hell indeed hath no fury like a woman scorned

for the past month my family and neighbour number one have been tolerating the infuriating plant-with-the-protruding-branch neighbour number two has.



see that?!? either you duck beneath the branch or twist into some impressive acrobatic shape to avoid the damm shoot.

but i had a brilliant, beyond brilliant, idea.

i cut the branch away.



there you go! now we can all walk straight without having to resort to back-breaking contortions - not very advisable for an old man like my father.

money money money (it's a rich man's world)

i have half a mind to kill my study plans and get a job instead. why not? a riffle through saturday's Recruit tantalizes with all those would-be opportunities. why should i spend the next two years of my life in the (beautiful) city of Perth getting a degree that would need an entire lifetime's work to pay off?

every meeting with my counselor at IDP ends up with me - i mean my parents - forking over either their credit card or cheque paying for something i deem expensive: $45 for hostel application; $533 for a student visa; and this tops the cake: $5 just for applying my visa at IDP - $5 for a process i can do myself at home, $5 because IDP "encourages" you to go down to their office at the high-end orange grove road so your visa application process would be faster and without hickups.

at saturday's pre-departure seminar (where i saw the (handsome) saiful and desiree and where she won a prize in the lucky draw, lol) there were more payments to be made, so what's new? sigh. and this is just the beginning!

i need a high paying job when i graduate, like at certain PR agencies where diploma holders get a starting pay of $2K. or i could embark on a pilgrimage of lifetime study, as the chinese saying goes: 活到老,学到老!

so, godspeed, myself!

die bill gates! DIE!

on inspired days i wager i could probably accomplish more than mr. president himself. fed up with using my sister's knotty fujitsu laptop and being stuck with google and blogger in chinese, i hauled my (gargantuan) ass off the couch and started re-installing all my applications back into my laptop. (i did a reformat about three weeks ago)

what bliss! it's always nice to be back in familiar waters.

but, as a result of the reformat, i had to go through the ardous process of installing windows xp service pack 2 again.

microsoft.com simply is the worst site ever. EVER.

example: i want to download sp2, so i go to "Top Downloads", then select "Windows XP Sp 2", i am brought to this site. what a lot of words! so i scan, there's a heading that says "Get Windows XP Service Pack 2".

Get Windows XP Service Pack 2

• Turn on automatic updates
You can download SP2 and all future critical updates automatically by turning on the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP.

You can also download SP2 from Windows Update. If you cannot use Automatic Updates or download SP2 via Windows Update, order a CD.


ok. pause.

now that i'm already on sp 2 after the initial fiasco. the site works fine. but i swear, while i was still stuck in newly reformatted sp 1, the windows update site doesn't work! i swear! i only got to update using the CD-Rom i'd ordered from microsoft when sp 2 was first released.

anyway, rants aside, i'm a happy camper now. :) i never thought i'd see blogger in english again!

c'est fantastique

remember the jazzy, sung-in-french commercial about singtel's 3loGy? it's also the commercial where camera men got sea sick, where the bumboat driver became a well-heeled professional for a day, where professional golfers were filmed and where manhunt winner jon johnson starred.

i must be one of the last ones to post about this: singtel has very nicely provided the video clip and mp3 on their website for downloading's sake.

magnifique
chanson d’amour, cherie
c'est fantastique
comme on chante de nos coeurs


so now we can all have magnifique as our ringtones, huh. gone were the days where horrible monophonic tunes blared at unforgiving levels. now, it's techno beats at mp3 quality! what a revolution!

note: my sister's laptop somehow configures blogger in chinese. so i'm not understanding it very well, thus the missing layout. don't panic, i might have the site back in a few months. :)

i stopped by the polyclinic monday morning for another round of prescription. it's more cost effective this way, compared to buying medication at our handsome family doctor, they're daylight robbers.

it's a good thing mum is, as her nametag says, a medical technologist at the polyclinic. i only had to spend 10 minutes for consultation - no queue no hassle. is that cool or what? plus, mum allowed me to jump the line. my number, 2051, took its turn when the counter was only at 2003. heh. :)

because i am leaving for perth, mum thought to ask for a longer prescription; usually i get one or two months, depending on the doctor. this time,



well that's 12 months.

excuse me i think i need to sit for a while. my nerves aren't well.

my boss has a client who is colour blind. he also looks like glenn ong's long-lost brother but that's not the point.

this client, he mixes the greens and reds so while these colours look weird to him, others are fine. however, when he briefs my boss on how he wants his artwork to be, haha, what a disaster. let's just say if we were not supposed to at least make some executive decisions to contrast his directions, his company will be in deep shit.

anyway, i think it's a good thing he was diagnosed somewhere during his lifetime. imagine being colour blind and being completely in the dark. it's like someone suddenly came up to me and said my site is red, my eyes are brown, my hair is black, the traffic lights are green, the sky is blue, the ocean is pink, and my skin is beige.

come on! those are green, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow and white respectively!

right?

the world under my mouseclick

saturday was a productive day at work indeed. being alone in the office does have its perks.

i scanned an entire world map, which came up to 16 pieces,



and then stitched the pieces together on photoshop.

the result?



it's not easy okay. the pieces don't join as readily as i would have liked them to, albeit it was nice to have the world map tremble with fear from my airbrush -- one quick sweep and poof! be gone, maldives! hahaha!

So HELLO, HELLO

Have you seen the new Mercedes A-Class commercial on the tv this past week? you know, the one with the song that goes:

Hello, hello,
Here I am, here I go
Yeah, yeah
I got love to give
And I got dreams to live
So hello, hello


i had a hunch that the song was sang by Christina Aguilera, i mean, her powerful vocals are very recognizable, there aren't much singers who can belt out such tunes while remaining that diminutive.

a quick search on google confirmed my suspicions:

Christina Aguilera endorsing Mercedes A-class

C. Ag’s new tune “Hello” will be juxtaposed exclusively with the forthcoming launch of the new Merc A-class. The song supposedly has something to do with MB’s latest marketing ploy, which makes heavy use of the catchphrase “Follow your own star.” No doubt the song will be laden with clichés about self-confidence and being true to yourself and never letting go of dreams and other crap like that. Regarding the partnership, J. Justus Schneider, MB’s head marketing guy said, “The A-Class underlines the importance of believing in success in order to truly achieve it. Christina Aguilera lives and breathes this philosophy and truly follows her own star.” This marks the first time that the words “Christina Aguilera” and “class” have ever been used together in the same thought.

(read full entry here)

that song has caught me, imagine using it as my ringtone:

"So HELLO, HELLO!"

"hello?"