Pages of INK

Collected my “free” PSP (Portable Sony Playstation) today and I must say, this ranks near the top of my list for one of the geekiest gadgets to own. Reasons are:

• It’s got so much functionality packed into that portable unit – video player, MP3 player, photo viewer, web browser over wireless LAN, and did I mention it plays games!
• It’s supposedly almost as powerful as a Playstation 2.
• It’s got superb battery life (4-6 hours).
• It’s so darn sexy.

So, what did I do to qualify for this “free” deal? Well, I recontracted my Singnet Broadband (SNBB) from 1.5Mbps ($83.90 per month) to 10Mbps ($88.00 per month) and got a PSP, 2 free PSP games and 2 free PC games as part of the promotional offer.

I would’ve chosen the white version over the black one anyday for that iMac-compatible look but those weren’t on offer.

The 2 free PSP games were given out randomly and I was “lucky” enough to end up with two decent games – Bleach 2 and Sengoku Ace III. Not as bad as some people who ended up with Space Invaders (I can feel their pain) but not as good as those who got Ridge Racer (the most demanding game on the PSP thus far).

At this rate, I don’t think I’m ever going to get started on my Civilization IV which I purchased last week…

Popularity: 13% [?]

Been on a gaming binge lately thanks to some pals who introduced me to the following addictive (and brain cell vapourizing) online games. Try them at your own risk! And, as usual, let’s compare scores! Heh heh…

First off, a classic – Chess! I’ve not played chess in over 2 years when I last lost to an old classmate 3 games in a row. He was somebody I used to be able to beat easily in JC so I figured that my brain was degenerating at record proportions (only in Chess) so it was time to retire. My comeback match a few nights ago was marked with a very surprising win, much to the shock of my very confident challenger (don’t tell you who!). In fact, I was pretty resigned to losing until he/she made some mistakes towards the later part of the game.

Black (ME!) forcing White to exchange queens thanks to a fork and check on his/her king, thus, heavily tilting the endgame in Black’s favour (rooks are very powerful in the endgame).

Next, the current puzzle fad that’s all the rage right now – Sudoku! Sudoku is a puzzle game where you have to fill up a 9×9 grid of nine smaller 3×3 squares. The rules are simple:
(i) each 3×3 square must have all the numbers 1 to 9 and numbers cannot repeat,
(ii) each row of 9 squares (up and down) must have all the numbers 1 to 9 and numbers cannot repeat.

Try the online version! It’s free and allows you to rank your timing against everybody else.

Finally, this game was discovered by Pris during her trip to Germany earlier this year. It’s called “Set” and happens to be a Mensa Select Top 5 game for 1991 (gee that’s ancient!). The objective of the game is for you to create sets of 3 pictures consisting of either common shapes, colours, patterns or numbers.

Try it online! The daily puzzle is refreshed daily (doh!)

Hope you guys have fun! And, if you have other games or puzzles to recommend, do let me know in the Comments section.

Popularity: 11% [?]

For the unitiated, the thought of boardgames (or boredgames depending on your level of patience) evokes momories of classics like Monopoly, Cluedo and Risk that we used to play before console and computer games became the in-thing. Well, ok, I must admit that I didn’t really play these games much either as I had boxes of Mask action figures and Zoids to keep me occupied; but you know how parents would sometimes insist on playtime with their kids and I was nice enough to spare them the humiliation of playing with kiddy stuff.

Anyway, back to the main event, last Friday (14th Oct), we had the priviledge of hosting a boardgame night for IslandHope and it turned out to be a fun-filled success.

Click on the image below for all the action.

Some other memorable highlights of the night:

• Reindeer winning the “Underdog of the Night” award by triumphing twice in Blockus despite very tough and competitive opposition.
• Mermaid winning the “My One Longer Than Yours” award for building the longest railroad in Ticket to Ride.
• And finally, Guppy winning the “Sound System of the Night” award for his persistent (and very audible) laugh tracks during the Settlers of Catan smackdown. No prizes for guessing who won that game…

Popularity: 8% [?]

CRASH – Crummy Rotten Appalling Sick Hard-disk.

Got into the office on Tuesday morning, full of verve, only to be greeted by this cryptic message:

"Disk Read Failure. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

Dejavu. Exactly one month ago, I stepped into the office, half an hour before an important meeting to be greeted by an almost identical message. Only that time, the screen was a lot bluer and there were numbers all over the screen. My heart sank… I had not backed-up some important code, documents and e-mail since a few days ago and this time, the hard-disk could not be detected even after trying it in other laptops and external USB casings. Basically, this thing was hosed.

As if things were not bad enough, I got home wanting to update my blog (which was 1 month behind) and was greeted by this message :

"WP doesn't seem to be installed."

WP stands for WordPress, the blogging software I’m using. So I fire up my MySQL Administrator and log into my blog database and find that all my data is missing! I contact Brinkster tech support and am patiently told that the database server had, you guessed it, c-r-a-s-h-e-d, and that I should’ve backed up my data yadda yadda. *groan*

To cut a long story short, after two failed Hitachi Deathstars (Hitachi Deskstar is the actual laptop hard-disk brand) in the space of a month and many tech support calls to restore my blog, I decided to get myself a new external hard-disk to do backups on a regular basis. Being so reliant on the digital, losing data is like getting part of my memory wiped out. Another crash and I’ll develop amnesia!

My new Seagate 300GB backup drive in an external Sarotech aluminium casing. Who says backing up data can’t be sexy?

Anyway, Kaidy, guess I can really empathise with you better now! Haha…

Popularity: 2% [?]

The toughest part about blogging is having to recall events of the day and to pick out mental images of something, anything, remotely interesting that is worth writing about. Being new to this, and being a person whose 24 hours seem to pass in 8, that equates to basically “not much”.

So, “Hello, World?”

Popularity: 5% [?]