Before Friendster

Wow. Loading the Create New Post page took a while this evening.

I read this really nostalgic post from Kenny and I laughed.

Yes, I too had an autograph book once, a long long time ago before I became a somewhat cynical older person.

For those young ones who've never been through this fad, the way it works is very simple. An autograph book is a book your pass around to your friends, friends of your friends, people you want to befriend, total strangers etc so that they may write something in it and sign. It's kind of like Friendster testimonials.

It was fun. When I was in secondary school (Form 3 I guess) I once knew this rather popular girl back from our sister school. (In fact I still know her, but we don't hang any more. Her husband might not like that too much) So I passed her my autograph book and when it came back, it was full of entries made by many, many girls from St. Mary's. Needless to say, my ego was boosted that whole week. Quite a feat for a bespectacled geek. And during that time, this was a very important point.

It was so much fun and a great way to make new friends and acquaintances. Although thinking back, I suddenly remember that autograph books were always full of teenage corn, if you know what I mean.

I even wrote poetry *shudder*. I think if I look around the house, I'll find at least one of my two autograph books. The question is, do I want to?

The other thing about this autograph book thing was how personal each one was. Certainly more personal than all these new fangled networking sites.

Things are certainly different now.

In other news, immediately after I posted my last entry, it rained that very morning. It's been raining a bit the last few days. It's wonderful. You'd never think that the sky would look so good when it isn't grey and full of wood ash.

Yesterday, I transfered money and my package should be here tomorrow. The only problem was I left out the street name in my address when I mailed the guy back. I hope that doesn't screw up my delivery.

Diana is in town and I met with her and her fiance on Sunday night. It was nice, although I kind of wished we had more time. It's all good though.

I bought a Rockfire joystick. It was quite cheap. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a good joystick in Kuching. I went to Wisma Saberkas and out of the 153,215 computer shops there, only ONE carried joysticks.

What's up with that? Kuching people don't play flight sims anymore?

Anyway, I got bored of playing WoW due to a spot of particularly bad lag, so I reinstalled IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles. Only this time, I also installed the Ace expansion pack and Pacfic Fighters on top of it. There is this option called merged installed that allows all these different packages to function together. It's neat.

Also, the last time I played this game, I had a crap graphics card and crap joystick. This time, the game really looks gorgeous powered by my Radeon 9600 Pro. And now I have a good joystick with vibrate function, POV hat, Z-axis twist and throttle!

I'm doing very well, I don't stall as much and I no longer crash on take-off because of the torque. I still suck at piloting multiengine aircraft. It's quite complex.

Sometimes, I fire up a quick mission and fly around just for kicks. No combat, just flight and the occasional tower buzz. It's fun.

And those are the things that I did this week so far.