hendrikch.com - Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life

Just feeling lazy at home over the past couple of days. I do have lots of things to attend to, I have at least five priority-2 tasks to be completed, and one priority-1 task, but I just can’t seem to find the mood the past few days to clear them out. Reached back home, just browsing around, read news again, again, and again. Check my email again, again, and again. No, I’ve not gone that far as to browse each and every single person’s profile in Friendster or every videos there are in YouTube like the one besides me often does :p

Tomorrow is Friday, maybe finally I’ll get some mood to clear out those never-seem-to-get-done tasks. At least if I can complete one to two of them, that’ll be great.

The past few days have also seen me gone to bed half-an-hour earlier, and I hope it’s not a coincidence that I don’t feel that sleepy anymore in office. Maybe it’s not the lunch after all, maybe I just don’t have enough sleep during the night.

Sometimes we make it harder than it is
We’ll take a perfect night
And fill it up with words we don’t mean
Dark sides best unseen
And we wonder why we’re feeling this way.

Sometimes I wonder if we really feel the same
Why we can be unkind
Questioning the strongest of hearts
That’s when we must start
Believing in the one thing that has gotten us this far.

Chorus
That’s what love is for
To help us through it
That’s what love is for
Nothing else can do it.
Melt our defenses
Bring us back to our senses
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that’s what love is for.

Sometimes I see you
And you don’t know I am there
And I’m washed away by emotions
I hold deep down inside
Getting stronger with time
It’s living through the fire
And holding on we find

Chorus

Believing in the one thing
That has gotten us this far
That’s what love is for
To help us through it
That’s what love is for
Nothing else can do it.
Round off the edges
Talk us down from the ledges
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that’s what love is for

That’s what love is for.
That’s what love is for
Melt our defenses
Bring us back to our senses
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that’s what love is for.
That’s what love is for.
That’s what love is for.
That’s what love is for.

I proud myself to be an advanced Windows user (and a dummy in Mac still ), but time and again I found new features in Windows or Office that I never knew. This time round is a feature in PowerPoint called Slide Master. All the years, when I wanted to adjust positions of a textbox in ALL the slides, be it the header or the body, I would have done it manually, dragging the box to the desired place. It’ll be easy if I hadn’t started typing away texts into those boxes and creating many slides. But more of than not, textbox alignment are desired only after you have lots of texts, and manually adjusting the position and alignments of textboxes in ALL the slides is simply a mundane task, depending on how many slides you have.

How to access Slide Master feature in PowerPoint 2007

To access this feature in PowerPoint 2007, go to View and then click on Slide Master. A new Ribbon tab will be displayed on the left of Home tab, appropriately called Slide Master. Here you can adjust the slide master as you wish, and when you close the Master View, the adjustment you’ve made will be applied to all the slides using that Master. You can have multiple Master in one PowerPoint slide (caveat: Only PowerPoint 2002 and above). Consider that as having multiple templates in a slide.

Now, let me bring you can a few days back in time on how I found out this “new” feature. I needed to create a PowerPoint slide a couple of days back, and since I was using my Mac at that time, I decided to try out Apple’s latest iWork ‘08. You can download their 30-days trial for free. It came with Pages (similar to Word), Numbers (you guess it, similar to Excel), and Keynote (similar to PowerPoint). The download was blazing over 600KB/sec, so it took me less than 15 minutes for that 470 MB package. After I installed them, I nose dived into Keynote to create my presentation. Now the fun begins. As I was still figuring out how to use Keynote, I had no choice but to randomly click on anything that looks like a button that I can click that has a label resembles what I am trying to do. Hey, that’s what you do when you have no idea of a new piece of software, no? This is when I was introduced to this new concept of Masters.

Masters in Keynote

Obviously, when I am back to Windows to refine my presentation (after all, this presentation will be run using a Windows machine, so I have to make sure that it runs fine in Windows. Luckily I did, as many of the fonts I used in Mac was not available in Windows, and my presentation looks awful at best), I looked out for a button that has the word “Master” in it. It was easy to guess, it’s a view, so I headed to View tab, and there you go, big button called Slide Master. If only I had known this feature long time ago, it would have saved me countless hours refining my presentation manually, and I hope that you don’t have to suffer similar fate if you need to create some presentation in the future

If 7 = Days of the Week, what will these be?

52 = W …………… in a Y ……………
26 = L ……………. of the A ……………
12 = S ……………. of the Z ……………
80 = D ……… around the W ………..
90 = D ………… in a R ………. A ………..
7 = W ………….. of the W …………….
1000 = Y ………… in a M ………………
9 = P …………… in the S ………. S ……….
60 = M …………. in an H ………….
366 = D ………. in a L ………. Y ……….

About 7+pm Singapore time, there was an earthquake in Bengkulu province. I was having my dinner and I didn’t feel anything. At 7.46pm, someone sms-ed me telling me there was an earthquake. I checked with my parents, but they said they didn’t feel anything. Well, I guess it’s good that nothing happened.

They were wary about the possibility of another tsunami, but until now I haven’t read any further news on that, so I guess we’re safe.

Powerful quake strikes Indonesia (CNN)
Singapore buildings sway after strong quake hits Indonesia (Channel News Asia)
BMG: Kepastian Tsunami Diketahui Pukul 20.00 WIB (Liputan 6)

On a totally unrelated side-post, we are no longer allowed to give money to beggars in Jakarta, or you will be fined between Rp. 10,000 to Rp. 20 million. (about S$1.60 to S$3,232) What do you think about this new regulation?

Today I took 502 again from office home, and this time I noticed the exact bus number. The one I’m supposed to take is either 502 or 502B, and not 502A. Apparently yesterday I took 502A.

On a totally unrelated note, bus fare in Singapore will go up between one to two cents from October 1.

Nothing like Lost in Translation, but today I somehow got lost in Jurong West. Sitting in a bus, round and rounds of unfamiliar sights of HDB blocks, wondering where I was at times. I usually took 502 home from office, but this time round I took 502A, can’t really remember if I should have taken 502A or 502B. I sat in the bus, hoping that I would see something familiar, like MRT tracks. Unfortunately, after 15 minutes in the bus, all I saw was HDB blocks, 700-something, 800-something. I alighted the moment I saw something familiar in the shape of McD. I took bus number 243, reached Boonlay MRT in 15 minutes, and the rest was simple.

So hungry after I reached home about 8.30pm *haiz* What a Monday …