Some friends come and go, only true friends leave footprint etched deeply into the heart. Thanks for being one!

Nicely said.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Quote by Lucius Annaeus Seneca that I don’t quite agree on. True luck is when opportunity comes without preparation. Hahaa…

FRIENDS: 2 (maybe +1) | CLOSE FRIENDS: 3 , identifying in process… am i such a failure in life or is it the world???

Erm… Okay, kinda strange. Let’s see some others.

Spending an inordinate amount of time romancing the impossible.

Okay.

“Silence can be a expression of love” – Chika Umino, Honey and Clover season 2, epsiode 2.

The above personal message actually has a citation longer than its quotation. It’s almost like Harvard referencing style. Where is the year dude?

“Love doesn’t make the world go round, Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.” – Franklin P. Jones

Ridzuan has this. I stole the quote from him. And he, erm, borrowed it from someone.

“We know accurately only when we know little. With knowledge, doubt increases.” – Goethe

That’s my previous personal message before I stole Ridzuan’s.

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Rowan Atkinson Amazing Jesus

“I have a problem with Porsches. They’re wonderful cars, but I know I could never live with one. Somehow, the typical Porsche people — and I wish them no ill — are not, I feel, my kind of people. I don’t go around saying that Porsches are a pile of dung, but I do know that psychologically I couldn’t handle owning one.” Rowan Atkinson appeared to relent from this position when reviewing a Porsche 965 for Car magazine in the early-1990s.

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Singapore airlines is tops!

Once upon a time in Singapore, there lived a happy couple, Mr & Mrs Ng with their 3 lovely triplet daughters; Elaine, Ena & Ella.

The 3 daughters were brought up in a prim-and-proper fashion and when they reached 20, their parents thought it was time to get them married.

So, the parents found them the most suitable “leng chais” (handsome guys). They got married and were preparing to set-off on their honeymoon.

As “concerned” (more like “kay-poh”) parents, Mr & Mrs Ng were curious about their daughters’ first-night experience.

So, before the daughters went on their respective honeymoons, Mrs Ng told them…” Your father and I want to know about your 1st night encounters and whether you were satisfied. Write a letter to us, but so as not to raise your husbands’ curiosity…you all must use a code-name to describe your experiences”.

So, the excited daughters were off.

A week passed. Mr & Mrs Ng got the first letter. It was from Elaine.

They opened the letter and found the word “STANDARD CHARTERED”. They immediately took the newspaper and looked for the Standard Chartered advertisement. “Ah! here it is!”, exclaimed Mr. Ng. The motto for Standard Chartered was… “BIG, STRONG & FRIENDLY” Mr & Mrs. Ng were happy.

A week later, they got another letter. This time it was from Ena. The content was simple. “NESCAFE”. So, again they took the neswpaper and looked for the Nescafe ad. “Ah! here it is. “NESCAFE: PLEASURE TILL THE LAST DROP”. Again, Mr & Mrs Ng beamed with joy.

Another week passed. A month passed. And another. There was still no letter from Ella. The Ngs became worried.

Finally, the letter came. It was scribbled and could hardly be read, but Mrs. Ng managed to figure it out. The code-name was “SINGAPORE AIRLINES”.

Why Singapore Airlines? Mr.Ng rushed to the nearest store and got a newspaper. He flipped the pages frantically. “Ah! Here it is!” Mrs. Ng grabbed the page and read aloud.

Before she could finish. THUMP!!! … she fell off her chair.

The motto was… “7 TIMES A WEEK. 4 TO 6 TIMES A DAY. NON-STOP”.

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1. “They misunderestimated me.” –Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
2. “I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.” –Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001
3. “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on –shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” –Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
4. “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.” –Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
5. “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” –Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000
6. “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.” –Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2001. And later, “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.” –Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002.
7. “Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.” –Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
8. “My answer is bring them on.” –on Iraqi insurgents attacking U.S. forces, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2003

For the full list, read it at About.com. I actually quite dislike About.com, oh well, once in a while they do have pretty good stuff.

[via Digg]

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1. “Itâ??s probably too cheapâ?¦” â?? Ken Kutaragi, Regarding the $499 to $599 price point
2. “A bit pricey.” – Michael Ephraim, Managing Director of Sony Computer Entertainment Australia, speaking about Nintendo Wii in an interview with the age.com.au
3. “Microsoft does not concern us. Microsoft is not a technology company.” – Nobuyuki Idei, Sony chief corporate adviser in an interview with BBC NEWS
4. “We do not care.” â?? Kaz Hirai, current President of Computer Entertainment, regarding competition from Microsoft and Nintendo
5. “(the PS3) is not a game machineâ?¦” – Ken Kutaragi, Regarding the machineâ??s beefy hardware architecture
6. “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” - Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, responding to the outcry over Sony’s DRM Rootkit spyware uncovered on its music CDs

Thanks Sony, you guys brought a lot of memorable quotes. Meanwhile in technology news, PlayStation inventor Kutaragi leaves Sony. Since hitting the market seven months ago, PlayStation sales have been outpaced by Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.read more | digg story

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I quote from Wikipedia:

As of 2007, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disks and Flash disks define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate a gigabyte by dividing the bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1,073,741,824. This distinction is a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a manufacturer rated capacity of 40 gigabytes may have its capacity reported by the operating system as only 37.2 GB, depending on the type of report.

The difference between SI and binary prefixes is logarithmic â?? in other words, an SI kilobyte is nearly 98% as much as a kibibyte, but a megabyte is under 96% as much as a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% as much as a gibibyte. This means that a 500 GB hard disk drive would appear as “465 GB”. As storage sizes get larger and higher units are used, this difference will become more pronounced.

Note that computer memory is addressed in base 2, due to its design, so memory size is always a power of two (or some closely related quantity, for instance 384 MiB = 3Ã?227 bytes). It is thus convenient to work in binary units for RAM. Other computer measurements, like storage hardware size, data transfer rates, clock speeds, operations per second, etc., do not have an inherent base, and are usually presented in decimal units.

As an example, take a hard drive that can store exactly 140Ã?109 or 140 billion bytes after formatting. Generally, operating systems calculate disk and file sizes using binary numbers, so this 140 GB drive would be reported as “130.38 GB”. The result is that there is a significant discrepancy between what the consumer purchased and what their operating system says they have.

Some consumers feel short-changed when they discover the difference, and claim that manufacturers of drives and data transfer devices are using the decimal measurements in an intentionally misleading way to inflate their numbers, though these measurements are the norm in all fields other than computer memory. Several legal disputes have been waged over the confusion. See Binary prefix â?? Legal disputes.

The basis of the problem is of course that the official definition of the SI units is not well known, and some legal settlements include directions for manufacturers to use clearer info, e.g. by stating a hard disk’s size in both GB and GiB.

Thus:

When you purchase 160GB, which is 160,000,000,000 bytes.

You take 160,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 to be roughly equals to 149.0116119384765625 GB. This amount is reported by the operating system.

And look how much you seemed to be shortchanged:

160 GB – 149.0116119384765625 GB ~= 11 GB

It would be worse for the 320 GB hard disk I intend to purchase, I get 298.023223876953125 GB reported in the Operating System, which is roughly shortchanged of about 22 GB.

This problem has always been there but Western Digital sums it up best by lamenting – Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a “dozen,” because some bakers would view a “dozen” as including 13 items.

Wow, quote of the Day!

[I was talking about this to some friends and thought I share with you guys.]

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_(The most ironical thing my commander is quoted for saying.)_

It’s filled with irony and is so unfitting for my commander. He really amazes me at times. If I can choose, you know what I would have chosen. It’s almost like a sick joke.

[We were talking about purchasing pink network cables on purpose to fill the company today so I brushed the words with hot blushing pink.]

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(I got quoted in TODAY paper.)

Did you get the numbers right?

Afterthoughts and comments by Netizens about the election

WITH the dust still settling from Saturday’s polls, check out the post-election quips from our bloggers.

On the still-brewing James Gomez saga, blogger “beconfused” (beconfused.com) wondered whether it would be the end of the Workers’ Party member’s career.

“If the PAP are aggressive enough, perhaps it may just be the end of politics for James Gomez. In Singapore, to survive in politics, you will need a squeaky clean image. You wear white,” he said.

Read the whole article at TODAY in pdf or html.

I think this is the first time I’ve been quoted in a printed media, unless I missed it out. I don’t really have the chance to grab a copy of TODAY on most days as I either stay in camp or don’t pass by the MRT station. Thank you, viv, for pointing it out to me. That made my day.

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XXX Company Representative (CR): Good afternoon, how may I help you?
Me: I am calling on behalf of Mr. Joseph from ABC camp regarding the photocopier that you’re selling. Just to check with you – have you sent the quotations to us?
CR: No, we haven’t. The contact person for the sale has not get back to us.
Me: May I know what’s the current quoted price?
CR: That would be SG$5,200.
Me: We are tight on budget at the moment, would it be possible to sell us at – say – SG$5,000?
CR: SG$5,200 is a discounted price already, other people are selling at SG$5,700. You can check if you don’t believe.
Me: I see. It seems that other photocopiers are…
CR: This one prints faster and has better duplex functions.
Me: Yes, I know. We like the printer. Would you consider lowering the price to SG$5,000. We were thinking of just getting that photocopier.
CR: That would be hard, it’s already discounted.
Me: But we like your photocopier. Would you consider lowering to SG$5,000 to meet our budget?
CR: I’ll check for you.
Me: Thanks a lot.

… Five minutes later…

CR: Hi, thanks for waiting. We can lower to SG$5,000. It’s a really good photocopier at a very good value already. I’ll send the quotations to you now.
Me: Thanks once again.

_(A picture of a HP volume printer I took at Biopolis. I don’t have a picture of a photocopying machine.)_

It’s quite fun, you know. I never bargained much in my life. That’s perhaps the advantage of going through national service. You do a bunch of strange things sometimes. This is one of the sai kang I enjoy. I never negotiated on the phone for such things, so it’s quite an experience for me.

And guess what, when you screwed up, it’s really okay. Because my superior asked me to negotiate till SG$5,000. If I really screwed up, he can’t reprimand me, after all I don’t do this for a living.

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# “I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me.” — Nashville, Tenn., May 27, 2004
# “Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.” — Washington, D.C., Jan. 23, 2004
# “Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.” — Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2004
# “I want to thank the astronauts who are with us, the courageous spacial entrepreneurs who set such a wonderful example for the young of our country.” — Washington, D.C. Jan. 14, 2004
# “We will make sure our troops have all that is necessary to complete their missions. That’s why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental – supplemental funding, which is money for armor and body parts and ammunition and fuel.” — Erie, Pa., Sept. 4, 2004
# “After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain, we will not have an all-volunteer army. And yet, this week – we will have an all-volunteer army!” — Daytona Beach, Fla., Oct. 16, 2004
# “Tribal sovereignty means that; it’s sovereign. I mean, you’re a – you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.” — Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004
# “I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft.” — second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004
# “Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.” — Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
# “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

Source: About.com

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Man: “Haven’t we met before?”
Woman: “Yes, I’m the receptionist at the VD Clinic.”

Man: “Haven’t I seen you someplace before?
Woman: “Yeah, that’s why I don’t go there anymore.”

Man: “Is this seat empty?”
Woman: “Yes, and this one will be too if you sit down.”

Man: “So, wanna go back to my place ?”
Woman: “Well, I don’t know. Will two people fit under a rock?”

Man: “Your place or mine?”
Woman: “Both. You go to yours and I’ll go to mine.”

Man: “I’d like to call you. What’s your number?”
Woman: “It’s in the phone book.”
Man: “But I don’t know your name.”
Woman: “That’s in the phone book too.”

Man: “So what do you do for a living?”
Woman: “I’m a female impersonator.”

Man: “What sign were you born under?”
Woman: “No Parking.”

Man: “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”
Woman: “Do not Enter”

Man: “How do you like your eggs in the morning?”
Woman: “Unfertilized !”

Man: “Hey, come on, we’re both here at this bar for the same reason”
Woman: “Yeah! Let’s pick up some chicks!”

Man: “I’m here to fulfill your every sexual fantasy.”
Woman: “You mean you’ve got both a donkey and a Great Dane?”

Man: “I know how to please a woman.”
Woman: “Then please leave me alone.”

Man: “I want to give myself to you.”
Woman: “Sorry, I don’t accept cheap gifts.”

Man: “I can tell that you want me.”
Woman: “Ohhhh. You’re so right. I want you to leave.”

Man: “If I could see you naked, I’d die happy:
Woman: “Yeah, but if I saw you naked, I’d probably die laughing.”

Man: “Hey cutie, how ’bout you and I hitting the hot spots?”
Woman: “Sorry, I don’t date outside my species..”

Man: “Your body is like a temple.”
Woman: “Sorry, there are no services today.”

Man: “I’d go through anything for you.”
Woman: “Good! Let’s start with your bank account.”

Man: “I would go to the end of the world for you.
Woman: “Yes, but would you stay there?”

Well, these counter lines aren’t important for me. They’re made for women. Maybe the guys can take note of these lines so they won’t use them again, lol.

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