretty low levels for APMI Kaplan, if not, already in shambles. Their quality of service is simply awful. In fact, we often felt that we have been mislead and they had over sold their capability to deliver. This is their first foray into IT courses, therefore I had expected them to spend more effort into this to uphold their reputation. Unfortunately, at this point of time, I am not impressed and my recommendation for anyone interested to sign up for any IT related course at APMI Kaplan to seriously rethink their decision.

Literal translations

Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982) was a big thing when it was released. The MTV is really interesting to watch. It's as quite revolutionary for it's time, with a nice story arc, special effects, and long run time. Basically Michael Jackson turned into a zombie and scared the hell out of a lot of kids. When I was in poly, I came across this Indian parody of the MTV which was really ... lame, and further purposely badly translated with Chinese sub-titles. Recently, I came across another English "translated" Indian parody which was extremely funny too.

Friendster blog sucks, I can't embed videos, so I got so pissed off that I moved out and moved to blogger. So now, you can just click on the clicks below to check out the Youtube videos. Google wins again.

Go take a look at the parodies and laugh your ass off !

Michael Jackson's Thriller

Grrr I am a big bad zombie ...grrrr

Indian parody with Chinese sub (foul language and rape theme)

I got to rape you !!!

Indian parody with English sub (murder theme)

Kill her or you are a girly man !!!

Hope you will enjoy the videos. This just proves how little with understand the Indian language.

Hans lunch turns into disappointment

I took my lunch at Hans @ Harbourfront Centre with Jia Lun this afternoon.

Photo of my lunch


The scene after the carnage


Spotted anything between the 2 photos ?

The cali-flower soup takes like warm water and the iced-lemon tea tasted just as weak. No amount of salt and pepper could save the miserable bowl of soup so they were left for dead. I made a comment about the soup to the waiter but he made no offer for me. Not that I expect any but apparently, they have no pride in their food. If they are serving this crap everyday, I will suggest that this branch should be avoided at all cost. I doubt I will be revisiting this branch anytime soon.

By the way, for your information, my list of cheap and nice western food has strunk again. Last year, the Ah Beng western food stall at Adam road hawker centre has closed down, and now the Ah Beng western food at Hougang Centre has also quitted. Aston Prime at East Coast Road (just opposite Katong Mall) has joined the list of recommended steak house on the cheap.

Devil's guide to the movies : The Golden Compass

(Entry updated 9 Dec 2007)

On Thursday, I went for Desmond's movie premier event for The Golden Compass at Great World City. After grabbing a quite bite from the self-service buffet, I redeemed the free drink and popcorn from the junk food counter before making it to the silver screen with Qinghai in tow.

The pre-movie advertisement segment was so long that our popcorn was gone before the movie started. The popcorn was made too long ago and had became soft. It didn't help when the ice in the coke was also half melted too.

Without revealing the plot line, here are some of my thoughts of the movie.

The architecture of the city was nicely done, something like a glorified Rome. The transportation devices in the movie were powered by globes of energy, bearing some similarity to the many transportation devices in The Matrix series. The movie is scores average in the story telling department, the acting generally good and the CG is reminds me of Final Fantasy X in style and design. Nicole Kidman's acting really shines in this movie, as she brought her creepy bad ass lady character alive.

For some crappy reason, the characters in the movie have long and unmemorable names which are basically tongue twisting impressive sounding names which are really hard to pronounce and remember. Everyone in the theater probably got the "What's-up-with-the-name-of-that-XXXX" feeling after the show. In fact, at the end,I only remembered one name, Pan, which is the incidentally the shortest name in the entire movie.

The movie is based on a book, "Northern Lights", featuring people with animal pets that speaks. The pets, called daemons shares a life bond with their human counterpart in which when the human or the pet dies, both will perish together. The daemon will disappear in a puff of rising golden powder, which looked suspiciously like the animation of the defeated Aeons in Final Fantasy X. Oh well, the Daemons are able to fight too, but the fight scenes all ended very quickly.

It didn't take long before it was revealed that the golden compass didn't actually point north or have any navigational properties at all. The Alethiometer as they later call it, is actually more special device for the gifted that "tells you the truth", aka the modern day google search. This brings us a to a grand total of 2 "compasses" that didn't point north in recent movies. Captain Jack Sparrow's version in the pirates series, points to the thing that your heart desires.

The lead character is a young girl who kept lying throughout the movie to achieve her objectives. That's quite different from the normal muscle male hero driven storylines.

Battles scenes in the movie are generally quite lame.

There is a scene where 2 polar bear fought for the royal throne which is actually the best fight scene in the movie. That's until the last part when the good-guy bear stole victory from the bad-guy bear by throwing a fatal strike after apparently feigning an arm injury. That left me a What-the-fXXk feeling when the bad-guy bear got plummeted because he left his guard down while taunting the good-buy bear. It's so sad to see the good guy had to use such a honourless and desperate attack to win the better. Didn't the bad guys hand guide includes a rule that saying something like kill first, talk cock later ? At least the bears wore armour and looked better than the druids in bear form in WoW.

The last battle where witches, children and men fought was utterly disappointing. It's just a big melee where witches flew around like cupid, firing arrows, men firing guns and swinging weapons while children ran for their lives. That's right, the witches didn't have any fireball spells or what-nots, just bows and arrows. Before the battle began, some character in the movie implied that whoever the witches sided with in the battle, it will be be certain defeat for the counter party. I therefore expect a one sided battle with the witches on the good-guy side like the scene in LoTR 2 where the dead human spirit army overran in the invading coalition. But all I saw was witches dropping dead one by one while being shot at by riflemen.

There was also a scene in the movie where a parody of the famous Starwars scene, " I am your father!" by Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker is replicated with "I am your mother!, followed by a resounding "nooooooooo!" which is awfully lame.

And just after the battle draws to a close, the movie ends so abruptly that everyone was stunned when the lights came on. At least they didn't bluntly put up a screen saying, "To be continued suckers !".

I suggest that if you are not in a hurry to catch this movie, wait for the second installment and watch both together instead of leaving the seats after watching a bad cliff hanger like i did.

Also you might want to take note that this story reeks of Atheistism. The bad guys were a obvious reference to the Catholic Church, and this lead some US schools to ban the book from their libraries. If you are aware the accusations against the Church, you will be able to understand the movie better.

For example when Lord Asriel was trying to get fundings to study "dust", the Magisterial, fearing that the truth will destroy their grip on power because their fortunes are built on lies, tried to silence him at every corner. This is quite similar to what happened to astronomy in the early days when talented people like Galileo was labeled a heretic for his discoveries that proved that the Church was wrong.

If the script had went any further with it's pro-Atheist shots at the church, this movie will most likely be virtually banned by the Church.

Ass See Ass SAP engineers strikes again

In the continuing saga of the SCS SAP engineers' effort to solve the world's hardest to align printer in the whole wide world, engineer 'S' came back with another buddy to attempt to bring peace to the world.
For those who didn't read the long complain story yet, you can read it here, under the sub topic, Paper type and Paper Source.

Walking out of the board room after solving a projection problem, I was intrigued when the all too familiar engineer 'S' tried to get hold of me. I knew it would be a blast working with these awe-inspiring guys again, haven't not seen them for a month or two.
We got to the dot matrix printer again, and engineer 'S' showed me that there was something wrong with the printer. It was months after the problem was reported and the problem is still hanging in the air. They claimed that the printer settings couldn't be saved and the network printer settings couldn't be found for the printer. The printer is also different from the setup guide they had with them. The setup guide is the sort that is haphazardly compiled with a load of screenshots made be a lowly paid general clerk with a few barely sensible pieces of English text sticking in-between them, printed on what looks like toilet paper, in full colour.

Guess, what. The two experts are so highly experienced that they couldn't tell that the printer in the setup guide is a laser printer and the one that they were setting up is a dot-matrix printer. And when they finally figured that out when I pointed out the difference, I told them that they were wasting time arguing about the difference of the printer type because the type of printer being setup here doesn't matter at all. For all the normal people out in the streets, so long you can read and follow instructions, preferably applying a IQ of at least 80, all will end well. It's like arguing that a Sony Playstation will not work because you are not using a Sony TV. The two awesome guys took a hint and shut up for good. I guessed that they saw enough of my annoyed and amused face rolled into one for more than a occasion already.
FOR GOODNESS SAKE, DON'T FOLLOW A SETUP GUIDE BLINDLY !!! USE YOUR BRAIN IF YOU STILL GOT ONE !!!
They earned the next scornful reply from me when they told me that they couldn't change the network portion of the printer's settings. It's not like the first time I told them this. We went through this before, and their memory had failed them miserably. I wonder how they couldn't learn from their previous mistake, like what a baby do.
OPEN YOUR BLOODY EYES ! DAMN IT !
With their obvious lack of basic knowledge of networking and Windows, they didn't know how to tell if a printer is a network or a local printer in Windows. I could not forgive them that they failed to see that the printer is attached via a parallel printer cable, not a UTP Ethernet cable. Morever, I have yet to seen a network capable dot matrix printer before, unless in conjunction with a print server. A parallel port printer cable and a UTP cable has completely different connectors on both ends and different thickness in the cable for your information. Has these 2 guys ever installed a printer before ? Which self-respecting IT professional didn't ?
Next they showed me how they couldn't save the customised paper settings for the printer. First, engineer 'S' selected a paper profile, and complained that the "save" button is greyed out. I took a look, and figured out that the paper profile is not editable by design, thus that the "save" button is greyed out.
Next they key in the new paper profile and pressed the "save" button. The profile details disappeared and they claimed that it could not be saved because it, eh...had disappeared into the thin air. It didn't strike them that the profile was already save and all they need to do is to select it from the profile list to see it again. The controls were cleared because the system is waiting for the user to enter another set of new paper profile.
I demonstrated all that and the two IT professionals stood there rooted in silence. It took engineer 'S' a moment to collect his voice and said that he didn't know how this works. This was unacceptable as they are professional software engineers themselves working in a big local company, and they should have seen more user interface designs than I have.
Before he could splutter anymore nonsense, I cut he off rudely in mid-sentence, on purpose of course, saying that I didn't knew anything before hand either. I am so tired of his nonsense and sorry excuses already, and I didn't have the patience to listen to another worthless speech. It took me less than a minute to figure things out and worked the system, not hours. Sarcastically, I asked them if they need any more help before storming off, shaking my head in complete dismay.

If these two sad losers can be IT professionals, they must have bought their certifications from some unknown university with no webpage and falsified their working experience by blindly copying someone else's resume. Or the other possibility is that they somehow earned their living through lies and deceit, somehow getting through day after day. Maybe IT really isn't their cup of tea, so they should help out by offering their positions to some other people who are more attuned to the IT. This is exactly the type of people who gave IT professionals a bad name. Hard working engineers like me have to suffer bad vibes and shame brought on by these leeches of the IT industry. How sad !
(By the way, you can buy your degree and certificates.
Here is my take on engineer 'S'
Technical skill - 4/10 - Some how managed to performing an amazing feat by completing the SAP project without showing that he knew how it works at all. A complete SAP noob like me is able to tell him how a function works by observing the input and output while he couldn't figure it out for weeks and months.
IT Knowledge - 0/10 - Has as much IT knowledge as the dead cat on the streets. Did not demonstrate knowledge on the most common OS, MS-Windows or common hardware like a printer.

Internal PR skill - 0/10 - Lost credibility very quickly due to obvious incompetence. Project manager 1 quit prematurely and his replacement shunned the project as early as possible.

External PR skill - 0/10 - End users and project managers completely lost faith in his ability to deliver anything usable within a reasonable time frame, if they are expecting any at all.

Final score
10 / 100

Quick ! Employ this guy to get your SAP project signed off earlier because the customer will just sign the handover form as fast as possible just because they want to get rid of him for wasting their youth ASAP !!! Just be prepared to see a letter suing you for liquidated damage soon though.

Sotong Devil makes tea

Have you ever wonder when do you need some caffeine to start the day ? I guess I could really use a cup of tea yesterday morning. Feeling sleepy, I went to the pantry to make a cup of lipton tea. Having a high sensitivity to caffeine, means that I do not usually drink coffee as it will cost me my sleep at the end of the day. So I have always sticked to tea.

As usual, I will grab 2 packs of creamer and 1 pack of sugar after drowning the tea bag in hot water. I then made my way back to the storeroom which is really my helpdesk HQ for the past 1.5 years and the foreseeable future.

I have a habit of adding in the creamer and sugar about 2 minutes after adding in the hot water. So it was time to do so. I looked into the cup and saw something astonishing.

The water is still clear.



Wait a minute, tea bags are not computers and they do not malfunction. I stared at the cup for 5 seconds, lost in thoughts. I held the cup closer for a look and saw that the tea bag didn't diffuse it's goodness into the water at all. Then it dawned on me that the cup feels cold and there was no steam rising.

Oh yes, I have added cold water into the cup instead of boiling hot water. So boys and girls, you can't make tea with cold water. It will not work.

The lesser of 2 evils : Marshmallow Fries

I would say MacDonalds is doing an excellent job dominating children's minds with their trade mark golden fries. The happy meal will not be so happy without the little pack of fries right ?


In an apparent effort to take the little kids off the oily real fries, someone came up with a healthier alterative : Marshmallows which look like fries. I found this during a trip to Suntec carrefour and it striked me of how ridiculous things are nowadays. Why can't parents just stop feeding their kids junk food like these? Marshmallows are still full of sugar, and can still give the children an urge for the real thing.

It reminded me when I was in kindergarten, that there was an old lady selling junk food next to the PAP kindergarten I was enrolled in. We were fascinated by the cigarette candy which looked like the real thing. The kids who could afford it, would sometimes buy a stick or two and put in their mouth like a smoker do. It's just mimicking the actions of some bad adult role model or plain play acting but it gives a dangerous idea that smoking is actually cool.

It's a good thing that I am one of the poor kid who couldn't afford a stick or two. And as an adult, I couldn't put myself in the position to smoke a pack or two everyday. It's a expensive and painful way to commit suicide. As the lesser of two evil analogy goes, I take death by junk food over death by smoking.

Hellgate London opens a floodgate of hellish bugs

It's such a romantic idea. The people who made Diablo 2 walked out of Blizzard, setup Flagship Studios and created Hellgate London. I was sold, and bought a copy, expecting the game to be as addictive as Diablo 2 was. I had a blast with Diablo 2 for 3 years, a solid investment with it's only expansion, Lord of Destruction.

I went to Funation at Ang Mo Kio hub and grabbed a copy of the collection's edition for $75 on Tuesday, and went straight home to give it a shot. The games is in full 3D, basically a fast pace action shooter with Diablo 2's skill tree. It was great for a while until the big ugly cracks started to show up.

As this blog always go for the ugly side of things, and with no exceptions made, this post will not be a promotion of the game, but paints a harsh review of reality for this game.

Installation was about 15mins from a DVD, taking 7GB of space. It didn't surprise me when the auto patch screen came right up when I started a multi-player game for the first time. It's kind of expected and didn't take too long to complete.

There were still many bugs in the game and it feels that it was rushed into the market for Halloween. I was expecting game balance issues but that was not the case. The very playability of the game is at stake because of it's numerous crucial bugs. Here is a list of what I have encountered so far.

1. Memory leaks
   The dread "Memory exhausted error". The coding is done pretty badly. The memory leak problem is so bad that no one can play without rebooting once every 3 hours. I haven't seen a commercial game having memory leak problem for a long time. Getting more memory is not the solution, it will just delay the onset of the problem. Sloppy !
   
   
2. Lack of statistical numbers
   The development team has left out the most important feature from Diablo 2 : The numbers. There is no way to find out how an item is different from another when there is only a miserable here and there. The modifers on the items are amazingly confusing and doesn't help in seperating the trash and gems.
   
   
3. Poor icons artwork
   The choices for icons are very bad. Very often, you cannot tell the difference between different grades of a item and the icon itself makes little sense. I have to spend a lot of time trying to use the tooltip to see what the items really are.
   
   
4. Irritating NPCs
   The NPCs made too much noise and there should be a way to shut them up. It''s fresh for the first time, but highly irritating after that.
   
   
5. Invisible party members, update problems to party bars and portraits, teleport to party location not working, party member does not show up on automap
   As a MMO game, these are crucial features of the game that should be working perfectly from day one. It's a real eye sore here. The party member is either invisible to each other, or unable to teleport to each other. Half way through an instance, the party member's torso can just disappear, leaving a floating gun firing alongside with you.
   
   
6. Chat problems
   The chat window itself is badly made. Switching channels is hard and I couldn't figure out how to filter chat channels. During peak hours, you can see a amazingly fast moving chat window flooded by WTB, WTS and WTT requests. This could only get worse if nothing is done about it. The chat window itself had low layer priority and that means whenever you open a menu, it gets hidden under it. Since it cannot be moved either, it became very hard to chat with people while opening the in-game menus like inventory, character, skills etc. Opening certain in-game menus also causes the chat box to go out of the screen. This is awful, a MMO game with serious in-game chat flaws. Come on, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft did way better than this.
   
   
7. Buddy list not working
   A MMO game with a non-working buddy list ? There is no way to know if your good friend is online or not. Terrible. Back to MSN guys.
   
   
8. No Looking for Party/Quest mechanics
   Another glaring problem. I am unable to get a team going to do quests quickly because I have to yell out in general chat before I can get a party started. Suddenly, World of Warcraft's LFG function and Diablo 2's Battle Net support looks so shiny.
   
   
9. Getting stuck in areas
   It's advisable not to jump around at corners because it is likely to get you stuck. I got stuck once every 2 hours because I was jumping randomly at the edges of the instances I was clearing. Poor boundary boxes drawing at fault here. Since there is no /unstuck command, you have to quit the game and start from square one again. No more bunny hopping guys.
   
   
10. No in-game GM assistance
    There is no GM to be found, no in-game ticketing system and so, you are on your own there. It's a wild wild west situation. Be it a game bug, or abuse by other players, there is no law enforcement available. This will eventually lead to the demise of the game if not tackled fast. As with any MMO game, if there is no enforcement guys around, the chat channels will be flooded with rubbish and people will leave the game for good because of the terrible bugs that cannot be submitted fast. As soon as the first duplication bug is exploited, all hell will break loose. The entire in-game economy will collapse and palladium will no crease to have any real value.
    
    
11. Need for identification for items
    It's a legacy feature from Diablo 2 that should have been discarded. It's a waste of time to identify items and does not add value to the game at all.
    
    
12. Lack of support
    There is virtually no support for the game. As I mention earlier, there is no in-game support at all. Asia support is done via hellgate.iahgames.com. You can log to the site, log a case but get no ticket number to trace your case. Not even a auto-email is sent until 15 hours later. The IAH forum is full of gripes from disgruntled players who alse experienced numerous game-stopping problems with the game. There are no replies from the administrators or developers at all. Smart move, because it's so buggy anyway. If there is support, it will be swamped completely and rendered useless.
    
    
13. Connection problem
    You will get disconnected seemingly randomly or cannot connect to a multiplayer game. You just have to keep trying until you get through. The player authentication server is most likely at fault here. The game will tell you to check your firewall, anti-virus settings etc but it's simply a load of bullshit.
    
    
14. Free/Monthly subscription cannot be activated
    The game comes a month of free online subscription that enables additional features such as bigger stash. However, the game still doesn't let us activate the subscription. Very disappointing.
    
    
15. Level cap
    There was a level cap at level 22 until 6 Nov which made many players angry. This is the first time in gaming history that an unannounced level cap was imposed when the actual cap should be 50.
    
    
16. Lack of end-game content
    There is no end-game content like in Guildwars of World of Warcraft. After going through the linear story, you are left with the option to PvP. And that means, to challenge another player without any rewards other than the satisfaction of killing another player and advancing through a ladder. This is another outdated "feature" from Diablo 2. The developers are expecting the gameplay to be the same as Diablo 2 where players just raid normal instances to no-end for items. That's too shallow. If I want to do PvP on a ladder, I will be better off in Guildwars or World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft features tough end-game instances which are so tough that it takes some time to overcome them.
    
    
17. And lastly, unable to load a multi-player game
    The worst problem of them all. I am now completely unable to play a multi-player game. It simply hangs after it starts to load. Re-installations didn't work and my account was fine. So it's a game that I enjoyed for a few hours and that's it. I am not interested in single player games because it's worthless. If I am interested in single player game at all, I would have downloaded a pirated copy off Bittorrent.

This is not all, there were reports of people having other problems as well. Try and do a google search for "hellgate london problem" and you will see 1,930,000 results. Recruiting 10 million players to save London ? I seriously think that they need 10 million man hours to recode the game.

This game should not have be released at all. It belongs to early beta quality. Curse Electronic Arts for allowing this crap to be released at all. I smell corporate greediness in the air. The Flagship studio guys are better off learning a thing from their last company. Blizzard is famous for delaying a game until it is ready. Seldom do they patch a game for show stopping flaws. It has always been game balancing and more features. Guildwars was done properly and also made by people who left Blizzard.

The idea is good, but the implementation is bad. The gameplay is addictive despite it's serious flaws but not having the chance to play the game I have paid for is pissing me off. It will take a couple of hundreds of megabytes of patches to fix this still born game and I hope they can fix this fast.

Game score = 25 15% Very bad game

Hellgate london should have stayed as a beta. Too many show stopping bugs and terrible technical support. If you are considering buying the game, wait for another month and see if they have patched the game to a more playable level.

Latest Update :

On 10 Nov Sat, IAH they announced that all player data will be wiped on Monday ! This is probably the first in MMO history ! Everything will be lost to the nethers ! The character, the items ... everything ! Woah this one tops them all !

Apparently, Asia servers were not patched to patch 0, and they couldn't apply it without screwing all the players. This will go down in gaming history as the worst game ever released.

Update 12/1/08 : In the end, they managed to patch the game without wiping the character database. But to clean up the database, they added a "Elite" mode in a veiled attempt to force people to ditch their pre-patched characters

hellgate.iah.com

[Urgent News] Implementation of Patch0

10/11/2007

Gamers,

Thank you for your patience while we worked to upload Patch0 onto our local servers. For the past two weeks, IAHGames and our partners have worked overnight almost everyday as they attempted to implement Patch0 onto our existing servers.

In the end, it has been determined that there is no way to implement Patch0 onto our Hellgate: London servers without also discarding relevant player data.

Because of this, when Patch0 is installed on Tuesday, there will be a complete character wipe.

We understand this event is frustrating for you, and we are sorry for the problems in implementing Patch0. As compensation, we are providing all gamers who purchased both the Standard and Collector's Edition Box Sets 4 weeks of free subscription benefits. Each box already includes 30 days of free subscription benefits, meaning all of you will be entitled to 80 days of free subscription when the service becomes active around the end of the year.

IAHGames and our partners have taken this event very seriously, and yesterday our CEO and Deputy CEO flew to Seoul to discuss the issue with the CEO of HanbitSoft. As a result of the meeting, HanbitSoft has graciously agreed support IAH Games' decision to provide free subscription time as compensation. HanbitSoft and Flagship Studios have also agreed to provide all further patches on par with US patching time lines, to ensure the SEA version of Hellgate: London stays up-to-date.

The implementation of Patch0 and subsequent character wipe will occur at 1200hrs(GMT+8) on Monday, November 12. After the Patch is implemented, a comprehensive test will be run to ensure there are no further problems. The process will take about 8 hours.

We would like to repeat we are sorry for the delay and the frustration it may have caused you. Please accept the game time as compensation, and thank you for your support until this point.

Sincerely,

Team HGL