Aqua Harp

I was rather amazed when Jared showed me a video clip by Animusic. It is actually a musical piece but there is a video with it as well. What amazes me is that the animation and the graphic synchronises perfectly with the timing of the music. Here, I'd like to share one of the clips I found in YouTube.

But, as the bird singing is so lousy and it interrupts the music to be played here, I have removed the previous post.

Some funny stuff

I found this while checking out the testimonials of my other friends in Frienster. I thought that I might want to share it with you. Be warned, though, if you cannot stand lousy singing, you'd better stop the loading of the clip immediately. Otherwise, have a hearty laugh.

University versus Home

Indeed, it feels great to be home again for the holidays. But, is it really that great? Sometimes, I ponder that wouldn't it be better if I spend most of my time back in university, where I can really be free to do whatever I want?

This is not to say that I can't be free at home or forbidden to do whatever I want, but you can't expect me to be so homely at this age right? Is it not simply natural for a teenager like me to go out and hang out with friends and have some fun? I just simply can't sit down at home quietly and do almost nothing! Meeting out with friends is one of the many things that I find is able to make me pass my time more quickly.

Sure, my parents do not like the idea of my going out with friends so often. But what is there to do at home for the whole day? I have done the necessary studying I planned to do at home, I play the piano every day and I have spent enough time with my family. Does it do any harm to go out with friends to keep in touch with one another?

I feel that I have been restricted lately. Yet, it feels strange when my mother used to say that I was too homely and refused to go out (even now she says that). But, when I want to go out with friends my parents do not really seem to like that idea. Well, I am out of home, am I not? My mother said that I'm too homely, so I've decided to go out more often. And yet, when I return home, my mother would then say that I spent too much time outside. So, what is it that they want?

I try to balance up things a bit. Supposed that I go out with friends today. Then, I'll make a point to stay at home tomorrow, but I might have a programme with my friends again on the day after tomorrow. That at least does not infuriate my parents that much. They can't say that I'm too homely, yet they can't say that I spent too much time outdoors, too.

I am starting to miss university now. I have not felt this bored at home for such a long time! Time passes as if one millisecond is an hour at home, but it passes as if 24 hours is just 24 seconds in university. Before you knew it, day would have turned to night in university so quickly.

In university, I could find company easily. Whenever I'm bored, I would go to my friends' room and have a chat with them or I would sometimes (actually, frequently) be blessed by the presence of Jared Ee or Josiah Tay in my room. Often, these two buddies of mine would cure me of my boredom. But now that I'm home, none of them could come to my house (one lives in Johor, and the other has transport problems) and I know that it would be too much for me to spend hours on the telephone. Sure, I could go online and find friends to chat with, but it's not as fun as having a nice time talking with friends face to face.

Perhaps all this is due to the fact that I get to go home almost every week. Missing home is certainly out of the question for me now. I could understand how great it feels for other friends who live outside Perak to go home for the holidays. I recalled that I had never returned home so frequently during my last semester compared to this. Perhaps, I shouldn't return home so frequently. Then, I'd know and appreciate how great it feels like to be home.

But, for now, all I could do is wait for the DeepaRaya break to end. I am indeed looking forward to my lectures, tutorials, tests and revision. I am also certainly looking forward to meeting my university mates again. However, just sitting around at home waiting for time to pass just won't do; I've got to do something!

Tomorrow, I'm going for a game of badminton with a friend of mine. After that, I shall be going for another outing with Chee Lupp and friends in Jusco. Perhaps, it will be my last outing for this holiday.

Sometimes, I wish that I had a brother (one who is slightly older or younger). Then at least we could share our thoughts. But it is a risk to have siblings in a way. What if our relationship is not as good as I imagine it would be? I am not being pessimistic here, but if, indeed, our relationship is not as good as I think it would be, isn't it better for me to be just the only child?

Ah, the pros and cons of having or not having a sibling certainly balance up lots of things. One just cannot decide whether being the only child is better or having a sibling is better. Things are very unpredictable, especially when they concern life.

Alcohol

A wedding dinner I had tonight prompted me to write something pertaining to the above-mentioned title. As we all know, alcohol is one of the many types of organic compounds in the homologous series of Organic Chemistry. But what I'm going to discuss now is nothing about methanol, ethanol, propanol or hexanol, but about alcoholic drinks, which I shall now refer to as simply alcohol.

So, what is so exciting or tempting about alcohol? It is just another ordinary soft drink. People drink to enjoy, perhaps, a certain meal or to have some chat with friends. But, the main question is that has alcohol brought more good than harm to society?

I have a true story here which I would like to tell you. My father was in the insurance line. He had a lot of friends and many, many years ago, he was a heavy drinker, like his friends. Frequently, he would come home totally drunk and of unsound mind. There were even times when he could not even get out of the car upon returning and slept in it.

This made me share a strong hatred for any drink related to alcohol since I was very young, as young as five years old. When I, unintentionally, first tasted liquor, it was terrible! I didn't like it at all and I still couldn't understand why there are people who think that liquor is a nice beverage. Neither did I like the bitter taste of beer and therefore cannot comprehend why beer companies can still make millions of profit from it.

To me, drinking alcoholic drinks is like smoking cigarettes. Is there a definite benefit from drinking alcohol? Perhaps there is one, but people, being human, often cross the limits. People often drink more than they should, and they enjoy the feel of being "high". And always, these people become a burden to others, especially to family members.

I wish to highlight a bit of my disappointment on how wasting these heavy drinkers can be while drinking alcoholic drinks. Most of these people do not drink wine or liquor bit by bit. They pour one big glass of liquor and down in one, single gulp. They seem to think that to be able to down the liquor in one gulp proves the "manliness" of that particular person. I say that is total nonsense! What is so great about drinking liquor or wine like that without enjoying the full taste and the aroma of it? They down the liquor or wine as if it is water, and they could hardly enjoy the full taste of their drinks, which totally defeats the purpose of purchasing such expensive beverages.

Alcohol, I must say, has put a great impact in my life. When I see people drunk, I frown involuntarily and become uncommunicative towards them. If I see my father drunk, I suddenly have a dislike of him. I know that alcohol is my worst enemy and there is nothing that I can really do.

People who are drunk often think that they are not; they think that they are always in the right and you are always in the wrong when you are talking about a certain thing. It is obvious that their state of mind becomes shaky and yet they persistently deny that fact. Their behaviour becomes annoying and disgusting to me. In fact, I have very bad impression of people who drink alcohol and get drunk. It is already bad enough to drink alcohol, and to get drunk because of it seems like a weakness to me. Well, after all, it seems like instead of you controlling alcohol, it is alcohol that is controlling the person!

So, the question still remains: what is so great about alcoholic drinks? To me, they are practically nothing but drinks that taste unpalatable and contain organic compounds known as Ethanol. What is it that Coca Cola, Pepsi, tea, coffee and other beverages are less preferred to alcohol, especially in wedding dinners and other functions?

One more thing I dislike is that people who love to drink alcohol always and will not stop persisting those who don't drink to try. Also, they will persist other people who drink to drink more! It is like before you can finish your cup of wine, somebody just comes in and pours more wine into your cup, without your consent! So, those who have enough of wine would find it shocking that their quarter-full glass suddenly becomes brim full!

It has been thirteen years since I first showed hatred to alcohol and I am, indeed, anti-alcohol. Until today, I refuse to consume alcoholic drinks for the same reason I refused to drink alcohol when I was young. To me, alcohol doesn't bring real benefits to society. In fact, in history, it has indeed caused the downfall of one particular society before.

Would mankind and society be of any difference if alcoholic drinks just simply did not exist?

I have nothing against alcohol (not alcoholic drinks) that are used properly, such as for medicinal purposes or manufacturing purposes. However, as drinks, I just don't see its benefits. Firstly, it's not good for your liver and, if taken too much, can cause deaths, too!

I think that it is rather pathetic that people get addicted to alcoholic drinks. What if the government decided to ban alcoholic drinks and cigarettes here? Would it be a bad thing, after all?

Perhaps soon we can have a debate: "This house would ban all alcoholic drinks."

What is next?

To the IT and Media Services Department of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, what is next for me? First, in the beginning of the semester, I had no Internet connection (and no LAN connection, too) at all. I persisted the officers of ITMS to get things done quickly and it wasn't until after the second half of the semester that I, at last, got my Internet access in my room.

Just last week, someone from the ITMS Department came to my room and said that they need to test my LAN connection to make a report about my connection. I told them that they could go ahead with the test and after a while, the word "PASS!" came from the walkie-talkie.

The greatest part was that after they left and an hour after I returned from lectures, my LAN connection was simply gone, AGAIN! Greatly annoyed, I went to lodge a report at the IT Helpdesk. They told me that they will come and fix it as soon as possible.

So I waited. It was Friday, and they said that they'll come on Tuesday. Tuesday came and nothing. I called them and they said that they are fixing some connections in Village 5 and will contact me if they're coming to Village 1. (Note: UTP isn't very big, after all, if you're travelling in a car.) So I waited, and waited. Until Wednesday passed uneventfully and Thursday came. Still, I was patient. Thursday went like a breeze and I'm home already. Yet, I received no call, no knocking at my door, nothing! With such atrocious efficiency, I wonder which organisations would survive.

So, as I'm writing here, my LAN connection back in UTP is still down. I do hope that they will get into my room during the holidays and fix it. If my LAN connection is still unavailable upon my return to UTP, the IT Helpdesk can expect a firing from me. AND I MEAN IT! I'm too annoyed now even to think about it.

This 10-day holiday for me in conjunction with Deepavali and Hari Raya isn't one for me to relax. That's because after the holidays, I can expect A LOT of tests! Therefore, these ten days have to be spent on studies.

Another event after the holidays is the Drama Competition. Being the head of IT and Media Department in the Drama Competition Committee, I'd be extremely busy supervising the flow of the Powerpoint slides, lighting, PA system, etc. Hmmm... I'm looking forward to Jared's performance (he's acting). Pictures will come in soon regarding the drama.

That's it from me for now.

Just another day

Nothing could be more joyful than not having seven to eight hours of lectures a day. It can be said that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are my best days because there are only two and three hours of lectures respectively, excluding tutorials. I wonder how many times have I said this now.

Anyway, the fact that I can put up a blog entry here now simply means that my Internet connection has improved, and so has the haze problem. The view from my hostel room is clear as before and the heavy downpour yesterday certainly helped very much. With the rain, the weather now is not as warm as it was a few days ago.

It has not been such an eventful week for me after all, except that on Tuesday I went out with Josiah for a CELL outing in Teluk Batik. It has been a long time since I last visited that beach (about six to ten years). It was nice to be able to visit the beach again and I was certainly happy to see that the beach in Teluk Batik is much better and cleaner than the one in Port Dickson.

About thirty or forty of us (I didn't count how many of us there were) joined the outing and as expected, there would be a lot of activities. What is an outing, after all, without any activity, right? There were games (physically tiring ones) and BARBECUE! Although my team lost all the games to another team, (thankfully) we were not the last among all teams. We enjoyed our lunch thoroughly (we had chicken rice, barbecue fish, chicken wings and banana bacon!) and had a great time chit-chatting and teasing some other friends.

After lunch, a lot of us didn't feel like moving anymore so we were all contented to just sit around and talked. Eventually, some of us felt so bored that we started playing some funny games, namely "I've never..." and even a story-telling game (which wasn't quite a success). At 3.30 p.m. we made our way back to campus. Some eye candy here:

This game is similar to football, but instead of kicking a ball, you toss the ring to your own "goalkeeper".

Broomsticks and a tennis ball for a game of beach hockey? (How creative.)

This picture is self-explicable. No further explanation is needed, I'm sure.

After lunch, we tend to have nothing to do. Josiah, quit with that kind of expression when taking pictures! And for goodness sake, try to look at the camera and SMILE!

Very poor Internet connection

For no particular reason, I could not connect my computer to the Local Area Network at all since I returned to campus on Sunday after returning home to celebrate the mid-Autumn Festival. The following message kept showing: "Limited or no connectivity" and then a foreign IP Address is assigned to me.

Therefore, as can be expected, I can neither log into the Intranet or even the Internet. I tried repairing the connection countless times but all my effort was in vain. In the end, I resorted to forcing a LAN connection by manually configuring a connection. It worked, for a while, but I wasn't able to connect to the Internet (the Intranet worked fine).

As I said, the connection was unstable. Soon afterwards, I had no connectivity at all. So, I decided to change my network settings to automatically detect the network. It worked, at last! However, I noticed that my computer was assigned a new IP Address, something that will not occur normally as each LAN port in every room is assigned a Static IP. Initially, the last three digits of my IP Address was 130, but it changed to 155.

My joy was short-lived. Not long after that, I lost the LAN connection again. Therefore, it was back to manual configuration of my network, but this time configuring it to my new IP Address. It worked fine, but as I said, the Internet connection was so poor that I could hardly read the news in The Star Online.

But again, today, I lost my connection totally! Frustrated by the constant failure to connect to the network steadily, I intended to lodge a complaint to the IT and Media Services Department tomorrow when I tried to use my last resort: attempting to automatically detect a network. It failed once, initially, but upon my second try, it worked again! Funny though, I was assigned a new IP Address for the second time! My last three digits of my IP Address are now 137. How many times must the switch change my IP Address? I didn't know that Static IPs can change so frequently in such a short time.

Anyway, connection is still as bad. If it wasn't because of a software that I use (called "Your Freedom") to bypass firewall, I wouldn't be able to surf the Net now. Thankfully, I could do so via Your Freedom or else I wouldn't be able to login to Blogger at all! I cannot understand why the Internet connection lately has been so terrible; all I could think of is that there is a possibility that someone in my campus is hogging the Internet bandwidth.

For the past few days, I could not understand why the audio file that I hosted in Uploadingit would not play in my blog, and I thought it mighty strange that I could not even access the website. Today, much to my surprise, it was up again and there was a statement saying that a group of Germans hacked the website by launching a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. As expected, all the songs that I have hosted in Uploadingit are gone, so I'll have to re-host them.

Life in campus currently is still going on as smooth as the wind. The only drawback is that the current haze situation is also affecting the Tronoh area quite badly. Although my block is the nearest to the Main Hall, I could sometimes hardly see it standing outside my block. The haze was terrible a few days ago and visibility from my block was less than 1 km. I was contented staying inside my room for the whole day. Now, the haze has reduced but is still around. Our only hope is that it will rain soon so that the view will be clear as before. It was disappointing that while it rained almost daily in September, it hasn't rained at all since October started. Contrary to what we had learnt in Geography (whereby October is supposed to be one of the wettest months of the year), it feels again as if we were going to have a draught.

Despite having such clear skies, the haze made everything fuzzy and unsafe. More and more people are getting sick now. Let's just hope that all this haze nonsense will cease soon.

One door closes, the other opens

I feel quite lazy to post up an entry now. But, I feel that it is obbligatory to do so. I just came home yesterday afternoon for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Actually I have lectures in the evening from 3.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m. However, as our Introduction to Computer and Information Systems (ICIS) lecture at 10.00 a.m. was cancelled, some of my coursemates requested that we push forward our evening lectures to the morning.

Therefore, I spoke to our Physics lecturer about it and decided to have the lecture at 10.00 a.m. instead of 4.00 p.m. She immediately agreed to that proposal and that was settled. Now, all that had to be done was to discuss with our new (and I mean new!) Engineering Mathematics lecturer to have our 3.00 p.m. class earlier. After the checking the timetable for all the lecture halls, I found that none of the lecture halls were available at 11.00 a.m. and the only time when the halls were unused was 12.00 noon. I had to discuss with my fellow coursemates because they would be having their Friday prayers after that. I was afraid that the time I suggested might clash with the prayer time.

Nevertheless, the Muslim guys agreed to that time and so all that was left for me to do was to talk to the lecturer about it and asked him if he agree would agree to that time. Surprisingly, he said, "It would be even better for me." That was settled, too! So, as you can expect, no evening lectures at all! I could go home at 1.30 p.m. which I did!

Upon my return home, I was determined to return to campus with a new bag. The bag which I got during my orientation week was torn (don't remember how I got it torn) at the compartments and as it was too small for me to put in many books, I decided to do away with it and get a better one. So, today, my mother tagged along with me to Jusco and got me a bag. This bag is labelled, "Notebook suitable", which I couldn't comprehend at first. Then, looking inside the bag, I found that there is actually a compartment specially for you to put your laptop in and there was also a side compartment to put your mouse and other necessary electronic items!

I flipped for the price tag, and it says RM159.00! Gosh, what's with bags today? They cost more than RM100! Fortunately, there was a 50% discount so I got it for RM79.50. Generally, it was quite a good buy but I didn't really like the base of the bag. Although it is made of thick polymer, I fear that it cannot withstand the weight of my books. Perhaps, I'll put a hard cardboard at the base of the bag myself later.

That's all for now! Oh yes, tomorrow I'd better buy some bread before I return to campus! As it is Ramadhan now, getting breakfast at 7.30 a.m. is just a dream.

PERMATA Camp at Port Dickson (Pictures)

Now let this entry be a picture entry. I shall now display some of the many pictures taken during the PERMATA Camp in Port Dickson during my mid-semester break. I shall also explicate about what each picture tells.

This picture was taken at the beach in the evening. Though the beach isn't as clean as one would expect it to be, the evening view is nonetheless rather interesting.

None of us had ever enjoyed our meals this much, especially after suffering through more than nine months of "unpalatable" university food.

We would, during our sessions, have some "interesting breaks". Here is one whereby we have the chance to enjoy durians (in the car park). These breaks normally didn't intend for us to really have a rest. It is more likely to have a moral behind such breaks. It is rather fortunate that the hotel was kind enough to provide us mint-flavoured sweets in the session rooms.

How many of such motivational camps would have a session they call the Sleeping Session, whereby the facilitators would "teach" you how to sleep and let you sleep for the whole hour? We were all given a "kain pelikat" and I just used mine as a blanket. No, I didn't sleep on the floor; I slept on three chairs arranged in a row.

There were more of us actually, but they left the room while I wanted to have a group photograph. Sitting on my left are our facilitators En. Hamzah and En. Yunos. They had been entertaining enough to keep us occupied during sessions.

Also, how many sessions would include snooker during your free-time? Josiah, you missed!

In a nutshell, although the camp had been rather dull, still there are some interesting and memorable events that can be etched deep into the mind.