Harrassing the Butterfly
30/11/2003
Long day
Spent almost the whole day at Roger’s wedding ceremony and dinner today. Originally planned for breakfast even, and a stroll at the Botanics in the morning but woke up at noon instead. On hindsight, it was really a fat hope, since we don’t even wake up before 9am on workdays.
The church ceremony was kinda sweet and upbeat. Andrea looked great. And there was lotsa singing and clapping (with a band and stuff), and stuff translated into mandarin. Nice change from the solemn Catholic ceremonies.
In the short break after the church ceremony and before dinner, we headed to the Expo to visit Sitex, the computer show. It was so crowded, I got tired just walking through the crowd. Didn’t buy anything.
After dinner, which was at Liang Court, we managed a couple rounds of Time Crisis at Clarke Quay. It feels great. I remember asking Ben Choi before he left for good, how he coped with his working environment. He said, “2 words. World Combat”. Or was it Time Crisis? One of those.
Snuffing the competition
At Sitex today MSN had their butterflies flitting all over extolling the benefits of MSN. As a websnob I abhore them. But nonetheless in the name of checking out the competition, I sucked it up and went up to the booth and tried to look impressed with MSN Messenger. My opinion is that they’re so unsure about their product they needed to have the application bundled with the OS. Hahhaha. Ok, I will give credit where it’s due (albeit grudgingly) and the fact is, they did make MSN Messenger pretty functional. Y! Messenger needs to play serious catch up.
I asked the Butterfly at the counter if their Messenger would work with any webcam, and with a dumb look asked where I could download their Messenger. All so that they’d give me one of those lameass notebooks (paper, not laptop). Ah well. For what its worth, I think I did sound pretty genuine, I thought I sounded just like those people who call us each day to complain that something isn’t working.
I’ve also found strangely that after starting my blog, I’ve been checking out my friends’ blogs more seriously. Previously I just read them and got bored with them. Some were totally personal and I felt a little intrusive. Imagine that! Being intrusive on the internet! But mostly, I never went back. Now I’m checking them out – maybe I need to feel some form of affinity. I don’t know.
My favourite browser
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this, but I’m in love with a new browser. It’s been around for a while, but MyIE 2 is made for the internet code cruncher. It behaves like IE, but is so much smarter. The plugins are the best thing ever. Here are my favourites:
1. The one that checks out the word you highlight on Dictionary.com (there’s an m-w.com and an encyclopaedia.com version as well).
2. The colour hex code one which will tell you the hex code of any part of an HTML document.
3. The partial view source one where you highlight the bits of a page and it gives you the html source for just that portion.
There are lots more, like a flash file saver, email this tab button – it goes on.
Naturally Thinking
29/11/2003
Naturally Thinking
Well, successfully made my order today. I’m very pleased with myself. Although of course it works out to be quite a lot I’m getting this time, but i figure this will last me more than 6 months. I like the magazine too. Lots of great facts about aromatherapy.
Roger’s Wedding
So the bunch of us will be attending Roger’s wedding tomorrow. Wonder how he’s feeling right now. Though I don’t necessarily believe in marriage, I do keep a fair amount of respect for those who do take the plunge. I do genuinely feel happy for my married friends. I’d just like for them to stop asking me when I’m going to do it, because I’m sick of answering it honestly and getting that “you can’t be serious” face. I’m also sick of having to answer why I’d like to avoid it if I can.
Half pregnant?
My first vacation vocation was at a dentist. My dentist, actually. The dental office regularly hires young students to be dental assistants. The dental assistant is the person holding the suction tube while the dentist scales and blasts your teeth clean. She’s also likely the one who has to clean the room in the evening when the dentists call it a day, and after each patient leaves.
Anyway. The funniest truism I heard ever heard was from a dentist working there. I think it was a Dr Lee. He said, to illustrate that something either happened or didn’t, that it was like being pregnant. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not. You can’t be half pregnant.
At 18, that seemed to be like words so true and neatly put. I promptly stole the line and used it ever since. Of course there are few occasions where you’d actually have to whip it out and use it (I like to use lines like that sparingly. It lasts so much longer that way.) but in the course of my 3 years at the current workplace I remember instances where I’ve used it.
Today my boss said that very line. We either do it or we don’t. We can’t be half pregnant. Heh.
Aromatherapy Day
28/11/2003
1. Aromatherapy Today
Am really into the whole aromatherapy thing now. I like walking into a room and smelling the lavender in the air.
I found a couple a nice sites with great uses, and more importantly, recipes.
1. Aromaweb
2. A World of Aromatherapy
3. Bird’s Aromatherapy site
Today was a boring lavender, lemon, geranium day in the office. Smells a bit like a spa.
I’m going to make a fairly large order on Naturally Thinking but right now I can’t get that damn shopping cart to work.
2. Dinner and a Movie
We went to Crystal Jade at Great World City for dinner tonight. They turned the Shanghainese Restaurant on the fourth floor into a noodle joint, and they serve really good Egg White Fish thing. I love that. It’s basically egg whites, cooked like scrabbled eggs, with fish and dried scallops. It’s served with an egg yolk on top. You eat it with pepper and vinegar and it’s just fantastic. I also like the noodles – the soup makes everything taste great. I had Xiao Long Bao too.
After dinner we went to watch Duplex. It stars Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore, and it was directed by Danny De Vito. Not one of my favourites, for sure.
3. Life at work
Had a meeting at work today, and saw how important it is to just shut up and listen. Of course, that tactic is less than impressive on a conference call. But people in general feel better when you don’t interrupt when they’re making their point, even if it’s just to say ‘yes, I know’. Maybe because it’s distracting, or maybe the person feels that you’re trivialising the point.
A separate incident highlighted the fact that dumb people tend to think your capacity to be consistent diminishes by the day. So if they called with a dumb request the day before, and you told them to bugger off, that perchance today when they call you, you might relent and entertain it. Why do people feel they have to find stuff to do when there isn’t any? Sounds extra-superfluous to me.
4. Shortened pants
I chopped up a cheap pair of jeans last night and wore it to work today. On average, each time I get my jeans altered I end up shortening it by about 4 inches. Last night I chopped it up mid-shin, and lopped off 8 inches or so. I think I’ll make a new pouch for my camera with the leftover denim.
5. Johnny Depp is the 2003′s Sexiest Man Alive
If he were dead, I doubt anyone would find him very sexy.
Nonetheless, I’m happy he won. He’s a kooky non-conformist, isn’t insecure about the way he looks, and therefore gets my stamp of approval. Mr Stench rules.
6. Having “u” and “i” next to each other on the keyboard…
is just plain inconvenient. Everytime I want to type one, I get the other. Its the same for D and F. Each time I want to type “d-u-c-k”, I end up with “d-i-c-k” or “f-u-c-k”.
My First Blog
27/11/2003
1. Gripe
So the first thing I do when I get my blog is find out i should set my own templates. Great. All I wanted to do was write something. Now I’ve to go through that CSS book I left lying around for a year to do a decent job of making this look vaguely like how I want it to.
2. Aromatherapy at work today
I started the day with 4-5 drops of lemon and 2 drops of lavender. The lemon was a pretty nice wake-r up-er. But it really doesn’t get you very far. The scent doesn’t last as long as I’d like, and an hour later, I feel like I need to give it another 4 drops.
In the afternoon, someone requested an all over office scent, apparently there was some bad air going around. Maybe someone in the marketing team didn’t take a bath this morning. So I whipped out some Geranium (4 drops) and 2 drops of Lavender (which was superfluous). The result was pretty much a really strong rosey smell. Ok in small doses. Wonder if we all felt less depressed. I felt great. But then again, it was a good day.
3. Extra-superfluous
There was a news report on TV today (both Channel i and Mediacorp covered it, I think) about that couple who took that reverse bungee after their wedding ceremony. The guy said something really funny when interviewed, something like “… at first, there was that phobia-fear, but then …”.
4. My favourite skincare item
Today it’s still Clinique Clarifying Lotion #2 (in the purple bottle). I love the way the menthol leaves a tingle on my face. Also, in general I think the toning is really working well. My face feels nice and scrubbed after toning. Worth every cent. All 2,900 of them.
