MMU has just received its latest bunch of newcomers, and here in Cyberjaya, there’s a merry bunch of FCM kiddies who are going to start their Alpha [foundation] courses next week. I’ll be joining their classes, too. I can’t wait to meet all the fresh young chicks!

*laughs and points at graduating FOE and FIT guys*

Now I feel bad for you guys. REALLY bad :D

For the past couple of years, I’ve helped some noobs to fix their PCs for a tiny fee. Usually it’s simple stuff like reinstalling Windows or replacing CPU parts. Sometimes, whenever possible, I backup their data before I format, but most of the time, all their files got infected and they don’t mind if I wipe the disks clean.

A bad habit of mine is that I always dig in to find any *cough* interesting *cough* media for me to leech. On one occasion, my last client actually, this habit kinda backfired on me.

I was underestimating the potential of the virus that haunted his PC. It was a Bro_ACT [or something like that] worm and it disrupted Windows’ administrative and troubleshooting functions, and even prevented the shutdown sequence. I thought I killed it off in Safe Mode but apparently, without me realising, it still lurked in the system registry.

I browsed through his, uh,…data, to find the afore-mentioned interesting media. The owner didn’t really try to hide his collection, so I promptly plugged in my thumbdrive. Upon restart, I discovered that the bitch of a virus already made a copy of itself into it.

In the end, I had to format my own thumbdrive [it's a 1GB Sandisk] and lost whatever stuff I had in there -.-” Luckily there wasn’t anything really important stored.

On my last anime rant, I forgot to include something. I’ve been reading the Suzuka manga, a high-school love-comedy series that eventually got made into an anime series that lasted for 26 episodes. I was very impressed with the manga that I decided to grab the fansubbed anime.

Unfortunately, after watching the first episode I can conclude that the crappy art and animation of anime version is an insult to the very beautifully drawn manga. Goddamn.

Oh, and I watched a few more episodes of Seirei no Moribito. I have this to say: HOLY SHIT! Spear fights have never looked so awesome in an anime series! And I thought only sword duels can be made into fancily choreographed scenes.

Optical media are really cheap these days. The last time i stocked on CD-Rs and DVD+Rs was like, 6-7 months ago. Back then, I bought a pack of 100pc CD-Rs for RM65 and 50pc DVD+Rs for RM 69. I just got back from Lowyat today with a 100pc CD-R for RM50 and 50pc DVD+R for RM50!

Hopefully by the end of 2008, the price of Blu-Ray drives can drop within the RM 200-250 range and BDs can go for RM 2-3/pc.

My Samsung CRT monitor went nuts a few days ago. For no reason whatsoever, the green ray of the RGB guns went nuts and gave my screen a violent tint of green. It took me several hours of tweaking the monitor and the output of my NVidia 7600GT to get proper colours to show.

I could get reasonable-looking colours now, but in some applications [like Photoshop, and some games] it’s got a weird tint that leaves an evil aftertaste in my mouth every single time.

A few weeks back I have thought of getting a 19″ wide LCD, but decided against it since I need to upgrade my CPU first :/ Designing stuff at resolutions of 4000 pixels and higher is NOT fun on an outdated AMD 64 processor and a mere 1GB of RAM. GAAAH.

These days, I just wish I can save some fuel with my 1992 Proton Saga.
I can’t afford a Honda car.

Yet :P