I heard of the news yesterday. A girl fainted during PE and had no pulse. She was resuscitated and then sent to the hospital. I passed it off as just a normal incident of over-exercising. She passed away in hospital yesterday at 5 pm.

We were told this this morning when we went to school for SPA. They cancelled all the SPA this week and we had no lessons today. I heard from a friend who knew the girl that she probably passed away because of Brain Haemorrhage (bleeding in the brain, i.e. stroke).

It’s saddening to think that she’s so young and yet she wasn’t spared from this sudden attack. Indeed, life is fragile. ‘Nuff said.

Remember the much hyped Windows Vista? Apparently, Microsoft approached photographer Hamad Darwish to take some photographs to be included in Windows Vista. Two of them made it. And now, he has released some of the photos he took in high resolution (perfect for wallpapers!) here. You might want to take a look at some of his other photos.

Gosh, his photos are simply great. The landscapes are pretty amazing. Certainly makes me want to go live out in the wilderness

In another not-as-happy note, I just realized I have been duped all along, with the discovery courtesy of Esther. I found out, to my dismay, from here that most of the blank DVD media that I’ve been buying fall into the 3rd and some even the 4th class category – meaning they are more suitable for coasters than for storing data! Only a few of them are of Class 1.

The moral of the story: Don’t buy Imation. I was fooled into thinking they are a good brand. Get them from Verbatim, an excellent brand.

Some people just cannot live without caffeine. They literally drown in coffee everyday. I, on the hand, found out through the hard way last night that I can’t live with caffeine. (I don’t drink coffee.)

I took a sip of coffee last nigh and guess what? I couldn’t sleep the whole night! Imagine the agony when I toss and turn in bed to find the time is already 2 am! Coupled with the fact that I have a terrible flu, today was a bad day. Very bad day indeed. Singing a sad song doesn’t help.

No more coffee for me. At least at night.

Not exactly feeling very well now, but I’ll handle.

For old time’s sake, I fired up Windows 98 on the free Microsoft’s Virtual PC. The installation took really long for such a small Operating System. Vista has gigabytes of files and it took a shorter time to set up than Windows 98!

Anyway, the system is plagued with so much problems that I can hardly use it at all!

Courtesy of ocean

It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

– From Shutdown Day
Read the rest of this entry »

So, it has come and gone again. With this, the common tests loom ever closer.

I managed to snatch a 182^nd this year, less than half of last year’s ~500 position. No, I’m not disappointed because I didn’t get a two digit position like what some of you might be thinking; on the contrary, I’ve met my target of being below 300.

But honestly, I would say I’m not satisfied yet. There is still room for improvement. My current record stands at approximately 25 minutes now. I’ve never really timed it. I just took some estimates from the others’ timings and subtracted/added the time the elapsed while I/they were waiting for them/me after the runs respectively. What a mouthful. But nevertheless, I’m still like 10 minutes behind the record breaker if I’ve ran today at the same pace. Much more room for improvement. (Not that I can reach that standard – at least I could try and close up the gap )

An interesting tidbit: Apparently, the Mathematics Department in VJC is pretty good at running. The top five male staff runners were all from the Mathematics Department. (Yes, GISC is included as well – there’s no such thing as a “computing” department.)

And a word of advice: Sometimes it’s better not to comment when you have nothing constructive to say. Thank you very much. AND NO! I am not some ignorant kid who stays at home the whole day sitting in front of a machine doing nothing but play games. You know who I am talking about.

Being the computer geek I am, it’s inevitable I still have some wants for my PC hardwares

– Linksys WRT54GL: Oh yes, I need to get this soon. The lousy 2Wire is driving me crazy.

As for the rest, they are not “urgent” in a sense but they could be part of a new PC to be built in the coming one or two years. (With my monthly-accumulated [i.e. saved up month by month] NS salary perhaps; it’s still too early to say.)

– Some Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
– 200 GB SATA Drive – IDE drives are a thing of the past!
– hmm… nothing else for now.

Anyway, I’m thinking of building a 64 Bit PC next. 32 Bit is gradually being phased out anyway. If you were wondering about this bits thing, read this.

We need more of this, this, this and this kind of high-end PC manufacturers here.Goodness they allow you to customise your system to your heart’s content and one of my customisation ended up being USD 3878.

While reading the papers this morning (YES! I do read, Mr. Kan!), some reports really drove the point of Singapore being really vulnerable up my head. Turn 360 degrees and take a look at how our neighboring countries. They aren’t exactly as friendly as they seem. If you are a foreigner who likes to blast the government for various policies, I suggest you take a look at these articles first: Read the rest of this entry »

In one more hour, it’s going to be Chinese New Year. Time passes so fast. It seemed like only a while ago when it was Chinese New Year 2006. Had a reunion dinner of sorts. Not a lot of food but we didn’t manage to finish all of these either.

It’s going to be a boring one again. Why? Check out my post from year 2004. Perhaps I could use these few days to do some long overdue stuff. Thinkquest. Projects. And revision.

A pointless post. Spot the number of Ls!