Ah... it's good to be back home. I was in Astana, Kazakhstan last week for the International Olympiads in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI), doing observation duty for work purposes. It was summer there; the weather was warmer than in SIN city, but thanks to the lower humidity, it was actually overall cooler than out here.
I won't talk about work stuff---there's a lot to be processed, and I really don't want to have to do that more than the necessary amount of times. Besides, this blog isn't really meant to talk about work stuff, but whatever I want to talk about in general that isn't work related.
So I got back home. And Eileen-III has a blown out screen---two red flashes on the alien-head power switch, followed by eight blue flashes, cycled indefinitely. When I first saw this yesterday, I was fuming; I had come home from a week of hard work overseas, and wanting to play either Mass Effect 3 or Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn and being unable to do either was annoying. I had to power Eileen-III down for the week due to some additional [electrical] works that Pa wanted to do during the week I was away---I had that weird feeling that I should've said no to him, but I gave in, and this was the end result. Thankfully, I had ordered the extra on-site servicing along with Eileen-III all those years ago, figuring that if I was plonking big bucks for the hardware, I might as well pony up the extra amount that would be needed to repair it in the five years ahead. I think they are going to replace the motherboard, but that isn't coming for a few weeks.
Thank God for that.
As mentioned, I only got back home yesterday, just on the evening of National Day itself. Didn't watch the parade, went straight to getting kway chap at the nearby duck rice stall, then spent the rest of the evening frustrated over the non-working Eileen-III.
The more astute might find a contradiction. If Eileen-III were down, why/how can I enter this entry? Did I mis-use work hardware to post what is definitely a personal blog entry?
Nah... when I was following the instructions of troubleshooting from technical support this early afternoon, I found that the external monitor was showing the original wallpaper that I had set for my log in screen, before going blank. On a hunch, I did a blind log in (i.e. just hitting ``enter'' then typing my password, and then ``enter'' again). I managed to log in, and then a few keyboard shortcuts later, I was effectively duplicating whatever was supposed to be on Eileen-III's screen onto the monitor. I had to turn down the resolution from 2650×1600 to 1920×1080, and physically re-rotate my external monitor back to landscape, but other than that, everything else seemed to work fine.
And so here I am, significantly less unhappy than before. I caught up on some of the fun YouTubers, leaving the stuff that I would normally watch in the background aside for another time when I had two working screens.
I got some dizi practise in earlier in the morning too, while I was waiting for technical support to finally contact me after filing that service request (this one, I did use the virtual machine on my work machine to file because it was infinitely less painful than trying to do so with a stupid-ass potato of a phone).
Now I'm just wondering if I want to start my cycling tomorrow morning again, or defer it till after I have done the staff appraisals as reporting manager. Part of me thinks that I should not delay the start, since it is as good a [workout] system as any to get back into to avoid myself going more nuts. But then there's that laziness that lurks in the background...
...I'll probably just muscle it up and go cycle. Time zone difference between Astana and SIN city is about 3 hours earlier, so it really makes no difference either way.
And that's all I have to share for now. Till the next update then.
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