quick notes.

Just a couple of quick things. Need to review the list of courses over at SMU and SIM and see which has the post-grad courses I’m gearing at. Also, I gotta buff up and train before my PPT (that’s Physical Proficiency Test yo!) in the next 2 weeks. Damn it’s been awhile since I did anything that remotely resembles exercise (apparently, walking briskly from store to store during a sale and in peak hour doesn’t quite constitute as exercise. sadfase).

Taking another breather from the rat race. I am not quite geared nor inclined towards corporate culture. Stifling and suffocating. Also, am thinking twice about venturing further into the commercial aspect and realm of social media. As a passion, food for thought and uhh… other things, it’s all fun and dandy. It’s the technicalities, the snobbery and uppitish attitude of some on the scene (omahgawd, from one hotpot to another) rings mega-decibel alarms in my head.

Also, I have found a new game interest of sorts – gin rummy. The pinch is a heck lot more painful when you lose as opposed to mahjong.

selamat hari raya aidilfitri!

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri!

Tonnes of things to say but I haven’t had the time to settle my fragmented thoughts and piece them together. In the meantime, it’s a four-day work week! I can smell the weekend. Can you?

nerdic elements

There really isn’t such a thing as a nerdic element. Or the word nerdic, to begin with. Just that I thought it sounded pretty cool and a rather nerdy thing happened to me this morning.

I’m on leave (HURRAH!) because my parents are leaving for the holy land and I’ll smack myself silly if I don’t spend the rest of the day with them and send them down to the airport later on. Now before they leave, there’s this whole clean-the-house rubbish routine/tradition/etc so that they’d feel that they left everything in order.

It’s a lil’ sensitive and semi-complicated thing which I’ll try to explain in the near future. Or, depending on how often I come back to writing here. Have I mentioned that my job sucks up most of my time? Heheheh.

So I was cleaning up my room and picking up stuff to dunk into the trashbag and for some strange reason, my brain was saying ‘delete. delete. delete’. Instead of ‘throw away’, I was thinking of ‘delete’ and then ‘empty trashcan’.

It just goes to show you how often I am on the computer (Mac or PC) and that isn’t a good thing.

A final thing before I return to cleaning up the house, check out my Dove Go Fresh vid. I had such grand plans initially, like trying to do a Christiano Ronaldo (playing with the bottle like what he did with the Clear shampoo bottle) but me and balance don’t really go well together. And then I thought, hey why not create a jingle for Dove Go Fresh and I spent a little too much time trying to get the chords right as opposed to actually composing the song.

I try. I do. I’m just not really that good at it and I have to admit.

Wah heng. My Mac died, just flickering on and off and then I decided screw it I’ll force-boot-it, and I did. Fortunately, ScribeFire saved my entry just before everything saw the inky darkness of meh.

Check out the vid and take part in the challenge!

The Go Fresh Challenge

Also, check out the Dove Go Fresh Facebook Page!

stop going through the motions.

“Stop doing things because someone says that is what you have to do. Do it because you believe in it. Do it because it is making you a better person. Do it because you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how awesome things are going to be when you wake up at 6am to do something cool.” – Greg Rollett (Rock Star Lifestyle Design)

please enter credit.

I really wish I could just vomit everything that’s in my head, bugging me and giving me restless nights. But I can’t. I wish I could confide in someone without getting patronised or have my problems trivialised. I can just say that life ain’t fair. I’m doing all the best I can but I’m getting the feeling that I should just give up.

Life feels like a video game. The screen’s flashing and asking me for credits and I’m all out of it.

of curious things.

I’ve gotten really lazy at blogging. Honestly, it’s more because of trying to find something remotely intellectual to say that will wow my readers. But since I know that only dear friends worried for my well-being (I have a rather, warped mind, at times!) read my blog, might as well make it interesting. No tale of what I had for breakfast (which was nothing more than a bowl of mussels in some garlicky onion broth and eaten with spicy sauce that’s usually reserved for mee soto) nor what I did (which is in essential, nothing. proverbial sloth that i’ve morphed into now). So why not of questions I’ve had lying about in my head. Makes for better stories and misguided theories.

Now the first thing would be, why do boys like playing DoTA (which i only just wiki-ed as being an abbrieviation for Defense of The Ancients – gotta love wiki) and World of Warcraft (WoW)? Sure I get that bit about teamwork (sorta, unless you’re my boyfriend and his homeboys where they start backstabbing each other once they get bored) and rivalry and this odd peculiar desire to pillage and raze the opposing team to the ground. Almost neanderthal in a sense. Perhaps deep down inside we have never forgotten our barbaric and less civilised beginnings – to rage, pillage and destroy. Human nature in essence, packaged nicely, animatedly and in a pixelly manner that allows people to live their fantasies of being a bearded dwarf (then again, aren’t all dwarves bearded? even the women!) or an amoured… being (like saruman, lord of the rings). Plus, you won’t get your clothes dirty, unless you happen to closet yourself in your room playing endless rounds and only sneak out to forage (or scavenge) for food.

Hmm, maybe I’ve already answered my question. Damned rhetorics. I can’t quite grasp the concept of it. Then again, I do enjoy pointless shooting games (heeeellllooooo left4dead!) and racing games (the inner ahbeng in me SCREAMS for speed. i am a very careful driver on the roads, i’ll have you know). Do other girls enjoy DoTA? I haven’t really met many. I am rather pleased an amazed at the rising number of females picking up Left4Dead. Though it isn’t always nice to hear shrieks and screams in a LAN cafe when you’re trying to concentrate on the Tank that’s just smacked a car in your general direction. Which leads me to question why Left4Dead and not CounterStrike or Battlefield 2?

Maybe I’ll ask a group of girls when I’m next in a LAN cafe for some answers. Or if anyone else who happens to pass by and would delight me with their preference in games and why the boys always gravitate to DoTA or WoW.

Now for some reason, I just can’t wait for StarCraft 2 and Diablo III to come out. Mmmm.

online im a party animal, offline, i prefer dark corners.

A couple of days back I blogged about the first #sgwteetup. I suppose when compared to tweettuesday, it was more of a social shindig rather than an informal conference of sorts to sing praises to Twitter. A conversation I had with @gnoserif had me thinking – are we losing our personal touch because social media platforms like Twitter, Plurk and even FaceBook have made us too comfortable and even complacent in making the effort to engage and interact with people offline?

Yes and no.

In the case of @gnoserif and I, we found that we hit it off pretty well offline. In fact, it was almost a firecracker explosion where we hopped from one topic to the next, dragging people into our conversation and then meeting new people simultaneously. I’ve always had the thought that once we get beyond our initial comfort zone – also known as the awkwardness of initiating a conversation with someone we only ever got to know offline – we’d be able to get down to the nitty gritty business and be able to delve deeper into topics without a 140 character limit.

Yet there are still people who find themselves albeit stuck and temporarily immbolized by the difference in communication offline, face-to-face with people you’re only familiar of or have had a conversation with online. It could be an individual thing, like say, I’m an anti-social introvert (which is true and stop laughing/sniggering) who’d prefer the nice corners of a room filled with strangers (some of whom I know by virtue of “following” them on Twitter and the likes) rather than jump, guns a-blazing, into the fray. We’ve got really interesting people on these platforms however, not all are gifted with the gab or are fearless enough to throw caution into the wind and make the first hello.

Would I give Twitter up to change this habit? Meet people the old-fashioned way or will I choose it so that I don’t have to trouble myself with what to wear to make a good first impression (and that its easier to track conversations with @ replies)? I don’t know. I believe that these platforms should be more of an add-on, a plug-in to reality to supplement the way we connect with people and share information.

That’s not to say that it takes less effort to build a relationship with someone on Twitter, in fact, it could be a lot more.

god watches over all.

I have never been a religious person. I broke rules, tried to twist them so they fit my context. I am not the only one, I know so many more. But this isn’t about me. In fact, I’m not even sure why I decided to write about this.

The son of a friend of mine passed on. I received the text this morning. If I remember correctly, the child was due this month. I’m not entirely sure of the details.

I’m not close to him but I do wish that I could do more than offer my sympathies and condolences via text. In my religion, as explained by my mother, god loves the child so much that he (I can’t really be specific about gender and all of the great creator ok) takes the soul to care for in heaven. Direct trip, no judgement, no queues. Straight to heaven, with all the other children who have passed on before their time.

At the end of time, when god sees that all his creation would end and causes the earth to implode upon itself, when all creation is at the desert of Arafat and waiting to be judged, these children will be like a lifeline. They will save their parents from damnation, they will be the light that guides them to the doors of heaven.

My dear friend. Your son watches you from above. And I know that even as he has never experienced your love in the real world, he knows that you love him with all your heart and his love for you, will be pure and eternal.

5.6km!

Just had to blog this because it’s something I’m really proud of. I ran 5.6km today! Yes I took about an hour (and that’s roughly the distance as the normal J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge runs) but it’s a step to that 10km! My new Nike trainers fit better than most. The guy was amazingly helpful and honest with regards to what I liked and what I should get. Will take a shot of the shoes soon. Before they get all muddy and yucky.

write what how?

A day or so ago on Twitter/Plurk, I asked friends how they wrote their blog entries. Some take time to plan out what they want to say, even having multiple drafts and re-writing as they add on and polish the finalised product. Then there are those who blog in the spur of the moment, a very right-here-right-now attitude. There is no right nor wrong to that question. We’re basically allowed to write however we want to. I guess writing style is dependent on objective of the blog. Like what a nice commentor said – Alan – when creating a blog, you must first consider and think through the purpose of the blog. Whether it be an outlet of frustration (and often times, at the sheer stupidity of the people around us) or commercial use. That done, the next step is what trips people most – content.

Good blogs, the ones that get favourited and starred and tweeted and re-tweeted, are ones with totally amazing content. It’s definite that what you choose to write about is important in getting readership. At the same time, I believe that the writing style matters greatly as well with regards to catching the attention of passer-bys (meaning people other than your friends). For example, I’ve been reading Angelique’s blog. Now what happens in there doesn’t always appeal to me yet it’s the way she writes that gets me smiling to myself at times. When you have a combination of writing wit and content, that’s when you know you’ve got the killer blog.

Which brings to the topic of how some blogs which possess neither content nor writing flair can sometimes garner the greatest hits. They have the Mee Pok factor. For non-Singaporeans, a Mee Pok blogger is basically an individual whose entries are nothing more than pictures and a smattering of text here and there. But the word Mee Pok itself doesn’t mean that, rather, it’s a type of egg noodle that goes really well with fishball soup.

To end this off, I leave you with a nice Mee Pok picture while I go get the rumbling tummy something to eat.

Mee Pok by Seet Ying