This is my first post since like... July I think or was it June.. just been busy and uninspired to write any blog posts though many things have happened since then, but anyways,

I just heard this song (The Show, by Lenka) on Radio Alice 97.3 and instantly fell in love with it. Such a cute song..It's one of those fun songs that makes you want to sing along and jump around.. good stress reliever. Check out the awesome music video (non-official) too! This is definitely one of the cutest music videos ever...





This one here is by Ingrid Michaelson, titled 'The Way I Am'. First time I heard this song I sent it to Vannessa just cause it's such a sweet song and I'm really grateful for her and her loving me the way I am just as much as I love her the way she is as well <3 <3 baby

And omg the 2 children doing the clapping are cute!





Sigh, why is it that no radio stations in Malaysia plays these kind of songs instead of just playing songs from popular artistes? Gah I want some Death Cab for Cutie songs as weeeellll!!

Labels: music

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ak2MYWhfudTI&refer=home

Labels: random

First of all, if you don't recognize where that phrase comes from, you need to go watch TDK (The Dark Knight). Even if you aren't a fan of Batman, go watch it and enjoy Heath Ledger's portrayal of the more sadistic, evil and psychopathic Joker. If he doesn't win an Oscar for his brilliant and genius performance, I'll /slit.

Anyway, I want to thank Suanie of Suanie.net for providing me with the means to obtain a ticket to watch TDK last Tuesday at the Signature GSC in MidValley, 2 days before the movie hit the big screen. Big thanks to Nokia too =D. Damn, wish I was popular enough to have people give me free movie preview passes haha.. Oh, and they had a contest too where anyone who dresses up in a character from the Batman comicverse has a chance to win an 8GB Nokia N95. Well, needless to say I didn't win the phone, but still had a blast dressing up as The Joker (which is the easiest character to dress up as, and considering I only knew I was going 24 hours in advance, didn't have that much time to go costume hunting, so hence Mr Joker).

Well, I didn't put on all that makeup by myself.. have to thank to my darling Vannessa for getting off work early just to help me put on that face makeup and assuring me that the Mid Valley security guards won't harrass me =P Sigh, I love her so much... Sorry baby I couldn't win the phone for you, there was just someone else dressed as a damn badass Joker... beat everyone else hands down. Don't have a photo of me dressed up as Joker, but if you look around you'll find some...

Rest in peace Heath Ledger, it's a shame you're not around anymore to provide us with more awesome screen performances. /signs petition to give Heath his Oscar .

Oh, and TDK just beat Spiderman 3 for the biggest weekend gross ever..

Labels: thoughts

I was watching CSI last night, and the episode was about a case where there was a police officer pulling over women, often offering them a ride home because they're drunk or their car ran out of gas etc, then offering them a bottle of water laced with rape drugs and eventually raping them. Abuse of trust, power, and this sort of betrayal is something I hope will not happen outside television, though it might seem we're sorta heading in that direction with the way the law enforcement is in this country right now, albeit at a smaller, different scale.

The police are supposed to be the guardians of the people, the enforcers of law. Something is obviously wrong if the thought of police or the sight of a patrol vehicle in the rear view mirror strikes a certain fear inside. If they can go ahead and pre-emptively arrest a politician who has agreed to surrender himself at a certain time for questioning, one can only feel a sense of betrayal of trust. They mentioned they will not go ahead and make an arrest until 2pm, but they did so anyway (with special ops personnel, a huge escort convoy) .... say one thing, do another. And why is it when there are allegations against two different people, swift action is taken against one of them while the other just fades away under the radar?

I certainly hope the law enforcement does its job well this time and not recreate the 1998 incident. With trust in the police already running at an all time low, another wrong move will shatter the already cracked sheet of ice.

Promises on abolishing corruption. Probably empty ones, much like the same promises we all heard a few years ago. Deja vu?

It's been a year since we've been together. Well, technically more than a year just that 6/26 is what we chose as the so called 'official' date.

It's been a year though it feels like only a mere couple of months. After all a year is relatively a short amount of time compared with the many more years that await us. I just can't describe how happy this past year has been for me, and those close to me will testify to that. Your love to me has brought a whole new meaning to love just when I was about to give up on it. You rebuilt the castle in me that was washed away by the storms of yesteryear, just when I was this close to drowning myself.

If I were to summarize the year in just a few words, I'd say it has been one helluva ride. Funny as it may sound, but I'm glad we experienced the sudden drops and sharp turns in our relationship. The fact that we're still here holding hands and moving forward on our journey, together as one, is a testament to our strength and love for one another and the will to keep the fire burning bright. For every good in a relationship there's bound to be some bad times, and I don't believe in a relationship that's only filled with good times and none of the bad ones.. that in itself is a bad thing. All I know is that there's no one I'd rather want to walk with and explore the paths of life than you.

I certainly could not have wished for a better year. Thank you for the wonderful surprise and well thought out plan for my birthday present/dinner/cake. I expected something but I didn't expect THAT much from you or even anyone else for that matter. Thank you for the i-love-yous every night. Thanks for the wonderful anniversary pressie which I will be looking through every single night before I go to bed =D Thanks for the kisses, the hugs, the caresses. Thank you for everything else that I'm just lazy to list (and also because I'll be called for a conference call anytime soon) but most importantly thank you for loving me and letting me love you.

Well, a year has gone by but there'll be many many more years ahead (I certainly am sure there will be =D, for I can't imagine the alternative). I don't know about you, but I'm excited for what the future holds for us. Be it dancing on a balcony under a moonlit, star filled sky or just making out on an empty sandy beach with the sun just setting on us and waves inching onto our bodies, I'm sure it'll be blisssss.

Happy anniversary baby, I love you so so so much.

T-2 hours before the launch of Firefox 3, the latest major update to the best free browser out there (yes, IE sucks, so if you use IE, you suck too).

What's new in Firefox 3.0? The most important ones I'm really looking forward to is much much improved memory management compared to Firefox 2.0 . Usually after long periods of browser use, the memory consumption of FF2.0 goes up to about 400 mb.

So for all you people still using Internet Expl.. I mean Internet Junk 7.0 out there, stuff it... seriously... and give Firefox 3.0 a try by clicking on the following link





update: So far the speed improvements are pretty damn impressive. Shifting from tab to tab and browsing in general has much quicker response times compared to FF2. Unfortunately the new FF3 has also broken some parts of our site (http://www.grouply.com), most notably some of the ExtJs framework javascript features ie dropdown boxes and calendar that we use doesn't work too well.

Damn, looks like it will be another web development nightmare, especially with the javascript incompatibilities seen so far, albeit not really serious issues but issues nonetheless.

As for memory management, it's better though not really to my expectations. I had about 2 FF windows open with 10 tabs each prior to installing FF3, and it took up ~200mb of memory. After installing FF3, memory footprint still remains at ~200mb. However when I close tabs, the new FF3 memory garbage collection works much better, reducing the memory used to about 170mb after closing 2 tabs, unlike in FF2 where it doesn't clean up memory that was previously used by tabs that you closed, resulting in memory leaks all over.

Another great feature is the new 'awesome bar'. By typing in a keyword, say 'stocks' in the URL address bar, it brings up in realtime a list of websites that I visited previously that had the 'stock' keyword either in its URL or web page title, and the order in which the results appear depends on my browsing habits (ie if I visit www.bloomberg.com often it will appear at the top of the list compared to say www.businessweek.com which I visit less often)

All in all this is still the BEST browser available despite it breaking a couple features on my work site, but it's a huge improvement in terms of performance. The new 'Awesome bar' is great, but can be a bit annoying at times, especially when it brings up results you don't really want, and it takes a bit of playing around to get used to it.

Labels: web development

... is something I no longer have when it comes to writing anything (that isn't code) anymore. Today's not the first time I've visited the 'Create Post' page on Blogger in the past 2 months or so but today's the first time I've actually stayed on the page and enter more than just a mouthful of words.

Bah, well anyway, it has been a blissful past 2 weeks or so. Had the much needed 5d/4n holiday in Bangkok / Phuket with my darling. I must say Bangkok isn't exactly my kind of a city and I'd hate to live there >< Those that know me well will know how much I dread traffic in KL during rush hour. Well if you think KL traffic is worse, then you haven't been to Bangkok. Like zomg the main streets are jam packed with cars and the slowdown exists the entire day. As in, morning till evening. like wtf.... Just to give an idea of how bad it is, the trip from the airport to our hotel which was supposed to take 30-45 minutes ended up taking a little over 2 hours. Hell that's longer than the flight from KL to Bangkok.... zzZzzZZzz



Our place of stay was the First Hotel Bangkok. Situated on the Pratunam district, the hotel isn't exactly the best of hotels there is and is rated 3 stars. From the outside it looks like one of those cheap ass old hotels you find in downtown KL/chowkit, but the rooms are decent lar much like those in First World Hotel in Genting, but slightly better. The hotel is also located pretty close to the Pratunam Market and the Skytrain hence why we chose that hotel, as we wouldn't otherwise. So having arrived at the hotel at like 4pm, we were daaaaamnn hungry....

Our initial plan was to go grab some lunch somewhere near the hotel but because the damn trip from the airport to the hotel took so long, we decided to just go to the Pratunam Market and eat whatever food we can find while on our way there. The first couple of stalls we encountered were.... well.... a little unappetizing. Most stalls sold some sort of BBQ kebab sticks with pork/chicken/vege/squid on it and just the sight of flies hovering around the stall and even allowed to land on some of the food just made Vannessa and I cringe. There was this stall that sold BBQ whole squids, and the stench from the squid was just awful and we could still smell it after walking quite a distance away. Let's just say if you aren't the kind that would go for Jalan Alor food, then forget about the street stalls in Thailand. After a while we came across this seemingly better stall in terms of hygiene and type of food served.... The stall was selling deep fried pork strips for about 25 baht a packet. And well despite my reservations on eating anymore after passing by earlier stalls, we were damnnn hungry so we bought a pack and ate as we went along...



And omg the pork strips were crunchyummylicious. I mean seriously, they were damn nice and cheap. I would've went back for another 2 packs if we weren't rushing for time... argh damn traffic again. By the way, notice the two black and white pigs at the top right corner of the stall? It's their way of telling people (like us) that they sell pork. Cute. For some reason Thailand has lots and lots of these cute things everywhere. Seems to be part of their culture.



This bear was like 500 baht (unbargained price ofcoz) ....



Super-sized dog was slightly more expensive, cant remember the price though. But still half the price of what you'll get in KL at least...



More fishieessss.....



.. and funny looking minipillows, all for 100 baht each.


Anyway, we didn't buy much lar. Not enough time to go through all the shops at the Pratunam Market. Neverminddd..... next day = Chatuchak :D

On our way back from the Market, I remembered I had to go look for cheap Jim Thompson clothes for my mom cause apparently a friend of hers mentioned that Jim Thompson clothes are cheap over in Thailand. We hopped on a tuk-tuk (after frustratingly telling the driver to send us straight there and not to some other shop he wanted to take us...) to the Jim Thompson house, which according to the tuk tuk driver, is the place we can get Jim Thompson clothes. Well, he didn't understand the 'cheap' part, so yeah when we got there I took a look at the price of the clothes and they were like 500RM and above.. WTF....... Wasted money and risked our lives taking the tuk tuk... FYI the tuk tuk was going at about 80 kmh... bloody fast and sum more it was threading through traffic like nobody's business... damn pro I tell you .




Oh and speaking of transportation in Bangkok, the cabs in Bangkok, unlike those in Malaysia/KL, comes in all sorts of colors! Omg we spotted pink, blue, red, orange, yellow and purple cabs. Apparently the color is used to distinguish between the different cab companies, so each cab company uses a different color. Most of the cabs are Toyotas with a few Hondas.. certainly beats a cheap-ass Proton. And the colorful cabs look way better than the typical cabs in KL that are covered in advertisements for 100001 jobsites. Some of the cabs in Bangkok also had spoilers and are modded cars. Pretty cool.




On our second day, we took a half day tour around Bangkok seeing as it was our first time there so it would be good to go around to interesting places in Bangkok. Much to my disappointment, a huge part of the trip was just going around looking at temples, not something I really enjoy doing but still interesting nonetheless.

Labels: bangkok, holiday, photography