Finally ... the country down under...

firstly do mind me if my posting is a whole wall of text....currently on my trusty n900 posting today. As I am typing this out, I'm actually on the road with my colleague making our way downunder. Yeap, that's right.. the land of Phua Chu Kang and ranked the 35th in the world for chili crabs.(yet to try it out)

So lurkers might be wondering what the heck is he going there for? the answer: work. Staying overnight first at Thristle hotel and the next day to customer data centre for fax solution, faxcore server deployment and configuration. Maybe if time permits, I could blog abit on the hotel (it's the second time around lodging there). The customer is a financial insitute corporate, (hint:- the logo has a tiger on it) .

Fast forward, weather wasn't on our side where it was scattered rains here and there. The hotel room wasn't over impressive and not to bad. But a few ranting would go to the hard latex pillow we had furthermore a leaking shower.

So our journey begin the follow day to Singapore, my colleague had to drop me off first at some Data center before venturing off for his business meeting. The best moment was, we totally forgotten to had breakfast before zooming into the country and with god mercy, we had only 7 SGD.

The building opposite the data center was a small cafeteria, so we popped over to have a quick breakfast, Nes-ICE + chicken pao which sums up to about 6.80 SGD. We talk to ourselves stating the obvious like we are very poor buggers in the land of Merlion.

Anyway, my colleague left and I was off to the Data Center. Was greeted with another System Engineer guy and to my amazed they had those retina scan to enter their office... like seriously.... those sci-fi movies with high clearance access with those eye scans.

Off to the staging room where I installed the fax card with a breeze and thought that installation of FaxCore would go around 30-45 mins. However that wasn't the case, the installation was interrupted with a dreaded failure of creating some SQL table on the pre-install SQL on the OS.

With the help of the staff for providing me their USB Singtel 3G dongle, I've manage to search the root cause. It was actually, multiple installation of SQL in different drives, (I've notice multiple folders in C drive as well as D drive) therefore the registry of the SQL installation left a previous configuration trace which does not resolved its path for some data log.

A quick lurking around the web brought me to a KB of Microsoft which helped me in fixing this issue http://support.microsoft.com/kb/836873. Of course I used the manual way, since i know my way around registry editor.

This pretty much drag the installation time to an additional 1 hour which was not what I expected.

After completing, we rushed back to our hotel for a quick rest and the following day my colleague had a last minute appointment. As for me? yea i just laid back in the hotel room killing my time resting. Haha... consider a day break from work...

We hit home on 21st October where it was my first time driving a Harrier back 100KM with fuel gauge at E. Boy that was pretty nerve wrecking ride when it was heavy downpour plus no gas station for about 10-20 mins when the E was blinking.


Oh well, summary Singapore is a clean place to be but for a holiday spot for me would not be a favorable place for me.

Next weekend I will be on my getaway trip to Macau + Hong Kong. Hope I have the time to put up some photos.

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