The phone system has just been upgraded and I believe the upgrade was the smoothest among all the IT upgrades which were done previously. The card system is still work in progress. So, all staffs are wearing the new card but without the system. The network infrastructure is considerably stable. Thought I mentioned the phone upgrade was smooth, there were also some glitches. We could only make internal phone calls at the moment. Well, they blame it to the provider but who knows when it will be sorted out. We could see who is calling who on the display. Each phone costs more than the agreed pay award we get but that’s a bit irrelevant. Anyway, the IT is always introducing something which is incomplete and they do not have a clue what kind of impact it will have on all the staffs in this organisation. They just unplug and plug as they want and when they want.

One of my colleagues is going to Australia next Monday. I bet she is excited about the trip but frustrated about the current weather forecast. Heavy snow on Saturday but we never know. It was forecasted that there will be heavy snow last night but it didn’t. For those who are now on a nice and cosy Royal Caribbean cruise holiday will not have to face the extreme weather forecasted. Why Royal Caribbean? Well, it seems to be very popular among my colleagues.

Guess what? I am using my mobile internet to access internet using my netbook. Well, it is not a new thing already and I could have just online using my mobile phone but there are things that I need to do using my netbook. The idea is to setup my mobile phone as a wireless hotspot. By clicking on the available wireless network on my netbook, it detects the mobile phone’s hotspot and connects to it. It’s a bit slow but still better than nothing. Anyway, how fast would you expect from running a mobile internet compared to a 10MB cable internet connection? The setup is painless and that’s the important point.

Christmas is coming, in fact, it is just 10 days to go. I don’t have anything that I wish to have in particular. Mee has promised that she would buy a pair of gym shoes for me. I have the brand and model in sight, and hopefully, I would be able to enjoy the classes even more after that. As usual for Mee, more handbags. I don’t actually have any gadget stuffs in mind. We will definitely be getting a digital camera. I am quite keen on getting an iPhone, although I won’t be using it, Mee will. The contract ends exactly a month from tomorrow and I shall call them, maybe this weekend, to see what offers I can get. Most probably, we will buy an iPhone from iStore and sell whatever phone we get for our contract from our mobile provider, Three Network. We just change our Ordinateurs de bureau about a year ago, so that’s still good. The more I use my netbook, the more I find it bulky. I have the Macbook Air in my mind but it will be my target for next year. The current Macbook Air is still using the old Core 2 Duo processor and the new MacOS codename Lion will be coming out next year. It will be interesting to see the next generation of Macbook Air with newer processor and the new MacOS. If Mee and I go back to Malaysia next year, I would probably buy myself an iPad.

The forecasters predicted that it will be a white Christmas this year. I wonder if it’s a joy or no joy thing. Some of my colleagues will be out of this country and going to somewhere warm during Christmas. And they are particularly worried about the weather as the weather might disrupt the operations at the airports. They started comparing cheap insurance companies as they wanted proper cover in case of any flight delay or even flight cancellation.

Well, when Mee and I first came to UK, it snowed around Christmas time. I wasn’t particularly excited about it and at that time, it didn’t cause too much problem to us because we used public transport to get around. I thought to myself, I have seen it and that’s good enough. Since then, it snowed almost every year. Just last year, it snowed so badly here and I had to walk to work for a week. It’s certainly not a good experience.

In my previous post, I mentioned that my HTC Desire is now working like how I wanted it to be. It meant that I have done most of the modifications that could improve the speed and performance of any HTC Desire. First, I moved away from using HTC Sense UI by installing a popular ROM called Cyanogenmod. In my opinion, HTC Sense UI is using too much memory even though it does not slow down the phone significantly. When I was using a custom ROM with HTC Sense UI, I only had about 100MB of free memory. But with Cyanogenmod ROM, I always have about 200MB and it does feel a lot faster. One of the problems that I had with the previous ROM was the battery indicator. No matter how many times I calibrated it, the battery percentage was always inaccurate. I didn’t suppose that the ROM itself was the problem because the ROM was based on original HTC Froyo ROM. Since I flashed Cyanogenmod ROM, I have no such problem.

Though I considered my HTC Desire is running on one of the best ROM, the internal phone storage was a let down with only 140MB available for applications and games installation. Even though most applications and games allow users to move the installations files to the SD card, there will still be some core files left on the internal phone storage in order for the applications or games to function properly. In addition, some applications have to be installed on the internal phone storage. There are several ways to improve the way HTC Desire handles the internal phone storage and I have decided to go for the method that modifies the internal phone storage. It is a method posted by AlphaRev which turns off the security flag of HTC Desire and enables modifications to the internal phone storage. It is called the S-Off. As soon as my HTC Desire was S-Off, I proceeded to update the internal phone storage table structure to the same as Google Nexus One phone, provided by AlphaRev. With the table structure of Google Nexus One on my HTC Desire, I get 60MB more free internal phone storage spaces.

The process of S-Off was fairly easy to me but updating the HTC Desire to Google Nexus One table structure was a little bit tedious. It required a PC and some commands knowledge. Some users posted problems while doing S-Off where they had to wait for almost one hour while I did mine in less than 5 minutes. Updating to Google Nexus One table structure was even faster; mine was completed in less than 1 second.

I don’t suppose there are more modifications can be done on my HTC Desire except updating Cyanogenmod whenever there is a new release. What I will be waiting now is for Cyanogenmod team to release an Android Gingerbread version.

Yesterday, I was feeling real bad; flu, a little bit of cold and sore throat. Mee was the same but she felt a little bit better than me. I could barely open my eyes and everything I saw was almost a single line. The coding on the screen was also blurred. Yet, I carried on working. Out of curiosity, I decided to check the pagerank of my blog. I don’t know why I would want to check as I make no effort in making link exchanges. I just type post after post these days. The highest pagerank I ever got was pagerank 1 and that only lasted like a month. To my surprise, My Ideas 4 You is now a pagerank 2 blog. How cool is that? Well, at least it’s cool to me.

I wonder how long since I last checked my friends’ updates on Facebook. I think I last checked like a week ago when I was busy updating and modding my HTC Desire. Well, just yesterday, I had it working like how I wanted it to be. So, from now on, I will start customising it to my needs again. As usual, login to Facebook and the updates refreshed automatically. Guess what I saw? The company that I used to work for was advertising job vacancies for three programmers, two supports and one or two business executive. They even advertised their point of purchase displays and services offered which are mostly related to retail business. Great for them as it seems like their business is expanding. When I first joined, there were only two staffs; the boss and me. Well, there was a part time account manager but that account manager is now the boss’ wife. Anyway, it’s good seeing them doing this well.

The previous episode of The Gadget Show looked a bit weird. As usual, they were given a challenge and this time, the challenge was to find an ultimate Christmas gift. And of course, the challenge was gadget related. Two male presenters competed with the other two female presenters in order to come up with the best Christmas gadget gift. Well, what I felt weird was towards the end of the show, the male presenters came up with a 15” LG LED TV monitor while the female presenters came up with a 3D projector that could definitely project 3D videos larger 15”. Well, LED or no LED, I don’t believe anyone would want to choose a 15” LED TV monitor over any plasma or samsung lcd televisions that they have in the studio. It seemed like they were forced to present the TV monitor as their ultimate Christmas gadget gift. Anyway, who knows what they were doing. Maybe they were just run out of ideas. It’s fun to watch the show though, but I don’t take their reviews too seriously.