RMIT Diary

It’s the title of my favorite song, originating from the game series Final Fantasy. The song is about the evil’s will to reunite with its mother thus creating a great power. (You need to watch Final Fantasy – Adventure Children to really understand its meaning.)

It’s the melody that helped me survive back in 4 years ago, when there was very little hope left.

How is black different from white? All aim for survival, and then to live.

Sometimes, life just doesn’t give us you a single opportunity to be angel.

You cannot understand the feeling of evil unless you become evil yourself.

Fortunately, it’s us, the human, who have the choice of whatever we become.

You cannot loose without giving up.

Z

It has been a while since my last entry when I had a flu. It’s over, yet not completely. I am feeling much better now. The weather change this afternoon, perhaps, caused some bad effects on my health again. And right now, I feel like getting sick again.

Have bought a new shoulder rest (for my violin), and it’s quite a pleasure to use. It was my teacher who noticed my left shoulder being too high due to the old, spoiled shoulder rest. Just a minor change brought about a significant improvement on my playing, and I’m happy with it.

I also bought a new monitor for my desktop PC, doubling my working space. It was a total boost in productivity. With two monitors, I now use one for coding, the other for reference materials, no more switching back and forth between applications. This is really nice and I would definitely recommend everyone getting another monitor for your daily use provided that your graphic card supports multiple output (my card has support for up to 3 monitors ).

Bad news, I am running out of storage. The 160GB HDD I purchased along with this computer one year ago is now almost filled up (only a few GBs left). Initially, I didn’t think that far about the need to store media. I thought the desktop is for processing-heavy task only. My laptop (250GB HDD) is still OK with the storage, but maybe this won’t last long. And I’m considering getting a 2TB HDD whenever possible (maybe next month).

These days, I am having a review of functional programming with ANSI C as I work on a project involving creating plugin for Pidgin (the most popular open source chat client). This recalls my old days when all the code was in Pascal (another functional programming language). After all, ANSI C is still an elegant language to learn and use. Some of my friends said it’s useless for OOP. In fact, OOP with C is not about the language itself but rather about the way of thinking. And while writing this entry, I am reading an ebook about Object Oriented Programming with ANSI C. It’s how we think about it, not just how we write it (the code).

My classes are fine, hope to get high scores as usual. Fortunately, IT students in my semester don’t have any mid-term exams. However, I personally consider this worrying since such exams are chance for us to “try out” the difficulty of the final exams, without the risk of failing.

It’s bedtime. Cygwin and some movies are supposed to be ready tomorrow.