So I slept at 5:30am last night and come to work at 9am this morning.

I was reading 5th out of 9 volumes of very captivating Manhwa, “Operation Liberated Men”, until my dad woke up and started yelling at me to go to sleep. Ok I will post about Hwang Mi Ri and Lee Mi Ra (sisters?) later. Their Manhwa are so damn good. “Hot Blooded Woman” by Hwang Mi Ri is definitely a must read. It’s so funny and listed as one of the best Manhwa around. Anyways, back to the subject – the annoyances.

The annoyances started due to lack of sleep but more because I couldn’t finish the Manga in one go. I can’t wait to go home this evening and continue with the reading. So annoying! Why do I have to wait till I get home, while it sits on my laptop!

There are lots of ants in the office. The tiny, very fast moving red ants, they annoy the hell out of me. They’re running around on my coffee cup, going inside laptop, taking a walk on the screen and doing all sort of things to annoy me. I couldn’t find the spray, Mortein, either. The cleaning lady must have hidden it somewhere. So annoying!

Whenever I open Macromedia Fireworks 8 my display color scheme changes to basic scheme. I got reddish pink but it always change back into the annoying pale blue scheme. It doesn’t happen with Macromedia Dreamweaver program but only problem with Fireworks. Such an annoyance!

I always use Dual Monitors at work. My laptop highest resolution is 1680 x 1050px and the duel LCD is 1280 x 1024. Every time I change to dual mode, I have to go change their resolutions as well; otherwise the laptop screen takes the same resolution as the LCD and the display gone stretched out and weird. Why do I have to click many steps to change the simple setting, why can’t we do that by one click and it changes automatically? Arrgh annoying!

I have this problem most of the time with new folder column settings. They display unnecessary columns like ‘Date Taken’, ‘Tags’, ‘Rating’ etc. I only want ‘Size’ and ‘Date modified’. So I have to uncheck the options from column header but the stupid thing keep coming back every once in a while for the same folder. Why can’t it just save the same setting forever! May be I’ll have to set that in the option list. But still…remember it for god sake, so annoying!

Lately, I’m not sure when it started, my Firefox or the Download Helper extension must have screwed up. Whenever I try to download using download helper FF extension, the download dialog box doesn’t function well. I click “Save” button but the file is not saving. I have to do save at least 2 times for the file to pick up in the download box and starting downloading. Before I can just press “Enter” key and it saves just fine. Now even direct click to the button doesn’t work well and have to do it twice. It just annoy the hell out of me!

I can’t use my twhirl at home. I can’t login at all from home. It works just fine from office. What’s the meaning of this? Is it cos’ twhirl stores some sort of network settings during installation? Then how come the twhirl on my bro’s laptop is working fine both at home and work? Must be stupid vista security settings again? Arrghh So damn annoying!

I use to login to my Gmail account first, from there I click on “more” dropdown list then choose to go “Reader” link, but occasionally the dropdown got shorten and does not list all the other apps anymore, so I have to type in the direct URL to go to GoogleReader or GoogleGroup. So annoying!

The MS Word 2007 is so confusing! Annoying big tool bar on top is taking too much space, it’s no good if you have small screen resolution. I can’t find page browsing arrows which I use to find at the bottom of the document in previous versions. To move to the next page, I have to either scroll down or press page down, but I want “Next” and “Previous” controls at the bottom as the way it should be. I also can’t find the “Print” control when I start using it. Can you believe none of those big tabs list the damn “Print” icon in there? Then I finally found it when I click the stupid icon at the top-left corner of the document. Print is an important function and should sit at the obvious place; at lease have it in the context-menu. But noooooo, it just has to go play hide and seek with me. So annoying!

I still got lot of annoyances but the post gone too long so leaving it for next time. Don’t read other people annoying post if you don’t want to get annoyed!

Recently I’ve been following “The Trump Blog” after I read about it from “A Guide to Billionaire Bloggers” on ReadWriteWeb. I’m sure most of us from Fiji are familiar about him from “The Apprentice” show on FijiOne hence need no introduction.

Anyways, just now I was browsing my feeds and this post, “Japanese Firm Offers Heartache Leave“, from Mr Trump really cracked me up. Well it’s not funny but somewhat makes me laugh, and think for sometimes.

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that all the employees at this company are women. I don’t mean to be sexist, but I don’t know many men who would call in sick to work because they broke up with their girlfriend.

Are you sure about that? What do you, guys, think? Don’t give me those man’s pride excuses and bluff about it.

But then I don’t know many women who would do it either. If you’re serious about your job, you don’t let heartbreak or store bargains keep you from doing your work.

I wonder our lives only exist around our jobs. He must be talking about those workaholics who got no life of their own and think only about work. It’s understandable since the billionaire such as Mr. Trump, who always think of how to increase his enterprise and who can get(or ditch) any women anytime without much effort would think work more important than other matters.

For me, I think if I ever get a serious heartbreak (I wish not), I wouldn’t want to do anything for sometimes. But then that’s all depends on individuality and how serious you take your relationships as. But I bet most Asian tends to take relationships matter more serious than those of the westenners. I’m just speaking in general but then hey what do I know; so may be not.

But I must say, that Japanese company is very considerate about their staffs well being. I’m sure the staffs appreciate about it and would boost their motivation to work harder for the company.

It’s a nice read for my morning tea break. Makes me think.

Yippie! It’s Friday again!. Been occupied with things this week, I didn’t even realized that the week is almost over.

This whole week, I got to work on time. Oh yes, ON TIME!. Our normal office hours is 8:00 – 5:00; Normally I get to work around 8:30 – 9:30 in the morning and knock out around 5:30 – 6:00 in the evening. It’s amazing that I’m on-time this week and proud for myself. You go gal!

Come to think of it, I never wake up myself in the mornings. Every morning at 6:30, Dad bangs at my door and tries to wake me up. I never move an inch from those bangings. Around 7:00, my mb alarm shrills in my ears; what a tedious job to switch it off and go back to sleep. Around 8:00, my bro comes in and yell at my ear. He would ask whether I’ll go with Dad transport or take a taxi later. His yelling is the worst and I can’t shut him off. If I don’t budge by a few yells, he would kick me and pull me down from bed. Most dreadful thing he does is jump on my bed with his slippers on. (more…)

Keeping in mind that LLBLGen generate dynamic sql statements and no need for storeprocedures, sometimes it’s hard for me to find the right code to retrieve data using complicated queries. Eg. those of multiple JOIN statements and DATEPART functions.

The followings can be used in search functions where you search by date range or by datepart such as by Day or Month or Year.

For my first scenario, I want to search records by “Date” ie. “dd/MM/yyyy” only and not considering the Time part.

By default when you insert a Date using WinForm DateTimePicker or Infragistic ultraDatePicker, the Time part goes in as 0s. eg. “10/01/2008 12:00:00″. But sometimes there are cases where you have to record the Time as well. My saved records include default Date values as well as DateTime values.

(more…)

A friend of mine invited me to Twitter a while back and I wasn’t really interested for it has an ugly interface and the site is ugly and … it was ugly and … just ugly and … well I decided not to like it.

Anyhow, I subscribed to their newsletter updates and from today’s issue, I came across this Twitter Apps page.

I was surprised to find that there are quite a number of applications developed for this ugly Twitty thingie and I learn some new words from there, like – Twadget, Twitterlex, TwitDir, Twitterverse, Twitigg, Twotteroo, TwittIt, Twitterlicious, TwitterBerry, JTwitter, iTwit, Twippera, TwittyTunes, TwitterFox etc…and I got myself a twitted twisted tongue.

Since I’m not a fan of Desktop Apps, and more of Web/Browser Apps, I decided to check out a few FF extensions from there. I installed TwittyTunes, Power Twitter Plugin for Firefox and Twitterbar Addon for Firefox/Flock.

I’m one of those who are too lazy to read through instructions but want to see result instantly, so after the installation I expected to see obvious result. The only obvious result I can see with above three extensions is from TwittyTunes where it created its icon at the bottom-right of my browser status bar. Its functionalities are just so cool and easy to use with one click away.

As for the other two extensions, no obvious new icons or context-menus were shown; only when I customize the toolbar then I found the icon of TwitterBar which I need to drag out to the tool bar. I was expecting to try out Power Twitter’s cool functionalities such as posting images, audio and video to Twitter as mentioned on their page, but was disappointed to find that there is no obvious function to play around with. I can’t even find its icon and I don’t know how to test that out. May be my bad eyes.

Anyway I uninstalled the other two and stick with TwittyTune. I posted a twit or two with it and immediately I was hooked.

All thanks to lovely TwittyTune, I am beginning to find Twitting interesting. Previously I post random thoughts on one of my blogs but Twitter is more convenient way of posting randomness and nonsense. So I decided to make a good use of it. And here it goes, my one and very own “TwittVelous” to publicize my cunning craziness!!! Ke Ke Ke…Fu Fu Fu < — Japanese way of laughing

Oh yah, if you wanna follow my nonsense then go ahead here is my RVelous, I mean RSS.

Ciao!

Scenario: Being the lazy arses as we are (Bro and I), we don’t even want to clean up our dishes after dinner and always putting off each other to do in turns.

Bro: Do my dishes for me today.

Me: I was gonna ask you the same thing. Why are you always copying me? Come to think of it, you always copy me and follow whatever I do.

Mom: That’s right. He always follows you around when you were young. He repeated whatever you say and always following you. Lucky, he didn’t wear skirt but went for pants. LOL

Me: That’s right. Back in school too, you used all my books to study.
You took the same subjects as me.
You went to the same Uni as me.
You graduated with the same degree like me.
Now we work in the same company, doing the same thing!!
What’s wrong with you? Why are you always following me?

Bro: Hey, I’m not following you. I’m just treating you like a bulldozer.
Don’t you know in Chess, the pawns go in front and cover for the king.
The same thing applies here. I’m just using you to clear my path.

Me: You little!! @#$%#@$%#*!!!

Moral behind the talk: Being the eldest is such a pain especially with these kind of bad mouth siblings.

Regarding the matter of pawn and chess, I just read that the guys from Failed-Paradise were also cracking up about Chest and Porn.

I love the slogan for geek T-Shirt idea proposed by Digital Fiji.

“We are not chest porns to be played around with.”

There you go, I’m not your chest porn nor I the bulldozer. haha.
I’ll just wait and see how the designs come out as. Whoever wear them, go around in town and take some photo of yourself. If you’re lucky, your pic might even get into the next day Fijitimes post; otherwise you can always show off yourself on your blog.

I’m Back! How is everyone doing? Miss me?

My two weeks trip was exciting, tiring and a great fun. I met lots of new faces and visited new places. It was a great experience for me. Couldn’t come back quickly cos’ I caught a cold after the trip due to too much excitements and weather changes; then my laptop screwed up and had to repair OS. Now everything is settling down so catching up on my feeds and blogging here.

I took lots of photos and a few videos of my two weeks stay at GC, Syd and Adelaide. The main event was ofcos’ GC Tech-Ed. It was my very first business related overseas trip. I thank my bosses and the company for giving me an opportunity to participate in such event. I met lots of geeks and super geeks at Tech-Ed. There were total of 2400 delegates made their mark at Gold Coast Tech-Ed this year. ~80% of them are male with very few female delegates, regardless of this year Tech-Ed having the most female participants compare to the previous years. I’m one of those very few female delegates and most of the time I found myself lost in the superiority and the geekiest air around them. I felt like disappearing when I have no idea what the geeks were talking about. Yet, I somehow found myself enjoying their conversations and was inspired by their intense knowledge and skills on various subject matters.

Here are some of the photos Sarnil and I took from the event.

Note: Lightbox enabled. (Click on the photo, hover over it to browse “Next” or “Previous”)

Surf Parade Apartment

We stayed at Surf Parade apartment which is about 20-30min walking distance from Gold Coast convention center and about 10min Bus ride. The room was very neat and well furnished – TV, fridge, oven, microwave, washing machine, in-room spa, etc. The view from the room was also great. Can see the beach and also the buildings from Surf Paradise area. The room costs around AUD 119 per night and ideal for two people but I stayed alone so quite a big room for me. There were heated swimming pool and tennis courts downstairs but I didn’t even have a time to peek at them. The whole day out and we only came back to our rooms after 9 or 10pm to sleep so we couldn’t check out the whole building and the surroundings.

Gold Coast City Views

There wasn’t much time for us to explore the city as our times were fully occupied inside the convention center. I found Gold Coast has many weird looking buildings, some having spiral type and some has alien style weird diamond shape in the middle. I didn’t see any building of my liking but overall the city is quite lovely and quiet.

Activities at Tech-Ed

There were lots of sessions to attend to and I had a hard time choosing them but Sarnil and I sorted out ourselves on which sessions we should attend and share them later. We couldn’t attend any hand-on-lab sessions because they were always too full. I sat one exam there but I didn’t make it. It was the very first failure in my exams history and I was very disappointed about it. I stayed 2 whole hours burning my head hard in the exam room; I missed one session and my lunch. I was so hungry and was mad at myself for the failure. Anyway what done is done and I’ll try that exam again later. So let just say, the exam was a hard one and I didn’t prepare well. Some of the sessions I attended are:

• WEB316 Ajax Patterns with ASP.Net
• DEV307 Developing Office Business Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office
• DAT302 Database Schema Versioning: How to Use Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals and Team Foundation Server to Version and Deploy Your Databases
• CON206 Custom Activities with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer’s Primer
• ARC307 Enterprise Library 3.1
• DEV308 A Lap around Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation
• DEV311 NET Framework 3.0 End-to-End: Putting the Pieces Together
• CON311 Building Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Enabled Windows Communication Foundation Services in .NET Framework 3.5
• DEV320 Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0
• OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007: Deployment and Advanced Administration Topics
• ARC312 Make your Customer’s Day: User First Design

I also attended the “Blogger Lunch” and here is one live post which covers pretty much everything about the session. I found out later in the “Ask the Expert” section that one of the Blogger Lunch session speakers, Darren Neimke, is in fact from Adelaide and live near Flinders University where my sister is studying.

One of the fun things about Tech-Ed was collecting stamps and freebies from exhibition stands. I collected a few pens, toys, a cap, a T-Shirt, a few evaluation product CDs and lots of information brochures. I also filled in lots of forms to place in the daily draws. There were some gift packs and good stuffs such as Xbox 360 draws everyday. My friend Robert won Xbox360 and we were very jealous of him. Such a lucky guy but he didn’t even invite us to play with him. Bad Robert!

There were tons of food and drinks at Tech-Ed; if you are a drinker, you would definitely love it. Coffee stands were always packed and I liked the breakfast donuts. Lunches and dinner were great too but for some reason I only ate lots of salad. I think it’s cos’ of different cooking style, their meat/main dishes didn’t taste good in my tongue.

Movie World Night

They booked the whole “Movie World” park for 2400 Tech-Ed delegates from 6:30 – 11pm on Thursday night. It was a great fun. We met one of the speakers and Sharepoint expert, Milan Gross, from Hawaii and team up with him to enjoy the night. We rode “Lethal Weapon” (roller coaster ride), “ScoopyDoo” ride, Batman stimulation and the Waterfall ride. I couldn’t believe I actually rode all of them and enjoyed it. I couldn’t have ride them if it wasn’t for the guys who kept pushing me to try so. Every ride I closed my eyes, shut my mouth and sit very still and stiffly so I didn’t get to see the high/dangerous views. But the feeling alone is scary enough for me. That was a great fun and we all enjoyed the night.

Evening at the Beach and Last Night Out

The final day closing note ended around 4:30pm and we rested a few min at our apartment. Then we paid our (my) first and final visit to the beach in front. It was lovely evening and we saw some surfers, walkers and swimmers there. We took some photos at the beach then went back to the apartment and waited our friend to go for dinner. The final night out was enjoyable. Conversation between Sarnil and Milan was interesting and amusing. They did the talking and I did the listening part as usual. We then had Korean BBQ for dinner and done a lot of walking around to digest the food. Actually the guys were searching for a good place to dance. I had a very early flight to catch and have to wake up around 4am in the following morning so I took an early leave, said goodbye to the guys and came back to the apartment. Then I packed my stuffs and get ready for Sydney departure in the next morning.

So Tech-Ed ended pretty well and some of Tech.Ed 2007 Statistics from lock note are:

• This year there were 89,608 teeth at Tech.Ed.
• You ate 12,628 bread rolls, and drank over 14,000 liters of enough coffee and Coke.
• And at MovieWorld, on the Superman ride, we recorded 1,216 cries of “shhh****tttt…!!!!”
• If all our Tech.Ed delegates were laid end-to-end, you’d stretch 4.15 kilometers long. But only an average of 1 meter wide. In most cases.
• If all this year’s delegates forms a conga-line, that would be the end of Gold Coast Tourism.

Interesting stats, aren’t they?

I was checking out the next Tech-Ed SEA 2007 at Kuala Lumpur 10-13 Sept and found out that there is one Burmese in the speaker list. The speaker name is “Maung Maung Phyo” and is a Senior Consultant from Singapore. He looks pretty young. Kuala Lumpur Tech-Ed got quite a few female speakers and most of them look very young. Also there are lots of Asian speakers. Impressive! Our friend “Milan Gross” is in the list as well. Being a Sharepoint expert, he got to travel a lot I bet.

Anyways Gold Coast Tech-Ed 2007 was great and I enjoyed it. Tech-Ed SEA 2007 looks interesting too so do share some words about it if any of you out there attending.