Monday, July 30, 2007

monday

my monday is so blue i've caught a flu. i swear it had nothing to do with the seafood dinner we had for my mum's birthday yesterday. okay her birthday is today, technically speaking, but it's easier to arrange a family meal on sundays. the crabs and prawns were quite a rare dish so it was pretty yummy.

my weekend was mostly indoors, playing on the Wii. rachel had her pretty little origami paper roses to fold while we played Mario Party 8! haha... it was seriously fun i tell you! they had this sort of turn-based board game that resembles monopoly and a whole bunch of minigames we've yet to finish unlocking.

will post a pic of those roses when i get the chance. they look pretty darn realistic, and it's just rachel's virgin attempt! =x

Friday, July 27, 2007

curses!

i just got an increment, but they are running a really tight ship so it really is peanuts. though of course i'd know people might say it's better than nothing. especially since not everyone got it. but if i were to go by what the bosses had said, this is all thanks to the state of plateau our medical/clinical industry is in currently. i suppose we'll have to get by with what they throw at us. a colleague of mine had commented that it appears the increment is about the same as last year's percentage.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

quick tip!

cool i just had first hand experience with this! i just cured a hiccup by drinking water!

but not just any old water-drinking fashion mind you. my colleague taught me to drink from the far end of the cup. this means you'd have to bend forward first. the cup should be pouring away from you, with you drinking from the edge of the cup furthest from you.

and my hiccup stopped immediately! yay!

Monday, July 23, 2007

Thinned

just met a colleague of mine who's transferred out. Said i look thinner! Gosh is the situation really that bad?

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Eew...

Yesterday, for dinner, i did, in a rare instance, something that was
for the very first time in my life.

I'd joined a couple of colleagues for a farewell dinner for one of
them. The place was for bbq steamboat. They had free prawns and crabs.
So far so good right? Prawns were okay to cook of course... But the
crabs... The handler plucked a few live crabs from a box, whipped out
his chopper, positioned it across the underside and chopped the
crustacean in half! The animal was still moving after that!

That's just the beginning mind you. After that, they passed the half
animals to us and instructed us to wash them ourselves. What the heck?
That's right ladies and gentlemen. For the first time in my life, I'm
here washing a crab still much alive, staring at me as i clean its
innards and removing its lungs because that's the yucky dirty part.
All that while trying to avoid getting grabbed by the pincers. I tried
to be brave about it, though it was quite a torturous ordeal. Not
really gonna recommend the place to anyone...

--
/regards,
/ken

NS Song



not that i mind my own ns days. i was rather okay with the whole shebang. and i do agree it's important that this island of ours employ conscription.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

poor car

well i've taken the car back to motorimage to get the dent fixed. i'm only going to get it back this friday but i guess some things can't be helped when you've been inconvenienced by a neighbor. in the mean time, at least since my brother is on holiday in japan since last thursday, i still have his car to use while sharing with my parents. this is a queer week indeed. and the ripples left over from monday is still not fully subsided yet. i'm still very very vexed about the external harddrive. :(

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Map of the Internet


Just when you thought you've seen it all, and then this thing pops up online, circulates halfway around the world for all to see. Pretty nifty artwork I must admit. And it's not all just drawn randomly too. The geographical locations on the map reflect the various arenas/genres/categories that the various online communities fall into. Neato!

Grand finale!

omg this has been a horribly unfortunate day for me!!! you wouldn't be able to guess what happened as the grand slam finale for this black monday of mine that has been fraught with misfortune.

my car was parked innocently just outside my house. but within moments that i'd barely finished my dinner that we'd bought home, my dad called me down. i rushed down to check things out and lo and behold... my neighbor had reversed his car into mine. ARGHHH!!! there was a dent the size of a closed palm on the front side panel of my car. of course he'd said he'll be paying for it. just heartbroken that my pitiful vehicle was barely out on the streets for more than a month and 2 mishaps had occurred with it being the innocent victim. BOTH times my car was parked stationary somemore! grrr...

this had been a really really really bad day for me! :(

Monday, July 16, 2007

Meow x 3

A friend has 3 cats which he needs to put up for fostering for a few weeks because he will be busy with house moving and reno etc. He is unwilling to bring them to the cattery because he wants these 3 to be in lovely homes even for the short period of time.

The 3 cats are very tame and they are litter-trained. All vaccinated. Very quiet, friendly and affectionate.

He will pay all fostering fees and supply/provide the necessities for the cats.

It is not necessary to take in all 3 cats. If you can take in 1 or 2, that is fine as well. As long as all 3 cats will go to good fosterer homes for the next few weeks. But of cos, it would be best for all 3 to go to one fosterer.

Let me know if you or your friends are interested. Please email three.pronouns@gmail.com if you require more information with regards to the above.

Thanks!

miffy monday

*WARNING: serious piece of rant ahead*

It's turning out to be weirder and stranger as every minute passes on this already-blue Monday.

First thing I saw my parents in the morning, they started nagging at me about not washing my car last week, and being late for work... ranting on and on. I couldn't wait to step out of the house asap.

Next thing you know, I was at work trying to fix a bug I'd set aside last Friday. Turns out in the end that it was because I was stupid and MS Excel was too clever. There was a figure I'd seen in the spreadsheet to be rounded up. But the actual result is 3 cents less! Hence I did a manual summation of all the items and finally realised that the amount was correct all along! Only problem was, because the cell width was not long enough to display the full amount, Excel had rounded up the figure, thereby causing the non-existent 3 cents. Had I clicked on that cell earlier I would have realised the amount was right all along and that it was merely a presentation oversight. I was too dumb to comprehend that on a Friday evening.

Then before you know it, a colleague of mine approached me before lunch and said he wanted to treat me to coffee at the cafeteria at our building. Strange and perplexing indeed. But not as confounding as what he wanted to discuss with me about. He said that he's heard some people mentioning to him about how I was speaking ill of him behind his back. So he was here to clarify with me, in a sense, to thrash things out with me. This was really weird, as I don't recall ever speaking much about him with others, much less speaking bad about him at all! I spoke to some other guy I'm on better terms with, and he felt just as weird about this issue, because even he felt that I wasn't the type who'd do something like this. VERY perplexing. Definitely a misunderstanding. But strange in so many ways.

And then there was this really confusing user who can't get her access accounts right. Two very different portals with separate user accounts had their passwords reset for her. Her account for website A had a password reset. She managed to log into there. And at the same time, she tries (probably using her user details from website A) and fails to log into website B. We resolved that, she manages to get into website B, and then she has a problem logging into website A because it was locked! I know, confusing isn't it!? Let's hope I've settled her down with my last email, because my head feels like it's going to explode with what is feeling like an infinite loop!

Last but not least, moments after returning from lunch, my computer decided to act up. The screen failed to come on and the keyboard sounded like the system had hung (with its error beep sound on each key pressed). I checked the connections and nothing happened. What was worse was after I restarted the system, the fan suddenly powered up so loudly the colleagues around me all were pretty frightened that my computer might blow up! It was making all that noise that everyone was rather worried of sitting still until my desktop support colleague came over and decided it was best to restart the system. It was kind of scary to have happened. At least fortunately the fan decided to quieten down back to quiet-sounding normalcy and we returned to our work. I reckon my computer likes the vacuum cleaner and was trying to impress the lady with trying to speak vacuum-speak.

Like I've mentioned, it's a miffy monday. I've felt miffed and full of pent up frustration since this morning. I hope the second half will improve. There is a bit of tight-chested feeling but with all these weird stuff going on I probably shouldn't be surprised.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Holy crap!

i just noticed the housing blocks near my home have wireless@sg installed!! Wicked!

Friday, July 13, 2007

it has been quite exciting. lame somewhat, but exciting.

it was quite a sudden thing when the guru in my department decided to hand in his resignation just yesterday. although technically speaking i'm not *all* that surprise. when i first joined about a year plus ago, the things he'd tried to upload/teach to me were really seeming to be EVERYTHING he knows, and it felt like he was going to resign any minute back then. so presumably by now we have grown our team to about 4 times the original strength he'd probably gotten everything well prepared beforehand. he's not a singapore citizen so it's probably not too big an issue that he's migrating to australia. good for him to decide to move on. but i believe we'll have our own set of headaches without him around.

and then there was my this dear friend of mine. rachel had decided to do some charity and offered to introduce a female colleague of hers to my friend. mostly because he was recently dumped. his ex was quite a nice person, just that they kind of had some conflict that didn't do either one good if they'd stuck on. so the colleague was introduced to him, with the intention of making acquaintance as a friend. the bugger friend of mine decided that she was too good a catch to be missed and by the looks of it, both of us felt that he was rushing things a bit. okay not a bit, it was VERY. hopefully for her it's not a rebound thing (both of them got dumped not too long ago actually) but this guy really took the cake. we'd tried telling him to SLOW DOWN but he don't seem to be listening. damn all that raging hormones, pheremones, endorphins and whatnot for giving him such a headrush. and my poor rachel had all this while been pretty sick and all, fever, sore throat and stuff. my friend and her colleague had their first "date" just on Wednesday, and after having their dinner outside, the next thing on their itinerary (we still don't know which of the 2 really suggested it) was to actually gatecrash my house!!! the 2 of us were like OMGWTFBBQ what could they possibly want at this hour! it was almost 9pm, rach was sick and we were trying to catch the latest ep of a taiwan drama series (feat. Rainie!) but got sorely interrupted. =x like i told her lor... she was asking for it by trying to matchmake them... (not that rach expected this to happen, her poor soul)

in even major news, rachel just had a cool job offer! she'd found an old contact, had a talk with him, and she's decided to move on! it's really quite great news for her. all the plus points are quite something, in my opinion. this had better pay, better prospects, better environment, better location (nearer to her home), and as a perk, her job title sounds even nicer! this is definitely a good thing. you weren't too happy staying on in your current job anyway darling. like what that silly bear said, take this as a new chapter for you. xD

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Feels just like...

some alien invaders had tractor-beamed my brain off of this planet. My mind has been on a blink today.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

achy breaky

my arms are feeling so suan this morning when i woke up. probably because i was playing on my Wii last night. =x it helped that we'd done a bit of warming up beforehand otherwise it might have felt worse haha! wii tried out the sports games last night and it was pretty difficult getting used to the range of motion required. they had a couple of games: bowling, golf, tennis, boxing and baseball! and this is just in "WiiSports". i had quite a work out in their boxing and tennis training until i was literally sweating! this is good exercise man ^^;;

Monday, July 09, 2007

wii!

wicked~! we just bought a fantastic new toy yesterday, the nintendo wii! it was so exciting i'm telling you... we had plenty of fun. the setting up process was quite a breeze too so it was quite a low threshold of pain throughout. i've even set it up for accessing to the internet over my wireless connection too. 2 sets of wii remotes + nunchuks calls for serious competitive game play between rachel and myself. they'd included the WiiPlay game to get us started. rach was even able to customise a Mii mascot character for each of us! despite them having doraemon blob hands the little fellas were actually rather involved in our games. quite interactive actually... i foresee us having to get a good workout often now! just hope the repetitive stress injuries don't catch up with us too soon... kekeke

Friday, July 06, 2007

arghh!

this is just great. Some car must have maneuvered around in the car park n scraped my car's corner in the process!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Live Earth Movement

Support the earth conservation movement on 07.07.07! But you know about all that 24-hour marathon concert to be aired on tv? Well i think in order to support prevention of global warming, we should all actually be turning off our tv sets for 24 hours instead of generating more heat with all this hoo-ha! So turn it off and don't watch the show!

Monday, July 02, 2007

sad state of the world

i just sent rachel home moments ago, and i noticed this bmw driving up next to us at a traffic light. the driver was alone; a guy dressed in long sleeves. it was most probably his car, as i believe singaporeans to be less likely to have chaffeurs nowadays. anyway, my point is, as i looked at him, i felt pity for him in a strange way. despite the fact that he was driving in a luxurious continental car beside my humble japanese vehicle, it was a sunday night (monday morning actually...) and he was dressed in formal attire? i mean, he looked to be in his mid-40s and he was alone in the vehicle. given any situation he'd still seem pitiful to me. just knock off work? attended an event? wedding dinner, alone? any of that, on a sunday, made me feel sorry for him.

in other news, heard of the "live earth" green initiative plastered all over tv recently? what's with that? if you want to support the green movement, surely you can do your part by simply watching less tv right? rather than turning it on, or organising concerts to contribute to the global warming with all that stage lighting and whathaveyous at concerts... rather counter-intuitive in that sense.

*i'm glad we'd spent plenty of time together this weekend! xD*