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Quit Bullshitting, Sky Internet

Our internet has been dead at peak hours (for us that’s 12mn to 6am) this past week. Fed up, I resorted to calling our provider, Sky Internet. We’ve been losing precious hours and a few pesos finding alternate internet sources at such odd hours.

First call, it was a recording of downtime at areas such as Ortigas, Pasig, etc. Not hearing our area in the list, I called them again so I could speak to one of their agents.

Finally an agent answered. Before he could ask for my name I asked why we had no internet at our area, Loyola Heights. He didn’t answer the question, but instead, went for protocol and asked for my name. I gave it, and I also gave the name that was attached to our subscription. He then asked me where I was located despite me telling him that a few minutes ago.

He asked me to hold for a while, as he would be checking with their technicians to see where Internet would be down.

It was a good five minutes before he came back. The first thing he said? He told me to reset our router.

I said I’ll do that later since our router is upstairs.

He said try connecting the laptop to the router.

Again, I said I can only do that later.

Furious, I asked him if I did all those, if my Internet come back.

He said no, he wasn’t sure if those solutions would work.

It was then when I started ranting and rambling about how much precious time and money we wasted because one they couldn’t provide what we paid for, and second, because they won’t tell us straight if there was a problem.

I mean, if you’re the provider, and you know something is wrong, you should tell the user straight to the point that something is wrong, not blaming it on the user’s hardware.

He should have said, “sir we’ve been having problems” not “sir you should do this and this and that and shit” while covering up what has been happening.

GAHD.

30 minutes later the Internet was back up. Yes I restarted our router, but that was long before our connection came back up.

Dear Sky Internet Philippines, do your job. Quit bullshitting your users. Please deliver.

For other Sky Internet users, Internet at midnight to morning apparently has been erratic since Feb 7. WTF.

Wherever Our Hands and Hearts Bring Us

From sunset to sunrise, and sunrise to sunset, you have always been there for me.

Whether it was bright or dark, you always held my hand.

I’m holding on tight.

Remapping

After having lunch this afternoon, a good friend asked me what would be a good age to reach one’s personal goal. Meaning if I set realizable goals and dreams for myself, how old would I expect myself to be by that time.

I told her that I plan on getting a few things done before I turn 30.

Why 30?

30 years old is an age that I think is somewhat feasible for goals I have set for myself. By that age, I won’t be too young to lack maturity, and I also won’t be too old to be too late.

And then I remember, around 2 years ago, I wrote a blog entry on how I planned to live my life for the next 8 years. Two years after writing that, I immediately looked it up and read it.

Category: AP186

With the previous blog entry about image compression, I have written my last entry in my AP186 image processing blog entry series. Though this is the end of the blogs, this is not the end of all the image processing.

To properly follow the series of blog entries, please click on the Category: AP186 located all over the blog (in each entry, in the right sidebar). But for convenience, I linked it here: Category: AP186. This is to avoid confusion from reading personal blog entries sandwiched between the image processing entries.

I hope you enjoyed and learned a lot from my blog entries. I’ve put a lot of effort in trying to keep my entries entertaining for my readers to not lose interest. Anyways. If you want to use them for reference, go ahead, just give credit where it’s due. I believe that in the near future I myself would be using my entries for reference

‘Til next time.

PS If I will have fun in my project I’ll be posting a blog entry about it. Hehehe. We’ll see.

Activity 14 – Image Compression

Back in 2002, my siblings and I had a relatively high-end computer. It had specs (500Ghz, 80gig hard drive and 512mb RAM, a good video card) that were optimal for playing the newest game at that time, which was the graphics and memory intensive Warcraft 3. Making my setup wicked still is that it had two monitors, enabling me to chat and surf the web while at the same time playing Counter-Strike.

This set-up lasted for quite a few years. In fact, I’ve been using this computer until first year college. Through the years I pushed my use of its hard drive to the limit: I’ve reinstalled/changed its OS many times (Windows, Ubuntu, both), I partitioned the hard drive for different set-ups (for dual-booting, for media organization) and then I filled it with lots of stuff.

As I installed different games, captured more pictures, pirated more music (hehehe), downloaded more movies, the 80gig hard drive, I realized, was not enough with the demand for more storage. Even now that I own a 3 year old Macbook Pro with a hard drive of 160gig, I sometimes find this storage is not enough (as of now I only have 11.42 gigs left).

Of course, this demand was obvious to the computing community, and that is why different programmers developed different ways of compressing files. Zip, tar, rar, and all were basic solutions to compression of multiple files.

Another compression technique of interest is image compression.

Activity 13 – Color Image Segmentation

Image borrowed from Dr. Freemason
“Were you listening to me, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?”

One of my favorite scenes in the Matrix (besides the spoon bending, bullet evading, reality warping scenes) is the scene wherein Neo is being taught the basics of the Matrix. Neo and Morpheus were walking along a bustling street of seemingly hostile and preoccupied people clad in black. Morpheus was explaining something to Neo when a lady in a red dress walks by and catches Neo’s attention. And then we realize that the woman in red was just to test how cautious Neo, or even the viewer is with respect to his surroundings. Morpheus calls Neo’s attention and tells him to “look again,” only to find a gun point-blank towards his head.

Of course, this was just a simulation to test our hero, so Neo is still well and alive.

But you can’t blame Neo. In a sea of black coats, black ties and black socks (even black sunglasses) a beautiful woman wearing red is a very welcome distraction. If I were him I’d also be turning my head in admiration.

We human beings can easily distinguish prominent colors such as the red of the woman’s dress with the help of our eyes and brains. In a sea of black and white, it is easy to point out which is red. But how about our computers? How can we teach them to automatically isolate different colors?

Activity 12 – Color Image Processing

An obviously wrongly balanced image which was done on purpose to enhance the mood.

In the previous entry, I mentioned that I am a musician, though informally trained. It’s one hobby that I pursue because I just want to enjoy it, so I don’t need to make it more complicated than what it really is for me.

Another hobby that I pursue is photography, a field in which yet again, I am informally trained. I do not own professional grade cameras and equipment, nor have I attended any workshop on teaching me how to capture the perfect images. I just capture memories (yes, that’s what I think of my photos) on the go without any forethought on how to optimize the end product.

But one aspect in photography that I always am conscious of are the white balance settings.

Activity 11 – Playing Notes by Image Processing

I am a musician.

I am a musician in the sense that one, I can sing in tune, and two, I can play music using an instrument of choice, which is the guitar.

But if you want to be very strict with your terms, I am not a formal musician. I sing and play music by ear. I base my music skills on what I hear. If you give me a musical piece to read and play (you know, with the staff and the notes), my brain automatically presses the pause button. I can’t read notes as fast as a formally trained musician can.

Who needs notes anyway? I know that I can play and sing from my heart and soul, so, I don’t care much about formality.

That was what I thought until I joined the glee club back in high school.

Activity 10 – Binary Operations

An image of stars with a supernova, taken from Outer Space Site.

As a kid, I used to be fascinated with outer space. Mainly, I guess, because of how my sister always exclaimed that she would be an astronaut when she grew up (although she never pursued this dream, as she became an attorney instead). I used to look at photos of stars in the net back then. In more recent years, I was giddy when I found out that Mac OSXs featured an image of an aurora with stars behind it as its initial wallpaper (see here).