Monday, February 28

thank who?

alvin lim just texted me on getting six points. whatever. another one bites the dust. and, of course, he thanked whoever it was that he worships on his achievement. again, whatever.

my sister got thirteen. she cried a lot. i thought it was a good mark, but then again what do i know/care?

through the Khoo Nosey Parker Network, it was determined after questioning regarding my sister's own results that our cousin kenneth got seventeen. sad.

"our father, who art in heaven
don't take the credit, i'm my own creation
my jealous god, here's some advice for you:
you're not on the list? get to the back of the queue"


- "Girls Guide For Modern Diva", Black Box Recorder

it's gonna take a miracle

i'm sick as a dog. but there's still school later.

finally got down to the last third of A Home At The End Of The World. and it's only three days overdue, in its second renewal [which is the limit the NLB places on number of renewals on one loan].

should sleep.

Saturday, February 26

Microsoft Optical Mouse by S+ARCK


starck_article_mouse
Originally uploaded by aklw.
i finally bought one yesterday. then my aunt decided she loved it, paid me for it, and wants to use it full-time on her PC. and i can't buy another.

also, my brother came over yesterday, and hogged the PC until i decided i was going to give up on trying to make the other PC work with his games and go to bed, whence he decided he wanted to use my PowerBook and i could play The Sims 2 on the with my S+ARCK mouse. of course, i was too pissed off to allow that, so i told him to piss off, and watched some Desperate Housewives and Will & Grace instead. after that, he was fast asleep. then, he woke for no reason. i told him he could use my PowerBook, i was going to play The Sims 2.

of couse, he said he wasn't going to do that, he wanted to sleep. so i got my crap outside and booted the PC. and was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. i was itching and growing hives everybloodywhere. went to take my itch-control pill and played The Sims 2 until it started to take effect, then went to bed.

this time of year sucks.

Tuesday, February 22

torn

and then it comes. after looking up the Acuvue site for some time, downloading documentation and stuff, it hits me.

WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY? HOW CAN CONTACT LENSES COME WITH A TEAR IN THEM?

anyhoo, i guess i've lost a month of glasseslessness. also, they say never to use tweezers with contact lenses, unless they were made to be used with contacts. and that the right way to remove contacts from a case is to slide the lens out sideways, in contact with the case at all times until completely out. no wonder. though i do know for a fact that the tweezers i have are meant for use with contacts, i suspect they were what tore them.

Well. Yay for me.

There is no way my luck could be this bad.

I decided to try on my new Acuvue Clear contacts today. I noticed the left one had a small tear in it when i was placing it on my finger to try and put it on again. No problem. I just replaced it with my old permanent one, since it was the right one that tore in that pair.

Then i noticed that the right Acuvue had a similar tear in it as well.

So here i am, glasses on, late, and only just getting onto a bus.

Friday, February 18

why do you love me, it's driving me crazy

i spent the entire afternoon and evening listening to BBC Radio 1 to get a listen of Garbage's first single off their new album, Bleed Like Me, due in April.

the instant the track started, the bitrate dropped once, to transistor-radio quality. then near the final third of the track, it dropped again to transistor-radio-over-a-telephone quality. and plus many many skips in the recording i made.

what the fuck, really. three hours for this? but who i am kidding, i'd still listen to it over and over.

how my week went

lundi:
did not complete day of school

mardi:
did not complete day of school

mercredi:
could not concentrate in class, fumbled assigment

jeudi:
did not complete day of school

vendredi:
probably will not complete day of school


for some reason i'm feeling like a train wreck again. my mother's on my back about my passport, my contact lenses, the fact that i go to lunch with my grandfather when my aunt takes us out for dim sum some samdis--which she assumes to be every samdi, after which i no longer deigned to verbally respond into the telephone until she hung up on me--, that i have a life outside of sitting around and waiting for her to call and demand that i do something or be somewhere. my grandpa has started to defecate himself in situ with more regularity these days, often in the afternoons or whilst in bed, and it's troublesome to have him cleaned up with only one person with him, who also needs to be at the beck and call of my wheelchair-bound aunt, and i've a new addition to my stable of paranoid habits: checking in every now and then to check if he's still--i have no way of saying this tactfully, so i'll just come out and say it--breathing.

also, for the first time in my history of watching it, Gilmore Girls actually made me feel worse after it watched it, as opposed to lightening my spirit and all that jazz. not that i hated the episode. i'd describe how it is so you'd understand, but i don't want to give anything away either, for the Gilmore addict that reads this. so i guess you'll just have to trust me on this.

Tuesday, February 15

i bloody hate bill gates

i have just finished spending five hours repairing the Windows 98 Second Edition installation on my aunt's PC.

Sunday, February 13

day five, part two

i just got back from yet another gluttonous Sunday lunch, courtesy of First Uncle. four people dining, enough food for eight. i feel fat. there was this piece of roasted meat that was almost pure fat, it tasted like soft candy.

"Aw, Luke, wait, come on...

Hey. Please, just, just...

Christopher get out of my way.

Please stop.

Get away from me, Christopher.

I just wanna talk!

Get some coffee, Christopher.

This wasn't the way I wanted it to go down, I wanted to get you alone, I... What're you doing?

I'm going after Luke!"

-Lorelai Gilmore to Christopher Hayden, just before Marylin Gilmore finds her for the photo shoot.

day five

the flat just recovered from bursting wide open with unexpected guests. my first uncle and aunt-in-law had just arrived less than half an hour ago for their weekly lunch with my grandfather, and my grandfather's sister and some members of her family arrived to visit, re: the lunar new year.

two more ang paos, i guess it isn't all bad. but i was playing The Sims 2. and i was just managing to get Mary-Sue Pleasant to recover from discovering her husband making out with the maid, and the subsequent, very messy divorce after [he asked the maid to move in, she broke up with him which forces him out the house, leaving the maid behing to contend with her]. now do take note that i didn't start anything. when i loaded the Pleasant family's game Daniel was already in love with the maid, and though still married to Mary-Sue, nothing more than friends with his wife. i just handled it in the best way i know, from observing the Khoo life.

"There you are!
[to photographer] I've got her!
You cannot keep a roomful of Anglo-Saxons waiting for cake this long. They start to form more clubs.
[to photographer] Take her, take her, take her!"

-Marilyn Gilmore, to Lorelai Gilmore as she finds her for the wedding party's photo shoot

to lorelai on her one hundredth episode.

Gilmore Girls 0513 Wedding Bell Blues

Direct from TWoP, the recaplet for the episode 0513:

Hundredth-episode shenanigans get rolling when Luke and Lorelai go a few more rounds in the diner about his going or not going to Richard and Emily's big, rich-people vow renewal. He, of course, bows to the iron Gilmore will, and agrees to attend -- a decision he will later regret. As Lorelai and Rory prepare for their carbfest, Cop Rock marathon, hee, Emily calls with a trumped-up excuse to visit, and the Girls realize they're supposed to be throwing a bachelorette party for a sixty-year-old woman who has already been married for forty years. After rounding up all the ladies in Stars Hollow and getting Emily a snoot full of rum and Cokes (rums and Coke?), everybody drags ass into the wedding facility the next day, slungover but happy. Well, everybody's happy but Luke, who feels uncomfortable because the elder Gilmores are making him feel uncomfortable because they are jerks. Christopher shows up at the soiree (late, of course), and the awkward part of our evening begins. Luke is just about to rise above the whole thing when all hell breaks loose: Rory has oozed off into an anteroom with that Backstreet Boy she has such a crush on and is on the verge of hittin' it when Lorelai, Christopher, and Luke walk in and insert their own mess into her private moment. The drama boils until Christopher shouts out that everybody knows, just like Emily told him, that this thing with Luke and Lorelai was only temporary. Luke swiftly exits. Lorelai? Gets real mad. She rages out just in time for a family picture and brilliantly and viciously declares her relationship with Emily to be over. Finally.


best. episode. ever. well, one of the best, anyway. sure, it was almost definitely written to be as such because it was the hundredth episode, and... i'm rambling. and, hey, no-one's making you read this blog, so you'll just have to put up with it.

"You and me? We're done."
-Lorelai Gilmore to her mother, Emily Gilmore, as a photo is taken of the wedding party in the last scene of the episode


i can only ask one thing: why did i put off watching it for so long?

Friday, February 11

chinese new year ...

... was/is so bad, i'd like to opt for pretending it never happened/is not happening.

i'd like to elaborate, but it figures that my muse comes to me when my brother has just decided he's ready to stop hogging the wintel box outside playing Gunbound/Maple Story/R.O.S.E. long enough for us to go to my aunt's place so that he can hog the Xbox there, even though he has one at home, leaving me in the exact situation i am in now: with nothing to amuse myself with.

so. i must get ready to go. have to be at Tanah Merah station in an hour, now that my brother has agreed to start to get ready to go, and i've made the rendezvous arrangements. i want to bring my PowerBook there, but i'd have to interrupt a couple of downloads. such is the irony of life. depriving myself of entertainment because i'm downloading even more.

Thursday, February 10

trouble in paradise

it appears that the "K750i" uses a different connector for charging/audio/data. any mobile phone user worth his salt would know that Ericsson has been using the same connector on all its phones since the T28 series. unless what i saw was the audio/data connector only, with the power connector somewhere else, it would appear that the Sony has eaten the Ericsson, and there goes yet another vestige of Ericsson-ness: almost universal accessories.

tsk tsk tsk

mrbrown: Chinese New Year Eve last minute rituals

i've noticed two things from the photograph attached to this post.

one is that the Nokia 6630 is as unattractive from random angles as imagined.

two is that mr brown uses Sony MDR EX71-SLs with his 4G iPod that looked like a 1G/2G iPod at first glance because of the humongous transparent case around it, like the ones i bought and lost the medium-sized eartips and discovered that the large-sized ones fit better.

three is simply a personal opinion. driving whilst listening to an iPod with noise-insulating in-ear earphones?

"It's Veeery Dangerous!" - MTV Asia Promo

le nouveau Sony Ericsson "K750i"

The K750i, Sony Ericsson’s new two megapixel cameraphone - Engadget

i would buy this if the Motorola Razr V3 didn't exist. it looks T610 good, and has all the good bits of the K700i without the bad bits [the lack of a crystalized keypad, to begin with, is a VERY welcome omission here], and some more better bits thrown in as well [2.0 megapixel camera, multi-LED flash, Memory Stick Duo slot, to name a few]

i'm glad to see that Sony Ericsson hasn't lost the plot. but final report card is: great improvement, but can do better.

it's [dis?]heartening to see that cameras in phones have caught up to the resolutions of the pre-golden age of digital cameras. the Olympus Camedia C2020-Zoom that my brother broke was 2.1 megapixels. we'll see when this phone comes out. in the unlikely case that i've tired of my Razr by then, and i read things i like about it and little i don't, i might switch back.

Tuesday, February 8

the morning after

and my phone looks much worse in the morning light. it's funny how this only happens when i hold on to my phone too tightly. but you know me, i'd be too terrified to keep a loose grip on it.

the bits where i dabbed on the silver paint from my old paint pen looks ultra-bright and obvious, like the putty you fill into dents and dings on your car without the coat of paint. and i don't have that coat of paint.

when i dropped it i had a heart attack, heartbreak and swearing fit all at the same time. it seemed to have been flung out of my hand, and after it landed it appeared to skid on the rough tile for a bit. sadly this time i wasn't flipping it shut, so impact was achieved whilst the phone was open, and previously protected and pristine bits were exposed and ravaged.

shopping list

black or deep-blue inked rollerball or felt-tipped writing pen
A4 sketchbook
better silver-pigmented paint pen in shade that perfectly matches my Razr (yes i dropped it yet again)
inkjet or laser printer transparencies
"one plus one is one" by badly drawn boy
"twentysomething" by jamie cullum
"pointless nostalgic" by jamie cullum

now the last two i weren't even going to consider. i once swore i would never buy music that was advertized on television, after which i promptly went online to download Green Day's "American Idiot", which i didn't really like at all and have listen to less times than there are fingers on one hand since.

but trying to find the tracks is a bother. i can't invest that kind of time in downloading the same song thrice to acquire non-dodgy rips and surfing Amazon for track listings and artwork, only to find that you're copied information for the American version of a particular album, which isn't the one sold here and isn't the one which i want information and artwork from.

yeesh. it's too much effort. i'm just desperate for music i want to listen to. people who obtain their music soley through pirating must either be really desperate to get stuff for free, or enjoy testing their patience. so i can either spend some money now, or wait a few weeks, when it's fiscally sounder.

Sunday, February 6

... and a peaceful moring to you.

i've just realized that the Chinese greet each other "peaceful morning" in the, well, mornings.

and, also, "peaceful evening" in the evenings.

why, when that is rarely the case?

today's coffee: three scoops granulated beans, two scoops sugar, two scoops condensed milk [two scoops condensed milk being the result of not knowing that there was no normal milk before adding the sugar.]

yes, it was vile. but it got me going. i still didn't feel any kick, but at least i no longer feel like my eyelids are made of rarified lead. man this week is going to suck big time if each morning is going to start with an unco-operative grandpa [my aunt-of-sorts went back to malaysia for lunar new year, and now it's just me and rosemarie, who has my second aunt to contend with as well].

may everything you do have ten thousand meanings.

Saturday, February 5

hilary fluff

hilary duff once had her own television show.

hilary duff once had her own movie.

hilary duff once had a singing carrer.

now all hilary duff can do is guest star on "Joan Of Arcadia".

Friday, February 4

the honeymoon is over

the first computer-based class in which i cannot use my Macintosh instead of the school's computers has come along, and it is the Digital Drafting component of Design Drafting. because it uses this piece of software called:

Rhinocerous(R)
NURBS modelling for Windows

and its

Training Manual
Level 1

is two hundred and fifty-five pages long.

this is going to be such fun.

and the specs of the wintel box i have to use?

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4
3.06 GHz
1.00 GB of RAM

nVidia Quadro FX 500
128 MB of RAM
1600 x 1200 pixels @ 75 Hz [self-set, original resolution was 1024 x 768 pixels, ew]


now i'm going to dinner, and in about half an hour, after i meet the guy whose brother's selling me a stick of RAM, my PowerBook's memory will have tripled.

GodPods, holy golf balls and JCUK

what the hell is this?

BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | GodPods, holy golf balls and JCUK

Wednesday, February 2

02-02-05_2223.jpg

02-02-05_2223.jpg

Love for sale?

The first airport in Asia to launch Curious - Britney Spears, a new fragrance

The first airport to launch Curious by Britney Spears

Who says we have nothing to be proud of?

i know, i know.

yes, i should have gone to bed at eleven like i was going to. but i just had to try and see if i could get any more work done, didn't i?

well, what now? it's twelve thirty, and i have no more work done.

today is a right mess. have seven hours' sleep left to clock, and that is provided i fall right asleep after [here i would like to be as poetic as i can get, and say "fall right asleep after i put my PowerBook to sleep", but i'm downloading something and am not going to sleep, so here's what's taking its place] i close my eyelids.

0800 Wake. Decide if want to attend WEBP--factor in fact that have missed last term's term test and have yet to submit interim submission

0900 Arrive at school for WEBP/Arrive at Jurong Regional Library to play hookey

1200 Leave WEBP class/Leave Jurong Regional Library

1210 Head for grandparents-in-law's place to visit them/Head for Marine Parade to collect RAM for PowerBook/Head for Victoria School to return Mac OS X Panther to mr liong

1600 Must have acheived at least two of above by now, else day is considered failure. Should now complete final task from above/Get back ID from xuan for Thumper tonight

1800 Arrive back here/Have dinner?/Lie about evening plans and pray nothing comes/came up?/Say you're going out, and go?

2030 Leave for Thumper/Get held up and stew at home

refreshingly, i've already long decided that i do want to go to the Live & Loud "official media launch" at Thumper. this is a good change, and possibly a good sign. now let's see how that all goes to by my sketchy and movable plan.

at My Very Own Glob {Curiosa Felicitas}: Even fewer reasons not to own a Mac,

mb said...
I like the fact that the new Powerbooks support 2-finger action.

Ok, that came out wrong.
3:40 PM

kids, listen to big brother aaron...

... don't check your email just before you go to bed.

From: devnews@sonyericsson.com
Subject: Sony Ericsson Developer World News - January 2005
Date: February 01, 2005 09:39:09 PM GMT+08:00
To: aklw@yahoo.com.sg

Themes Creator for Mac

A number of Apple Mac developers have requested that Sony Ericsson provide some of its popular content development tools for use with Mac OS. Their wishes have finally come true! Sony Ericsson has published Themes Creator 1.60 for Mac OS X. Also supporting the Sony Ericsson V800, the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator 1.60 (including Developers' Guidelines and Release Notes) is available here >>

... continued, but irrelevant to my grief, hence not reproduced.

great. after i buy a Motorola, you decide to sweeten the Sony Ericsson experience that little bit more. granted, not enough to make me choose a, say, S700i, over my Razr V3 even if i hadn't bought a new phone yet, but still enough to make me smack my forehead. sure, extremely superficial, but i always liked the ability to custom create or download a limitless selection of themes for my old Ericsson. and now that i can do my own with my Mac instead of through some clunky online interface that breaks all the time, well. you know how i feel. and if you don't, tough.

however, that was not all. my indonesian friend, who has gone back to indonesia to await the 2004 GCE 'A' Level results, recently bought a BMW 330Ci, customized it, and entered it in an auto show. he didn't win, and not even because the car he honestly thought was better than his anyway [a Mercedes-Benz CL500] won, but because a Nissan 350Z. i have nothing against that car, i would love one, but i would much rather the BMW or ever the CL500 over a 350Z.

back to the whole don't-check-your-email-just-before-you-go-to-bed thing. he's just sent me pictures of his BMW and the CL500. now i don't know whether to feel sympathetic over his non-win, or wildly envious that he's entered HIS BMW 330Ci in auto shows when i can't even run Need For Speed: Underground on any of the PCs here. the saddest thing is that i abhor modified cars. a little bit of customization is fine. but when the car starts not to resemble its original self, then, well, what can i say. you might as well be driving a Honda Civic, Toyota Vios or Subaru Impreza.

shit. six hours left on the clock.

Tuesday, February 1

All this could have been avoided.

I hate it when people buy clothes for me, and get me things that aren't generically good-looking basics or things that they know that i'll love and that i actually love. My aunt was supposed to meet me after school at Expo because she wanted to go to the John Little warehouse sale. She went without me because she was impatient. I now have three shirts that make me look about thirty years older.

fuck fuck fuck

Crap i've lost the pair of silicone tips for my Sony in-ear ear phones. Now i either have to hope the small or large sized ones fit as well/better, or go buy a set of all three sizes from Sony.

Another post from within Wood Technology

My word. Following the lecturer's train of thought is like taking the mrt system through orchard, yishun and woodlands to get to jurong east. I can no longer be bothered.

down, two, three, up.

i'm back onto the PowerBook. couldn't wait the twenty-four hours i wanted to. nothing seems wrong, except for this [see hyperlink below]. this, is very, very, very, very, very, very wrong.

Apple - PowerBook G4

the new PowerBook G4s are out. mine is obsolete. the new ones have faster processors, more built-in memory, faster and bigger hard drives which come with fall-protection sensors, trackpads with scrolling capabilites, option for 8x DVD-writing drives, AND a two-to-four hundred dollar price reduction.

i want to kick something. anything. who's got something for me to kick.