AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition & Gigabyte MA770-UD3

Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Disks

Damages? These 4 items = RM1600.

Current specifications:

• AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3.20Ghz
• Gigabyte MA770-UD3
• Galaxy GeForce 8600GT OC
• 4GB DDR2 800MHz
  
• Currently using onboard audio – previously Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
• Vantec ION2+ 600W PSU
• 1TB Caviar Black Hard Disks are on RAID 1
• 500GB Seagate 7200.12 HDD as OS HDD
• Going to kaput 80GB Maxtor Sata HDD.
• Lousy Imation DVD-RW
• FLOPPY DISK DRIVE (I bet you don’t have these baby! Hahaha)
  
• Dell Ultrasharp U2410

Italics are new. Underlined are marked for changing.

Remember when my laptop’s motherboard was fried?

Then it came where my desktop’s OS hard disk was corrupted – just last week. I managed to fix the errors and it was back and running a day later. I decided to give it a soft run – running non intensive or critical applications as well as reducing read/write load on the hard disk, and it’s been running for nearly 5-6 days till today, it crashed again.

I roughly figured out what’s wrong, it happens when I’m multitasking with Google Chrome (my quick startup browser), Firefox (normal usage browser) and Lightroom (my photo management/editing software) and a few other small applications running.

Not related to this whole ordeal, my network storage is finally maxed out. 50GB remaining but insufficient for the next few months. The last wedding alone took up 50GB on each NAS, desktop and laptop hard disks.

So now it’s back to the drawing board on how to build up my work studio. I think I’ll be heading downtown this weekend to get fresh sets of hard disks. Two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black for the desktop to be RAID 1, a normal hard disk for OS. Then will decide on whether to upgrade the desktop or to get 2 more 1TB hard disks for the NAS. Ugh decisions.

And uh I definitely need to get a FireWire card reader. And uh a small and efficient laptop cooler. And uh, CAT5 network cables. And DVD-Rs.

This upgrade will definitely cost more than RM2000. T_T

P/S: I think the wedding is jinxed towards me. All my hardware fails right after the Hen’s night and Wedding.

The problem: Longevity. If I’m not here, who’s going to be responsible for my clients? Who’s going to pay the bills, collect the money? Family knows nuts about what I do, so they can’t help, and friends? It’s a matter of trust I suppose. I don’t give my full trust when it comes to money, so what can I do then?

I have a friend who started this thing with me, but she dropped off after that when I took full control. She’s still the secondary contact to the accounts in the event of an emergency. One thing is, we met online, but never actually met face to face before. Talking about putting your full trust into someone you never actually met.

In terms of contribution, I’ve contributed 99% of all the work and clients, but she did thought me how to do this and that in the early beginning.

So, back to the question, what can I do then?

Friendship is not bound to twitter, plurk, facebook, friendster, msn, ym, etc. It’s merely methods of communication, stalking, and keeping up with each other.

And we don’t go around like kindergarten kids saying “I don’t friend you anymore” as well.

So what do we do if really an ‘unfriend’ event occurs?

Tebj hc naq zbir ba.

Was quite nervous to begin with. Not because I was just sitting for an exam, but because of the cost of the exam.

So there I was, telling myself how many questions I need to get right, a nonsensical thought but it’s because of all the years, bowling competitively, telling myself to achieve a target I set.

10% successful so far.

Based on the sample exam engine that I’ve been practicing at home, I needed 70% to pass an 80 questions MCQ paper, that would mean I’ll need at least 56 questions correct to pass. There’s two types of MCQ questions, a single answer question or multiple answers question (meaning more than 1 correct answers). A question may have more than 4 choices, some even 8 choices, and it doesn’t specify how many answers are correct. A full point for getting all right, and half for incomplete answers.

So again, I entered my credentials and begin the exam ‘tutorial’ – how to use the exam program, etc. Then I saw something rather odd.

“To pass this examination requires at least 55%”

Okay, I was delighted, even more when it mentioned that it will specify how many answers are correct for the multiple answers questions. There was a downside though – there wasn’t any partial marks for incomplete answers.

55%, that’s 44 questions I need to score.

Timer started counting down when I press ‘Begin exam’. 3 hours and counting.

By the time I finish answering the questions, I did a rough estimation of the possible score I’ll get.

A breakdown of confident/50-50/not-sure answers.

25% – 100% absolutely correct.

25% – 50-50

50% – lets hope for the best shall we?

I even included error co-efficiency for total breakdown of the correct answers into the calculation.

100% for confident answers.

80% for 50-50.

And the remaining, 5-10% should be correct.

So that in the end would get me at around 50% for the total score. 5% short. I guess that extra 5% would have to be put under the ‘lucky answers’ category, if there were one.

Ran through my answers a few times and with 15 minutes remaining, I couldn’t wait anymore. It was killing me that the ‘End Exam’ button was just there, waiting to be pressed.

53%

BloggerUnited.com‘s domain is expired as of today.

Same example like Advertlets back then eh? Don’t these people check their mail for domain expiry warnings? (my bad, i jumped the gun)

Update: rei99, the owner of bloggerunited.com twitted the following at

1134PM 07/06/09:

cc got rejected!!..and no one in customer service can explain to me y!..duh

9:54AM 13/06/09:

@*removed* no..got problem with credit card, blocked by domain provider

1. Run a Game Server (dedicated game server)
2. Run a Webserver (host websites/scripts)
3. Run a database server (to compliment the webserver)
4. Run an online radio/video streaming server
5. Create a virtual private network (VPN, for proxying your internet connection)
6. Run a VOIP server (make calls online, free?)
7. Run a IRC server (mIRC days huh?)
8. Run a FTP server (host and transfer files between people)
9. Run a torrent tracker server or just download torrents with the VPS/VDS
10. Host a cloud computing software

Here’s what you can’t do with a VPS/VDS:

1. Can’t use it as a very expensive paperweight (however your physical server can)

That’s all that I can think of. Any more? Leave a comment!

Two things you need, your command prompt (Start > Run > Type in ‘cmd’ > OK/Enter) and a DNS trace service.

First find out the host IP address via the command prompt.

C:\> ping cincauhangus.com

This will start pinging the domain as well as giving you the IP address of the domain (which might look something like this: 123.234.4.24).

There’s an alternative to this method. You can try using the DNS Lookup tool and do an ‘A’ DNS lookup. It will then return the IP address similar to the method above.

Using that IP address, do a reverse DNS lookup. It will then return a web/domain address.

Now that you have that information, you can do a WHOIS Lookup. If the results of the reverse DNS lookup has a subdomain in it, remove it and enter the domain address only (eg: mschosting.com and not something.mschosting.com)

The results will tell you the company that owns that domain, which usually is the hosting company for that website you’re checking out.

Head to Monitor Distance Awareness.

Nearly every computer has a webcam installed, especially on the newer laptops around now.. Most of them have a built-in webcam. What this program does is use the webcam to estimate how far are you from your monitor, and alert you whenever you’re too close to the monitor.

Sometimes you’re too caught up with what you’re doing, you don’t realise you’re getting closer and closer to the monitor.. Which unfortunately I do a lot. ><

The rough idea is to measure the size of the subject in the ‘safe distance’ and ‘close distance’ and use both sizes to give the computer an estimation of how far you are from the laptop. (i feel i’m repeating myself..) As long as you’re within the ‘recommended’ distance, the computer won’t pop a message, basically tell you to back off.

Or make the computer blank off the screen or put the monitor into standby until you press a ‘resume’ key.

Or display some lolcat. Or ugly fat chicks. That would keep you away from your screen for a while.

You get the basic idea kan?

Rough Ideaz I Haz. Sumwan meak dis progrum for mi, kthxbai.

So lets start with my 9 to 5 ‘job’. I’m currently in a certification course to be certified as a SAP ABAP developer. I’m taking it in HCL-Axon at TPM, near my old uni. Steph said that company is one of the best companies in Malaysia for SAP, while my dad stunned after I told him I was taking a SAP course in Axon. More like astonished actually, but me being as blur as possible wasn’t too sure what the ‘astonishment’ was about. Haha.

Those who are wondering, I’m still unemployed. I’m taking this course under the MDEC Job Camp initiative by the government (it’s their way to help fresh grads and unemployed IT peeps to be more desirable to IT companies by providing free IT courses).  The course itself costs RM30,000, while the exam fees is RM2,000. Of course I’m not paying RM30,000, plus I don’t have that much either (else I would have bigger lenses by now!!), but I have to pay for the exam fees. I can not take the exams if I want to, but I think the RM2,000 is worth an investment.

If I do get certified, I’m most likely going to work in a medium-large sized MNC (maybe?). I’m not being ‘chun’ or a show off, but SAP is a very expensive platform for small companies to have it. Usually SAP is deployed in the oiling, mining, aeronautical industry, so that’s why I’m expecting to be somewhere around there, again, if I get it.

Oh, haven’t explained what’s SAP about. SAP is a business solution for big companies to handle nearly everything in their company. For example: human resource, finance, marketing, information management, etc. It’s basically a skeleton framework for business to run. For it to work for different industries, all you need to do is to install the right modules into SAP and it be available for developers/programmers to build programs for the clients. There are modules specifically for mining, oiling, transportation, business warehousing, and all kinds of industry which I never heard of as well. Cool stuff.

Talking about development in SAP.. It’s freaking simplified! All those things I learnt on Microsoft .net and those kononnya state-of-the-art programming languages.. Suddenly, SAP ABAP programming interests me even more. Table/Data adapter and all those codes you used just to retrieve a set of data from the database, which could be 20 lines worth, is only 4 lines in SAP ABAP. Crazy and super ‘cheating’.

Wonder why I never find out about SAP earlier. Bleh.

I do hate that I can’t simply double click in SAP, even highlighting text, because it will trigger SAP to search/display the details of the text I clicked.. Sheesh!

The SAP server that I connect to is hosted remotely somewhere I don’t know. So the training is HIGHLY dependent on the Internet, if it’s down/slow like what we’re having right now with Streamyx, I can’t do anything at all. Like yesterday, no internet = no exercise.

The training is 5 weeks long, 9AM-5PM everyday. Though I start ‘work’ a little earlier because I have to send my sisters to their uni everyday by 8.30AM. It’s a freaking long journey from home to Sunway to Bukit Jalil. Not to mention about the tolls, RM6 one way. I even just serviced my car (5,000KM maintainance), where the previous service was just 1.5 months before that. Bleh. But whole family is against me not taking them to uni. I still don’t understand why my sisters cannot take the LRT to their uni, LIKE how I did last time. WHY?

Sometimes I feel my sister is treating me more as a driver than what I’m supposed to be. Sigh.

Summore I’m sort of ‘training’ to be in a 9-5 job. What happens when I get a real job after that? Sigh.

Okay. Time to sleep. Tomorrow a long day with BarCamp and Nuffnang-Maxis Broadband Music Bash party. And I’m going to watch/shoot Formula 1 the following day. Ciaos!