the lastsplash

What do you first look for in a fantastic bowl of ramen? I think it has to be the soup. *slurps and then my eyes wide open* hmmmmm... Next its the noodles. *slurps munch munch munch* What's that unqiue taste? Its the noodles mixed with melting cheese! Oyishii! Sorry no photographs, cuz we are not allowed to carry camera handphones during at work. =p I had saw them featured on TV a few years ago, and Thurday I finally tasted it. I think Naruto will probably recommend it too. heh heh. It was one of the best ramen I have tasted so far (maybe I have not tried enough?). But I'll definitely recommend you try the Ramen Ramen Singapore, at Upper Bukit Timah Road's Rail Mall, if you happen to be around that area. It is kinda outta the way lah , especially if you don't drive. A bowl of ramen is around 8 bucks, and 1 dollar for each additional topping. I think that is abit steep, but my colleague said thats the normal price of ramen. I tried the Chizu Ramen, ie. ramen with chees...

If it wasn't for the GSS, I wouldn't have known this... The male fitting rooms at the Robinson are so spacious. And I think I know the good reason for them being so. Heh. Its fabulous for those family outing! I saw men with their wives, kids, babies, and strollers. Everyone, everything, into the fitting room together! I wondered if they were having picnics inside. Some wives were so nice, they just went back and forth, in and out, with more slacks, more shirts, for their husbands to try. I bet these guys were sitting comfortably on the chair inside, waiting. Yes there's a chair, perfect for checking whether there's too much cloth at the erm... crotch area when you sit. Their wives out there ploughing through the clothes were probably thinking, "Last day, members additional 20% off mah , die die also must buy one loh-ly of cheap clothes home lah , no wear nevermind, cannot miss out on the great offer leh , very lugi one you know?" However, poor guys outside ...

Imagine having aweb browser with the features of Firefox and some of its best extensions, without the need to install the extensions manually? There you have it, Opera 9. If you are still using IE, here is another great alternative you have to try. In fact, Opera 9 is so smart that it actually imports bookmarks from Firefox automatically. And there's no need for a session manager which may not be able to recover from a crashed session, as Opera 9 opens up the same tabs from the window which you have closed previously. The "Home" and the "Top Ten Visited Sites" buttons are cleverly hidden within the address bar (they appear only when you click on the address). So the menu and toolbars are less cluttered and you can have a larger area for surfing. When I first started loading a folder of sites simultaneously, it took quite a while. After that, things went smooth and I started to discover the cool features which came out of the box. Unfortunately, things turned sou...

They were performing at Orchard Road, Singapore. But, there was no Krist Novo or Dave Grohl, and certainly no Kurt Cobain! I could not believe what I was hearing. Nirvana, live in Singapore. It was a local band busking for the Singapore Children Cancer Foundation. They were very good. Their repertoire consisted of their original compositions and songs by Nirvana. The lead vocalist and gutarist sounded alot like Cobain, with his strong husky voice. From far, you would probably had thought that someone was playing Nirvana cd really loud. They played songs from Bleach, In Utero and Nevermind. A free Nirvana gig, on the streets of Singapore. How cool is that? Unfortunately, I think the Nirvana is lost in the current generation, as few stopped by to listen and the audience were mostly subdued. Balik kampong lah Superband, Singapore's true super bands are out there on the streets, and for a good cause. =p

I account my lack of activity here in the previous weeks to the World Cup... But I just had to pen down this entry, perhaps to make myself feel better? Yes, you must have guessed it - to complain. *lol* I just fend myself from a woman "dying" to get off the bus. She repeatedly said "Excuse me, excuse me", although there was no where I could have moved to "excuse her"... It was a crowded bus. We were one traffic light away from the bus-stop she was going to alight. I had the feeling she was thinking, "I said the magic word, you are supposed to disappear, why are you still here?". The fact that three gentlemen who took three separate outer seats (one of them taking two seats for himself while he comfortably enjoy his morning papers) did not help much in managing the crowded situation. Especially when a woman was "guarding" the way to those seats. I think she can interview for the post of Guard-of-Honour at Istana or even at the Buckingh...

Now we all know why they wanted us all to plug into cable and do away with the traditional antenna... Why do we have to pay for something which is "Free-to-air"? Thank goodness I stay near our boleh -neighbours. =p

Not so long ago, we were doing camp productions, welcome-tea vidz, and some event vidz. At the end of the video editing phase, there was always the long wait for the video to be rendered. A 5-7min video took about 1hr to render. Assuming we used 25 frames per sec, thats about 2.9 frames per min. I thought that was real damm long, till I read this article . 10 hours/frame! Pixar's new animation, "Cars" used 300 times more computing power than "Toy Story". We were always wondering where was the bottleneck for the video rendering, was it the CPU too slow, or not 'nuff RAM? Now the mystery is revealed. The NFS file systems which Pixar used to feed data to the rendering system was hampering the process. And guess what, each of the file server head already had a GB of cache (not 'nuff?). They needed around 32GB! The solution, 8 Linux SAN based boxes to feed the data. That, cut the rendering to 1 hour/frame. A few rounds of tea break, go home to bathe, catch so...

That's me, in the field! I think I should be worthed more than just $500 bah... This week, I have been inserted into the site at dusk and extracted out after dawn everyday. For those who are abit stumbled by the terms "inserted" and "extracted" (no no, its nothing to do with pulling out my teeth or whatever kinky things you are thinking =p ), these are fancy military terms for being transported to and out of a place. Last week was "deployment-preparation-hell-week", and this week, the "actual-deployment-hell-week" continues. My job requires us to give 24-hr on-site support for this period. I am on the 12-hr night shift this time round. This is my first out-field deployment as an engineer. No fancy heli-insertion lah , just normal dull rover ride into the forest area. As I told my mum, what I do there is mainly catching spiders, collecting some leaves specimens, and observing some red and black ants fighting it out. I must admit, in contrast t...

It felt alot like those times during camp productions, just that this time round, we are ain't doing video editing or filming, but programming and debugging. After working for 20 straight hours, we finally went back home at 6am and it was back at site again after 2 hours of sleep. More to come next week, still not much time to take stock of things yet...