Yeah… it’s done. Almost

My DVD Writer is humming rather quietly while I wrote this piece of blog entry. One point six gigabyte worth of data – culmination of hard work for the past three weeks – is being transferred.

Indeed, I am currently working on school open house publication. We are expected to publish a full blown magazine on… of course… SMU School of Information System in insanely short deadline – we miss it several times by the way. It was indeed a daunting experience to work with a hastily (not to mention) randomly formed team whose members know almost none of the person sitting next to his or her.

Of course none of us is a professional or used to be one in publishing a magazine. We are students after all – SIS students who are constantly bogged down by projects. Undeniably, none of us know any publishing software around – beat that! Of course there are some other minor obstacles here and there. Lousy grammar mistakes, missing persons, glory grabbers, blurry pictures, slow laptop (yes… for publication purposes… my laptop is quite slow. God bless A**r), ubiquitous red tape are some factors that I could still remember vividly.

I think I have lost my ability to write…

Nevertheless, working on this project is indeed a physical, mental and spiritual rollercoaster. I learn a lot of new thing which I should not elaborate now since the burning process has already finished and I need to go for a roll call.

Rush rush

[Extra]

http://myfile.sg/s5xd/  (small low quality pdf 11megs)

Thought of the day

For a long time, I have not updated my blog. School works have taken most of my time if not all. Yesterday, or rather today, is the first day where I could reclaim my sleep deficit. 13 hours straight followed by three hours of slacking and another six hours of LTB firefighting session… not exactly that promising but SMU life, or specifically SIS, is indeed great.

While I believe that none will miss my presence in this blogosphere, I keep wondering why there are some SMU-ners who could blog on daily basis. It is either they have plenty of free time to burn or they have marvelous time management or they do not care with what happened with their projects or they wrote something rubbish or … There are many plausible explanations but that is not my point. I just want to write more but I simply cannot due to various reasons but mainly because I am sick with computer screen.

Anyway, some thought of the day… by despair.com

Felt like I Have Been Framed…

Guess what, for the past two days, I have once again become one of the most infamous person on the school.

The problem began when this person with the name similar to the big-green-man’s decided to send a typical email to the entire school. For some reason which I am not sure why, that 100kb poster-attached email suddenly turned into 3mb mammoth – annoy the entire school population who are forced to download that byte laden mail.
Since school network is fairly fast, its not so bad… until I realize she put my website address directly below the poster image.

I deny all connection with that … fat and ugly poster!!!

Hmm… did I said “once again”? Indeed, this act of character assassination has happened to me not once but TWICE!!!

The first one was worse though.

That time, I was asked to make a mail poster to promote some event. Piece of cake. I sent the poster to someone who has the right to email the entire school population . Similar naturally occurring phenomenon happened. The size of the image increase meteorically from 30kb to 1mb.

That time, the person who forward the email to the entire school population forget to delete my email signature. Yes… my mail signature which inclusive of my FULL NAME, EMAIL, HANDPHONE NUMBER, and MSN ACCOUNT.

Well… what can I say

Defective Computer User Theory

I come across many people who said and show that their computer, let it be windows-based desktop or laptop, is very lousy.

Common problems such as intermittent freezing and ‘hang’, black out, blue screen of death, unresponsive keyboard/mouse/fingerscan/all keep repeating itself over and over again despite alleged claim by various vendors that their system is the most robust/secure/tough in the world. Have I mentioned all those viruses, trojans and X-ware?

As a scientific person who demands explanation to every natural phenomenon, I tried to find any recognizable common patterns that may possibly lead to such undesirable outcome: intermittent computer problems.

My first theory is that, just like any other system, computer abides to second law thermodynamic law:

the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.

If you do not understand what I have written previously, do not be afraid. At least 80% of human populations never hear about such thing. Consider yourself as part of the majority who inhabit this little blue ball.

In layman term, second law of thermodynamic means all things tend to become more chaotic/ defective/ broken over time. Imagine an abandoned house.

Nice theory until I realize that certain brand of A**R and D*L* tend to move towards maximum entropy at much faster rate as compare to let say I*M or T****B* brand. It seems that thermodynamic law is not enough. I must have missed something.

The fact I have gathered so far:

In terms of their computer performance
The unhappy *CE* and **EL users far outnumber the happy ones.
The unhappy *BM and T***I** users is far outnumbered by the happy ones.

Intuitively, as a normal human who thinks highly of its kind, my first deduction is simply: AC** and DE** computers are of low quality and bad workmanship and thus unable to deliver expected performance.

Nevertheless, I could not discount the significant number of happy A*E* and D**L customers – no matter how low, the number is still quite significant – and angry IB* and TO****A users from my grand reasoning equation.

Here is my new theory:
People who choose I*M and T*****A tend to be from the segment that know the value of computer and thus they prepare to fork out more money to acquire computer of such brand which is known to be more expensive. Intuitively, they know how to take care of the computer and hence their computer tends to be more durable and running more smoothly over longer period of time.

On the other hand, people who choose *CE* and **EL tends to be from the segment that barely know computer and hence put budget as the sole consideration. It is no wonder that after the second day upon the purchase, the value of their acquisition plunge into a point where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth for eternity or until they purchase new computer or until they decided to become technology-hermit and toast all the electronic lifestyle out of the window (whichever earlier)

Most human is just like a bad carpenter and bad carpenter blames his tools.

Lesson to be learnt: laptop with lower price tend to get worse reputation.

Disclaimer note

All the names and brands used in this post are purely hypothetical and do not refer to any specific brands in the real world no matter how close the match be. The ‘*’ character is used to merely emphasis my goodwill to avoid accidental use of imaginary names (e.g. Dull, PoshyBah, AiBeEm, and Aser) that can affect any real companies in any way.