Category Archives: random

random, self, singaporeans

The End of an Era – Goodbye Mr Lee Kuan Yew

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I count myself fortunate having been alive during the lifetime of Lee Kuan Yew. I have actually seen with my own eyes how the transformation of Singapore was done.

When he was alive, stories were rife about how strict and stern he was. How uncompromising his position was, woe be those who tried to oppose him. His very presence in the same room as you would cause balls to shrink and you started to squeal like a little girl (yes it’s just an exaggeration).

Like everyone else, we don’t know what we have, until we no longer have it. Lee Kuan Yew passed away on 23 March 2015, and suddenly, the guiding light of Singapore was extinguished. What happened next was unexpected, and unprecedented.

People from all over Singapore came to Parliament House to pay last respects. Not a few thousands mind you – HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. All in all, in the 4 days, over 1.2 million people have paid tribute to him, with something like 450,000 having done so in person at Parliament House. Putting that in context, that is 20% of the entire population of Singapore (foreigners included) have paid their last respects to him.

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random, self

Going to Windows 7 64-bit

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Windows 7, the latest client version in the Mi...
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This is probably going to be one of my shortest posts.

When I first installed Windows 7, I was initially worried about the compatibility problems that I may have if I had installed the 64 bit version just like I had with WinXP 64-bit. Many software didn’t have a 64-bit version, and still don’t. However after about a year, I’ve seen almost no difference in terms of compatibility between Win7 32-bit and Win7 64-bit.

Further, recently my PC started acting really strangely – it would hang or freeze at random times and I couldn’t pinpoint it at all.

Also, I have been running Windows 7 for over a year now. It’s about the right time for a full reformat anyway.

Since I have my C: drive as a standalone partition, wiping it out and reformatting it is not much of a problem. My data (ie documents, pictures, savegames etc) is safely tucked away in other partitions. Also, having a NAS helps somewhat too, since all your stuff are actually not on the PC but on a network drive somewhere.

Thus I decided now would be a good time to reformat and go up to 64-bit.

Long story short, after booting up Win7 64-bit for the first time, the weird problems of hanging and freezing persisted. Thus it couldn’t be a software problem, had to be hardware-related. I spent a day thinking about this, wondering what I needed to swap out/upgrade. I even began looking at prices for CPUs (the chip, not the computer case), motherboards, RAMs etc.

Eventually I narrowed it down to my old 5-year-old 250GB harddisk. I wish I had installed a SMART monitor for the harddisk. I had enabled SMART in the BIOS but didn’t follow up by installing a monitor for it, so when the harddisk started to fail I was unaware. Anyway now I do, so the same thing shouldn’t happen again, I hope!

You know what I hate about reformatting?

After the reformat I would have to re-install EVERYTHING.. my Firefox, my Thunderbird, my games, etc. One saving grace is Steam – whatever games I had installed under Steam is all right back when I re-installed the Steam client.

 

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