Thank You 2007

Before I frolick off to celebrate the New Year in style (somewhat), I thought I had better complete this post first, which has been sitting on my To Blog list for the past couple of weeks, as with approximately 8 other topics which I sincerely hope will be struck off soon.

2007 would be hard for me to describe as a good year. I laughed alot, but I also cried alot. Arguably I got my heart broken in a most unique situation. But 2007 was a very interesting year. Every bit of it. And here are my thanks to the people who made it interesting, laughed with me through interesting times, and sat by me while I cried through interesting times.

~~~~~

Jesus
Dear ol' Jesus. This year has been a heartbreaking year for our relationship. We started off well, and You were there to support me whenever I was down, from the tiniest misunderstanding between my parents and myself that made me moody, to the ultimate heartsmash (yes. Why can't there be heartsmash? And then there's heartcrack too, below heartbreak. Imagine, people.). But I? I broke Your heart so many times. Too many times. Only You, who died to set me free, could have the strength and crazy love, to follow behind me and run after me even when I turned from You, so that when I was hurt from the front, You would be ever ready to embrace me from behind. Jesus, help me know You more. Help me hear You more. Help me seek You more. Let your everlasting love, hope, and glory, shine through me, that the world may come to know You.

I love you Jesus. And I'm so, so, grateful that You love me, more than I can ever think of loving You.

Maria
Dearest sister, you are a God-send, you know that? You have always been there to support me and edify me, ready to reveal the word of God at the slightest expression of doubt or uncertainty from me. Like what I hope to be, you are a shining star my dear, a testament of Jesus' glory. And may He continue to shine brighter and brighter in your life. Thank you sis.

Eube~!
You, on the other hand, are a quiet testament to the Lord's glory. Quiet, but terrifyingly powerful. :) Your ever-present smile, and the joy that just radiates from your being, is more than enough to show the world what a great God we serve. May you experience more than ever before the double portion of serving, and get ever closer to Him. Thank you sis.

Cheillalala
You too! Just your saying 'hi' can brighten up a lesson (and the three of you usually say hi all in a row lor, can you imagine). I look forward to seeing you continue to grow in the Lord. Who knows you may spread the love in Batam? Thank you sis.

JJ
No not the singer. That one seems nice, but I never really could get over hating his face... Eube's bro! We hardly exchange more than a knuckle punch, or even raised eyebrows, but our conversations have had great impact on me. Brother the power of the Lord bursts through you and your words, and so be not afraid to speak forth through the promptings of the Spirit. It will bring you to great places. Thank you bro.

Justin
You mad boy you. :) Thank you for showing me the ropes in sound (or the notes, hur). But more importantly, thank you for sharing the Word of God. You know, sometimes I'm envious of your superglue relationship with the Lord, despite your failings that ou are not afraid to acknowledge. Ishio-ni gambatte ne! Thank you bro.

Jason
Quietly making every service an aural success. Thank you for teaching me how to operate the Mothership. I really hope to learn much more from you in the coming year. Thank you bro.

Clement
You are scary. HAHA to people who don't know you that is. You have taught me so much... about sound and about the philosophy of serving the Lord. I can't wait to meet you again. Thank you bro.

Esther
You know, just watching you serve by running the Arrow AV ministry teaches me alot. There are times when things seem to go wrong and we see you get terribly stressed out, but your faith shines through even then, and that's wonderful and edifying to see. Thank you sister.

Daniel
You hooked me into Tech65 (;P) and what has become of me now? I feel like someone with a purpose, rather than just float around watching anime. The visions you have shared with me for Tech65 - goals, hopes or even fantasies (maybe Revision3 will buy us) - are wonderful, and just thinking about it coming to pass is such a faith booster. Thank you bro.

Jerrick
It is actually quite hard to find someone of such similar, or at least complementing, interests as mine. Ever ready with an opinion, you make a fantastic philosophical buddy anytime. Not about to forget that time you were there and ready to quell my doubts about myself. I look forward to an even stronger friendship in the coming year. Cheers mate. And thank you, brother.

NTT
I KEEL YOU! Nawwww how could I? You who fed me loads of Chemical 9. And if you don't know what's Chemical 9, you are not deserving of xkcd. There that should be clue enough for you. Thank you. :)

Kai Yi
Man, your madness (and arguably twisted sense of humor sometimes) is welcome in my life anytime. Thank you.

Right, so much for procrastination... This is exhausting to do all in one shot...

Graham
You, my friend, have been there through everything, everyday. Through my good moods bad moods mad moods sad moods. And that's enough for me. Thank you.

Hans
You ah? Ahhh whatever la.

How could I right? Thanks for being there everyday too. For teaching me all about metal and music, (and for the music too...). I see you rising really rapidly, so don't you lose steam now! Become a great big star, so I can leech off you next time. :D Rock on Serberuz Hammerfrost. \m/ Thank you.

Samantha
Thank you for the endless car rides! Your smile and sense of humor is something to be wary of... They say too much endorphins early in the morning isn't good.

I lie. It is. Thank you.

Bao
We don't have time to talk much nowadays, but I'm really grateful that you are always ready to watch out for me, to warn me of trouble ahead. Thank you sis.

Leongky
Thank you for simply being there and being encouraging when I need it most. Thank you.

Ian
All those crazy outings, crazy movies (and not so crazy suckass shits...), crazy concerts, crazy pool, crazy time together. How to describe? I'll miss them when I move (not as soon as I expected though yay). For just being such a great friend, thank you my dear bro.

Chong Yi
After all these years, I'm glad we can still click so easily (somemore got girlfriend liao hor lol). Thank you for always being there.

The Ping.sg Community
Man, if I addressed each of you individually, I would never complete this by 0000 1st Jan 08 even if I locked myself in my room and applied an electric shock whenever I stop typing for more than 5 seconds. You guys make Ping such an addictive place to be, and you're all a right riot on the shoutbox, not to mention the crazy gatherings as well. For all your fantastic posts, and your "NSFW I Got Raped By My Cat" posts, thank you all so much.

You think I missed you out? Why would I? How could I? :) Save the best for last I say.

Ben
Interesting, isn't it, life? How it can bring you to the greatest heights, show you the world and beyond, only to wink at you and Piledrive your stupid naive head 3 feet into the concrete. Just like how you say I am to you, you are a very unique friend to me. Able to answer questions others would squirm at the mere thought of. Able to reason with emotion. Seen and done things people have only dreamed of doing. Everyone should have a friend like that, I always say, but then too bad I choped you already so no one else can benefit from your imbaness, hoho. It is my sincerest hope that whatever we will choose in life's fucked up game, we will always be available for each other.

Even with money and time-sucking biatches at our side and biatchspawn.

Thank you Ben. Thank you so much.

~~~~~

If you've read this far without CTRL-Fing your name (which you all did anyway, I know, don't even thinking about protesting in the comments), thank you all once again. Just so you know the people here are grouped by brethren, Tech65, SIM, contacts, dotcomrades. So please please don't take how far down you are as an indication of what you mean to me. Some of you may have jumped to mind before others, but you all made a difference one way or another, and are all equally meaningful to me.

Happy happy blessed New Year, all of you. :) The best is yet to come.

-Took 2 hours to complete this post. You all in this list owe me a drink. Ulterior motive revealed!-

Seiko Ignition SBHS001

SBHS001? Looks like this is an older model than I thought it would be.


For the past few days since I returned from Hokkaido, I've been making my mother's money worth (she bought this with a storm on her face) by showing it off to everyone I know. With cousins and friends we coo over its sleek elegance. With Pingsters and geeks we geek out on its relatively l33t features.


The Seiko Ignition Solar Radio Wave Control Watch. SBHS001.

Here are the features I pulled off an eBay page with its Engrish cleaned up.

• Seiko Ignition Solar Radio Wave Control Watch SBHS001 (Japan Domestic Market Version)
• Solar Power Movement Caliber : 7B22
• Pure Titanium Case
• Shockproof Structure
• Curved Sapphire-coated Scratchproof Glass
• 10 Bar Water Resistance
• Fully Automatic Calendar
• Radio Wave Correction Function
• 2 Wave Reception Modes (Auto/Manual)
• Wave Reception Display
• Time Difference Correction Function
• Power Save Function
• Screw-Lock Crown
• Noctilucence/Lumibright
• Solar Power Life : 6 months (Power Save Mode : 18 months)
• Case Diameter/total weight : 40mm/89g
• Case Thickness : 11.2mm
• Accuracy : ±15 seconds per year
• MSRP in Japan : 63,000 Yen (apprx. $ 555 USD)

63k Yen is worth about 850SGD. And I paid 30k Yen, or 400SGD for it. Very cheap. But still relatively expensive.

So yes, the fully solar-charged battery can dish out power for 6 months at full steam. This watch however, has unoptional power saving, so it'll last up to 18 months. But that's all theoretical. Even if WW3 comes and we all have to go underground, if you have enough light to read the time, you have enough light to charge the battery.

Now this Radio Wave Control. Something we aren't too familiar about here. Japan utilizes two time signal radio stations to broadcast the JJY signal. Radio Wave Control watches work like RSS feeds, where they receive information from the signal, and adjust themselves accordingly, automatically. For this watch, one can manually get the watch to check and set itself (good for initial use). If not, or after the initial setup, from 2am to 4am everyday, the watch will communicate with the radio wave signal and automatically adjust itself while we're drooling in the other room.

Not that new a technology, but to the suaku geeks here in Singapore, it's totally h4ck0rz.

Why did I buy this watch? I've wasted a good portion of money on a technology I'll not use for the next 10 years, if not for my entire life. But I've always liked gun/black metal strap watches, and this piece totally caught my eye. It's simple on the surface, but beneath the imperturbable ticking is a powerful cumulation of technologies brought together to uphold Seiko's brand image of producing hardy and long-lasting products. Certainly one of the material treasures in my life.

Strip Generator

Ah. The fun of life. The joy of living.



Was linked to this site from NTT's blog sometime back when he made a strip about a Tech65 joke.



I've always wanted to go into comics, especially after seeing and enjoying the success of the likes of 8bit Theatre and Ctrl-Alt-Del. I don't have the patience to piece stuff together without actually having to draw, like in 8bitT, much less draw like in CAD. Stripgenerator.com provides a simple solution for aspiring artists like me, with content but no skill. With simple solutions however, restriction is inevitable. I am often irritated by the lack of customizability. It's more like a humungous selection of images and templates to use, rather than how you can tweak these things. You can't even, for example, select what text to bold, italicize, or boldly italicize. Format one, format all. Still, I would say get your ball rolling and your practice going here. Once your engine's spinning smoothly, you can move away towards your own innovative solution.

Santa said to say hi, and Merry Christmas to you

'Tis the season to be jolly, and for me, 'tis also the season to catch up with my blogging backlog.

There are so many things I could tell you guys about, but lack of time and lack of motivation to induce muscular movement, as well as an apparent campaign by my body to aggressively earn back lost sleep, has set this site away as lower priority. Well now that I've nothing better to do, I guess I'll grudgingly grant you some content.

Actually no, I do have better things to do. More like, now that I've nothing better that I want to do. Like packing or tidying or housekeeping.

On this snowy Christmas (not here, elsewhere), I went to my cousin Celina's house for a fantabulistic Christmas lunch, consisting of Ikea's Swedish meatballs and salmon, turkey (+ stuffing), ham, pork knuckle, and KFC mashed potatoes. The last item was to make up for the lack of carb (or excess of meat, whichever you please), but received rather poor attention. Only three of the five tubs bought were opened. On the other hand, that brown, diarrhoea-istic meatball sauce from Ikea appears to be Mr I-can-complement-anything-you-lob-me-on. Turkey, meatball, salmon, pork knuckle, whatever meat we had on the table was elevated from excellent to zomg-heaven. The only reason I didn't splat it on the mash was 1) it already has everyone's favorite they-say-its-what's-left-of-the-chicken-frying-oil gravy, and 2) it was running out, and every Asian child has been smacked into being considerate to others.

My cousin had two medium sized dogs, a cutely overweight Corgi the length of a skateboard and the width of A4 paper, and another smaller, fitter... something else. They positively barrelled themselves into us when they were let out of their barriers, and only after they'd calmed down an hour later could we use them as wuffing, licking, furry bolsters.

The last attraction, which at the worst times the dogs would get in the way of, is everyone's favorite Nintendo Wii. My cousin had bought it as a Christmas present for her husband, my cousin-in-law, and we battled it out with tennis and boxing from Wii Sports, gymnastics, table tennis, swimming, shooting, fencing, and running from Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, racing in Donkey Kong Barrel Blast (ohhh my arm...), and retarded fun in Smooth Moves. I'm starting to think if I had a 20min session of each of the games in Wii Sports everyday, I just might slim down.

I accept belated Christmas presents. Belated any-occasion presents. Early any-occasion presents. And just as you're about to do your super duper hyper galactic final finisher move, one of the dogs will jump up and give you a humongrelous slurp on your hand, causing you to jump and smack the ball right out of court.

Ok la. The other subjects deserve a post of their own. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

A Music Generalist

I started musing about this courtesy of Jerrick, when he insisted that because I listen to opera and metal, sometimes concurrently, I am a music generalist.

I've always prided myself on not being like "the other shallower folks", whoever they may be, who make their musical choices based on what's in. As a result their library is a bloody mess of singles.

"Oh is this good? Do you like it? Well I'll buy it then. Is that good? Me? Why should I buy it when you don't like it? How silly my dear."

Despicable.

But after what Jerrick said I can't help but ponder if it was true. If you listen to more than one genre of music, you're a generalist? If so 95% of the world's population are music generalists. And 3.5 of the remaining 5% are tribal folks who've never heard any other notion of music than their own hooting and beating.

Going along with that then, let's make a distinction. Fine, we're mostly generalists. But there are two types - popularists and picturists.

Popularists, or what I'd like to more derogatorily call poppies, listen to music just to own an iPod. A pink one. And if they don't like the Shuffle, they will buy the model of their choice then varnish it pink.

Alright, no they don't do that, not all of them anyway. But poppies treat music like scented tissue paper. Because it's nice. Whatever their friends have, they also must have. Because otherwise they'd run out of topics to talk about. As mentioned earlier they hardly bother listening to the whole album, and only go for the songs that are MTV hits, that everyone is talking about. As a result they miss out on hidden gems in albums simply because it was never made into a soft porn music video.

Picturists, as you might have guessed by now (unless you're a poppy), also listen to music as entertainment, but they also treat music as a revered art. Picturists explore albums, discographies, other projects that members of their favourite bands engage in. In the music they listen to they look out for motifs or leitmotifs, and having identified them relish every single instant it is unleashed on their hungry appreciative ears. Their ears perk up at the sound of an unusual fill, or rhythm, or solo, either something simply unique or technical. Picturists live for the details. They live for the canvas painting. They live for the brilliant red tree amidst a lush emerald forest. Picturists listen to music because they love it, not because their friends do. And quite obviously, as author of this article and despiser of poppies, I count myself as a picturist.

What are you? Wait! Don't answer that. You'll probably disgust me. Pestilent poppies.

Moofee Review: Pirates of the Carribean 3 - At World's End

K this is abit late, but I just watched it. And now I wonder why I was in the least bit surprised at the graphics in Enchanted.

I see PotC as Disney's attempt to appeal to the older crowd, be it youths or young adults. Because I just can't see how falling off the edge of the world or having to look for a beating heart and stab it or battling while getting sucked into a huge-ass whirlpool or for that matter Davey Jones's face would capture a kid's imagination. As with Enchanted (multiplied by 20, actually), graphics were seamless and looked really......real.

It was 3 hours long though, goodness. And it got off to a very slow start. So slow that I watched it forever, then paused it to heat up my lunch, and oh my God only one hour passed??? And I wonder whether the changing allegiances were believable or not. Of course I understand that some of that were silent nods to bigger trickier plans, but scorning a woman and making her captain of the ship when you're dying a minute later? Weird.

Get the HD home theatre disc. But then make sure your home theatre is 7.1 Surround equipped, echo-padded and tube-amplified. And your HDTV should be, oh I dunno, 40inches across?

That's the only way to enjoy this movie.

Moofee Review: Death at a Funeral

I watched this film solely based on the fact that it was labelled comedy. Yes people do that.

I was presently surprised. Death at a Funeral started off abit slow, but as it picked up pace, I realised that it was just the type of comedy I liked. Eccentric British humor. It's the same reason why I loved Keeping Mum so much. Apart from the characteristic dry humor that tickles the acquired funnybone, both movies have a perfect plot that, quite simply, leads to one screw-up after another, each one bigger than the last.

While Rowan Atkinson excelled in his classic "bumbling idiot" character in Keeping Mum, I have to say Alan Tudyk was in grave danger of outshining lead Matthew Macfayden with his stellar act of a normally sensible lawyer falling prey to accidentally administered hallucinogenic drugs. Also took him some balls, literally, to do half, if not more, of his screentime stark naked. And alot of ingenuity in the videography too, to keep it NC16. There have been comments that the drug joke went on too long. Well it's true that occupies quite a good bit of screentime, but to me they did it really well. Timing, gag, whatever. Perfect.

As they say, this show certainly puts the F U in funeral. Go watch it.

Moofee Review: Enchanted

For some reason, my friends refused to watch Enchanted. When I ask them why not they threw the question back at me "What's so good about Enchanted?"



I wouldn't know! That's what we're supposed to find out right?!



I could tell them what I thought was good, but I look at animation from a geeky perspective, so I decided that gold-fishing my mouth was a better option. For Enchanted, I was excited to check it out because a well-done fusion of cartoon and real-life acting was something I haven't seen in a long while, quite possibly since the last time I viewed Roger Rabbit. With no one interested, I finally got the movie by... other means, and even though the quality was nothing short of dismal, Disney's magic still shone forth.



It is really heartening to find a company who takes the effort to deal with mature issues of "the real and cruel world" and "relationship complications" without having to resort to gory scenes of human luncheon meat or gunshots and some serious name-calling. Then again, it would be thoroughly un-Disney to have the remotest implication of "muthafuckin' whore!".



And then there's the digital effects. Oh my God I never would have thought that Disney would splash so extravagantly on SFX. As is often the case in digital effects, to the trained eye, the little things count the most. Apart from textural rendering, like the chipmunk's fur detail, or the reflection in the shiny poisoned apple, I really enjoyed the seamless transition where the evil queen (cartoon) sent three poisoned apples to her lackey (RL) through a soup pot. As the queen was musing she took the apple (RL) floating in the water back (cartoon) to admire it, then let it float back up again (RL). Really really impressive. Also, when she was snapping to her lackey in his vodka, her cartoon gestures affected the two olives floating in the drink. Gee, "how the hell did they do that" doesn't even begin to scratch the tip of the iceberg.

And then there is the Happy Working Song. I can't even describe it, you just have to take a moment here and see it for yourself.




At some point I lost track of which animal could be real and which was probably digital. The last time that happened was in the Matrix Reloaded's (in)famous highway car chase. The evil queen's transformation into a dragon was perfect, not to mention the stunning reality and detail of the dragon while retaining the facial flexibility of a human and the powerfully evil aura of the evil queen.

The last point is that I kinda felt that Disney was making a statement here, saying that they've grown up in some ways. As the movie progressed it became clear that while Giselle was warming up to the harsh reality and endless questions of this world, Robert was starting to accept that there may be happily ever afters after all. And I thought that was quite a powerful statement from Disney, as if they were saying "We know the shit you go through. But never, never let your dreams and fantasies go."

While kids will be entertained by colorful dance sequences and extravagant (and I use this word mildly) song numbers, adults may choke in laughter and tearful reminiscence of classic Disney references, most of which are in the opening sequence and the working song. I highly recommend you to catch it before it ends its run in theatres, and I look forward to buying the home theatre version of it in the future.