After four years of subscription with the green Starhub broadband today marks the day the Ethernet cable from my computer is detached from my black cable modem and attached to the white ADSL modem from the red Singtel!
I first started using Starhub through a corporate plan from my father's company; at the end of the two year contract I extended another two years because I needed the desktop that came with it. Now that contract was up again, but given that I will gain no benefits for continuing the plan, cost now becomes the deciding factor instead. So much as I have enjoyed the [somewhat] huge 8mbps bandwidth, I have no choice but to downgrade to a 3Mbps from Singtel.
Testing on a Singapore server...
...and a US server...
The speeds are good for now, but with the hardware and the connections still being new and green, they have not quite settled down. My analog home line disrupted my Internet and the mio TV box initially, and halfway through an online game with some friends I got mysteriously disconnected and after many hours of troubleshooting to no avail, my desktop was mysteriously reconnected again after a restart.
One other thing that bugs me a little is the colour of the modem. After painskatingly building up a [somewhat] uniform colour of black, grey and silver for my computer equipment, now comes a modem that is so white it looks out of place! Haha!
Apologies for being late. Everytime I think of the time needed to upload the photos I get put off haha.
As mentioned before, we had more freedom this time round to explore different places, made even easier by the fact that there were Supply and Transport personnel under our Group who could easily get hold of vehicles.
Within the training area there was the Freshwater Bay:
A few days later I went there a second time...
Down the road not too far was Seahound: No beach, rather a jetty-like platform.
Going out of the training area we went to the nearby coastal town of Yeppoon!
The wind was so strong, my camera flew! Ok that was a dumb joke, but really the winds there were very strong... ...the trees by the coast had been shaped such that they remain in the same positions even when there is no wind.
The quiet little town beside the beach:
I kind of like Yeppoon; imagine living in a house that faces such a nice beach, waking up every morning to the breeze.
Last but not least, the different creatures I met along the way... What are you staring at!?!
It was a gigantic turtle. Really huge in size.
Just like humans they cannot take heat, preferring to be under shade most of the time. If you disturb them, you will see them hopping from one shade to another.
For the record I didn't spot any.
I will have a concluding Part III soon! Wrapping up my entire Wallaby 2008 trip will be my R&R, and some other extras~
The fifth installment of the Call of Duty series has well lived up to the reputation it has built up over the years, both the good and the bad! Haha.
I think this game simulated war really well; even though the game was still rather linear, there were still some instances where I was left wondering where I should go or what I should do. When I was told to shoot enemy tanks down, they rained so many shells all over me that kicked up so much dirt, I could not see where the tanks were. Explosions would cause the ground to shake so much that 'I' as a sniper could not aim properly.
Then there were the @#$%! Japanese soldiers who @#$%! killed me so many times from behind; because their bayonets were already into 'me' before I could press the 'V' button.
Plotwise the game very well brought out the might of the Soviets [just like the Soviet music of Red Alert 3]; the constant yells to charge at the enemy reflected the 人海战术 the Soviets employed to fight against the Nazis.
Bad points wise, just like the previous games, it was still way too short, despite having a two-year development cycle. I completed the game in less than a day; too short to be fully immersed into the story haha. Also there were a couple of bugs that resulted in me having to restart the level.
Whereas COD5 is no doubt a great and fun game, I don't find COD5 a better game than the previous one; I put both at the same level.
Thinking about it, the better a game is created, the higher the expectations the fans will have with regards to the next one. COD4 and 5 has raised the bar very high, which makes one wonder how far the two developers can reach and surpass this bar in future games.
I just reached a new level in gaming today! While I was at the game the house telephone just next to me rang and I was unaware of it, while my brother heard it from inside his room; and I had no idea my brother had left the house until almost an hour later.
My lovely desktop is almost two years old, and over the two years the desktop has went through various stages of upgrades, almost until the stage it can no longer be zhng-ed anymore.
As can be seen my RAM is my weakest link, for the motherboard only supports maximum 2GB of RAM running at a mere 533MHz. Besides no dual channel feature is present.
Pentium D is essentially two Pentium 4s dumped together, so performance is not that great.
Sadly technology waits for no man, and more importantly, no poor man. While two years seem like a short time for a desktop mine is already showing signs of aging. One great example is games. While games from Electronic Arts, as mentioned in the previous entry, aren't that great, at least their demands for raw processing power aren't ridiculously high. Recent games like Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 still run fine on my desktop [although there is the occasional crash here and there]
Company of Heroes, a two-year-old:
Some games, however, are not that forgiving:
As can be seen my lovely desktop is barely passing the minimum requirements, and I saw for the first time today, a game that has minimum requirements higher than what my desktop offers: GTA4! It requires, among others, a Core 2 Duo minimally.
I still remembered back in the good old days of secondary school where Challenger still existed in the town centre beside the MRT station, the game section used to be a hangout for me; the standard of those days was a Pentium 4 [and the AMD equivalent], and sitting in my house was the earliest Pentium 3 product. So everytime I went there it would be a case of 'can see, cannot buy'.
Soon history will be repeating itself. Haha.
But I still love my desktop!
On a sidenote,
As if having minimum and recommended requirements for a game like Minesweeper was not strange enough, ESRB actually went to rate the game! Too much time in their hands? Haha.
Last but not least,
A little cleanup of the desktop, the background programs that run at startup, and the wallpaper to welcome the new year.
I finally completed all three campaigns in Red Alert 3!
To be honest Red Alert 3 is not exactly that fun; its nowhere near Company of Heroes despite the latter being around for already two years, but that was sort of expected for a game coming from Electronic Arts haha.
But I appreciate the effort put in by the team to come up with all the seemingly silly, but rather interesting features to make the game fun; that was unlike Tiberium Wars where the game was almost to the point of boring [until this day I have yet to complete the campaign, let alone start the expansion haha.]
To digress, I was disappointed when I realised Tiberium Wars came only with video cutscenes but no animation. Back in the glorious days of Tiberian Sun when I was a Primary Six kid:
Sure animation standards weren't as high as what we see today, but in those days they were enough to make me go wah!
[To digress more, Company of Heroes had plenty of them!]
Even the cutscenes from Tiberium Wars [and unfortunately, also Red Alert 3] aren't as exciting as previous games.
This time round Red Alert 3 came back with limited animation, nowhere near the games of yesteryears but still better than none.
Plot-wise one will rarely find a game where stupidity and fantasy are woven together into a package, like using sonar-equipped dolphins to down ships, attacking present day bombers using future day Japanese-style mechas that switches between land and air and sea modes, or building choppers that freeze units or shrink them into 'embarrassingly small sizes'.
Even the menu and the music is refreshing for a change!
The singing without the music. Sets the tone for the mighty Soviets. I like!
Kiddish enough to set a not-so-dark atmosphere, but decent enough to appear in a 21st century game.
All in all Red Alert 3 is not bad a game; at least this time its not 拿旧的概念翻炒一遍。
Being overseas for two months [oh ya reminds me I have yet to do my Wallaby Part II] has left me out of touch with my dearest home. Yesterday when I wanted to ask my friends out for a movie, I realised that Yahoo, and also the papers, no longer carry the showtimes for Overseas Princess!
Turned out Overseas Princess has maybe/likely/could be/there's a chance/I think so closed down! And it happened almost a month ago!
In the end we watched Bolt at Tampines Mall, after squeezing through a horrendously large crowd.
Gone are the days where one movie ticket cost $5 during weekdays and $7.50 during weekends. Gone are the days where I had to catch bus 69 to meet my friends there [because they live there and only I live here!] [and I remembered taking a taxi once because I was too late to take the bus haha]. Gone are the days where we could ahem, openly bring in McDonalds haha. Gone are the days where we did not need to sit according to the seat numbers we were allocated.
Despite all the complaints about the place being dirty with rubbish and spills and whatnot[which might just be true given that the place was already dark when we go in, so we can't see anything] I, in good fortune, had not encountered any. In fact I thought the surround sound system in the bigger theatre was quite good.
Just like what the dramas and movies always say, when things are in place we will take them for granted. Only when they are gone do we realise the importance of their roles in our lives. Yet like spilled water, once they are gone, they may never return.
But after watching so many dramas and so many movies and listening to the same 'words of advice' so many times, we still commit the same mistakes.
So ten years down the road, a new cinema will by then have already been up and running and is part of everyone's lives. No one will remember the old cinema anymore and all the nice memories that came about because of it. Humans can just...drop everything so quickly.
