Friday, October 26, 2007

A cause for alarm

Ugh. My phone's alarm clock didn't wake me up because the loudspeaker was faulty so there was no sound when the alarm went off. Ended up waking up at 7.45am instead of 6.50am. How annoying.


| HCH - 9:47 AM |



Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Mini Chess Set

Hey there people!
Wikipedia is soliciting donations once again!
Join the fun, help the world and donate some!

I donated $2 USD, and if another 19 more people donate $2 USD then according to wikipedia, they can provide 1 MILLION pageviews of free information! Well I guess that means I've paid for about 50000 pageviews! I think that i've used close to 20000 pageviews myself on wikipedia reading stuff, information and weird nonsense so I guess that leaves you folks 30000 page views! (If i refreshed my browser that many times, my finger would probably break).

Nonsense aside, wikipedia is a great (and invaluable) source of information, especially on controversial topics where asking others would be frowned upon. I'm glad to make this donation :D



I've also made my very own miniature chess set! Yeah, homemade chess set. It's both an International chess and Chinese chess set combined in one, pieces have chinese characters inscribed on one side and international chess symbols on the other. I duplex printed a chessboard, one for each type of chess, all on one sheet of paper.

Well, I like the eclipse mints (about $4 from petrol stations and supermarkets). They usually come in nice metal containers with a snap on metal cap. I had recently just finished another box so I had an empty container. Basically I just rinsed and cleaned it, and it was ready for use. I wanted durable chess pieces, so paper and cardboard were out of the question. Buttons were too small and coins were too heavy (not to mention unsightly). So what I did was I went over to Daiso and bought wooden chips. These are circular discs made of balsa wood, generally for hobby crafts, relatively inexpensive.

Bought 2 packs for $4, which contained 25 chips each, totally 50 chips. That gave me plenty of room for errors, should I happen to damage any of the chips. I then used the red and black ballpoint pens to inscribe Chinese characters on the chips. It's not really that hard, and in the case I found anything unsatisfactory, I could always rewrite that character on a fresh piece. Chinese and International chess both use 16 pieces per side (32 pieces total), so I had quite a few pieces left over.

I considered coating the chips to protect them and enhance their look, but it would be too troublesome and take up a lot of space.

Using flash, I quickly drew up two chessboards, one chinese chess and one international chess board. Printing them were quite easy too, although I had to manually duplex it.

I then decided to laminate the paper to protect it, thereby using up the last bit of laminate tape we had. Unfortunately, the laminate made the paper too thick to pack into the box and it had to be abandoned and reprinted.

Anyway, here's the final results of my miniature chess set.



The metal box casing, originally holding eclipse mints. Pretty small for a chess set.



The 32 wooden chess pieces.



Board with pieces, properly arranged for a game of chinese chess.



The board and pieces flipped over, this is for international chess.



All fits in the box nicely.

A match, anyone?


| HCH - 2:56 PM |



Thursday, October 18, 2007

Autumn trees shed their leaves to live again

As I walked home one October afternoon, I couldn't help but notice the beautiful sunset. In a way, it's a day slowly but surely leaving. The light fades, and there is nothing you can do no matter how hard you try, you can't outrun the sun. October skies represents a life looking for more. They show that sometimes, a fleeting sunset swiftly leaving the horizon can be beautiful. That leaving can both be painful and hopeful, bitter and sweet. There is hope, and a new dawn awaits after the sun sets, and only after the sun sets. The mistakes and misery of yesterday are washed away by the brilliant sunlight. I never really did catch the sunset or sunrise. But I know, while it lasts, sunset is beautiful.

Well it's been ages since I've changed my blogskin. I felt that it was time for a change from the green and blue themes, so here's a nice orange - red one with a magnificent photo of the sunset. For your info, most of my blogskins are either made by myself, or in this case, taken off some obsolete and semi-functional blogskin, heavily modified and used as my own. Oh by the way, I was upset at the fact that embedded background music isn't compatible with both IE and firefox, so I made my own flash music player. It's pretty basic stuff, but it works, and on both browsers too (didn't test with opera and safari though, but it should work like any other flash movie).

Anyway, lots of stuff has been happening, and I guess it's good to pen it down once in a while. For one, it's already october. Time really flies, in just over two months this year will be over.

This week itself has been pretty crazy. Sunday was good, went for lunch with sam and hoho just like the old times, back in ACE. Like the fun we had crapping and telling lousy jokes. No LAN, netspiel had long closed already. Gigantic burgers at Carl's JR and a really fun game of pool. This was my second time playing pool but I think I picked it up pretty fast, considering I even scored a double kill shot. Yep, the cue ball hitting two separate balls simultaneously into two different holes. I'm either that good or that lucky. Although I did pocket the cue ball a few times.

Well yesterday wasn't all that good. Maybe I was really sleep deprived, I kept making minor mistakes (such as repeated mistyping, tripping over something). What was really annoying was that I accidentally closed an important browser window and I have no idea what was in it (up to now, i still don't know). I do know that it was relatively important (if not I wouldn't have left it open.) I have a habit of leaving many windows (maybe over 10) open at once so I can multitask. It was a lousy mistake, and one just waiting to happen, I wanted to check my logoff screen and pressed alt-f4, but the focus was set to a browser window and poof, it closed. Got me really pissed as I searched through my history pages to no avail, trying to locate the window. Why doesn't firefox add a recently closed windows function. I would have gladly paid $2 to get that closed window back. Hah.

Another even worse thing. My sister was trying to install the Sims 2 on my mother's laptop. Well apparently there was a problem with the 3D accelerator, and the program wasn't working. She asked me to help, and try to help I did. And then, oh, I foolishly disabled the display adapter for the graphics card, thinking it might help in some way (actually, a reason why I can solve PC problems is that I am more persistent in finding solutions to such problems compared to many people, and that I try solutions at a much faster rate. Of course, IT skills also come in handy. Very handy. But that's besides the point.) Anyway, a little popup demanding a restart, a few mouse clicks and a minute later, I was stuck with a PC that showed nothing on the screen. Nothing. Just the BIOS loader, the splash logo from the boot screen and that's it. Blank screen. VGA mode doesn't work, Last good settings doesn't work and Safe mode freezes up. Oh what to do? Tried and tried various solutions, to the point of even trying blind keypresses, remote administration. Nothing worked. Windows narrator was immensely helpful, but the display adapters in the device manager had already mysteriously disappeared.

So my dad's going to try get his office tech support to help fix it (hah, I know you're rolling on the floor laughing now, like roflmao tech support lol). Anyway, if it doesn't work then I really don't know what to do.

P.S. For anyone who faced a similar problem and fixed it, please help me.

Well that's about it.


| HCH - 12:44 PM |



Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Halfway through the new skin

It's not finished, it's a work in progress.
Juicy post coming up soon.
Stay tuned.


| HCH - 3:41 PM |



Monday, October 15, 2007

October Skies



Autumn brings a song I sing so desperately
These shattered dreams
From broken wings of love
October skies and city lights were all a blur
And high tide came washing them away

I said
Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, this is for real

Church bells ring
the North Star seems so far from me
The coastal planes is where my shame shall lay
Autumn trees they shed their leaves
to live again
The cold air brings clarity to me
Yeah

I said Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, this is for real
I said Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, to your love

I, I've been running to nowhere
And I, I feel something's getting clear

I said
Alright, alright, alright
Alright, alright, alright
I surrender, this is for real
I said Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, to your love

I said Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, this is for real
I said Alright, alright, alright
You make the calls tonight
I surrender, to your love


| HCH - 9:06 AM |