Once more, with feeling
30/03/2004
Taking the good with the bad
First, dinner last night. My friend drove down and picked me from the hotel to bring me to Tanto, a spiffy Japanese Restaurant just a few blocks from House of Tofu on El Camino Real. The real hiccup was that there were 2 Tantos in the area, and only the other Tanto (on Saratoga) was listed on Yellow Pages. We ended up at the wrong Tanto, and had to scour around for the real one after several phone calls and a lot of patience.
The real Tanto took some looking for but it was worth it. The Yaki Onigiri was the best thing.
The mouth watering grilled rice patty
Who’d have guessed that a grilled rice patty would taste so good? Topped with a sprinkling of fish killies, Ikura and chives, the crispy and fragrant rice patty hides a devilish secret – fish roe on the inside. It was a real treat! It smells so good, and just melts in your mouth.
Sardine Tempura
What looks like snails is actually a Sardine Tempura – sardines wrapped in Nori, coated in tempura flour and deep fried into balls. I didn’t try this as I was stuffed to the brim.
We also ordered a serving of grilled butter mushrooms in foil (I love this), some sashimi, and tempura udon. The sashimi probably did me in, I was feeling good yesterday and had some. 
Foosball
I played foosball with some of the photos engineers today. One of them came up to say hi at the cafeteria, so we arranged for a game. I also ran into Craig who tried to arrange a game, but it didn’t happen due to scheduling conflicts. We played 2 games – and my team won both. To qualify – the photos engineers aren’t what they call the “Grade A” players, they’re much like us. I was a little surprised at the engineer who said hi, when I met him last year over the foosball table he made the snidest remarks, and I made it a point to ignore him each time.
Well, I think I can forgive someone over a game of foosball, so we will play again on Friday. Will try to play Craigey again then.
On the flipside
My day started out bad, again I woke up at 4am, but managed to sleep a little bit after that. However, the stomach condition was bad again today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, it will be a long day for sure.
Touchdown
28/03/2004
Here in Sunnyvale
After a damn long flight. This conference had better be worth it. Temperature is really nice, it’s around 12-15 degrees celsius. Tomorrow looks nice and warm.
The plane ride
The 3.5 hours to Hong Kong passed by quickly enough, I didn’t even get to finish Love Actually (which by the way, is a really funny movie). What annoys me is that the overhead compartments are so high, I can hardly reach it. And those uselessly skinny stewardesses in their manicured hands and perfect hair always look around at other people when I ask them to give me a hand with putting the hand luggage in there. And some poor guy sitting around the area will feel bad for me and do it.
The long and winding queues
At US immigration and customs was unbelievable. I would’ve taken a photo, but I didn’t want to come off looking suspicious. They’re already so touchy about everything. It took me 45 minutes to get out of immigration (for just 2 minutes for the guy to stamp my passport), and another 20 minutes to get out of customs. It was unbelievable, the sheer number of people and the number of stops and checks they had.
Anyway, after dinner (with some of KF’s family) I caught a ride back to Sunnyvale, and got all set up. The room is kind of nice and large (king sized bed!). Suitably comfortable, but not something I’d expect from a Sheraton. There’s no minibar (no fridge), no safe. But on the other hand, I’ve a room that overlooks the pool.
Check out the pool view
That’s my work area. It’s quite pleasant.
High speed internet connection is available for $9.95 for 24 hours. Skype has worked out really well – conference mode is great for rowdy chats. Been using it to chat with friends.
Ok time to wind down from all the days activities. The office is close enough to the office for me to walk there, but I’ll take the shuttle tomorrow and see how it goes from there.
Timing myself
26/03/2004
They say the key to comedy is timing, so if you get it wrong, does it make it a tragedy?
Will be in the US next week
So yeah, finally got my trip approved. And I can’t tell you how much I enjoy making totally last minute frantic arrangements to get the hotel room fixed up, figuring how to travel around Silicon Valley (without driving), fixing up meetings ahead so I’m sure I’ll have enough “face time”. I also immensely enjoy spending too much time holed up in rooms disagreeing with stupid-ass WC. All in all, I’m in a great place. And what’s more, I’m really so looking forward to this trip, which is basically a lame-ass excuse for us to go there to ask people to grant favours, and not really for the conference. Who cares about product conferences, right? No one does anything constructive there.
It’s a waste of time.
So yeah. Sunnyvale here I come, puking and purging as I go along, since I feel like pure and utter crap. But it’s ok. Anything to get the job done. Heck, I’m sure I’m going to be handsomely rewarded for my efforts!
Because life is fair. And things work they way they should, and the guys running the show always know best. I’m lucky to have people like that in charge. Ahhh… life is good.
What a half-wit boredom makes of me
25/03/2004
First things first
Welcome back to heat, humidity, sudden torrential downpours and good clean Geylang ! Hope you had a good time. Now can you update your blog?
Boy, was it a long day
Could it get any longer? I slept badly, woke up early and dragged my sorry ass to work to slog it out. It wasn’t very long before I set some geranium and lemon in the burner. It worked pretty well.
The highlight of my day was sitting in the room with Walking Carcinogen and saying that what he proposed we did was to me, “rape and plunder”. All hell broke loose and I was immediately subjected to the North-South-East-West of I’m not sure you’re familiar with how we count our revenues and let me explain how we keep the office in the black followed by I’m not sure if you got any of that and let me put it in layman’s terms for you without skipping a beat. I do admit I was pushing it with my choice of words, but it was amusing nonetheless to see the fallout.
In my mind, there is no question that this is an issue of greed. But if the business allows itself to be propelled this way, it ought to fail. So in the end, everything works out. And that’s cool with me.
At peace with myself again
Right now I’ve 4 drops Lavender, 4 drops Rosemary and 2 drops Clary Sage burning. It’s quite refreshing. I’m looking forward to shopping in the afternoon with Sharks and a short day. I figure, if I don’t give a shit, really, the person who suffers is the Walking Carcinogen. What can he do besides, scream, shout, threaten, cajole, insist, and ultimately if it comes to that, fire? The beauty is that the downside is relatively small for me, and it’s strangely comforting.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
~ Neil Gaiman, Sandman
The unexplained mysteries of life
24/03/2004
Some light entertainment
Yesterday KT stumbled upon this site which left us in stitches the whole day. Perhaps it’s an entire Asian thing, not just the Singapore thing. But it’s all too funny.
I hate it when the timings all wrong
Ever have the situation where when you want something and you don’t know if you’ll get it even though you should ‘cos of one shithead reason or another? So you try and psyche yourself for the worst. And enough time passes where you can actually give up hope that it’s ever happening, and you’re cool with it, since if no one cares, why should you? And then it will come to pass that the option again presents itself, this time when you’re not half as enthusiastic anymore – but you’ve to make yourself jump through hoops to justify having that something, now you don’t even really want it. Ever? Well. It friggin sucks. I know it’s not worth feeling pissed over that piece of crap, spawn of something gross, walking carcinogen (incidentally, that’s “WC” and he’s that too). But I just am. This feeling of futility is just killing me.
Weekends are for eating and sleeping
22/03/2004
I ate and slept, got up and did it all again
This afternoon we went to Orchard to find a nice lunch, and ended up the Crystal Jade’s Korean restaurant.
So I guess you can call it a good day. After lunch, we got some of them Famous Amos cookies (yes we are such pigs) and headed to Wheelock Place to check Borders and Marks and Sparks out. By the time we had to leave for dinner at my folk’s place it was 6.05pm, the sky was dark and it threatened to totally rain out. The rumbling had to be a sign. We walked out to try and find a cab, and got into one as we walked up to Patterson Road. If we hadn’t caught it, we’d have been stuck and it would’ve been my fault cos it was my bright idea to head towards Patterson Road. Just after we got into the cab, torrential hell broke loose and it just poured. How’s that for lucky?
Random stuff
Well, looks like I’m not the only one sick of Friendster (but probably for different reasons). Apparently online socialising isn’t for everyone. Gee, where do these reporters get that idea from?
And wow, looks like Intel is going to start naming their chips like cars makers do. So you can expect Intel to name their chips Intel Superfast instead of Intel Pentium 4. I bet they’re just doing that so they won’t have to worry about the Pentium 5, which would make it sound so dumb. I’d like Intel to name their chips like cosmetic companies name their skincare products. Try an Intel Have a Nice Day or an Intel Lucidity today! Then maybe your workday wouldn’t suck so bad, and things might make sense for a change.
Saturday afternoon lethargy
21/03/2004
I think I believe everything Bryan Adams says
Don’t you? Ok – you can ignore that if you’re a guy. But each time he sings, it always feels like he’s singing to me, that must be good, right? All those American Idol contestants sound like they’re singing at a karaoke lounge.
Things move quicker with fewer friends
So Friendster finally got around to improving their service. It works much faster now (they caught up with everyone else!) so you don’t have to wait endlessly for a page to load or to just go back. They did, however, cut your network of friends to just 3 degrees (the connections aren’t so prominently displayed past 3 degrees). I knew it. The answer to efficiency is fewer friends.
A couple of months ago I pretty much nailed the rule when it came down to judging a friendster profile by the photo. As with most rules (ok, more of a guideline) as long as I’m right 80% of the time, I think it works. But this was it: how to tell the sexual orientation (described in the Interested in meeting people for: section of the profile) from a photo.
If it’s a guy, with larger than usual biceps, and in a singlet – he’s probably interested in meeting people for: Friends, Dating (Men), Serious Relationship (Men), Activity Partners. Some variations of this: he’s in a tee shirt, but it’s tight. The tee shirt/ singlet is usually white, or gray. Most times the picture is taken in what appears to be a bedroom. There is the odd outdoor photo, too. But you’ll see the biceps, and sometimes abs, featuring prominently.
Perhaps this is the problem with having few friends – there really isn’t very much to do on these social networking sites, is there? Yeah, you can send people a message and say Hi to friends of friends. But how often are you going to do that, if you’ve kept your list to your usual 20 pals and don’t intend to go further?
I think this would be killer – they should make it possible to rate a photo/friend. So Orkut already kind of does it with the fans system. You also rate your friend’s based on coolness, reliability and sexiness (one for each segment that Orkut is trying to cover – social networking, business networking, personals). But that’s way too serious for Friendster. Right now, there’s no real incentive for someone to keep going back right? Yeah, rating a photo will be fun. I know I’ll keep going back to rate – there’re some photos I’m just dying to rate 
.
Getting up early, train rides, and Ethan
19/03/2004
Survivor Update
The latest casualty in the real-est reality show was Ethan Zohn, Mr Survivor Africa. I am upset that he got voted out, he was fun to watch because he was usually 2 steps behind. Nonetheless, he sucked it up like a man when he knew it was him, and left gracefully.
Waking up is hard to do
Am in surprisingly good spirits even though I slept like maybe 5.5 hours last night and got up too freaking early! It was a nice train ride to the office, given it was rush hour (or perhaps remnants of it). I am beginning to enjoy the morning commute, I think it’s because of the MP3 player, and feeling like I’m back in school again. It’s been 6 weeks since I gave up the cab routine and so far it’s been fabulous. Even that time when I stupidly took the wrong train and only noticed 3 stops down, and the ride in the right direction kept stopping every 5 minutes.
New Loot!
I couldn’t resist, and opened my new loot today! Couple of days back I went shopping with Sharks and this is what I got:
Make a Difference Skin Rejuvenating Treatment (aka moisturiser)
I *really* like this one. The texture of this is like Clinique’s Moisture Surge. It’s kind of gel like and light. Unlike Moisture Surge, it doesn’t leave your skin sticky. It leaves a fantastic satiny feeling like A Perfect World White Tea Guardian does. I like it so far, will report how it feels in the morning.
20 March 04, 11am or thereabouts: Nice feeling still on skin. Not sticky or oily. Feels soft and well rested.
Night-a-mins Moisture Lotion (aka moisturiser)
I haven’t found anything I like better than the smell of Night-a-mins before bed. It’s really relaxing, and it helps me end the work day.
Well, I’m getting off the internet now
To get back to wood pulp and glue. My reading backlog has now burgeoned to
· Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman. Which came first – the movie or the book? In this case, the movie (the script to be precise). Both are good.
· The Ultimate Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams. Supposed to contain answers.
· Unfinished Tales- The Lost Lore of Middle-earth – J.R.R. Tolkien. In a bid to make sense of everything.
· One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Apparently highly comic, and deeply tragic at the same time. My kind of thing.
· The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany. Fantasy probably began here.
· The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It got a little sappy, and I stopped, but I’ll get to it!
· The Rape of Nanking – Iris Chang. Nothing like a little Chinese History.
- while I take my time to savour Good Omens again.
The Gaimans on the way:
· The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish
· Angels and Visitations
In my wishlist:
· Signal to Noise – Gaiman and Dave McKean! Should be awesome.
· Coraline – this should be the last Gaiman for now
· 1984 – George Orwell. Looked good in the Apple Ad.
· The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie .
I really need to read everything before a fire breaks out or something…
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
19/03/2004
Lunch adventure
No curry in a hurry for me today, I went to a curry place and had a salad. It looked good:
V’s salad
It was nice, they leave the dressing separate. I’d prefer to have romaine lettuce in my salads, though. I’m not much of an iceberg fan. It’s tasteless and fibreless. Maybe I should’ve gotten a caesar. But I don’t like the dressing.
The place was generally pleasant, although I preferred the Moon River half to the Curry Favor half where we were. I also would’ve gone with something other than sentimental piano pops, but we can’t have it all, can we?
V & YW – just like starting over
So here’s V and his buddy from way back, YW. V felt this need to help make small talk between YW and I, which was nice. I don’t like to have to eat, think and phrase. I like watching it happen, and those 2 just keep going. If it was for my benefit, thanks that was mighty sweet of you.
I’d put my bets on them both being like a couple in a previous life. But since there’s no real way to verify that, I’m also betting they will deny it.
Dinner adventure
Dinner with Annie and SL x2. We ate at Sketches, which is Annie’s default place. I didn’t enjoy my meal enough to want to take pictures of it, the pasta was sticky and soggy. I’m not going back.
We got Annie this for her birthday pressie:
It smells really pleasant, clean-linen with a hint of honey, not floral, or heavy, or too saccharine sweet. It was a light, almost there, totally natural scent that I couldn’t resist – it was really quite Annie. The only thing that was a little weird about it was the packaging. The whimsical ice cream tub thing was so un-L’Occitane. Also picked up a Linden Honey Hexagonal Soap to go along. It smelled totally like the gentle water, so that was cool.
I love the stuff at L’Occitane – I just can’t figure out how to pronounce that name. Do I pronounce it like it reads in English (thereby giving you a very unglamourous “ler-or-ki-tane”)? Whatever it is, the next chance I get I’m going to get something from the Verbena range of products. The cologne smells fantastic, not like lemon, where you get a citrusy but oily sweet rich smell. Verbena is crisper, more refreshing and less sweet. That scent magically transports you to a better place in your head. Where the grass is greener, the spaces are wider, the life is freer and the days are worryless.
Who am I?
18/03/2004
Quizas, quizas, quizas
So yesterday I stumbled upon this quiz. And it said this about me:
You are Coraline! You are quirky, strange, and charming. Some people may find you a little alarming and not always get you… But they can piss off, right? You are the kind of person who always needs to be entertained, otherwise you get uncomfortable. You probably still enjoy everything you did when you were little, such as childrens books and Disney movies. Youre fun to be around and are usually the life of the party.
*~Which Neil Gaiman book are you?~* brought to you by Quizilla
Piqued, I went to the “Most Popular” page and found more fun quizzes, the most notable being:
You are going to marry Brad Pitt. He is always friendly to anybody he ever meets and he is very talented as an actor. He is also very sincere and friendly. He will respect you until the day he dies. Congrats!!
Which male celebrity are you going to marry? brought to you by Quizilla
I always knew Brad Pitt had a thing for me.
