Some people amaze me with their appetites. Quest is forever telling me he's hungry and describing his meals. I don't understand why he doesn't balloon at the rate he eats. I'm so green with envy. Hiaks.

Made last minute dinner plans with B12 at Holland V. We talked about feng shui, the art of tipping and the use of money clips, his boss' Star Wars analogy at work ("steer clear of Darth Vader, he is evil..."), speed-dating at SDU (which feels like pimping for the elite), sms that were salah, travelling (he wanted to travel to Brazil. Brazil?!) and if we should attend Womad (nah). Not bad, just 2 old friends shooting the breeze.

Quest is trying to explain to me how he drinks down creatine (sand-like stuff for body-building). It doesn't dissolve, so he just swirls a teaspoonful into a glass of Ribena and gulps it down. I still can't imagine how he can do this day after day.

Busy day at the office. A new baking analogy surfaced today. A baker told me that he couldn't bake cos the microwave oven was spoilt. I told him I thought he only needed the oven? And he replied that the microwave oven was spoilt, and hence somehow the oven was too. Try as I might, I couldn't figure out how they were related. And of cos in the meantime, the customer didn't get his cake. Woohoo.

76 office emails when I wasn't in the office yesterday. Time to go plough through the lot. Sigh.

These days, I've no business asking you what you're up to.
- my friend in Chicago, who reads my blog faithfully and knows my daily routine better than my own mum now

Take care in Japan and hey, Jap girls are the way to go ok? :)

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.
- an Elf saying from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

No wonder I sense ambiguity in me while generating random decisions for others. lol.

A star shines on the hour of our meeting.
- an Elf greeting from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Just read Caterina Net. Blog with a wicked sense of humour. Nice.

11 is a good number. Prime too.

Today, I phoned a girlfriend who's working from home and chatted. Finally started re-reading Lord of the Rings too (page 28 out of 1000+ pages, not much progress though). Slow relaxing day, almost felt like it's the weekend.

I don't know which is worse, condescending folks who are younger or those who are older. I'm more tolerant of the latter though.

Lots of bad luck this week. A colleague got into a car accident (luckily he escaped unscathed), another colleague was sick, an acquaintance had an accident, and I went to the clinic to remove the remaining splinter from the same big toe again. Urgh. The doctor injected my toe with anaesthetic this time round to clean out the splinter properly. I know it's nothing compared to pain from body piercing but still.. Anyway, the doctor gave me medical leave today so I don't put pressure on my toe, which incidentally, has a huge bandage. This sounds so bloody ridiculous. Maybe I should go bathe myself with flowers or something to cleanse away the bad luck. Hiaks.

Yoyo said there's a reason why Ted Hughes took his time to publish Birthday Letters. He thinks that Ted Hughes might have passed the poems over for his previous works cos they're either too personal or not good enough, somewhat like B-sides for poetry.

I got zero earholes and don't intend to pierce my ears. I'm really chicken that way.

While attending a seminar with a colleague this morning, we wasted our time thinking up imaginary Who wants to be a Millionaire type of questions for each other. She knew I'm bad with dates so she asked me all the date questions (In which year was the Causeway built? On which date did Princess Diana pass away? When did Deng Xiaoping pass away?). In return, I asked number questions (How many white gorillas are there in the world? How many strands of hair does Aki Ross have in the movie Final Fantasy?).

However, she asked a real simple question that I didn't answer correctly. She asked which ingredient was missing from a Big Mac (Lettuce? Tomato? Cheese? Pickle?). The answer is Tomato. I didn't realise there's no tomato slices in a Big Mac.

deadboi told me he's got 5 earholes in his left ear and 1 in his right. When I asked him why, he quoted the Doors' song Five to One:

"Five to one
One in five
No one here gets out alive."

He mentioned that according to Paul Rothchild, this meant that by 1975, there would be 5 young people to 1 old person.

May birds sing for you today. lol.

My best friend just lent me Blue States' album Nothing changes under the sun and Lemonjelly's album Lemonjelly.ky. Blissful listening. :)

I've read my previous private diary entries and the conclusion is I write better when I know I have an audience. Ah, what does this tell me about myself?

I remember reading about a behavioural experiment at a factory assembly line. Workers were informed that they were hand-picked for research about their productivity level. They felt so motivated by the attention that their productivity level was higher than any time in the past. In the end, the experimental results got skewed cos no one anticipated the attention generated would become a factor.

Sometimes, people behave differently when they know they're being watched.

Do I want to retire? Of cos. If I can, right away, without a doubt.

I received a strange call on my cell phone yesterday. An old lady phoned me up to ask if I did her a favour by bringing her a pair of Snoopy slippers at Ang Mo Kio hospital in 1999. She said a relative of mine was staying there and I was visiting, and she was in the next bed. I don't think I've ever been to Ang Mo Kio hospital at all. I told her she's got the wrong number but she recited my cell phone number correctly to me. Then it struck me that my current cell phone number belonged to someone else at that time, so it's the previous owner (whom I don't know) who helped her. I repeated for the upteenth time to the old lady that it's not me, but she sounded so earnest to say thanks for something that happened 2 years ago.

Yesterday I bought a collection of Ted Hughes' poetry called Birthday Letters. Though he's a Poet Laureate, it seems Ted Hughes is more famous for being the husband of the doomed poetess Sylvia Plath, who killed herself at 30. Well..

There's a poem in the collection which caught my attention with its title alone. It's entitled God help the wolf after whom the dogs do not bark. The wolf or the dogs aren't mentioned within the poem anymore, but somehow it's no longer necessary. I wish I can explain things like that.

Didn't write much last weekend.
Didn't sleep much last weekend.
Didn't read much last weekend.
Sometimes I'm hard pressed to figure out where all that time went.

My best friend commented that I write ok cept the times when I write like a girl. Those bits get somewhat tedious I guess. lol.

It's always the same. When I'm offline, I wonder why I'm not online; and when I'm online, I wonder why I'm not off.

Today, I bought Shino's old album She Knows, one of a rare handful of Chinese albums I bother to acquire. The only other Chinese female musician I listen to is Faye Wong. I guess it's apparent that I like attitude grrls rather than Sweet Young Things.

My head’s full of new words,
that sing to the sounds of the day after Friday.
- the Carpenters' song Saturday

A colleague sent me an email of interesting facts and one of these says that all polar bears are left-handed. This really drove me berserk cos I don't believe there are no exceptions to the rule. How can it be true?

A closely watched conveyor belt won't deliver the sushi plate you desire.

I hardly remember those Friday nights before I started playing pool.

I've caught the pearl tea craze along with the sudden mushroom of pearl tea places here. I'm not interested in the drink per se, cos I won't order it without the pearls. I don't know if it's the huge straw and the frivolity of the drink that attracts me to it. There's just something funny about it all.

My best friend believes that one day women will find it fashionable to velcro gadgets onto their clothes. Hello. Do you know how hard it already is to find a functioning/ non-decorative pocket on women's clothing? I can't even fit my wallet, cell phone and tissue paper anywhere on me when I go out for lunch.

We keep walking away for no reason at all
For the sake of being free
No one's invested enough of themselves
To yield to maturity

And the rate of attrition for lovers like us
Is steadily on the rise
Nobody's in love this year
Nobody wants to try
Nobody's in love this year
Not even you and I
- Warren Zevon's song Nobody's in love this year

Just finished watching the VCD movie Midnight Cowboy. It featured Jon Voight as a not-too-bright hustler from Texas who came to New York City to offer women sex for money, and Dustin Hoffman as a sleazy crippled con man who met up with him. Don't really think much of the movie. How did it get the Oscar for Best Pic in 1969?

It's not often that someone you know has their pic on a nation-wide magazine. So deadboi, how do you intend to bribe me not to disclose your pic to the world? Muahahaha! :)

Honey, even if he phoned you, he also hung up on you. Wake up!

My Japanese colleague said there's a Japanese game show every year which takes place from Japan to USA. It starts off with a few thousand contestants at a stadium. They have to answer a question with Yes or No and split themselves into 2 huge groups. The group which answered wrongly will be eliminated. From then on, a decreasing number of contestants will be asked questions (not MCQ ones) and the subsequent questions will take place at the airport, on the plane (enroute to America) and in various locations in America. Those who fail to answer correctly will be sent back to Japan straight away. The prize will be a free trip to America (duh), so you're consuming your prize as you take part in the contest. Interesting.

I remember while playing virtual pool with Hegemony and Quest, Hegemony was asked if his girlfriend wanted to join in. There was a joke that nah, virtual pool is for shady people. I think it's ironic I qualify for shady. lol.

I can finish reading 1 Seinfeld episode script in 10 to 15 minutes, so comparatively speaking, I can read 2 to 3 episodes in the same time taken to watch 1 episode. Yeah, I know it's not the same. I have this feeling of deja vu reading the scripts and I wonder why since I don't watch TV. Maybe I've caught some Seinfeld episodes on plane journeys before.

I threw away the 2 African Tulip leaves which I've been trying to grow in the office for the past few months. Maybe I should try growing cactus instead.

I don't want to write. I just want to curl up with a book and die a little.

Just had my first virtual pool game at yahoo with Quest. Surreal. I started missing the things I do around a real pool table. Like when I have a ball in hand, I have a habit of tapping a gentle kiss on the cue ball before placing it on the pool table, for good luck. Or pacing around the pool table checking out all angles. Or sitting around flipping through magazines and listening to music.

However, you can still banter with other virtual pool players on a scrolling dialogue screen like in irc. My problem is my mouse doesn't respond well while I'm prompted to take my shots, and I have a problem with 2D visualization (I have this urge to hunt for a ruler to align the shots on the screen. lol.)

One good thing with virtual pool is that it assumes I can do steeple shots which I still can't. Steeple shots are when the cue ball is too close to another ball and the only way to hit it is to stand your finger-tips next to the cue ball when taking aim. I'll rather take air shots (which is not to rest any hand on the pool table surface, and hence highly unstable) than steeple shots. Yes, strange, I know.

Thanks for introducing virtual pool to me anyway. :)

Some people aren't gonna make a dent in my life, so why should I give them a moment?
- my friend in Chicago

I can't stand it when people tell me to forget it. It's like they've given up on me and don't expect anything. It makes me really pissed.

Stumbled upon this checklist for writers and I figured I've broken a few cardinal rules already. Oh well.

E.B. White's List of 21 Reminders to Writers
1. Place yourself in the background.
2. Write in a way that comes naturally.
3. Work from a suitable design.
4. Write with nouns and verbs.
5. Revise and rewrite.
6. Do not overwrite.
7. Do not overstate.
8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
9. Do not affect a breezy manner.
10. Use orthodox spelling.
11. Do not explain too much.
12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.
13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
14. Avoid fancy words.
15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
16. Be clear.
17. Do not inject opinion.
18. Use figures of speech sparingly.
19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
20. Avoid foreign languages.
21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
- Kurt Vonnegut

When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.
- James Geoffrey's book The Tao of Programming

<flame>
Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!
</flame>

Got this insult from somewhere and thought it's kinda cute.

I bought a copy of Seinfeld's scripts after all.. it's the second last copy at the mobile bookfair. My colleagues can't understand why I'll read Seinfeld's scripts cos I don't watch TV, but then some things can't be explained.

"The bad thing about television is that everybody you see on television is doing something better than what you're doing."
- Jerry Seinfeld

Just received an email promoting a new booklet on ways to manage the most disruptive employee dispositions. What amused me was how they named the employees in the case scenarios: Bullying Brenda, Complaining Carl, Irresponsible Ian, Negative Nelli, Stubborn Stella, Tuned-out Tom...

Maybe I'm Vile Vaya.

Wapblogger. Now you can post your blogs with a wap-enabled cell phone. Hmm.

My colleagues may be mentioned a lot here but I've never told them about my blog. Maybe one day when I leave this company.

Had an interesting observation with my best friend last night regarding blogging. If you know some people before they start blogging, will reading their blog affect how you view them? Will it be better or worse? If you know someone only after you've read their blog (if any), how is it different?

I like doing sports with my best friend cos his aim is to have fun and not to beat me. When we played badminton just now, he knew I had a weakness with shots hit to the further ends of the court and he would gradually train me by hitting high shots which I had time to respond to. This is the same way I picked up pool with him for the past year. I just thought I should say thanks again.

I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
- a resignation note on the terminal of an engineer mentioned in Tracy Kidder's book Soul of a new Machine

Circling over the airport
Beacon confirm our height
Is anything wrong, can we go down?
But the radio remains quiet
- Stina Nordenstam's song CQD

It's been so long since I've seen the ocean.
- title of an album by Jon Sheffield. Classified under Insane Ambient, if such a category exists.

A good DJ can spin the appropriate records seamlessly in the right sequence. A great DJ can, for an instant, make the whole room fall in love.

I just dropped by the mobile bookfair during lunchtime and bought Tracy Kidder's 1981 Pulitzer-winning book Soul of a new Machine. It's on the efforts of a company to bring a new mini-computer to market. Was contemplating whether I should buy a copy of Seinfeld's scripts and decided to coax another colleague to do so instead. Saw a hard cover copy of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius selling very cheaply but I've already bought a soft cover copy previously. I do like to hoard books don't I?

It's a series of mayhems and rescues, then mayhems and rescues. I'm tired of the mayhems and rescues.
- my ex-colleague in Poland's comment on re-reading Lord of the Rings again. I've still not started re-reading my copy. :)

Tip of the day: if you're supposed to quit smoking but have broken your promise in the first few hours already, don't write about it in the guestbook of another blog. Especially since there's a monetary penalty involved. Concentrate will you, go chew on mints or something.

CELP means Code Excited Linear Prediction. My friend in Chicago was explaining that cell phones use speech prediction algorithm to digitize the voice, but this algorithm works poorly on anything but human speech.

I bought 3 albums today. Another old Faithless album Reverence, a John B album Redox and a double CD compilation of Heaven 17 mixes. Hmm, all dance music. Must restrain from buying too much. And the weekend is gone again.

deadboi has promised to quit smoking as of today. Good luck and remember, every ciggie you smoke now will cost you $10 to me ok? :)

Rollo Armstrong of Faithless can write upside down. I don't know why but knowing that fact strangely endears me to his music.

I told you that Jon Voight (Angelina Jolie's real-life father and screen father in the movie Tomb Raider) was in the movie Midnight Cowboy. You didn't believe me so we wandered into a video shop to check it out. They didn't stock any copies of that movie though so we got out of the shop. I turned right instinctively and erroneously started to walk back the way we came. After a few steps, I stopped and asked you if we were heading in the right direction. You said no. I asked you why you didn't tell me. You replied that you would walk on a while and then ask me where I would like to go.

Tact. :)

Women in love don't answer their phones.

No one has posted to their blogs since I slept and woke up. And now blogspot is undergoing some maintenance work. Just finished watching the VCD for an independent HK movie called Made in Hong Kong. Probably going to watch the VCD movie U Turn while waiting for my brother and sis-in-law to come home for family lunch. Wow, half the weekend is gone already.

Even sitting in the garden one can still get stung.
- Faithless' song The Garden

I was browsing through the CDs at Borders while I was on my cell phone with you. Then I spotted Whiskeytown's album on the sampling machine. I told you I remembered quoting a line from their song Reason to Lie in my blog, but I've never heard this song before though. It's track #4 and I wanted to check it out. To carry on the phone conversation while sampling, I placed the sampling headphones over the cell phone on my left ear as well. While chatting on, a lady passed by and gave me a weird look. Then I realised it's cos the cell phone was covered by the sampling headphones and she probably thought I was talking to myself. lol. I repeated this incident to you and laughed. Thought the track sounded nice and I asked you if you could hear the music. You replied yes, a little. Then I figured you could only hear the pipe-in music within Borders, and not from the sampling headphones. We were listening to different tunes after all. In the end, I didn't buy the Whiskeytown album but an older Faithless album Sunday 8pm instead.

During pool, my best friend joked that there should be a teen version for the clothing brand Mango called Mangosteen. Dave commented that I play pool like a taxi driver cos I like to give directions to others on what to hit. I stand accused. :)

Goethe says it is good to think, better to look and think, best to look without thinking.

Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jogged with my best friend this morning under a relentless sun, and I didn't wear any sunblock cos it'd streak. Hmm, there's no helping it if I tan, but at least I'm going for pool tonight again. :)

"If you notice people with exceptionally bitchy, elitist smirks on their faces, please don't hurt them. It's a natural reaction to this, the great champagne of Brew..."
- explanatory tag which came along with my brewed Wheat Ale during dinner at Brewerkz last night

A colleague and I snuck out from our office farewell/ birthday event and joined limabean to play Survivor pool. So I did play pool on Friday night after all. :) Weekends can't start better than this.

A colleague told me the way how 4 people can play Survivor pool. Each person will pick 3 balls, eg. 1 to 3, 4 to 6, 7 to 9 and 10 to 12. The remaining 3 balls (13 to 15) will be bonus balls. When a player pockets a bonus ball, he is allowed to put one of his pool balls (which someone else has pocketed) back on the pool table. Interesting twist.

My friend in Chicago was trying to explain his work to me using the baking analogy. He said that he's the guy who test bakes the first bun on the commercial oven.

"Someone wonders to me that to fly to London it takes 12.5 hrs while there is only 8 hours time difference between S'pore & UK. So can't we invent a plane that just lift itself up out of rotational force of Earth, let Earth itself rotates, 8 hours later, descend down back to Earth, bingo! There you are in London."

Sometimes you write the most amazing things.

My colleagues were discussing about the strange Taiwanese game/ talk shows. One mentioned that recently, there was a guest on a show who loves to eat paper, especially those receipts from ATM machines. Someone then asked which bank has the tastiest receipt. Unbelievable.

I am Star Wars today
I am no longer English grey
- Smog's song I am Star Wars!. lol.

While drinking teh tarik after lunch, some colleagues were folding paper cranes and such using flyers. I realised then that I only know how to fold paper airplanes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the splinter has left my body. I'm ashamed to say I covered my eyes and squealed while my doctor performed what she termed a "minor surgery" to remove the darn thing. I think the patients outside were staring at me strangely when I left the consultation room but I don't care. I'm a free woman now and I can move on! :) Thanks for all your concern.

Just said goodbye to a german colleague who's returning to Germany for good today. He's a really nice guy whom I could banter with. Like a schoolboy, he would playfully recite those few chinese phrases he knew to me, like "wo ai ni" (to which I'd chirp "wo ye ai ni") or "zhuo wo lao po" (and I'd go "mei wen ti"). I hope to see this colleague again at his wedding end of this year. I'll really miss him.

But though we're more friends than colleagues, I still couldn't bring myself to hug him goodbye, as caucasians are wont to do. No matter how long I've known my foreign colleagues, they know me enough to gauge if I'm receptive to hugs, and even then I don't throw myself whole-heartedly into hugging. It's not that I don't like them enough. I'm just inhibited cos I guess I'm not brought up this way. Actually, I've seldom hugged my close friends, and my best friend not at all. Hopefully, people can sense my good will towards them anyway. *wry smile*

Friday nights without pool feel strange. But farewell cum birthday celebration calls.

I saw Maya^ in irc and chatted her up cos of our similar nicks. She said that in Hindi, maya means:
1. wealth; illusion
2. unreality; phantom; art; wisdom

Ok, don't read this entry if you're squeamish. I've got a splinter stuck in my right big toe since last week. The splinter gives a little pain and has a slight bump on my toe where a speck of it can be seen. However, it's lodged too deep for me to extract on my own, and I am procrastinating against going to the doctor for the extraction. I'm afraid of PAIN and I don't want the doctor to cut up a huge slice of my toe to reach the splinter. Urgh. Poked my toe with a safety pin trying to reach the splinter to no avail. :(

Summer princess, midnight maiden
When I first saw you I just breathed
Into your smile my past went fadin'
Inside your voice, my mind was sheathed
In lost lagoon, we waited, wadin'
Along the streets we went paradin'
Never looking back to where we'd been

Autumn temptress, sundown angel
Inside your blood you aren't so young
I came to you a loving vandal
And heard your heart and touched your tongue
Day became a lighted candle
Sky fell down beneath your sandal
In your eye I began to spin

Winter harlot, moontime lover
I can't speak when I feel this way
Don't keep your feelings undercover
Tell me what you want today
Don't leave me in the air to hover
Sing it out don't make me suffer
Don't be ashamed love is no sin

Springtime woman, sunrise girl
I am hiding behind the sea
Trick or treat, the Hallowe'en world
Hide and seek but you can't catch me
I won't chase you until you hurl
Your wing to me, and make me twirl
You're alive underneath my skin
- Tim Buckley's song I can't see you

Touch my hand
It's only me, listen
I'm here.

Come to stand
In sultry fields
With you.
- Alpha's song Sometime later

As Emiliana Torrini sang,
guess it's time for a walk just to read some license plates.

Stephanie says,
That she wants to know,
Why it is though she's the door
She can't be the room.
- Lou Reed's song Stephanie says

Did you know that tuna fish
Float up to the surface
Belly to the moonlight just to cool their heart down
- Tuna Fish, from Emiliana Torrini's album Love in the Time of Science

Currently listening to Moby's Running. Didn't run to this tune before, but I can tell where the footfalls will land within the song.

Today's baking analogy at work:
Customers will like to sample the cake (BEFORE it's baked) and decide IF they want it to be baked. Since no other customer is requesting for a similar cake, there is no cake to provide for sampling. So the cake has to be baked anyway. What an oxymoron.

WhatIs.com explained today that dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) is a technology that puts data from different sources together on an optical fiber, with each signal carried on its own separate light wavelength.

Everyday we have to read and learn.

You sent me an email with subject kitchen sorcery and mentioned your own baking stories at work. Hope you don't mind, I took the liberty to quote you again.

"I felt the same, except sometimes even short of decent or right ovens, the gas goes out the wrong time, the order queues up but too petty for the bakers, giving too much icing on a cheap cake we sold. The recipe too spaghetti to explain to complaining customers when the cake turns sour."

Just realised that it's been exactly a week since I quoted lyrics or mentioned music in my blog. Way too long. I've gotten feedback that my blog is more like a repository of lyrics and well, that's not too bad is it?

Yesterday I was beaming while I did my stairmaster and treadmill routines. It's been a long time since I've visited the gym (I've switched to other sports), but I'm glad to return to the gym again. I always liked working out to music from my Discman.

Yoyo also mentioned that the next Star Wars prequel is called Attack of the Killer Clones. Eh. That sounds so B grade leh. Then Yoyo realised he added in the word Killer unconsciously. lol.

Yoyo told me that a family was supposedly saved by meditation during an earthquake. Apparently they were meditating on the 6th storey when the earthquake struck. When the building crashed down, they walked calmly out of it. Hmm.

Just realized that wedding cakes are generally fake and recycled at wedding functions anyway. Nobody actually eats from the monstrously tiered wedding cakes anymore.

My faithful pandan cake bakers are getting resentful that they need to bake wedding cakes cos the wedding cake bakers have taken their own sweet time. However, the weddings cannot be rescheduled.

When inheriting cake orders done halfway by other bakers (esp. those who do not follow standard recipes or document their own secret recipes), I find that most of the time is spent scrutinising the cake mixture and wondering what ingredients are already in there. Even when secret recipes have been jotted down, they can be so cryptic that it's like lines from fortune cookies instead. In this case, I guess we make do as much as possible and hope the customer doesn't get food poisoning.

Spoken too soon. More baking analogies at work:
When a genuine wedding cake order comes in, there are only pandan cake bakers around. And it seems like a few weddings are taking place simultaneously. Woohoo.

Hitting the gym tonight to work off all that stress and calories. The day seems good so far, but it's only 8.45 am.

My snake has just been named smirgot. No meaning or reason.

There's a strange comfort in having my toy snake coiled around me while I sit in front of the terminal and blog. Maybe I should think of a name for him.

Actually I don't know how to bake or cook. I can boil water, so that means cup noodles is achievable. Beyond that, I'm at a loss. I remembered I was in Home Econs class in secondary school, and we had to bake pandan cakes. I thought the cake would taste nicer if I added more pandan colouring into it. In the end, my pandan cake came out a weird dark green. That sums up my encounter with cooking pretty well.

I visited a customer this afternoon to do muffin inspection. He said that the system is churning out random strawberry muffins when it's only configured to make blueberry muffins. However, he couldn't pin down the exact sequence which triggered strawberry muffins to appear. I told him I couldn't help him unless the problem is reproducible. But I visited him to check out his system anyway. For 2-3 hours, we watched blueberry muffins come out from the assembly line without a hitch. Finally, my customer said he should stick my pic on the system instead since the system seemed terrified of my presence. I told him to call me next time an errant strawberry muffin turned up.

There you go, a case study in IT trouble-shooting.

Hope you had a good trip back to Arizona. Take care of yourself. :)

Bakers with gourmet aspirations do not listen. They are just plain unwilling to bake pandan cakes, do not want to follow recipes and do not understand that their exotic cakes taste horrible.

And all I wanted is to feed hungry folks.

Another thing. If your office is a bakery and the customer asks for a pandan cake, don't give him a wedding cake. Wedding cakes take time and while you're diddling over the perfect icing, the customer is going hungry. Besides, the customer isn't even getting married and a wedding cake will only confuse him. An appropriate cake delivered on time is more important.

I don't understand why Qoo orange exists. Surely Qoo white grape is enough. 2 weeks back, my favourite pool joint stocked up 10 times of Qoo white grape canned drinks as compared to Qoo orange, and still the Qoo white grape cans were all sold out faster. Yoyo though, is a Qoo orange fan. There's no accounting for taste. :)

My US travel mate, UK travel mate and I went to ikea together and were smitten with the green toy snakes there. The toy snake is this comic-looking soft-limbed creature with a gaping smile, and taller than me when extended to its full length. It's not that we haven't seen the toy snakes around before, but this evening we just felt like slinging them round our shoulders like feather boas and taking off to the cashier. At the check-out counter, my US travel mate sobered up and gave up her snake, but my UK travel mate and I carried on to purchase ours.

When I got home with it, I realised that my mum hates it. Sigh.

Another colleague just quit today. What a way to start this week.

My friend in Chicago has responded so here's his take on positive externalities (reproduced as-is)...

"here's a proper defn: When you produce or consume a commodity or service within your private property rights that bestows a benefit on a third party not directly involved in the market transaction.

in english: u do smth for ur own benefit but others indirectly benefit. i like the fax eg: as more ppl buy fax machines, existing fax users gain 'cos they can connect to more ppl. that gain by existing users is terms positive externalities; negative externalities would be the opposite.

thus, as more ppl blog, existing bloggers gain as they can connect to more ppl. positive externalities, dont u love econs? :)"

ikea ikea ikea! Gone there last night, going there tonight. ikea is the place to go! :)

My friend in Chicago mentioned that replying to other people's blogs in your own blog is similar to emailing. This argument reminds him of the economic notion of positive externalities. (But what's that?)

I dreamt again last night. Wow. The trick now is to remember what I dreamt.

We make lousy random decision generators. When confronted with "Yes or no?", I always answer Yes and you always answer No.

I went jogging by myself this morning. Didn't run as much as I intended to cos it was so hot the sunblock started streaking off me in milk tears. Had my ritual soya beancurd and soya milk afterwards and felt so content.

deadboi was explaining to me how dreadlocks are maintained. You're not supposed to wash them, instead you powder them. Dreadlocks have to be waxed too, and when they get wet, you're supposed to blast dry them. Oh yah, and you can't do sports if you have dreadlocks. Sounds really high maintenance.

These are the pics taken while out yesterday with my digicam:

1. The blue cow outside Suntec Marche
2. The red cow outside Suntec Marche
3. My left hand holding open the photo book I'm reading currently
4. My left hand holding my cell phone
5. My jc girlfriend
6. Me

I don't really like to be photographed. When I travel, I seldom have pics of me. I guess I'll rather be behind the camera.

pi Pipi pi pika pi Kachu?

I dreamt last night but I don't remember what it was about. I just recalled that during the dream, I realised I was dreaming and kept reminding myself to remember it. But of course I didn't. At least I dreamt. At last.

Just learnt a new way to play pool with 3 players. The game is called Survivor and you play it like this: each player picks 5 balls, eg. 1 to 5, 6 to 10, or 11 to 15. To win, you have to pocket the balls which don't belong to you. The winner is the player whose pool balls remain the longest on the pool table. Kinda fun cos you can see how treacherously others play. :)

I'll never forget that day, though the photographs didn't come out.
- Malcolm Lowry

Finished reading Anthropology and a hundred other stories and started on the collection of photos. It's light reading cos I just randomly flip to any page and scrutinise the photo, slowly reading about the photographer and the photo's meaning. My dad would have loved this book.

He who crucified Himself never returned to himself. Never. For he also surrendered to Life the self by which he sacrificed Himself, after having forced it within himself to become the being of his own life. I want only to be such a poet forever, who sacrificed himself in the Kabbala of self for the immaculate conception of things.
- Antonin Artaud's revolt against poetry. Courtesy of deadboi.

When I woke, I watched the VCD movies All about my Mother and March comes in like a Lion. Depressing fare. I wonder why I take leave to stay home and watch quirky art flicks.

All about my Mother is a Spanish film about a woman whose son was struck dead in a car accident. She left for Barcelona in search of his father, whom she told the son had died before he was born. Actually the father is now a transvestite called Lola.

On the other hand, March comes in like a Lion is a strange Japanese movie about incest. There was a girl who loved her brother dearly, so when he lost his memory in an accident, she told him she's his lover.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction tries darn hard.

Yesterday I was sitting near a bunch of secondary school girls who were preparing for the National Day Parade. I overheard bits of their conversation and couldn't help smiling to myself cos they sounded so young. They went like "my mum is so gullible! I told her I'm going out with friends for dinner after NDP at midnight and she said ok, but NDP ends at 8pm!", "my sis told me i gotta stop that or she'll never bring me out again! oh no!".

I don't remember when I last needed someone to bring me anywhere.

I just got a search hit from Google for "help me locate my ex girlfriend she left me crazy and nuts". In those exact words too. Gee.

I have a one-track mind and take things real literally. Must be experienced to be believed.

Yoyo said the sky in Singapore seems lower than the sky in the countryside overseas, probably cos we have so many highrises that the sky seems closer to the ground? Hmm.

Halfway through Dan Rhodes' Anthropology and a hundred other stories. Fantastic. The following review sums it up:

"101 stories, all about girlfriends.They cheat, they die, they leave (frequently) and they name their daughters Lesbian. The funny ones are all the funnier for being brief; the sad ones all the sadder for being sparse. Every one a 20-second gem." - Maxim

Was tempted to quote one of the short stories but decided that it's unfair to highlight any one story. Go get the book instead. :)

Just dropped by the book sale again with the guys and bought 2 more books. One is a small photo collection by assorted photographers. The other is a history of DJs called last night a dj saved my life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton (from the magazine Mixmag). My table-tennis junkie bought a book on the Left-Handers Syndrome (Left-handers are supposed to die younger than right-handers?!) and a biography of mathematician Paul E. which I recommended him called The Man Who Loved only Numbers. Yoyo bought a guitar score for Bach and you can read Dave's blog to find out what he bought. :) Nice day.

then suddenly i hear my guitar singing
and so i just start singing along
and somewhere in my chest
all the noise just gets crushed by the song
- ani difranco

And lo and behold, National Day has descended upon us. My foreign colleague kept referring to National Day as Independence Day, and we had to correct him that we don't have Independence Day here (for obvious reasons).

Don't worry about missing the book sale. Really. :) Here's a song for you to tide you through the night.

It's the end of the year
I have just settled here
It may not be much, but it's enough
Yet trouble has sprung from the pubs and the clubs
We'll see blood soon, when the nights through
Still you can have it all, There's a hole in the wall
Get some money and we'll show them
This is our territory, This patch belongs to me
Why don't they understand, But I've got a plan
So take my hand.
And sleep well tonight
Tomorrow we fight, would you like it in town?
As the bass drums boom by
We'll leave this lay-by, this excuse for a town.
Now that everybody knows all about me
I've been rumbled, I've been sold
Born with plenty but you're left empty.
You can have it all,
There's a hole in the wall
Get some dough out and we'll show them
But still trouble comes from the pubs and these clubs
Why don't they understand, but I've got a plan
So take my hand
And sleep well tonight
- Gene's song Sleep well tonight

You know those keychain tags some people have with their names on them? What if you spotted a name on a keychain tag and went up to the owner to say "Hi so-and-so, remember me?". How will he/ she react? I wonder how many people will pretend to know you when they obviously don't.

I bought Ayn Rand's 1000+ page classic Atlas Shrugged, Dan Rhodes' whimsical Anthropology and a hundred other stories and Dave Eggers' hilarious A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius from the book sale. Yoyo bought some books as well as Spin magazine, which we flipped through while having drinks at some new italian bar/ restaurant we came across. The funny thing is we read the review for the same italian place in this week's issue of 8 Days and did a real-time comparison of the review and the actual location. Surreal.

Nice wallpaper. Is that one of your pics?

Stumbled onto an interesting interview with Thom Yorke of the band Radiohead. Lots of oddball questions and answers.

Yoyo and I are going book hunting this evening at Books Kinokuniya's 20% pre-National Day storewide sale. I know I shouldn't buy any more books but sometimes I just can't help myself.

Why will anyone search for "clothes worn by Billie Holiday"? And why did Yahoo reference my blog for that? The majority of the searches that end up here are looking for ringtones RINGTONES RinGtOnEs ringtones. Bet that will generate more misleading links but anyway.

WhatIs.com explained about Chaos Theory today. As usual, I love these folks and here's an extract.

"Chaos, with reference to chaos theory, refers to an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless obeys particular laws or rules... The two main components of chaos theory are the ideas that systems - no matter how complex they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events...

The butterfly effect, first described by Lorenz at the December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., vividly illustrates the essential idea of chaos theory. In a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences, Lorenz had quoted an unnamed meteorologist's assertion that, if chaos theory were true, a single flap of a single seagull's wings would be enough to change the course of all future weather systems on the earth. By the time of the 1972 meeting, he had examined and refined that idea for his talk, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?" The example of such a small system as a butterfly being responsible for creating such a large and distant system as a tornado in Texas illustrates the impossibility of making predictions for complex systems; despite the fact that these are determined by underlying conditions, precisely what those conditions are can never be sufficiently articulated to allow long-range predictions."

Limabean told me before that the way I say wtf is incorrect and proceeded to demonstrate how it should be done. To be honest, the right way sounded like a confused swearing chicken. You have to hear it to get it.

I checked out Chronoscape as usual this morning and was freaked out to find it taken over by siaosiao.net (wtf?!) and a cartoon pic of a penguin in a nun's attire (wtf?!). I emailed Quest at his chronoscape email but the email bounced. I thought wow, his site has been hacked! Later on, I managed to reach him and he said nonchalantly that the site is moving house (switching providers) today. Gee. Cheap thrill.

Before we have the birthday greeting for our nation, here's one for you. I wish my mum tucks a birthday angbao under my pillow too. :)

You asked if I've landed and I said no. I told you that from your handwriting, your F looks lopsided, like a childlike scrawl. You said all your big letters are weird sometimes.

I noticed today that after finishing a drink, I will always chew absent-mindedly on the end of the drinking straw till it becomes all gnarled and warped. I don't know why.

Auto-repeat song for today is Goldfrapp's Horse Tears. Simple heartbreaking melancholy. Maybe it's the song title, tears beget tears?

The strangest search referral I got was from Google. Someone searched for "Air France lost my luggage". In those exact words.

Must it always be about music? Well, to be frank. Yes.
Let's say music is a 24x7 service I provide to myself, and I have to write a Service Level Agreement on its availability, I'll make it 75% up time (minus a minimum 25% quota for sleep time). So I'll need music for 0.75 x 24 = 18 hours each day.

My table-tennis junkie just got me the latest John B album Future Reference from UK. Thanks! :) This really made my day. Welcome back, we missed you at badminton.

I was surfing Amazon on other Goldfrapp releases and Amazon listed that customers who bought Goldfrapp's album also bought Lemon Jelly's Lemonjelly.ky and Blue States' Nothing Changes under the Sun. Either my best friend has read this list or he conforms to consumer demographics. lol.

There's a fine line between fishing and standing at the shore looking like an idiot.
- deadboi, when we were discussing about, of all things, dreadlocks. lol.

Since I was blogging, I decided to type out the track listing for Fila Brazillia's anotherlatenight here instead of emailing it to you. I'll pass the jewel case to you next time we meet, but till then here's what you are listening to:

1. John Barry - The Persuaders Theme
2. Homelife - Firefly
3. Infesticons - Hero Theme
4. Prince Alla - Bucket Bottom
5. Mr. Scruff - Get a Move on
6. Marvin Gaye - T Plays it Cool
7. Brian Eno - Regiment
8. The Beta Band - It's not too Beautiful
9. David Holmes - Rodney Yates
10. Fila Brazillia - Nature Boy
11. Unforscene - Nuclear Symphony
12. Nightmares on Wax - Les Nuits
13. Outside - Blue Skies
14. Kelis - Suspended
15. The Swingle Singers - Prelude & Fugue in C Minor

Surprisingly, my favourite is the Swingle Singers. :)

Armoured cars sail the sky
They're pink at dawn
If I lived forever you just wouldn't be
so beautiful
As the sun
When it shines
All over the world
We're pilots watching the stars
The world pre-occupied
We're pilots watching the stars
Who do we think we are?
Ice and clouds
Shimmer outside
Rain just falls
At magic hour
It's just the sound
Of you and me
Time twitching
Murmurs of our
friendly machine
- Goldfrapp's song Pilots. Thanks to my best friend for lending me the album.

Seems like everyone is talking about relationships currently. You asked if I'm in love and I thought if I am, I'm not sure I'll be blogging now.

Out of the blue, my US travel mate just sent me the cell phone ringtone for the Darth Vader tune. I laughed when I played it. Thanks for remembering me and my little Star Wars obsession. :) You must recover soon! We've got to meet up!

The CD ROM drive on my office laptop just got replaced and I can listen to my CDs during work again instead of the usual handful of mp3s. It's a nice start to the week. :)

It was an insane conversation. You kept chirping hi! on the phone and I followed suit, but we knew there was nothing wrong with the connection. Yet somehow we still managed to do that for half the call.. just two people sharing a private joke without a punchline.

My UK travel mate told me that both her colleague and her fell sick after meeting up with me for badminton. Now it's my US travel mate's turn. Eh. I can't believe I spread my illness to so many people. Sorry folks! I didn't mean to. Hope all of you are better now.

Surprisingly, I didn't plan anything for today. I woke up from a late afternoon nap and sms'd my UK travel mate. She wasn't doing anything either so we met up for dinner and caught the movie Shaolin Soccer. The movie was screening in one of the smaller cinema venues and we couldn't even get adjacent seats.. we had to sit in single seats one in front of the other. Never tried this before but it was still fun. I leaned forward and propped my chin on the back of her seat for a while and we both laughed a lot. Not a bad way to end a weekend. :)

While we were online, you started digging through your old portfolio of pics to send me those of your frens. I noted pic after pic of people I've only heard about but never been in contact with, and I hope they treat you well.

But frankly it's so bloody surreal... I believe if you cut out pages of it into tiny lil stamps and put 'em in your mouth you could get high.
- deadboi, who was trying to explain to me about Breton's book Nadja

I was chatting with Yoyo and another girlfriend yesterday and the latter commented that she watched the movie Hamlet some time back. I asked her if it was good and she looked at me strangely and said "I watched it with you". Oops. Foot-in-mouth bimbotic moment there. Later, my colleague joined us after watching the movie Memento and I said that I've seen that, it's a wonderful movie. And I turned to my girlfriend and asked her if she's seen the movie too. She looked at me strangely again and said "I watched that with you too".

This highlights perfectly a grouse my friends always have with me. Perfect memory for irrelevant facts (like how many permutations of band members the band Santana went through) but shit for brains in terms of normal memories.

My best friend told me before that with so many friends blogging, his life online will soon be complete. Bingo.

Let's leave it as a prime number.
- me referring to the number of phone calls exchanged today

It rained during the bbq so we were all huddling pathetically under the small shelter or umbrellas. It was fun though and I ate fit to burst. lol.

Started jogging again this morning but at a slow pace so I wouldn't stress my knee. My best friend bladed instead so we caught glimpses of each other when our paths crossed. My knee didn't protest much though I didn't wear a knee guard, and I didn't stop jogging inbetween to rest. My best friend didn't fall down so I guess we could pat our backs.:)

I was on my way home and missed your call. You left a voice message for me instead and on it you sounded high and happy. High and happy is good. :)

I met Yoyo for dinner and pool. It was wonderful just relaxing round the pool table, and we met Dave who also happened to be playing at the next table with his friends.

After pool, Yoyo and I went for drinks. We lounged around sipping drinks (kahlua coke for him and coke float for me) while watching old 80s MTV videos. He demonstrated some Yoga moves which I doubt I can do, and then we mused over the true meaning of the movie Dracula which I thought is about bleeding chicks. We chatted with another friend about Radiohead, the fluctuating weight of the Spice Girls and the unexpected Take That survivor Robbie Williams. It was a nice start to a weekend. :)

You looked so weary and wary, so out of sorts you didn't seem to be present. I just want to claim your spirits back from the Lost & Found.

We had a lucky draw for company souvenirs in the office just now. I drew a huge company towel but swopped it for a small company swiss army knife. I've got a few swiss army knives already but I still have a soft spot for them. When I was in an all girls' secondary school, my classmates used to whip out their switchblades to dissect cockroaches during biology class. I didn't have a switchblade then though. Will you call this delayed gratification?

For all the guys reading, my female colleagues have declared that their favourite cologne is Aramis' Tuscany cos it's very man. You know what to do. lol.

My colleagues were discussing about ordering satay at such late notice and someone made a whimsical remark that we should order it online. The others thought no way! but since durians are already sold online, we decided to give it a shot. So we thought up an URL for City Satay and typed it in. And the site came up with an online order form as well as delivery! The only glitch is they don't accept credit card payment yet. Wow.

My german colleague was trying to explain to me why we need at least 3 kinds of salad (noodle, potatoes and greens) at tomorrow's bbq party. I told him that salad doesn't really come to mind when I think about bbqs. Another cultural difference.

I woke up this morning to 2 sms from an old secondary school girlfriend. She reminded me about attending her wedding (ROM) and I panicked cos I didn't remember if it's today. I started rescheduling today's activities mentally while I tried to reach her. Luckily it's 3 months later, though I won't have blinked if I had forgotten. I jotted it down in my Palm V this time. A disaster averted. :)

My friend in Chicago mentioned that 3 sick colleagues either indicates bad air-conditioning or a conspiracy. lol. It'll be a lot more fun if it's the latter won't it?

Since I was on a roll, I watched the VCD movie Basketball Diaries too. At least I know Jim Carroll didn't die in it. I'll quote a poem from him before pushing off to bed. :)

The Birth and Death of the Sun
Now the trees tempt
the young girl below them

each moves off the other's wind
endlessly, as stars from the earth,

stars from the stars.

Just finished watching the VCD movie Happiness which is actually damn sad, the kind that gives no respite and just makes me wanna howl out the window and freak out. I've got a stash of art movie VCDs left to watch and they all promise to depress. Woohoo.

Thanks! :) I'm feeling better. Can't wait for the weekend.

Immediately after I fell ill, 2 other colleagues also reported sick too. Yikes.

My german colleague surprised me during a meeting by mentioning about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). Eh? This isn't a phrase that pops up in my work area at all so I had to go check it up to see what it means. According to the NLP Information Center, NLP "studies the structure of how humans think and experience the world. Obviously, the structure of something so subjective does not lend itself to precise, statistical formulae but instead leads to models of how these things work. From these models, techniques for quickly and effectively changing thoughts, behaviors and beliefs that limit you have been developed."

I've pegged my sleeplessness down to the red milk tea I've drunk at 8pm last night. I know I'm caffeine-intolerant but this is ridiculous. Urgh. But then I remember an ex-colleague who's lactose-intolerant and could only stand around watching others eat his birthday cake. So... caffeine-intolerance isn't the worst that can happen.

Must have jinxed myself saying I fall asleep immediately. Now sleep eludes me too. All I want to do is sleep a little and dream. Ok, let's not be greedy.. sleeping itself will be fine.

Faithless is filed next to Marianne Faithfull in the CD racks at the music store. I've never really noticed that.

Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down
They're going to destroy
Our casual joys
We shall go on playing
Or find a new town
- the Doors' Strange Days. Another song for Dave. :)

I just went to HMV and bought 4 CDs: Best of the Doors (which I was always reluctant to buy cos it can be borrowed), the Church's Sometime Anywhere (its jewel case fell apart after I unwrapped it), Deep Dish's Junk Science and Urge Overkill's Saturation.

I had an impulse to buy Urge Overkill's album though I had it in cassette when it was first released in '93. Yeah, it was that long ago but I've never replaced it with a CD copy. It was before I forayed into dance music, music without lyrics and all the rest. It was pure rock music and I remember I used to bop along happily while listening to it. So I bought it and found I still do, listening to it now. I'm quite unabashed about bopping to music I love openly... I don't bother about the weird looks I get. Whatever it takes to smile.

My jc girlfriend told me it's good not to dream cos dreams are mostly manifestations of the problems we encounter in our daily lives. But then, no dream doesn't equate no problem. I find myself even strangely envious of Dr Aki Ross in the movie Final Fantasy cos she seems to dream all the time.

Seems like I can go for my regular Friday night pool after all since my colleague postponed the bbq party till Saturday. :)