island tales #25

well it's a saturday night, and the weather is nice and cool, just the way i like it. :) had a leisurely 10 minute walk to dinner (hawker center, just down the main road), and stopped by the supermarket to buy drinks and ice cream on the way back. heavenly... :P

woke up real early, around 6am, more out of habit than anything. had breakfast, and got a hair cut! my (notorious) curly hair was getting a bit shaggier than i'd like it, so cut it back to its default short cropped self. oh, and i played a record 7 dota games (yes seven!!), and since they take up an hour plus each you can tell how i spent most of my day, lol.

fell asleep around noon (right after dota game number 3), and woke up at 2 smth just in time for lunch. decided on...

...mcdonald's! lol. not something i'm particularly crazy about, but since it's been a busy week i decided to treat myself to a mcchicken + sundae + apple pie, without the drinks and fries. was pretty nice! :) chen's out for the weekend so it'll probably be quieter around here than usual.

oh! and on the way back i could have sworn i saw a couple making out in a car parked at the side of the road. was pretty shocked but hurried onwards, so i could be wrong. but i was definitely NOT staying to find out for sure... haha. you get all sorts.

well it's tv time, something i havent done for quite some time. so i'm signing off for now...

island tales #24

it's friday again... :) i plan to stay back after lunch despite the half day's work schedule, and get some more stuff done before heading home. no badminton for me today, maybe i'll squeeze in some dota games instead.. hahaha.

it's been a pretty busy week so far, and things are expected to get exponentially busier as time goes on in the coming month. oh, and i might be going to malacca (a famosa waterpark, to be exact) next weekend with my department for some team building thingie. tentative plans though, nothing concrete yet. and gordon aka jleong will be visiting on august 12th, some concert being held here in penang.

weekend plans: i want to watch a movie!! maybe the 'seven swords' show, it seems nice. i want to get a hair cut!! i want to play dota!! i want to be a piggggg... :P but nah guess i'll most probably be cleaning up the place and spend the rest of my time glued to the monitor. but one thing's for sure, i am definitely not going to spend another bucketload of cash this weekend!

aaaahhh.. few things feel as good as waking up early in the morning to get stuff done. fresh air~... it's really different from waking up with the sun in your face! maybe i'll wake up earlier next year as well... :D

island tales #23

time passes day by day... and another week of my life is almost over. i really do wonder if it's just me, or does everyone else also feels like there's not enough time to spend on anything at all these days? maybe it's coz im working, so there's always something to do, or something to look forward to.

* * * * *

and today i will expound one of my old theories (although i must hasten to add that my bro says he thought of it first, years before me.. man we must have been bored when we were kids... but anyway this is my version), which is the Many Me Theorem! actually, i've probably said this before, so if you have heard it you can skip right to the end of this paragraph. that's right, hop it!

anyway. the Many Me Theorem states that, between any two moments of time, there are two different you's whose only link is that they share some (tiny bit of) memories in common. which also means, for example, that the person you were yesterday no longer exists, and has been replaced by the person you are today. which also means that the person who read the beginning of this sentence has just been replaced by multiple versions of you by the time you reached the full stop, here. :P

ok, not really mindblowing stuff ("hm, i knew that already"), but if you actually remember this mumbo-jumbo, you could actually benefit (in certain ways) by following a couple of simple rules:

1) if you're studying/working/doing stuff, and you're making notes for yourself, write it in such a way that it will be useful to a version of you in the future. also, ALWAYS assume that the future you is going to have forgotten EVERYTHING you wanted to remember (which is in fact an extremely likely event). and i'm sure you've experienced the feeling of discovering something useful a you in the past has left for you, and thought "wow im glad i did that for myself.."

2) if you want to procrastinate, then congratulations, you are a selfish version of yourself for the time being. throw away the guilt, enjoy the moment, then leave the rest of the work to a future version of you. hey who cares, it's not the current you anyway! certainly better than being wracked with guilt when procrastinating... which means you didn't do work and you didnt enjoy not doing work, which defeats the whole purpose.

3) on the other hand, if you never get things done, then a heck of a lot of future you's are going to suffer. if that made you feel very happy indeed, i would suggest you seek out the nearest specialized institution where they have various forms of treatment for heartless sadists like you.

and also, if all this sounds like garbage to you, it probably is. but i do apply it a lot in making notes, and doodling during lectures leaves little pictures among the notes that reminds me of things a previous me had learned before. certainly saved me a lot of time... so just thought i'd share it with everyone. :P

(legal disclaimer: if you are actually mad enough to apply this and you find that it doesnt work, you are not entitled to any claims whatsoever, and there sure as hell ain't gonna be a 30-days money back guarantee since i did not get paid and anyone can tell that this is crackpot advice. use at your own risk)

* * * * *

well that's it. oh, and i realise that my memory's improved somewhat since i've started writing the blog more frequently. mostly because i now remember important dates (such as the date today.. not today today, but today as in everyday. nevermind.) and events, which is something i've never been able to remember before. mostly due to a combination of factors:

i) i dont play games as much as i used to, so at least most of the time i'm present in the real world...
ii) i take notes of events that occur, in case i want to write them in the blog. so they stick to my head longer
iii) i remember dates since i usually need them when working, and also for the weekly internship reports

(hey i realise i love to list things out.) oh, but im still blur when doing things that have become a habit, and tend to lose myself in the background chatter of my head. but i guess everyone is like that.

so that's about it for today. oh and a special note: all the best to carol for her test!

island tales #22

it's me again. :P hm, yesterday was pretty busy, had a whole day of work then proceeded to a seafood dinner + double birthday celebration for a couple of colleagues here at work. got back at 10pm, stuffed, tired, and with a petrol tank that had the needle hovering over the dreaded 'E'. went straight to sleep.

and today, i had to drive the long way round to pump fuel, then turn another huge round back to get to work. but at least i no longer run such a high risk of running out of petrol on an expressway... which incidentally did happen before (a long time ago.. it was aaron's car), which was the first time i ever drove (more like... glided) a car that had run out of steam. pretty freaking dramatic.

but anyway. im at work now, safe and sound, and about to dive headfirst into another busy day where time just FLIES~ past. just wanted to drop a post on my thoughts before that happens.

* * *

oh yes. here's a quick lesson in science. there are several constants that are assumed to have a, urm, well, constant value. examples include pi, the permeability of vacuum, the gravitational constant in a Newtonian model, speed of light, mass of an electron, et cetera et cetera.

and i think i can now add "weight of nerdook" to the list, since it has been STUCK at 60kg for years and years now. it's unbelievable. i do believe i have an auto correction mechanism (possibly with a feedback setup: something only engineers would say, haha) that burns food at JUST THE RIGHT rate to keep my body at 60kg. it just wont go up... after 2 months in penang, it should have at least gone up a teeeenyyy tinnyyy bit. but no. it has officially declared itself as a universal constant and i cant get any heavier... sobsob.

well at least im not getting any thinner either, which is somewhat consoling. maybe i should eat even more now...

* * *

oh and before i go. im wearing the neon green shirt (n.g.s) to work today, in the vain hope that its blinding brilliance will somehow make me appear friendlier. so far i am unable to ascertain the effectiveness of this theory, because there is no sign of anybody else at the moment. probably all recovering from the dinner.

guess i'd better get back to work. breakfast in less than an hour! (FOOD!)

*hums* heigh ho... heigh ho.. its off to work we goooo... lalala lala lalala lala... heigh ho! heigh ho! *end hums*(ironically.. this was sung by a bunch of dysfunctional dwarves..) :P

island tales #21

hm. it may be hard to believe, but i indulged in yet another impulsive shopping trip today! and i finally bought the stuff i had wanted to buy a long time ago, but couldnt convince myself to part with the cash. :P so blitzed into tesco (again) and bought myself a new keyboard and a new mouse (BenQ) for RM30. i seriously wonder why it is so cheap. the old keyboard was getting really dirty, and my mouse was on the verge of conking out, so it was about time for a change, and it was really quite a bargain.. i think.

the crazzzzyyyy part was my decision to add a NEON GREEN shirt to the shopping purchases. it's really neon green.. no other colour to describe it. bright enough to dazzle. excellent addition to the wardrobe if i am ever in need of attention, haha, and definitely brighter than the second brightest shirt i have (which is a bright orange shirt carol gave me). but the downside is, my wallet feels light again. been spending a lot this weekend... guess it's time to tighten the financial strings.

right, time for dinner. played 4 dota games today (what a way to spend the weekend..), and boy did time pass fast. the weekend's about to end... and it felt like i spent it doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. which reminds me.. i have an edx report to write. :P

island tales #20

it's a hot saturday afternoon, and i just got back from driving to perangin mall. now feeling pretty lazy to do anything but sit around and listen to songs. but before that! i am now RM155 poorer (and my wallet is so much lighter), having blown the entire amount on this thing here: a 512 MB thumb drive. wanted to get one for some time now, since i'll need to transfer files around at work. and i've been searching for a thumb drive for some time now..

right. time to take a quick nap. basketball's at 6. *stretccchhhh* goodnites everyone...

island tales #19

alright alright, so you can tell from the purple sign in the corner that i did not take this picture. dug it out of a folder called 'Cute Pics', and it perfectly summarises my current life at work. but everything's gotten busier this week, been fiddling with this and that all day, and came back feeling like i actually got stuff done. which is good.

the downside is, i usually get pretty tired earlier at night, due to a whole day of working and working. 'earning my keep', i call it... and socially, i guess it's going okay, though i am a lousy judge of social relationships. really! as much as possible, i try to keep my mouth shut (which is so weird!), though i realise i've been talking more these few days. time to zip it again i think, since i tend to lace my words with diamond tipped bullets without ever realising it. ehehe. side effect of spending so much time with a machine, and i dont trust people as much thanks to my lovely secondary school life...

but in the meantime, im going to kick back and enjoy. the weekends are almost here again, and tomorrow's a half day followed by badminton in the afternoon, yippie! looking forward to it.. then it'll be the weekends again, which involves basketball on saturday evening.

ahh... the calm before the storm. oh, and you are welcome to comment on previous posts, i'll check them for replies too, since im updating pretty often these days. maybe i'll start whipping up quick posts in between work... :)

island tales #18

did something strange last night, which i havent done in ages. i actually went to a wedding dinner. didn't plan to go at first, but there was a last minute shift in plans so i ended up there. of course, there was the customary ang-pau to hand over, then it was down to business.

ok, the strange thing was, once the dinner started there were people selling newspapers and keropok from table to table. but the even STRANGER thing is, this is supposed to be perfectly normal for a penang wedding (or so i was told..). everything else was pretty much standard wedding dinner fare, which included the customary presence of a bride and groom (haha, well some things go without saying!), food, red clothed tables, an utter lack of cute girls (i wasn't looking, of course. definitely not. my eyes were firmly not searching for cute girls in the audience), a room full of strangers that you do not recognize. only this was my colleague's brother's wedding, so there was an unusually large amount of people i did not recognize.

entertained by a bunch of people singing, although some of them were pretty hard on the ears, ehehe. had a string of food, which was a mixture of ok-tasting food, one quite nice fish and a bunch of bleah so-so dishes. took pics with the bride and groom! but i dont have them yet, since it wasnt taken on my camera. so will post it up once it's here.. :)

got home at 10 something, the dinner passed pretty quickly since it was a weekday and everyone had to get to work the next day. quite an interesting experience though, but i doubt i'll be attending another one anytime soon. unless any of my classmates are getting married! :P

* * *

word of the day: oubliette. derived from the french 'to forget'. possibly the worst kind of mental torture you can inflict on anyone....

island tales #17

i dont know if it's just me, but i have a tendency to associate time periods/events in my life with whatever song i happened to be playing at the time. utterly strange, but perhaps not unsurprising, since i tend to listen to mp3s when doing work, since it somehow helps me absorb information faster. or in the case of coding, keeps me entertained during the endless stretches of repetitive tasks.

anyway, here are some examples:
i) form four/five: my very first mp3 downloaded was 'vertical horizon - you're a god' (yea yea, blasphemous title, but it was nice k..), so i listened to that for ages. and when i went for the surveyor's competition thingie (with roy, rom, martin, victor.. i think. anyone else??), i brought along some richie ren songs, so listening to those brings back memories of that time. ahhh.. secondary school.. an endless depository of bad memories there... the surveyor's finals was one of the better times. :P

ii) first year first sem: when i first entered uni, i had this cd full of emil chou's songs, so those hot, lazy afternoons in tronoh were spent listening to that cd on my creaky old 450 MHz computer (it is now, uh, inactive) on those plastic old speakers (currently used by my dad, who seems to inherit our electronic hand-me-downs). since gordon lived next door with fong, i had a cd of jay chou's songs as well. the jay chou songs (fantasy album) are especially connected to... morbid's era. :P

iii) first year second sem: a plethora of darker songs here (heh). also continued listening to jay and friends, but the addition of an extra thousand songs to the playlist disassociated the period with any particular song.

iv) second year-third year, aka carrot's era. several songs do stand out here, haha, mostly coz they were my sms companions. suitably jiwang collection... and added some songs that my bro downloaded. playlist populated with more english songs (mostly pop-rock fluff. what can i say, im the Average Consumer), and less chinese song updates. also lots of songs connected to movies i watched with carol. I AM NOT A ROMANTIC! i deny all accusations on the contrary.. :P

and this morning i heard avril lavigne's "nobody's home" on the radio, which is DEFINITELY associated with the previous semester in uni and all its glory: dota games, the edx montage (was listening to that from 4 to 5 am thanks to the sleepless nights), basketball, the project-after-project month, mamak nites, the tests-where-i-havent-read-anything-before, and my adorable rmate, Mr Mato. haha... one of the best times of my life.. :) all associated with the song, since my rmate had a tendency to blast songs when stressed, and this was one of them. found it nice and adopted it as the anthem for that semester..

hehe. but i cleaned out my mp3 collection recently, it was getting a bit bloated. hm. oh and as a sidenote, i freely admit that i dont understand girls. at all. and i cannot ever remember the colour of people's clothes in my memories (including my own)... hahaha...

island tales #16

well, im sure you'll have noticed by now, but in case you havent, i've been tweaking bits and pieces of the blog recently in terms of how it looks. shifted the sidebars to the left, and today i recoloured everything to be black and white (and removed the hyperlink lines as well). hope everyone likes the effect, it's spozed to feel like "black coffee", lol. any further suggestions are always welcome, and it's just too bad i'm unable to run perl scripts here as well. :P oh the things you can do with scripts... haha.i'll be more than happy to make this site as accessible as possible to everyone...

since there havent been any new pictures lately, here's one of the street outside the place im currently staying in. those huge trees are the reason i have to wash my car every week, and also sweep the porch and street. this was taken after going to church on sunday, just as the sun was rising. i dont usually get to see this street at that time on weekdays, since i'll be on my way to work before 7am...

and now it's time for an anti-lactose commercial break! :P i hate cows.... only because they produce milk. so here's a picture of a cow! cute eh? ;)

island tales #15

It's monday morning... my how the weekends flew by. strangely enough, i've never actually experienced the monday morning blues, getting back to work always seemed a nice change from lazing around doing nothing at home. or that could be because i havent actually been given a heavy workload yet.

oh! you can now post comments on the posts without being registered! just click comments, put urself as 'other' and add what you want to say. (thanks chen for pointing out the fact that i hadnt enabled this nifty little feature) so if you have anything to say, uh, feel free to drop your two cents worth into the comments section.

it's the beginning of a.. brand new week.. dumdedum...

island tales #14

yes, i bought it. and no, i didnt plan to buy it. it just sort of happened. for the last few days carol has been talking about collecting the book with her friend who booked it, and believe it or not, it really didnt cross my mind to get a copy of my own. nor did i actually feel any excitement over the fact that "the new harry potter book" was coming out. you see, i went for lunch. and then walked around. and chen said he wanted to get one for his sis, and i thought what the heck, let's buy one. i wanna read it anyway. yes, i know u can find the (illegal) e-books online now. yes, i know it's RM89.99 (10% off thanks to chen's card). but i've always preferred reading stuff on paper, and i bought the previous book as well, so now im happily engrossed in reading it! :)

the really crazy part is, my bro ran and got himself a copy as well. *smacks head*

island tales #13

i'm home from Fantastic Four! drove to gurney just as the skies started pouring, and watched it with my department people, and it was a pretty nice movie. even nicer since i got to watch it with a big group of people.. :P quite a rare thing these days, so yea had lots of fun! oh, and i left my umbrella behind at chopperboard, so that means i am umbrella-less, on a rainy night...

*notice to mum&dad: please stop reading here, in order to prevent your hair from turning white, thanks. your loving son.*

*wah still reading.*

SO! the real adventure began as i began my journey back after the movie. well, you do realise by now that i am in fact lactose intolerant, and i totally forgot the inconvenient fact that popcorn caramel is SOAKED in lactose (butter, that is). so yes, i bought a packet, and halfway thru it i remembered and went "oh sh(oo)t!!". but who cares, done was done. and so i began my journey home

a) in the rain, which happily started its second round just as i came out of gurney plaza
b) at night
c) on a totally unfamiliar road that i have driven only once last week, with chen, and astonishingly i only remembered HALF of the instructions on how to get home from there
d) with a raging lactose intolerance reaction in full swing
e) umbrella-less, too!

digression: Lactose Intolerance Reaction, for me, is defined as a series of reactions that consistently occurs when i consume lactose beyond a certain amount. the really bad reactions always begins with hiccups, which are really painful. it's like getting punched everytime u hiccup. the normal reactions only have a constant pain in the stomach, kinda like the one u get after running around a lot. and i will always experience short breaths and a feeling that i ate too much. after a while, it'll eventually progress to stage 2 where i feel like vomiting, and i'll have to keep swallowing to suppress the urge to spill my guts all over the sidewalk. at this point i have 2 choices: i) vomit, or ii) sleep it off. both seem to work for me, and vomiting sounds exactly like normal vomits, except that it usually releases lots of gas, and not the usual slime that u get from vomiting. wat a gross thought. but there u have it.

anyway! back to the trip.

good news is, i stopped by chopperboard and got my umbrella back, someone there kept it for me, yay! then i walked to the car, as the reactions started piling on the pain on my stomach. but i shall prevail! reached the car, took a deep breath, and drove.

followed chen's route as much as i could remember, and made it as far as jalan logan where my memory dissipated. and then... wat the heck! keep driving on. there were maybe 5 cars in front of me, so i gambled and followed wherever the majority of them were going.

came out at a junction, where i saw a police station i remembered seeing on the way to komtar last time. but i cannot remember which side of the road it's spozed to be on, so i dunno where to turn. so i reached into the primitive depths of my brain, dug out my trusty Direction-o-Meter, and guessed it was a turn to the right.

keep driving along this dubious path, and eventually reached a road i knew. so i made it home! yay! thank God! etc etc.

*wonder if my mum&dad are still reading this*

anyway, the swallowing stage started just as i passed the door to my house. and it's about to get worse after this. so long folks, im off to lie down a bit. *swallow i-hate-cows swallow*

island tales #12

ergghh.

it's 7am in the morning, and im already at work. slept like a log thanks to the rainy weather.. oh, and it has to be mentioned that one of my Unorthodox Goals in Life is to stay in bed during a heavy rainstorm, wrapped up in my blanket, surrounded by lots and lots of pillows!! it's nice, u really should try it... :P

played a dota game last night, and amazingly, the moment i joined a game i was declared as a leaver (that is, someone who leaves the game halfway through) by a little snot called [name removed to protect the guilty]. was kinda shocked at the blatant slander, but the game did go on anyway, and 2 of my team mates left the game (actually, one of them never even started...), but it was a fun game, mostly coz i played well enough to kick mr slanderer's ass comprehensively. miahahaha. REVENGE IS MINE!!! sigh, i should learn to be less evil and more likeable. still wondering why is it that chen gets stalkers and admirers in the game he plays, and i always make a collection of enemies. and that was without typing a single word... :P

maybe it's that anti-charisma thing. hehe.

debating whether to go for badminton today. after pingpong yesterday and basketball tentatively scheduled for tomorrow, it seems like a good idea not to go. *wiggle wiggle*. ah well, let's decide after lunch. for now, it's back to my early-morning, crack-of-dawn keep-earning.

island tales #11

man time is flying past!! it's almost the weekends already, and it feels like the week just started. hm, before i know it, i'll be OLD!!! no... what a horrifying thought! but strangely enough, today was pretty uneventful. so i really do wonder where the time went. *ponders*

so not much to update for today. signing out for today...

island tales #10

new shirts! got these on a spur-of-the-moment shopping trip. wonder what made me do it.. haha. had wanted to get shirts for a while now, and actually saw some bright red/orange/yellow shirts that looked pretty tempting. but no, didnt feel like buying them then, the thought of parting with my cash was terrible... :P so got these instead, which are, of course, my standard dark blue and black ensemble. unfortunately that makes it look weird in the pic coz it looks like two shirts melded together... erk...

and as a disclaimer, i only uploaded this pic coz carol asked me to. yes indeed.

island tales #9

speaking of genes.. im also lactose intolerant! used to think this was pretty freaking weird, until i looked it up in the wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), and guess what... i quote:

"The normal mammalian condition is for the young to lose the ability to effectively digest milk sugar (lactose) at the end of the weaning period (a species-specific length of time usually equal to roughly 3% of lifespan). It has been established that certain human populations have undergone a mutation on chromosome 2 which results in a bypass of the normal shutdown in lactase production, allowing members of these groups to continue consumption of fresh milk and fresh milk products throughout their lives."

*blablabla*

"Approximately 70% of the human species cannot tolerate lactose in adulthood. It is thus argued that the terminology should be reversed, lactose intolerance should be seen as the norm, and the minority Western European group should be labeled as having lactase persistence"

haha! which means, people who can take milk/cheese/lactosey stuff are all MUTANTS! will be sure to mention this inconvenient fact the next time any smart aleck offers me cheese.... hehehehe.

island tales #8

i have a migraine.. urgh. it's the usual one that i've been having for years, dull throbbing pain at the back of my head. and only on the right side, which is really weird. so, i did what any geek would do when faced with a migraine: look it up on the internet!

flipped through a bunch of wacky pages before i found d more useful stuff. apparently, it says right here that migraines are:
a) severe headaches on one part of the head,
b) periodic, and when it does happen it takes 3-12 hours to subside, usually,
c) hereditary (oh man, why do i always get those weird genes),
d) preceded by what they call an 'aura', or signs that you're about to have a migraine. examples include seeing lights or feeling nauseous. none of which i have ever experienced.

in any case, i really did feel sleepy the whole day yesterday, which was definitely unusual, and the headache came when i got back. errrrggghhhhhhh. managed to play rose online (haha nice game too, btw) until i couldnt stand it anymore, then collapsed in bed. and oh, forgot all about my laundry and left it soaking overnight, whoooooops.

some happy news to close this post. i've managed to get to new places to eat! and pumped fuel again, RM15 almost overflowed the tank, to my great surprise.

i've still got a mini headache. time to get back to work...

results are out!

woo! my exam results are out, and after a nailbiting morning of checking and rechecking, i finally got mine...

and the results are... confidential. :P but im real happy with it, and kinda surprised too. was pretty sure it was a screwed-up finals...

oh well, thank god, time to get back to my work. :P word of the day: hubris!

island tales #7

this is my current watch, and you can see that the weird thing goes anti clockwise. seen one of these before? i saw a whole bunch on sale once. i've used this for so long that my brain automatically switches itself to read the correct time, but it really disorients anyone who's not used to it. :P and of course, nothing like a weirdo watch to start a conversation with people.

ah, and yes, i am now flat broke. all three atms in tesco are out of service, and i used up my last notes on dinner. time to break open that kangaroo tube. guess i shouldnt have spent RM80 on those new bball shoes, but hey i needed something to wear. let's hope they get those cash dispensers up by tomorrow, else im gonna be living in debt... urgh.

how i spent the day: lazing around. just the way i like it!

island tales #6

it's sunday! and i went church this morning, much to my surprise. and the Guy in Green was talking about the parable of the sower, which is strangely appropriate when u think about it.. and also, the closing hymn was "showers of blessing", so (u guessed dat rite!) once i came out of the church, it just HAD to start drizzling. sigh... the irony... :P

oh, and last nite i actually drove to gurney drive. missed the flyover (wrong lane) so took d longgg way round and borrowed a methodist church to u-turn. hehe. and of course, i had to choose the most BRILLIANT (not..) time to drive to gurney drive for the first time. the roads were packed coz:

a) it was a saturday nite
b) it was a public holiday due to the penang governor (or someone)'s bday
c) roads were closed due to the bday celebrations
d) oh.. this one's totally unexpected. background: fong has this poster of this singer dude named JJ on his wall, and YES U GUESSED DAT RITE AGAIN, it just so happened that i picked the night of him coming to penang (and gurney plaza, to be specific) to drive to gurney.

so yea as u can see it wasnt the brightest of ideas after all. and i only knew about (d) when me and chen went to gurney plaza (to satisfy his craving for nando's), and saw a park full of young screaming girls. and COINCIDENTALLY (they just keep piling up, dont they...) we arrived just as JJ came on the stage. so i got treated to a park full of young girls in skimpy clothing screaming their lungs out. a veritable attention seeker's dream come true, except that, sobsob, they werent shouting for me.

but anyway, i did manage to park (further up, and needed to walk a bit), and had a nice half-a-chicken-wif-rice-and-coleslaw-and-hot-peri-peri-sauce meal, but was too full to do anything besides drive home after that. and the maybank atm seems to be down yet again. oh, and im lactose intolerant, i think, coz the coleslaw+mayo was really a heck of a lot to digest. but it was a nice meal! (2 thumbs up)

on a brighter note: i found a way to play dota here! no lag, either. wooohooo! not good news for carol, unfortunately, so i guess i'd better not show too much of my joy... :P

island tales #5

this is a kangaroo from carol's trip to australia. adorable, aint it?? the cute thing sits inside the blue container all day, sitting on my spare change. yea dats rite, im too lazy to keep my extra coins properly, and dump them all inside the blue container you see here, and it also serves as my own personal piggy bank. you'd be surprised at how much you can get from accumulating loose change...

things i've been doing: chen has gone back to his hometown for the day, so im practically in a "master of the realm" mode at the moment. been trying to get free online rpgs to play, and downloaded 'rubies of eventide' at a blistering speed of 110 kB/s (i haf no idea how it got so fast), but to my absolute frustration, part of the text is missing, so the game is pretty much unplayable. man that sucks!

so i went back to gta:san andreas and spent d morning mindlessly dishing out violence on my computer screen. with a break to watch 'the little mermaid' (or watever it's called.. the tv3 read haired mermaid cartoon... with the crab and the yellow fish thingie...) to balance out the excessive violence. i've got a basketball game planned at 6pm, and i gotta shop for bball shoes before then since i dont have a pair anymore.

shopping... sigh... how do people (esp women) find it so enjoyable?? mine is pretty much "walk in, take wat u want, pay and leave", which is infinitely better than the "walk around looking for wat u want and wishing u had more money" version. tho i can actually spend hours walking around the electronics section, looking for what i want and wishing i had more money... but that's totally different.

egads i think i might just possibly qualify for a geek. help!

news bulletin

and we now interrupt your normal programming with a rant.

what in the world is up with streamyx, i couldnt connect for a few hours back there, and my mum couldnt open quite a few sites. carol cant connect either. any ideas?? i've got a friend who experienced the same thing in kedah so that makes it four states. cacat...

island tales #4

well im home early today! fridays are half days when there's nothing on, so i get to start my extended weekend a bit earlier. and a big plus, no cars on the road at this time of the day! finally washed my car, so here are the promised pics... top is my beloved afk 819, constant companion in intel. here you see it fresh from its weekly bath, and what you cannot see is i just pumped petrol as well, so it's full AND refreshed. :P and here at the bottom is smth different for everyone, the doggie fong and hikki gave me for my bday (thanks guys!) with a reflection shot of the surrounding neighbourhood. hehe. i kinda like the effect on this pic... ;)

island tales #3

thought: if there is such a thing as charisma, im sure there's an exact opposite. anti-charisma, maybe. and if there is such a thing as anti-charisma, im sure i have it in bucketloads! :P (brief indulgence in self depreciation) not that im a horrible person, not as far as i know anyway (but i admit it! i confess to kicking a few cats! one of em was about to wrestle with me for my food, and the other climbed onto my face as i was sleeping, back in utp. so i gave one a good kick (and missed... arrghh)and the other got chucked out of the door), but i never ever seem to make a good first impression. i have no idea why, haha. could be coz i talk a lot.. :P

thought: since im in a rambling mode, let me go back a bit in my own history. wayyyy back in form 1 (has it really been 8 years...), i attended a chinese tuition thingie, since i, uh, decided to take Chinese as a PMR subject (dont ask), and boy was it a weird experience. i've been studying in a non-chinese-language environment since primary 1, and speak sporadic chinese at home in a couple of sketchy dialects (and only started speaking the funny kuching hokkien in form three.. god), so sitting in a chinese class was really really.. strange. kind of similar to walking into an advanced programming class without ever having touched a computer. however, i did get stuff out of it (number one: no matter how much u think u know, u dont know enough; number two: well, at least i can write and read in chinese now, tho it's getting rustier everyday. thank goodness for chinese mp3s.), so it wasnt so bad after all, but i am definitely putting this as one of the top twenty most bizzare experiences in my life. maybe at number eleven.

thought: when i was small too, i lost my specs and after an extensive search it was found at the bottom of a lot of clothes in the cupboard. i have no idea how it got there. was accused of hiding it there... uh... right. bizzaro index: number three.

well, good morning world, time for me to get back to work. cheerio~

island interruption

was driving back in a pretty down (more so than usual mood) when i heard the news on the radio.. apparently there's a series of explosions in london. hm, wats the world coming to. details are sketchy at best, so i'll probably be listening out for it as it gets updated. as to why i was down.. guess it seems quite trivial now. :P

island tales #2

phew im pooped. just finished basketball practice, and now im all tired. good thing about penang is there's no shortage of cheap food, so at least im tired with a full tummy!


here are the keys to my car, and my phone in the background. wanted to take a pic of the car itself, but it's in need of a wash (despite the weekly washings) so will only take pics of it when it's cleaner. if u squint u would probably realise the faded wooden keychain says... nah, i'll let u figure it out yourself. :)

as you can see, i've added a sitemeter thingie to the right side of this blog, under "sugar n cream". it's spozed to keep track of the number of visits i get, so visit often people and boost my ego!! :P at least it'll serve as a mini motivation to keep this blog going. nothing like knowing that someone is reading wat u write to make u write more for more people to read so that you know people are reading something you write! erm. and while you're at it, do type in comments in the shoutbox (aptly named "coffee stains"), and i'll feel real proud that people are talking to me.

carol says i love attention. heehee. that is soooo not true. i've always seen myself a shy and introverted individual... :P

oh yes. was reading through the confidentiality agreement i had today and right there in bold print it said i am not spozed to write anything about the company and wat i do there. darn. so.. let me just say that it involves computers, and u can fill the rest in with your imagination, since i really dont want to get kicked out of this thanks to a silly comment on my blog. blueks. but it IS a fun place to work (for me anyway), so anyone who's looking for a spot for internship do consider it... and (dont tell chen <-- current housemate and penang fan club president -- i said this) penang is pretty nice after all. nutcase maniacs on the road occasionally, and the water quality is comparable to kl, but otherwise it's nice. idlyic, even. darn. i've been with chen for way too long...

island tales #1

i've given up thinking new names for each and every update i'm posting, so for the moment all trivial updates are gonna be named by the incredibly unimaginative numbering scheme u see here. malas to think.

was pretty frust last nite over the inability to upload more photos.. darn thing kept jamming on me. guess i'd better stick to small pics next time, maybe that'll work better. in any case, i'm probably not taking any new pics anytime soon, due to the fact that i cant upload them until i do sm editing. and im way too lazy for dat! :P but in the meantime, here's a nice pic i took of a watch i got from a bowling competition while interning, hehe.

my life seems to have slip into a predictable routine. strange. waking up realll early is becoming something of a habit (wat a shock...), and the usual schedule of "wake up-drive to work-workwork-come back from work-fiddle around a bit-sleep" on weekdays is really sinking itself into my head. urgh. weekends are only slightly different, i seem to be washing the car and doing housekeeping on sundays, and for some reason time passes really fast here! hmm. cant believe a month has already passed. at least the pay is pretty decent...

and here's another observation: my english seems to be getting pretty rusty too. guess that's why i decided to start writing here again more frequently, at least my writing wont go COMPLETELY down the drain.. haha. and also on a totally different note, i seem to have signed myself up for a for-fun-only basketball competition at the workplace. and there's a 3 day weekend coming up!! cant wait for that, i guess. tho i cannot for the life of me imagine wat im going to do with so much extra time...

pearl of the orient

well. it's been ages since i last posted, yet again. and yes, i'm in penang! interning with intel, until january next year. so far so good, i guess. :P

i've got streamyx here (at last) and it's a lot better than the trickling internet access i got in utp, so yay, guess i should update this site more often. unfortunately, gta: san andreas has been soaking up most of my time lately, haha, which explains the total lack of updates here. and hey blogspot seems to have added a picture update thingie. guess i'll whip out d trusty old digicam and take sm pics to be uploaded here. keep an eye out!

on a slightly different note, i seem to be getting more and more absent minded lately. hrm. wonder why... seem to have developed a tendency to wander off in my thoughts as my body goes into autopilot. this cant be good!!! help~