Christmas in Birmingham

Sitting in a Holiday Inn hotel room watching TV. That's what my roommate and I have been doing for almost the entire length of Christmas day. Even lunch consisted of a combination of food packed from Nottingham and pastries we grabbed from a very crowded Tesco the day before. Dinner however, was...ironic, to say the least.

Back in Malaysia, Christmas isn't that big a deal so you'd still find most of the essential facilities e.g. restaurants and shopping centres open. Unlike here, where the city essentially turns into a ghost town other than the odd Asian or two (e.g. us) roaming the streets. Anyway, back home I would've celebrated Christmas by following relatives out to some Italian restaurant and stuffing myself with Western food.

But here in the West, nothing was open. Nothing except a handful of shops in Chinatown. And among these shops was a Malaysian restaurant (literally named "Malaysian Delight") where I had my Christmas dinner of this year. Where I stuffed myself with...this stuff.

Merry Christmas everyone!

on Windows 7 and its pricing

Microsoft has been giving me reasons to improve my opinion of it lately, firstly and most profoundly with Windows 7. Having painstakingly procured (hint: involving a 30kbps SFTP connection all the way back home...oh the pain!) and tested it on an Asus Eee PC, I have to say it is a huge step in the right direction. It's essentially a leaner, quicker, friendlier Vista, with the same bells and whistles but an order of magnitude easier to actually use to one's benefit.

The single best improvement of all has to be the taskbar. Even though its concept hasn't changed since the days of Windows 95, it has now been given a makeover that's revolutionary, yet intuitive enough to pick up again within minutes. I'm almost certain it was designed with heavy multitaskers like myself in mind - it just works so darn well, apart from the anemic Intel Atom processor only just managing to keep up with all my tasks. I intend to finally retire Windows XP as my desktop's main OS and replace it with this one as soon as I get home.

It's good enough in fact, that I was considering forking out part of my student (read: miniscule) budget to get a copy for myself. On the other hand, it was available to me at a student (read: cheap) price of £30, as I was told by a fine gentleman in a certain IRC chatroom. So, the deal was looking pretty sweet.

But if the sweetness of a deal is inversely proportional to the price of the item being sold, then this deal just got divided by zero.

Apparently, Microsoft thinks so highly of us geeks in the scientific academia that they created the MSDNAA (Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance) which offers to students pretty much their entire line of current software products, including Windows 7, for a very special price. And it wasn't too long ago that my university announced via mass e-mail spammage that the program was open to students in the School of Computer Science and Faculty of Engineering (that's me!). For those of you who speed-read through the last two paragraphs (and to drive the point home for those of you who didn't :P), try taking a guess what this very special price is.

University life kicks ass.

on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Being a mere student on a constantly tight budget, it's not very often that I consider purchasing an original copy of any PC game, especially when there are much ahem cheaper alternatives around.

But MW2 was one of them. After the awesomeness that was the first Call of Duty, and then Modern Warfare ('All Ghillied Up' anyone?), MW2 certainly looked promising based on the video previews of its single player campaign alone. Also, now that I've grown bored of Counter-Strike: Source I did feel like taking up a new serious, realistic multiplayer FPS. If you watch the video below and feel your heart rate go up then you know what I mean.

(N.B. Team Fortress 2, although loads of fun, is not realistic.)



Yet, the end of the video highlights one of several potential problems brought up by this official announcement. The summary:
1. No server listing, instead you get a matchmaking system not unlike those in console games. (Though honestly I don't see any reason console games shouldn't have server lists too.)
2. No dedicated servers, meaning a much higher chance of running into amateur admins and general chaos. Think Halo Trial.
3. No mod support.

I won't jump to conclusions and claim that MW2 multiplayer is completely botched, but I for one do not want to have my immersion broken by a "Host Migration" event every 10 minutes.

So, bad move by Infinity Ward? Seems likely, but I'll just have to wait and see.

Awesome Penguin Sighting

Now that I'm reasonably settled into life in a university half a world away from home, I'll do my best to catch up on some notable events of the past few weeks. This is about the flight here.

The aircraft was a Boeing 747-400 operated by Malaysia Airlines. Despite a capacity that earned it its Jumbo Jet moniker, the flight was "100% full" according to the check-in attendant. Also, we fellow travellers (in this case my mum and her former classmate) were split up, myself ending up in between 2 European gentlemen.

Now once upon a time, I managed to play one PC game for about 12 hours from the beginning until the final cinematic of the single player campaign, pausing only for meal breaks and the occasional calls of nature. That game was Halo: Combat Evolved (and while I'm on that subject, screw Microsoft for completely ditching the PC platform with their Halo series. Some example they're setting for their Games for Windows initiative.) But that doesn't top this flight, which took 13 hours.

To give you an idea of how long that is, I'll just list out all the stuff/content I went through during the flight:

• Lunch - Marbled beef. Yum.
  
• 2 House episodes - Typical stuff featuring Dr. House being a hilarious bastard, semi-accurate medical jargon, and drama.
  
• Michael Jackson: Unmaksed - Not the book, just a documentary about the life and illustrious career of a legend.
  
• All in-seat magazines
• 1 Reader's Digest issue
  
• The Sniper (神枪手) - Boring. Nonlinear storytelling bordering on confusing. Villain's psychotic hallucinations kinda cool. Actual sniping goes against every shooter game I've ever played. As for what little special effects there were: Come on, The Matrix was released ten years ago!
  
• The Big Bang Theory (2 eps) - Is it bad that I can understand the tall guy? :(
  
• Dinner - Garoupa fish
  
• The Incredibles - Interrupted halfway by the landing, but I already know it's fully awesome because it's made by Pixar. :D

Needless to say, the in-flight entertainment (and the fact that it was activated for Economy class) was a real lifesaver. Which brings me to my last point about the flight that deserves special mention:

It was powered by Linux!!!

Hard Disk Dissection

Just a little something I did a few days before I left...

In one final, ultimate display of summer holiday-induced boredom, I took out my former gaming desktop (now my dad's word processor and Internet browser)'s 9 year old, 10GB hard disk, and dismantled it. Then I plugged it into my current gaming desktop and turned it on to see how long it could last exposed to our beautiful Malaysian weather. Best of all, my trusty video camera captured the entire grueling ordeal. Enjoy!

Hard Drive 2

Signing back in from UK!

We're done vacationing in London, and now spending another week with yet another one of my mum's acquaintances in the relatively quiet little town of Buxton, Derbyshire. For those of you in Malaysia, think Fraser's Hill or Cameron Highlands.

Needless to say, my camera has been through some proper usage once again ever since, well, college. I've set Picasa to keep in sync with the online album below, so whatever new photos, captions or tags I assign using Picasa (including geo-tagging, which I might try out soon) will be in here too.

London

By the way, there are a few panoramic photos in there that were created using Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). Before this I used to use AutoStitch and it worked fine for me, but ICE is simply faster and more user-friendly. Sorry AutoStitch folks, but you got pwned.

Leaving for UK

I'm sitting in the plush cushion seats of the KLIA airport lounge with my mum and a friend of hers, enjoying a light meal, savoring what will be my last hour on Malaysian soil for a long while.

For the next 2 weeks, we'll be touring around London and Derbyshire. When that's done, I'll be staying at Nottingham University's home campus for the next 5 months as part of my student exchange program.

I'll be missing a lot of things. Parents, relatives, friends, piano, gaming desktop...but I have the Internet to thank to help bridge the distance gap considerably. Skype and MSN for friends and family, and as for my home computer, SSH and Remote Desktop. If other people's past experiences are anything to go by, those 5 months will go by in a flash, and I won't want to come back in the end. Hopefully you guys won't miss me in the meantime, as I'll be keeping this blog updated with my experiences in the foreign land.

This is yours truly, signing off from Malaysia.