Archive for November, 2009
I sat by the river of Kallang enjoying the breeze as the sun slowly set over the western horizon. it was the end of the year again and the winds from the north were blowing. The air was chilly. Certain parts of Singapore has been flooded today due to heavy incessant raining. Alena was with me entertaining herself. We sat beside each other, but as is normally the case, worlds apart from each other.
It so chanced across my mind the idea of what constitutes the shakespearen style tragedy during that very instance sitting there by the river with all these around me. In such normal tragedies the main character meets a bad end not because of his flaws but ironically because of his strength. A strength which in that unique instance of a situation becomes a fatal flaw.
Past few weeks the incentive to work for money slowly but surely evaporated like the morning mist with the coming of dawn. I was of the mind to step away for a while and do some journeying. What kept me working was but duty. To avoid no task, but to handle and deliver everything promptly as has been promised and agreed upon. Ironically, it was mainly due to closely sticking to this only mission statement and my lack of incentive for money that causes a contradiction.
My lack of incentive for money wishes that each project that comes in be the last for a while, my close sticking to my mission statement was like a magnet that inevitably attracts more and more projects and consequently money in my direction, additional of which I really have not much need of at the moment. It was hard if not impossible that other elements on this net of karmic cause and effect be convinced that my time and effort be inconsequential and not useful to their cause and agenda without my active involvment in betraying my cause and mission statement.
Metaphorically it resembled a Shakespearean style tragedy. One obtains not what one desires due not to his lack of strengths but exactly because of the existance of such strengths.
I continued sitting on the bench by the river pondering how I ever landed myself up in this web of things?
Apparently it seems Winter In Venice has been assigned a page rank of 0 by google and has been delisted from all search results on google. Interestingly this happened after we solved the session problem on fatcow hosting service.
So the thing we are attempting to do now is to get some really good quality linkages in from good sites. Fingers crossed. It is time to go site hunting.
Suddenly I recalled my younger days sitting in front of the computer playing my favourite game “Unchartered Waters”
A merchant cum pirate cum explorer role playing game. Depending on your choosen character, you start off with with a small miserable ship, the only thing of which you could do with it was to travel from Lisbon in Portugal to Seville in Spain, trading Salt from Lisbon with Porcelain from Seville.
However with each trade if done properly you gain more capital to trade in bigger bulk. Somewhere along the way you gain enough capital to buy yourself one of those floating bastions call Venetian Galleons and then of course you get it modified for the high seas. Once that is done, the ports the world over awaits. Haha!
Recently real life has been starting to resemble this RPG game I was playing since young. The trading side at least, less the adventure side.
Suddenly, running out of capacity and processing power on my current laptop, I bought myself a new one with more memory and processing power than what I currently have. Spent more money than I usually would on anything mechanical.
Well the system specifications are correct and now the microsoft pre-requisites are as they should be. Seems like I am now ready to move into deeper waters. Bon Voyage. 
I just saw the greatest love story ever on Capitalism. It is a must watch, extremely satirical, but accurate and information giving us a good overview of why the US is in the state it is in today.
It is puzzling sometimes wondering how come humans do not conform to the normal behavior of natural predators. It was ever reported that lions, tigers and wolves normally leave their prey alone once they are done with their meals.
Are we really cursed with the inexplicable drive towards converting every known resource on earth into dollars and cents? What the hell is wrong with us?
This is necessary mainly for business documents where you only want to allow the other part read only ability, and don’t want the other party to be editing any contents of the document.
I was trying the PDFCreator printing client for a while. However this client seems to fail when dealing with much larger clients.
Thereafter I switched to using PDFOnline.com service. This service is not very stable. If you are using the new version, it crashes all the time. However you will still need to go through the new version experience the crash before you could get to the old version.
I tried primopdf.com after that. The result was horrendous. The site’s engine did not take into account the possiblity of versioning within the winword document. I ended up having the original unedited version of the document.
I have tried http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ it is working fine so far. The only exception experienced was an inexplicable note attached to one particular page of the document. Perhaps I should raise this issue to the service provider and have them improve their service to make it even better.
Then again imposing systems on reality, is like catching water with a net, exceptions will always bound to occur.
Recently I have been spending alot. More than what I have budgeted for per period time. In reflection though these spendings are not really derived from needs or necessity but seriously due to the lack of answer for this fundamental question? On good food and tonns on books.
Why the hell am I still wasting time working and making money? Seemingly I have made enough money for a long while a year or more perhaps given my predictable spending habits. Any extra money is but just some figures sitting in the bank account.
It seems money as a compensation for effort spent on work is just not really enough past a point.
Even though having spent way more than I should on what I dont really need, I still felt that something fundamentally was missing. I literally walked half of Singapore on foot the other day just searching for that missing answer. Dropped off a bus at fort canning park and slowly made my way on foot to Mount Faber and thereafter on foot back to Clementi traversing through the southern ridges. At some points in time, I did feel as though I could almost grasp at the abstract thing i was searching for however always it remained elusive.
The day after though when I just so happened to step into the National Geographic shop in Vivocity, I was totally blown away. Coming to a wall at the far end of the shop staring back at me was a huge map on the world on the wall, with each and every country and territory clearly demarcated one beside the other. Lying around the place too were photos and books on the exploits of fellow adventures to parts of the world hidden from most.
Yes! This is and remains the only reason as to my motivation for working my ass of making money. Alena’s living expenses aside. Without this goal of traversing the world overland or by boat, life becomes truly meaningless, despite the tonns of money to be made.
That night I made Alena a proposal. We must go to India and journey from the southern parts to the northern parts just south of the Himalayan region, if not Bhutan, Nepal than Kashmir. To go I must!
After talking with Satheesh for a while, i have decided that I should install Microsoft Sharepoint and attempt to play around with the technology to familiarize myself with it for future hacks.
Sadly my laptop could not support it. Ouch! The minimal requirement is a IIS 6.0 which means a Windows XP 64bit. Mines a Windows XP 32bit. I prefer this versus the Windows Vista which is currently in the market.
Meanwhile I guess I will be either shopping for a laptop or a desktop.
Am looking at something like the below
- Minimum 2 Ghz
- 4 GB RAM
- 320 GB HDD
Once acquired this should be a good developement environment powerhouse to deal with this mamoth microsoft technology.
Recently we met a problem displaying the Explorer view of share point on the internet Explorer of windows 2008. This is mainly due to the fact that Desktop Experience is not enabled by default on the Windows 2008 server. Once you have enabled it, the Explorer View of SharePoint should work perfectly