Hmm... last day of April already. Time flies by when you yourself don't know what you've been up to.

Should you really cope with disappointment and regret, especially if its through no fault of yours but of those whom you have trusted your life with? If there's one hard lesson in life that I've learnt, it's to take control of your own life as soon as you're capable and then don't let anyone else mess with it. The consequences of not doing so can potentially last a lifetime and there's no way of backing out.

Okay! So I'm gonna cheat a bit as far as the log entries for the past three weeks are concerned. My modem got zapped the other day and when I finally replaced it two weekends ago, the phone line was found to be horribly noisy and crackling all the way that it was impossible to connect. Turns out that the lightning strike affected Telekom's switch as well. Anyways, it finally got fixed today. During the outage, I was still scriblling stuff on a text editor and so today I'm putting 'em all in. Good to be back!

Bart, Izaidy, Shida and I went to see Actorlympics at The Actors Studio, Bangsar this evening. If you're familiar with the show, Whose Line Is It Anyway, you'll pretty much have a grasp on how this show works. Essentially, the performers on stage (Harith Iskandar, Afdlin Shauki, Zahim Al-Bakri, Jit Murad, Jo Kukathas and Nell Ng) will have to think of a performance based on what the audience tells and they have to improvise everything on the go! Compared to the US version hosted by Drew Carey, I think Actorlympics still leaves much room for improvement. I was hoping there would be a song routine like performed by that dude Wayne Brady. Nevertheless, it was still fairly entertaining. I was seriously considering getting on stage if they were to ask for any volunteers. However, it was only during the Questions Only part so I wasn't really too keen on that. But hey! At least I got them do Cinderella in a Tiger Show genre when was prompted! Heheh!

Just as the entertainment world was recovering from its grief in the loss of Aaliyah last September, another star was lost today as Lisa 'Left-Eye' Lopes, the cute-as-a-button member of the popular girl hip-hop group TLC, died today in a car accident while vacationing in Honduras. She was 31. May she rest in peace.

Ever since Sunway Lagoon opened its doors to the public like almost a decade ago, I have yet to go there to see what they offer. Well, since today is a public holiday in conjunction with the installation of the new Yang Dipertuan Agong, Bart, Penang and I took the opportunity to spend half a day at the amusement park. We took on the rides multiple times since the wasn't any queue to talk about in the first place. Upon entering, we were mighty disappointed already when we were told that the waterpark section is closed for repairs. Anyways, since we were there, we just tried to make the best out of it. The first one we tried was the Tomahawk which is essentially two giant pendulums that takes the riders on a 360 loop a few times. It was then off to the Runaway Train, a roller coaster ride that takes the riders up and down a few dips, valleys and caves. We went on to try out the Colorado Splash, Grand Canyon River Rapids and Niagra Falls Flume Ride before we took a dip in the Surf Pool. Overall, I'd say it's rather okay. The rides are rather mild though (yet Bart and Penang still had to hold on to the handles while riding them as opposed to just letting your hands free like the way it SHOULD!). My opinion is of course, biased since I have been exposed to amusement/theme parks of bigger and badder magnitudes when I was in the States (Can anybody say Cedar Point, Six Flags or Busch Gardens?). They oughtta improve it a lot though and not leave most of the rides and attractions just as it is in its current state.

The local music industry held its award show tonight in the Anugerah Industri Muzik 2002. The whole show was pathetic to say the least. Lacklustre performances, un-inspired speeches and what the heck was Bob Lokman doing up there? Afdlin wasn't really at his best. His pairing with Bob was something that fell short of many expectations. In the past, the AIM was setting new benchmarks and standards that other award shows try to live up to but this time around, AIM just fell flat and short of many of its past shows. The presenters who presented the awards and artists who come up to receive awards mostly repeated through and through what was reputed to be the theme of the night: "Buy orinigals, do not support piracy". Album sales are reportedly down over the past two years and they're saying that it's attributed to the pirates at large selling bootlegged copies of their albums. It struck me something. When you come across any stalls selling pirated stuff, how many of them are actually pirated goods of locally produced music albums? Not many right? It got me thinking along this line instead. Perhaps it's those artists and record companies themselves who are at fault. How? Well, to put it bluntly, most of the stuff that they're giving us just plain sucks! Local album sales are down mainly because the public has gotten sick of the same kinda stuff that's being put out there in the market again and again. Most new artists that come into the market are not really giving us refreshingly new but rather, songs from the same set of composers of other artists. I don't think the piracy factor holds much water anymore when sales of local artists' albums can only reach 50,000 units (at most!) while album sales of foreign artists can reach up to 200,000 mark these days. Or is my logic seriously flawed? Local artists need to get their acts together as far as their art is concerned. They really need to break out from the mould and give us something that would make us all take the cotton wools out of our ears.

A bunch of us met up at Mid Valley this evening since Raida was gracious enough to treat us all dinner for helping her out with her survey! Thank you, Rai! We all later settled for a movie at the theatre. It's been a while since I last saw a movie in the theatre (think the last one I saw was M:I2. Sad, huh?) and today, I finally broke the spell. The movie that we saw wasn't really something to shout about though, A Walk To Remember, starring singer Mandy Moore. I shall spare the details here in case anyone who reads this stuff is looking forward to watching it. The storyline is rather typical, bad boy turned good after falling for the local pastor's sweet innocent daughter. Mandy's performance is amateurish overall. If there's one thing that I like from the movie is the bunch of songs that came up in the movie. I've heard Switchfoot's I Dare You To Move before and now I know why it got popular. :\ There was that rather inspiring piano ballad, Only Hope sung by Mandy herself in a musical sequence of the play in the movie. I'm thinking she should concentrate on her singing career for now. So long as she pouts in her music videos, I'm gonna keep watching 'em. Heh! ;)

I've always liked FreeBSD before and now I like it even better! For some reason or another, I never quite liked Linux although it is more popular amongst the alternative operating systems out there. It never felt as "UNIX" as UNIX oughtta be, but that's just me. It's quite a shame that FreeBSD is not as well supported in terms of hardware by the hardware vendors themselves. Point in example is nVidia. They've released drivers for Linux but not FreeBSD. However, a bunch of people out there got their GeForce cards to work under FreeBSD. Still there are other hardware that's not quite supported under FreeBSD, e.g. Creative's SB Live. It's also sad that some hardware are driven by operating system as well, i.e. those sucky winmodems. Had it not been for all that, FreeBSD would've easily replaced Win2K Pro as the primary OS on my main PC at home.

Anyways, I got more stuff to work on the laptop. I'm particularly please with the Orinoco wireless LAN card working under it as I'm intent on getting Snort and AirSnort to work so that I can further my research within the area.

On another note, I got a bunch of tickets for Actorlympics show at The Actor's Studio this April 25th. The concept of it is similiar to that of "Whose Line Is It Anyway", where the participants (usually comedians) make up everything during the show with no prepared scripts or such. The line-up this time is Harith Iskandar, Afdlin Shauki, Jit Murad, Jo Kukathas and Nell Ng with Patrick Teoh hosting. Looking forward to it already! :)

Stupid afternoon thunderstorm got my modem cooked again. *Sigh* This is the 6th modem already and it's even protected with a lightning surge protector, so I dunno what gives. The last two modems I was using were a good ones too (by 3Com and Creative) as compared to other sucky winmodems. A quick IP and routing change and the machines on my home network is still able to get onto the Internet via the laptop. But whenever I'm not home, Mom and Sis can't get on the 'Net. So, I gotta be shopping for a modem soon. It's gotta be internal. Although I acknowledge external modems are somewhat better, I just can't stand the extra clutter in my workstation. There are already some serious spaghetti going on at the back, so not having to add anything else just helps to keep the clutter at where it is right now.

I've been mucking about trying to get FreeBSD 4.5 - Release to run on my laptop (a Dell Latitude C600) and by God, I actually managed to get it all (X-Windows, XFCE, XMMS, Mozilla, GIMP) running perfectly! Woohoo! The graphics is showing fine (X-Windows is up and running with XFCE fronting as the Window Manager), the network adapters (both 3Com 3C556 and the CNet CN40BC), sound (XMMS is blasting away some MP3s at the moment), XChat, just about most of the stuff I need are practically working. I was thinking that the experience would be quite bad since it's on a laptop that I was going to install it onto but heck, it turned out to be darned pleasant! We'll see how it goes over the next couple of weeks when I can actually show people that I can do stuff on my laptop loaded with UNIX just as they do on Windows.