End of an era indeed

May 312011
 

Scholes has just announced his retirement. Wow, this is another of the great players that I grew up watching. One more confirmation, if needed, that we are getting old.

It’s true that he hasn’t featured too much in Man Utd’s 19th league title, and indeed he was justly a mere late substitute in their loss against Barcelona in the Champions League final. But it’s still a bit sad to see another one of your childhood’s great players go.

I thought the Champions League final was won very convincingly by Barcelona. But I still can’t bring myself to like them too much. Sometimes their passing just bores me. Having said that, I would love Liverpool to be as good as them.

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Word Art

May 312011
 

There’s this automated word cloud generator that uses the frequency of words appearing in your document and generates a picture with the size of the words in proportion to how often the word was used.

So I decided to feed it the top posts of Ultimates Sigh’s RSS.
wordart

Looks like the most used word on the recent posts is “Pretty”, although “Sigh” does rank up there but not as much as you would think. It’s a pretty interesting way of quickly displaying what a document or page is talking about. 😛

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The migration is complete

May 292011
 

So I’ve officially moved onto Just Host for all my hosting services. No longer is Ultimate Sigh sitting on my PC. This should be good in terms of better uptime and availability.

One thing I have sacrificed though, is the discontinuation of the Sigh Chat service. Rest assured though, those chat logs have been saved for posterity. This was due mainly to the lack of interest and dare I say it, pretty unreliable service resulting from a combo of corporate firewalls and my own server being a bit precious.

In its place is the new and improved Sigh Forums now with fixed layout and colours for easy reading. And of course the much delayed Ultimate Sigh Email Addresses.

So if you want to get yourname@ultimatesigh.com addresses, head over to this forum topic and leave your preferred username. I’ll give you your personal address pronto. Of course alternatively, you can just leave your username preference as a comment.

For those already with an @ultimatesigh.com address, I’m sure you know by now to access it via google here: https://www.google.com/a/ultimatesigh.com.

A new Ultimate Sigh begins now!

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So the times they are a changing

May 232011
 

Over the coming few weeks, I’ll be migrating the Ultimate Sigh to a new host. Most likely Just Host. So during the migration there may be outages while I port all the files and setup over. Hopefully everything will transition nicely without too much messing around on my part.

Why am I moving the site off onto an external host? Well that’s because I will be moving to……………..
Samoa* for a year.

Sunny Samoa
*Well pending visa approval and pre-departure approval, but there’s an agreement in place now.

How come Samoa?

I hear people ask when I tell them about Samoa. Well it’s simple really. I figure this is pretty much the last chance in my life to do something a bit risky and adventurous. I still have time after I return to progress in my career, and I don’t really have any responsibilities or dependents right now. If I don’t do it now, I will probably just find a higher paying job and stay in Sydney, settle down, that type of thing. That’s not bad. Life is pretty cruisey here. But I know I will regret it if I don’t set off this one last time to experience something completely different and to go work and stay overseas for a while. So in short, if I don’t go overseas now for a career break type of thing, I never will.

Here’s to less sighs, and more awesomeness hence forth.

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CitiFAIL again

May 162011
 

I got up early today for yet another early morning meeting at 830. I wandered down to the station in the morning chill, with its icy wind stabbing into me. I went to the only, but thankfully clear, ticket window, hoping to finally be able to buy a ticket quickly. The station master’s attention is elsewhere. I make it known that I’m there, ready to pay for an increased in price weekly. He doesn’t even acknowledge me.  What could be so important? His attention was focused on a screen. At first I thought it must be his computer screen with important network info. Then I poke my head around further and I see that the PC is locked and the good master is intensely occupied with the tv next to the computer.  Yep I had to wait while he watched a particularly interesting breakfasts tv segment before being able to buy the ticket. Another excellent customer service experience from that most awesome of organizations, CitiRail.

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South Korea

May 122011
 

So I am back from South (side) Korea.

I had a metric bucketload of fun. Highlights were:

  • Hanging out with my old buddy from Tsinghua days

    It was a pretty fun time drinking it up and just chilling with Chang again. Talked about old times, stupid antics that we got up to, you know basically reminiscing about the slacker days of being a international student in Beijing.

    Drinking culture in Sth Korea is pretty fun and cool when you are a student. All fancy free with a huge array of options for fun, entertainment and above all convenience. It probably gets a whole lot less fun after the student part of your life though, as I hear adult life for a male is pretty stressful.

  • Seeing the pretty scenery of South Korea in Spring

    We hiked quite a bit and Spring, whilst cold in South Korea, does provide some nice scenery. In particular, the cherry blossoms which are well, blooming during that time. We checked out the famous Seoraksan National Park along with some other nature preserves. There are many sites still not yet visited and definitely worthy of a return sometime, especially Jeju.

  • Gong to the DMZ

    Salsa will probably want to talk more about this, but the DMZ tour was definitely something that was hugely interesting. From seeing the ROK soldiers, to US marines, to glimpsing Nth Korean buildings and people, the whole setup is steeped in intrigue and lost opportunities. Which of course why Salsa is even more interested in Nth Korea, even buying up a few notes of their currency which is currently trading at 1 AUD to 146 Nth Korean Won (if you can somehow buy it).

  • Eating

    This one is pretty self explanatory. Food is a massive part of Korean day to day life. It seems from a casual observer’s point of view that they are always eating. Yet I did not see any fat people. Most of the dishes are communal, like BBQ and big plates of chicken in stew similar to the Chinese dish ???. All in all a lot of their dishes are very much geared towards being good with drinks and alcohol, like their version of Izakuya.

  • Jeju

    Jeju is a volcanic island in the south of Sth Korea. The whole island is basically a tourist attraction with loads of things to see and do. In the middle is Hallasan which is a massive volcano with a huge crater at the tip. But the area is also known as a honeymoon destination for Sth Koreans (and the Hawaii of Sth Korea). It is a massive place and we only scratched the surface (although Salsa erroneously thought we could cycle everywhere). It’s very pretty and definitely worth a repeat visit, this time more cycling and leasing a car to drive around to all the places we missed. We also had an ocean view room. 🙂

All in all, a good time and a great place to visit.

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Back with a sigh at citiFAIL

May 022011
 

So back from Korea and what a contrast between public transport systems. I missed my train this morning because it took 15mins to buy a ticket.  The queue was that long. Cause? Shitty slow arse payment methods. Only 1 ticket booth and 1 machine. The machine basically just accepts cash but only gives 19.90 change max. The majority of people need to use a cc to pay so they goto counter. These cc need to be swiped, reswiped, and signed or pinned. What about contactless tech at both booth and machine? What about more machines? All this wouldn’t be that much of a problem if peak hr service didn’t come every 20 mins only. WTF is that? And the fare increased too. 🙁

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