Happy birthday to my roommate Kenneth. Nearly all the Malaysians who aren't attending Midwest came for his birthday dinner held at My Thai, Shadyside. Eunice and I tried to find a nearby bakery but failed so we didn't have a cake during the dinner. But we picked up one after that and had an after-dinner party in our apartment. Photos will be posted soon at !http://crisab.homelinux.com/gallery



Welcome to the club, Kenneth. Your birthday is just a week away from mine and Eunice's.



Was very surprised to see the quality of shops at Walnut Street. There were many high-end boutiques especially those for women. I wish I live nearby. The houses there are mainly owned by the upperclass Pittsburghers like lawyers, doctors and bankers I think. The houses were really potray those lived by happy families like those we see on T.V.



My sore throat might get worsed. I finished 4 bottles of water today and I still feel slightly feverish. I need proper sleep tonight. Concepts homework waiting and this time it's hard.



Bo's leavig later at 3.45 am for his internship in Washington, D.C. Will not meet him after that for he'll be returning to Melbourne at the end of the summer. Good luck, mate

Finally I'm able to get blogger to reach my server via FTP. The problem was all about my ftp server not being passive. I went as far as asking help from Blogger's support group. They told me that blogger only support either secure ftp or passive ftp.



I fulfilled a long time intention of watching Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was very similar to deep impact excepted no characters were isolated. The movie is quite entertaining in a sense that it conjured some wild possibilities. I don't know why moviemakers like to send disasters to New York City. This time, it was flooded and eventually became part of the expanded Artic continent. In fact, nearly the entire Northern hemisphere was swallowed up by snow. The U.S. government ordered its citizen to evacuate as far south as possible. Then, the reverse of reality happened - the influx of American refugees at the border with Mexico. The President announced that it forgave all Latin American debts.... everyone laughed in the cinema. The freaky part of the movie is the eye of the snow storm. The area within the eye will experience tremendous drop in temperature - 10 degrees per second. People froze to death that instantly so I think it was like spraying someone with liquid nitrogen. There was a scene on three Brith RAF choppers which froze instantly crash when they were on the way to evacuate the royal family at Balmoral Castle. By the way, the movie was also about the paleonclimatologist who modelled the climate change rescuing his son stuck in New York.



I'm having a sore throat now. Sucks..

Thanks to multiple problems with package installers in my Redhat box, I've neglected my blog for the past few days. Even my summer studies is put aside. Last night, I made a second installation thinking that some package might have been corrupted. Still, redhat hangs when I tried installing a new version of php using yum.



I'd like to thank my dear friends here in CMU who gave Eunice and I a treat for our birthday in Bangkok Balcony on Saturday night. Kenneth, Chern Yih, Ken Yu, Joo May, Ding, Wendy, Seng Keat and Bo.. Great friends I have here in Pittsburgh. Great friends who are in other places as well. Thanks for all the birthday wishes via ICQ, MSN, Shoutbox etc. Max and Rafiq gave me a call. Thanks, guys.



What a coincidence that Eunice aka Yau Nai and I share the same birthday. What is more suprising is that we're from the same pre-uni center in Shah Alam. Oh ya, I remembered during Orientation. The O.C.s were asking if anyone wants to get a copy of the placement test. Out of the large crowd of incoming scholars, Eunice and I stood up asking for it since we said we would do anything to get good grades. None of our friends remembered about that incident. Neither does Eunice.



The food during the birthday dinner was great. Thai food. Ah, our daily lunch now is Thai Food too.. from the food trucks. Quite pricey but the classy decor explains the bill. Not as fancy as P.F. Chang's but worthy to be called one of those upper-class Asian restaurants. Usually, Malaysians would hold birthday dinners here.



Concepts and Stats 217 are really bothering me now. I find myself to have a very low sense of understanding mathematical ideas. Thanks to Kenneth and Eunice who explained the proof of Division with Remainder Theorem. I wish I can be as quick as them in grasping. My logic thinking is quite slow I must say.... Paokong commented my homework solutions today and that I should use the more proper way to prove. He took the course last semester and admitted that it was a course so rigid in writing proofs. I guess Maths' like Law. You need some structured way of arguing. It's different from problem solving.



Back to revising Stats 217... halfway downloading Fedora Core 2 for the other free P.C.Hope none of the problems with this first installation occurs there. Supposedly Fedora seems to be the more popular version of Red Hat now...

Yay! I'm 20 today.



Will not write much now. Need to sleep. Have been configuring my server for the whole night. Damn. Econs exam on monday and Concepts HW due!

testing. first try on putting the blog on my home server

Fuiyo.. Concepts (as in Concepts of Maths) was very not intuitive today. I feel so dumb compared to that math major girl who's taking the course with us. Prof. Grossberg introduced to us Well Ordering Principle (W.O.P.) to us. The definition seems infinitive and to the dumb like, it seems trivial. It states the existence of a minimum value in a non-empty set of numbers. Am I right? Correct me if I'm wrong. When he delved into proving the theorem that the Induction Principle = W.O.P, that's when I started to get dizzy. Suppose this.. suppose that...



I finally got the Indy machine running. Last Monday, Bo and I carted a free 19" SGI Monitor from the kind and helpful SCS Help Desk. This afternoon, the guy who donated the Indy to me came and resetted the root password and he taught a few basic stuff about Irix and Unix in generally. It's just a 166 Mhz machine built around 10 years ago but it is so well built that I can call it a product that has been over-engineered. The light blue casing is very solid. In fact, more solid than any PC casing I've seen. The CPU thin is thin too. The interesting part about this machine is its boot tune. When you turn on this Indy, you can here this tada sound.... I still have a lot to read about this IRIX. Apprarently, there are still user groups on IRIX 6.2 which might be helpful. Yet to set up the network as well. I intend to run this as a simple web server. Most probably this site will be hosted on that machine instead on my CMU Andrew web space.



After Arun left, I dashed to Hammershlag to help Seng Keat and friends move his things to his new dorm room at Morewood. Then I got a call from someone whom I'm borrowing a piece of software from so I had to leave Seng Keat before even meeting him (emm.. weird statement).



Then it started to rain heavily with the thunders and lightning.



This sucks. I'm stuck in Cyert waiting for the thunderstorm to go away. Killing time by writing a blog. Huh...