After wandering in Lowyat forum for a while, I found out a forumer posted a pretty simple solution. But the fix is only viable if you are not using the RJ45 ethernet jack. If you are using Wifi then yeap, just do it!

As simple as that? No warranty needed

1. Go to Device Manager, either from control panel or simply type it in your Start Search.
2. Find the device under the category of Network Adapters, make sure you choose the Gigabit Ethernet Controller like the one in le photo.
3. Right click and DISABLE it. Voila!

If you want to use the ethernet jack again, all you have to do, is follow steps 1 and 2, and at the third step, click ENABLE.

First, Treyarch is making different games that encompass different eras, different technologies and different political situations. If they make the exact same games like Infinity Ward did to the Modern Warfare series, it ended up like crap. Frankly I play Black Ops single player again and again but I don’t want to play MW campaign for the second time. Black Ops campaign has totally different setups in between missions but Modern Warfares’ missions are the same!

Oh not to mention, what if a burger shop selling one burger that has two different names and appear on the menu at the same time? if you want the classic gameplay go for the old games you moron, if you want something new like me I would buy the new game, period. They are doing it right.

People need to stop whining ‘we need something new’ on old CoD comment section, and ‘you guys screwed the new cod’ on BO2 comment section. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, as simple as that.

TakeUrTime as shown in iPod Touch, no zoom in, as is.

TakeUrTime, for your information, is the best UCTI/APIIT timetable viewing utility ever built. Lemme tell you why:

• Only this runs on multiple-platform, I am talking not only about PC or Mac, but on iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. As long as the operating systems and browsers are updated, you name it, you got it.
• This is extremely quick, and offline-capable.
• This is the most beautiful form of APIIT timetable can ever be shown, to date.
• It works like magic on iPhone and iPod Touch, seriously, no zooming in required.
• Updates? No sweat, everything is automated. Seriously who wants to go to download site just to download a shmall update?
• Who the hell want to use executable file just for a small task? Plus it poses security issues if not code correctly.
• Best of all TakeUrTime has a developer API and notes built in.
• Not to mention I have my own database to backup these timetables.

What if UCTI webspace is down? TakeUrTime survives, period.

If your program doesn’t solve the problem its supposed to solve, what is the point of its existence? Ask yourself.

On Time for Facebook sucks

On Facebook? Why? For Facebook Addicts?

• It’s not offline-capable
• Such a torture to view on mobile devices
• Oh you need Facebook! Dah I just go to webspace, thats quicker. No wait, TakeUrTime, 1 or 2 seconds!
• It dies when UCTI webspace is down
• Who cares about next lesson or tomorrow’s lectures?

Simple Timetable for APIIT sucks, big time!

Simple? Really?

• Again it looks terribly ugly
• For every updates from the developer you have to download from MediaFire or RapidShare
• Who the hell cares about Status message when they can see their timetable?
• Same as On Time, it dies when UCTI webspace is down.
• Windows only, you helping Microsoft to monopolize market or you want people to bring a Wintel laptop just to view timetable?

As you see the previous attempts didn’t solve the problem. I think the programmers did it just to kao lui, to attract chicks and such.

As my sales record is zero. Gosh the following problems contributed to such failure:

1. Spent too much time explaining lappies without closing the sales
2. Helped other promoters out of mercy, without grab away theirs
3. I gave the one and only sale to my friend

Generally, I guess I am too soft, although I am really happy to see people smiling and intrigued by the lines of laptops, I ended up getting sacked for zero sales record. How ironic.

In fact I helped a senior promoter from being raped by a programmer who asked about how to upgrade to Win7Pro. The malay that give us briefing tell him to buy pirate and format the laptop. I then told him that he can use Windows Anytime Upgrade to do it, since Windows discs are all the same, meaning that we all installed the same thing, the difference is determine by the product key. For every single time Windows boots up, it checks your product key and activates different background services for you.

Sometimes I still can’t fathom that the fact the less techie ones get the sales, I mean the girls.

The problem: I didn’t want to be promoter, I want to be promoters’ technical assistant without commission, meaning helping them out a while when they get screwed by tough customers. Xancy Tan of Thunder Match replied Noted with Thanks but the outcome is… assigned as frontline promoter with commission. I am not good at sales but I am the best when talks about and choosing the right laptops. I guess the problem is… people like Derrick are a little bit too simple minded, and he has terrible English (we speak Chinese but he insist on using crippled English).

Most promoters suck at tech

Only a few seniors and Aravind that I recommended can totally handle the job of explaining laptops. The girls are maybe, just lucky, or simply their sweet appearance that gained them businesses.

Seriously they will miss me, I showed them Ultrabook’s famous 10-secs bootup, ambient light sensors of XPS series, infrared simulated touch screen of All-In-One PC, and other little tiny bits like AlienFX editor, Dell Stage. They need a technical explanation guy like meeeee….

PC Fair? Oh I just found business opportunities for my primary business.

I deserve to get sacked for this. I can engage pretty well with intrigued customers, and I will ask about their business, and when I found that their business opens an opportunity to my freelance company I will start to give them contact numbers to me and my partner.

But I only gave two away, the first one is a boss who just started an Android App developing company, they are looking for web marketing guys, which is, us. I instantly introduced our business and some of our previous clients and he is definitely interested, I just gave him our numbers but I forgot to take his.

The second one is actually my first sale (I gave it away) , she is a tough customer and has a business of supplying Chinese medicines to SEA. I asked her whether they got a website. She said no. And I suggested that she should actually open an online store. Guess what she wants that all along but dunno who to ask. I instantly gave her our numbers, and still forgot to take hers.

Razer cheered us up!

Razer has set up an event booth, selling nothing but have a big stage and loud speakers. This seriously sucked away the attention of people from other booths there. They hired 6 dancing babes that keep on throwing gifts (keychain straps, hats, tumblers, headbands, but sometimes Ferox, Naga mice) and 10 Dota 2 players! The match is fairly interesting but I can’t watch for long as I am not supposed to.

At about 8.30 pm I still distributing pamphlets, with Alienware on top side when approaching Razer booth. I handed to a guy but he rejected it, I saw his face, it’s damn familiar. And I was surprised that he is actually CEO of Razer, Tan Min Liang. Oh well not many people surrounded him, that’s abnormal. I guess he looks down on Alienwares and plays on his Razer Blade.

Later I saw a guy wearing an e-club Malaysia uniform. I started to talk to him, all the rubbish like you guys are selling Valve games ah? And in 3rd minute I started to ask him “Where can I get Dota 2 key ah?”. Guess what, he took out a piece of paper containing a list of product keys, and he tear one for me, he told me to activate at Steam. Seriously I have no idea how much they worth. But the guy said Valve might release Dota 2 for free, like Team Fortress 2 did last year!

My friend wants to pay 5 bucks to buy the strap from me. Nah! That’s my prize

That is not the job that I like

It’s damn obvious assigning me to do something idiotic is not going to be productive, 50 bucks for a day is pretty low -.-”

I insulted myself, seriously, this time. I applied for this one because I want to offer a higher quality service for PIKOM PC Fair. I wish PC fair has more techy promoter like me so the confusions of the customer can be solved. However the company’s agenda in this event, is to maximize profit, they want to get more for less, as less as possible.

Now we know why PIKOM PC Fair promoters are kinda, unprofessional in explaining to customers, they are considered pro to the dealers though, who are the ones that attempt to squeeze the most out of them.

In fact, a little optional training session for promoters might help!

Nevertheless…

What did I get from PC Fair? Dota 2 product key for free, a Razer strap, 2 potential clients, and saw chicks and babes.

And it’s PC Fair time! And after weeks of research, Google and forum reading, I decided I gonna get an Asus N55SF for my college as well as my future gaming life. So I saw Asus booth and went there, hope I can get a demo to play around and ask some advance technical things that may not be covered in online articles or YouTube reviews.

The booth is pretty nicely decorated, owned by ThunderMatch. There is a room created specially for N55 for visitors to experience its amazing sound quality. The sound is crisp, loud and bassy. Lot better than other lappies out there I believe. There is no game demo though

Speaking of games, I was a little worried bout its battery life. But a that time I still haven’t learn how to manually switch between graphics cards for power efficiency. So I decided to ask a young female promoter to demonstrate how to switch between gfx cards.

And the infinite loop begins! She asked another guy, and the another guy asked another one, and so on. Nobody at the booth knows how to do that. So I said ‘Screw it, let’s talk bou the price’ Immediately their Genius $$ mode switched on. The guy sure knows how to talk about price! But when I can’t stop myself from asking bout the specs, he stuck and tries to get over it! What the hell is this kind of ‘promoter’ if they don’t know bout laptops and computers! I am getting curious.

At the end I didn’t buy laptop from them, weeks after I bought it from forumer, which sells fresh lappies.

Getting behind the front line

It’s bout PC fair season again. And I saw Thunder Match posted a post bout hiring for PC fair on their Facebook Timeline. AND SO I applied and want to see how they hire, filter and teach their promoters. The first phase observation is rather surprising.

I sent an email, of my name, IC, and my preference of laptop + no-commission + as tech support class. That means I have no intention to be promoter I just want to help promoters if they got stuck in techs.

At the time of writing, it’s Tuesday, 3 days away from PC fair.

I got a classmate to go with me, Aravind Radha. He is good at choosing laptop brands, I am not that good but I am technical literate, I can explain most things that those promoters I met in December can’t.

There are lots of Chinese lil teenagers, most of them, weirdly dressed, like Hipsters and some of them are simply provocative. They don’t look like they know things about PC inside workings and knowledge of comparing parts! There is no interview, you are called inside, they tell you what to do.

Aravind is assigned to sell HP printers (I told laptop supervisor that he is good at laptop after that) while I am assigned to sell Dell laptops. And then 30 minutes of speech. The supervisor/team leader/whatever, Derrick is horrible in English, 20% of the time used to talk a little bit about Dell’s on-site support, McAfee and different series. And hoola, 80% of the time talking about credit card charges extra 4%, how to deal with customers, our minimum target of 15 lappies over 3 days, and if promoters got any problem, FIND HIM.

That’s the reason! If the supervisor is already cocky in front of what he is selling, how you expect his minions to do a better job? And he forgot to say that XPS 13 uses SSD! He only say ultrabook but didn’t go much into what Ultrabook is! Is that the way most PC fair booths work?

Then a more interesting fact came in, he asked whether anybody went to PC fair before. Only me and another malay/indian guy raised his hand up, none of the Chinese raise their hand up! C’mon they have no passion or interest in computer at all! If they have zero passion in computer, how you expect them to persuade customers into buying laptops? The reason why Steve Jobs is so successful is not only that he is creative, he is passionate in what he is doing! He loves his own products!

Seriously, the supervisor should talk more about what each series do, and tell everybody to go home and stdy bout it.

Nevertheless, I came for some… experience and insights.

Now I spill something here.

Pay per day if less than target: RM50
Commission per machine (laptop/touch screen): RM15
Pay per day if more than target: RM100

Is the pay good? Your choice.

Other PC Fair problems…

At the last hall, you will see telcos hire soooo many people line up and distribute brochures and pamphlets. You are physically spammed by their hands and vocal boxes. This is too much!

The fake products (Beats headphones especially) should not ever ever show up at PC Fair, it makes the whole event like, flea market? Pasar Malam?

PIKOM should so something about these, the quality of the previous years’ PC Fair must be restored! Apple booths are so far the best actually, their employees definitely know what they are selling, they don’t hire at last minute.

Felt offended by this post? I bet you are one of them!

The solution? Make an app that can work offline! Without knowledge on system programming, I have to use what I got, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP and AJAX. The key here is Application Cache and Local Storage of HTML5, without them TakeUrTime will be a mission impossible without system programming.

To use TakeUrTime, you will need to use browser that supports HTML5 and localStorage, which is not a problem if you are not using ancient Internet Explorer.

Click to here to go to TakeUrTime

Developer API

TakeUrTime API can be accessed by http://www.anonoz.com/tut/api.php

To GET the timetable data from my database, simply send a request like this:

http://www.anonoz.com/tut/api.php?alljson=1

It will give you the timetable database as well as the week of the timetable, and some metadata that might be useful to track version and check if the timetable is obsolete.

If you have used the webspace timetable lookup utility, chances are you have spend at least 1 or 2 minutes just to find your timetable, and the extreme downside is you can’t bookmark timetable page showing the specific intake. Here comes the solution, make a new one.

GrabUrTime is a more graphical, accessible UCTI timetable viewing utility, syncs everyday at 2am, support Facebook social plugins, bookmarking, setting as default and especially its highly graphical user interface. It runs on CSS3, allowing a highly graphical and colorful user interface with a few more lines fo code, no extra images loading required.

To access the app on Facebook (without HTTPS) here’s the link: http://apps.facebook.com/graburtime

To other users, you can just visit http://www.anonoz.com/gut

Please give me some feedback after using it. Thanks

Hell, this is not only the case of mid-autumn festival, there are many other festivals (I can’t name all of them) that people keep on giving gifts under the heavy coercing from the merchants, keep on promoting mooncakes in supermarkets or advertising in media. Well they are pretty successful.

And now, there are ice-cream mooncakes, yoghurt, sushi mooncakes, and more “innovations” coming into the market. Personally I still prefer the traditional baked mooncake. So is the festival all about selling, giving and dumping mooncakes? Well, for the mooncake bakeries yes.

Festivals are used to celebrate something, not selling something.

You got the following reasons, or excuses:

1. School is hogging your money
2. It’s boring
3. It’s meaningless

Or let me sum it up for you:

• My friends are not going, I’m a crowd follower, I don’t want to be teased, keep it simple, I’m not going too.

I decided to post this after our school is because in this way, I won’t be blamed by all of you, that I’m a very, very harsh critic.

School is not hogging your money, and to those who got the yellow mini book during graduation, you will notice how desperate school is trying to get money to host your graduation. They found about 10 sponsors, and they even have to invite the principal of a college to advertise their institute. By the way, the free goodie bags are not free to you, instead they are a way to advertise. Much like product placement in movies.

Next it’s boring? True, it’s boring, because it’s formal, no party, no prom night, and no alcohols. But do you know that photo shooting session is where the fun at? One day you will regret that on Facebook, there are so many photos that you friends have taken at MPAJ auditorium, and you were not there? It’s a once in a lifetime deal, you let it go, don’t even try to ask everybody come and take a photo again.

It’s meaningless? You sure? A few years after you will change your mind on this.

Your absence shows that you are not being supportive.

We all can’t deny that, for a typical Malaysian, SPM is the most important exam in our life, as it dictates our future by qualifying us to different qualities of tertiary education, and later determine what kind of career we will go for. As torturing as it seems, we take it as a big challenge and we embrace it miserably… Miserable, that’s what it’s going to be for most of us at March, when we get our results.

Among the 3 language subjects, malay is unnecessarily hard, why? Because I only use malay to talk to the mamak waiters, order Roti Canai n Teh Tarik.

Among the 3 science subjects, only physics is going to be useful in the future. The game industry needs lots of physics engine, but no such chemistry or biology engine…

Add Maths and Maths are going to prove themselves useful in near future… as we have to study it in tertiary education.

But moral… I think our own principle is suffice to make the world a better place. I don’t think memorizing 36 values and definitions is going to make the world better.

And sejarah, stop spamming me with the lies and deceptions. I don’t believe at 610 A.D. there will be mobile phones for your ‘god’ to send SMS to you, just to tell everybody to read. And war without killing is a big joke.

Finally, everybody laughs after SPM. And I am so happy to sign as witness for Biology Paper 3 for my exam centre.

GG SPM~