I have an upcoming visit to Guilin, China next year and it is required to have a visiting/tourist visa so I took the liberty to apply for one during the Christmas break week at the Chinese Consulate in Melbourne. For the record, I always assumed the staff will all dressed up to their best, presenting a good impression for being part of the consulate.

I was wrong.

The staff that served me shattered my imagination. He was seated behind the glass wall and for the sake of security, conversations where done via the mic/speaker and a small slit hole to pass documents. I digressed. Let’s get to the point.

He looked like a typical asian movie gangster; dark skinned, wearing a thick chain necklace, semi tight ‘business’ shirt with exposed chest and crew cut hair. When I approached him, he almost like he wanna pounce on me and whack me good. I guess there is a reason why the glass wall is installed.

(Source)

This ad has been playing on TV every night while I was in Japan. So mesmerizing, it almost brainwashed me to buy that junk food. Till now, the tune is still ringing in my head.

[Official website]

Everyone is desperate for work opportunity during bad times. We posted an job ad for a graphic designer and we received fifty plus applications overnight. One of them is a window fitter.

My first notebook was a Dell Inspiron 8200 and it’s already 5 years old. It suffered through the IT storm for so many years and up till today, it is still alive and kicking (except the battery; it died officially last year).

The most significant change was the Operating System (OS) as I’ve been using it as a test platform for all the major OSes out there. I’ve tried:

• Windows XP (Home and Pro)
• Dark Windows (Windows Vista theme on a heavily modified XP Pro)
• GoogleOS
• Ubuntu 8 (problem with my PCMCIA wireless)
• Fedora 8 (same, problem with my PCMCIA wireless)
• Windows 7 build 6000 (crashed it in 2 reboots)

The most recent OS I’ve installed was the Windows 7 RC. Gave it a blue screen in 3 reboots but other than that, it was smooth sailing. Not bad for an old vintage Pentium 4 2.2Ghz Mobile (512MB RAM) running a new OS. Next step: Install applications and games for stress testing.

I left half of the hard disk space for a Linux OS. I haven’t decided which distro but very likely I’ll end up with Ubuntu again.

Update (3/8/09): Installed Mandriva Spring 2009. Everything works magically except my PCMCIA wireless. It just won’t connect. Grrrr…

Some random stuff I found in some forums:

 I don’t know about you guys, but I play my games with a scanner all the time! I write “shoot” on a piece of paper, scan it, and in Counter Strike Source it’s like “BOOM HEADSHOT!!1!!111!”

My colleague was building a PC for another colleague of mine. When he’s done assembling and installed the drivers, he told me to shove in my personal thumb drive to test if the USB front ports are working.

That fried my thumb drive, extra crispy.

Apparently my colleague accidentally plugged the USB front ports to a firewire connector (he was aware of it when he was reading the manual but totally forgotten about it during the assembly).

Stumbled this when I went to try out this new restaurant in Glen Waverly.

Why am I so tempted to buy this? *Thinking all potential sinister shots*

(Source)

A hollywood style movie for Blood

Original anime movie

The upcoming live-action movie

Microsoft has launched a new search engine to replace the buggy Live.com, But-It’s-Not-Google!

(Source)

TokyoTosho has been invaded by the Reds! LOLz

(Click to enlarge)

Yotsuba Koiwai is trying her best to do the Caramelldansen!

A mate sent me a CNY SMS greeting as follows:

May u in the year of the ox be spared throdding on cowdung and hit with bull***t and have the wisdom to discern which is which

Thank you… I think.