It’s Vesak day today, informally “Buddha’s Birthday”. Well wishes going to all Buddhists celebrating Vesak day alike. The day started with me crawling to to Aljunied MRT at 9am on a snoozy public holiday to meet Darius and Elrick for the Adventure race team briefing at Enamel house. Over there we were briefed on the conduct and expectations of the race. Interestingly this year, the inclusion of high elements back into the race with abseiling and natural quarry rock climbing in on top of the usual orienteering, trail biking and running (which will take up the bulk of the race).

We did a few practice climbs at the rock wall there but none of us can actually complete the practice climb! I mean I’ve climbed inclined tiled walls before, but presumably because of few critical tiles lacking in some parts of the wall (& I am not very efficient with the use of inserts either), we all couldn’t get up to a certain point! But that didn’t stop us from doing a “belay haul” haha which we managed to get Darius up to a point without much “climbing” on his side either! Though the natural wall we will be conquering at the quarry will be easily 3 times the height of this 3 storey synthetic wall, the organiser said that it will be easier to climb, about 5mins - so as he claimed. Free abseiling is fun, just like what I did in the Army before only this time, theres a 10 storey rock face to “walk” down from.

There was a outdoor tentage and a grand monument in front of the Aljunied MRT carpark in line with Vesak day, very impressive glittering landmark in the afternoon sun. Discussed the race plans and preparations with the team over curry rice lunch at the nearby coffeehouse, particularly how we need to go about transporting our mountain bikes to the race venue (there’s no bike and equipment rentals this year so we have to use all our own, which is quite a hassle having to bring to Bukit Timah). Nevertheless it was going about getting the needed race equipment at the Beach Road army market and cooling down with ice desserts before heading off. Met up with Mum and Dad at the Bukit Merah View Thai Temple to pray for the afternoon before heading home for a much needed rest.

Today is the last day SP swimming pool will be open, where it will be closed then to next year. Access to the Staff center and gym will be from the front glass door entrance from the Car Park, you can access it from Food court 5 after making a round outside Food Haven and the carpark facing the Stadium.

Excerpt from message to Staff and Students: Having upgraded the Sports Complex, we next shift our attention to the swimming pools. All three pools (competition, wading and children) will be closed from 1 June 2007 to end-Feb 2008 to facilitate upgrading of the pool filtration plant, replacement of pool and deck tiles and the renovation of pool toilets. The scope of work also includes the installation of a water ionization system which will provide a healthy, mineral water swimming environment for users.

We would like to seek the cooperation of staff and students, especially regular users of the pools, to bear with the closure. We also appeal to occupants and patrons of facilities nearby to put up with inconveniences and access restrictions arising from construction activities.

Should you have any enquires or wish to provide feedback, please contact Ms Chua Wei Lee at 6772-1628.

Got a letter few days ago that my Singnet broadband speed has been upgraded to 3Mbps from 1.5Mbps without any additional charges, maintaining the usual subscription at about $58/mth. This came very much as a welcome in sharing the bandwidth among the few ummm, 7 computers at home. It’s not the first time I’ve got a free upgrade - I remembered they’ve previously bumped up my old 256kps to 512kps and then up to 1.5Mbps previously, presumably to remain competitive with Starhub (aka ol’ SCV) cable who also have their own fair dishing of free upgrades on their own.

Remembering the old days, come to think about it it’s already more than 10 years since I’ve been a subscriber with Singnet, in fact about 13 years already since the ol’ Singtel “Teleview” days with those noisy but “cutting edge” 14kbps modems (yea- cutting edge… I always go laughing when I read dated computer magazines I’ve stashed from the 90s). Those were the days. I guess one can never appreciate broadband if they weren’t a 56k’s subscriber before - which I unfortunately have to put up during my growing-up years. Still can’t believed that was enough for Counter-Strike and Starcraft multi-player games back then. And laughingly, the whole house would be quiet whenever anyone is up online as no one can ever call through!

Singtel Mio
I had been considering the Singtel Mio for few months now and almost committed to it as my Net contract had expired sometime ago (sparking lots of annoying marketing calls from SingNet as well). Seemingly the Mio, 3.5Mbps Broadband, Home line and Singtel mobile line all at a low rate at $68 basic++ is indeed a very tempting offer (as the acknowledged by the horde of crowds at singtel stores at it’s launch). Though my current Net and Mobile bills alone are averaging a slight $20 margin above the basic Mio $68/mth package, I am considering putting Mio off as my current gateway modem and set-up is the most reliable I have to date- no DCs or home network crashes, so why fix anything which ain’t broke? So as I’ve learnt, Mio too have it drawbacks:

• Gateway modem have to be ON 24/7 or no phone line
• Cannot use existing VOIP software (for free overseas calls) with Mio
• Mio Mobile can only be used on “approved phones”
• Modem not exceptionally reliable (feedback from friends & acquaintances)

Besides chalking up your electricity bill for the modem, do take note that you cannot make calls (especially emergency calls) in the even of a blackout or power trip. Though that’s not very common in Singapore, but something you have to be aware of in such an event. The most disappointing thing is the limited number of phones which can be used for Mio Mobile- I mean $15/mth for unlimited wi-fi calls is a sweet deal and technically any phone with built-in wi-fi CAN make VOIP calls through Mio Voice, so why limit it and maintaining the partnership monopoly of “approved phones” to few Nokia phones only?

Mio is good, but it seems that I might put it off till something better comes by.

Sorry for not posting this up earlier. Anyway, here are the Penang bridge marathon details. The run is a major event and part of Visit Malaysia Year 2007. This is going out particularly to Norule who requested the details:

Event : PENANG BRIDGE MARATHON
Date : 24 June 2007 (One week after Phuket Marathon!)
Distance : 42km, 21km and 10km

Categories:
FULL MARATHON: Fee RM 50.00 / USD 50.00

• Men Open 18 y.o. and above 42.195 km
• Women Open 18 y.o. and above 42.195 km
• Men Veteren 40 y.o. and above 42.195 km

HALF MARATHON : Fee RM 25.00 / USD 25.00

• Men Open 18 y.o. and above 22.3km
• Women Open 18 y.o. and above 22.3km
• Men Junior Veteran 40-49 y.o. 22.3km
• Men Senior Veteran 50 y.o. and above 22.3km
• Women Senior Veteran 35 y.o. and above 22.3km

QUARTER MARATHON : Fee RM 15.00 / USD 15.00

• Men Junior 13-15 y.o 10.00km
• Remaja Perempuan 13-15 y.o. 10.00 km

FUN RUN : Bayaran Penyertaan = RM 10.00 / USD 10.00

• Fun Run 13 y.o. and above 10.00 km

(Thanks to Elrick for the specific addresses)
Entry forms must be submitted during office hours (9.00am to 4.30pm) to any of the following 3 addresses: (All Non-Singapore Addresses)

Malaysian highway authority
Northern region Office Batu 7, Jalan Sultan Azlan Shah 11700 Pulau Pinang Tel(604) 226 2959/ 226 2953

Malaysian Highway Authority
Jalan Serdang - Kajang 43000 kajang Selangor tel (603)8737 3000

Penang Bridge Sdn Bhd
Plaza toll Penang Bridge 13600 Perai, Pulau Pinang Tel (04)398 7419

One of my ram modules presumably went kaboom few days ago, as my “workstation” desktop system meter reads 510MB ram instead of 1024MB previously. so I am very much left with 50% of my available capacity with me now. As an analogy there are 2 ways to deal with a faulty car fan belt- you can choose to open the hood and fix the problem or you can simply just turn up the radio and continue driving. Seems that I am choosing the latter, until I can actually find time to troubleshoot.

With hardware prices coming down fast, finally I can look forward during the coming school vacation to get my quad-core system built and move away from the single-core and AGP era to something more respectable. Why quad-core? Well, everybody’s using dual cores now right?

New Items to purchase:

• CPU: Intel QX (6600/6700/6800) series Quad Core CPU
• Mobo: Asus Vista-Plus Mobo with Remote
• Ram: 2×1GB Kingston Hyper-X DDR800 Modules
• New HD: Hitachi E7k500 500GB harddisk
• Graphics: Geforce 8800GTS 320MB PCI-E
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM

Having used MSI, Gigabtye, Intel and Via motherboards before, this is my first with Asus, so hope they don’t let me down. Estimated price of all these components are $2000SGD currently, in time it will be within my budget not exceeding $1500, with the biggest chunk from the processor/mobo bundle taking up more than 50% of the total price (approx $1100SGD).

And no, Simlim square hardware prices are actually not affected by the “Great Singapore Sale”. Generally $1000-$1500 is my personal set limit on hardware, not that it’s “expensive” or stingy, but it’s just not worth to spend so much money on something which will be dirt cheap in a few months time, just like handphones, hardware prices will always drop- I’ve seen people spending $200+ on 2GB memory cards or equivalent one year back, and come crying back when it costs only $20 now. My point is that even if you have the cash to spare, it’s wiser to spend it on something else, given the opportunity cost.

Enough said, now here are the things I can savage from current system:

• Thermal Take SOHO casing
• 500GB and 2×250GB Hitachi harddisks
• Sony DVD-writer
• TDK CD writer
• WinTV Tuner/Radio
• Audigy soundcard
• 32-in-1 Media Card reader
• Antec Truepower 480W

Technically combined, the eventual system is a Quadcore system with 1.5TB Harddisk space with 2GB DDR800 ram. It seems that once you get a decently well built PC casing, you can stick with it as long as the ATX revisions are unchanged, so I generally advise anyone to get a good casing if you DIY and it can even last you a lifetime.

This system should be able to last me another 5-7 years till the next major upgrade, just like what I anticipated with my current system built in 2001, (with the exception of it already on it’s third motherboard!).

The Brooks life run and NUS Legs and Paddles was on today, didn’t go for it as firstly, I didn’t register for it, secondly am not quite the best of condition now (school school school) and lastly I already ran a race yesterday.

It’s quite packed during the week in terms of tutorials, but notably and commendably is the faster speed of the blackboard during this e-learning, maybe the offset of the e-mail servers to Microsoft for the SP iChat Email system definitely lightened alot of the CPU cycles and bandwidth bottlenecks. Just when I thought the road of homework was ended, I found out that I got my exam dates wrong, I actually do not have any papers next week! But instead the “29th” of next month! bummer!

Actually felt great this morning. Went for a sun-blasted afternoon 42 lap swim at the pool before heading for lunch at the nearby market - Yong tau foo duh, yummy “health food”. Started slaving back at home on the tutorials for the rest of the afternoon. Man that felt miserable, my running nose came back and just simply started flowing. Maybe I was still hungry, cus that always happens- finished a whole box of Kellogs Frosties and the flu went off, went back into the school work, Thermodynamics Steam tables & Library books and the flu came back again. Dammit I think I am allergic to school work.

Oh yea on Darius and Elrick’s team today at the Marina Bay NUS Legs and Paddles event, heres an excerpt from them:

“came back first for the run…”
“first team in my division to capsize…”
“and lost my specs to the sg river…”
“lol it was quite a chaotic event”

They completed the doubles race anyway. Was told the first position for the 10km brooks life run is strangely a 43mins, bummer most of us can complete round that timing as well!

Millege for week this week (7 day period)
Wednesday - 30mins Continuous Swim
Wednesday - Redhill/Tanglin Canal Route (16.6km)
Friday - 45mins Continuous Swim
Saturday - Moulmein Intra-Con Road Run (5.1km)
Sunday - 70mins 42laps (2.1km Swim)
Total Running Millage for the week: 21.7km
Total Accumulative Millage for 2007: 463.94km

Moulmein Intra-Con Road Run was on at MacRitchie Park today, reached the venue only to be greeted by overcast skies and a runny nose (which came with me from home). It rained during the race and interestingly, sinuses always clears when you run, just like how my smoker friends always exclaim at how puffing will cure their flus as well, for me it’s running, so does the saying goes “Feed the addiction and the flu will go away…”

Completed in about 23mins (I did say I had a flu right?), while the rest of the track team actually came in on 16-18th to a handful in top 10 positions, our girls came in 1st and last (technically), all bagging NTUC $10 vouchers. Anyway our team won 2 lucky draw prizes as well - a Akira OSIM-like U-zap and a table fan. There will be a related upcoming race in August held at Bedok Reservoir, will keep ya all in sync on that when the details come in.

Last but not least, would like to bid farewell to our SP track & field coach, coach Robin, who stayed with us over the last 2 years before having to leave now due to commitments and financial matters. He’s in Taiwan now for a track and field meet. Our new coach will be coming in officially when school reopens next week, bummer, new club officer, now a new coach…

well I am back from a period of relatively long absence, not much your typical case of fleeing from reality but actually getting in touch with it on the contrary. Yup with an “offfphh”, gravity caught back onto me after my day off on Monday (which you can recall being the last day of my round island expedition).

Things are pretty loaded this Semester, particularly E-learning which simply came with lots of homework, an equivalent of say 2 weeks on tutorial work-worth all dumped onto you to complete in one week, simple as it seems? The catch is that it’s all the same for all my modules - all 8 of them. As exclaimed by some of my peers it’s not much of a holiday as many intend it to be - with about 6-8 hours a day spend doing homework and I am actually only done with it by yesterday night.

To make matters worst, there is one Class Test (Thermodynamics) coming next Tuesday and the following week, one graded presentation and 3 more papers, all which I have not prepared… yet. On a brighter side, this semester will be my last academic semester, which technically means my last semester of E-learning, mid-semester tests and Semester Exams! Homerun!

Don’t know did I mention this before, but one of my Adventure race teammate, Ahlong won’t be able to join my team in the upcoming teengames adventure race on June 9th, due to his OCS commissioning parade. Together with Elrick, we were a formidable team, coming in 2nd overall and aiming for the pole this year. In his place this year is a rather anticipative Darius (aka my team manager for last year’s race) who will participate in Ahlong’s place.

Ever always wanted to own a Tablet PC for ease of notes and penning down handwritten notes in lectures, but always don’t seem to be able to afford one? Well look no further, the word is out, Dell will be releasing their first Tablet PC late this year in their Latitude Laptop range.

Dell usually waits for a particular product to become mainstream and then they look to develop a product and own the market. Dell feels that since Vista will have the tablet features built right into the OS that the corporate world will embrace the tablet on a large scale. The reps at Dell said this will be especially true once service pack 1 is out for Vista. They plan on releasing their tablet to coincide with the release of service pack 1 for Vista. (The date is roughly Q3/Q4 2006 for Vista SP1 too)

I personally use a Fujitsu T4020 tablet which actually set me back a considerable sum of money few years back but it’s worth it I say - rocking big time in lectures and penning down quick notes with ease while the rest of your peers go frantically tippy-tappy - a highly recommended tool for students, not to mention the Wow factor it has when you swivel the screen for use flat on your seat.

With the exception of the HP Pavilion tx1000z being the most capable all round and value tablet presently for students, it seems that Dell will always rock their products in terms of price - the biggest deciding factor for us students. Only time will time now whether the relocation of the Dell PDA department to Tablet PCs will bring things up.

With bug shoes to fill, StarCraft II will see the return of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg races. Mentioned by Starcraft and Warcraft makers, Blizzard Entertainment, with goals are to ensure that all the factions in the game play even more distinctly from one another than in the original StarCraft, while still maintaining the fine balance that helped make StarCraft such a classic. Blizzard is also introducing a number of new units to each race, as well as modifying some of the familiar units returning in StarCraft II. With these design refinements and the new features we have planned for the single-player and multiplayer elements of the game, StarCraft II will offer a next-generation StarCraft experience.

Taking advantage of DirectX 10 graphical goodies as well, StarCraft II will also feature Blizzard-quality cinematic content in the game and will be available on Mac simultaneously with PC (Windows Vista, as well as XP). The graphics engine will also be very scalable to ensure that a wide range of different systems will be capable of running StarCraft II. The new engine is also capable of rendering very large units, as well as large numbers of units on screen together. Havok physics have been integrated into the engine for added realism as well.

Zergling Rush	Protoss Teleport Attack	Zerg Attack in Badlands

This would definitely bring back the good old days or Starcraft during my Secondary School days, even my favorite race, The Terrain looks better than ever before! One thing I like Blizzard games over the Command & Conquer series is it’s rather engaging and captivating story line which is a true work of art and trademark in all Blizzard Games to date, hope they won’t disappoint!

There is no confirmed release date at the moment, but we gamers can see it up around in time for Christmas or early 2008 where the next highly anticipated sequel to the Unreal Tournaments series will be released as well.

Source: starcraft2.com
Thanks to GamerZ for the heads up during my expedition.

Hey hey, I am back from my group round Singapore trekking expedition. Overall the trip was rather manageable with the group generally seeing ourselves traveling the bulk of the journey on foot in the day, stopping to rest at regular breakpoints. Contrary to walking in the night (which we did on day-night 1), which is relatively cooler. Our nights are largely spent resting for the next day, given the possibility of jet lag if we do it the other way at such short notice to our bodies. The expedition is largely self-sufficient, with us carrying all the food we need throughout the whole length of the trek, stopping at intervals only to rest and to refuel water from nearby taps and toilets, let be coffee shops or MRT stations.

Short rundown of our journey
The average weight of our packs are at least 10kg, dropping down to about half of that on the last day. We always complete the planned distance for the day before night fall which gave us ample time to tend to our fatigue and blisters formed during the day. The total traveled distance for the expedition is approximately 95km, avoiding the Lim Chu Kang area due to fears off running into life-firing areas. The whole journey is summarized as follows:

Old Seletar Camp Road	Cooking outfield style	The nice sunrises

Interesting events includes setting up camp in front of Lavender where we had food breaks, not to mention and Aljunied MRT where we had lunch together with Bunsen Burners and such, attracting a rather great deal of attention from passer-bys. Thinking that we might be around for long, even an Aunte left us a her shopping bags to look after and went off to buy 4D!

The toilets in our base camps for the nights are relatively still usable by my standards, with Sembawang Park one being the least favorite of the few. Sentosa’s toilets and showers are the best with music but most disappointing in water pressure. Pasir ris, though not very well maintained was the best of the few.

Amazingly too, despite after a long day, many of us still found time and energy to rampaging through the playground at Pasir ris park (spider nets are fun) and gather for card games. Nevertheless the dinner on the last day was definitely one big feast with loads of instant noodles, canned soup, baked beans and instant mashed potatoes, yummy!

View the whole expedition photo album here.

Up and coming for me would be the round island trekking expedition starting this Friday night. Organised by the SP environment club in support for the National Youth Achievement Award (NYAA). It will encompass continuous trekking during the day and rests at night (though the opposite is cooler to work with) starting at SP Dover towards the south, then making our way towards the east then circling to the west through the north, passing by Sentosa, Sembawang, Pasir Ris, Changi Beach and Kranji just to name afew.

It will be a self sufficient event, where we will be completely relying on the food we bring on our trek packs, cooking and sleeping out in the wilderness. This really brings me back to my old scout days in the army, but better! (no camo, jungles & enemies lol). I will be going for this in place of Judging for the Singapore River Raft Race this Sunday (as initially planned). My team (of 20) will cover around 100km for the whole expedition (round Singapore in 80 hours? lol). Wish us luck! Route March Reloaded, civilian style!

Got my bag packed weighing in currently at 7kgs without full rations. Will be up with an intermediate update only if I can leech onto any Wireless@SG points from my phone along the journey, otherwise expect a photo update coming next Monday!

Running Millege for week this week (7 day period)
Tuesday - Track & Field Intervals 10×400m
Wednesday - Gym 3 sets Upper Body + Threadmill (8.88km)
Thursday - Redhill/Tanglin Canal Route (13.35km)
Total Running Millage for the week: 22.23km
Total Accumulative Millage for 2007: 442.24km