Rain In The Morning

Ahh~ The sound of rain. I find it really soothing and relaxing especially when it is in the morning. The sound of rain droplet hitting the ground, the sweet aroma of water in the air and the cooling temperature just makes you feel rejuvenated and refreshed! Its a great time to continue to snooze though...

No Photos

Its been long since I posted any photos in here and neither are there anything interesting enough to be blogged about or should I say, nothing interesting to be blogged without a photo so to say. Ever since I returned the D40 to my brother in law, I have not taken much photos except with my Samsung Omnia phone which is really not that impressive although I do agree that its the photographer's skills that matter to a certain degree.

I have been looking around for a budget dSLR ever since and have contemplated the D90. I have checked online and friends in Hong Kong on the price of a D90 complete with the 18-105mm lens and surprisingly they are much much cheaper compared to Singapore. To add salt to injury, one of my friend has a contact who have ventured into the digital camera business and has been making a bomb since, which also allows him to "retire" from doing anything constructive to the society (Sorry) so can you imagine the kind of filthy margin they made?

Anyway, I've read that Nikon is launching a new beginners dSLR D3100 complete with the stuffs that I wanted in a D90 with extra stuffs thrown in E.g. auto-focus video mode, now that is sweet! The price for online camera stores like Adorama and Amazon are around US$699 which works out to be approx S$945 (US$ is at a low of US$1 = S$1.34 now). For more info on the D3100, you may wanna check out Ken Rockwell's website for more info. Fingers crossed, hope I'll be able to get hold of it before new year.

Till then, I guess the posts will be pretty boring unless I squeeze some creative juice into my writings. God bless!

Various uses of household products

Its amazing what our everyday household products could do, which are not only cheap and efficient but also environmentally friendly but yet many of us may or may not know of. Recently while browsing on Yahoo!'s news homepage, I read about the many uses of salt and am very impressed by such a humble ingredient that I so often taken for granted. The blog disclaimed that the infos are sourced from the Salt Institute and some from his personal experience and I personally find it a good and beneficial read. A brief surprising use for salt are as follow and for a full range use, please refer to the SALT INSTITUTE:

Washing mouth - Mix equal parts of salt and baking soda as a mouth wash that sweetens the breath (I'm doing this now. Hopefully it helps with the breath)
Peeling eggs - Boiling eggs in salted water will make eggs peel easily. (As I made egg mayo sandwiches very often, I will be doing this in future)
Poaching eggs - Poaching eggs over salted water helps set the egg whites. (Has been doing it without realising so)

A case of mistaken identity or Sabotage?

Just to keep those of you who are reading this blog updated, I am selling my HDB housing at Serangoon North and will be moving to Potong Pasir comes November 2010 (Just in time for a pre-Christmas house warming). Truly excited about this new place as it is nearer to the MRT (800m), bigger and comes complete with full marble flooring. The best thing about this new unit however, is that I will be able to have a bigger master-bedroom with attached study room, a walk-in wardrobe and twin sharing basin.

Well, to stay relevant to the topic, my front gate was splashed with black paint on Sunday morning. Yes... paint splashed by Loan Sharks (LS) or what the locals here call Ah Long. Why am I questioning whether it being a case of mistaken identity or sabotage? The circumstantial evidence gave me the reason to be suspicious. To provide all of you some information that I have gathered via a CSI investigation, please see the info below:

Paris in 6 Days (Day 2)

Day 2
21^st Dec 2009

This is an exciting day! With so many interesting attraction lining up back-to-back, I can’t wait to get started. I have make and paid for a dinner reservation for two at the Paris Hard Rock Café via Viator so the evening is taken care of. For the day time, we headed to La Defense to have a look at one of the many places in France that was featured in the movie “Mr. Bean’s Holiday”. The location is easily accessible as it is the last stop of metro Line 1 (Yellow line). I have also purchased a Louvre Museum ticket via their official website here (http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=en) but the collection point is at any Auchan (Which is like the Sistic counter in Singapore but with exception that the Auchan is also a French MNC retailing giant) and so happens that there is one in La Defense.

Arc de Triomphe fade to gray

Hong Kong in 6 Days (Day 6)

Day 6

Cheung Chau! I know many of you have never thought of going to the remote island of Cheung Chau during your visit to　Hong Kong and let me tell you something... lean closer yet... You are missing out big time!

Hong Kong in 6 Days (Day 3)

Day 3

Today is the day whereby my wife and I will take a trip down to our childhood memories and where else would it be if its not Disneyland Hong Kong? During my childhood days, Mickey mouse and gang is the best thing that could happen on TV and my brother would record the cartoon down on our then sophisticated VCR to watch. Watch we did! In fact for so many times that we could memorize the dialogue/lines from the start through till the end and perhaps that was one of the ways that my siblings and I learnt our English.

Our morning breakfast spread consists of (Clock wise from 12 o'clock position)
Chicken porridge, stocking tea, hotdogs + toast + eggs, French toasts, Rice dumpling in soy sauce

Hong Kong in 6 Days (Day 1 - 2)

Day 1 and 2

Come the end of this year, both my wife and I have planned for a vacation to Europe. Well, someone once asked where's the rest of my Hong Kong honeymoon posting which happens like one year ago, so before I go for my Europe trip, here's something that happened last December.

Room view of our Executive room in
JW Marriot Hong Kong
(Great location! The Admiralty MTR is just opposite the road)

National Day Dinner Performance

Well, once in a while, the town council here in Serangoon would invite me to perform for some of their event and this time round, it is for the Singapore National Day!!! This event is truly huuuuuge as it is going to be attended by 2,000+ people from the Serangoon community and the ministers! Ms Lim Hwee Hwa was recently promoted to be a minister in the Prime Minister office so this event has grow from a medium size event to a huge event and yours truly would have to sing to all these people. It was truly scary and I was stressed throughout the week prior to this event. The organiser has requested for some tough songs and I am not so confident that I can make it but nevertheless, I told her that I will try and see what I can do.

The two songs she has requested are "朋友" (Friends) by 谭咏麟 (Alan Tham) and "祝福" (Blessings) by 张学友 (Jacky Cheung). Anyway, in the end, the songs grow to include additional two free choice english songs. I choose Boyzone's "No Matter What" and was thinking of taking the challenge of "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. To cut the story short, I only did two songs i.e. "No Matter What" and "朋友" (Friends) by 谭咏麟 (Alan Tham). Supposed to also sing "祝福" (Blessings) by 张学友 (Jacky Cheung) but due to time constraint, was cut short.

Included in this posting is a few video of my singing. Hope you .. err...enjoy.

**Note: All rights reserved. If you like any photos found in this blog or would like to engage me in any assignment, please e-mail me for more details at seage79@gmail.com.

Business Continuity Management (BCM)

One of my colleague Mr. B will be ending his employment with the company that I am working in tomorrow and thus, one of his portfolio i.e. the BCM was being passed on to me. After passing all the documents both softcopy and hardcopy + briefing, he pass the "equipment" required to carry out the BCM task to me. The items are surgery masks, gloves and a termometer. This termometer is pretty interesting as it does not requires any contact to determine your body temperature. All it needs is to point the laser on the forehead and "bam" you've got your temperature! Pretty neat huh? Anyway, to give you a better idea, I have uploaded the photo of the gadget as shown below.

Better than Nothing

Well, after the news that we (or "me") are not allowed to take leave during the CNY period, I voiced out to my superior's superior("SS", ironically it can also be read as asses since we have double "S"s, BUT my SS are not asses lar...) of my concern and distress. The reasons given to her for consideration are as follow:

1 - In Terengganu, transport are not abundant;
2 - I've already purchased my flight tickets;
3 - Its a once in a year thing; and more importantly
4 - If I couldn't get a ticket back to Singapore, there's really no point going back AT ALL!

Oh well, my voice and grievances were heard and my superior's superior call a meeting with the rest of the managers. After discussion and deliberation, they agreed to allow all of us to take a one day leave on the 28th. Good news but doesnt really help much... since it doesnt allow me to carry on my initial plan. Oh well, its still better than nothing. Managed to get a bus ticket back to Singapore on the 28th night itself from Kuantan, which is 65km approx from Kemaman.

Well, Kemaman, here I come!

Chinese New Year

How inconvenient

I've an old injury sometime ago on my right knee and it happened during a badminton game with my ex-colleague in United Fiber System Ltd. Being someone competitive, I always strive to give my best when it comes to competitive sports and ever since I hurt my right knee, I kinda exercise lesser as I could not participate in competitive sports any longer as most of them would require me to utilise my leg.

Of late, I have cycled to work on a daily basis and it was truly fun albeit not a competitive sports. However, it sorta gave me the impression that my knee is ready for other stuffs and boy am I wrong! I tried to pick up skate boarding again and you've guessed it, bad choice! I tried to do some stunts and there it goes... I sprained my right knee again >_<>

What are the little things in life?

To each his own. Different people has different definition of things be it big or small but I guess the more important matter is that one constantly stay conscious to their surroundings. I remember reading an e-mail forwarded by a friend long time ago on the importance of time to different groups of people. I managed to find the article on the web here. The e-mail I read somehow has a more extended info with the importance of a nano-second or something to a Formula 1 racer and on the list goes.

Personally there are many little things (LTs) that I enjoyed in life and I will list a few of those down in this posting and of course, these are what I termed as LTs. I enjoy walking in the local supermarket especially in the raw products section. I love to just have a stroll and watch all the beautiful array of vegetables, fruits, fish, meat and cheese. Its truly exciting to see something new as it will trigger my curiosity to search for it on the web. Of course, there are some items that I would not buy in the near future either being too expensive or I simply don't know how to go about preparing it. So to me, seeing these stuffs in the supermarket really makes me felt grateful and happy.

The other LTs that I love to do would be to spend time with my loved ones, especially my wife. I used to be a PC game junky and when I started playing games, my surrounding grew dim except for that 21" box. I will skip meals, calls, work, tv and everything in between until nature call or fatigue sets in. Ever since I met my wife, she restrict my gaming time to 3 hours per week. The reason she argued is so that we could spend more quality time together. I make the effort to resist playing games in totality as l knew that I would be so absorbed that hours after hours would passed by without me ever realising it. Thank God I survived and has little urge to play games nowadays. Having done that, I can spent more time with my wife and doing something else more beneficial like reading and bringing my pet dog, Bon Bon out for a walk in the park. I have friends labelling me as hen-pecked due to the PC gaming matter. Seriously, to me, I don't see the reason why must I stand up to my wife's restriction on PC gaming and get into arguments over such trivial stuffs. I would question myself whether it is worth the while to have an argument and hurting our oh-so-precious relationship JUST for PC gaming and academically speaking, anything at all in the world?

 

I also love to be able to cook whenever possible as it really helps me to destress (Yes... destress). My mum used to hum and whistle a tune or two whenever she cook and initially I thought that "Wow, mum is really enjoying cooking!". Probably that's why I have the mentality that cooking is enjoyable and destressing, thus my passion for cooking. Its only like a couple of years back that I realised why my mum hum and whistle when cooking.... she said that cooking to her is something stressful, that's why she hums and whistle to destress -_-". Anyway, I am still cooking today and loving it. I love to be able to enjoy (people like mum doesn't) cooking for people l both love or love lesser. My wife once tried to stop me from cooking because I never liked cleaning after cooking (I guess we all don't) and I got really depressed. Only after I made the effort to clean THEN she let me cook again but please don't get me wrong, I STILL despise the washing and cleaning.

I enjoy being able to sing and play music whenever possible. It used to be like a ritual to me everyday to play my guitar and sing a few dozen of songs but sadly nowadays, there are one thousand and one things (The so called big things!) bogging me down that I have missed the chance of doing this. In fact, My guitar string was so rusty that it will give me tetanus if I play it. Guess time to do some moderation and enjoy playing music again. Maybe I should just make a trip down the guitar shop and get a new set of strings and change it. I used to tell my guitar students that they MUST buy their own guitar and that I am NOT teaching anyone that doesn't have their own guitar. The reason is simply that "the heart is where the treasure is", meaning that if you have spent hundreds of dollars (The treasures) to buy that guitar, it will be a total waste if you don't practice hard enough to ensure that you make the fullest of the money you've spent. Thus, the students will all obediently practice their guitar skills.

So in this blog, there will be plenty of LTs in life that I will record down. God knows what benefit or revelation it will give to the reader. That's all for the time being.