Coincidence? Probably.

I've been thinking about coincidences in my life. There are loads of funny ones, and some that are just plain scary. A lot of my life has been associated to the number 4, 13 and 14. I live in a house whose number is 27 (13 + 14) on road number 4. (I think my address is on whois. Not sure.) When I go to a restaurant where the tables are numbers, there is a 50% chance that if I choose a table, it will be either table 4, 14, or 24 (this is at complete odds with the fact that there are so many other numbered tables).

That meant that when I came to Arrow, I was expecting to stay on the 4th floor, which came true. What I wasn't expecting? Two seniors for actuarial science staying on the same floor (it's one thing to find a senior on your floor, but I think it's another story if you find the president of the Actuarial Students Society on your floor). A person in the room whose door is directly opposite mine - shares a birthday with me. A housemate whose name is highly similar. (if it were the same, I think it would already be safe to say it's time to find out what trick destiny is trying to pull).

Among the funnier ones? HELP University College was founded one day before I was born. My year of birth is 1986. 1+9+8+6 = 24. 2/4 (2nd April) is my birth date. That about all I can think of for now. I don't think it'll be that long before I find more. (Pointless fact: Oh yeah, the Faculty of Economics and Commerce in the University of Melbourne was founded in 1924.) I'd say you can probably find a pattern of some kind in your own lives too if your look hard enough. Funny things happen to a lot of people. :D

Full of Crap

(I'm posting using the wireless connection available in the ICT Building. Not that Arrow's Internet is down, I just happened to be here with my PowerBook.) My blog has been comment spammed very slowly. While I am doing my best to ensure no strange comments crop up which are actually spam, you will see the occasional SpamKarma slip-up which I will have to delete manually. On another note, how much comment spam do I attract?

In general, thanks to the non-popularity of this site, it attracts very few comments. That means me keeping track of spam comments are made a hell of a lot easier. I don't have to read through a post or two every once in a while to make sure the newest posts are comment spam free. As a general rule, if there's a comment, there's a 50% chance it's spam. Then again, you guys sometimes type nonsense in your comments, so I'd have to say the number of useless comments can escalate up to 90% of total comments, but I appreciate your comments, regardless of how worthless they are.

Why do I appreciate it? Because you guys took the time to type it out and send it. That shows me you have something to say or something that I blogged actually meant something to you or made you want to reply. :D

Errors in My Text on the Blog

I know a lot of you have probably had a good laugh at some of my grammatical errors on the site. Unlike u238, I do not foresee myself going through my entire 200 something posts to correct errors that I made. If I see one while I am free and have spare time, I will correct it. If I see one and I'm busy, I will just ignore it and hope I remember later. A lot of the errors actually come from me changing the entire layout of my sentence rather than just plain typos. Hm.... let's use a programming analogy. Let's say I used this variable/constant name throughout the program and decide to change it later without a find and replace function, you can imagine what kind of errors happen.

It's how a sometimes disjointed sentence can show up, and the other problem is that my thought process can cycle pretty quickly, leading to swift and quick changes in the sentence structure to the extent that my sentences no longer make sense.

Until then, I shall just live with my errors, and hope you will too. :D

Internet on the Fritz, and A New Look at the Fantasy of War

As you might have deduced from my lack of recent posts, my Internet has been acting up again. Want to know the strange bit? The lag is so awful that I can no longer access websites normally since it will take at least one minute to tell me that the remote server dropped the connection. After that, it'll take me about 5 minutes to actually load the page. You can easily imagine what kind of horror it is to surf the Internet in this kind of situation. It took me close to forever to do anything beyond nothing. Here's the reallly interesting bit. Despite all the lag and dropped connections, BitTorrent actually works fine over the network. It might be a little slow, but it actually works. It was pretty damn interesting to look at all this happening and it was pretty funny. In a sense, it meant I could see only what was on BitTorrent. The problem cropped up towards the weekend, and I hope it'll be fixed soon. This time, I don't think it is any fault or oversight on the management's part.

However, all of these incidents do tell a tale. TMNet in Malaysia is a far cry from something to complain about. In fact, I don't foresee myself referring to streamyx any more when my connection drops. I'll probably say it Arrow'ed on me. :D

As for Fantasy of War, my lack of a stable Internet connection has led me to be unable to continuously post new pages to the story, and as such, it won't continue until I get my Internet back. (how many times have I put it off by now... hmmm.... I think plenty should cover it). Of course, any time I put it off means that I will continue to develop the depth and scale of the storyline by leaps and bounds. I have just recently added new sections to a later part of the storyline, and am now looking through the current portion of the storyline to articulate better and clearer the point of view I am trying to push.

As you should have noticed by now, all I've been doing is ranting. What else can I do? It's not like I can do anything constructive by just sitting here without a plausible solution to my problem. Of course, as long as I come to uni, can use a computer (PC/Mac/Linux/UNIX) no longer matters much anymore as long as it has Internet, I can continue to study effectively. Probably. Maybe. Or... not.

(This is being posted from an iMac Intel Core Duo with 1.5GB RAM in the CSHE. Since there are an abundance of Macs usually free for me to use, don't expect me to be posting from a Windows machine any time soon since for one, I don't have a Windows machine at home, and most of the Windows machines in uni are usually taken, leaving the Macs to me to post from. Happy news from some, sad news from most. :D)

Poor Yam and His Computer Troubles

(Refer to: http://kcforge.blogspot.com/2006/03/revenge-of-revenged.html for more details.) I just read that the workaround Yam and I worked out no longer works for HELP computers. :( (To be truthful, I merely presented the idea after I saw what happened during a server breakdown, and Yam refined the techniques considerably from there (since he was around the labs more often than I was)).

It's pretty sad that he can no longer access these computers which I believe we should rightly have access to, since we did a whole lot on our fees, and we do need computer access for doing our assignments. Now, of course, this flaw as I had already realised, wouldn't be existent if the software were newer. This is because nobody in their right mind in offices that require far more secure systems would use this kind of security where the entire had drive of the system could easily  be compromised by a simple cable pull.

While this simple cable pull problem could easily be actually an allowance for when authentication servers breakdown, so that work can go on despite failure. this would work if everything was on a central server instead of the computer hard drives.

I was pleasantly surprised by the news the HELP has finally decided to roll out Windows XP equipped PCs into all the labs when I read it, of course, since this upgrade also entails a software upgrade, the result is that until a new workaround is found, there will be no free access to HELP computers. People have to pay. Boo-hoo.

There goes our nice workaround to use free Internet. Of course, since I'm already being made to pay for it here, I have access to most of the student computer labs here. There is no point in trying to break the system here. However, I see plenty of fun in seeing how to break into the other one - again. :D

Until then, may Yam find a way to soothe his lack of Internet at college (without trading off significant amounts of financial resources). (And if you are wondering, yes I am bored. And yes, I have nothing better to do than read other peoples' blogs. And yes, this course isn't close to being to difficult to comprehend despite what people say. And no, I'm not the occasional genius. I got nowhere close to perfect grade for my SPM or my Diploma in Business. That is, of course, unless SPM is a lousy benchmark for future performance (which is what I would like to believe, but I know it's probably not true, maybe.).)