neighbour below me

i have a very nice neighbour.

i don't know who in particular came up to speak to my parents, about someone bathing late in the night, the toilet drain making lots of noises that they can't sleep. They wanted to call mata in. Wow.

plus my aircon leaking water, dripping on their whatever item at the bedroom aircon ledge. So, they couldn't take it.

i appreciate them for coming up my house and telling my mum, but hey, we are not supermen. I cannot move mountains at a snap of a finger, just to enable them a sound sleep at night.

2 days after the feedback, i threw away the drain filter that made the water noise. Not enough, it seemed, because they came knocking on my door complaining again about the aircon, which i turned on 2 days back. It was barely a week since the first feedback.

i'm going to call Gain City, then obtain a service report from them. Then this service report will go down with me to their doorstep, and end their freaking grouses once and for all. Oh yes, they can threaten to call HDB or the police for all they want. Go ahead and be my guest.

but! i'll be a gentleman and ask them for what exactly they told my mum, since there's a language barrier. If i found out they used unpleasant tones on her, i won't bother to be nice to them.

national day spending, friday horror

i thought i was going to spend a leisurely day at home watching the parade, the fireworks.... nope.

my mum jumped on the eve when my brother came back from camp, and the washing machine made its last breath. It made so much of noise that signaled its last useful use after a good 11 years 4 months. Then the 七月初一 is on the Aug 13 (my mum is very ban tang about this; no new purchase during 7th month).

So the whole family went out to shop for a new one, and i decided to get a new DECT caller too. My caller ID and the Sanyo phone has been here for 9 years, and recently the reception problems are quite bad.

I guessed it lost too much screws after the 5-6th year

My new Fisher&Paykel washer, washing capacity of 7.5kg, and very water efficient.

My new replacement, however the Caller ID stays

we split the bill, and i paid the lion's share of the combined purchase. Now people, don't say i'm rich or has extra $. I don't have kz!

my fish tank has also given a huge overhaul as i left it standing for 3 good months - no feeding, no cleaning, no pruning of plants. When YX came by, he said "you're really busy, because you have not been cleaning your fish tank for so long - the plants are so overgrown". Sigh...

armed with a gravel cleaner to remove dirt, i remembered walking at least 10 times back and forth to wash my filter, another 5 times to top up water and clean my accessories such as CO2 reactor, thermal heater, etc.

the whole overhaul took 2-3hrs, and i have not even cleaned my external Eheim filter for this operation, as i'm missing the pipe brush and sponge filter.

only 30% of my hair grasses remained after 3 months. However, only 6 fishes remained - what a good way to reduce plant and fish load =x


Fri horror
the workshop was to be concluded with a mini project - designing a Leave Management System for the CS3214 project. Before even getting down to the coding, we were already stumped by the use case and class diagrams, modeled in an OO aspect.

the road down is tough.

lab servicing prep and aircon servicing

tuesday was a day of gossips. Cos my lunch with somebody got 'discovered' by her classmates and my colleagues... omg. Melvin and Celine couldn't stop grinning....omg!

i was in my office the whole afternoon fishing out spare parts for my Saturday duty, since the last duty ended up quite nightmarish. Extracted all the faulty stuff like shorted power supplies (thanks to students who happily set them to 115V, one even caused the lab to blackout), hard drives etc. Going to prepare hard drives for deployment tomorrow. Hope weekend duty will be more enjoyable!

while shopping at CWP, i saw Mj. Fated to meet or what? I don't know. I was almost at a loss for words. Was dead tired when i reached home, and went straight for the sofa for a nap. Then met up with eze for a late dinner, and i was busy cleaning my aircon before this post.

i bought a chemical cleaner called Concaire at HomeFix, cost me $49.00 for about 4-5 uses! I thought i should give it a try, since i use my aircon frequently during summer period and the dust just won't come off using a vacuum cleaner (condensation + dust = grime). After spraying the chemical agent onto the fins, i wondered for awhile before realising that the agent leaked straight into the PVC leakage pipe. Scared me cos' i was thinking why the aircon was still so dry after spraying 300ml!

i must say, it really works. Together with the 3M Filtrete, i hope my sinus will improve instead of worsening after sleeping with aircon turned on.

Free sprayer bottle with the 2litre bottle -
Considering 4-5 uses over a year or so, it's cheaper than paying $100-200 for quarterly aircon service.

My Mitsubishi Electric StarMex - i did lots of homework on aircon selection

I went as far as to remove the front panel... as easy as removing a computer's cover

The bare fins and blower beneath

Look at the dirt from the blower!

For peeps who own or uses aircon at home, do note your aircon may look clean, but it's not clean! Besides using additional carbon/electrostatic filters to keep out dust in the fins and blower, consider signing up "service contracts" with major players like Gain City to perform chemical cleaning and outdoor unit servicing. It's quite worth it especially if you want to keep your aircon working at maximum efficiency and energy savings.

A good read and reference for to-be aircon owners will be here.