Everybody's Doing Matt and Ben

If you haven't seen this video yet what is wrong with you?

Filed under fun | |

Requiem

Slam!

You freaking playing with me? Look who's the boss now! Slam! Want a piece of me? Slam! You little piece of junk. Blasted piece of worthless metal. I will euthanize you if you were freaking real, you sanamagan. Slam!



Well. There goes my DVD player.

Filed under everyday | |

The Botched Job

My officemates and I had lunch in a small eatery at Lalaipan (I’m not sure about the spelling), which is an open marketplace just a few minutes walk from the office. Of course, we had to make our rounds in the marketplace, where they were selling everything from live crabs to bags to DVDs. (They can’t beat Quiapo in the Philippines though, where alongside some rosaries and talismans you’d find cock rings, fertility pills and abortion cocktails. This right in front of a Catholic church.)

On our way back to the office, we found that the plastic bags my officemates were carrying had slashes on them – apparently some thieves and pickpockets had been on the move. Amazing, as my officemates were walking right ahead of me and I never noticed. But the place was also cramped you’d barely notice it if somebody plucked out your kidneys while you’re walking. I wish I had the same cunning so I could apply to work part time for the CIA.

Fortunately, the thieves weren’t able to finish the job as the wallets and cellphones of my colleagues were intact inside the plastic bags. “There’d usually be two persons at work,” one of my colleagues offered. “One would be knifing the bags, and a second person would be attempting to sneak the valuables out of the bags.”

In audit, this is what we call Segregation of Duties.

Filed under everyday | |

Next

Next on my reading list is Michael Crichton's Next. I am being redundant.

I can't believe I'm really reading again. Sometime in college, my fixation with books lost steam. If you're an accounting student it's just too easy to lose interest in literature. You would rather spend time trying to hide that floating 1 peso in your balance sheet than get deluded into thinking you have free time in your hand to read a book. Unless of course you are mother brain Heidee. I think that being involved in competitive debate also played a part. If you had to analyze and make a case out of the top 10 pressing world issues, you'd so easily lose interest in the top 10 bestsellers in National Bookstore (or Golden Bell, if you're from Zamboanga City). Unless, again, you're Heidee.

My previous read was Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. I thoroughly enjoyed the humor in the first chapters, but towards the end, it felt like there were too many things happening with too little explanation to keep the pages under four hundred. But the ending was fun so yeah, I'd still recommend it. 

Filed under book | |

It's Suntory time

Another video clip, my friends, and this time it's a scene from "Lost in Translation."

Filed under movies | |

I'm Done with my Jail Time

I just finished watching all the DVDs I have of Prison Break. All 12 of them, which I bought in Myanmar.

Now what?

Filed under thailand, tv | |

The Hawaii Chair

Before I hit the sack I would usually download some podcasts from iTunes for listening/viewing while I commute my way to work. One of my favorite subscriptions is Best of Youtube. You won't believe some outrageous stuff they got in there. But then again you already do.

Last Friday, en route to work, I watched this.

Filed under everyday, fun | |

Oops

Oops, they did it again.

Filed under interests | |

Dirty Job

After finishing reading Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie- yes, such a crime to have not picked up this book 10 years ago despite its popularity, eh?- here's next on my reading list:

Filed under book | |

Troubleshooting

This post is only for those who own an Acer 4310. So, shoo shoo.

Okay, just to set things straight, I am not an expert nor am I pretending to be one. I am simply an owner who's done a bit of searching on the net and wanting to share some (probably) useful info.

Before I migrated to Windows Vista, I've had my share of glitches with my notebook, largely owing to the fact that I am such a sucker for fresh releases of customized Windows OS from the nearest IT shop here in Bangkok. So sue me.

Anyways, here's what I found out that may be useful to other Acer Aspire 4310 users.

The Acer Aspire 4310, said an Acer technician to me, is designed for Windows Vista. The Acer CD drivers pack that came with the notebook are all for Vista so that confirms it. But of course, like other PC's, it can run on XP as well. That said, the first thing you need to decide for yourself is whether or not you would like give Vista a try, or if you would hang on to good almighty XP.

If you go with XP, that means you're one of the substantial number of people who are comfortable with the reliability that XP offers you wouldn't think of touching Vista. Initially I did try XP Pro SP2 on my notebook and it ran perfectly well. (But eventually I switched to Vista because of those delicious GUI and Aero effects.)

Now since the hardware in the 4310 are Vista-ready, you're going to need some additional drivers for some stuff to work in XP, like Bluetooth, volume dial, Wi-fi and etc.

The good thing is all these drivers are available in the Acer website. Check out the Euro site here and all the goodies offered:

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_4310.html

Remember to load only the XP drivers and to install the Intel Chipset first, and then all the rest.

Now chances are, you will come across some problems with the camera. The Acer technician told me I should use the Suyin cam driver. It did work, but I found out on the other hand that the Acer CrystalEye camera shortcut link under the Programs list no longer worked. What happened was the 1.3 megapixel camera built into the system had shown up as a "USB drive" in My Computer instead, which isn't really a problem. Look for it, it's there. So instead of using the broken CrystalEye camera link, you just can just go to your My Computer folder, click on the videocam icon and snap away.

Now how about if you would like to use Vista? First of all, the original 512MB RAM is intended to work on the Home edition of Vista, but if you want your notebook to run faster (or if you want to install a higher version of Vista like Premium or Ultimate), you just gotta upgrade your RAM.

Upgrading the RAM however doesn't mean you're turning your system into a heavy-duty Deus Ex Machina. Your notebook, after all, is still running on Intel Celeron with a shared graphics memory. A top of the line 40K Baht PC would usually have dual (or quad!) core processor and a dedicated graphics memory. The Aspire 4310 is single core and uses shared memory of 224 MB. But for me that works just fine. It's all a story of preference and user requirements anyways.

Once you do a clean install (clean is always better than the Upgrade option), you will notice that Vista would automatically install the required drivers including all updates necessary for your in-built hardware to work. If you find something's still amiss, like if the Wi-Fi network adapter wouldn't work, you can simply download the necessary Vista drivers from the above Acer Euro website. It's really that simple with Vista.

Additionally, I found out that I don't have to separately install the Suyin camera driver. But I did notice that unlike Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger couldn't detect the notebook's camera, initially. Fortunately, Acer offers a solution: simply install the Bison camera driver. I did and problem was solved.

I'm not sure if installing the Bison camera driver will sort out the same Yahoo Messenger glitch within XP because I never tried it, but why don't you go ahead and test drive? You can always uninstall the driver if you run into any problem.

Also, if you find that there's a problem with the Bluetooth driver that Vista automatically installed in your notebook, simply load the driver from Acer website instead.

So there you go. That's about all I know about my notebook. I've installed all the Vista updates and hotfixes from the Microsoft website, just to be safe. Previously I installed the Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh (Beta) update, but I was getting some problems with Internet Explorer- sometimes the browser fails and self-closes- so I decided to uninstall it to rectify this glitch and it did, though not a hundred percent. Vista is far from perfect but heck, it sure is pretty. I also switched to Firefox, which is more stable than Internet Explorer, and I also opted not to install the Acer Empowering tools- I don't need these. I had them running while I was on XP but I never used them.

And just for added info, what's my notebook's Windows Experience Index rating, you might ask. Well, my lowest subscore is a humble 2.6, owing to the shared graphics memory. It's just a 17K-Baht notebook in case you have forgotten. But the rest of the subscores are quite okay:

What's your rating? Post a comment.

Filed under geek squad | |

That busted yellow van

Filed under movies | |