Still not dead

What a great holiday. Gonna be over soon, but still, long enough for me.

Didn't work much. Very low on $. Finished 2 freelance projects, so I probably learned a bit about web development, even if the pay isn't too great.

Started driving lessons.

Now I'm working on a space-based game. I hope I can get enough motivation to actually finish a significant portion of it before the holidays end.

This holiday is too short! Argh.

Tyranny

Post title holds no meaning.

Had a meeting with the client. Changes requested, as expected. Actually they seemed alright with most of it, so I'm rather relieved. My friend said I was sweating during the meeting, hah.

Then, went to have a drink with friends. I had Earl Grey tea, of course.

Picture

Start of a new evening

Just submitted a prototype of the project to the client. This gives me a bit of breathing space at least until.. tomorrow when I meet with them again. I have a nagging feeling there will be a lot of changes requested.

I'm going to be taking a look at the mobile project again. So far, I've not really delved into J2ME yet, although I borrowed a book about it.

What else is new? I went for guitar class after skipping a few lessons already. We are learning "Sing" which is a well-known Carpenters song. You know: Sing... sing a song.. sing out loud... sing out strong..

Of course, there will be no actual singing while I'm playing it.

Work

I've been pretty obsessed with the freelance project lately. Time to step back a little, and take a break. :)

I did a bit of stargazing from the balcony just the other day. I didn't really expect to see a lot, but instead I saw about 20+.

I did spot the Crux star cluster, as well as Antares, which I know because I played a game with that name before. I also noticed Saturn (I think) and Jupiter, which was extremely bright.

I also saw some mystery objects flying at extremely high altitudes. Hmm..

Lazy Sunday

Very tired today. I didn't get much done, really need to start working on my projects soon.

I've been toying with elinks and w3m these few days. These are text-based web browsers, meaning you can surf the net using a simple terminal. Both software have their pros and cons: w3m has better rendering but elinks is more usable. Either way, its nice to browse web sites without distracting images.

One thing I did today was to play around with the source code from my friend's mobile game prototype. I removed the splash screen and high score system (because it needed a server), but haven't wrapped my head around the game code itself yet. Ubuntu works very well with the WTK beta released by Sun.

I just got baptized today. Joy? :)

My dad flew overseas for business. I saw him off at the airport, then had an enjoyable dinner at Swensens.

Goals for this week
1. Get started reading some books given to me by the church and family
2. Arrange a dinner with guitar-ensemble mates, since I probably won't keep in touch next sem.
3. Finish the basic functionality for the freelance project.

Number 3 is quite worrying. Its turning out to be a bit more work than I had expected. Hope things will go smoothly.

P.S. I don't know when I started writing in point form. I don't know when it will end either.

Mid-week

Gave the space demo a top-down perspective. I'm going to work on the controls next, so that moving the spaceship will 'feel' right. Hopefully. Having the camera follow the ship is another problem.

Installed Ubuntu Studio on my desktop PC.

Have to revise for tomorrow's quiz. The subject matter is interesting, but the lectures are pretty boring. Wonder if I can get through it by guesswork.

Accepted some freelance work. I have to do it in JSP, so now I have the chance to learn something new. I did some database accessing. XAMMP is very nice for this sort of project.

My friend already came up with a prototype for our mobile games project. I haven't done a thing at all. :(

I applied for a part-time job as an invigilator.

I wonder if there are part-time jobs for volunteers? I don't mind not getting paid, if the work is meaningful. But all the places I looked require at least 6 months commitment.

My thoughts are all over the place today. I can't concentrate on anything at all

Not again

Last night I dreamed of Earth being attacked again.

Last month, I dreamed that a horde of flying creatures (let's call them birds) descended upon the Earth. Their leader was a giant creature that looked a lot like a rubber duck. Our leaders tried to negotiate with them, but I felt that they were up to no good.

This time round, the aliens were mostly humanoid like us. But they had at their disposal giant woolly mammoths. These mammoths had the ability to infect our animals, turning them into zombie-like creatures with elongated jaws and sharper teeth.

Among these aliens was a small mischievous boy. Somehow, one of the humans had managed to influence this boy, who was perhaps a prince of some sort. Thus, the aliens attacked and rounded us up to find the cure.

I'm just posting this here in case it becomes true, so that I can say I told you so, while the rest of the Earth goes down in flames.

Mother's Day

Went to grandma's house for Mother's Day celebration. Chicken curry, rojak, crab and fried noodles, that's all I remember about the evening's activities. :)

Got started on the game, it's fun playing with the demos that come with python-ogre. One of them already comes with a spaceship and a nice space background too. I'm not sure how to make the camera top-down and following the ship, but that's for another day. Hopefully tomorrow.

Second post

I've decided not to go for UCLA Summer program. Too expensive, lah.

Driving lessons might have to wait.

I really want to start on the personal game project! I've downloaded python-ogre and can't wait to try it out. Previously, I wanted to use ruby as the language. Don't know why I'm going to use python now. More importantly, the game is going to be something in space, in my opinion there are too few space games out there. Independence War 2, and Escape Velocity:Nova being two of my very favourites.

It may tie in nicely with my special term too, which is about astronomy. :)

So, this makes two posts in quick succession. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this blogging thing.

Been a little busy

I thought holidays would be easy... well it certainly has been fun. But I might have put a little too much on my plate at the moment.

I got into special term at NTU, that's like extra classes. I already missed a week, equivalent to two weeks in the normal semester. Hope to catch up by reading the lecture notes, and maybe finding the textbook.

Accepted some freelance work from a bunch of students who are doing their project. I didn't know it would be for someone's school project, but I'd feel bad backing out now.

I'm doing a mobile game project with a classmate. This one should be quite simple, we're doing it on our spare time only.

Time management has never been my strong suit. Hope that everything will work out well.

Went out with friends a couple of days ago. Everyone is working now... earning money and supporting themselves. Cool.

Yesterday,

I went to Aloha Loyang, and had fun there. Just sitting around and hanging out. We watched the sunrise together.
We recorded some songs too. I wonder if they could be uploaded here.

Jamendo

Apparently, there's all this great free music on the web, available via Bittorrent. I'm having fun listening and discovering new songs, which can sometimes be good, but usually it's just average, or maybe not my type of music.

There are two options when downloading the torrent: mp3 or ogg vorbis (default), but the mp3 version has much faster seeds.

A nice extra is that most albums are licensed under Creative Commons with derivatives allowed. So you could use them in your own remixes. Or whatever.

Back to study, tomorrow is a very exciting day.

Back

University holidays are starting soon, so I've a few plans in mind:

1. Summer school at UCLA starts in July, ends August. Sounds pretty interesting... and expensive. Overseas studies are always tempting, as they offer once-in-a-lifetime experiences, but this one comes with a US$4500 price tag.

2. Driving lessons. It's about time, too.

3. Brush up on my language. Specifically, Chinese.

4. Build a HTPC for the living room.

5. Make a game. :)

Number 5 is a particularly sore point for me, as I've always wanted to code a game by myself, but put it off for later. Procastination could be my middle name. As a matter of fact, I should be studying for my last exam paper, which is this Monday. :)

Oh no.

Backup

After reinstalling my OSes 3-4 times in the past few days, I've come to realize the value of having a separate backup system.

I need something with more storage though. For stuff like photos. Mozy's servers don't seem to be as reliable as I'd like, too. And the client, which you MUST use, is Windows XP only.

At least I've managed to save my years of IRC chat logs though.

Hello world

OK university life is not exactly what I expected. Living in a hostel when you're surrounded by people you don't know sucks. Everyone keeps their door closed. Including me, I guess =) This makes it hard to introduce yourself.

Crazy huh. My parents are paying for my education, how lucky I am. But I'm here whining away about isolation.

STUDY!

What just happened?

Call it crazy/sci-fi/fantasy/fiction, whatever.

The fact is that I just had a waking dream.

In this dream I could walk around on At first I was just coasting around, suddenly it clicked that I was in a dream and I could do whatever I wanted.

It was a exhilirating experience, I felt very much alive during it.
My heart is still pumping from the feeling of flying(which I did do in the dream)

Some boring accounts of my experience in my totally made up dream world is as follows:
...
I can only remember bits and pieces of it now.

I was with some poly mates. Sitting in some rocking chair thing. Weird, I know.

I was exploring this place. It was empty and barren. This happened a few times, all with different places.

I saw people sometimes. Sometimes they would say something to me, but I couldn't talk to them. I saw a good looking girl too, but when I tried to kiss her she pushed me away :) :(

Sometimes I was doing things to the environment - ripping pieces of the walls, looking through with "x-ray" vision, etc. No one seemed to respond to my vandalism.

I had a encounter with devils too. Perhaps they represented the demons in my heart? How poetical.
I had to come into physical contact with them. They held on and wouldn't let me pass. I prayed to God and suddenly I moved to the next phase in my dream.

Oh yeah there was flying too. I found I could float or just speed whereever I wanted. Cool, like some superhero. I even encountered an evil empire which threatened the planet. But I didn't fight or anything. just spied on their soldiers. There was a heroine in that story too. But as soon as we met the dream changed :(


Why did I think that this was a lucid/waking dream? It was much more vivid. I could recall a lot more. I also was aware, while dreaming, of my real identity. I keep telling myself my home address, thinking of my real room. I could move my physical body while in the dream too (or maybe that was part of the dream?)

Before this dream I was really dog tired. I even fell asleep during Economics lecture earlier on.(not that hard to do - it's Econs). Then, I stayed up even later to try and fix problems with my laptop. By the way, my desktop monitor seems to have blown up this evening as well.

My writing is shoddy and probably full of mistakes. That's because I'm writing in the early morning. I don't know how tired I'll be tomorrow. Aiya it's National day anyway...

Ubuntu again

I formatted the old linux partition and reinstalled Ubuntu. Haven't installed the temperature sensor, but processor scaling seems to be working again. From putting my hand near the heat exhaust, it doesn't seem as hot as last time. Hope that this isn't the prelude to an explosion or something...

Taiwan

Taiwan is nice and fun. There were many great places to see. The food is good and cheap too.

Okay, pics.

Ubuntu is killing my laptop

I guess alternative OSes are just too advanced for me. I can't seem to stop Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) from overheating my ASUS W3J. It starts at 70 degrees and slowly rises after startup, even though it's idle. Meanwhile in Windows, it averages 53 to 55 degrees. After reading some forum posts, it seems that the solution requires recompiling the kernel or something, so that Ubuntu can access the fans or throttle the processor. This seems like a really nice OS, but I'll have to stick with Windows until I can really look into the problem.

What irks me is some forum posters writing that it's not a OS problem, it's the manufacturer's fault. If the laptop stays cooler in Windows, how can it be a hardware problem? I think Ubuntu should have more built in GUI support for laptops, like ACPI and suspend modes. A new user like me won't know about things like command-line configuration and recompiling the kernel.

I really hope nothing went wrong with my laptop after that experience. Argh.