Posted in Personal, Technology, Work, tagged Google Desktop, search on March 11, 2010| 3 Comments »
It’s time to swallow my pride and admit how lazy I am to manage ever-increasing number of files and folders on my working laptop. Even lazier is to manage emails.
Hence, I’ve decided to heed my manager’s advice to install Google Desktop, an application that will perform indexing of documents and files, including Outlook emails.
Posted in Personal on February 8, 2010| 3 Comments »
It costed me RM1460 for the following:
I was not sure whether I was overcharged, I dont know much about cars. Sucks!
Anyway, browsing around, I found a list for prices for Perdana V6 parts. Gonna memorize by heart now.
Posted in Personal, Work, Writing on January 31, 2010| 2 Comments »
Last Wednesday and Thursday, I attended a company sponsored training called “Teaming with Passion”. It was a course aimed at our front-liners, who deal with interesting customers everyday. Being a pre-sales technical consultant, I too attended the course and here I’d like to write a brief summary of what I had learnt.
Up until very recently, I had been chiding the concept of positive attitude, power words, inner strength etc. I thought I did not need them, and all of them are common sense, and discoverable upon needs. How wrong I was !
The exact reason I did not need any emotional help or encouragement before was because I did not push myself enough that time. Now with bigger responsibility, with performance being measured in sales figure, I am getting more and more serious at work. Stress level is high, and I cant sleep easily.
What I found most helpful from the course was about positive thinking. Heck, positive thinking is so obvious that I feel ashamed that I care about it too much here. But, during the course, we had to keep shouting “I am mental warrior”, “You are your energy”, “Today is a grrreat day” and so on. We (the front-liners) also sang unity-themed songs together, keep shouting the support each other, look at the eyes of our learning partner while talking to him/her. I suppose this kind of training system is what Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is all about, although I know too little about it to write here factually.
People cried tears of joy. Connections renewed among colleagues, and created among strangers.
When the course started, I mumbled to myself, “Am I going to be brainwashed here?” I’ve been to quite a number of sales-themed training/seminar, although being more technically inclined by profession and interest. LOL, my worry was unwarranted. I am now “brainwashed” and see nothing wrong with that.
Well, too busy to continue blogging, but if you were also like me before, dismissing self-help, motivation and encouragement as common sense or unimportant, you may want to check whether you have pushed yourself enough.
Posted in Personal, Programming, Technology, tagged Sharepoint on January 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »
I’ve been rather busy these days that it’s almost impossible to rest. My sector has finally had interesting projects going on, and while not unexpected, I spent a lot of time on the process flow, populating online forms, validating past records and consolidating inputs coming from different people. These projects are based on IPVPN product, which is rather popular among enterprises these days. IPVPN allows an enterprise to have Local Area Network (LAN) over wide geographic scale, by renting service providers’ infrastructure to connect between the sites. While it is possible to implement SSL VPN over Internet, private IPVPN solution provided by telecommunication companies ensure better security, as the network packet will not traverse public or Internet infrastructure.
Also, I am developing a web portal for our department which is aimed to facilitate our daily operations including room booking, document management, and performance tracking. I am unpaid for this extra work though 😦 , but I view this as a good opportunity to warm myself up to web-based technologies, and develop a software that people use. However, I might have to redo everything if our department decides to have the server hosted by IT department, which could possibly use Microsoft Sharepoint instead. I really hope that this is the case. I dont mind redoing the PHP/Python programming in ASP.
I wish I had put more effort in Microsoft based technologies before. Perhaps, from trying to be geek-cool by not using Microsoft products, I spent the last two years using Linux, Apache, gcc and many other open source software and tools. Seriously, if I had learnt IIS, Visual Studio, .NET instead, my life would be much easier now.
If my life sounds very boring, it actually is. I miss being physically active, being able to fly in the air, doing somersault, juggling, playing football etc. I have lost all those skills now, and I dont see acquiring them back. I suppose I am very bad at having a balanced life, but time is scarce. I dont think I can afford the overhead of time management.
I wonder if having close friends, or community that share my interest in programming will make my life more fun.
Posted in Personal on January 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »
From time to time, I will dwell on the new age fundamental question : What is the purpose of blogging? With the arrival of 2010, I overdwelt on it. Apparently confusion and societal pressure and eventually shame then took the better part of me and caused me to switch this blog to private mode for a while. But now I have realised my error and reopened this blog.
Why was it error? Was it not good to save humanity from half-hearted journalism (which is this blog)? It was an error for the following reasons:
What’s the rebuilding I was talking about? It’s Inkuiri Terlampau, a new blog where I’d post deeply technical, nonsense-absence stuff. And I write them in Malay. Initially I operated it in two languages with the name “Nauseating Enthusiasm” instead, but I decided it would be too confusing for any visitor.
Inkuiri Terlampau was motivated by the fact that computer science /mathematics/ engineering related materials in Malay are too little. In fact the Malay web world is overly infested with “Menjana Pendapatan Di Rumah”, “Dapatkan Kekayaan Mudah dengan Mengisi Borang” kind of links that I hope some Malay technical blog would put a balance to it. Acknowledgably, I and most probably most Malaysians are technology adopter instead of leader/innovator, so it would not be bleeding edge. And also, last year I voiced out my support of government decision to revert the teaching of science and mathematics to Malay despite the obvious argument that learning materials in the language are severely scarce. So, I’m just trying to help the government here by making the argument less qualfied each day.
Helping the government post-308? Gasp … haha 🙂 Seriously, waiting for a government that would appeal to all Malaysians would take too long, so I choose to support policies instead 🙂 I’m done with zealotry in any polarity.
So what’s the 2010 new blogging attitude that I title this post with? It’s separative journalism. This blog will remain about my personal ongoings, while Inkuiri Terlampau will be about hardcore technical stuff.
Posted in Personal on January 5, 2010| 2 Comments »
This time last year, I made a ridiculously ambitious set of new year resolutions. I was aware of the evil of making unrealistic goals, but I thought I was different. I thought could achieve anything. Afterall I was young, energetic and more importantly, I was living off my parents. But unfortunately it turned out that I failed every single resolution including going to the gym, practicing my Mandarin, memorizing Hiragana/Katakana, earning money online, reaching 7d in Go strength (hahaha!), earning golf ‘licence’ and whatnot.
This year, I decide to only have a modest set of resolutions to fulfill. It may not be half as fun, but hopefully will be more meaningful and effective as a guide. Failing self-drawn resolutions every year is too meaningless to make a habit of.
Anyway, I decide on the following seven resolutions to welcome the new year, and the new decade ( if millennium started in 2000, decade may start from zero too). They are aimed at nurturing good habits and subtly improve my effectiveness as an individual.
Always carry a USB memory stick , pen/paper and business card with me everywhere. It’s not that I know the exact purpose these are for, but there were countless of occasions when I wished I had these. Especially business cards. It is too unprofessional to walk around without bringing them.
Relax. Listen to music. Two recent fantastic movies had one thing in common. They mentioned that when men are too full in their thoughts, they cant be receptive to ideas or think creatively. What are the two movies? Hint: Awesome cinematography. 🙂I notice that except for the first one, all of them could be too abstract but I am outlining them as the initiatives to combat my ineffectiveness. I am clear of my goals and aspirations and do not need a new year resolution as reminder. What I am more concerned about is my ability to convert my effort and investment into tangible results. Actually, I believe that is what everyone should be concerned about.
Posted in Personal on December 15, 2009| 1 Comment »
So the news has it that Accenture had dropped Tiger Woods as their representative, while Tag Heuer retained. I would think that these decisions were taken with business consideration in mind instead of morality stance.
Personally, I dont care about his private life at all. This may sound ironic, as I’m about to write my concern about media obsession with his recently uncovered extramarital affairs. But my concern is only that all this is causing Tiger to take an indefinite leave from golf.
I’m not a fan of golf. But I’m a fan of geniuses. Tiger qualifies as one of the best geniuses who register most success in their sports career. Others in mind being Roger Federer, and I am a fan of these two. I play neither golf nor tennis, but their achievement of total success are inspiration to me in many ways. The fact that Tiger had extramarital affairs did not trouble me, because I never saw him as morality spokesperson anyway.
I just hope the media frenzy over this matter will be over soon. Or better, for Tiger Woods to still be back on golf course doing his usual best despite every negative whisper around him. I hope it’s the latter, although I might be expective too much. ( Cristiano Ronaldo comes to mind, when he gave his superb performance despite being booed during 2006 World Cup against France. If Tiger could do that … ).
Posted in Personal on December 1, 2009| 2 Comments »
It’s already the beginning of an end. It’s the first day of the last month in 2009. Despite my very selfish way of life, I still had moments of joy, despair, frustrations, pride, regret. Plain life, like a pendulum swinging between good and evil, between success and failure.
Retrospectively, I dont think I have achieved much this year. Regarding Go, I am glad that I managed to get 4 wins in both Nanning International and KPMC tournament. Also, I managed to create a new (secret) account on KGS and maintain it at 5d, although ‘idazuwaika’ and ‘sensemaker’ account (which are more representative of my current strength) are still at 4d. Those achievements however fall short of my resolve during the beginning of the year. Overall, I am neutral about my Go. The pendulum aint swinging between emotions or perceptions, save for a minor, occasional vibration.
Health .. ! Sad to say, it’s progressively going backward. During the desperation times of managing my thesis, I had successfully gained few kilos. I dont feel good looking at the mirror nowadays. I also consumed large amount of caffeine, sugar and snacks. Of course, I dream of being a hard-core programmer, but living on soda and snacks like one was not part of it. Haizz.. gonna take a lot of effort to reverse the damage.
Knowledge acquisition .. ! I am kind of pleased to have gained a substantial understanding of Trusted Computing technology, due to my research on its application in Internet Voting. And along with it, I had familiarised myself with Qt C++ GUI framework during the project development for demonstration. I had wonderful moment using Qt Creator and Qt libraries. They allowed me to focus on my project without too much overhead.
Skill acquisition for this year is zero. Or negative to be exact, if I take into account of my degrading memory of Mandarin Chinese. At one time, I also managed to memorize katakana and hiragana of Japanese writing system, but now they are gone too. I am embarrassed being reminded of my super failure in this part.
There’s only one month left before the end of year. I dont think I have the energy to go at any more personal goals. I rather prepare myself with knowledge and skills to make 2010 a better year.
Posted in Ideas, Personal on November 26, 2009| 4 Comments »
I feel bad for my blog. It used to be quite active, with me writing my life in hope to share my thoughts with others besides being a personal journal that I can revisit to judge whether my life is interesting or not. But lately, I have been too busy with my Master thesis and consequently had to abandon this blog.
I did not expect my project to be very challenging. Conceptually, it was easy enough. I wanted to study the capabilities of Trusted Computing and then use them to tackle problems inherent to Internet Voting. But it turned out there were too many suprises. Configuring tpm-emulator 0.61 from Mario Strasser, and TrouSerS took weeks, since I was not familiar with Linux. I also had to modify and recompile tpm-tools to make some of their options work.
Also, during the course of my project, I probably have read and reread “A Practical Guide to Trusted Computing” for about 6 times, and funnily I enjoyed gaining new understanding every time. Oh I’m so geeky 🙂
So .. what’s next for me?
Should I be focusing on my work, achieving top performance and patiently climb the corporate ladder?
Should I ride on current momentum, and do a PhD part-time?
Should I be gaining new working experience as freelancer and putting myself into different problem domains?
Should I create an idea, rigorously work to implement it, and launch a startup?
Honestly, I am not sure of what my decision will be. Right now, desire is burning in me to just implement everything I have studied and read. I have some ideas, but revealing them now would be premature.
Posted in Masters, Personal on September 10, 2009| 4 Comments »
Hmm, the number of readers of this blog is declining rapidly. Cant help it, been to busy for updating anything. The past 4 days, I have been working on two global issues assignment, firstly a group work about China and its rise to superpower, and secondly an individual work regarding G8 and its commitment towards eradicating global poverty.
I have to say, despite the short time allocated for this subject, I have learned tremendously a lot. Perhaps it’s because I previously knew so little about global issues, hence can easily absorb the intros and the fundamental theories. I am eager to learn more and actively participate in various discussion although for now, I’m too tired.
Yawn…
A better life awaits after I finish my part-time Master in a month (hopefully). Until then, this blog has to suffer for a while 😦
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