Hi everyone, I'm back from my Amazing Trip, thank God safe and sound, though a bit sick.

Two continents
Six countries
Fifteen days
Two times sixteen hours flight
Three nights on cruise
Countless hours on coach bus
Over 23,000 km travelled
34 roaming-SMS sent
Over 23 minutes of outgoing phone call made. Starhub, have pity to me on this one pls?
3,444 photos taken totalled 6.64 GB
Almost 24 hours of videos taken totalled 22.7 GB
Thousands of €uros spent

Okay, now I need a breather, and heaven-know how many days or weeks I need to sort those photos and videos out.

All in all, it was amazing and fun trip. More to follow when I slowly put all the pieces of my life back.

- Arrange my rooms after I shifted (again)
- Make sure that I pay up all my bills that need to be paid up soon (especially credit card bill with that ridiculous 24% interest)
- Read, digest, and follow up my over 300 work emails
- Read, follow up, delete my over 500 not-so-important personal emails

As expected, my first day in office after two weeks hiatus was jam packed. First half day before lunch was spent solely for reading all my emails, trying to digest them as fast as I can. After lunch was spent following up on a couple of emails, and meeting, catching up, phone calls, and meetings.

Luckily today I was awake enough to go through all those meetings. Somehow, last night I was unable to sleep. I simply felt so awake, many things running through my head at night. Probably jet-lag effect hehe ....
In the morning, in the MRT, I was unusually awake (I'm always sleepy in the morning haha..) but in the evening, a couple of times, I totally dozed off and almost fell down. So malu...

Let's see if I can finish following up on all my work tomorrow, before the new batches of work coming along again

Okay, some of you who have read my previous blog post may be curious on where I have been these past two weeks. Didn't you? :p So, here they are:

Two continents are Asia and Europe.
Six countries are Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway.
Three nights on cruise were those from Stockholm, Sweden to Turku, Finland, and vice versa, and another one from Oslo, Norway to Frederikshavn, Denmark. It's a super tiny cabin on cruise, a mere 9 m2 (that's about 3m x 3m) shared by four persons, and some are strangers.

As for the photos, I have gone through about one-third of all my photos collection, and will keep finding time to sort out the rest. I have not touched the video at all, they are simply an enormous collection of videos I have in my PC now.

For those curious about international roaming charges while I was there, here are what I can gather from my latest bill from Starhub on my outgoing SMS based on different provider there:
- Turkey TurkCell - S$0.5436
- Germany TMobile DEU - S$0.3979
- Germany Vodafone GER - S$0.2369
- Germany VIAG - S$0.3956
- Denmark Telia Dnk - S$0.6222

At least now I know that I probably should stick with Vodafone next time round

If you're running Windows Vista RC1 and you notice that the nice Glassy Aero UI keeps switching into "Basic Mode" every time you visit a website with some Java on the page, you should upgrade to the Beta of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Beta 2 (second link on the page) as it supports staying in Aero mode while running Java Applets. [from Scott Hanselman]

I thought it would take at least five days to wait, but to my amazement, it didn't even take a day. Great!!! Good stuffs!!! Now, I have one less worry to think about :D

It was 11 pm flight from Singapore. After office hour that Friday, I rushed back home, had dinner, packed up my stuffs into my luggage, and rushed to Changi Airport. From Changi Airport, it was 13 hours flight to Ataturk International Airport, Istanbul, Turkey, waited there for three hours, followed by another three-hour flight to Frankfurt.

The stewardess on Turkish Airlines was unfriendly at best, failed when I ask even simple thing like a glass of water, *sigh*

Anyway, reached Frankfurt in the morning, took a cab to Holiday Inn hotel. Apparently, all taxis uses Mercedes-Benz, so there isn't any cheaper taxi. The meter jump of the taxi fare was really scary, it jumped €0.10 in less than two seconds. It was scary!!! By the time we reached my hotel, which is not so far away from the airport, the meter fare showed €28.60 *haiz* I tried checking in, but the receptionist said that our room is not ready yet. Never mind, waited there for about an hour, then went into our room.
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For those who are not so fortunate enough to move to Windows Vista yet, hehe... and still using Windows XP or below, if you need an instant search capability on your machine, I highly recommend Copernic Desktop Search. Now version 2 has been released, it is a great product to search every single file, email, documents, anything in your computer, INSTANTLY !!!

I used it in my Windows XP machine last time before I moved to Windows Vista. [Thanks INK for letting me know of its release ]

We woke up in the morning to join a half-day city tour in Frankfurt, and you know what, the city tour brought us to Römer to take photos, yeah, it was the place we went to ourselves the day before, and that's all. So wasted!!! Anyway, since we have paid for it, we have to make full use of the city tour, so we went for another round of photo taking sessions in Römer haha...


Clockwise: In front of Galeria Kaufhof in Haupwatche, a church in Römer, and a nice car spotted on the road side
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Some people said so.
From someone to me, transcripted, edited, and censored accordingly hehe...: "Dasar elu lucu kali !!!!!! Wakakakakakakaka... garink"
Another time from another person: "hahaha.... kamu lucu banget deh...boleh jg nih kalo lg stress contact kamu. kok waktu disini ga selucu ini ya..... huahuahau...kalo ga kan, i bisa ketawa sampe guling2 dilantai. seumur hidup i hanya sekali ketawa kayak gitu"

Glad to know that I can make someone's day, by making them laugh. The latter one was certainly exaggerating, but I'm happy when I can make someone else happy and laugh Take things easy, laugh more, don't stressed yourself out too much with things that shouldn't be. I know, some other time, it'll be their turn to make me laugh when I'm down. That's what a friend is for after all, right? Strive to keep those kind of friends, because you never know what you ever had until you have lost it

Lucy has been walking in a dark cave for days, trying to find her way out of the cave, when she suddenly saw in front of her, that the cave is splitted into two ways, one to the left and one to the right. Lucy saw that the right one seems well ... right, so she took that path and kept walking. Seven hours later, she started to doubt herself, "Have I taken the correct choice? What should I do now?" She kept walking and walking, one hour later, tired, so she sat down by the cave side. She started thinking of her choices now. One, keep walking and hope that her choice is right. After all, she could be nearer to the exit door that she thought she was. Second, waste her eight hours effort, walked back to where she started, and took the second choice, the left way, which can be wrong too, knowing she may not have enough time to get back here again, and surely regretted that she has left the right way.

What should Lucy do? What if she's right? What if she's wrong?

With the current rate of my posting of my Europe Trip stories and photos, not sure when I can finish blogging all those 14 days hahah.... *haiz* Not before my next trip I guess hahaha.... -_-!

I'm drooling ... Nokia has just announced the latest Nokia N95, with a new form factor with 2-way slide movement and impressive list of features: impressive 5.0 MPixel camera with Carl Zeiss optic, auto focus, mechanical shutter and DVD like quality video. Also it features WLAN, 3D stereo speakers, mini-USB connector, 3.5 inch mini-jack connector, dedicated music buttons and camera buttons, QVGA resolution display of 2.6", 160 MB of internal storage memory, 64 MB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR support, uPnP, infrared, UMTS, GPRS and EDGE, SIP support, BL-5F Battery all that packed into compact body with size of 99 mm x 20 mm x 53 mm and weight of just 120 g !!! [Read more here]

I want I want I want ... All I want for Christmas is ...

Besides Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and Word, I do rely on Microsoft Office OneNote in my work for jotting down notes, thoughts, random ideas, etc. etc. Today, I found a song by one of the PM in OneNote product team. Check out the mp3 and the lyrics. And you haven't used OneNote, I highly suggest you try it out

Can skip you've read this before

Why did Ah Beng go to a movie with his 18 friends?

Because below 18 not allowed Lah !
-------? ? ? ? ? ?-------

Ah Beng wants to buy a TV set. He goes to a shop.
Ah Beng : "Do you have color TV ?"
Salesgirl : "Yes !"
Ah Beng : "Give me a green one, please "
-------? ? ? ? ? ?-------

Ah Beng is filling up an application form for a job.
He supplied the information for the columns on Name, Age, Address etc.
Then he comes to column on "Salary Expected", but he is not sure of the question.
After much thought, he writes " Yes "
-------? ? ? ? ? ?-------
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