Mid-Semester Break

I live in a great apartment with a cozy environment, nice property-manager, and just a few minutes away from Uni. But one thing I don’t really like about it is that the residents must stick with only one internet provider! It’s waaaaayyy expensive compared to other providers, like Telstra and Optus. And they don’t have unlimited plan! Last semester I used a 2 GB plan (and shared it with Mayuko) and I usually ended up paying more than the original rate because I always used more than 2GB. So I upgraded it to 3.6 GB, and I thought it’s enough for both of us… (btw, Mayu doesn’t use THAT much). But NOOO.. I ended up using more than 3.6 GB again!! Sigh… Anyway, I was soooo excited today, coz I stupidly thought that tomorrow’s date would be 1st of October. That means, my bandwith will be reset to 0 byte again. When the clock turned 12:01… I was like “Yessss!!! It’s time to download hahaha”. But then Mayu said, “what are you talking about? today is September 30!” WHAT??!? I was so freakin stupid! All of my dreams were shattered!! LOL.

One may wonder what I usually do with 3.6 GB of downloads?? (actually, 3.6 is not enough for most people here… they’d prefer unlimited, of course) I always download music every month, although it only adds up to 10 MB or 20 MB per month. I like to browse websites like Flickr and DeviantArt which also take up a lot of bandwith. I also loooooove to watch videos at YouTube, sometimes for hours!! The last video I watch was Diana: the Secret Video Tapes, which has about 21 separate videos! I watch all of them!! And not to forget videos at CNN and ABC, and many softwares, programs, and web applications on the net! Yes, I’m terrible and I’m wasting a lot of money. But hey, this is what I call fun! I never go shopping (my mom and sis bought most of my clothes in Jeddah/Jakarta), rarely go out to eat, and I even forgot when was the last time I visited the cinema!! So my living expense doesn’t change that much. One thing I have to do is to avoid browsing through ebay! Once I can handle it, then I’ll be fine most of the time.

So, that’s basically what I do during mid semester break. I’m also doing some web development stuffs. I’m still very very confused whether I should use
Joomla or Drupal!!! Anyone has any ideas??? I finished the design part… and now I’m completely stuck which CMS I should use. The thing about Joomla that I hate is the amount of table attributes it uses for the layout!!! Can’t they just use divs instead??? I wish I have time to explore all of Joomla’s php files!! On the other hand, Drupal is much lighter than Joomla. It doesn’t use a lot of junk table attributes. But I seriously don’t like Drupal’s backend. Whoa… confused!

I just finished designing a website for my INFS3204’s group project. It’s about building an online library management system using .NET and C#. It’s quite interesting!!! I’m happy that I finally learn .NET, although I’m still very slow on understanding how it works when we want to use multiple web services. This is the layout I designed; inspired by a Diabetes Website that I found at DeviantArt yearssss ago. You can see that I entirely copied the layout’s original design. But because this one is for educational purpose, I don’t have to concern about copyrights & stuff.

My housemate, Jenny and I were planning to go to Mt Tamborine this Sunday, before the mid-sem break ends. Jenny wants to go to the winery and I want to enjoy the fresh air of the mountain (I love mountains!! Yes, Puncak is my fave destination!). So we planned to rent a car or perhaps a van to go there… coz we’d like to invite our friends as well. Omar’s brother, who is a part-time cab driver would be our one-day driver. But unfortunately, Omar’s bro has an exam on Monday on Tuesday… And nobody we know except him has a “proper” (meaning Australian) driver license. So we had to cancel off everything. Jenny was upset. I told her that we could perhaps go there after final exams - before our friends fly back home. Hmm, so sad…

I met up with my former classmates one day before Ramadhan in the City. I had to arrange everything and invite everyone; thanks to Loretta and Nikki for your help!! There were 6 people came including me. I decided to have lunch at Nando’s because they provide vegetarian meals, knowing that 2 of my friends are vegetarians. I had a very good time!! We haven’t seen or even bump into each other at Uni for ages! It was great seeing them again, although I was hoping Haewon and Sunny could join us too. I think our table was the noisiest!! hahahaha.