The UnSub

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Ever encountered irritating automatic sensors that flushes when you start wiping your ass? Once the sensor loses sight of our back, it triggers. It is highly likely that several flushes will occur per session, at least that was what happened to the neighboring cubicle. My solution is to waste a small piece of paper to cover the sensor. Please do not ask me how I get the paper to stick to the wall.

Do you receive bills or statements from banks? Ever wonder why they need to print credit card/account numbers all over the pages?

I still haven’t figure out why. It’s good that I do not have many card bills or statements to go through, but I can’t imagine how others deal with them especially for different cards statements from different banks.

There was once I almost threw away pieces of statements that weren’t conveying any important figures, but yet had my card number printed amongst the horde of information on it! Isn’t a bill number sufficient for the bank to process our payment?

After that incident, I bought a manual cross-cut shredder that is more secure than a straight cut one (no we are not talking about hair-style) since it is easier to re-construct a shredded document from a straight-cut machine.

It is better to be safe than sorry. I noticed many overseas online-stores are more secure from the way they handle your sensitive information. At least the bills, statements or invoices that they sent via courier or wire do not print the entire credit card number string but a partial one or even omitting it altogether (”payment via credit card” is sufficient since I am the one paying).

So why can’t DBS do that? I am not sure. Perhaps it is costly for them to adjust their IT system. And since we can’t change the way a bank works, we better change the way we handle our bills and statements.

There are other techniques to destroy sensitive printed material, I personally tried incineration and water soaking, but the novelty of such techniques wears out over time especially if it has to be done periodically.

If you have lots of printed material to deal with, I would suggest an electric cross-cut shredder or bring to an office that has one!

Experience taught me that my hardware will tend to fail me when I need them them most. Eg, when I was about to quit my previous company, my workstation harddisk decided to give way! Good thing i had the habit of manually copying files into my network folders. Still it was a painful experience to reinstate winXP back into another disk.

One way to save the pain is to backup entire disk with freeware like DriveImage XML but it is quite time consuming. As I often develop and test programs, I’d want to synchronize some folders into the network drive.

Recently, i found easySync @ http://www.mybytes.de/. It is a nifty little free tool that helps me synchronize folders. It does so by helping u configure shortcuts that runs the program that does the work.

Compared to the other tools I have used before which sits at the background taking up CPU resources. This approach is better since I can start it when I am sure so as to prevent unintended syncs.

So far, I am pleased with easySync. I always check “Don’t delete anything” checkbox found at the shortcut creation wizard to play it safe!

*disclaimer: Don’t sue me when your files/folders get screwed ok?!*

Found this advertisement on my flat’s notice board. They even have childcare for the little “animals” at their little farm. I wonder if Old Mcdonald is there to sing ye ya ye ya ho~

This is even more interesting…

I was at Chai Chee visiting a friend’s shop/office where I noticed this odd looking machine outside a Mama store just a few units away. Really a piece of work to host a PC running some games and coin slot fitted nicely in a study desk to make money of out little kiddos.