Today, Sunday, 4 pm, I was walking to a bus stop going to church. When I was walking on the pedestrian, 50 m before I reached the bus stop, I suddenly heard noises like something was dropped from the tree above me. I looked back, and there I saw a tree branch only five six meters away from me, big enough to knock me down and send me to hospital.

Last week's sermon taught me to say thanks and praise God for everything, including small things, and this will be another event for which I will say thanks to our Heavenly Father above. This was one of many events in my life which, without God's protection, could put my name in Straits Times newspaper, Obituary section.

After spending record expenses last month for dining and movies, I was telling myself that this month, I must not spend as much as last month. However, any hopes of curbing expenses this month were dashed as early as my dinner on the first day of July. $12 at MOS Burger . That was last Friday.

After watching Batman Begins two weeks ago, on Saturday eight of us went to watch War of the Worlds at Bishan. We had our dinner at McD before the movie and our supper at Cafe Cartel afterwards. In Cafe Cartel, I had Eastside Brownie Stack. It was two pieces of brownies with rich chocolate topped with a vanilla ice cream, yummy

Yesterday, I had lunch with my colleagues at Secret Recipe for a farewell meal. It was a $17 set lunch for a main course, drink, soup of the day, and guess what, another brownie.

Today, after lunch, I dropped by the new mr. bean opened in Tanjong Pagar. I bought their $1.20 soya-ice-cream. Tasted like McD's ice cream cone.

Let's see if you can solve it. This one very tricky.

I went to Raffles City this afternoon to have lunch, and realized something different today. There were lots of police standing by around Raffles City with their machine guns, two to three persons in every entrance. Soon, I realized that there was the 117th IOC (International Olympic Committee) session going on at Raffles City Convention Centre to decide which city has the right to host Olympic 2012.

It was a nice and bright showcase they have at the ground floor with a huge screen showing live telecast from the meeting. Kinda depressing knowing people like Tony Blair, David Beckham, and Raul Gonzalez are somewhere near where you are, but you just couldn't get a chance to meet them, hahaha...

In the end, congrats London for winning the bid !!!

It may not sound like much, but coupled with recent increase in SMRT and buses fares, this news could mean additional transport expenses in the coming months. They increase current booking charges up to $4, waiting time fares, staggered surcharges for midnight starting from 11.30 pm, and so on.

Read more from ChannelNewsAsia. Will you be affected by this? How much?

Somehow this weekend I didn't feel like doing anything useful. Actually I got a couple of things planned for this weekend, but laziness just crept in and in the end, I didn't do much. This weekend ... sadly speaking ... was kinda wasted. *sigh*

This song below is in Indonesian language, rather in Jakarta-style language, and it shows how I am grateful to have friends like all of you.  And that 50 years from now, after we all have walked different paths, we will still be friends.


Artist: Project P
Title: Ingatlah Hari Ini
Album: Pop ok

Kawan dengarlah yang akan aku katakan
Tentang dirimu setelah selama ini
Ternyata kepalamu akan selalu botak
Eh, kamu kaya gorilla

Cobalah kamu ngaca tuh bibir balapan
Daripada gigi loe kaya klinci
Yang ini udah gendut, suka marah marah
Kau cacing kepanasan

Tapi ku tak peduli, kau slalu di hati

[chorus]
Kamu sangat berarti, istimewa di hati, slamanya rasa ini
Jika tua nanti kita tlah hidup masing2, ingatlah hari ini

Ketika kesepian menyerang diriku
Ga enak badan resah ga menentu
Ku tau satu cara sembuhkan diriku
Ingat teman-temanku

Don't you worry just be happy, temanmu disini

Don't you worry, don't be angry, mending happy happy.

Notice a pattern? SMS from Bear are usually started with Hahaha...

This was not an issue so many years back, but as hard drive grows, our file adds up, and after a while, you find your 40 GB harddisk ran out of space. You bought 120 GB hard drive, after a while, you still ran out of space. You just don't know what fills them up. Come to our rescue is TreeSize. It shows where your precious disk space has gone to. I used it last night as I realized that my 8 GB drive C only have 150 MB disk space left. I used this tool and managed to delete 2 GB worth of junk from my drive C. Download it from here.

Update: Other alternative can be found here. They call it FolderSize.

I got four tickets for Giving My Best (GMB) concert at Le Meridien Hotel on 31st July 2005 - 7 pm. Anyone interested to go?

As usual, weekend updates. On Friday, we had company wide meeting, then followed by banana split competition. Above is the result of Avanadian's banana split, from those that contains liquor, unedible accessories, had balls, balanced yin and yang, had three-tier architecture, had six sticks to signify Avanade's sixth year, and so on, hahaha... We closed the event by having meal of KFC and Pizza Hut. We also had Ben & Jerry ice cream, *yummy*

After then, I went to Fish and Co. for dinner with Eric, Dapit, Ferry, Emmy, and Nita. I ordered Seafood Platter for one person, but since I've already had KFC and Pizza Hut one hour before, I could only finish the prawns, fish, and calamari, but left the chips largely untouched. Photos waiting from Dapit.

The remaining Saturday and Sunday was rather fruitful days, managed to do quite a number of things (which I can't recall now), didn't skip any of my Quiet Time and church. Though I missed two sessions of tennis with my flatmates, but higher priorities tasks must come first.

Today, I received email from Microsoft Connect for my participation in the upcoming Windows Longhorn. The email subject states: "You Are Invited to Join In the Pre-Release Testing of Windows, code-named Longhorn"

The excerpt for the first part of the email:
"Dear Microsoft Beta Tester,
We are pleased to offer you an early preview of Windows, Code-Name "Longhorn," by extending this invitation to join the Longhorn beta program. Your participation is completely voluntary. Longhorn Beta Program participants will preview software for the next generation of Windows as well as Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003." so on and so on.

The rest of the email states how I can participate by entering my provided invitation ID in Microsoft Connect website. Longhorn Beta 1 should be released either this month or next month while expected ship date remains end of 2006. I hope this will be a big-band release when it ships.

After my colleague, my client, and my manager all down with fever/flu etc today, now I also feel a bit of headache, and not in the mood to do anything. Wanted to go down to the tennis court to hit some balls, but all four courts are fully booked. sianzzz... So, here I am blogging.....

Currently feeling: giddy

If you use Firefox and after upgrading Firefox to the latest version and you get the error that says: "The program must close to allow a previous installation attempt to complete. Please restart.", here is the solution:

1. Go to Task Manager, kill any xpicleanup.exe process
2. Go to C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox and delete xpicleanup.dat

After that, you should be able to launch Firefox as normal. This happened to me when upgrading from Firefox 1.04 to Firefox 1.05, and just now from 1.05 to 1.06, but didn't happen with other people I ask. Could just be isolated problem.

Currently feeling: giddy

So, it will not be Windows 2006 or some sort, but the operating system to succeed Windows XP will be called Windows Vista, according to Microsoft-Watch. It is currently called Windows codename Longhorn.

In 2001, Windows codename Whistler was finally named Windows XP as we know it now. Official announcement is expected in a few hours time. Keep checking. In the mean time, what do you think about that name? Windows Vista?

Update: It's official !!! No more Longhorn, from now on, we have Windows Vista. Check the official Windows Vista website and watch the announcement video too.

My weekend started with a lunch at Purvis Street just opposite the New National Library at Bugis to celebrate Serene's birthday. Today happened to be the day that New National Library is opened to public, so we went over. It is a huggeeee library, but sad to say, the "library" is just a tiny portion of the library, at Basement 1 some more!!!! So, you would ask, what do they have for the rest of that 13 levels? Well, they have Drama Centre, Reference Books, Courtyard, Imagination Room, Possibility Room ??!!!!

(Read More)

Today is youth fellowship day of welcoming new students from Indonesia who came to Singapore for study. We brought them around City Hall and Bugis area. The places that they went to are Merlion, Fullerton, Esplanade, Bugis Village, Simlim, Boat Quay, Suntec City, and Swissotel. I had to drag myself up at 8 today, reached Bugis at 9.30 AM. The outing started at 11 AM and we finished at 4 PM, then followed with our youth fellowship. After it, we went to Funan (again!!!! count how many times I've went to Bugis/Funan in two days !!!!) for dinner. (Read More)

Do you know that our Moon is indeed made of cheese? Check http://moon.google.com and zoom in all the way.

Today, I went to Orchard area for dinner and went to Borders to buy two books. The first one is titled "Reaching for the invisible God" by Philip Yancey. From the back of the book: "Life with God doesn't always work like we thought. High expectations slam against the reality of personal weaknesses and unwelcome surprises. And the God who we've been told longs for our company may seem remote, emotionally unavailable. Is God playing games? What can we count on this God for? This relationship with a God we can't see, hear, or touch - how does it really work?" I read over someone's shoulder in the MRT few weeks back when a lady was reading this book. In the journey from Clementi to Tanjong Pagar, she read about three pages, and so did I, who was standing behind her, hehehe... I was very interested with the contents of this book, that I decided to buy it. (Read More)

After I didn't manage to get my backpack last week, today, my colleagues and I went to Funan again. This time was a quick one, since we roughly already know what we wanted. In the end, I bought a backpack from Targus, Urban II Backpack - Navy/Black color for $99.90. It feels very comfortable with a lot of padding and cushions, and a very spacious compartment inside. It's made of water-resistant material, and this surely helps when I lugged my Toshiba Tecra M2 around. After shopping, it's time to fill our stomach, we went to Ajisen Ramen for dinner.

Four of us went to Coriander Leaf at Clarke Quay for dinner tonight. Yanwar and I arrived there first around 6.30 pm, then waited for Winarto to arrive around 8 pm. Nelly came even later close to 9 pm I guess. Now we know Microsoft people (i.e. Winarto and Nelly) are very busy, at least compared to IBM (Yanwar) and Avanade (myself), (only for today mind you), hahaha.... (Read More)

A couple of years back in a seminar, I was asked: "What would you do if you have a power of a president or king?" I answered: "I'll eradicate smoking from this world !!!" Why on earth this cigarrette thingy was created in the first place, I thought??!!! Only people who don't care about themselves and the people around them will smoke, and to me, they are, forgive me, simply pathetic. Even worse people who smoke inside air-con room, they are, again forgive me, moron to say the least !!! Don't get me wrong, a lot of people realized that smoking is bad for health, but just powerless to stop smoking. I'm also not implying that I'm better than these people in other cases, it's just me, who hate smoke so much, and to be clear, I hate their smoking, and not the people. If people smoke around me, I'll make sure they know I don't like them, most of the time, simply by moving further. A couple of times though, in an air-con restaurant, once in Swiss, countless times in Jakarta, (never in Singapore, since it's not allowed to smoke inside air-con room), if there are people smoking inside air-con restaurant, I'll call the waiter to ask them to stop. It may not always work, but at least I tried. Of course, everytime I did this, I'll be scolded by my parents. (Read More)