Yesterday I stayed in my soon-to-be home for a night. The ADSL line is not ready yet, damn TM-Nut. First impression of my soon-to-be room is – it’s almost 4x my current room size, and finally – a queen sized bed mattress (on a king sized bed) just for myself :D

Gonna move in once ADSL and my book racks are ready.

Well, I got invited to witness an online karaoke session (yes, there’s this shit called Meetoto). Didn’t expect it to turn out so interesting :D

Enjoy.

When I stated that I’m going to the Prom Night, people who know me will most probably respond with “Really ah?” Well, I suppose pigs do fly nowadays – but not after much persuasion by Jenny. (My 3-day attempt of irritating her failed catastrophically, such incredible persistence)

This year’s theme was ‘Prom Goes Green’. The aim is to instill the awareness of environmental protection to youngsters. In my humble opinion, they’ll need to do more homework and try to be a role model (by reducing the carbon-footprint of the whole event). There are still many aspects in life that contributes to environmental deterioration which were not highlighted throughout the event.

At least it’s not ‘yet another prom night’ thing.

Anyway, back to business. I arrived at One World Hotel quite early (I didn’t anticipated the jam is not that bad), sat at the lobby and fire up my PSP (I did expect some wait time). The jazz pianist playing live in the lobby was kind of cool, I didn’t bother to take photos though.

Around an hour later, these guys showed up. Before heading to the ballroom, we went for a stroll in One Utama. A group of people walking together wearing different odd clothing (creative black tie, long sleeve + slacks, long sleeve + tie, etc.) really looked… umm… odd.

The dinner table in the ballroom (as well as the ballroom itself) is quite meticulously decorated, with oxygen-consuming-carbon-dioxide-producing-heat-generating-burning-candles to boot. For the sake of ambience, we shall sacrifice nature! The buffet was okay, but not perfect. Fish has metallic taste, I love the lamb steak, smoked salmon was too salty, marinated jellyfish was tasty, the chicken curry rocked… (yadda yadda)

The whole event went out considerably well, with a few minor quirks here and there (emcees not cooperating properly – giving each other blank stares, the constant showing of Windows screens in multimedia presentation, some “home-made” videos that should fail QC checks etc.) But overall, the RM100 investment kinda turn out not so bad (*cough*T.F.O.*cough*) after all.

(Some of my photos are still with William, darn.)

Well, I’m just had a long day and currently sitting on the poo-seat (don’t ask) waiting for the reservoir to fill up, so I might as well as post something random. Here goes.

For people who are unfamiliar with my online messenger behavior, here’s a guideline on my regular response pattern.

Receiving Messages

1. When I’m marked as away, I am away. Asking “you there?” won’t help, “drop me a message when you’re back” works better (if you are online the moment I’m back). Best way to deal with this is to (cut the crap and) post your questions/comments/random-stuff anyway so I’ll get back to you ASAP.
2. When I’m marked as busy, it is (almost) the same as I’m away – except my reply will be slightly faster (average around 1 hour). The way to deal with this situation is the same as above.
3. I have a status indicator on my screen name (e.g. [status] <screen-name>), if my status is set to ‘idle’, means I’m free to trash talk, feel free to bug me. If it looks like I’m occupied with something, please get to the matter directly.
4. I dislike people asking (pointless) questions such as “can I ask you a question?”. Reason? It’s a question itself – it’s like asking “can I kill you?” after stabbing a person in the heart.
5. I don’t give a damn about greetings such as “hi”, “yo”, “hey” etc. So you may get to the point and skip the politeness/protocol.
6. I dislike nudges.

Sending Messages

1. I never send messages to people who are marked as busy, away or offline unless it is of utmost importance.
2. When asked more than 1 question in a row, I usually answer the last question and ignore the rest.
3. If one chats with me often, I will chat with him/her often.
4. If one doesn’t reply my message, I will not bug or initiate a conversation with him/her until he/she replies or initiates a conversation.
5. I usually don’t initiate a conversation with people who just added me into their list.
6. My messages are usually typed in full text, if you see I type in shorthand (except common Internet lingo such as ‘lol’), it means I am holding something (eating/talking on phone etc.) with one of my hands.
7. When I send ‘lol’, 98% chance I have nothing better to send, and 2% chance I am laughing within myself (usually this ends up a ‘LOL’). The real LOL expression (whereby I’m laughing out loud) is expressed by ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA’.

Today, after messing up the NAND flash chip of my aigo F566 (MP3 shades), failing the 1st stage bootloader and forced to load the ADFU server in USB mode* (took me a while to figure out), and later sent my cousin an SOS message requesting for the flash dump of his F566 (the tool I used was s1clone, a flash memory dumper/flasher for the generic made-in-china s1mp3 “architecture” MP3/4 players) – and after performing tests on it, I realized the stock earphones equipped on that cheap-looking thing was in fact, surprisingly good.

In fact, it’s almost as good as my pair of Sennheiser IE8 (which is among the best I own), except with poorer isolation (being a normal earphone, not canalphone) and maybe a bit rougher on the mid-highs and a little “boxy” on the mid-lows, else the highs are fine and lows are solid – think of an up-scaled 92x92 icon versus a true 128x128 icon.

This S1MP3 thing really caught my attention, maybe it is time to dive into the world of microcontrollers once more :)

And it looks like China is about ready to go head-to-head with Germany. :3

* On power-on, the 1st-stage bootloader from BROM loads the first NAND flash page into ZRAM1. If no error occurs, it jumps to address 0x0000 and executes the first instruction of the 2nd-stage bootloader (BREC). Otherwise, like for my case, the 1st-stage bootloader enters ADFU recovery mode and waits for healing.