//beconfused

Altavista Founder Dies

Flaherty died March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, Calif., about 20 miles south of San Francisco, family members said Friday.

It’s kinda sad if you point your browser to Altavista.com for some sort of information regarding the founder. They apparrently made no mention of Flaherty’s death.

Altavista was my favorite search engine back then when it was still under Compaq. It was still pretty good, back then it was Yahoo! and Altavista for me. It’s sad to see Altavista’s condition right now. (As of now, Altavista is part of Overture, which is now part of Yahoo!.)

Rest in peace.

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Years ago, my parents got me a Compaq Presario. It’s Pentium 1, that time considered as quite high technology already. It cost about SG$3,000 I think. Well, computers weren’t exactly the cheapest thing in town I guess.

That time was still Windows 95. I don’t know much about computers. The only thing I recall doing is to play one game of solitaire after another. You can’t blame me you know, that’s one of the few games I have in my computer.

Compaq bundled that SimCity 2000 Constructor Kit but it’s absolutely useless without the SimCity game itself. Why the hell do I want to construct buildings for SimCity 2000 if I don’t have the game?! What are theCompaq people thinking?

Then there’s another game that got me totally addicted, even up till now. Minesweeper. Finding mines have never been so fun.

But these are very basic games. After a couple of months with playing Minesweeper, I start playing online games at Shockwave.com. Didn’t play for long though.

One day, I called up my friend and ask him if he has got any good games. He recommended to me Age of Empires. So I followed the instructions and install the game.

That copy of Age of Empires is a pirated version. That time I really have the idea that pirated games are okay. Please don’t sue me Microsoft, I got yourAge of Empires game later from the stores and it’s original. [Note to Microsoft: If you sue me, please withdraw your lawsuit soon. After which, send me an Xbox and tour me around your research faculty.]

Then, there’s also the all popular Red Alert. Most of my classmates are playing it. To tell you the truth, I kinda suck in that game. All I know how to do is to build Tesla coils and watch my enemies get fried. I really like the sound effect too.

Most of the games I play requires me to build and build, raze and raze building. I like those types of games. Up till today, I still play this type of games.

I upgraded. Age of Empires 2 came. SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 came. Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack came. Windows 2000/XP/2003 includes Spider Solitaire which I find to be more interesting than the version of Solitairethat was originally bundled with Windows 95. The only game that doesn’t change is Minesweeper I guess.

In the Visual Basic Programming module that I took in school, we’re forced to make a space game for a graded assignment. I worked alone for that one. It’s a game called “Alien Attack”. I’ll post it for download soon. I need to update some codes as the high score system does not save high scores in your computer. It reads and submits the high score to a Microsoft SQL database that can only be access in school.

This is the 3rd game I made, the most complicated one too. The first was Hang man, then followed by this 4 by 4 game with tiles and you have to move them around to arrange them in numerical order after it’s shuffled. Both are inFlash. The Alien Attack game is made using the not-so-basic Visual Basic .Net language. I’ll post it soon.

Thanks to all whom have commented on my previous post.

Just a while before midnight, I picked up my phone and start dialing a number. It has been quite some time since I last called before midnight, I wonder if it is actually alright. And then I heard a lady’s voice. In a deep and husky voice she spoke, demanding my absolute attention. I listened obediently to her somewhat robotic voice.

“..for general enquiries on products and services, please call..” she commanded, “..for broadband technical enquiries, please press 1..”.

I have been using SingNet as my internet service provider (ISP) for 6 years and I believe that I have made at least 1 call to their technical services every year. I am always kinda embarrass when they ask me for my username because I understand that a crosscheck with their systems would also reveal the number of times I called. I wonder if I were the record holder in SingNet’s technical support line.

SingNet’s a good ISP, they have answered my question well, especially when my first question is so vague that it goes like, “Why has my internet got no connection?”. Most of the time it’s a hardware problem, so I should have actually called Compaq which is my previous PC’s brand. But you know, Compaq has shitty customer services, they just want to get their computers sold.

Blog*Spot is causing problems for me. Basically, I can’t access any sites hosted by Blog*Spot. The worse part is that that includes mine. It didn’t take me long to suspect it’s not my computer’s problem because most of my friends using SingNet can’t view the damn domain.

So I gave SingNet a ring at half past eleven, they have phone support till midnight. Like most phone support numbers, I got a recorded message to navigate me around their services.

I do know a thing or two about these recorded messages. Firstly, it’s all powered by robotic women. Yes, not just human, must be a woman. Not just a woman, she has got to have one of those BBC robotic newscaster voice. These recorded messages are used to divert attention and make people give up in calling technical support.

Take my favorite ISP as an example, the lady requested in the pre-recorded message for me to “try rebooting my computer first as I am waiting for the technical officer as it usually solves the problem”. It didn’t, Blog*Spot is having problems for days.

Then I got diverted to the menu. The lady commanded me to call different sets of numbers for specific technical supports. Finally the actual main menu comes as she tells me to press <1> for broadband technical support. Yes, that’s what I want!

So the technical guy answered. The good thing about SingNet is that they have enough technical people and I never waited for long, unlike that dreadful Compaq and put me into the 20 minutes queue. SingNet is smart to waste 2 minutes of my time by putting me on a recorded message. I would have screamed “Why the f*** can I not access Blog*Spot?”. Er, f*** means “fish”, you know those that swim. Oh, you don’t get me? Of course you don’t, there’re so many different species of fish, there’s puffer fish, clown fish, selfish and well… puffer fish. There’re so many types of fish, you probably don’t know what I’m referring. I’m actually say “Why the puffer fish can I not access Blog*Spot?”

I have been trying to access sub domains hosted under the blogspot.com but fail. Is there a problem with your servers?

[Translation: Why the puffer fish can I not access Blog*Spot?]

I always get redirected to new.blogger.com, it seems that only SingNet users are affected.

[Translation: It's you and your mom's fault!]

So he checked and he can miraculously access it. Then reconfirmed that I can’t. He put me on hold with some stupid classical music for 10 minutes, I am sure it’s ten minutes! He’s probably at the loo with his favorite computer magazine or gathering with his colleagues at the coffee corner discussing about their boss’s bad hair days.

He finally came back and provided me with a solution which is to access through their proxy server. Okay, that worked. He also assured me that the problems will be fixed as soon as possible and I should not be using their proxy servers necessarily.

Today, I checked my blog. It worked, this time without me having to insert a proxy. Damn, am I in good mood or what.

As for what really happened, Blog*Spot is never down, but on December 31, they updated some DNS stuff (they call it DNS snafu or something, not sure). I think that caused a problem when SingNet didn’t refresh their servers or something. This is only affecting SingNet users who are not accessing through a proxy server. So basically, if you’re using dial up, you’re safe. [SingNet Broadband does away with the proxy thingy.]

This, I believe, is the post that contains the most number of words.