the lastsplash

I just finished reading the book, "A Year In The Merde" by Stephen Clarke. For those who are unaware, "merde" means "poo poo" , "excrete" , or simply "shit" in French. I bought this book earlier this week, and couldn't put it down since I started reading it. And I began to think and speak in zee funeh french azzent. The book is about an Englishman who wenta Paris to set up "English" tea-rooms. Why would the land of cafes need tea-rooms? As the book critics put it, this is a "funny, mostly irrelevant, and politically incorrect" book. If the what described in the book were true, then this book had provided a great insight to life in Paris. And come to think of it, some aspects are quite similar to living in Singapore. To begin, Parisians say " Boujour! " when they see you, so do Singaporeans, eg. when they see you at the canteen enjoying your kopi break, they are likely to say " Bo Jio! Not ste

We all knew that this was coming. After the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, one by one, the classics will make it to the big screens again. And this came at the timing none better than the December holidays season! Yes, I watched it today - "The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". Thanks to my dear, we got the tickets from her company at $5 each, with free popcorns (only available in mix flavour, so we don't havta argue whether to get salty or sweet ones) and two free small coke. The only complain was that our seats were all the way in front at Row F, so I had to slouch really low, resulting in aching tailbone and butt. =P I'm sure most people have read the novel before, so I'm not elaborating on the story. But I wanna briefly mention that although the storyline was simple and the characters were typical, it drew parallelism with the real WWII. By walking into the world of Narnia, the children were escaping reality, and yet fighting another war

I slept for 90 minutes in the past forty hours. Yet today was one of the most productive day in the past few months. Can feel the heat rising, time to kit-kat and tango.

First it was the bus and train fares, now the hostel fee. Ain't you just sick and tired of hearing the argument, "Current rate is lower than the market rate" to justify for price hike? Why do transport companies and schools want to a substantial amount of profit from the masses? No matter what so call "financial assistance" they have, the burden is always added to the group of middle income people who are not eligible for the assistance and hardly make ends meet. Such cases are already happening for study awards. Moreover, I remember there was a increase in fee not long ago during my final year in hostel. It is no surprise that we need watchdogs for this and that , as we continue to wonder even if the watchdogs and measures are effective.

I remember not long ago, there was a debate about the Singapore transportation system in the media, highlighting the bus services (I was one of them * sheepish grin *). So it is not surprising that the spearhead (矛头) is now pointing at our dear cabbies. If you read the copy of Today on Monday, you would have read about the letters too. Before some of you go on to say Singaporeans are a bucha whinners who complain too much, maybe you'd wanna see this as yet another effort at continuous improvement, a process embarked by our nation since 40 years ago (in the form of lifelong education, increasing our competitiveness, and the recent re-training for the workforce), which has paid off quite well. A point worth reiterating. My experiences with taxi drivers so far had been generally good. In fact there were only a handful of times when I was unhappy with the driver. Mostly they were the times were drivers drive too fast and the taxis where vibrating really badly, or drivers don’t ask me f

I may not be good at videographing, but I know a lousy video when I see one. After watching these clips from my sister's friend, I was sure he/she must be first-timer in filming or never do video-editing before. I thought maybe I can point out five little tips based on those mistakes. It'll come in useful when you're doing some videographing for your company events, or even for your home videos! =) Tip #1 : Try not to pan too much: If you ain't clear with whats "panning", it means moving your camera left or right horizontally. I was watching about 1/2hr of clips and the videographer was perpetually doing fast panning. It may look ok in the small camera screen but when you view it on the big screen, its not. You can imagine how dizzy I got. And if you don't stop panning, the camera will not be able to focus, everything will be blur. heh heh. And when you pan, try to pan slowly. Combine it with zooming in or out. Tip #2 : Zoom smoothly: Practice the pushing

We made our way to Kukup, Johor, Malaysia. It was the 2nd consecutive Friday, our department had a welfare activity. The previous Friday we had our annual services-level family day, the Escapade, at East Coast Park. It started with a wet morning, followed by some wet beach games and lotsa mud. It was really more like a buncha engineers playing some uni orientation games. My team ended up last. But as a consolation, we won some GV movie passes thanks to the quick thinking of a teammate who managed to borrow a shoe from the director during the scavenger hunt. I think at the end of the day, it was having fun first, competition second, for us. It was great getting to know people from other divisions. Below is a picture of my team. Back to the Kukup trip, our first stop along the way was the Pineapple Museum at Pontian. Apparently, growing of pineapples aka Nanas, is a big business there. The government does lotsa research and there are many different species. I still remember there's

On 5th Dec issue of Today newspaper, a reader, Mr Lim Wui Boon, wrote in to express his views about the transport system in Singapore. He commented that Singapore has one of the world's best transportation infrastructure. He went on to describe his experiences in Adelaide and compared it with Singapore, which made him "appreciate Singapore's transport system more than ever". I must agree with him that Singapore has a top-notched transport system, safe, efficient and clean. Finally, on the topic of the bus service, which was much debated recently, these were his comments, "I'm overjoyed that I don't have to carry a bus timetable anymore. Waiting 10 minutes is perfectly fine with me: What is 10 minutes when I have waited for more than an hour for a bus?". I think he was comparing to his experiences in Adelaide when he made that comment. However I can't help to think that Mr Lim had missed a point here about the ongoing debate on the bus service. W