Narrowband.org

As we couldn’t take our own cameras along during the race, all photos shown here in this entry except for the last two - were taken using the N82 itself. During the race, we could only use one phone for uploading photos (SIM card provided by the organizers), so a little bit of strategy had to kick in here. Two in-car phone chargers were also provided for obvious reasons. The topics for the race were announced only around 5 minutes before the actual flag-off.

There were 8 Nissan Cefiros that were used as race vehicles - one for each team. We had to get back to 1U (our finish-line) in 5 and 1/2 hours’ time, and we wanted to cover 5 locations! In each car, there would be a driver, a cameraguy, a race marshal, and the two team members. Our cameraguy’s name was Desmond, our race marshal Eve, and our driver was Mr Ibrahim! Mr Ibrahim was an excellent driver because he knew almost the whole Klang Valley, including short cuts and all.
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The announcement of team members was made shortly before the phone handover ceremony at the Hibiscus function room in One World Hotel. I was indeed very lucky to be paired with Pinkpau, cuz I knew she could write very well! She could come up with just the right descriptions for our photos during the race.

You can say that I had it easy - I practically skipped the whole description-writing part and left that to her. She also went around interviewing people (-.-”) in order to get more background info and stuff. We’ll come to that later…
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The Nokia Wireless Adventure II race was fun. It really was. I remember how panicky it felt when we thought we couldn’t upload all our photos onto the website (via 3G) on time. Damn stress ok. Anyway, it’s over now and a very big congratulations to the winners, Suanie and Frankie who each won a trip for two to Hong Kong!

On top of that, they also get RM1500 bux for pocket money! And don’t forget that brand new Nokia N82 which was given to everyone the night before. I think it was a close race. Everyone was really good, and I believe that must’ve had given the judges a hard time determining the winner. I have lots of photos so I’ll do this in parts. First up, show you my roommate.
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*Blows away dust* Ok it’s been quite a while since I updated. The entry (+ pics) on my trip to Australia will be published later. Hehe. Actually, I *thought* we would be able to visit Brisbane as well. But no, it didn’t happen. We took advantage of Air Asia X’s cheap (like, super cheap!!) fares and flew to one of its hottest (pun intended - it’s summer) destinations, Gold Coast. And we remained there for the whole trip. Anyway, meanwhile I wanna tell you guys about a boo-boo I did yesterday.

I bet some of you saw a password-protected entry in your feeds. And then when you came here and (I quote Angel) ’searched high and low’, there wasn’t any password-protected entry to be found! Look, it’s like this. I accidentally published an entry that I did not intend to make public. Yes it’s one of bloggers’ greatest sins, ever. How can such a stupid mistake be committed? Within seconds, that entry quickly propagated to my Feedburner via RSS and I panicked like a siaokia. Deleting the entry was no use - it wouldn’t be removed from the Feedburner quickly enough. Many of my subscribers’ RSS readers (Google Reader/Feedreader/Bloglines/etc) would have fetched the contents from my Feedburner.

So I tried a trick. In less than one minute after publishing that entry, I deleted it, and republished another dummy entry (the password-protected entry that some of you guys saw, which has since been deleted). This immediately sent a ‘ping’ to my Feedburner to update the feed contents, and voila!, as I expected, my Feedburner sync-ed with my blog contents! That unintentional entry was gone, and a newly-published, password-protected entry was up. *Phew*. Nevermind that the password-protected entry was visible, as long as the unintended entry was removed! Speaking of that ’sensitive’ entry, how many of you actually caught a glimpse of it in your Readers while I was frantically trying to remove it? ;p

Recap: In order sync my blog with my Feedburner, I simply published a new entry to ‘nudge’ or ping my Feedburner. The reason why that password-protected post still appeared (prior to this entry) in your RSS Readers even though I’ve deleted it off my blog, was because I didn’t bother to publish another new entry to sync things. As a result, it stayed in my Feedburner until your RSS reader had picked it up (and cached until now). Uhm… wakarimasuka?

P/s. By the way, someone hotlinked one of my images from her blog, but the image is not visible (cannot appear on her site lah). That’s because I’ve activated a feature that does not allow hotlinking of my images from another domain besides ‘narrowband.org’. Actually, it’s okay to use my images, as long as my watermark/signature is not cropped off. But I’d recommend that the images be hosted on your own server (Photobucket, Flickr, etc), so as to not share my site’s bandwidth. Yougetwataimean? So darling, download the image to your harddrive, and upload it onto your own Photobucket ok? ;D

The 2008 Quiksilver Revolution 2.0 at the Sunway Lagoon’s surf beach saw some of the world’s best boarding actions performed on and off beach, much to the enjoyment of the appreciative Malaysian youths who mostly turned up revealing more skin than they usually do on normal days. It was a wicked beach party!

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We’re seconds away from a spanking brand new year and let me tell you, 2007 has been nothing short of rewarding as far as blogging is concerned. I made many new friends and saw many new faces - each has their own writing style and their own legion of readers. Best of all, it is gratifying to know that some of these people actually do recognize you and have at some point in time dropped by your blog before.

Yesterday I had one such opportunity (possibly the final one in 2007) - to go out and meet several fellow Malaysian bloggers at Pavilion KL. Esther told me that there would be a free AVP screening, and asked if I was interested. As a freeloader, I’m always up for anything that employs the ‘no-payment’ scheme. After the movie, I was thankful that the ticket was free because otherwise I’d have kicked myself for actually paying to watch it. Oh right, this post isn’t supposed to be about AVP…

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It’s the time of the year again to review, recap and remember some of the highlights and most memorable entries on Narrowband.org. As many of you did not start reading me from January onwards, here’s an opportunity for you to walk down Narrowband.org’s memory lane (I know for a fact that at least one reader used to dig up my archives and read all the way til my maiden post on Narrowband.org!). The following are the selected entries, sorted according to the month in which they were published.

January 2007

And as the Internship Draws to an End… (Read)
One of the main highlights during this time of the year was my internship with a company that gave me much more than just a working experience. It marked the beginning of an extraordinary friendship that I thought I could only dream of.

How to Create a CSS Photo Gallery (Read)
I did a CSS Photo Gallery based on an online tutorial, and modified the codes to fancify the whole thing. I then wrote my own tutorial on how to do that - and for the first time in my life, I experienced the “Digg effect”.

Widening Narrowband.org (Read)
Some of you might have seen the original Narrowband.org layout - a two-column theme called Intense, created by Sadish Bala. I then altered the CSS to widen the layout and accomodate another column.
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Okay 86.52465% of you would have probably guessed - at first glance - that this is a sponsored entry. Let me assure you, this is not. Narrowband hasn’t crossed over to the dark side yet! I am doing community service right now. I want to talk about a new service that a friend of mine is providing (well, of course he has his own team members lah).

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Yes, the drive has journeyed on to the Land Where Consumer Electronics Are Eternally Blessed. But it’s not the end of the world. Surprisingly, I’m not *that* upset about it. I mean, I have back ups of the really important stuff - like photos. Documents… I can’t think of any important documents that I’ve lost. I have back ups of my lecture notes and slides throughout my years in university though - if you consider that important.

That’s my harddisk, being treated under Intensive Care Unit. It didn’t make past the critical stage. It showed some positive signs, after more than 15 minutes plugged into another laptop - signs that say the drive was successfully detected. However, efforts to access it were futile. The clacking noise made was pretty loud. I could actually feel something knocking against its casing when I held the drive in my hands. Something mechanical has apparently gone terribly wrong. I’m in the process of getting a new hdd. Meanwhile, I’ll be using another laptop at home - which has become somewhat like a ‘common laptop’ in the family hall. It’s much newer than mine, and has better specs so it’s not that bad.

By the way, Google Reader rawks. I just love the interface. Remember I was talking about my feed management in Feedreader? Well, the downside is that it’s offline. Therefore, it’s gone together with my dead harddisk. I’ve since been using Google Reader. I guess keeping things online does have its advantages. In fact, a number of my installer (setup) files have previously been uploaded onto my server too. As for mp3s… ahh… they were my prized collection. But then again, I hardly listened to all of them, only a select few. And guess what, I have my favorite tracks in my phone already (especially one super rare track). Thank goodness.

I don’t like Mondays. Especially when it rains. But I like Monday nights - because it’s my workout night. Heading to the gym now, adios!

Here’s a community service reminder: BACK UP YOUR HARDDISK TODAY! Or, at least your important files. Failing to do so may cause severe depression. Be very afraid.

I can safely say that there’s probably a 50-50 chance of successful data recovery. From what I gather (Internet as well as friends), the harddisk is dying and I’ve to get the data out ASAP. Luckily, I’ve done one round of backing-up about a month ago - where a large portion of my jpeg files was burnt into DVD-Rs. So the ‘data loss’ this time around (touchwood) is not that critical, I guess. That said, there are still files and folders that I’d want to keep (which I’ve not backed up), so I hope I’ll still be able to recover them. Last night’s Windows Automatic Update was real, after all - It’s got nothing to do with the harddisk failure.

I’ve just removed the harddisk from my notebook, and I plan to use an IDE-USB interfacing cable to access the harddisk, using another computer. By the way, I am currently using Sis’ desktop. Last night’s entry was published using my phone - the phone that many people consider a close contender of the iPhone (although you shouldn’t really compare the two side-by-side).

I decided that I won’t do that again (tapping on the numeric keypad, manually inserting symbols in tags such as <img src=”Picture URL”… />), because it’s not at all a fun thing to do! The photo taken was resized using the phone’s installed software. Anyway, let’s go back to my laptop. Right now, the harddisk is sitting on my laptop, (almost, maybe) lifelessly. Tonight, after hooking it up with another PC, I’ll try to salvage whatever I can. It’s strange because according to Bernard, Hitachi drives are considered to be reliable. I’ve not dropped my laptop or anything.

He added that once there are strange noises heard from the harddisk, it’s unlikely that data can still be recovered from it. Anyway, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’ll be sending Mom & Co. to Bukit Jalil stadium for Emil Chou’s concert before proceeding to kautim my harddisk. I can also forget about checking out this year’s Bon Odori Festival - Sis and I planned to go and have a look-see actually. Now no mood lah. This whole misfortune started last night - and I couldn’t think of a better reason than it being Friday the 13th!