Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Programs I need!

History will always repeat itself.
My laptop crashed, just in the nick of time where I had to deliver my final thesis, and now I have to rebuild my life again (ok, the last one is an exaggeration :D)

Eerily, the same thing happened almost exactly 4 years ago. And that was around the time I graduated from my master.
Apparently my laptops lifespan are in sync with the length of my study somehow :D

Luckily, my current one is salvageable. So, I am now still typing on my dearest XPS ruby!
And in the process, I've increased my geekiness level by at least 300% or so! xP

J made me learnt how to:
- Examine the back of my laptop, identifying which bolt relates to which part of the laptop.
- Take the HD out (I used a screw driver!! It's astonishingly easy... I thought I'd have to use my full power or something to unscrew those minuscule bolts. And an addition of weak magnet on the tip of the screwdriver is really such a great innovation!)
- Identify whether the failure is in HD or in the other hardware. The chance has it that J installed a bootable version of Ubuntu in a usb drive that I carried around everytime. It really came in handy!

We found that the failure was in the HD. Booted using Ubuntu the laptop ran just fine. And after plugging the laptop to J's desktop, we found that all the data are pretty much intact! *BIG WHEW!* So, all my thesis data are safe and sound.

Alhamdulillah.

- Defragment and shrink a volume, J suggested to just make a new partition in the HD and install a new OS there.

- Install the new OS. J actually wanted me to use unix system. But I still want to live my life and work peacefully... and play my games someday maybe in the future hahaha. So after insisting on installing yet a new windows OS and deleting as much as possible unimportant data (well.. games mostly *sniff sniff*) we secured ourselves 80 GB of free space to be partitioned =D

And now I'm back, installing things from scratch. It's amazing that the list I made in 2008 is mostly still relevant now. The only differences I made this time are :

1. Chrome

I use chrome now. For no particular reasons actually. But J made me used it, and it already saved lots of my passwords :D
I'm still lamenting the non-existence of proper read-it-later extension on chrome though. In firefox the extension would automatically save the content of the link I gave and have it ready for me to be read offline at some other time.

2. notepad++

PSPad got real slow by the time. And it often got stuck in trying to save new files. So I'm trying notepad++ now.

3. Microsoft security essential

The constant nagging of the last AVG for me to download the new version really turned me off. And J suggested this one, so this is what I'm using now.


4. Winmerge

It's a new tool that I come to love and can't live without! I so often keep duplicate copies of a file, just to be safe, and ended up with no knowledge which copy was from which version of that file. This tool really helps me! It's super easy to notice the differences and merge whichever part of one version we feel fit.

5. Skype

Now it's an essential IM for me, because... my parents are using it now for video call! =D
They are marvelous, aren't they! My dad now carries his Ipad everywhere, and are always available for video chat... well, that would be on weekend and on his off hours though :D

And... the rest are still the same with the ones that made to my 2008-must-have-program list. It's kinda amazing, some programs really are just that good to last and stay updated.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Highlight of the day

It's a gloomy morning, with heavy clouds hanging, and light showers.
However, I've got my highlight of the day early in the morning : being chased by a dog while chasing my bus! xD

The dog is of a bigger breed. After consulting with J and wiki, I learned that it was of boxer breed with fawn coat and flash on its chest. The dog belongs to an old lady, one of my neighbour. Apparently they were out for a walk earlier this morning and happened to be in front of my building when I went out to catch my bus.

I did not really pay attention to them at first, as I was just hurriedly opening my building door and immediately running towards the gate. I first noticed the dog when it was then suddenly positioning itself on my direction and staring at me. I hesitated in a split second; he seems like to be of the breed of the guard dogs. You know, the fierce ones, with appearances meant intentionally to scare people off. But, alas I was late and the owner is here anyway, so I just continued my run.

As soon as I restarted my sprint, though, the dog dashed towards me!
And before I realized it the dog has already jumped on me, paws on my torso:
playfully begging for head rubs! awwwwwww =')

I have always been enticed by dogs. Well, picture of cute dogs and puppies actually. And the sight of dogs being walked around in my city, since I don't have any dogs nor friends who happen to have dogs xP

But I have never actually came into direct contact with any dog of this size.
And I have always been actually rather terrified of being in contact with dogs.
Aside of the consideration of the ablution hassle I have to go through if I got licked, their size and bark are rather disheartening compared to cat's size and cat's meow.

However, the dog who was looking at me directly in my eyes and had its paws on me this morning didn't bark at all. And it has completely playful and friendly eyes and attitude as it tried to get even closer, pawing at me and sniffing my skirt, when I stepped back out of my surprise. I couldn't help but just laughed, I didn't even want to say no to that adorable dog.

The old lady then called the dog and apologized to me to which I just said "No, it's ok" while giggling. Of course it's ok! In fact I was super delighted! I so wish I could just give the dog the head rubs it deserved!

The dog then found another passerby, which then responded to the dog more appropriately despite having her music player earphone cables entangled on the dog paws as it's jumping on her xD

So I continued my sprint again towards the gate. And what did I found:
the dog ran too chasing me!
Shortly, it was already running ahead of me!
This time, though, as apparently it has learnt its lesson and I heard the old lady's voice too saying something, the dog just circled me, while kept running with me.
awwwwww =')

The chasing then had to stop since I've reached my gate and had to leave, closing the gate behind me with the dog still running, now encircling the fence around the gate. Awww =')

Now I so wish I have a dog to run every morning with :D

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Do not just randomly watch any movie you could download!

Because bad movie leaves a reaaaally bad taste in your mouth:
they torture you with all the questionable things happening during the movie,
making each second feels so horribly long, confusing and painful to endure,
and after finally the credit rolled in, the thought of "what was that supposed to be abt, originally?" will keep you restlessly wondering.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Stages of KPOP idolation craziness

1. Enjoying the song
Oh that song is cool.

2. Knowing the name of the group
Hmm, who sang that song? Korean group/singer, eh? I see.

3. Found more songs by the group and listen to them

4. Watch their performances
They usually have the MV for each of their promoted songs, as well as live performances on music shows. And Korea has several of these music shows at least one in each of their TV stations.

6. Watching fanmade clips / fan recording highlighting some features of the personnel/group

This is usually catapulted by all the suggested videos to the right of the youtube vid. Clicking and clicking will bring you to more and more suggested vids and before you know it you've spent significant amount of time mindlessly watching all the suggested vids that piqued your interest.

Each member of a group usually has their own fanbase. They will call this personnel as their "bias". Amazingly, from one song performance in a show you could rely on these fanbases to each have their own recording (fancam) that follows their "bias" throughout this song! Talk about dedication.


5. Researching about the group/personnels

Read the wiki of them, googling their data, history, stories etc.


7. Watching all shows which have the group/singer as guest

Korea has several talk shows, some reality shows, etc that often invite idols as their guest.

8. Checking their official sites and fan sites for every updates on their latest event, videos, pictures everyday(/hours/minutes? xD)

Oddly I found lots of these fansites are on tumbler. I suppose it's because their
easy to share facilities? People would post some pics, gifs, vids of their idols, and other would reblog it on their own.

9. Joining their official fan group


10. Buying all of their albums, official goods


11. Donating stuffs on behalf of their group/artists

Evidence 1 Evidence 2 Evidence 3: Indonesian VIP


12. ....

To go further to the extreme you could even be their sasaeng or privates.

Writing these all I felt somehow relieved that my downward spiraling motion to the bottom of kpop fandom has not been too much yet.

However, if there's anything we could learn from these KPOP idols, it would be their total hard work. They spent years in training to achieve their position. And really lots of hours have been dedicated to it.

Each time, it's the thought of appreciation to their hard work that could stop me from continuously drooling over their pics *oops* and get back to my own work. They've come along way to make their dreams come true.

I should work as much too towards my own dreams.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Current obsession

Wow! Fantastic, baby!


kyaaaaaaaahhh! that blue haiiiirrrr *___*



You think I could pull that hair colour off? *_*

Source : tumbler 1 tumbler 2

Andd, isn't this just super cuuute? xD

#BIGBANGBURGER by =Fiveonthe on deviantART

okayy, i'm completely fan-girl-ing over them now. So, to minimize the effect, and to prevent my blog to be a kpop devoted blog, I'll just keep on updating this post with my... current obsession of big bang :D


One of the thing I watch from a KPOP movie is their dance. As that's how my attraction to KPOP started: the venture to search an inspiration for my morning sport. However, I found that their dances are not meant to be cover-ed!

I now respect Big Bang more in this notion. They don't have complicated, extra synchronized dance with everyone, except on the chorus part. Since everyone has to concentrate on their part while singing. Compared to SNSD for example, I adore them for their complicated and ultra-sync moves, but I saw how only few of them could really sing good. And this is understandable since they're always too busy with their dance moves.

With Big Bang, I think they really make the dance choreography to accompany the song. Therefore a proper dance cover is kinda hard to be done, unless we really want to cover their background dancers for example, who are indeed dancing all the time they are on stage. However, big bang doesn't always have dancers around all throughout the song. So that's not really a good idea either.

But now that i think of it, it should be the correct way anyway. They are singer and performer by definition. Despite TOP having reported to have "visual" role aside from being the rapper (I giggled at that, but now, omg that's true! xD and he does that just so effortlessly *_*), none of them are designed to be the "dancer" as some people in other _singing_ groups.

I also respect them in the fact that they always bring some singing improvisation in their live stage. This makes watching any of their live performance worthwhile. We don't just hear what we could hear from their album. And for sure with this we are sure that they are not blatantly lip-synch-ing all the time. And I found that despite some slips that are normal, most of their live singing performance sounds above standard! And from what I have learned so far, I think that's super rare in KPOP world.
More kudos to them!