Why Horatio Caine gives me the creeps - VIDEO - TV Squad

THIS is not one of the reason i watch CSI Miami... but 'tis funny anyway lol...

YouTube - Helsinki Complaints Choir

courtesy of shan. lol... and you thought Singaporeans loved to complain?!

life at lightspeed

time flies! i know i say this all the time but it really does seem to me that, be it at work or play, or just plain not doing anything at all, time flies past me in the blink of an eye. maybe that's why i've hardly played a real game for the past... i don't know... months? the last thing i'd tried out was only F.E.A.R. multiplayer online. and that was a short stint - barely 2 days - before i decided that the time i spend in the game can be better served elsewhere. or that i'd simply grown out of it. man i'm feeling old. i mean, in just 8 weeks' time will i be a quarter of a decade old! oops... didn't mean to drop hints. just stating the facts... just the facts...

ek ngee: didn't quite expect you to be checking up on my blog in any case :)

makes me wonder who else lurks in the shadows of this annoying little site o' mine...

oh and dug up these from my dusty bookmarks...
my c.v.?
a very shameful act o' mine that nearly got me/us into trouble
a more recent portfolio that isn't as embarassing

*oooooooh... ahhhhhhhhh... let's check it out when we can ;) *

WE LIVE IN SINGAPURA. THE MTV by ~NCH85 on deviantART

spread the word! the biggest inside joke i've ever seen! by a whole nation! =x

Life and Incredible Adventures of Optimus Keyboards

there's this keyboard that has been fascinating me for some time now. it's from russia, it's unique and they're accepting pre-orders for it next month. i think it's gonna cost a bomb.

heaps

do you know shitty bank? my colleague sure does. i introduced that term to him as he was working on some stuff related to that. i've got tight schedules and dead deadlines to meet so i'm more work-oriented at erm... work. yet, a sadistic little part of me is still telling me that all this i'm doing is actually fun and enjoyable. strange, sad but true. this little inner-geek of mine is having a field day (indoors as we all know most fields are outdoors) at the office.

i popped by sim lim square few days back and i saw it. ps3 is here at last! but going at $1,599 who the heck can afford it?! -sigh- i know it comes with 3 games in the bundle but all this is pretty costly. an arm and a leg, i know.

well, financially, i must say that my experiment sort of works! some sort of flexible spending with bits of leftovers, apart from the fixed savings amount. i shall continue with this system. ganbatte!

*whoooo whoo whoo whooo whooo whooooo... you loh*

my lesser-known side?

call it what you will. maybe i'm really in it for the extra dough but i've been getting my hands dirty on weekends and burning some midnight oil on weekdays too. bwahahaha i didn't do anything evil. just doing some designing freelance on the sides. no conflict of interest with the company right? anyway they've been small and silly little "odd-jobs" spanning a week or two at a time. keeps me dabbling in graphics editing. satisfying though, i'm kind of enjoying this. which is good of course. all that programming at work can just dull my mind at a stretch. you can even consider this sideshow keeps me sane.

even rach is also getting into the swing of things and picking up some of those editing tips off of me.
xD not to say that i'm anywhere near perfect with my skills just sharing those bits of knowledge that's all. so at the end of the day, i can't really tell. did my graphics editing interest rub off of rach, or was it the other way around? either way i'm sure we both enjoy it :)

*pho-shop? lol guess where that term came from...*

Canelé Pâtisserie Chocolaterie

hrmm wonder who introduced this? lol no prizes though. but it does seems oh-so-tempting. one of these days eh?

proof of life, proof of evolution.

*ahem* let's not get into a debate here. but the british side of mitsubishi appears to be showing sneak peeks at the car manufacturer's next-in-line for their lancer/evo models.

i figure the regular lancer is going to be a toned down version from the evo but the lines and body will roughly be similar in any case. i'd been harping on this lancer for the past few (in fact many many) months and finally i spotted it on the cover of a car magazine today! gosh that made me so excited. i'll be patiently waiting until roughly the middle of next year for them to drop the curtain and hopefully by then i can afford to get my greasy little hands on one of it!

i'd recently been experimenting and venturing into this rather new domain of Ajax and JSON... i'll bet you'd never even heard of XOXO. don't rack your brains too much if all the 3 terms i'd just mentioned seem a little foreign to you. they are tech terms much to do with web programming and data presentation. scriptaculous was quite interesting. but dojo seemed tons better. and my colleague gave me a sneak peek at zimbra. my jaws dropped as he demonstrated its wonderous powers.

*why did the fly fly? because the spider spied her.*

i'd want my kids to be doctors

i don't suppose it's a good thing, but after catching just one episode of "The Finer Side" on channel 5 tonight, i seem to gather that doctors on this sunny island get paid very well. i shouldn't be surprised, considering the amount of time they have spent on learning how to save lives and related coursework. but looking at all the glitz and glamour on top of their cushy lifestyles, i just might feel that that's the way to go for my next generation.

of course, it's not like they don't have risks in that profession either. aside from the doctor molestation and malpractice cases where surgeons mistakenly left bandage gauze inside the patient after an operation, they still have a rather short occupational lifespan. their eyesight and hand dexterity plays an important role. once either of this is jeopardised, their career is at stake. that may explain for how the filthy amounts of dough they roll in at one go. same goes for celebrities and similar high-profile occupations. i can't think of one profession that isn't fraught with it's occupational hazards. can you?

nevertheless, i still think that it's a neat idea to encourage my children to go into the medical profession when there comes a chance!

*老鼠， 老虎， 傻傻分不清楚。。。 xD*

haha

silly me. i'd nearly gone to buy myself a new PSU (power supply unit) for my desktop pc. fortunately, i did some testing with the psu i'd borrowed from work (nice to be in the IS dept) and after a bit of coming and going, my manual diagnostics lead me to identify the cause of my power failure on the existing psu. the 20-pin plug connecting the psu to the motherboard was loose! gosh... it seems to be working fine now that i've reconnected it fully in its seat. just that the operating system is still unwilling to power off the computer after shutting down. this tiny exercise saved me $50-70+ on a new psu! would have been a waste to get one as this one's still working! PSUs rarely go down as they are such (compared to the cpu chip) basic/simple design.

*achoo* i think i'm coming down with something. flu or something. should have seen it coming and shouldn't have continued rubbing my eye. this always come after i rub my eye too much.


oh and some old classmate asked me to help advertise this ;) some second hand shop online that sells... well... stuff.

*sniff*

topic of curiousity

Sensitive and rather private topic here. Not for me at least. My ex's ex looked me up in friendster, and then in msn. I'd added him at his request as i just wanted to find out what happened. And after the short exchange did i realise some things...

We'd noticed a pattern in her (our ex's) behaviour. She'd apparently been doing the same thing all this while. It's like every 3 years or so, she hooks up with a different guy. But the thing is, this will happen probably gradually, as around the end of the first 2-3 years with Guy A, she'd get suspiciously bored of the relationship and move on in a way. When i used "suspicious", I'd meant that she'll manage to get to know some other unsuspecting Guy B while still with Guy A.

The next step of her modus operandi would be then to start being impatient and quarrelsome with Guy A, maybe even possibly meeting up secretly with the unsuspecting Guy B (alone) and eventually avoid Guy A for 2 weeks straight without meeting up or responding to phone calls or smses. Bad as I may sound, this seemed to have happened for the 2 of us, as I'd discovered. She'll then finally declare she wants to break off with Guy A and therefore turns single, possibly in hope that Guy B will hop right on. But hey, the above was just speculation by my ex's ex ok? ;) You be your own judge of the situation, but don't judge her as it's her life, her rules. Although quite frankly I'd send her my condolences if this is the way she's decided to ru(i)n her life with. It's sad, really. Because even one of her closer girl friend(s) had also drifted far away from her due to her behaviour.

So girl, make up your freaking mind. What's all that talk about nearly going ROM with this ex you just broke up with? Thought you were all religious and stuff? He wasn't religious enough for you? Ended up with him looking me up in friendster to complain to me about you. Where's the faith in the relationship indeed... if this lady want's to get married, she oughta find a guy and stick to him. Guys aren't clothes you can throw away once you get sick of them. They have feelings too eh?

Minus the fact that your ex seemed somewhat gay with the notions he'd been giving as he typed in our exchanges (if i'd misread his lines badly i'd think he was hitting on me seriously!) I'm fine with the situation now as I'm really happy with my current girl. No thanks to you... well maybe indirectly but i'm not going to give you credit for letting me go.

*Her loss, your gain, baby. xD*

Everyone Must See This! Video

Everyone Must See This! - video powered by Metacafe

uh... it just seems kinda nice? ^^

an experiment

i'm halfway through this experiment i've been conducting recently. since i got my most recent paycheck. it's about saving money and setting budgets for consumption. and it's quite likely a feasible way to go.

i'd started off on the first day of receiving my paycheck for October. yup, i then proceeded to document on PAPER, what amounts go to where, such as to save up, for my parents, and so on. all my spending, thus far, have been recorded, in a dollars-less-cents rounding up manner. i'd jotted down the rough descriptions of my spendings. no receipts. it's all laid back in a way. so i'm keeping track of what i'm spending on.

and then there's the budgeting. i've laid the rules for myself. a mere $3 for my daily lunch during work. in order to achieve this goal of $3/day in a stricter manner, i've managed to not get myself a soft drink during lunch, and instead chose to get my drink when i get back to the office and have my plain water from the pantry - which costs nothing. there were days when i exceed this by a little, say $4 if i were to order a drink. this gets deducted from the next/past weekend.

well yes, i have a budget for each day of my weekends. i'd defined my weekends to be inclusive of fridays. so it's 3 days of $45 each. it's been reliable so far, with me not really exceeding the amounts (if i'd been spending at all) because there were times when we don't really go out at all during the weekends. spending time at home saves money :) so the amount from that day we spend not doing anything gets "saved" and can be re-used elsewhere. this means my original amount that i'd decided to save is theoretically left untouched (which is good).

i'm doing this probably because i think that i might not have very strong willpower to save properly. so if you think you want to try this here are the main points:-

1. start from the nett amount you get from your paycheck (after CPF)
2. set aside the amount you wish to save monthly
3. make estimates (reserves) for phone bills, ez-link/cashcard topups etc.
4. determine the amount you wish to spend daily for lunch/dinner ($3 is a good place to start)
5. calculate the number of days you expect to have this lunch/dinner (excluding those you may eat at home or even weekends)
6. multiply 4 with 5 and you get the total budget you'd expect to eat from
7. divide the remainder by the number of weekends (for me i'm including friday so it's 3 days per week for 4 or 5 weeks for the month)
8. the amount you get from 7 is the budget you have for your daily use during your weekends.
9. that's it, your paycheck has been fully assigned/utilised!

i know this is still an experiment halfway through, still in progress but i hope to see a happy ending by the end of this month. the reason why i'm writing down my expenditures with pen and paper instead of typing it out, is because i see that i have something physical to look to.

seeing the amounts on paper in a way signifies some sort of determination i've had which in turn motivates me to persevere and not to disappoint myself by exceeding the budgets i've laid out, aka written in black and white. and at least i can still see where i'm going if i need to spend a bit more (maybe on presents, magazines, treats to reward myself with? kekeke) i know just roughly how much i can afford to push for. and then i can still make adjustments elsewhere.

it's part psychological effect, part financial planning (loosely put) and it makes less of a hassle than if i were to really start working the accounting books in strict format. personally i think this might seem like nonsense to some, but i hope this post can inspire some too... :)

ps: this photoset is cute.

*only youuuuuu*

crocs

great. so 2 kids got their toes caught in 2 different escalators in the past 2 days. the news had it on, and it was a field day for the journalists. then somebody raised the issue of how a pair of branded (and predictably quite costly) slippers was a cause of the accidents happening.

enter crocs. they sell all those queerly coloured slippers/sandals/shoes, if you haven't noticed by now. tons of people have got it (not me). you see couples wearing them, kids, even whole families. even the china OEMs have got it in on the act. bottomline is... even though this may seem like negative press for the manufacturer of those damn footwear, any press is good press.

so why am i ranting on this? my parents had bought the shorty a pair of OEM crocs that's what. >_> they were just criticising about it in the morning as we left for work, and by evening when i returned, he was happily running about in one of them pairs. tsk.

edit: interesting message i'd received in friendster. apparently the ex of my ex sent it. yup. it appears he'd given up on their r/s or something. i'm like... huh so what you looking to me for? support group? well ok maybe he's more a "phone" person. but i think i'm more an online person. so i have yet to reply him but i'm somewhat puzzled by this message of his. no worries though, i'm happy with rach now! ;)

*ponnnnnnyyyyyy =x*

my phone bill

i just received my phone bill a few days back and guess what i discovered?! my phone bill had dropped about $10!

a few weeks back, i'd made a call to M1, my phone service provider and requested a change of my usage plan. it's time for a change because my previous plan (SunText) allowed me a ridiculous number (1000 free SMSes/mth) of SMSes that i previously had been (almost, think in the range of 700-800) fully utilising. until recently, my SMS usage has dropped drastically (like <400/mth) and hence the phone bill amount i'm paying for warranted some looking into.

my normal phone bill previously would be in the $40+ range. this bill was $51-odd. fret not, i haven't failed my maths yet. this $51-odd amount is including a topping-up exercise i'd done on my mum's pre-paid phone number. so $51 - $18 would be $33! goodness i was really surprised. should have done the change sooner had i not been so hesitant.

my parents were naggy on this. when i told them about this $10 difference, they'd then go on about how i'd wanted to change plans months back when i came back from studies down under, and then being so hesitant about it. yeah yeah... so i'd finally made the change. good for me right? i must say, my phone bill had been dropping all this while, which is definitely a good thing. maybe it's also due to the fact that i'm in the office most of the time and receive more calls on my land line extension there than on my phone. and at least now i don't have to pay every time so telemarketer decides to try their luck on my phone number. i was on free outgoing calls all day previously, now it's free incoming calls all day. i'd think the difference is apparent enough.

*rrr*

Enemy at the Gates

i'm suddenly reminded of this much-criticised film. pretty cool in my opinion...

HAL

need a bit of pick-me-up recently? with this, you can pick up a lot more!

BuyMobile.com.sg

don't laugh, cos i didn't build this site. but one thing i did get involved in was the teensy logo right at the top. ooh and they'd even used it in the 30 Sep 2006 issue of Today the free newspaper... go flip through it! xD

iraq?

wahahaha... i think some of you might have seen this before already...