Just The Wei I Am

ARGH, super pissed off with ZoneAlarm Pro!!!

Why did I have to put myself through the torment of installing and configuring a personal firewall? NUSNet is so arcanely configured (stupid SPNP and all) that I just can't get ZApro to work with it - it invariably crashes my system. My PC probably hung more times these last 3 days than in the entire semester!!

3 options:

1. Continue using ZApro, but with a local profile running VPN. Smooth, but sux cos IVLE prompts for password with every click. Grrr...



2. Uninstall the stupid thing. Who needs a personal firewall anyway? Isn't NUSNet that secure anyway? But ZApro does offer brilliant web filtering as well as a phenomenal pop-up killer! Now those features will be missed...



3. Go sift through user fora, FAQs, technical mumbo-jumbo, etc. I don't exactly look forward to that...

So what will it be? I can't decide. Really quite unreluctant to uninstall it, but wrestling with it has really been irritating. Think I'll go for Option 3 first ... sigh. If anyone of you had any good experience with personal firewalls, do let me know!

I watched the live coverage of the Miss World 2003 pageant on Saturday. Didn't intend to watch the whole thing initially, because Ace Ventura was on the other channel. But it turned out to be a good show, so I watched the whole thing.

I used to think beauty pageants were bimbotic or sleazy, but I realise both of these notions are rather far off the mark. Well, perhaps some lesser pageants are, but the Miss World pageant surely was not. Most of the contestants, we're told, are in higher education. Among them are 2 doctors and a dentist (with a doctorate!). Reading their biodata on the official website, one finds that many of the contestants are multi-talented. Very impressive, some of them. Of course, all of these could just be part of a major branding exercise to ensure the 'bimbotic' image doesn't ever come up. Well, I'll give the benefit of the doubt.

What really impresses is the overall entertainment value of the whole show. It was all very tasteful and professional, with showcases of Chinese culture all over (it was held in Hainan, China). There were the "Shaolin" monks, the Chinese dancers, the hold-on-to-a-red-cloth-and-fly acrobats and videos from trips to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hainan itself. The show started with all 106 contestants but that was swiftly cut down to 20 semi-finalists and then to the 5 finalists, so it wasn't draggy at all. No beauty pageant is complete without mention of world peace, right? Well, Jacky Chan got to do the honours this time around! He gave a short speech before presenting the Miss World Scholarship (yes, they give scholarships!) to Miss Albania.

I think Miss India really messed up. She got into the finals but she did really poorly for the interview segment. I can't remember what question she was asked, but she started her answer with this memorised (so obvious) generic "Having spent the last month among 105 girls from around the world, blah blah blah" and she went on and on. And then, when she finally addressed the question proper, it was a one-sentence answer. A case of nerves, I guess, but she threw it away. Miss Ireland and Miss Canada both did well, and when Canada got 1st runner-up, I knew Ireland would get the crown.

Anyway, the girl that really caught my eye was Miss Australia. She's got this Meg Ryan thing going, hahaha. She won the Internet Popularity Vote and was fast-tracked into the semis but didn't make the final 5. Quite impressive actually, this girl. Check out her biodata. Just 22-year-old and such a high-flyer. Anyway, I think her Masters course is interesting - Gastronomy! The study of food and wine, I think.

Here is the stupidest idea of the day!

I tried to cook egg in the microwave. Must have been the worst egg I've ever cooked. Hey, I'm pretty good with egg - fried, scrambled, half-boiled, hard-boiled or omelette. But this was one bad egg. Never again.

To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability.

Guess who? None other than George Bush Snr, in A World Transformed(1998).

I'm very lazy to blog. Actually I'm lazy to do anything productive. Oh no, I'm wasting my time away. Sian, this isn't excellence and it's less than a week since the camp ended. What am I doing?! Time for some reflection.

Pragmatics            B+ 
Grammar               B+ 
Civil Society         B- 
Digital information   B-
systems  
Social Variation      C 

However, I was rather surprised by the 2 B+'s. I was expecting A's for those 2 modules, at the least A-. I can imagine why Pragmatics was a B+, however. It must be because of the rather thin answer for the second question in the exam and Benny Lee must have been quite stringent. Hmmph. That's okay, I still enjoyed the module. Grammar, I'm not so sure. I thought I did pretty alright, both in CA and the exam. I think I'm going to ask for a script review and that costs $10. =/

Yay!! I finally watched Lord of the Rings!!

Hahaha, while everyone's raving about the Return of the King, what I'd just watched is The Two Towers! Missed it when it was showing in theatres, and haven't gotten around to watching it ... until now. WELL, now I CAN go watch Part III properly. I find it unbearable to watch a good movie without having seen its preceding episodes - that kinds of ruins the experience, I think. Star Wars is exempt, Episode 4 was a perfectly apt position in the chronology to start. =P But the point really is that I'm sure Peter Jackson didn't intend for me to watch his movies in the sequence 1, 3 then 2. hahahaha ... By the way, I haven't watched Matrix Reloaded, horror of horrors. I'm sure you can guess - I haven't watched Revolutions either. Neither have I watched Infernal Affairs 2. Speaking of trilogies, one I really like is Back to the Future but I shall not go on further... =P

Okay, now I am left with the challenge of finding somebody who has not watched LOTR3 to watch it with. Hmm, everyone seems to have watched it. Still, I've heard about how it's so good that people are actually willing to watch it in the cinema more than once! Well then, I should be looking forward to catching it soon!

Went for a Christmas party at Felicia's place on the 27th. It was really quite a nice party, with good food and lots of people. Most of the people were from USP but I only knew a handful of them. A lot of them are those who are more socially active in the USP community. I got acquainted with a few new people, but stayed largely away from the crowd, choosing instead to join small pockets of conversation here and there.

A curious thought struck me yesterday: Part of the reason why I'm not that comfortable with that crowd is perhaps because they were largely the ang-moh-pai type. Me? Well, it's true that I tend to be a little anglophilic when it comes to things like music and other parts of popular culture (I think they have more character and depth than the Americans). Coming from Chinese High, I have also come to loathe the Chee-na label - especially since I belonged to the English-speaking clique of the class. It isn't a bid to distance myself from indicators of Chee-na-ness, but 1) I prefer to converse in English, 2) I listen almost entirely to English music (however, I'm fairly familiar with Chinese evergreens since my father tunes to FM95.8 on the car), 3) I'm an Arts student. Of course, I doubt these are sufficient to become ang-moh-pai. But it's not as if I need to be so anyway. I guess I'm one of those not-here-not-there ones. Anyone begs to differ?

Anyhow, I guess this is why it's so comfortable with the people from church. There is quite a mix, but I think we largely fall into either the cheena or the not-here-not-there categories. Strangely, I think we have very little of the ang-moh-pais. Yes! A church with a young yet non-ang-moh-pai population. A minor miracle in itself, IMHO. On a serious note, though, I think this reflects a trend where we tend to reach out to people who are like us. Oh, but imagine church-planting - everyone will be different from us!

One of my partitions went cranky ... the file tables went crazy .. directories became inaccessible, or simply disappeared!! *poof*

Now I must really recommend a great program ... GetDataBack by Runtime Software ... It has saved my files more than once, really good stuff ... if your drives ever die on you, turn to GetDataBack. Of course, if it's a physical crash, then hard luck .... that happened to me twice, so I know how lousy it feels ... now I'm always contemplating setting up a RAID ... hmmm... hmm...

Saw a slimming product ad in the newspaper. When you buy their products, part of the proceeds go towards some Red Cross Fund for the Iran earthquake victims. What a weak attempt at charity, I thought. Surely, it is just a gimmick and entirely profit-driven. If they were really charitable, why not just make a direct donation to the fund?

Matthew 6:1-4

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Got a lift from my father to come to school early today. He missed the Clementi Road exit, and I decided that I would just alight at ITE Dover and walk all the way to Arts. Well, the weather was fine and the walk was quite enjoyable. I had wanted to do 2 things - go to a comp lab and transfer some files from Zip disks to CDRs; and find breakfast. Turn out that I could do neither - today (the entire day) is a 'University Holiday'. The labs are all closed and so is the Arts canteen. Shucks. Anyway, I managed to spend an hour or so reading Today and Streats at the USP Student Lounge.

Getting to the LT13 busstop to catch the ISB back to PGP, I found that there were many people waiting. Great, I thought, the bus hasn't arrived yet. I figured that today being a holiday, the buses would be coming at half-hour intervals. After a short while, some of the people there got fed up with waiting and decided to walk to wherever it was they wanted to go. Barely a minute after they departed, the bus came!! They were already too far away to shout at, so I didn't. I must confess to being a little mean when I decided to sit on the curb side of the bus so I can see the look on their faces when the bus goes past. Well, they tried in vain to flag the bus down in between stops - the bus driver didn't even give them a glance.

Patience is a virtue.