Remittance through MasterCard MoneySend

MasterCard has launched a money transfer service called MoneySend.  This service allows you to do a money transfer through your MasterCard to another MasterCard or Maestro account, and is available on the Internet.  Currently, only DBS-issued cards can be used as the funding account, and transfer money to overseas participating banks.  That also means that you can only remit in Singapore dollars to other currencies.  There is a list of participating banks available for you to check.  For current promotional purposes, the service fee is zero.  Seems like a good deal.

MasterCard MoneySend is at https://moneysend.mastercard.com/singapore/dbs/moneysend.

Obama, new name for an old drink

In Singapore, there are 2 traditional drinks that are commonly sold in the many hawker centers located all around Singapore.  One is chin-chao, also known as glass jelly.  The other is soya bean milk.  They are frequently sold side by side.

They are also given quick short names, so when you order a glass of chin-chao, you can call it “black”.  If you order a glass of soya bean milk, you can call it “white”.  If you order a mix of chin-chao and soya bean milk, it’s called “Micheal Jackson”.

One enterprising hawker in West Coast surprised us just last week.  When we ordered “black”, he replied “Obama”.   Seeing us confused, he said that’s the new nick for chin-chao drinks.  It’s the new black, and he’s very popular too.

Just reporting on what’s happening on the other side of the world.  I’m in no way associated to any hawkers, any beverage companies, nor being mean to any races or person.  It’s just the world over here.

Near death experience

I was almost knocked down by a car last night, while I was cycling home.  The car was turning into a side lane on my left, and didn’t slow down to watch for incoming traffic.  As it was raining, and I was on a down slope, my attempts to brake hard was futile.  I was watching the car in alarm as I saw it hurtling on to my right side.  I was thinking that it was going to hit me.  Thank God that the driver slammed on her brakes.  I was 20 centimeters from being crushed by the car.

All I could do when it seems as if we were going to connect, was to croak “Hey hey hey!”.  My life did not even flash across my eyes.

Golden Ears

Do you have golden ears for sounds and music?

You can test yourself at http://lggoldenears.com/.

I managed to score 84%.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I’ve upgraded my Ubuntu 6.10 to 8.04, because I had problems writing to a NTFS-formatted hard disk…

To be able to use Ubuntu 6.10 for 2 years without feeling the need to upgrade, that’s some achievement, right? Good job to all who have contributed to open source, Linux, and Ubuntu!

Ubuntu 8.04 is another major achievement. This time round, the installation of Ubuntu 8.04 went without a hitch. Remembering my previous attempts, this time round I didn’t have to grapple with SATA issues.

The starting up and shutting down of Ubuntu 8.04 is faster. Ubuntu 6.10’s shutdown process seems to have 2 stages, whereby I had to wait for a second pop-up of the Ubuntu logo and process bar before the PC shutdowns completely. There’s only one now.

On the desktop, the icons are looking more professional. The softwares are looking and feeling snappier, feeling better integrated. When I tried to play a DivX file, the Totem Movie Player informs me that restricted plugins are required, and proceed to install the necessary files when I agreed to proceed. Quite troublesome-free.

Ubuntu 8.04, or rather I should say Gnome’s graphics now comes with transparency support, those nice effects whereby you are able to see a faint image of the other windows below your current one. But that requires your graphics card and driver to be able to support that. Mine is a Nvidia card, and I used their Nvidia accelerated graphics driver, but that caused my PC to hang because of some icq interrupts conflict when the PC is on for some time. I haven’t resolved it yet, so I just unloaded the driver and went back to normal graphics mode.

My final verdict, I like Ubuntu 8.04. No regrets on upgrading. And I can write to the NTFS-formatted hard disk now.

Updates:

1. Gnome with chinese language seems to stall during logout.  Common pattern is when it is used with Pidgin after an extended amount of time.  You can do a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the session.  It’ll bring you back to the login page.
2. Multiple logged in users through Gnome has a weird problem.  When switching between user sessions, that is User A to User B to User A, and finally back to User B, User B will hear the “Logged In” sound being played repeatedly.  No work around for this yet…

Back from my annual visit to my in-laws

I would have written while I was on my vacation, unfortunately I was blocked out from WordPress.com by China’s firewall.  It’s really an annual visit to my in-laws.  Can’t get away from it.

Now back home, I’ve 2 weeks worth of dust to clear.  So here’s a summary.

I saw pigs giving birth.  The family bitch gave birth to 2 cutesy puppies too.  A swallow built a nest at my in-laws’ home.  So it was a pretty productive 2 weeks.

I did some coding, documentation and preparation work for the work I’m about to face this coming weeks.  Well, they hooked up Internet back there, so I couldn’t get away from it all.  Nothing much to do except to eat, sleep, watch pigs giving birth, or till the  land to grow vegetables if there wasn’t Internet.

The weather was nice.  Not too cold, nor warm, with the occasional rain.  May is a good time to go to China, with lots of fresh vegetable coming into season.  October will be a better time if you don’t fancy the rain.

Shocked by the massive earthquake at Sizhuan.  Originally planned to visit Sichuan with mum, but dropped it due to cost.  Lots of TV time was used to cover this natural disaster and human tragedy, and how the government and military are helping the victims.  Lots of inspirational stories, miracles, fund-raising shows, men getting into action.  If you had been there, you would have felt the whole PR engine kicking into gear.  Not saying those are not necessary, but it was just a tad too much for me.  Out of it all, Wen Jia Bao left me an impression of a good leader.

It’s good to be back home.

I’m not a regular blogger

I am not a regular blogger.

I just realized that I didn’t blog for a few months already. My life has been kept busy and interesting with work. Work in my current company is interesting. The people are interesting. I wonder when was the last time I felt this way. At the end of a day’s work, I don’t feel like logging on to the Internet again just to blog. I just want to walk around, fiddle around, clean up the house a bit, read a book, listen to music, shower and sleep, or just rot in front of the TV.

So if I do have the energy to blog, it’s because I have nothing more interesting to occupy my brain on an extended period of time, or I have something that I felt strongly passionate about.

Free Straits Times online

This I have to write! This is specially for those who are pissed by the Straits Times’ price increase 2 years back.

You can get free Straits Times online from our National Library Board. You can the exact printed copy of the Straits Times, excluding Classifieds.

Go to www.nlb.gov.sg, login and go to EResources on the top menu bar, and go to ENews. You need to register for a free account if you do not have one yet.

I won’t recommend you to read this unless you have broadband. The pages are huge in size. Other than that, enjoy!

Update:

This is no longer available.  Sucks.

Key to a good session of music listening

How I wished that someone could have told me that the key to a good session of music listening is a pair of good headphones.  It’s funny that my dad who is a fan of classical music for years couldn’t have told me that.  He tried to invest in a good sound system within his means.  A pair of good speakers, matched with an amplifier and CD player, but it’s no match to a good pair of sound isolating headphones.

So save your efforts and money in trying to create a sound room with expensive setups.  Jump straight into a good pair of sound isolating headphones.  A pair of headphones is going to cost just a fraction of the money that you’re going to spend if you embark on that journey to setup a good sound system.  Anyone who has been to a sound equipment shop will know what I mean…

With that headphones, you’ll be able to tell the difference between a good and badly produced songs/music, be it from the quality of the encoded MP3 to the quality of the hardware used to reproduce the song/music.

Now I’m embarking on a journey to re-encode my CDs into MP3 with a 256 bit rate.

Just one reason for not buying Epson CX6500

I can honestly say why you shouldn’t get a Epson CX6500 simply because I bought one 2 years back.  Since I see that it’s still on the market, this blog entry may still save you from the agonies that I went through.

The main problem with Epson CX6500 (and I’m not sure if it applies to all ink-based models from Epson) is that when one ink cartridge runs out of ink, all functions of the printer are suspended and it will just keep on prompting you to replace the empty ink cartridge.  You won’t be able to scan.  You won’t be able to copy or print in plain black.

If you do not use the printer frequently, then chances are you’ll face clogged ink nozzles, which you’ll have to waste a lot of ink in order to clean them up.  Which means, the cartridges will run out of ink with low frequency (hence low volume) printing.  Which means you are likely to face the same situation as I did.

I’m dunking ink-jet printers for now.  Color laser printers are cheap now, so I’m going to try that out.  Anyone with bad laser printer experiences?