Monthly Archive for December, 2005

this entry is a work in progress. more snapshots to come.

(edit 18/12 11:25am)

the shots look very dim on my computer, since they’re saved without the gamma adjustments. but they should appear quite alright on anyone else’s pc.

basket! i just realised i’ve been in a perpetual overdraft loop on my Personnel Current Account (PCA)!

ever since maybank2u and autopay, i’ve rarely had the need to issue any cheques. seems i only do that when i want to pay my car insurance. so i thought, we leave any credit in that account? not getting any dividends from it anyway.

so i leave the balance at RM 0. however, maybank charges me RM 10 twice a year for heck’s sake, so the last charge brought my balance into negative. then they say i’ve overdrawn my account!

so i top it up back to zero.

then they charge me RM 5 interest. overdrawn again!

so i top it up back to zero.

then they charge me RM 5 interest. overdrawn again!

and again, and so on and so forth. gawd. think this has been happening since june! that comes to one oldtimer at chili’s.

sigh. the customer service rep told me i have to go back to the branch if i want to try to get these charges waived. don’t think i’ll even bother though.

anyway, anyone got any dell coupons. i wanna get a new monitor to soothe my ailing eyes.

everything is somewhat in order now. brb. sleep time.

(edit @ 9:02pm)

if you missed my quickie, here’s a background of what happened: was planning to upgrade to freebsd 6.0 over the weekend, but after putting it off quite a bit, i only did the cutover on sunday night. suffered some graphics problem during boot, but managed to bypass it via the boot loader. the rest of the subsystems were a bit of a pain though. the gnome upgrade script pretty much rebuilt every single ported application i had, so along the way it also disabled my web and email.

that wasn’t the tricky part. thought i’d upgrade to apache 2.2 while i’m at it. turns out that some of the 3rd party modules i was using were not built for 2.2. so i went back to 2.0, while having to redo the build a few times to make sure my security settings were ok.

this post was made right after rebuilding php. and suphp. and suexec.

so in conclusion, my apologies to everyone dependent on this site. obsessive readers = 0. scratchboard users = 3. may future upgrades be without pain.

so….
i’m now planning my finances for the month. it’s good to have access to payroll results. payday is early this month, and there’s some debt that needs clearing. but aside from that, i’ve already placed orders for new RAM (crucial ballistix z503) and the case-modding plan is still on.

one thing that concerns me are all the recent crucial deaths. seems that the last few batches would die after at most 3 months of use (within their rated limits). some even die after a day or two. scary. but hopefully i’ll be getting a batch that’s fixed. otherwise, my supplier dinster@lowyat has promised to help in any RMA process. even if it has to be every 3 months.

well, that’s a huge chunk of cash there. another thing that’s tempting would be a nice LCD monitor. haven’t been able to focus on text on bright colors lately. gotta get my eyes checked. there’s a thread on lowyat.net for a pretty good 19″ one (listed here) for RM 999. aaaa temptation!

as for my case-modding, the first step is to check out the kind of work people have done on their own computers. some of them are very very impressive. breathtaking even. but they probably have the DIY experience and their own workshops to back them up. at the moment, i have neither, so i won’t concentrate much on aesthetics; much attention is needed on the basic need of good airflow.

i also wondered what people have done to cases similar to mine. i bought my case years back, and the only thing i could remember that it was either made by InWin or Enlight. after browsing some pictures found via [google], i discovered that mine was an InWin Q500, one of better full ATX towers back in the day. based on that info, i find myself a few interesting links:-

http://www.benchtest.com/way2cool4.html
http://www.overclockers.com/tips196/
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/articles/q500/index.shtml
http://pc509.tripod.com/guides/mod.html
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/articles/q600/index.shtml
http://www.overclockers.com/tips191/
http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU4

this following one made my jaw drop:-
http://articles.pimprig.com/featured_pimprig/the_caffeine_machine.php

since i’m not a coffee fan, i won’t be going that route.