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This is a coolermaster Jet 7. I have HAD this cooler… Just yesterday, it was acting up… THe Jet Like thing on top had stopped running and my cpu temp went all the way up to 65! Damn coolermaster. I realised that the screws on the copper Heatsink fit an 80mm fan… couple of minutes and some mounting tape later….

VOILA i stuck 3 80mm fans one on top of the other resulting in a monstrosity i call the tower of terror… LOL sounds so ghey.

As you can see… the size aint that much different from the original Jet 7. Surprisingly the performance and noise ainthalf bad! Not to mention this…..

Those ARE UV LEDs you see in the fan… did i mention the whole green thing is UV reactive? Call me a UV whore! I AM A MODDER! HEAR ME ROAR…
School is out… i am officially not affiliated with a college, now hopefully i can get the grades for manchester and 23 Grandale St… =p

Till next time… unless my PC blows up first… =)

Stupid portugese computer won´t let me copy and paste! Dammit, now I lost my blog.

Anyway, at a friend´s house in Lisboa recuperating from yesterday´s match and the adventures of the days before that. Fantastic game to watch. Will blog about it later.

And as for the Scandinavian conspiracy, geographical neighbours Sweeden and Denmark would both qualify for the quarter finals if they drew 2-2 or more hence kicking Italy out of the competition even if they had won their last match.

Trivia: The Spaniards make fun of the Portugese chant “Portugal Olé” because its pronunced pur-tu-gal o-le. Putu in spanish means pussy.

Greetings from sunny Spain where the weather is great and the women are beautiful (and bountiful)!

Hmm… so the English made it through after all. Guess that “fluke” win by France in the group stages didn´t affect them that much.

And I´ll be watching Portugal v England in Lisbon this Thursday! Woot! But say some cwazy English fan decides to offer 1000 pounds for them tickets hehe, I might reconsider heh!

Sad to know that Italy crashed out. But if you play like shite I guess you don´t deserve to go through. Watched the game at some seedy Spanish bar in Cordoba ordering “uno cola y atun” and repeatedly saying “no habla espanyol” everytime some feller decides to chat. The Denmark – Sweeden 2-2 draw seems a bit fishy to me… But oh well, I´ll leave the conspiracy theories to the Italians to come up with like usual.

Oh, and my mohawk´s gone already. No way was I going to make it through customs looking like a hooligan. Last thing Portugal wants is another yob from England who looks like he´s courting danger. And there is always the mother factor when I decide to fly back to KL too…

I was at Birmingham’s Bullring for a date with unruly hair and an unkept goatee and sideburns which Roz hated very much last Wednesday. But that aside, I didn’t get any shopping done but we did manage to catch The Day After Tomorrow. Roz thinks its a very disturbing movie. I agree, its very apocalyptic. Special effects were great as usual… but I’m sure watching the movie again in 5 years time will net me not being impressed at all. Just try watching ID4 again and you’ll see my point.

Anyway, I made the mistake of not telling me mates in Coventry that I was in the “neighbourhood” so to speak. That resulted in a 30 minute dash for dinner that evening with the boys at Sobar in Birm to which I was to catch my 10:23pm bus after the mini Naquiyuddin house gathering (minus Jimmy Boy of course who is the only farker not on this bloody island). But Perng being Perng hijacked my bus tickets and so I willingly joined the coalition back to Coventry.

And soon after a decree by Roz to Fariz to “clean up my excess hair” I landed up with this:

Portugal here I come! Whoo hoo!

In the space of 1 minute, this man:

scored TWO goals! Whoo hoo! Football rocks! /me is going to LOVE reading the tabloids tomorrow… hee hee! Looks like Mr Beckham is going to be public enemy number one again!

France 2 – England 1

Viva la France!

I have found the ultimate boredom killer….

p/s: Greece & Spain. =)

I’m bored. Exams ended last week. Bumming is actually becoming a chore.

I hope someone bothers to port this game to java for mobiles. I can’t seem to get enough of it at the moment.

Watched Avalon recently. Very very nice, directed by Mamoru Oshii. And I would appreciate it if someone can explain the ending, cause I don’t have a clue. At all.

Also watched Van Helsing and Shrek 2 recently. Quite dissapointing. Van Helsing was as generic as they come, while most of the good scenes in Shrek 2 were already shown in the trailer. I was probably more entertained watching my sassy girl. And I’m not even a big fan of those kind of movies.

There also seem to be a lack in good anime lately. Although I found one or two old ones to watch. Voices of a distant star was short and sweet, nice animation. Nausicaa was also good despite being almost as old as me.

Mailman woke me up to deliver….

This and…

should kill my boredom… for now.

Before I go any further, a shoutout of good luck to the Warwick blokes who are sitting for first papers soon. You sad-ass mofos. Giler lambat nak exam. Orang lain dah merdeka lama dah. ‘Nuff said heh!

And thus summer descends upon us. Tell tale signs include skimpy dressed mat-salleh chicks and sunbathing neighbours (hello!). Which is really making me look forward to my Spain and Portugal trip. FOR THE FOOTBALL OF COURSE what were you thinking? Hee hee! Project Ole commences on the 21st June wahey! Not long now…

Anyway, I sat for my (technically) last paper this afternoon – Japanese Stage 1 written test. Man it was tough. Tough because I didn’t study much for it; my bad. The comprehension passage was cute though. It was about Mike’s dog (Maiku no inu) who wanted to be reincarnated as a cat because all it would need to do was sleep eat and then sleep again. Well, my thoughts were, “Hmm… this sounds remotely like what I do nowadays!” which is true to some effect. Of course there is always the occasional PS2 o shimas (play PS2) which is always sugoi and totemo omoshiroi. Apologies for the linguistically challenged. I have been watching too much anime lately…

With lazy days ahead, time has been spent watching over a collective 300GB plus worth of anime, movies and tv series. Man I love this house! Oh, we went ahead and bought the Netgear DG834G Wireless router/modem from MicroDirect for £79.34. Fantastic price! Remember, it retails over £90 and sells on ebay for sometimes much more! Idiots… if they only bothered to check on Pricerunner for prices. Getting the Netgear for that cost was lucky though, it was on a special promotional price and I barely made it to the shop on Upper Brook Street 5 minutes before the deal closed. Phewh! So what of our 2 existing routers? Well, we’re probably going to sell the fantastic Sitecom one for its face value to our juniors and send in the old router for servicing when I get back home. Damn that GS8100 to hell. I should have never considered buying that piece of trash.

On a sadder note, my two sisters have been hospital frequenters lately. One sustained 50% fractures in one of her vertebrae when she fell down some stairs in school and the other broke some funky joint (I will find out what this is Jasmine and I admit its not the sterno-cladio mastoid joint as originally thought!) in her elbow. The younger one has now got pins sticking out of her elbow and the other has titanium implants in her spine. Ouch? You bet. Say hello to no roller-coasters for a while let alone somersault flips for cheerleading. So right now my mom is kinda paranoid whenever I call home (which is in a blue moon apparently). Can’t blame her. She probably thinks that the probability for her son to go carousing for danger is much higher!

Economics for Dummies™ teaches you that the closer a particular market is to the “perfect competition” state, the lower the price of a product. For non-economists, “perfect competition” is where there are many buyers, many sellers, products are indistinguishable from one another and substitutable, few (if any) barries to market entry and well informed purchasers and sellers. OK, that might not be entirely correct… (cue for Rozanna to fire away!) The point I’m trying to make is the higher the supply for a good, the lower price it will (should?) command. Which should be what ebay.com and other auction sites ARE.

I’m currently eyeing this NetGear 54 Mbps Wireless ADSL Firewall Router DG834G on ebay.co.uk which retails at £99.86 (plus VAT) on ebuyer.co.uk. On paper its a fantastic piece of hardware so commanding such a price is no biggie. Buying retail would be the no-brainer approach to take if return-ability (see previous post on Maplins) and warranty were factors in the purchase. But that isn’t the case hence me turning to ebay.co.uk for a better deal.

Given the number of SAME routers on sale, you’d wonder if basic economics applied at all, the postulate would be that prices would naturally fall ie. be LOWER than the retail price. After all, isn’t that the whole point of ebay? To get goods at CHEAPER prices? But no… you’ve got idiots bidding at extraordinarily high prices which pushes the price of the unit even higher, sometimes even higher than the retail price! And that doesn’t even include shipping! Methinks that a deal is knocking £20 off the retail price not £2 off it. The idiocy of these people continues to astound.

If they were so desperate to get the router, why not go to the shop and buy it yourself. There is NO POINT turning to ebay if you are going to get a crapper deal than off microdirect or Curry’s. Why the fark these idiots never bother to do their market research is beyond me. Committing yourself to an expensive purchase should mean going beyond clicking on the “Buy it now!” icon and doing abit of r-e-a-d-i-n-g or at least educating yourself to making a good purchase worth your buck.

Take for example the time when my house was peddling PS2s – we noticed that on ebay lurked certain vunerable idiots who were buying silver limited edition PS2s for more than £180 for a single unit. These were non-modified, no-frills, no-games, unit-only sales and these idiots were willing to part with their £180 easily, and add another £15 for postage and handling for something they could have easily gotten off amazon.co.uk for £135 PLUS FREE SHIPPING! Eventually some samaritan posted a ‘fake’ auction telling people to go to amazon.co.uk instead and that they were real dungus for paying so much for these so-called “limited edition” units. The prices fell drastically after that.

These village idiots which continue to plague ebay.co.uk spoil market forces and spoil deal-grabbing people like myself from getting steals :) heh… So here’s a call to everybody out there: can you please read up a wee bit more about what you are going to buy before committing yourself to paying a ridiculous price over something worth much less?

After 9 months of service, our AS502 GlobespanVirata Hyundai router finally died. I failed to resuscitate it after an attempt to update the firmware due to repeated system failures. I hereby offer the following eulogy:

Dear router, I only speak the truth when I say, you did not exactly serve us well. You left us many hours of frustration, anguish and pain when you repeatedly screw up MSN and drop packets of data when we least expect it. You wasted much of our time downloading off BitTorrent with obscenely slow download speeds when we knew you were capable of much more. Yet, you served us in dire times in ebay.com bidding and obtaining licenced Initial D manga off IRC (albeit very slowly). May your warranty not be void when I send you in for service this summer.

Here’s a piece of advice to router buyers out there… STAY AWAY FROM THE AS502 [or its evil doppeldanger the GS8100] or anything on a Globespan Virata chipset. If you google it up, you’ll find many Malaysians buying that cheap piece of trash (myself included). Simply not worthit. A cheap router doesn’t necessarily mean a good router and I think our experience is testament to that. Here’s why:

I’ve realised that the best computer hardware out there comes with fantastic support may it be a message board or a website with detailed information how to get the best out of your purchase. Just try Googling up LinkSys, 3Com, DLink or Netgear! Conversely, Google up the AS502, and you get jack – except a thread on dslreports.com with people who are at wits end with their router. Though the AS502 is based on the GlobespanVirata chipset (the core that powers the router/modem), support is sparse. The best port of call was the Solwise.co.uk forum boards relating to the SAR110 but even the posts there couldn’t help resurrect our router from the dead.

Lesson number one: Try to buy products from a reliable brand who at LEAST have a website with support information. We should have bought the DLink DSL-500 when we had the chance. It was just that forking out £80 at MicroDirect wasn’t exactly our cup of tea at the time. Now that model isn’t sold anymore. Seems that people are slowly making the transition to wireless-LAN hence shops no longer carrying expensive wired solutions. Safia: your house is VERY lucky and we are envious. Can we convince you guys into a sale?

When making a hardware purchase, TRY to do a leeetle bit of homework by reading reviews – the more the better. Our new £69 DC-214 Sitecom router is faring pretty well so far, but it was a neccessary purchase. Given proper time, I wouldn’t have bought it. A maximum of 20 forwarded ports = bad. But BitTorrent speeds are constant, hitting > 1mpbs on a good day else 20kB/s – 30kB/s with three of us housemates torrenting at the same time. It’s not that this wasn’t possible before; its just that the old AS502 kept dropping the connection once a certain threshold was met. Something to do with the VC - whatever that is – being congested. If that means gibberish to me, I can only imagine what it means to a non-techhy. And that is the gist of lesson number two: Good hardware function like they should. If you have to make sense of your hardware then its crap. Seperate the good and crap with the magic that is google.

And lesson number three: WHENEVER POSSIBLE, buy stuff from a shop where you can return stuff easily: used or unused, faulty or otherwise. Here’s a big plug to Maplins. I’m going to return all the cables I used to try and fix the old banger today. Hope they don’t make a fuss hee hee! All is fair and square: it’s in their returns policy!

So yes, finally after 9 months I’m reachable via MSN now with no scares of sudden disconnections and now able to hold a decent online conversation. My housemates and I are all breathing sighs of relief as we wonder what made us put up with that idiot box for so long. 9 months of crappy internet connection is simply unnaceptable!