Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Random Thoughts

In no particular order:
  • Apple plans to refurbish its new line of iMac and Mac products, so whomever buys Mac products now is not really smart, because you will get a much better machine with the same price a few weeks later.
  • Learning SQL and UI using C++ now. Quite interesting and start to understand why UI guys prefer WYSIWYG interfaces. I am using Qt 2.3, honestly, it sucks. Ok, to be fair, QT 2.3 is _old_ and is from 2005. I have used Qt 4.5 and it feels quite predictable and sane. Ah thanks 2009
  • I miss my cat :(
  • More and more people are getting married. Hmm...

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Quotable Quote

Marriage Is Finding Someone Special That You Want To Annoy For The Rest Of Your Life



The instance I saw this there was exactly one and only one person emerged at my mind. I smiled but later wanted to cry. It is not likely I can annoy her anymore, I can't even find her.... :(

Friday, September 18, 2009

No Plain Water

Recently I had a very unpleasant dining experience at the Indonesian restaurant Rice Table at Orchard. The price is not cheap (around S$30/head for dinner) and I have a lot of reservations for its food and service quality.

I went there with 10 other friends for dinner. Two of us ordered warm water because we had throat problems, while the others ordered juice or soft drinks. When we asked for refill of the warm water, the waiter told us its their restaurant's policy not to serve plain water, and serving us the warm water was a 'mistake' apparently made by another waiter, but they said mineral water is for sale at $2 per bottle. After arguing to and fro with the waiter and his manager, we were going nowhere. Fuming, we talked among ourselves of not patronizing this place anymore. Then after like 10 minutes, the same manager came with a jug of warm water, apologized for 'the mistake', and sheepishly refilled the glasses. Why didn't they just refill the glasses swiftly until damages were done by pissing off so many potential customers?

I always don't understand what these people are thinking. They just want to squeeze $2 more from the customers? I feel serving plain water is a basic courtesy from an eatery. Just like you have chairs for customers to sit, despite the fact you can still eat while standing.

I highly not recommending places that charge for plain water and chairs.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Sleepless

Not sure why I am sleepless, usually I have gone to bed this time. I just browsed facebook, nothing much there. Don't think I can read any technical stuff at the moment, though I have been tinkering with the Qt tool kit these few days, and this tool kit is where C++ really shines.

Some people argue that you can implement the same thing in C with even better performance, but C lacks a lot of features like classes, data type checking and support for object-oriented programming. Using C in this case is just awkward. I also came across a installation wizard written in Python using Qt4 binding, and hey, it is neat and actually quite easy (enjoyable I would say, if you will pardon me describing reading script files can be joyful) to read, compared to scripts written in bash or perl.

More on this next time I guess...

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Some Thoughts

  • Yesterday it was an auspicious day for Chinese, because it was 09/09/09, and '9' in mandarin rhythms with the word 'lasting', and not surprisingly, many people had their wedding ceremonies or registered for marriage. To me that was just yet another day and putting any labels on the passage of time is entirely arbitrary and artificial. Having say that, I don't deny a hypocrite I am, I am thinking 2010 marks ten years of my knowing her. Does 10/10/10 sound romantic and geeky, as it can be interpreted either as decimal, binary, and hex?
  • I took bus yesterday and the TV in the bus was showing a drama series. In the drama, a guy was proposing to a woman he admired, knelt down, hands with bouquets of roses and a huge diamond ring. The woman just said in a very firm tone: "We can't develop further, because my heart still lives in the past." She loved a man long long time ago, and she refused to let go of the memory. Though usually I would just ignore this kind of drama series, what she said did ring a bell in me... I still live in a relationship that has lasted for 10 years, though there is NO relationship per se. I am living in my perfect dream world, with everything imagined by myself (and some years-old memory fragments), but i know much better than anybody what I am up to. I just can't help....
  • With a glass of Somerton 2007 merlot in hand, I am in blogging mode. The wine is so nice while drinking in quiet environment. I have turned off my handphone, and a while ago my gf sent me an IM asking "do you love me?", I ignored the question with a sense of guilt at heart. She is innocent in this case, but my attention is not on her tonight. I am thinking the other girl.. whom I have missed for ten years, ten fucking years. I just don't understand why she doesn't try to talk to me if she is still interested? I admit I was quite rude when she called me while we were still in college, but I did that entirely unintentionally, I thought she was my office-mate's wife, who always called him every night. The last phone call I got was when I was in Intel, and I still remember she put Shakira's song at the voice mail. So much for family, great.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Random Things over a Week

It is nearly the end of Sunday and tomorrow is the start of another work week (technical Sunday is the start of a week, but it doesn't feel so). Some random thoughts:

  • An ex-colleague contacted me for job prospects in Singapore. It seems he has been unemployed for almost one year. He claims he is doing free-lancing now, but from the way he talked, he was desperate. I am in good terms with him, but I am not so sure what to say to my manager as this guy is a typical engineer with weird temper and attitude. Still figuring how to help him...
  • I got back from yet another movie with gf just now. It was a Singapore-made movie "Where Got Ghost", though it is advertised as a Chinese movie, but inside 80% of the conversations are in Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) and the rest is mixtures of Chinese, English, and Cantonese. This movie to be frank is only suitable for people residing in Singapore and the furthest it can go will be Malaysia where the people also understand the context and culture. Other than these two places, the audiences will have a really hard time to understand what the story is about, let alone catching those Singaporean jokes. Here is  a 'derivative' product from this movie, and see if you find it funny or not (I do).
  •  I slowly will set up a technical blog for all the technical stuff to showcase for potential employers and investors. This cuppa chai site will be solely for posts related to my thoughts and daily routines.
  • Sometimes you will miss someone for no reasons. I hate myself. 

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Should I should I (Part 2)

Though these days most of my blog posts are about my personal stuff and I grumbled like an old man, I did have an (engineer's) life, listed below.

  • Opera 10 debutted a couple days ago and it seems sexy. You must heard about Opera, right? No, you mean you don't know there is a browser as good as Opera? Then click on the link and go take a look. The size is comparatively small (~10MB) and installations were painless for my Windoze and Linux machines. The most important thing for me is this is the first time I can finally see the blogspot interface being rendered correctly with no missing features.
  • Snow leopard is out. Apple has pushed the new OS X ahead of Windows 7  to steal the show. From the user point of view, there aren't many new features, but internally,  changes aplenty(e.g. moving a major portion of the kernel to 64bit). These changes not necessarily are crucial or useful to most of the users _now_, but these are obviously plan-ahead that will serve as a more liberating foundation for OS X in the future. John Siracusa from Ars Technica has done an extensive, excellent review which covers many topics, include the user interface, kernel internals, compilers, and multi-threading on the big cat. It is an interesting read if you are into technical stuff (if you think my blog is interesting, then you will like that article). The link is here.
  • After reading what Snow Leopard is capable to do, it is extremely tempting for me to get a Mac to play with. So, again, my question this time is: Should I get a Mac? :P

Going back on some softer subject, just now my gf called and told me her female friend has already talked about wedding, despite she and her boy friend only know each other for less than 2 months. As usual, my gf asked me why we were so 'slow'. Well, proposing for wedding isn't hard, the key is you need both persons to say 'I do'... Right place, right time,  wrong person....