My Lo Hei Dinner for Ox Year

Tonight I went for a lo hei session with mayi and maomao at Suntec City's Crystal Jade Kitchen. Xin wasn't able to attend as she had made other appointments for the night.

Well, frankly speaking, somehow I don't really feel the mood for any celebration this year. Be it birthdays, wedding dinners or even the lunar new year celebrations did not get me into a happy mood.

I guess too many bad news on the economic front has gotten to my brain and heart. Nonetheless tonight I tried to put unhappy news out of the way. Yet I also found myself talking, or rather grumbling, about my work. The sad thing is I don't have any good things to look forward to there as well. *sighs*

Anyway, here's a picture that was taken at Crystal Jade. Our plate of Lo Hei yusheng. The flash function was turned off when this picture was taken, it looks more yellowish due to the lighting there. See how we posed our chopsticks as if we were preparing to toss the dish as soon as the camera went off. *grin*

Lo Hei Yu Sheng @ Crystal Jade Crystal

So me & maomao ended up late for our dinner. Maomao arrived the latest at 6.30 pm even though we supposed to meet at 5.30pm. Last year, we also went to Crystal Jade for lo hei and maomao wasn't around to meet up with us.

Besides the lo hei dish,we also ordered some other foods which I had neglected to take pictures. I was rather engrossed in my eating.

After we finished our dinner, we went window-shopping for a short while before we came across a sale at Levis Strauss Signature. Two bottoms were going for $99.90 and so I promptly bought one straight cut and one bootleg cut. Thus I saved around $31 due to the promotion, which is quite okay.

Well, that's just about it for the day. Pretty boring eh? Hopefully the new year will bring some good luck for me.

Cheers!

Whoa! It's New Year 2009!

Time flies so fast and before I know it, it's now 4 days into the new year of 2009. Honestly, 2008 has not been a very good year with all those depressing news on the financial crisis, terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

As for the countdown, I didn't go out anywhere in order to avoid the crowd and spent my time reading online manga. The current manga that I am chasing right now is Skip Beat! and it's totally awesome. Maybe I shall write about that later.

Right and so, on Friday night I went clubbing with mayi and xin at Zirca, the new club which had replaced the former Ministry of Sound. Frankly speaking, the whole atmosphere at the new club just reeked of boredom. The music was so-so and the dancers are not so fantastic at all. Plus the second level didn't have anything much except for a lounge named "Envy". Envy of the previous club's success, perhaps? After an hour or so, mayi and I went off to another clun while xin went home.

The second club was The Arena and at least the music there were much better than Zirca. There was a live band at the club but the singers are not quite good. The house music was like the Top 40s chart so it was pretty ok. Towards the second part of the night, it was getting pretty boring though and so mayi and I went home.

And so, back to the new year. My hopes for the new year would be that more pleasant things will come back to earth and that life goes on without any troubles or fears.

Happy New Year!!!




Cheers!

Twilight director won't return for Sequel

According to this report, Twilight's director, Catherine Hardwicke would not be returning to direct its sequel, New Moon.

It was quoted as saying that due to timing differences, Hardwicke had to bow out of the commitment. Some say that Summit Entertainment wanted to do the sequel as soon as possible, given that the current Twilight movie is doing extremely well at the box office.

For Hardwicke, whose previous films include Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, had the highest opening ever for a female director when Twilight made nearly $70 million in its first weekend. It has grossed over $138 million in three weeks.

Twilight will officially open in Singapore on 18 December 2008 and that's when I will be watching it along with maomao. She's very excited over the movie though she has been claiming otherwise.

So for me, it remains to be seen whether the film is really that good or I should just concentrate on Harry Potter, whose next film release will be in July 2009. Boy, that's such a long, long time. Warner Bros better catch up quickly if they want to beat the Twinkies in their movie debut. Hee...

=(

The Hynoptic Power of the Twilight Saga

Finally. It's done.

I have completed my reading of the whole Twilight saga and I must say it was quite an eye-opener for me.

I rarely read vampires stories like those of Anne Rice and so, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight was my first foray into the vampire world.

Overall, I am happy with the whole series as it touched on several topics from love to family to friends to alliance to power. There's so much more to each book than just a love story on Isabella [Bella] Swan's love with an ancient vampire, Edward Cullen.

The story arc covers literally everyone in the plot. From the first time Bella seen Edward to her despair when Edward left her for her safety and then coming back together again forever, it has been hell of a ride.

Though in the final book, Breaking Dawn, it seems quite dubious when all of a sudden Bella turns into the strongest member of the Cullen vampire family, a big contrast when she was first introduced as a clumsy and injury-prone human in Twilight.

Nonetheless, the books kept me entranced throughout right to the end. If you are interested, check out the covers below:










The new movie of Twilight shall be released on 21 Nov 2008 and I will be watching it together with maomao. She was the one who introduced me to the Twilight saga. Ironically, she has never read the series before so it would be the first time that she will learn about the eternal love between Bella and Edward.

As it's a teenage story series, the writing is not as intense as those of mature writers like Judith McNaught and Nicholas Sparks. Nonetheless, it was still good to read for the action sequences in the plot.

I would give the series a 3 out of 5 stars for easy reading. Overall, my favourite book of the series has to be Twilight as it offers the freshest insight into Bella's and Edward's world. I hate eclipse and breaking dawn as it kind of pisses me off whenever the love triangle between Bella, Edward and Jacob comes up.

It's too draggy and the author simply has a penchant for taking out old stuffs to write. It does not make any sense to me but she's the writer, who can argue with her? Then there's Bella's hesitation on almost everything. Frankly speaking, it's got onto my nerves. One moment she wants to be a vampire, then the next she worries about being a vampire. Darn. I don't think eighteen year old girls are supposed to behave so wishy-washy.

But that's just my opinion. You have to read the series in order to understand what I'm trying to bring across here. Or maybe you should spare yourself the agony and just read the spoilers on wikipedia.

Right.

That should prolong your life by just a margin, I suppose. Or perhaps, we could find our own Edwards and get them to vampirize us. Won't that be absolutely lovely?

Yum! Being a vampire should certainly be a good thing. Then I won't have to worry about anything, except to get blood. That should be easy if I have a diet like the Cullens, hunting only on animals.

Too bad, there are no real vampires in this world and no, I won't haunt Robert Pattinson to try to get him to bite me, if ya know what I mean. He's human too. Awww shucks!

I guess it will all be just a bad dream. Oh well, I'll get over it soon enough. =P

Movie Watch: Go, Wall-E, Go!

Yesterday, I watched Walt Disney's new animation film, Wall-E, with mayi and maomao at Plaza Singapura.

The film is a very fun and touching story on WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), which has its own feelings and learns to mimick after human beings. He was left behind on an abandoned Earth which is polluted beyond hope. Yet, day after day, he would work to clear the pile of rubbish, collecting little tokens to be kept at his home.

Soon after, he came across EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), which was brought to Earth by a spaceship. And so, the viewer gets a robotic version of love that transcends all boundaries and space.

Wall-E is extremely likable as a kind robot who would sacrifice himself for Eve's directive. Together with Eve, they managed to get the humans to return to Earth and save it. Beyond the film's fun adventures lies a simple message that only we can save our Earth from pollution.

This film is truly good and when the DVD release comes, I will buy it for remembrance. So, as usual, I have attached pictures from the Internet of the movie for fun:

















After the film ended, all 3 of us went to Chinatown for some korean dinner where xin would join us. The little eatery is located along Mosque street and it was very crowded when we arrived at the place. Luckily for us, we managed to get a table before another huge crowded descended on the place. All of had ramen for dinner and I ate lots of kimchi, much to my stomach's delight.

I have been craving for kimchi for a long time and this dinner hit the right spot very well. Mao stayed for a short while before going home as she wasn't feeling well. And so the remaining 3 of us walked to Central after dinner for a cuppa of coffee before heading for home.

I suppose after tonight, it would hard to get anybody out as everyone would be too busy with their lives to bother. And so, I shall end my writing here.

dblO Fun!

Right after the concert, both mayi and I headed off to dbl O for a night of dancing.

It had been quite a while since the last time we went to dbl O. Our usual haunts are either MOS or Phuture. I used to enjoy clubbing at MOS but lately it's getting way too crowded and the kind of people who gather there are not your friendly type too. They jostled around you while you are trying to dance and it's not pleasant at all.

Initially, mayi wanted to go MOS but I suggested dbl O since xin always go there for clubbing and I am getting really tired of MOS.

Well, dbl O indeed did not disappoint. For one thing, the drinks are cheap and the music is great. I had a good time dancing to many familiar songs like Backstreet's Back, Baby One More Time, Umbrella and The Way I Are.

So many good songs in such a short span of time really made my night. Though at first mayi wasn't feeling very well after we had our tequila shots. Hmmm... probably she wasn't used to the tequila used. I don't know but probably MOS used a different brand of tequila. Heehee...

Nonetheless, she managed to recover on time for a round of fantastic dancing. The night would have been perfect except for a speck of dust that marred a bit of fun. A guy was trying to be funny with me and he thought he might get a chance in trying to get me into sexy dancing. Ha!

He got the wrong girl though. I just kept doing things the opposite way that he wanted me to do. He wanted a yes but I gave him a no. For one thing, he's way too short for my liking. Hahaha!!! Besides, good guys don't hang out at such places. Only jerks looking for a good time and easy prey come to this place. But hey I still got to give them some credit. At least they know when to back off.

Anyways, people go clubbing simply just to have fun. So do I. Only my fun is pure dancing. Wee!!!!

F.I.R. Concert! w00t!

Last night mayi and I went to F.I.R. first world tour concert at Singapore Indoor Stadium. Initially I hadn't taken notice of their concert but when mayi asked me whether I want to attend the concert, I agreed without hesitation.

When F.I.R. first came out in year 2004 with their debut album, I was immediately attracted by their unique music arrangement and Faye's excellent voice. I loved all the songs on the debut album and that was a first for me in recent years. Only Jay Chou has the ability to make fall in love with all his songs. ^_^

Now, fast forward to year 2008. With 4 albums under their belts, F.I.R. has indeed come a long way since their debut days. Their trial and errors with the experiments of music led them to their highs and lows in their music career but through it all, they gritted their teeth and might to finish their journey.

Last but not least, Faye and Real had found true love within each other and it was a joyous occasion when Real proposed to Faye last Christmas. Indeed, everyone had been so happy for the lovebirds and that love shone throughout the concert as well. I am very honored to be part of their joy.

For the most part, I sat quietly through the concert as my seating area is not the crazy fans' arena so thank god I was able to enjoy the concert in peace for the most part.

As expected, F.I.R. performed all the crowd favourite songs which had garnered them huge scale of popularity.

Lydia... Fly Away... Get High... so much more!

Faye looked respledent in her white costume and later when she changed into a gold costume, she truly looked like a queen who has come of age.

To see the pictures that I took during the concert, go to this link. Once again, the quality of the pictures are not that good as my camera does not take night shots very well. It totally sucked at that. Pui!

Then there's the zoom issue too. The 3x zooming feature is not enough to capture F.I.R. closely at all. The only one shot that was close had been based on digital zoom, not optical zoom, so the picture quality suffered. Damn...

Overall the concert was a rousing success for F.I.R. and fans couldn't have asked for more than this. Truly.

NDP 08 Preview Fireworks Video

All right, I finally got one of my fireworks files to upload onto my blog. Hope it works.

This video clip is just a short portion of the total fireworks display. My other bigger file is simply too big for any websites to upload, with its size tipping the scales at 278 MB.

Yep. It's a very big file due to its longer duration of 3 minutes and 50 seconds. That is truly awesome with lots of fireworks exploding in the night air, with the financial business district in the background to complete the picture.

Hope this small video is able to share some of the nationalistic atmosphere to the reader.

Happy National Day! Cheers! =)

My National Day 2008 Preview

Finally the day has arrived!

The day where I will be catching the National Day Parade live for the 1st time in my life as an audience. My effort in balloting for the NDP 08 Preview tickets for the 1st time yielded good results.

And so, I went to the preview with my friend, Mayi aka Angeline Chew yesterday. We met up early in order to go the venue early so that we can get the best seats possible. From our viewpoint, we figured that we got quite a good seating area as we could see the stage in whole and we were able to get good shots of the stage.

It was a long wait before we could get some relief from the hot weather. The sun shone non-stop during our wait and it was hard to get comfortable in a cramp seat for long period of time. Furthermore the girl sitting on my right kept poking her umbrella onto my shoulder which hurt a lot. I can tell you that it was truly a test of my patience when the girl just refused to be considerate when using her umbrella. I really felt like committing a murder there and then. Damn her....

I took loads of photos during the preview and posted them onto my Facebook Photo albums, which can be accessed by public. My photography skills are not quite up to scratch and my Casio Exilim EX-70 is not an excellent camera for long shots so some of the photos don't turn out quite nice. So sad sia...

When the Comex comes at the end of this month, I'm gonna invest in a good superzoom camera which is also able to take good shots in dim light conditions. That's for sure.

All right. The urls for the public albums are listed below:

Part 1

Part 2

Yup. I also took videos of the fireworks which are the main highlights of the show. I'm still uploading the videos onto my web pages and it's taking forever to finish uploading, at the rate it's going.

Nonetheless, the fireworks was simply amazing. They took my breath away, literally. I was so awed by the beauty of the fireworks that I wish that I could set off my own fireworks. If only fireworks are legalised in Singapore, that would be a totally different story altogether. *sighs*

Anyways, once the preview had ended, both mayi and I went for dinner at Sushi Tei at Raffles City. I still prefer the outlet at Vivo City as the food and service are much better than this Raffles City outlet.

I didn't ate that much as mayi's mum was around and I wasn't exactly comfortable with her. Not totally, you know what I mean? Hmmm....

So, after the dinner, I went on to meet Veron and my other colleagues at Party World KTV at Shenton Way for a singing session, though I didn't sing that much. Having sung so many national day songs earlier on had sorta tired me out. Heehee...

Yep. That's all for the day. Enough rabbling. I'll post my fireworks videos as soon as I can get them up. See ya!!!

=)

Yay! I finally gets my new Wind!

It has been a very long wait for this baby to come along. I had placed order for it in early June and was told that the estimated date of arrival is in July. Finally, after a month of waiting, my baby has come.

Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the MSI Wind.

I received the much awaited phone call from M/s Corbell yesterday afternoon to notify me of my wind's collection. How I wish I could go down to the office immediately to take the wind but it was not yet time for dismissal and their office hours are the same as mine. *sighs* I could only wait till today in order to go down and collect my wind.

And so, after 1 whole day of charging the batteries, I finally get to tinker with my new baby. Here are some pictures that I took of my new Wind: -

My Wind in comparison to my Sony Ericsson K800i

I bought the Wind for $864 with an upgrade of my existing 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM. Besides using the latest Intel Atom chipset, my Wind also has a 80GB hard disk, wifi, bluetooth, 1.3MP webcam, 3 USB ports, 1 ethernet port, 1 kensington lock port, 1 vga port, 1 mic port, 1 headphones port and a 10.1 inch screen. For the operating system, it comes packaged with Window XP home basic, which I prefer to use. =)

Setting up a wifi connection by myself sounds very daunting to me and I went about doing it pretty much reliance on a CD. This CD is supplied together in the package of the Linksys wireless router that I specially bought for use with my Wind. Now I can happily say that everything went well, from the connection to the security of my network. Now both my desktop and laptop get to surf Internet without any worries. Wee! =)

The only bad thing about the Wind is that it has a short battery life with the supplied 3-cell battery. If I were to wait for the 6-cell version, it would be another long wait again for its expected release period is September. Plus MSI has this bad habit of pushing back the release date so I decided to take the 3-cell version. I can't bear the long wait again. But the battery power life really sucks big time.

Other than that, everything is good. The keyboard is manageable. The screen is also relatively good. I don't own a EEE PC so I can't really compare the two netbooks together.

Nonetheless, I am loving my Wind a lot and since it's supposed to be power-saving, I am going to be using it more often than my Acer desktop. This should help to save a bit of electricity.

With the upgraded 2GB RAM, I am seeing a fast response to my applications as well. Unlike my 512MB RAM Acer desktop which works so slowly. Everything is so zippy on the Wind and I am more than delighted at its performance. Though the webcam is not quite good and the mic doesn't capture my voice at all. So when I tried out video-conferencing with Mayi, she can't hear what I'm saying and the image freezes occasionally.

All in all, I would say it has been really worth it. I don't regret buying this netbook and I hope it will be a faithful companion to me the way my Acer desktop is.

Hair Job Done

Yo... I had just came back from a rebonding session at Reds Salon at Suntec City. I had heard about this fantastic offer of $180 for a rebonding job with no hair length limits. As my hair is very long, it will suit me well as I am looking at a possible cost savings up to $200. That's a lot of money!

Plus it was Mayi who introduced the offer to me and she also recommended me her stylist whom she said is very good at styling hairs. And so I had called up the salon and fixed an appointment with Karen.

Overall I am very happy with the results. My hair went from messy to straightness/sleekness in a snap. Now I look much more presentable with well-behaved hair. It is certainly worth the $180 that I spent for.

Now that I look different from before, I wonder how long will it take for my blur mum to notice my new crown glory. She has never bother to be more concerned about my life. *sighs*

Let's wait and see. =)

New PSP Slim Case

I had just came back from a BBQ session at Angeline a.k.a. mayi's house, exhausted but feeling very satisfied. Besides me, Felice a.k.a. maomao also came for the BBQ session. Xinhui a.k.a. xin didn't turn up eventually due to some personal matters.

Nonetheless, the 3 of us enjoyed ourselves despite the unpleasantries from mayi's elder sister. Between the 3 of us, we managed to set up 2 BBQ pits and got some food cooking sizzling hot before the elder sister came over and took away all our cooked food to share with her own set of friends. This left us with only raw food in which we had to cook again before we could fill our stomachs.

Magdeline is such a horrible person that mayi had the misfortune to live with all her life. She is such a huge disgrace to the family. All of us were busy preparing the necessaries for the BBQ, like setting up the BBQ pits, cooking the food and the eventual cleaning up of the BBQ equipments but all her elder sister did was snatched our food away without a word of thanks.

Her friends were even worse than the sister. They just came over to the BBQ session and ate up the food without offering a single helping hand to us nor a word of thanks. They should be ashamed of themselves and rightfully so, since they are working as full-time teachers in public schools.

Is this the way for public teachers to carry themselves in front of other people? NIE should sieve out all these bad apples lest they teach the wrong values to the future generations. Bah!

Right. Enough about those ungrateful sods.

Aside from the excellent food, I had also managed to get a beautiful PSP Slim case for myself at Bishan Junction 8. Needless to say, it is in black colour.

Here are some pictures of the case which I took with my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone:







Now my beloved PSP Slim is finally getting the proper home that it deserves. With this case, I don't have to worry about scratches marring the beauty of my black PSP Slim anymore. What a relief!