Update your URLs and RSS Feeds Hi all, just to announce that I have migrated to nicole.sg. Kindly update your blog links and your RSS Feeds. Thanks so much! The new site’s blog roll is being updated, so please bear with me a day or two if you don’t see your blog listed. If I have missed out, you can drop me a mail (preferably) and I will edit the blog roll asap! It’s been fun blogging here, but I’ve got to move on. Cheers. See you at nicole.sg! Nicole of yesterday evening After my wonderful evening yesterday, I decided to stay home and be good… Mum’s cooking fish curry… or rather… asam pedas…yum! And also, do some reading for my FYP. Yesterday was a wonderful time with Terence. Been a long time since we last met up… And oh, needless to say… GeekTerminal was the choice since he had not been there. Good ambience, good coffee and good food, what can go wrong? Company was good too! Ok, we had the signature pasta… the soft shell chilli crab pasta… and the carbonara pasta. to top off the meal, that has to be coffee! Lattes were the order of the day, and yet another coffee convert. We chatted a lot, and laughed a lot too… to be frank, I never laughed that much so often. The walk along the Singapore River to Esplanade was peaceful, and very quiet, and the weather made it lovely to walk too… Made a stop at Pan Pacific - The Atrium, where I tried the cocktail “Envy” and enjoyed live singing performance. The singer’s vocals are good! We chatted more there, and I do feel a little sorry that I had to go home… Last but not least, thank you for such a wonderful time Nicole of site migration, business. So sorry if there is a lack of updates here on this blog, am busy doing site migration, as well as my usual load of stuff offline. Feeling excited about starting a business… but a lot of hard work in the process. Am not sure what it will lead to… but hopefully, a satisfying ending. This marks a remarkable change in my direction of life, and hopefully, embark on a beautiful learning journey. Nicole too busy I’ve loads to blog about. Been too busy going out shopping/eating/chilling. Ouch. Be back with more! Nicole [Contest] HP TouchSmart up for grabs! Read my post on the HP TouchSmart? Do you wanna touch it? Yeah! Ok, I fess up, I like the product so much I wanna own it too! But whats the point of me winning it alone?! YES! One lucky reader will get to own the HP TouchSmart too! So… here is your chance to own the HP TouchSmart! Simply tell me.. my dear readers… *drum rolls* what do you think…. What will your life be with HP TouchSmart? Gimme something… creative/ innovative/ productive/ interesting uses with the HP TouchSmart. OK? The best reader comment will win the HP TouchSmart IQ500. And because you are my dear reader, if you are selected, I get to win one for myself as well! Whee! I regret that only Singaporean based bloggers and readers are entitled to participate in the competition. The judges decision are final. Hurry! The contest will end on 00:00 12 July 2008! Nicole my internship attachment results… 4th July. Today marks the day where all NTU Internship Attachment students will receive their IA results. This put an end to a long wait for our grades. I am pretty much taken by surprise at the grade of my internship. I never asked for a distinction, nor an A. In fact, if I were to get a B+, I am more than happy. That was what I had in mind during my internship. I just gave my best, and left the rest to Him. I am pleased to announce I´ve got a grade A-. I know its not an A or A+, or rather, its the lower form of A counterpart. But to me, its special. It proved myself wrong of some things I thought of. Instead, it made me realized that if I set my heart into giving my best, I will not be disappointed. Nicole Happy 2nd Birthday Ping.sg Here’s a short entry dedicated to ping.sg Happy 2nd Birthday! May ping.sg continue to grow, and as we all know, it has come a long way since its first birthday last year and moreover, today is the day where ping.sg turns 2 Nicole Chinatown, Here I Come Am about to go to Chinatown with my mum and sister. It’s been a while since I went out with them, so yeah, make the best use of my vacation, and also the advantage is that it’s still a weekday and thus not so packed. Will be trying CT18 for the first time from Bedok Interchange. Gonna have some fun today, and hopefully, nothing short of too much damage to my wallet. Oh in the meantime, my results will be released on Friday, which is like tomorrow. In case you didn’t know, its where all the interns in NTU will get their grades for the internship. Wish me luck. Ok, short and sweet post. Gotta go! Nicole Thinking too much Lately, I´ve been thinking too much it seems… after all, what right do I have? No rights, no beginnings, no endings. That´s right. From now on, I will never look at life the same way again, I will never know what is it like to have true love, till the day, my mr right decides show himself to me. I am NOT desperate for a boyfriend. Or rather, I need company. I hate to be too lonely for a while… makes me totally cranky if you ask me… Sometimes I would love to be surrounded by people whom I like, and ones that I really enjoy being with, be it gentlemen or ladies. And truth be told, after all that has happened to me lately… I realized one thing… I am skeptical of true love. Honestly, how many can actually claim that they have experienced true love? What defines love in the first place? Does love means peace, joy or does love mean cruelty, selfishness? If life is meant to be a joke, then whatever has happened is a cruel joke then. To be honest, if you don´t get what I wrote here, its ok. Its my way of randomly venting out all the anger and hate. Thanks for reading. Nicole machines… are cute I think I will go crazy coming up with such complex and cute ways Enjoy! Nicole Death Cab For Cutie I´ll be camping in school almost daily, holed up in my FYP lab. Guess its something I got to do. So I won´t slack. Anyway, I am in love with this song… Someday You Will Be Loved - Death Cab for Cutie Cheers! Nicole Countdown to 4th July 4th July. My Internship Attachment results would be released. I know there is like a default grade of B for everyone, but I hope I can get a better grade. In the meantime, July spells yet another month of 2008. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken another course of action. But then again, why bother? Nicole of the HP TouchSmart This is so gonna be a long post… of the lovely HP TouchSmart, gorgeous venue and the very wonderful people that night. So sit back, get a drink or two, and be ready for one long post! Before I carry on, allow me… to get you just in the mood of…. touching…. the HP TouchSmart… Held at brotzeit - german bar and restuarant, of vivocity, this place was chosen to be the venue of the HP TouchSmart launch. Reason being? Cos HP launched its products in Berlin, Germany, and it couldn’t be better to have similar settings in Sinapore! A little camwhoring outside the venue… Notice the poster? We were then ushered in, and voila… look what’s that!~ Shrouded by a piece of purple cloth… and yes! behold the HP TouchSmart! Bloggers being bloggers, we can’t resist snapping the pictures upon the product being unveiled. These was after a short presentation by Ms Chua Hwee Koon. Finally, we lay hands on the TouchSmart and try it out to see for ourselves… I quite like the touch interface, although it leaves me to desire even more, and with multi touch support, that would be great… ala Minority Report. The 22″ wide screen display makes all the graphics look so sharp, and not only that, Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM makes this machine truly powerful, and not to mention, there is another variant, that comes with a TV tuner. With that, which means, you can have a PC and TV rolled into one! Wicked! Apart from that, photos can be easily uploaded, via the SD card slot… but can other forms of media be read? Like the Memory Stick? (am not very sure) This would appeal to shutterbugs! With one touch of the finger, one can use the HP TouchSmart easily, like opening music files, videos, and even to surf the net. The cool part would be 2 finger scrolling in IE browser! Photo editing is simple and a breeze, to get the desired dimension of cropping the photos… as well as scribbling notes or even taking down a simple voice note. The built in camera is a disappointment though, with a maximum resolution of 640 x 480. On the last note, I like the ambient lighting, which allows the keyboard to be illuminated, using it without problems in dim or dark places. Hehe… Need more information about this wonderful product? Click here. The event would not be complete without the people, drinks and food. There are many other bloggers present, and loads of camwhoring and phototaking! Here are some of them… With Nadnut With Melvin, Bernard, Nadnut With Sheylara With Estee With DK With Kris, Juzzy, DaintyFlair, Rinaz, Daphne, Sheylara With Precious and DK With sexeh Rinaz With Nic. (Nic and Nic) With Brian With Daryl Last but not least, big thanks to Melvin and Daryl Tay for the invite! For more photos, click here to view it. Nicole PS: Am late on this post. Oops. Local Research Project Just helping to spread the word, there will be a research project going on, and calling for participants to do a short recording of their voice for 15 mins, with a compensation of $7 dollars. The team will be located at North Spine Tutorial Rooms 1 to 3. It is open to all Singaporeans age above 18. So do come on down if you can, from 11 am onwards. Cheers~! Nicole Too much Too much of something is bad enough… Too much of nothing is just as tough… I never know how true these words till until now. Nicole blogging using N810 am currently at geek terminal with mintea, rinaz and chillycraps. i dun have a laptop but i am using the n810 that rinaz kindly let me play it with! hehe… geek terminal have certainly changed alot! wow.. =) alright i gotta stop writing. just wanna chill. nicole Blocked. Be Right Back soon. I know I am supposed to blog, but somehow, I wasn´t in the mood to. But do look out for it. Loads and loads of pictures are coming your way. Have a good weekend. Nicole wassup?!~ So what’s up for me today? Nothing much, except that I am off to attend an event at Vivocity later at 7 pm! w00t! While I am gonna have fun at the event… meantime, groove to this song… LOL! Nicole Drug Free or Not? Are you drug free too? Thought I would just wanna share this picture with you guys. Was given this tag while walking by Plaza Singapura, and its a great way to decorate my bag, at the same time promoting the anti-drug day in Singapore. Nicole my downside Seems to me that life has moved at such a pace, I can barely stop by the countryside and smell some fresh air. I struggle against the constant pace of my life. I think too much, and worry too much. I over-analysed things. Am emotionally, mentally and physically taxed. I never knew what is it like to relax in one corner. I never knew what is it like to have good fashion sense, nor how to do my make up properly. I guess I will never be able to walk out of my rough tomboyish side, and to embrace the feminine side of me. I try to please everyone, but realized that I can’t. I try to make everyone happy, which I succeed, at the expense of myself. I worry for people around me, and bring misery to myself. I support everyone, but not myself. I never will know what true happiness is, because I never been through one. I know of broken dreams, because mine’s constantly shattered to pieces. I find satisfaction when people acknowledge me, but never with myself. Considering all the above, I can conclude, I love others, but not thy self. Nicole 3d puzzles. These are all 3d puzzles that are assembled. Ain’t they lovely? Nicole Have an Idea? Why Not? Ting! Ah! An idea strikes. Ting ting! Another idea strikes again! Ting ting ting! Yet another one… and many more ideas to come… or rather.. ideas are infinite! So you see… Ideas, ideas, ideas. It’s everywhere. It can strike your mind any time, any where. But ideas are just empty thoughts if nothing is done to it… But what if your idea is as bright as the star? So what are you waiting for? Waiting for someone else to come up with your idea? or that by the time you waited long enough, someone else has realized the idea? And that someone gets all that recognition? What if this very idea can make life better in Singapore? Wouldn’t it be cool to be the one who came up with the idea? I think that’s something really cool. If your idea is about increasing Singapore’s attractiveness for business, nurturing entrepreneurs of tomorrow, and encouraging more innovative and competitive businesses… Why Not make it come true? Why Not? If you are eager to see your idea through, Why Not? Do you have a wonderful idea? If you do, Why Not? Still waiting? Why Not submit your wonderful idea right here!~ Contributing your wonderful idea might just win you $1000~! Why Not? Quick! Send in all that bright, creative and nifty ideas before July 17~! Why Not make that idea of yours come true? This contest is conducted by ACE. The above review is an advertisement, courtesy of Blog2u. Horsing around… Ain’t this drawing beautiful? My cousin drew it… Pretty much like it, so I decided to take a picture Nicole About me (3) Honestly, I am going through things I can barely take. You see me strong on the surface, acting tough at times… I don’t want to see worried faces all the time. But you see, I am only human. I really need time off, before I snap at anyone else. I’m scared. Very scared. Because no one understands how I feel. Nicole Food Damage at Causeway Point I took my cousin out to causeway point today. Since she wanted to go there, I happily oblige. Afterall, its been such a long time since I went out with her… The damage of the day was a yummy lunch at Pastamania… LOL. I shall let the photos do the talking, and hopefully, don’t get you guys drooling and craving for pasta and piazza… Our table number… while awaiting for the pizza and pasta to arrive… We ordered a set meal… and here are the soups… Minestrone soup and Cream of Chicken soup… First looks at the pasta… My Tuna Bacon pasta… yummy!~ and… next… the Pizza… Look at the chunks of pineapple and ham! And the crust were very crispy too! Finally… the damage… LOL! But overall, it was a very pleasant meal. I can’t say more about the food, but the company was fabulous. Nicole got my subj! Phew, I managed to get all the subjects that I wanted in my preferred timeslots! Whoopee! I am pretty thankful for it because it´s always a game of fastest fingers first. On another note, there are still personal stuff I need to settle on my own. Nicole updates… updates… A little short update on my FYP, aka Final Year Punishment Project… Started my reading on the previous student report, papers, thesis and what not I can find relevant to my project.. and that means, I gotta have multiple dates with… ahem… Mr Google! I know my workstation setup ain´t complete as yet… but at least, more or less is up and running… hehe… and still getting used to using Ubuntu, because I am too used to Windows. Tsk Tsk. Lately, I am totally head over heels on fixing this 3d crystal puzzle… and it comes in so many lovely shapes… Well, I am helping my aunt to assemble it… and photos of it is coming soon… stay tuned! Seems like there´s alot of work cut out for me… Oh, I am in the midst of getting the recipe for the pumpkin cake, bug me for it! Nicole Software Review: Diskeeper 2008 I had the opportunity to review Diskeeper 2008, thanks to the kind folks of Blog2u. There you go, the cover of the software… and I might have to add that this review are strictly my opinions about the software, based on what I see, and what I’ve done with it. It will be a long post, so do hang in there and read on… Before I even started the installation process… there was a little booklet attached… This little booklet is a quick start guide to get the user started on installation, features of the software etc. It comes printed in 2 languages - English and Chinese. And at the last page of it would be software activation instructions. Installation of the software is simple and straight forward. I enabled the activation of Diskeeper after installation as well as enabling automatic defragmentation for all the drives in my computer. And this is the program’s interface… The interface is neat, and the clean look makes it easy for one to glance at the information displayed. Notice that there are 3 Columns - the Automatic Defragmentation, Boot-Time Defragmentation and Frag Shield. Hold your horses, I will come to that and explain what each is for. Automatic Defragmentation uses InvisiTasking to defrag the hard disk by utilising the idle system resources, and in the long run, improves overall system performance. I monitored on how InvisiTasking utilises the idle system resources, and found that it rarely takes up much of the available resources, and I can still run my other applications per normal, with no significant notice of lag time… I must add that I am quite impressed at how it uses the resources to do constant defragmmentation on my C drive. Boot time defragmentation allows system files to be moved safely, as these files cannot be defrag or moved in the operating system. I can’t comment much on it, as I have not tried it at the point of writing. Last but not least… Frag Shield… Ok, Frag Shield prevents the Master File Tables (MFTs) from fragmenting, and contributes to overall improvement of paging files, and to put it simply… it means that your data can be accessed quickly, since optimality is maintained by Diskeeper 2008. Having wrote so much thus far, I am sure that your burning question would be… How Diskeeper 2008 improves defragmentation of hard drives? Well, to start off with, I hate defragmenting my hard disk, because the Windows Defragmentation tool is very slow… and that easily wasted half a day of my time defragmenting my drive! Thus I kinda gave up defragmenting my drive for about 1 year or more to date… And to be frank, I am slightly sceptical of how Diskeeper 2008 could make defragmentation easier… So here I present a screenshot of how horribly defragmented my C drive is…before using Diskeeper defragmentation function. See all that red patches all over? That is how bad my C drive looked before defragmentation. The time taken to defrag normally will take me 3 hours, if I am lucky… with the Windows Defragmentation tool… But with the Diskeeper 2008, it took me slightly under and hour! w00t! Now ain’t that something?! I find it impressive that it could defrag my heavily defragmented C drive, and does not break a sweat… And this is the after defragmentation screenshot Diskeeper also generates a nice report with statistics of the volume to be defrag… and here is an excerpt of the report. The report can be saved in a .txt format. The screenshots can also be saved from the program as well… Job Report Computer: BLAZEBLIZZ Volume: SYSTEM (C:) Findings and Recommendations ————————————————————————– Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found 11,634 fragmented files and/or directories and 35,272 excess fragments. The average number of fragments per file is 1.25. Heavy fragmentation detected on this volume. Keep Automatic Defragmentation turned on to correct this problem. Also, free space on this volume is running low. Consider actions to free more disk space. Health ————————————————————————– Warning! The overall health of volume C: is degraded The overall health is at “Warning” level for the following reasons: 1. The volume is heavily fragmented. The average number of fragments per file is 1.25. 2. The free space on this volume is very low (20%). Diskeeper solves file fragmentation, but more free space will also improve overall volume performance. Last but not least, laptop users will be pleased to know that automatic defragmentation function is disabled when the laptop is running on batteries. This will help save the precious battery power when you are on the move. Neat eh? Overall, I feel that Diskeeper reduces defragmentation timing, and having real time defragmentation by using idle system resources is a great way to keep all the data in the hard disk organised and not fragmented into pieces, which in turns improves overall system performance. At the point of writing, I noticed that my system does not lag even with the real time defragmentation is running in the background. I hope you will like this software review. And I do recommend users to try this piece of amazing software. Nicole The Pumpkin Cake… Hungry yet? Above is a shot taken with my new camera. Pumpkin Cake made by my dad. Very yummy… Chokeful of pumpkin with mushrooms and dried shrimps. *Yummy* Enjoy! Nicole the state of insanity Honestly, sometimes I question the state of my emotional being, the state of my physical self, and how capable is my mental strength. Of late, happenings have left a very deep and negative impact on me, which results my daily rhythm and harmony being upset and broken. Gosh… The feeling on the brink of the great depression is something I am desperately trying to avoid. I need to find my happiness back. Nicole