So, how do you spend your holiday on this Deepavali Day? I spent my day cleaning up, mopping my room, throwing out things (a lot of them) from my room down to the garbage chute, and writing this blog. Later at night, I should be exercising again, playing 1-2 hours session of tennis.

On a separate note, I've just gotten myself two new upgrades for my PC. The first is a 16x BenQ DVD Writer at $83. I guessed this is just the right time to buy DVD writer for two reasons. First, DVD writer price will not drop too much already. Second, DVD writer speed can't go up already. Some managed to squeeze in 18x drive in the market, but similar to CD Writers which already stucked at 52-56x, I believe DVD writer speed are already stucked at 16-20x. Second item is a graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9600XT 256 MB RAM at $169 to replace my old, trusty, but now retired ATI Radeon 7200. Both purchases were bought from Fuwell in Simlim Square.

Lastly, for those going to have exam soon, prepare well, all the best, and may the Force be with you, hahaha...

Your personality is Sanguine Choleric. <-- as expected
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When Muslims are happily gathering with families to celebrate their Hari Raya, I spent my whole day out with friends. I went out from home 10AM in the morning (a record in itself considering today is holiday and I don't usually go out before lunch time ), met Dian and Ezer in Clementi before heading to Tiong Bahru MRT to go to SKS, a Christian bookstore in Tan Boon Liat Building. We (read: Dian ) browsed the bookstore for about an hour and half before we headed for lunch in Tiong Bahru hawker centre.
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He doesn't need any cash, since his staff takes care of buying anything he might need. He carries no cell phone, either, since he is surrounded by aides who take care of dialing his calls. And why would he need keys since every door is held open for him and his car comes with a driver trained by the Secret Service?

It's intriguing to see that George W. Bush only carries handkerchief in his pockets.

Update: Congrats to Asen as my 30,000th visitor

Just realized, my visitors counter is reaching another milestone again soon. My blog hit its 20,000th visitor counter back in May 2005. Now, within the next 24 hours, the counter will hit 30,000 !!!
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When I went out from Capital Tower, the building where I am working in, for lunch, I saw this van stucked to the glass cover on top of Capital Tower lobby. There is a panel saying Maximum Height is 2.2 metres, and this van clearly exceeds 2.2 metres. It seemed when it tried to drive through the lobby, the van got stucked to the glass cover, and no one dares to remove the van, scared that the whole glass cover will collapse.

If you don't know how male toilet looks like, here you go

Let's start from the background of the story. Last month, SQ flight ticket to Jakarta for 2006 Chinese New Year was $239 each person, for two to go promotion. A week later, it was $241. The following week, it was $291!!!! Last week, it was $289. So, when Dian called me near to lunch time today, telling me that Singapore Airlines flight to Jakarta ticket price has been reduced to $241, we didn't hesitate to quickly purchase our ticket. Since I already promised Bear and Ferry to go back together, I called them to confirm whether they want to purchase those tickets or not, at the same time asking for all their particulars, name, passport number, DOB, etc etc. It was not a problem calling Bear, but it took me frustrating 30 minutes to get Ferry on the line to no avail. I called, called, and called, but he didn't pick up. Further more because during those few minutes, Dian said, some flight had already increased their price back to $291. So, tried as I may, Ferry only reverted back near to lunch time, the time when Eko told me that he wanted to go back too. So, I tried checking the total price for 5 persons. Whereas 4 person total price was $964, when I added the fifth person, for some reason, the price shot up to $1705 !!! What the ???!!!
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Many of my digital images end up looking blur than I'd like to admit, so it was with a happy heart that I read about a new technology that could refocus photos after they've been taken. A team at Stanford University are claiming to have figured out how to adjust the rays of light after they've reached the camera, thereby letting us make blurry, nasty images look good as new. To do this, they inserted a sheet of 90,000 lenses between a cameras main lens and its image sensor. The angle and the amount of the rays of light are then recorded, letting software adjust them, basically reconstructing the image to what it would have looked like if properly focused. Not a bad deal.

We'll probably have to wait for another 5 years for this to go mainstream, but at the moment I could say that I want this I want this I want this !!!!

[read more from New Scientist]

If you were asked to sum all the good things you have received in your life in one word, what would that be?

One bright morning when I just started to work, an Indonesian friend of mine called. Sounded shocked, she sobbed, "My dad is suddenly sick. He went for exercise just now, then he took a nap, and he doesn't wake up. He's now comma. I'm flying back to Indonesia this afternoon." One hour later, her dad passed away.

At the same day, in the afternoon, there's another phone call. Another good friend was then suddenly hospitalized. He suffered stomach cramp and he already took too much painkillers. There's a fatal infection in his appendices. He went for surgery that night.

[More from Dian's blog]

If you are looking for an mp3 player lately, there are two major brands that you would probably look into, Apple iPod and Creative mp3 players. That's what I did last week, did some research to look for the most-value-for-money mp3 player, with all the features that one would wanted.



So, I browsed to Apple iPod page, they essentially have three types of iPod, namely iPod shuffle (cheapest, no screen, 512 MB or 1 GB), iPod nano (nice, thin, color screen, 2 GB or 4 GB), and their bigger sibling (iPod non-photo, iPod U2, and iPod Photo, that comes with either 30 or 60 GB). I looked for the product comparison page, it was there, easily found.
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I reached Level 5 when it's timeout after I've only found 5 out of 6 in Level 5. How far can you go without retry?

[Play online from Spot the Difference Game page]

Tonight, a total eight of us went for Jeremy Monteiro Live Jazz Band Performance in Timbre bistro in City Hall. We settled for dinner in Out of the Pan in Raffles City before heading to Timbre bistro to watch Jeremy Monteiro live jazz music that started only from 10 pm.





Dinner at Out of the Pan

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I guess probably many of you owns a camera-phone with you now. 43Folders website lists down some of the things that you can do with your phonecam to make it more useful.

Of all the items in the list, the most recent one that I did was to take a picture of myself after I took my haircut, then sent it to my friend to see how I looked like after my haircut, hihihi..... Then, last night, I was in SITEX to help my friend looked for an mp3 player. I found this SHIRO-brand mp3 player that has very nice screen, and also quite cheap. I tested the sound quality, it was good (not that I can tell much anyway), then I asked for permission to snap the picture of it, and then I sent the picture, along with price tag, and some other info, via MMS for her to see if she would like it or not.

There are so many things that we could do with our camera-phone. What's yours? Care to share what you've ever done with your camera phone. Maybe some of us could take some ideas along the way

This one is funny


PS. I'm on blogging spree, three in a day

My brother-in-law called me this morning, asking if I was okay, and where I was just now, sometime nearing to lunch time. Apparently, someone, admitting that he is from Indonesian Embassy in Singapore, made a call to my family back in Jakarta, telling them that I was involved in a car accident and now am in hospital. He told my brother-in-law that I am now in this so-and-so hospital, the accident was somewhere in the east side of Singapore, and gave my brother-in-law his contact number in Singapore.

Whoever this person is, is not anyone who anyhow picked phone numbers for prank calls. He certainly know my full name, my father's name, that I am in Singapore, and my parents work number. However, he certainly didn't know that my brother-in-law stayed in Singapore for a number of years to know well enough that so-and-so hospital doesn't exist, and that "somewhere" doesn't exist in Singapore either. Moreover, my brother-in-law stayed in east side of Singapore with my sister for over a year. Also, giving a Singapore contact number that starts with "2" is simply a give-away. Guess he doesn't know that Singapore only has "6", "8" and "9" to start with.
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Currently feeling: uncomfortable