o...kay?

For some reason, the counter for this blog has leaped again. In a mere few hours.

coolSTYLE has a point there. Indeed, the Gemini in me just makes me get bored of many things really quickly. Whoever you are...

I'm guessing that coolSTYLE:
1) likes cynicism?
2) has a dark sense of humour, somewhere, somehow.
3) is someone I've talked to before in real life.
4) is a guy.

Welcome to my blog, and tell me if my conjectures are right! :D (and also who you are. hehe.)

ok, wild guesses aside, I really like what 巫启贤 (Wu Qi Xian) said about the lyrics to one of his songs. I forgot which. But he said,
先要有勇气，才能够许下承诺。
(you gotta have courage before you can make a promise. Something like that.)
That's how he remembers the lyrics to that song. Very meaningful, huh.

I guess I'm leaving Abraham alone.

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
Abraham Lincoln

Here's another one.

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.
Sidney Sheldon

multitasking

I wish that I had two brains, or was born a savant.

Just so that I can watch my detective-themed dramas while reading a story book, or read two pages of 2 different books at the same time.

It's going to be double the fun.

Even if my brain were a computer processor, Moore's Law can't possibly be applicable to it. Or could it?

Nevermind. Let's just hope that reality is just a really persistent illusion.

something's holding me back.

it's definitely not the contract.

With my parents nagging at me to leave this company (almost) every day, plus the crazy workload these days, it's quite tempting to.

I really want to try becoming a photographer. Even if I'll have to start with free projects.

I'll feel terrible for leaving so much work behind, though.

Maybe responsibility is keeping me from leaving. Hmmm.

I guess I'll stick to this job until it gets horribly unbearable. :)




Digressing... My blog's hit counter jumped by 46 hits in 3 days. I wonder who's reading this?

Impulse and Fun

There are alot of things which I do on impulse. For fun. For the heck of it.

Why take life so seriously? Switch on the lights and brighten up!

Talking about lights, my eco-friendly colleague Annie just reminded us that it's Earth hour from 8-9pm tomorrow! :D Get in touch with your dark side during that hour.

Was watching Little Britain after I was done with the scholarship applications. Emily Howard the transvestite stole a dress and got interrogated in the police station by a really stern police officer...

Policeman: Name?
Emily Howard: (smiling flirtatiously, talking in a girly voice) Emily Howard.
Policeman: (skeptical look)
Emily Howard: (deep manly voice) oh all right. It's Eddie Howard.
Policeman: (writes down details in the form) Sex?
Emily Howard: (blushing) oh no, we've just met! (giggles like a girl) [LOL isn't Emily Howard super qian bian?]
Policeman: -_-..... Marital status?
Emily Howard: (girly voice) oh I've got plenty of suitors but...
Policeman: (skeptical look again)
Emily Howard: (manly voice) all right all right. I've got a wife and three kids.

LOL!

one good deed a day

makes the world around you a much, much happier place. :D


Remember those anti-piracy videos you're *always* forced to watch before a movie?
Here's a parody of it! Super funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82Lq2rVB_4

Are we really that dumb?

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

- Bill Watterson

Nice one!!

the drawback of efficiency in the workplace

If you work swiftly, your superior is gonna be a real happy person.

Your superior would (naturally) delegate more work to you.

But that's likely to make you one severely overworked person.

So, how efficient should you be to avoid burning out?


A big chunk of a pay increment would be nice, though. :D

the unspoken words

how someone says goodbye to you seems to say a lot about how they really think of you.

as a friend or an acquaintance.

maybe I read too much into these stuff. :b

the joy of sharing!

Understanding introverts: (we are not aloof! :D )

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/


How Six Songs Collide - by Norwegian Recycling



One of the best mash-ups I've heard in my life. You can download the song (and many other great mash-ups!) at http://norwegianrecycling.multiply.com/music. Soul of Fireflies is pretty interesting too.

Thanks for all the nice stuff you've shared with me! :D

a tough choice

Is it better to love, or to be loved?

I think that love should be a two way street.

And I hope that none of my friends would ever have to make an important life decision while considering this question.

it all seems to even out.

With all the cash that I've uncontrollably spent on technology, it is a weird feeling indeed to realise that technology can save me loads of money too. hmm...

I laughed my diaphragm into oblivion a while ago while chatting to constructionworker and alternating current on msn. I have no idea why I am easily amused (and that's a good thing, it makes life much more fun-filled!), but moments like those really make me feel like a kid again.

Without a care in the world. Ahhh.

dilemmas.

imagine yourself as a shepherd, and you have a black sheep in your farm of white sheep.

the black sheep seems to be giving you many problems.

but you don't have any qualms about keeping the other white sheep.

you want to get rid of the black sheep.

do you:

1) tell all the other white sheep to stay away from the black sheep, or

2) tell the black sheep to go away?

recently, the shepherd chose the first option and stuck to it. And sometimes, we do pity the black sheep. Sigh.

Mummy bought a bottle of silver nail polish for me today. I intended to paint it over the damaged areas on the reflector panel of my crumpler bag. (I decided on this after a few failed attempts with a $4 silver fabric pen. #$%^$#%!!!)

But it turned out to be a translucent nail polish.

To save this new resource from wastage, the white sheep decided to paint her nails silver. Heh heh. The last time I coloured my nails was when I was five?? :D

Had a great start to my day in the office today. Constructionworker welcomed me back with a joke. (or rather, a re-enactment of an earlier conversation.)

alternating current: (looking at the policy template) Who's lily?

constructionworker : Oh, the trainer.

alternating current: What? The traitor?

:D HILARIOUS!!!

By the way, the IT fair is on right now in Suntec Convention Hall. I checked the Nikon booth out this afternoon, only to find out that they don't sell any lenses at the fair. The salesman told me to go to either lucky plaza or the Fuji Xerox Tower to purchase lenses directly from Nikon. Hmm. Isn't it weird that everyone is so concerned with camera bodies? I want to check out the price of a Nikkor 50mm f1.4D lens. So do give me an sms if you see this lens around. Thanks! :D

having fun with the kit lens.

Shijia Outing No.2: Aston's Express in Bedok.

Food for thought...

and for drooling.

They offer pretty good food for under $10 per person. Not bad at all. :D

Yep, it's the IR. (Streaks of light! Yay!)

Taken at an area outside the Singapore Flyer after my family's reunion dinner this year.

Light Painting: my first try at this! It's quite fun.

Just find a light source and a very dark room.

Increase your shutter speed... up to a couple of seconds.

Increase the f-number to deepen the depth of field. Set the camera to manual focus/disable auto-focus. (the camera has trouble focusing on stuff in the dark)

Then, press the shutter release button.

Swish your light source in front of your camera until you hear the mirror in the camera slap down. And ta dahh! You get something like this. For this picture, I used the iPhone menu as the light source... Which explains the presence of the numerous little colourful squares!

Unfortunately, (?) you can see the fan in my room on the left side of this picture. :P So remember to point your camera towards an empty wall if you don't want stuff other than the light to be in the picture!

ice lemon tea

happy days: hippo and the sesame street guy.

Precious Moments: Friends write from the start.

nikon? Hmmm.

macro: a little bee on my mum's sunflower.

You... are... The Only Exception.

(just heard that Paramore song on MTV. Pun intended.)

Clearly, this was not taken with the D90.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of Adrian's new workstation on Tuesday. :D

(taken with my iPhone. Why are there vertical streaks in the picture? It may be due to the flickering fluorescent lights in my office. )

Going for the National Infocomm Scholarship talk tomorrow. And I'm going to have lots of work to chiong in the office tomorrow, too. I'm kinda too lazy to write essays for scholarship applications after I come back from work. Sigh. Must press on.

NUS open house on Sunday.

Learning to bake a shepherd's pie at Nina's house on Sunday too. :D Thank you Nina!

And yup. I just uploaded new pictures on flickr.

ok this is very late but.....

Just posted our previous shijia outing pics on flickr.

In case you don't remember the URL... (which is most probably the case!)

It's
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkphoton/

Didn't manage to post all the pics we took, because I'm a lazy scrooge who won't pay US$20 for a pro account, and I haven't optimised the file sizes of the pics. Heh heh heh.

And I apologise for any weird yellowish/grayish colour casts in the pics. Haven't got the time to photoshop them all yet. :|

Looking foward to our gathering this Sunday? :D
and the NTU talk this Saturday! :D

thinking when you don't want to.

Paiseh ah. Haven't been updating due to my new job. :P

As the days go by, I've been getting weirder and more horrifying nightmares every night.

From dreaming of my parent's petrified faces when they see my A level results to dreams of random people.

Uncertainty is worrying. And driving me crazy.

Must remember dad's words. "Whatever it is, you must live with it... Aiya anyway A levels not very important one la. Just study what you like."

I'm hoping it's NUS for me, I have nothing against NTU except that it's a 2+++hour public transport journey from my home!



I thought that walking/jogging for 1 hour at the gym every day could make me sleep better, but nooooo... Physical exhaustion doesn't eliminate weird dreams.




CNY was generally boring, as usual. But I realised that I like to see kids playing happily. :D Or kids *beaming* at the mention of pizza for lunch. Super cute! I miss the innocence we all once had. Don't you? The times when we never understood or heard of politics.

Didn't take many pics during CNY. My pot of flowers got thrown away, though, because it was completely infested with aphids. Haiyar. 1 month of gardening effort!

For some reason, many things have fallen nicely into place so far. I can only hope that this sense of order (probably imposed upon my life by an extremely kind higher being, thank you! :D) will persist.

I mean, a national infocomm scholarship with 1 year at Carnegie Mellon doing game design (whoohooooo!!!) would be fantastic! Plus 3 years at NUS doing electrical and electronics engineering. Heh heh.

Talking about game design... I finally got to setting up my Xbox in my room yesterday, so Shijia can have loads of fun this Sunday.

We must enjoy our lives while we can! :D

Mum and Dad are right. The workplace IS full of idiots.

"All truth passes through three stages:
first, it is ridiculed;
next it is violently attacked;
finally, it is held to be self-evident."
- Schopenhauer

So I may have only spent two days in this company,

but there are, indeed, many inefficient operating procedures...

and dangerous ones, too.

I pointed them out to the inexperienced, unreceptive trainer. She didn't listen. She didn't care for the welfare of the company either. She simply puts on a fake front, pretending to be concerned for customers, and then grumbling about them afterwards.

Can we call that honesty? The world may be a stage, but feigning concern an assault to your integrity.

Can't stand being mentored by morons...

Anyway, I won't be seeing this moron ever again. You thought that all I did was irritate you with a cornucopia of questions. :) I'm 18, and I'm inexperienced at work. But I'm pretty good at surreptitiously manipulating and sabotaging my enemies without them even realising it. You had a low threshold, I saw through your vulnerabilities easily.

(but seriously, I broke down out of frustration with your nonsense. Worst person I've ever dealt with, man. Gotta learn to control my temper better.)

You've offended the wrong person. So watch out for your rice bowl. Moron!

I'm moving on to better things.

You, remember to stay single!

Vacation pics!

Love my camera... :)

Now for the less mushy stuff.

This pic above is of a very luxurious-looking golf course at Monterey Bay (for the rich!) which I visited during my trip to the US in December. Love the tree! And the lake in the background! :D Don't think I can afford a golf membership there, though. hehe.



This was taken when we were just about to leave the Grand Canyon. (Ironically, the nicer pics I took there weren't of the Grand Canyon itself...) The skies there were cloudless. And the sunset was so beautiful. Sniff...

Ok these pics I've uploaded here are really taking up loads of space, so I've uploaded the rest on Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkphoton/

Hope you enjoyed the photos! :D

These are the days...

When I wish that I was born a guy.

Sigh. I hate cramps.

Will be updating when my cramps are gone for good. :D

By Request!

First of all, sorry for not updating for nearly a month. Lazy, lah. :P


In case you're wondering how I'm spending most of my time... Well, I've rented the first season of The Mentalist ( :D yay!) and I've enjoyed almost every minute of it! Patrick Jane is the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, in my opinion. :P





Other than lazing around with my Patapon 2 PSP game and watching DVDs, my long period of mental shutdown also includes running on the treadmill once a week and following my mum out to do some shopping. And of course, cable TV! :D





Really, I'm just waiting for some job offers/interviews to roll in now.





By the way, here are some pics from our latest shijia dinner! There are 60 pics in total, and I think I sent about 5 pics to each of you. But the emails to Jael and Julia bounced back. :( I must have made your mailboxes explode. Sorry... :(





Like Jael said, we should set up a blog to post shijia pics only. Hehe :)