Accident

I had a very bad week.


First , on Monday , I banged someone else's car. It was just a minor "kiss" I would say. Its a bad luck that his car was a Proton. I never believed how "milo tin" our national cars are until today. Mine was also a Proton Wira , 1.5 AT, famous for low power , low pickup and no speed. My leg wasnt on the pedal, just the D gear and such a glide-kiss would dent his bumper. 


We both stopped at the roadside. Okay he looked like a nice guy, we went down to check his cars. Actually, we both didnt know what to do and being at rush hour around 6oc I decided to exchange phones and we can discuss later while we go back, rather than causing the massive jam. So halfway back, I called him and planned to ask him to come over to the workshop where i repair my car dents after i arranged an appointment. He said okay. 


The next day , i forgot about it. And he called saying why not he take to his workshop and check with me the price if its okay then he'll proceed to repair. I said okay too since its inconvenient for him to travel up to my place.


The next day he called back and informed me that the quotation he got is a whopping 380 while i expected to be around 100 because thats why i paid to knock my bumper back in shape. During lunch time i went over to find him @ Agilent to see whats costing so much ? 


So it was like this
His bumper internal frame was bent requiring repairs
The knocking of the dent
The spraying of the entire bumper


While cross checking with the price that I got from my workshop it was 70~80 for knocking the dent and 180 for spraying which totals up to 250.


I thought for a while. Well okay since i was the one at fault so I just agreed to fixing all that but asked him to negotiate for a lower price. He managed to get 350 while i was trying to have 340. He said he'll pay the RM10 himself. How nice ? 


On that day to pass him the money, he collected 250 only. He said he didnt want to replace the internal bumper frame and understands my situation as a fresh grad.


Well I paid less, but that left me thinking was he such a good person ? Or he had bad motives in the first place. Hmm..

Follow Up : I hope !!!!

Sort of a great news I received yesterday, 7th March 2011, 2 weeks after the interview. I heard that the manager has decided to hire me but they are in progress with the hiring but due to my nature as a contract worker, its a bit troublesome. 


I have been thinking, what if I didnt accept the contract offer ? Might it be easier.
If i didnt accept the contract offer. I never had the chance to learn perl, write a perl script, get in touch with the internal job fair. What a dilemma.


Haih..


Nevertheless, I still continue to hope for that long awaited phone call from them. I hope its tomorrow.

Tearing apart my Pentium 4 system

I have a pentium 4 system in my house, been here for about 6 years ! can you imagine that ! It even has a floppy drive. Well this system has been dormant all along only to be awaken recently due to sudden interest.

Theres a problem with old systems > 5 years. The system time keeps resetting every time you shut down. I realize its because of its CMOS battery that had died out all the while. Please keep this in mind when you revive an old system or else it will make you go crazy every time you boot up to set the system time.

Anyway, due to some unknown problems, the system eventually died. My dad got a new i3 system. But the main focus of this post is the tearing apart of my P4 system. Not exactly tearing, just dissecting to see if theres any salvage parts. The first thing on my mind is its 3.5'' hard disk. Although only 40GB in size, i figure it could be used to store some of the movies / media i have.

So this is what looks like inside the system. There we see the HDD , the motherboard , PSU, PCI slots, the CPU , PCH , and there's the famous floppy drive. How many of you still have it ? Of course, anybody familiar with setting up their own PCs might have spotted. Its HDD is a PATA drive. Saw all those ribbons ? How disappointing.

Another close up of the PATA drive. PATA drives are slower than SATA drives. This is very impractical as a storage medium.

Heres a close of up the floppy drive. Seeing the system board, I cant help but feel a sense of similiarity in my line of work. All the cabling and stuffs.