Thoughts from a Techie

This post is a significant one. Why? Because this is the first one I write on my shiny new laptop. More on that later. As the title suggests, lots of things are going on in my life at the moment. Everything is in full swing: studies, ECAs, even the "other" things. Extremely busy. Much of the development, however, happened in the span of the last 4-5 days. I'll split my post into many parts, each part on a certain development. Part 1: Cycling. The most significant development in my opinion. I have always wanted to get a bike. Two main reasons: good exercise; and the more important one, my pocket - my need to travel costs me quite some money. Imagine just a simple task of grocery shopping at Jurong Point takes me .77 a leg (or 1.54 a round trip). And I make such trips every other day. Then a good soul saved the day. A good friend/ senior sold me his (largely) unused bike for $80. First ride is always the most memorable. This first ride had the distinction of bei...

Shake It Off is one of these songs... The first time you listen to it, it sounds like shit. But then you keep listening. The 13th time you listen to it, it actually feels like an okay song... Then you keep listening. The 131st time you listen to it... THIS IS DOPE AS HELL!!! Of course this kind of stuff doesn't happen to all my Taylor Swift songs. Not even many of them - just 2 years ago for example, Never Ever was an instant favorite of mine. I have to admit this song is one hard to swallow because it's so much different from anything she's ever put out (true for every new release, but none as profound as this one. Again compared to 2 years ago with Red already considered a giant leap towards pop). But then it still has the quirkiness that made Never Ever so likable. And it was accompanied with a music video. And a brilliant one. I have to wait for more songs to be released and most importantly for HMV to carry the physical deluxe album with gifts so...

Was trying to forge new $1 coins for laundry. Put an old $1 coin into the sandwich machine (somewhere near Canteen A) & pushed the coin return button. And nothing came out. I pushed the button again and again and again... and nothing came out. A few people have already passed by the machine since then & they all noticed 2 weird things: one, there is one guy walking back and forth around the area looking like an idiot, and two, there is $1.00 displayed on screen... but no one decided to buy a sandwich. COME ON PEOPLE $1 DISCOUNT TURN DOWN FOR WHAT while I'm thinking hard on how to get back that $1... Okay so there are a few ways around this problem: 1. Put a $10/5/2 note into the machine, buy a sandwich and take the change. Tried my $10 notes, rejected. Changed my $10 note into 2 $5 ones, put one in the machine, also rejected. $2 notes are useless because $3 - sandwich = $.70 which kinda defeats the purpose of forging $1 coins. And basically wasting money on ot...

This is an awesome place. Well that's what people who belongs to that institution (almost) always say about it. I'm not officially an NTU undergrad until tomorrow after online matriculation exercise & medical check-up result, and I've just checked in on Saturday. Regardless, it's still an awesome place. 1) The pioneers of Pioneer Hall (from now on referred to as "18" because I want it that way - probably because it sounds like the way Hunger Games districts are referred to). Being a foreigner, staying in a hall is an obvious and simple choice. Even when I've already been in Singapore for more than 4 years, I obviously don't have the confidence and the money to go out there and rent a HDB flat. But when the actual results came in and the new 18 popped up, I was disappointed, for they assigned me the most expensive double aircon room out there when I explicitly stated my intentions for a non-aircon room together with my roommate (teaser: he...

This is the season for developers' conferences - big events at the Moscone. Starting with Apple's WWDC 2014, keynote address this morning in my timezone. As usual, I didn't stay up for Apple conferences. Simply not a big fan. Plus streaming requires QuickTime, which is pretty useless besides the streaming itself. So I waited for the whole keynote to be available on Apple Events, installed QuickTime (really Apple?), sit back and enjoyed. And it was a pretty enjoyable keynote. Craig Federighi certainly knows how to crack people up with OS X naming. The whole Handoff setup is absolutely brilliant. And of course let's not forget Swift. (Makes me immediately think of Taylor Swift. No big deal.) Except the comparisons. Seems like they do it every year without fail. When they talk about OS X, they compare with Windows. When they talk about iOS, they compare with Android. And they only, and always, talk about latest version's adoption. OS X Mavericks vs Windows 8. i...

Good time to break my string of three long opinionated serious posts for something more light-hearted and fun. Fixing stuff. DIY goodness. Long story short: once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, I dropped my Samsung external hard drive. It was lying on the cold hard ground. Ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhhh, trouble, trouble, trouble. The USB connector inside the drive snapped out of its integrated circuitry (IC). All my hard work torrenting movies now gone. Or maybe not yet. I was determined to get things fixed and I got lucky. I'll explain my "get lucky" moment in a short while. But in the mean time, the best I could do was breaking the drive open. And it took an enormous beating. Forgive the bad focus but you got the idea. Only hard prying could get this thing opened. And I was greeted with this bad boy. Nothing like I had ever seen before. Some technical stuff: normally hard drive connectors are SATA-to-USB which makes accessing data from...

Note: This post is actually a not-so-literal translation of the previous one (http://nguyenhuyanhh.blogspot.com/2014/04/3-tuan-canh-google-docs-nhung-khoanh.html). 29/04/2014, 21h00. The very last time I press that "save" button in the Apps Script editor. Did a copy-paste special values-only on the data, officially locked that into the database. Done with the first round of RED Your Song contest (bit.ly/TSVNContest) organised by the fanpage Taylor Swift Vietnam (which I'm a current admin of) and sponsored by Cornetto. It requires participants to submit a YouTube video of them singing to Red by none other than Taylor Swift. I've only been in this position for a little more than a year, done this data collection on Docs twice or thrice and I must say it's a pretty interesting job. Probably thanks to my love for El Goog (yes, their Spreadsheets are really powerful) and my general interest in stats. However this time the task is slightly different in nature - it...