The Bad

• Lost Headphones
  I was listening to tunes on my wp7 on the way back home from work but then uncle cab driver was feeling a bit chatty so I did the polite thing and took off my headphones and chatted with him. I’m not sure whether I remembered to toss the headphones in my bag. I just realized the next morning when I went out for a run that they were gone. Sadness.
• Scratches on the iPad
  Well so much for the claims of the iPad being scratch proof. I guess they relied on people treating it like a holy object that they didn’t think it would ever happen. But alas, while I was cleaning up the screen of the oils and dirt from my fingers, I noticed there was a scratch right by the home button. Sadness.
• 160 Dollar Ugly and Useless Screen Protector
  Happened while the F was buying his Macbook air so I just chucked in the first screen protector I could find. It was from the brand Power Support and it was supposed to be a privacy film guard. I probably wouldn’t have complained if it worked as a privacy film guard but no, it didn’t work as good as those privacy films for laptops in that you could still see the screen from the side angles but it would be a bit blurry and a bit dark. Now I have trouble reading my iPad in bed since it’s more difficult to keep it aligned to the eye. Also, my Boxwave stylus doesn’t work as well anymore. I guess this was my fault for not checking the price but I didn’t realize that a privacy film could be so expensive, AND so crappy. Sadness.
• Failed Vivo City Shopping
  On Saturday, the F and I ventured out to Vivo City to shop for an extra battery for my phone and some clothes for our trip coming up in December. I guess we should have just gone to Ion or somewhere nearby by knowing the weekend crowd, we wanted to avoid that (only to find out there are enough people in SG to accumulate a crowd in most malls on the weekend. I did a search online for the shops I wanted to go to: Columbia and the LG. I found online they were supposed to be on the second floor of Vivo City, but apparently after searching the whole second floor (because they make it so difficult to figure out what the store numbers are) we found that not one, but BOTH have closed down. How I wish that people keep their online listings up to date. We ended up taking a cab to Ion anyway. Sadness.

The Good

• New Sennheiser Headphones
  Although the bundled in ear headphones from LG was already okay quality, these ones are really good. You can never go wrong with Sennheisers. I love the earphones and it just makes the music listening experience so much better. Aural Pleasure!
• Lunch with the Old Bosses
  It’s always nice to meet up with old friends. I got to have lunch and catch up with not one but two of my former bosses, catching up on old times. We’re all in different roles, different companies but it’s good that (at least I think) the friendship is still there. Happiness!
• Good Sunday Breakfast AND Dinner with the F
  We had breakfast at a new place on recommendation from a friend at a place called Wild Honey where they serve all sorts of breakfasts. For dinner, it was at an old favorite, Spices of India for a nice Indian dinner. Chicken Tikka Masala is the bomb. Fullness!

As a friend always says, “don’t sweat the small stuff”. It seemed like a crappy weekend but I think we’re still okay.

I saw this video going around and obviously it piqued my interest. Also, my left jaw is acting up again so I don’t really feel like going out and about, so I found something else to amuse myself with.

I didn’t want to waste paper and my printer was unplugged so I decided to create a silverlight simulation instead. Try it out in fullscreen below:

You’ll discover that when you re-arrange the pieces as in the video, the blue and green pieces go beyond the boundary at the bottom. This is probably why even when you make the paper cut-out version and try out yourself, the illusion holds because you’ll have no reference to the original square.

At least now I have that out of my system. My jaw still hurts though

I started out with two problems, the insanely low audio quality + this strange red light emitted from my headphone jack, and not being able to update to Bootcamp 3.1. I’ve been wrestling the internets to find out how to fix both these problems and it turns out, the former can be solved if you get the latter.  I then found the thread on http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2326188&tstart=0 that says the Bootcamp Update has issues when you have remote viewing software. The advice was to remove any additional graphics adapters apart from your actual graphics adapter.

You can do this by going to the start menu, right-clicking on Computer -> Manage.

grr.. so print screen button in MBP is Fn+Shift+F11 (thanks F

You can right click on the extra display adapter and uninstall for now. You’ll probably need to reinstall your remote viewing software after the update.

After you uninstall, you should be able to install the Bootcamp 3.1 update with the Apple Software Update. I’m not sure whether that alone did the trick to fix the red light problem and the poor audio quality, but I had previously downloaded and installed the latest Realtek drivers for Windows 7 from their site cause I saw folks mentioning this solved their problem though this didn’t fix it for me before the 3.1 update.

Now I can get back to coding with some good background music. Yey Sunday!

I have a good feeling about 2010. I think this year is going to be a year of change. I just realized that this year I’ll be turning 27 and that to me is just a bit scary. I still have a lot that I want to do and if I don’t start putting my mind to it, it’ll never happen. When I first thought of coming to Singapore, I had a plan in mind: That I would do SG for 1 or 2 years, then AUS, then the US. Somewhere along the way, I got a bit sidetracked What can I say, Singapore is definitely a great place to work. Here everything just works AND you feel safe at all times. I realized though that I’m getting a biiit too comfortable with the way things are around here. I’m just scared that before I know it, I might be permanently trapped in this  comfort zone and forget that I should be moving around while I still can. So this year will probably be the year I start exploring again. It was supposed to be last year but I guess we all know the world wasn’t in that great a shape. Hopefully, this year will be different. I’m looking forward to new things in my life. People back home are experiencing lots of new things from a different aspect in life. I can’t have that just yet, but I  would also want something to be excited about. Hopefully this year will be the year.

You’re probably wondering where the new year’s resolutions are. Well, there aren’t going to be any this year.  As per experience, they just don’t work. :p But one thing’s for sure, 2010 sounds like a great year. And I’m looking forward to making it so.

Doesn’t guarantee mean anything anymore?

I call BS on this as I’ve had a TERRIBLE experience.

I made an order with them on 22nd of December, specifically because they had a statement on their site that they guarantee delivery on or before Christmas. I received a confirmation email with the following note: "Order Before 12/23/09 5:00 AM*CDT time for assured delivery of this gift to your loved one on or before Christmas." And since the deliveries are made through local florists, as stated http://www.pickupflowers.com/info/about-us that’s not hard to believe.

On the 23rd, i went online with their Live Assistance CSR inquiring about the order. I was told that the order was "delivered to the recipient". So I contact my recipient and ask about the delivery and he says he hasn’t received anything.

On the 24th, I send an email to customer service asking for the details of the so called delivery to ask who has signed for it – No response.

On the 25th I call their CSR informing them that I’ve spoken to the intended recipient and that he hasn’t received any packages which they had claimed they delivered and would like to know when and to whom exactly they delivered the package to. He said he would check with their local agent. I mention to him that if this doesn’t get delivered on or before 27th, I would like to cancel the order as the recipient will have left the place of delivery on the 28th (local time). He says he will check with the local agent and get back to me. I ask HOW he will get back to me, and he says he will send me an email.

On the 26th, I send an email to the CSR stating i am still waiting on feedback regarding my order. At this point, I’m assuming the order has gotten delivered to the wrong place or whatever so I tell them i hope i will not be seeing a bill for this.

I finally got a reply from their CSR email address, apologizing for the inconvenience, and that they were still waiting for the reply of the local agent regarding the non delivery of the order and that they would get back to me immediately after receiving the information from them.

On the 29th, i reply to them expressing my dissatisfaction with their service and informing them that the recipient has already left the place of delivery.

Later on in the day, I check my credit card account and notice that I was charged for this service. I send them an email wanting to know why i was charged for an order that was never delivered. – No response

I contact their Live Assistance and explain my situation. They went on about explaining the weather conditions hence the order was not fulfilled in time but that it was going to be delivered “today”. How they will manage, that i have no idea as the recipient had already left. My biggest issue is that I was told it was delivered to the recipient when in fact it was not, and now they’ve delivered it when the recipient is no longer there.

Then he goes on to tell me that as a token of their apology they will refund me 50%. Not 50% plus the order value, but 50% OF the order value.

So in effect, paid the 50% for the stress of having to chase after their customer service people to tell me what was going on, and for not having been able to a gift of Christmas cheer to the intended recipient.

In summary, i guess you can say i won’t be joining their "more than 100,000 satisfied customers across 80 countries".

This rant has also been posted on http://bit.ly/6YTzgy for the benefit of everyone who is evaluating delivery companies to entrust with something as sacred as delivering flowers and the like.

Last weekend, my team at work had an outing at East Coast Park and thanks to @nenggiin we had an awesome time, going on a pseudo scavenger hunt on bikes.  Prior to that, I think the last time I remember being on a bike was when I was 8 years old. Back then, I had pink bike with training wheels. My granddad used to take us out in the afternoon at the plaza beside our house. When I grew older, I didn’t really get into riding bikes and I never went past using them without the training wheels

Suffice it to say that last Friday was definitely interesting for me. You know how they say that you never forget how to ride a bike. Well I was a bit ambitious and thinking that applied to folks who had training wheels on. But the good news is I somehow managed Well, I did crash into a tree and a few bushes a couple of times but nothing more than a few bruises. It was well worth it though, we definitely had a lot of fun that day. And I have to say, I felt proud of myself for being able to ride a bike, even though I still had to learn how to turn and to stop. :p

I was proudly telling my story to the F when we decided to check out some bikes during the weekend. We both thought it would be fun to be able to just cycle around to the nearer-by places we go to and getting some exercise while we’re at it. We went bike hunting on Sunday. At first aiming for Carrefour, we saw a bike shop somewhere around Tanglin Road and stopped to browse there. Sure enough, we found our bikes in less than an hour and were already excited to ride them home. We were extremely disappointed when after we paid, they told us that they would be delivering it the following day.

That was just as well because on Monday when the bikes arrived and we took it out for a spin, I was back to my old clumsy mode and I could barely get going! In my mind, I was starting to regret buying the bike so impulsively :S With F’s patience, I eventually got going again except for when there were people around. For some reason, the more I try to evade them, the more I seem to be aiming towards them. Eventually we gave up for the day, but there was a spark of hope that I might be able to pull this off eventually.

We decided it would probably be better to cycle at night when there are less cars too so I could at least ride on the road sometimes instead of the narrow sidewalk where I can’t manage to maintain my balance enough to let other people pass. Yesterday, we went out and bought some lights for the bikes and today, on my runner friend Eugene’s suggestion, went for the Park Connector nearby. Surprisingly, the ride was much better today, although I still managed to crash myself into a garbage bin but that’s alright. Judging by the way the oncoming biker laughed, at least I made someone’s day by providing some comic relief.

This was the route we took:

and of course, here’ is the bike:

I had an awesome time today, except for the part when we had to ride through a path surrounded with, I would say easily 10-15 barking dogs. I like dogs, and I don’t mind barking ones either. But I realized while I was on that path, the number of barking dogs make a difference. So yes, maybe not pass by that part of the route next time.

I decided to clean up my blog over the weekend. Actually, I was considering for a while there buying yet another domain and starting all over but then I realized, there really wasn’t any point to that. I had just become lazy to maintain this one because I felt it had become a bit messy. So I decided to do a few things: 1. Upgrade my wordpress installation to 2.8 (had been on 2.5 for the longest time ) and 2. Delete the twitter integration.

1. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. This guide details everything, i think the most difficult part was step 0, which I skipped. I thought, well, if this installation messes up then I guess it’s time for a restart :p. Luckily, it didn’t. It was just a matter of copying over the new wordpress files and running the script. Definitely not as painful as I had imagined. The upgrade made me feel good, at least gave me a feeling of some sort of freshness.

2. I realized that my twitter integration thingamajig was making me more lazy to blog. Plus, It made my site look like crap whenever there was silence. I realized, if my friends want to read about my twitter activities, they’d probably go to my twitter page. I delete my aggregated twitter posts. Well I guess not all of it, it was too taxing to delete them all so I just went as far back as I could and gave up. I think there are still more in the archives but at least my front page is cleaner now.

I have decided I should put more effort into blogging, maybe set aside some time in a week at least. I know it’s going to be good therapy for me if I do.

Some things I need to know about life, I learn through running.

Today I was feeling a bit cocky and thought that my usual route here at lavender just wasn’t enough, so off I went trying to discover a new route. At first I was amused at how far I’d strayed off. After a while I got so distracted that I did lose my bearings and got myself lost. Below is how my run ended up looking like

I guess what I learned is that if you’re going to be deviant, and want to “stir things up a bit”, you’ll still have to be responsible about maintaining common sense, and always have yourself in check. You should never lose yourself in the moment so much that you just follow where things lead you. You have to keep a straight head about making sure you know where you’re going, and you have to be humble enough to admit you’ve gone astray. At this point, you stop, think, recalibrate and go for it. Mistakes are part of everything. And as long as you know to realize it when it happens, and are able to correct yourself as much as possible, then you’ll be fine.

Parents left today and there was a cry-fest outside our gate as they loaded their bags into the cab. I didn’t realize how much i missed my parents till they were leaving. This whole day while we were going around, I felt that familiar weight on my chest. I’ve always been amazed how negative emotions can actually manifest itself into physical pain/discomfort (and curious how positive emotions manifest themselves). At the start of the day, I already broke down into tears while we were eating breakfast, and throughout the day i had that heavy feeling. I broke down again when they were getting into the cab. I decided to run it off rather than go for the unhealthy alternatives, and this is how i did today:

I feel a bit better. I don’t feel the heaviness on my chest that much anymore.

In an effort to get our asses in shape, a few of my colleagues and I have started running. Yes, I know I’m a bit late into the running craze but hey, better late than never   I have to say, I think I have a long way to go to get in shape.

This is my run for today:

Cant wait for Tuesday! Maybe I will run on my own on before then though. Like I said, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Why am i tearing…

This is a long overdue post, but  I will post it just the same.

Because we knew that F. was leaving for a month this week, and because we had both been quite a bit stressed lately, and because it has been a while since our last non-SG escapade, we decided to take a trip out of SG last week.

Friday morning, the plan was Genting Highlands. Neither of us had time in the day to actually research on how to get there, where to stay and what we could do. 5pm, he came by the office and we decided to do the research then. I had heard Bintan was less than an hour away so we decided to go for that instead. We did a quick search and he got on the phone to book a hotel, random one from the list that came up and we stumbled on Angsana. We quickly checked what time the last ferry out was. 8:00 pm, and we are advised to be there an hour before. The online site wouldn’t allow same day booking so we decided to just make a run for it. Both of us went for a quick shopping run for swim clothes and went home to pack. We left his place at about 7:00 pm, an hour before the ferry leaves. No tickets, and heavy traffic. In the cab I was getting more and more stressed. I realized what a pain it would be if we had to pay a no show fee because we missed the last ferry. I’ll spare you the agony though, we made it just in time. The ticket lady responded with “I’ll try” when he told her he wanted to buy tickets. We were practically running through security and when we got in, they had just started boarding. Lucky us!

Once we were at the ferry, I finally relaxed. It was so exciting to be on an impromptu trip yet again. When we got to Indonesia, I got a bit worried seeing F and another Caucasian guy being escorted by one of the security guys through customs. Turns out, they had gotten some special treatment (of course paying extra) for their Visas. Eventually we were both through customs and went for our hotel’s bus. The drive was quick but because it was night time, we couldn’t see what was outside. Sightseeing would have to wait till the next day, or maybe on the trip back.

When we got to the hotel, it was just lovely. I could literally feel all the stress just evaporate.

We went ATV-ing, Jet Skiing, Spa, and even a sales meeting! We pulled it off. All in all, it was a wonderful weekend, we came back Sunday afternoon very relaxed. I wish I could say the same about this weekend though. BUT, positive. Thinking POSITIVE!

My mom pinged me about some Swedish guys getting busted in my own home town. Very unfortunate news indeed, but i think what’s more unfortunate is that inquirer can’t seem to distinguish Swiss from Swedes

God dag! Jag heter Jocelyn Villaraza. Jag kommer från Filippinerna. Jag har aldrig varit i Sweden men jag vill gärna tala svenska.

Okay that’s probably as far as Chapter 1 can take me and it’s probably terrible that I’m frankenstein-ing my sentences. I’ll have to wait till F. is back to verify my understanding of the language.

Like I said, I’m going to make this one of my side projects while he is away. I have been meaning to learn a new language as a new year’s resoultion –from last year I think it’s high time to fulfill it.

So far it’s been going alright. The hard part i think will be learning how to make the right intonations when speaking. There is a section in the first part of the book that has tongue twisters that they suggest to try. I’m just like—:|

I will be patient with this one. I think it will require a bit more effort than I imagined.

F. is away for a full month and I think I need to keep myself occupied to avoid feeling the agony of missing him. I figured, reviving my personal blog (and maybe a few other blogs) would probably take an ample amount of my time in a day. We had been talking about going on discipline week/health week/ whatever but we never really got around to doing it. So this will probably be the beginning of it. Discipline month. I will probably pick out a number of things to put into my daily routine and make a habit of. I haven’t thought about it much yet but I think it will come over time. One thing’s for sure, blogging is definitely something I will put into my routine. I promise it won’t be (all ) sappy, “I miss F” entries, but more of my reflections through the day.

For this entry, since I really haven’t had the time to reflect on things other than F.’s leaving, (saving that entry for another blog :p) I’ll put in my to do list for tomorrow.

1. Hit the bookstore – I told F that one of the projects I’ll be taking on this month to keep myself busy will be to learn his language. I also thought that an interesting project would be to study the history of my country. I know we studied it in school before but for the life of me, I can’t remember a single thing. I’ll probably pick up some other books as well.

2. Hit a coffee shop and read! – of course, with all the books i would have acquired, I’ll need to make time to read them so I’ll probably head down to one of my favorite coffee shops and just read the day away. I could also possibly do it at home so i can cover some chores while I’m at it.

3. Have aircon serviced – self explanatory

4. Prepare for the brand new work week! – Yes, I’ve found that changing your attitude towards things can drastically improve your productivity. Drown out the voice inside your head that keeps telling you that you are under stress and just face things head on. Take a positive attitude towards everything you do. You’ll surprise yourself.

I’ll probably think of more things to do but that should be fine for now. It’s 12.03 am and I better get going. I don’t want to end up sleeping in tomorrow.

• i should keep twittering so i remember that i still have my phone #
• sweet nothings.. #
• lunch at lau pa sat #
• Mang kiko’s lechon at Lau Pa Sat http://twitpic.com/498ie #
• enjoying seesmics ability to support multiple accounts.. annoyed at the cursor sometimes straying away though.. #
• RT @eugene17: http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html time to run! #

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I just had to share this, it’s just refreshing to see “excluding U.S. and Canada” for a change. For that, I will install the app. HAHA

Yes, I have created a new one. I just felt that I needed a place to rant out in public, well, a select public. That’s where I think Live Spaces has potential. If only there was more granular control over who can read what, I’d definitely switch over permanently (i think). Right now, you can filter out who from your contact list can read your blog. You can specify individuals, and groups. But the thing is, right now it’s an all or nothing option. If I were to diagram how I (would) sort people on my contact list right now, it would look something like this:

And I’ve found so many instances where I felt the need to rant about something to a specific audience, or more accurately, exclude a specific audience. I would be nice if I could just tick some boxes to indicate which audience I want the post to be visible to.

The reason behind me being a blog nomad is because I always felt the need to create a new blog for a certain audience. I used to blog just for myself so I didn’t care. Then there was a time I used the blog to update my friends so i thought of creating a new one. Then I got a job and started blogging both work related stuff and work related rants, so i thought of creating separate blogs for this. Then of course, there are the emotional issues, which I didn’t really want to mix with work, so I had to create yet another. There was a time I grew tired and finally created this blog, where I just sorted out my posts to personal, tech and media (for my random creative outbursts). I noticed, the most important reason for blogging (it starts with an “R” and ends with “anting”) has now been taken away since i did that. Both my work contacts and my personal contacts are looking at the same location now so I can’t rant about either! So yes, this was not a very smart move.

Oh well, till that day comes, I will have to make do. But even if I do find a platform for one blog to rule them all, I think i will still have to keep 2 blogs. The other one would be for the rants where I would rather remain anonymous and solicit feedback from strangers hehe