Pix

Some pix to share on my recent Hong Kong trip, short but memorable one... Going in Jan'09 with CM again, hopefully get to go to Macau then:p

Reached HK at 12am, watched Ironman throughout the journey and drank too much white wine. When the alcohol hit me at the end of the flight, I puked in the washroom.

The SIA stewardess was like," Mr, the plane is going to land. Please return to your seat and put on the seat belt."

"But I really need to go to the toilet."

"No sir, please return to your seat." she insisted.

"I am going to puke." and I rushed to the tiny closet and threw up like the Singapore merlion. After I was done, the plane had landed and the stewardess smiled at me and asked,"Are you feeling better now?"

Moral of the story?

Better to fly with SIA in future:)

By the time we arrived at Conrad, it was about 1am. We checked in and I was soon sound asleep after a hot water bath. What you witness here was the topsy-turvied bed after one night of tossing around, snoring and kicking the blanket. Yes, that's my t-shirt and belt, always been an unkempt guy:p


The luxurious looking bathroom with a huge bathtub, towels everywhere within an arm's reach. Notice the round mirror on the wall above the towel (right)? That mirror can magnify the pores on your face several times larger than the normal ones and thanks to it, I managed to squeeze out some stubborn sebums.

Yes, they even prepared my childhood playmate, Captain Ducky. We practically hijacked the HMS Interceptor and went after the Black Pearl to the End of the World...okay, this is crap.

This is where I work with the latest member of the Sony VAIO (VGN-SR16GN) launched only this July in Hong Kong.

View from my room, nothing but skyscraping edifices sprouting out from the lush green hills like mushrooms.

Jason, the FC told me it would be fun to go to Repulse Bay and I heeded his advice. However, I went to the wrong place, instead I ended up at Repulse Beach...sien.

Cool huh? Going to a beach during the summer time without your trunks. The weather was damn hot, much hotter and humid than in Malaysia or Singapore. Nonetheless, the sea was not at all inviting, and so I just took a snap and that's it.

Horrifying apartments beside the beach. Looks like pigeon hole to me.

Some shots from a nearby temple.

Next stop, The Peak. Some shots taken from The Peak Tower, trying to mimic the shots on the postcards... Okay, the picture on the postcard looks much punchy than mine, but i think i got the angle right lor. It's kinda hazy then.

Ahh, who would have miss Madam Tussauds' wax museum. Waited for a very long time to shoot Bruce Lee "alone" but the crowd was just too enthusiastic about the late Jeet Kune Do founder and martial art icon. This is another way to explain why I captured this pic with the lady in it. (Disclaimer: I don't know her!)

One thing to note is that most of the famous icons featured here are surprisingly shorter than I am, except Yao Ming lar.

Lau Kin-Ming aka Andy Lau: ngo siong jou hou yan!

Beatles

Rembrandt

MM Lee Kuan Yew

Cecilia Cheung. Couldn't find Edison...:P

Twinz: Ah Sa and Ah Q...(Still can't find Edison...)

Datuk Michelle Yeoh and Gnustiy

Realized that touring around alone wasn't that much fun, so I decided not to visit the underwater world and headed back to the Central. Took my lunch in one of the local "cha can ting" and took a stroll around Wan Chai.

Kelly Chan on mooncake advert

Petaling Street?!

Yucks! Pigeon holes...

Tramcars

HK's trademark, little red cabs.

This was my final shot in the cab, on the way to the airport to fly back to Singapore...See you in Jan'09. Till then.

Happy Birthday, Malaysia

Let's work for Malaysian Unity!

Let's forgo racial politics!

Let's curb corruption!

Let's improve public transport system!

Let's listen to the rakyat!

Let's be open to criticism!

Let there be equality to all!

Let's be fair!

Let's be clean!

Let's be transparent!

Let's be efficient!

Let's be responsible!

Let's...change!

So that we can celebrate the rebirth of our beloved country...

Happy 51st Brithday, Malaysia.

ps: My wish for this independance day, ban public smoking!

The Last Lecture

If you knew that you will be gone for good within months, what would you be doing today? This professor from CMU truly inspires me...

Read more:
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

August Snippets

It's a hectic month.

080803: Got a call from Seattle while having breakfast on a Sunday morning. Zhao Shao needs a little favor from me which eventually turned out to be a big thing...too big for me to stomach...Still, I tried my best to help and I believe I did good.

080807: Tom took off today. He treated us cakes, so sweet. Gonna miss my buddy...

080808: This is an eventful day. Friends got married on this auspiscious day, congrats to all:) And watched the Beijing Olympic 2008 at home. How can I watch without TV at home? Dread not, just go to TvAnts, download the application and tune to CCTV5 and you get a live-cast of the majestic event:) Too bad I didn't get to see Li Ning hovering around the Bird Nest and light up the Olympic torch as need to accompany CM out to buy some sun-block for her Tioman Island trip. Thanks Yan Han for passing me the HD DVD on the event:p

080809: Woke up at 5.30am and walked CM down to take a cab to Jurong East, where she will meet up with her colleagues to Tioman. Returned to my cosy bed till 8am and it's my turn to take off to the Woodlands custom to go home for Siew Teng's commencement at Cyberjaya. Though I reach the Larkin bus terminal at the usual 10am, the usual 11am bus ticket to Kluang was sold out. It's Singapore's National Day, hence a long weekend. No wonder. Had to take the 12.30pm bus lor. Met Yan Ling at the waiting area. Reached home, took a quick bath, some food and off we went to KL with mom and dad at 2pm.

Reached KL roughly at 5pm, met up with Siew Teng and went to my aunt's place where we will put up for the night. Jing Wen, now a young teenage girl, is preparing for her PMR in Oct. Li Xian has grown into a young man, a little rebellious according to my aunt and I assured her it's normal. He is now a little like me when I was his age, I was much worst:p I was surprised when dad told me Jing Wen is reading my blog. Okay, so from now on, I will try to spur more sensible write ups and hopefully she will not become anti-government like me..haha.

080810: Siew Teng's big day! Woke up at 6am. Deprived of sleep now:p As usual, only parents can enter the grand hall for the conferring ceremony. I had to wait outside for more than 4 hours. The Chancellor of MMU, apparently a very old man, had to give out more than 3000 of certificates at one go. In the midst he actually dozed off and when this young Bachelor walked with pride to the centre of the podium and reached out for his cert, the Chancellor head was dropped dead. For 5 seconds, he didn't moved and the time freezed. The poor Bachelor was stunned and didn't know what to do. He must be thinking what I thought at the same time, "This old fart must have got a stroke." Dramatically, the douche bag dozed off 4 times throughout the ceremony, wtf.

After the ceremony, situation got worse as thousands of ecstatically charged graduates plus thousands more family members flooded the square outside the hall. Followed my sister everywhere, squeezing through the traffic, preying on targets and stopping occasionally to snap. By the time we were done, it's already 3pm. All 88 shots from me were as sharp as Hattori Hanzo's samurai blade, my personal best record:) We headed back home right after dinner as I need to be back in school the following day.

The photographer and the proud graduate, who is immediately RM54,000 richer than others.

080811 - 080815: Intensive training and reading on the prospectus. Need to understand the company fully before I can present. This week, I was living an amphibious life, both as a student and as an IR. Strangely, I was not feeling a tinge of fear to face those fund managers and investors in the coming week. I was just thinking of how to help out, and hoped to present and translate the best I can. Wrangled with research, studies, part time GA, trainings and this...phew...

080815: Had to manned the booth for OutReach in Marina Square from 9am to 3pm. Thanks Han Yang for accompanying me. The Education Minister of Singapore will be at the Science Fair as well and the professors were quite tensed. During our demo, the bloody reporters kept snapping pictures of the minister and the camera of our setup had a hard time to detect the laser disc. Fortunately it worked after all those flashes ceased and the minister's ,"Oh, this is fun!" saved my ass.

First time having Japanese cuisine in Singapore. CM was thrilled and contented at Sakuraya, haha:)

080816: Went on a shopping spree for shirts and ties and shoes. Had to get the attires for my big day as well as for the meetings with all the honchos. Bought a pair of Pedro at AnchorPoint, only to find out there are much cheaper leather shoes at Queensway shopping centre 100m away.

080817: Last minutes preparation for the next day.

080818 - 080820: Five to six meetings per day back-to-back, each lasting for an hour or more. Adrenaline level rose to a record high! A bit staggered at the beginning but eventually got better and better. In HK, it's all by myself.

080821: One day trip to Repulse Bay, Madam Tussaud's wax museum, Wan Chai...

080822: Back in school and a whole loads of stuff to iron out. Need to make a decision by next week.

COol, HaVe YoU TriEd cuil??

When we thought the google couldn't get any bigger, here we have a winner! Cuil claims to search more pages than anyone else on the web - three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. The brains behind this were once the architects behind Google's search engine.

Well, i've tried it out and though i think it will not pose any threats to the search giant just yet, it will still be my search engine for the time being:) Check it out!

Snippets

Finally, i am able to rummage through a great deal of complex maths equations and come up with something for my next experiment. i thought i had lost it all, the derivation, integration, Diophantine identity, Taylor's expansion...etcetera.

Glad that i still have it due to my strong foundation back in my pre-uni days. This, i have to thank my dad. My dad instilled the importance of maths to my siblings and i since young. But back in those days when i was in primary, all that i thought of was to have fun in school (and after school) and i sucked in maths terribly. Since he was a maths teacher in secondary school, Dad would be furious if we did bad in the tests. I remembered that once i got 38 marks for my maths in Primary 4 and was so worried that my dad would freak out when he reviewed the paper. So, i only showed him the paper early in the morning when he wasn't fully awake,

"Dad, this is my maths paper. Erm, can you sign here...fast? I have to hurry, the bus is here." i used my left thumb to conceal part of the number "3" so that it looked like i scored "88" instead of "38" and pointed to the space for signature with my right index finger.

"What's your score?"

"Erm...88%" I lied.

"Good, here you go."

Sorry Dad, that I lied. Probably you knew that I was lying then, but you just let me off. I am grateful that you rescued me from the abyss with the intensive yet fun maths tuition classes from Sec 1 to Sec 3.

~*~

This new girl from China in my lab told me the other day that my spoken english is quite good. That very same day, my Singaporean friend from another lab told me that my "England is very powderful*." Thanks to my mum, for forcing me and my siblings to converse in English since young. And yes, my mum was a English teacher in secondary school. I remembered the entire Ladybird's Peter & Jane series my mum bought for us, the Enid Blyton's, Delight Magazines, The Star and New Straits Times, Reader's Digest...etcetera. Vividly, I could still recall the times when my mum made me sit on the kitchen floor and read the novel aloud, passage by passage while she cooked, stopping occasionally only to correct my pronunciation.

Now I understand how well you have prepared me for this world. Although i may not be the best, but I am far better off than most. Thanks for the head start, mum.

~*~

When you start to develop man-breast, it's either you are filthy rich and old, or you are not working out hard enough... I am not rich, so now, instead of playing badminton on Thursday and squash on Friday, i think i am going to start jogging in the morning before i go to school. But first thing first, need to buy a pair of sneakers.

~*~