I got an invite to participate in the beta testing of the best thing to happen in PC gaming this millennium.

Took a while to download. Then, I had some problems playing on Battle Net.

But no worries. With a little help from ‘friends’, I can toss in a simple AI and play single player games just to try out the game.

It’s still gonna be Zerg, Terrans and Protoss. Some familiar units and abilities are still there. A lot of things have changed.

Terran

Supply Depots can lower themselves underground or pop up at will. Thus becoming essential defensive structures. Able to block off a choke point completely, yet lower themselves out of the way for your own army to walk through. Evil.

Air transport is now a Medivac too. Nukes are built in Ghost Academies. Upgrades allowing buildings to pump out 2 units at a go. Command Centre upgrades include a gun turret. Robotech Valkyries transforming to provide both air and ground support. A new giant mecha, the Thor, stomping around like a Warjack. Battlecruisers shoot much faster now. Then a unit that can throw out mini gun turrets…

Protoss

Gateways can turn into Warpgates, which warps in new units almost instantaneously to any spot covered by a pylon or a warp prism. There’s a 15sec cooldown, but that’s still much faster than building the unit via the Gateway. Zealot rushes are still scary. But no more Reaver drops. The Mothership isn’t anywhere as scary as the alpha preview video Blizzard shared with us in the early days of SC2’s development.

Zergs

Zergs is a whole new creature! Creep Tumors to spread the creep all over the map. Hydralisks now an advanced build; more expensive to maintain, but powerful. Brood Lords shoot funky ammo. Infestors can burrow and move, and shoots out Neural Parasites that controls an enemy unit for 10seconds. How fun is it to parasite a Protoss probe and quickly get it to build you your own Nexus, so that you can start building both Zerg and Protoss forces? Think cloaked Hydras…

Not sure how Zerg will deal with air superiority… The few games played, Zerg’s anti-air seems lacking. But ruling the ground with swarms of Zerglings is terrifying. Extremely fast buggers, annoying hit and run attacks.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever play much on Battle Net. Will definitely work through the single player campaign when the game launches. Although, should put some effort into the beta to demonstrate enthusiasm, so that they’ll keep me in the list for future betas >.>

One week of Android training, and 2 weeks of CNY holidays in Victoria, Oz. Did exactly 5 days of actual work, and got a month’s pay. How sweet is that?

Took off to Melbourne on 13th Feb in the afternoon. Arrived in Melbourne in the dead of night of a Sunday morning. Not the most pleasant 8hrs on the cramped AirAsia X flight. And the BBQ chicken wasn’t much good.

Spent the two weeks in Australia between my sister’s apartment in Melbourne city, and her rural posting at Foster. I’ve already seen the city in my previous visits, around year 2000. More excited about Foster. Scouted out the area using Google Maps, and the aerial view of the landscape there is just amazing.

Achievements Unlocked:

Visited just a few of the amazing spots at Wilson’s Promontary, like Squeaky Beach, where the sand is so fine it literally squeaks when you walk over it.

Visited Tidal River, walked around the wetlands.

Hiked up Mount Oberon, 547m above sea level.

Hiked 10km to Sealer’s Cove, and back on the same day.

Shot a wallaby and a koala bear at Morwell National Park.

Saw Agnes Falls. Toora Wind Farm. Whelshpool. Sandy Point.

Drove around in my sis’ Honda Civic, which was kinda lame cos the speed limit is NEVER above 100kph. What’s the point? And with 2 back-seat drivers and 1 passenger criticizer. It’s not the most ideal driving experience. But I survived.

Managed to auction my Pentax K10D off on eBay. Didn’t get the price I was hoping for, cos there were a few similar sales just the week before. Still, I managed to sell it for almost exactly what I paid for it second hand.

Upgraded to a Pentax K-7. ^_^  Much glee~~~

Shopped at Bunnings and found a random piece of gear that will be useful for the random repairs or dismantling that I often inflict on my gear. Got a cheap siphon feed airbrush that will be suitable for spraying varnish and similar toxic stuff. I *heart* Bunnings….

And now it’s back to hot and muggy KL.

1.5 weeks here and it feels as if months had passed. The holiday a distant dream.

Has anything improved in KL in my abscence? Well, a number of politicians have walked a few weeks closer to their grave. Silver lining in everything…

It’s a black box. Comes with 4x 500MB SATA harddisks. Different flavours of RAID 0, 1, 5, or 10. 2x Gigabit LAN ports. 2x USB ports, which you can use to plug in an external harddrive / thumbdrive to share it via the NAS, or plug in a printer and the Terastation will run as a print server too.

Power it up. Hook it up to your network. Do the networking voodoo. Sacrifice a white dove or two. And you’ll have 2 Terabytes of NAS (Network Attached Storage) on your network.

That’s enough to siphon all the multimedia content from your desktop, notebook, home theatre entertainment PC, and iPod over, without even making a dent to the capacity. Unless like me, you’re running multiple units of high capacity harddrives on the desktop… I might be able to fill up half of this thing.

It’ll even run Bit-Torrent and help you fill up the vacuum.

Very cool gear.

But kinda pricey. And the higher capacity models are exponentially more expensive.

Which is why my boss had the brilliant idea to buy the 2.0TB version. Then buy 4x 1TB SATA harddrives separately. Swap out the 500MB from the box, and getting the 4.0TB version for less.

What he ended up with was a large brick with cool lights and fan noise.

Then it became my problem….

Apparently, removing all the drives at once generates some bad error. The OS (there is one) expects to find an array of disks in the box, and failing to find them, it even fails to boot up properly. Downloaded and did a lot of shit to make the thing boot, by way of some serious voodoo, I got the BIOS to boot via the LAN etc. Couldn’t see a way to reflash the firmware or rebuild whatever’s necessary back onto the new harddisks.

Found a guide on rebuilding a TeraStation. But this is a crap load of work. Basically, this is for the case if you’ve got a RAID-5 array, and you don’t have 2TB of external storage to back up your existing shit. What the guide does, is basically breaking the RAID-5 by taking a drive out and replacing it with a new one. Let the RAID rebuild the array, taking 10+ hours easily. Repeat this 3 more times until all the old drives are swapped out. And THEN, telnet into the box, INTO the Linux OS inside, and run the commands to manipulate the disk partitions to discover the extra 2TB you just upgraded.

I got as far as downloading the Java, running the ACP Commander, and gaining Shell access on the Linux box. It’s quite exciting. At least I didn’t have to look for a hacked firmware of the correct version, take a leap of faith, and attempt to root the firmware.

But there MUST be an easier way. I’m stepping into this device blind. Reading stuff here and there was slowly putting the puzzle pieces together, but I still can’t be sure what and how exactly this thing  works.

Fortunately, I came across this easy way to upgrade a fresh Terastation with no existing data on it.

Distilling it down…

I put back 3 of the original 4x 500MB harddisks back into the box. 1 of the drive has the new 1TB harddisk.

Switch On. Delete the RAID-5 array, so that it doesn’t waste hours rebuilding an array that’s got no data on it at all. So the system just sees 4 HDs, and one of them is new.

Select the new disk, and format it with the XFS file system. Maybe in the formatting, it built some information onto the partition somehow. It’s voodoo, so I’m only speculating.

Finish formatting. Switch off. Remove another disk, swap in with another 1TB disk. Switch On. Format.

Repeat until all 4 disks have been swapped.

Whooooop~!! A Terastation 4.0TB is born. Now create a new array to flavour.

The trainer was a young man from India, and the venue is at this shitty old place in town: McOrange Institute. The venue had serious plumbing issues, failed airconditioning, a 30yr old elevator that didn’t work half the time, and indescribable odours haunt various corners of the building. We had to move the training over to our own campus. But overall, the training was fun and informative. Although the pace of the teaching had to match the pace of the slowest student, so I felt that many higher level stuff was never covered.

But at the end of the day, our ally managed to procure a unit of the Nexus One for our department for use as our development phone. I was quickest to grab hold of the unit, and had been hogging it all to myself for almost a whole week.

This is the first time I am using a phone costing this much. It’s not technically available in Malaysia, but I’m on the newsletter list of a trader who imported a couple of units from HK. It’s available in the US for US$529. The guy over here sold the Nexus One at RM2400 each.

A simple looking phone. Doesn’t look too flashy, but the big shiny touchscreen already gave me an R+J moment…

HTC manufactured. 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Android 2.1. OLED display. Capacitance multi-touch screen. Thin and solid.

The moment everyone else got done looking at its shininess and tested out the camera… I commandeered the unit and lost no time tossing my SIM card and SD Card in. So, in the order of things I tested…

#1 Multimedia:
I want to know how my music and audio book will sound. The multimedia uses the crappy ringer speaker. Volume leaves much to be desired. Quality will obviously be crap too. Even at full ringer volume, I don’t hear the phone ring in my pocket.

#2 Phone:
Comes with 2 mics. One on the back, one on the bottom. Noise cancellation. But can’t speak for how well it works. Signal reception does seem to be a little bit worse than my Nokia. Loses signal occasionally underground.

#3 Wifi:
Grabs a signal and starts working very fast. Very easy. Just works. And once there’s wifi…

#4 GMail:
Log in GMail, and everything else starts working. Mail starts coming in. GTalk starts working. Even the picture gallery starts to grab everything I’ve uploaded onto PicasaWeb. My Contacts list starts filling up.

#5 FaceBook:
Log in this one, and my Contacts list fills up to the brim with everyone’s email addresses.

#6 Market:
Once you’ve logged in a Google account, the Marketplace opens up for you. Head right there and browse thousands of free apps that downloads and installs easily onto the phone. Lots of useful and show-offy stuff like Google Sky Maps. And a Sudoku game is practically a must. No good, free Kakuro game yet though…

#7 Web Browsing:
Flash support. SUCK ON THAT, iPhone! Everything is smooth. But there’s no multi-touch in Android 2.1. Some patent issue. Apple wants to hold exclusivity to the interface. Just like what they did with the iPod shuffle wheel and UI a while ago.

But with an OTA (Over The Air) update that happened on Friday afternoon, the multi-touch function is suddenly enabled! The hardware is there all along. Pinch zooming and other gestures now available.

#8 Battery:
Takes an insanely long time to charge. About 5hrs for a full charge. It depletes about 50% in 7hrs. Hardly enough, especially with the myriad of things you will want to do with it when you’ve got a web connection. But on the plus side, the battery is replaceable. There’s another inconvenience: you need to remove the battery every time you swab out the SD Card. The slot is on the inside of the device. Pain.

#9 Keyboard:
Not very pleasant to use. The predictive text and such helps a fair bit. But it requires much more concentration to type messages on this as compared to a T9 input. And tapping out long URLs are a particular pain, if you accidentally touch the Search or Back button and lose all your hard work and have to start over again and again…

#10 Voice Input:
There’s a handy little mic button on the keyboard. Tap, and speak into the mic. Voila, voice to text! But it uses the internet for this. Very clever, using off-device processing and database resources to do this. And it’s so responsive that you don’t actually realise that your voice was just digitally encoded, pushed into the internet, parsed by a giant datacenter somewhere, crunched through a very good algorithm, the results matched to a database, and the results pushed back through the internet and back onto your keyboard. It’s like being able to eat French fries that was fried in France and freighted over, that still tastes as good as MacDonald’s French fries. On the down side, this doesn’t work when you have no internet access. And it also censors vulgarities. “Asshole” comes out as “####”.

#11 The Mouse Clit:
I’m inventing a rude name for the tiny trackball interface, to see if the name will catch on. Male rodents have had their genitals maligned for much too long, so I figured there should be equal opportunity for the other gender. Besides, it’s quite apt, descriptively. It’s a little nub at the bottom of the phone that serves little purpose. There isn’t a way to adjust the sensitivity of the clit, and when trying to move the cursor around a line of text, the clit moves it way too slowly. But I can appreciate why such an interface is still very much needed for accurate cursor movements. Cos you can’t use a stylus on this screen, and fat fingers can’t poke exactly where you need things to go. But the sensitivity needs to be very much better for it to be useable. Also, it serves to protect the shiny screen cos it keeps the screen off the surface if you put the phone facedown on a table.

In summary, this is a fine fine tool. Especially if you’re willing to pay for 3G broadband access, so that you can use all the cool shit everywhere you go. All the truly neat stuff needs the net. Very cool to sip coffee with friends, and be able to MSN when everyone starts talking about work.

I want one. But not at this price.

The name of the phone is an obvious reference to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep which got made into the Harrison Ford movie, Blade Runner. In the story, the Nexus 6 is a series of bio-engineered androids made for off-world work. Does Google think it can get that far with five more iterations of its phone?

Then it broke.

When attempting to connect to the HyperV via the remote management console, I kept getting, “You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer.”

After a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the password to the HyperV machine has expired.

Change the password on the HyperV server. Change the password on the remote management machine. (Remember that the username and password of both machines have to match, if you’re not using Active Directory.) Reboot both computers. And they work again.

Now… something else has broken my KnowledgeTree install. How do I want to fix this?

2nd January, 2010.
CheeKidd & Charis’ wedding. Am the ‘co-coordinator’. Which means I run around clicking mice and queueing music while claiming too much credit for involvement in the wedding. It was an amazing garden wedding and there was perfect weather. Lots of old classmates showed. The event really deserved a bigger chunk of InsaneSquirrel instead of just a small blurb in a list… Maybe later.

3rd January, 2010.
Sent parents off to the airport.

4th January, 2010.
Met up with SoonYee, an ex-colleague from ABRIC. Interesting fella. Claims to have run a Starcraft Academy in the old days, employing deep mathematics to train a clan of undefeatable Starcraft cadets. Discussed a potential online business.

5th January, 2010.
Kuan from Kuantan, posted in KL for a month. Dinner.

6th January, 2010.
Was supposed to watch The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. Was FFK-ed.

7th January, 2010.
Settled a dinner-debt with WeiYin from UM. And then, a second dinner with Ted at Jln Imbi. Primary school classmate from Brunei. Have only seen him one other time in the last 20 years maybe. He’s fixing his visa so that he can work in Italy stitching designer bags. Had a long chat about the impending dominance of China, and discussed the viability of various contingency plans in case our society devolves into anarchy. It will appear that knowing Chinese medicine and TaiChi will improve the odds of survival. Had to miss a farewell dinner with a colleague even. Figured that the 2.5 decade old classmate was the rarer event.

8th January,2010.
Me time on a Friday night. That’s one evening to myself all alone.

9th January, 2010.
Second attempt to watch Imaginarium with Suan. Couldn’t catch a movie cos she couldn’t catch a train. Then dinner with gamerz.

10th, January, 2010.
Guilted into skipping Kempo in favour of church. Then an afternoon with Moses looking at the 720p HD documentaries that he has been downloading but I can’t copy off of cos they’re such freaking large files!!

11th January, 2010.
My K10D isn’t reading my 16gb SD card. A little panicked, so went out to buy a new SD card. Luckily the issue was that 16gb card, and not the camera. *Phew* And while reading at Borders, I was buzzed by an unexpected call asking for help how to fix the strap on a brand new Canon 1000D.

12th January, 2010.
Dinner with the Technical Marketing Manager of Gigabyte. Another old pri school classmate from Brunei~!! What were the odds? He’s moved to Taiwan since forever, and was in KL to promote motherboards to the local techie media. Again, dinner in Jln Imbi and lots of talk.

13th January, 2010.
Third attempt to watch Imaginarium. Kuan made an excuse how seats were two rows from the screen, and went and bought tix for Old Dogs instead. Crap.

14th January, 2010.
SoonYee again. Portions at Williams have gotten bigger…

15th January, 2010.
Dinner with colleagues.

And January STILL has a lot more in store! This Saturday, an NJC-ian from S’pore days, whom I’ve not seen in 15 years, will be dropping by KL.

THEN, a roadtrip to Malacca on Sunday.

Oh, let’s not forget to mention the mountain climbing on Saturday too….

Wild Hogs worked because you can relate with the characters. There’s that faint possibility that anyone of us might one day go through a midlife crisis and buy a hog and go traipsing into the middle of nowhere.

Old Dogs has Travolta and Robin Williams as two bosses of a big sports company, and Williams suddenly finds himself to be the father of a pair of precocious bastard twins. Not exactly characters people can relate easily with. Not even a social situation that typical decent human beings will find themselves in. There’s an unnecessary scene with Bernie Mac and a technology that turns a person into a human puppet. And a Rocket-Man finale?

Old Dogs is just another serving of Disney family crap that convinces me that American kids just aren’t smacked often or hard enough. It also continues to prepetuate the Disney-generation larvae’s delusions that their mere existing confers upon them a mandate from heaven to rule over everybody around them through guilt and volume.

The only thing halfway amusing is Seth Green. It was amusing SEEING him in a film. He’s funny when he’s playing with his old G.I.Joe toys. Not so much in an actual film.

Founded on the timeless formula of 2 neighbouring apartments with quirky room-mates. The gimmick here is the 4 geeks being an extreme condensate of the worst stereotypes of Otaku, MMORPG junkie, Trekkie, comic geek, science geek, sci-fi geek, video-game geek and all other manners of geekdom that the writers never lived and poorly imagined.

Yar, it’s quite amusing that many jokes incorporate random geek stuff. The Picard-Kirk debate. The Hadron Super Collider. MMORPG Raid-speak. Comic book superheroes.

Other elements the writers THINK are funny: the chronic shyness and social awkwardness of nerds, their cluelessness about sports, their lack of appeal to the opposite gender, etc.

The characters and writing is quite juvenile and unimaginative. The jokes are predictable. Admittedly, there was a hilarious ROFL moment when Sheldon divided mitotically, completely blindsided me. But one good laugh like this in 1.5 seasons… Needs More Effort. It’s like, Garfield hates Mondays but love lasagna. Alf likes to eat cats. Good gags. But it gets old.

I enjoyed the early episodes. But towards the end of the first season, it had become evident that the schizophrenic C-3P0 (ie. Sheldon) is the show-stealer. Whereupon the Kramer of the show outshone the Seinfeld. And that’s also where the writers & producers took the path of least resistance, pushed the whole show to C-3P0, and gave up developing any of the other characters beyond their offensive geek stereotype.

It’s like producing Scrubs, with one J.D., a half dozen Todds, and nobody else. The Todd is a gag character deliberately written to be one dimensional for comedic effect. Many of the other characters in the show slowly developed depth as the years went by. Not so with Big Bang. They accidentally found their Kramer, and are so excited about him that they’ve allowed him to be the entire show henceforth. After so many episodes, I can only remember the names of Sheldon and Penny.

I have lots of geek friends. Several of them socially awkward characters. I’ve been mired in borderline neurotic geek conversations many times. Any of them are more animated and more interesting than the writers’ narrow perception of “Geek”.

Only today, I managed to get hold of the data cable for this phone, and was able to do interesting things to it.

I had purchased an Iranian copy of the phone. The only languages available are English, and probably Arabic, Kurdish or something.

Chinese would have been more relevant to me. And to enable such, I had to do the following.

1. Download NSS from B-Phreaks.
2. Disable Nokia phone suite if enabled. Plug in phone. Run NSS.
3. Click the Magnifying Glass to scan for phone. If all’s well, then Phone Info, then Scan.
4. Tick the Enable box for Product Code, change the code to 0576251. (Complete list of Product Codes for 5730).
5. Write.
6. Close NSS. Download and run the Nokia Software Updater, downloadable from Nokia’s website.
7. Run the update, and my phone now supports English, Simplified Chinese, Melayu, & Indonesian.

Can’t do anything about the Arabic letters on my Qwerty keyboard though.

Random exercise: Think about 2009, and what’s the first 10 things that pops into my head:

1. The WATCHMEN
2. Dead celebrities: MJ
3. Changed job
4. First paying photography job
5. Trip to China: Beijing, Tsingtao, DaLian etc
6. Built a fine Pentax lens collection ^_^
7. Zach Braff is done with Scrubs after 8 seasons
8. So. Many. Weddings.
9. Took up astronomy
10. Got back in touch with an old penpal

December blew by so damn fast, with a series of 3-day weekends, but I could not get a whit of rest at all. Attended an outstation wedding one weekend. Wedding photographer for an outstation wedding another weekend. And helped out a friend’s wedding another weekend. So tired now that my vision is bleary.

Gonna get some sleep before I start working on a huge backlog of blogs.

What’s to look forward to in 2010?

Hopefully the Hyperion movie gets made, and rock.

And I might get to see the Nine Gorges, and Urumqi.