Mandarin And Me

To be frank, I was from a Chinese primary school. And at that time, my Mandarin was quite good. yeah yeah yeah, so I did score an A in my UPSR, but that was like wot, 7 years ago? Fast forward to secondary school. Ended up in some newly formed smart school, which wasn't remotely smart. (Was referring to the students, not the school), and knowing more people from English educated backgrounds. This changed me a lot. Back in primary school, it was 99% Mandarin, 1% English/BM. Here, in secondary school, its the total opposite. Well, not really, more like 90% English, 2% BM, 8% Mandarin. Darn. And due to that, I mingled more with those from SK backgrounds that those who are Chinese educated. Well, I still can mix well with the Chinese educated ones, as I still can speak some Mandarin. So I take it as my advantage. LOL. Anyway, my parents kinda forced me to relearn Mandarin in secondary school, claiming that they did not want my 6 years of Chinese education to be wasted. Yeah right. Reluctantly, I took up Mandarin, from Form 1 all the way till form 5. Results? None too satisfying. Did not fail, but gosh was it boring. Tell me to write an essay or read a Chinese newspaper, chances are, I might have some difficulties. Heck, even using XunLei is kinda hard. Should I or should I not learn Mandarin? I guess I might need to. The Chinese market is growing at a very fast rate, and if my Mandarin continues to suck, there goes my future. Yeah. Looks like I need to read some more Mandarin words. Last week, my sister SMS-ed me in Mandarin. Took me ages to decipher what those words were saying. I can see where is this going...

Win7. Ain't that great?

After weeks of using Win7, here are some more in depth problems.

1) Plug And Play service kinda buggy. I don't know if it's just my side, but every time after using a USB drive (pendrive or external HDD), and I want to eject my drive by clicking on the "Safely remove hardware" icon, it takes a very long time (around 15 seconds) before the pop up message appears. At first I thought it was my USB drives problem, but using it on my friend's laptop, which is also Win7, there was no problem. I noticed that svchost.exe will take up a lot of CPU time when i try to eject the drive. (around 45-50%). I've ran Windows Update to see if there was any problem, but there were no updates as yet)

2) When I launch Media Player Classic to play any video file, the mplayerc.exe process will also shoot up consuming CPU time. I've downloaded the latest the version of KLM, but the problem persists.

3) DCOM launcher occasionally eats up tons of CPU time again, and yes, via svchost.exe again.

4) Is it actually possible for a video to make the video card driver stop responding? cuz I have a video that causes the ATi Catalyst driver to crash everytime i play it. It seems that KLM has a problem, as when I used WMP to play it, it works perfectly fine.

5) While opening folders in Win7, the explorer.exe process again consumes a lot of CPU time.

Kampar has affected me

Ever since coming to Kampar, my body clock has gone haywire. Back in KL, i usually sleep by 12am. But ever since coming to Kampar, my sleeping habits has changed dramatically. Now? The earliest I sleep is 2am. Latest? 8am. Bloody hell yeah, 8am. That does suck. Penning this down at exactly 5:30am didn't help either. I had assignments yesterday, which lasted till 7am. Got home, bathed, spammed /k/ a while and slept at 8am. yeah, then i woke up at 4pm. Damn. Talk about body clock gone wrong. Well, unless I'm working a night shift at McDonald's or 7 Eleven, having my day turned into night is just so wrong. I can't imagine what would it be like 3 years later. Would I be dead by then (literally), or would I have changed all my habits? My mind tells me that is this not good at all, and in which, well, I could be dead before next year. LOL

Introduction : Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

Managed to get my hands on the beta version of Office 2010. Let's see how much improved is it. Alright, here it is when downloading. Love the speed. Managed to download the whole installation under 1 hour 30minutes.

Extracting the files. Took me almost 10 minutes on my laptop running a Core Duo T2450 processor.

EULA. Just click "Accept" to continue..

Options for you to Upgrade, Keep All Previous Versions or Remove other application.

Installation progress. This took me almost an hour to install on my crappy laptop.

Installation completed. A restart is necessary.

Now MS gives you the option to send a ":)" or a ":(" based on ur feedback.

Here's the "new" Power Point. Only minor changes to the menu bar.

Most changes are here. File save menu, printing etc can be found here. Since Power Point's color is orange, it can be found around the file menu.

The "new" Excel. Like Power Point, most obvious changes are to the menu bar.

File menu options for Excel. Notice the green theme.

Lastly, the most used Office component, Word. Users from Office2007 will feel right at home. For those from 2003, things are a little harder.

Blue is used in the file menu this time.

I suppose this is all for now. Will continue using Office 2010 and provide more feedback. Do let me know if there's anything you all wanna see from Office 2010.

Blog...

Darn, has been quite some time since I last updated..

seems like sudah berkarat..

will update when something happens..

LOL