Japanese drama - Shiroi Kyoto (The Great White Tower)

This is a highly addictive drama about 2 outstanding doctors who pursue their distinctly different goals. Zaizen Goro (Karasawa Toshiaki) is an ambitious surgeon who is working his way up the medical field's pecking order by his excellent surgery skills and clever use of politics. Satomi Shuji (Eguchi Yosuke) is a doctor whose expertise lies in cancer research. Both are doctors of Naniwa University Hospital and have known each other for years, as rivals and as friends.

Throughout the show, many questions are raised about doctors and the medical system, from philosophical ones down to the practical ones. It's interesting to see how Zaizen and Satomi differ on these issues. It is this that makes the show particularly attractive to me, as it brings different facets of an issue to light.

The pacing of the story is just right and some flashbacks of the story are shown to emphasize that the decision an individual makes at an critical juncture can mean a world of difference. For a doctor, it means life or death. The characters are well-developed, in particular Zaizen, who does certain things which you can't forgive but can thoroughly understand. Each character goes through his own turmoil, and each makes a decision on how to handle it, and the script is excellent at depicting the different faces of humanity. Some people will falter, others will stand steadfast.

Thumbs up for an excellent Japanese drama!
(Spoiler alert!)Here's a great blog entry on the show and the final episode.

More shows to watch out for!

Soulcalibur III

After the reading the previews for Soulcalibur 3 (SC3), I wasn't really excited. I wasn't too keen on the new modes, namely Character Creation mode, and the Chronicles of the Sword mode, and I was skeptical that the addition of a few new characters would better an already excellent game.

But after playing it for a few hours, I think the game is definitely worth it, especially if you like the last installation of the series.

First, the visual effects appeared to have gotten better. Rippling streams of water churning out foam, sparking as light bounces off them. Ephemeral tongues of fire lapping up their victims before dying out. Mists that thinly veil your vision yet reveals the world of SC3 in it's full splendour. This has got to be one of the games with the best visuals on the PS2.

Second, the multiple endings add replay value to the Tale of Souls mode. The new feature of requiring the player to input some commands (the success or failure will influence some elements of the game) makes the game more varied, and coupled with the choices the player can make in deciding how to pursue his goal makes player want to comeback for more and see all the different endings.

Third, improvements in stage design, music and character design make the whole game tightly integrated. Obviously, much thought has been put into creating a believeable and enjoyable world. For example, the haunting Oriental music being played in Setsuka's sakura garden accentuates the Japanese atmosphere prior to the battle. Some of the arenas are so detailed and well-designed, that you can't help but admire the architecture.


I'm not particularly excited by the new character additions but I guess it's not too bad. Some of the new characters are interesting, particularly Tira, who uses some sort of a hoola-hoop. The pace of the game has been increased, I'm used to the slower game in SC2 but it shouldn't be too big a matter. My only gripe is the change of some of the attacks of some characters, especially Xianghua.

Being scolded (and not snapping back) IS part of the jobscope

Recently I keep seeing/hearing stuff about getting scolded is a normal part of a job.

I saw this job advert.

• Able to remain calm under pressure


• Remain tolerant even when provoked.

There was a post in a forum that said being scolded is part of the job and you just need to get used to it. Civil service, mind you.

Reporters covering accidents or social news lament that they always have to deal with people when they are emotional and thus are scolded almost everyday (ocassionally threatened with and receiving bodily damage too).

My colleague said she went for a job interview at a certain bank offered high pay for a customer service job but was warned by the interviewer she was too soft-spoken as she needed to deal ferocious customers who lash out at them.

I've never liked service-related jobs because of this. Customer-facing jobs (and militaristic ones) demand this, but I hope this is not true of most jobs. If a boss has to resort to scolding his employees frequently, don't you think there is something wrong with the boss, the employees or the company culture? I hope I don't get to work with a screwed-up boss or in a screwed up team, or worse, a srewed-up company.

Job hunt continues.

Dopod 900 & O2 XDA Exec

O2 XDA Exec

Specs

Reviews
http://www.tekguru.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7031

http://www.infosyncworld.com/reviews/n/6265.html

Very attractive gadget, but it's not available in Singapore, not yet anyway. The closest thing that is available here is the Dopod 900.



Specs

Specs in Chinese

Reviews
http://www.ppcsg.com/index.php?showtopic=59588

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/handhelds/0,39001708,39095784p,00.htm

It costs $1738 from Singtel for a 2-yr plan. Ouch!

17 days into work as part-time IT executive

There are 5 people working in my company, 3 part-timers and none of the part-timers are looking forward to staying. Other than distance, I don't have any complaints about the job actually. Some of the more interesting things I have learnt on the job are using simple AWK and SED to do some text processing.

sed -i "s/hahaha/hehehe" myfile.txt

This replaces all instances of the string "hahaha" with the string "hehehe". How useful is this?
Well, if I need to fit many webpages into a small webserver, you can use sed to delete all the irrelevant tags (like those that inserted by FrontPage) or comments to squeeze the files into smnaller sizes. Or if you need to add some html into many files that contain the same structured data, this comes in handy as well. For example, this shell script adds a new string tag5 after tag4 for all the htm files in the current directory:

myfiles=`ls|grep "htm$"`; for xfile in $myfiles; do sed -i "s/tag4/tag4;tag5" $xfile; done;

Most people would prefer to use Server Side Includes to avoid such a maintenance nightmare from appearing in the first place, but if you are not allowed to use that then perhaps this is an alternative.

I've always wondered how Windows knew which interface to use in a PC with multiple adapters. Found out you can bind certain protocols to specific network adapters such that it becomes the default interface to be used.

So it's not too bad, at least I'm learning something while doing some mundane jobs like updating catalgoues or dis/assembling PCs.

2 days into work as part-time IT executive

It's been 2 days into the job. Well, let's talk about the location of the workplace. It's in an industrial park in the north and takes 1 hr 45 min to reach there from my place. I have to take a bus, take the train, change train, then walk abt the distance between 2 bus-stops to take a bus to get there.It's pretty inconvenient and the bus fare is is ard $5.40 per day, to and fro. It gets tiring quickly too, I spend ard 4 out of around 8-9 waking, non-working hours on travelling.

Let's do a quick calculation, assuming I work 20 days per month earning around $50 per day, spending ard $9 on transport and food, it comes to around $800+ per month. I guesss it's ok for a part-time job.

The main office itself is average, neither tidy nor messy. There are faint smudges on the walls. Some boxes and stuff lying in corners. It's not too bad, some of the government offices are worse, like those IT departments in the military which I've seen when I went for interviews. There are 2 clusters of cubicles, each cluster containing 4 cubicles arranged 2-by-2. Outside, there are more cubicles arranged linearly. A very typical SME office. I saw 2 cameras hanging in the opposite corners of the main office, and I thought "Wah lao".

The worst thing is the state of the PCs. When was the last time you've seen a PC with a 486 CPU with 128 Mb of EDO ram running Windows 95? The last time I've seen them was in 2002, in the army, and I heard they were going to be replaced by Pentium 3s that same year. It's interesting to see such things in 2005, but it's a pain working on them. Yes, they are functional, but you can wash the toilet-bowl with a toothbrush too. Debian is installed on them too, but Windows 95 seems to work better, for some reason there's too much disk thrashing when using Debian.

The actual work I'm doing is quite mundane, as the manager puts it, and I agree, but not necessarily simple. It's basically a bit of everything, end-user support, maintenance and backup, administration, web designing. Nice, vague descriptions. Basically it's doing some stuff like burning CDs/DVDs, fixing printing layout problems in OpenOffice and such stuff. Main problems are using software I'm not familiar with(don't know that you can only save up to 100Mb with the unregistered version of a certain software, how to convert ISO images to other formats) and unstable equipment (CD/DVD-drives that fail on you, display problems, slow PCs). And not being very knowledgeable in the Linux shell. These don't seem to be very tough problems, though it can hamper how fast I do the job as I need to troubleshoot additional problems or google intensively for info that is not readily available.

Sending out more job applications later, hope to land a real job soon.

Korean movie - Scent of Love

I caught this show on either Channel 8 or Channel U. It seems that the reviews are not very good. The main gripes are that the movie is devoid of new ideas and the inability of the director to develop the characters as the original novel on which it is based on comprises of 4 volumes. I agree with these points, however, I find that it is still a show worth watching on two accounts.

First, the acting. In particular, Jang Jin-Young, puts up a strong performance as she grows up from a feisty student, experiences the pain of love lost, and becomes a subdued woman scarred by her wounds. Park Hae-Il puts in a credible performance as he soothes her soul with his tenderness and thoughtfulness. At certain points in the movie, their performances are so convincing that I actually felt for them.

Second, the dialogue. The lines evoke much feelings but not in an overwhelming fashion, making the movie believeable. In particular, the conversation between Jin-Young and Hae-Il as that sat on the swing was particularly heart-wrenching.

Overall, I think it was a nice movie, the cinematography and music was fitting and added to the feeling of the movie. It wasn't overly melodramatic even though the story was a sad one so the director probably handled the emotions of the movie well.

More shows to watch out for!

Recommended for the wrong job

Continuing my job-hunt, I went down to a company in the north this morning. Unfortunately I was matched for the wrong job. I was told that my job scope was Unix administration or programming. However, I was tested on assembling a PC. After fumbling around, I told the interviewer I couldn't do it. I wasn't here for this. Somewhere along the communication line, there's been a mixed up, resulting in the agency sending me down for this job.

It could have ended on a sour note, but the manager was flexible and asked me what I could do. So I told him and since he was having a few tasks that needed to be settled, I demonstrated a bit on those. I felt he was satisfied. Basically it wasn't going to a permanent job, or maybe it won't even be a contractual one, but I guess it's better than doing nothing at this point in time.

Resetting a lost WordPress password

This blog has been lying vacant for a few months now, so I've clean forgotten the username and password. That means I cannot use the password retrieval feature too. Thankfully this post got me in again.

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=md5('new_password') WHERE user_login='admin';