mrbrown: L'infantile terrible of Singapore

Good English Cool!

In a recent newspaper interview on the Speak Good English Movement, Professor Koh Tai Ann, Chairman of the movement, said:

"We would need workers who can communicate with not only the non-Singaporeans among us but all the visitors we are attracting to Singapore — tourists, those who come for conventions, meetings and so on. It would so ironic if we find many Singaporeans' English not suitable and we have to bring in foreign workers to work in these industries who can speak better English than we do."

Dunno whether correct or not but a Sammyboy forum chap made some corrections to the quote, in the spirit of good Englishing:

We would need workers who can communicate not only with not only (poor sequence) the (article unnecessary) non-Singaporeans among us but all (all is hyperbole) also the visitors we are attracting attract (present tense is used since article suggest future rather than current events) to Singapore — tourists, those who come for conventions conventioneers (why use 5 words when one suffices?) people attending meetings and so on. It would so be (choice of word) ironic if we find many Singaporeans' our (my stylistic choice) non-standard (better choice of word) English not suitable and we have compels us to bring in foreign workers who can (unnecessary) speak better English than we do can (polish up phrase sequencing; "can" a better choice than "do" as it denotes ability) to work in these industries.

------------------------------------------------------------
Bold Red: inserted word/phrase.
Italicised Blue: explanation of the correction.
strikeout: deleted portion.

Channel 8 does a CNA too

Hey, where did Tiger go?

More technical bloopers from our TV networks network.

(Youtube text link here.)

via everlyn

Channel NewsAiyah

Update: As littlecartnoodles pointed out, bloopers can happen very easily in a live environment, but this is a rerun of a Live recording. Hey, maybe they liked the blooper so much, they just had to share it again later in the day mah! Heheh.

Doodeedoodeedoo doodeedoodeedoo... (thought balloon: I can now talk casual because the mixer is supposed to cut away to something before cutting back to studio, so I can chill...) doodeedoodeedoo...

(Youtube text link here.)

via Tomorrow.sg

Letter from MICA: Distorting the truth, mr brown?

There is a MICA letter in TODAY, today, in response to my latest Friday column, S'poreans are fed, up with progress!.

Voices, TODAY newspaper, Monday, July 3, 2006:

Distorting the truth, mr brown?

When a columnist becomes a 'partisan player' in politics

Letter from K BHAVANI
Press Secretary to the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts

Your mr brown column, "S'poreans are fed, up with progress!" (June 30) poured sarcasm on many issues, including the recent General Household Survey, price increases in electricity tariffs and taxi fares, our IT plans, the Progress Package and means testing for special school fees.

The results of the General Household Survey were only available after the General Election. But similar data from the Household Expenditure Survey had been published last year before the election.

There was no reason to suppress the information. It confirmed what we had told Singaporeans all along, that globalisation would stretch out incomes.

mr brown must also know that price increases in electricity tariffs and taxi fares are the inevitable result of higher oil prices.

These were precisely the reasons for the Progress Package — to help lower income Singaporeans cope with higher costs of living.

Our IT plans are critical to Singapore's competitive position and will improve the job chances of individual Singaporeans. It is wrong of mr brown to make light of them.

As for means testing for special school fees, we understand mr brown's disappointment as the father of an autistic child. However, with means testing, we can devote more resources to families who need more help.

mr brown's views on all these issues distort the truth. They are polemics dressed up as analysis, blaming the Government for all that he is unhappy with. He offers no alternatives or solutions. His piece is calculated to encourage cynicism and despondency, which can only make things worse, not better, for those he professes to sympathise with.

mr brown is entitled to his views. But opinions which are widely circulated in a regular column in a serious newspaper should meet higher standards. Instead of a diatribe mr brown should offer constructive criticism and alternatives. And he should come out from behind his pseudonym to defend his views openly.

It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the Government's standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics.

Dr M is Da Bomb

Ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed said in a speech recently:

"...(the) MIGs are given, are sold to us without any condition, if you feel like bombing Singapore, for example, the Russians are not going to object.

[laughter]

Any Singaporeans here? Or ex-Singaporeans?"

Dr M continues in the later part of the speech:

...but this great aircraft called F-18, which we bought from America, after buying it, after several months, I got to know that this aircraft cannot be used for any attacks against any country, even if this is not Singapore.

Upon watching this video clip on Youtube, a Malaysian friend of ours said, "Every country has its Bush."

Top rated referee in the World Cup at soccernet today

Reader Hairul sent me this link at Soccernet where Shamsul Maidin has been rated top World Cup referee for today (June 23, 2006).

Check it out here (screencap) and here (screencap).

Go Shamsul!

爱到才知痛

I was watching the trailer for Singapore Idol last night with the fake audience cheering/clapping track attempting to hide the obviously bad singing of the girls in that group, and asked my wife, is this the William Hung segment or are we into the talented batch already?

Speaking of painful, love can also be painful, as this Singapore girl, princessgx, reminds us, by singing a Hokkien classic a capella beautifully on Youtube. The song is 爱到才知痛 "You'll Only Know Pain After You Have Loved".

I hear already my bak sai also lao, man.

(Text link here)

Why Japanese TV shows kick our TV shows in the balls

To quote a reservist motto: Good shit must share.

Ok, gather your office mates around a PC (or my 17-inch iMac, in our case), make the Youtube screen fullscreen, turn up the sound, and just watch these two video clips, the Portaloo video (above) and the other one. Trust me, it will be worth taking a few minutes off your day to enjoy these two clips together.

Our mouths are still smarting from the laughter.

And I am never using a Japanese portaloo. Ever.

Singapore beats Malaysia and North Korea in World Democracy audit

I am sorry to find this out so late, but it is my pleasure to announce that Singapore beat Malaysia and a host of other countries like Uganda, Dem. Rep. of the Congo and Sierra Leone. We were number 83 out of 149 positions, a good number ahead of Malaysia's 93rd position. We almost beat Mauritania (81st) and Bhutan (82nd) too. Better luck next time!

Go Singapore!

See the whole thing here.

Of course we all know that these freedom indexes are compiled by people with too much free time in their hands, and who do not have a clue about the unique conditions of Singapore.

But we beat Malaysia! Yeah!

(News of our win courtesy of Mr Wang)

MOE ad seen in The Guardian newspaper

Quick, native speakers of English! You have one more day to apply to Mould the Future of Our Nation!

Sorry, you Singaporean native speakers will not get a relocation allowance if you are living in Jurong and need to teach in Punggol. Actually you cannot even apply, because the ad is for a UK audience.

I particularly liked the precise way they described some of the requirements:

...Humanities (e.g. English Literature, Geography, History, etc.)

...English (e.g. PGCE, TESOL, TEFL, etc.)

...or relevant teaching subject (e.g. Geography, History, etc.)

Etc., etc., etc.

The ad in The Guardian's classifieds:

Organisation: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION SINGAPORE

Location: Asia & Australasia
Salary:
Date posted: 15 May 2006
Closing date: 15 Jun 2006

Ministry of Education
Moulding the Future of Our Nation

Be Different.
Teach in Singapore.

The Ministry of Education (Singapore) is looking for experienced, qualified native speakers of English to teach English as a first language, English Literature, Geography, History, Knowledge and Inquiry

We are looking for teachers who:
- Hold a relevant degree in English Language or Humanities (e.g. English Literature, Geography, History, etc.)
- Have a recognised Teaching Certificate in teaching English (e.g. PGCE, TESOL, TEFL, etc.) or relevant teaching subject (e.g. Geography, History, etc.)

Newly qualified teachers are encouraged to apply but they MUST have completed the induction year.

You can look forward to:
- An attractive remuneration package (including medical and dental benefits, and bonus upon successful completion of contract), depending on qualifications and verifiable working experience
- Relocation allowance (one-time baggage and lodging allowance, free economy air passage for candidate, spouse and 2 children below the age of 18 to Singapore on first appointment)
- Return air passage upon successful completion of contract
- Interest-free settling-in loan

You can view the video recording of our online career seminar held on 23 April 2006 on the website.

All terms and conditions are subject to review and change from time to time without prior notification. The Ministry of Education (Singapore) reserves the right to decide on the terms and conditions to be offered. No reasons will be provided for selection and non-selection of candidates.

All gay people take drugs one

At least that's the impression I got from this article. So all you promising doctors take note. Wait you become unpromising then you know.

Maybe when they are done catching the promising doctors who descend into the downward spiral of "gay sex and drugs", they can start catching the ones who descend into the downward spiral of straight sex and drugs.

And last on the list would be those who don't have sex at all, but take drugs.

Big Fat Duh disclaimer: mr brown is not suggesting that you take illegal drugs. Nor is he promoting or unpromoting gay sex, for that matter.

Lame slogan of the week

"My Life, My Copyright"?!!

What the the?

I keep having a mental picture of Kelly Poon saying (cue random funky music), "Yes, I am the kind who lives life MY way, because I am so original. And I hate people to copy me lor! Because... "My Life, My Copyright!"

Ok, gentle readers. For our project this week, go around saying "My Life, My Copyright!" in as many situations as you can. Report the reactions you get here in the comments section.

Go! Now! Because My Life, My Copyright!

We "scratched" your car, haha

Ad agency comes with interesting guerilla marketing by sticking transparent decals with scratches on cars. Accompanying the faux scratches? A message: "Call (Company X) at (XXX XXXX) or visit Paya Lebar Road for all your car grooming needs."

They also have a "wanker" and a "bird shit" version of the sticker.

Hmm, clever. But frankly, if I catch anyone trying to stick any kind of sticker or decal on my car's bodywork, he is probably going to get some unpleasant reaction from me. And I am also very unlikely to patronise a car grooming company that let their agency do shit like this to my car.

Flyers on my windshield, I can barely tolerate. Sticking stuff, especially advertising stuff, on my car? You've got to be kidding.

via creativecriminal from Chennai, India.

The first rule of Fight Club is — you do not talk about Fight Club

(If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club.

The second rule of Fight Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. But you can film it with your mobile phone.

Third rule of Fight Club, someone yells "你不要在那边做 l*n j**o pattern leh!" you start fighting.

Fourth rule, make sure none of your three mobile phone cameramen uploads the video to Youtube.

Fifth rule, let's fight like real men, in the school toilet. Because if fight outside, wait the teacher catch us then how?

Sixth rule, shirt pulling is allowed, heck, while you're at it, why don't you biatches pull each other's hair and bite too? Bitch slap him, boy. "I hate you I hate you I hate you!" (sobs)

Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to. Or until recess is over, whichever comes first.

And the eighth and final rule, wash your hands after you fight in the school toilet.

Choice quotes from the video:

"Fight leh, fight leh!"

"Sian leh, 快点 leh!"

"Wah lau, start lah!"

You can tell this is a film with high production standards. It was a THREE-Mobile-Camera Shoot. And years from now, one of the boys may look at this video and realise that he was only fighting himself. Yes, Grayson and Darren were the SAME BOY!

I wonder why this short did not win at the 7th Schools Video Awards organised by the MOE.

Must have lost on the sound engineering. Too much echo. And the cinematography also a little weak (must focus mah). I did like the last scene, when one of the boys pushed one of the fighters against the wall. Very original.

via Lancerlord

Baffled cabbie gets interviewed on BBC news as IT expert

Update 2: BBC interviews both, er, Guys

Update 1: Reader Nick informs me that the dude was not a cabbie but a Business Studies graduate, Guy Goma (ya, same first name), from the Congo, applying for a high level IT job with the BBC (more here from the blog of the real Guy J Kewney). Thanks Nick!

This is the look of a man who knows he is in over his head.

This black taxi driver was mistakenly interviewed by the BBC, who thought he was an IT expert named Guy Kewney — a WHITE, bearded technology expert — who was supposed to speak on online music.

The dude even gamely tried to answer the questions posed to him by the reporter. You have to watch the video of the interview (also viewable at Youtube). That look on his face was priceless. In the transcript of the interview, it was described as Face of horror.

ROTFLMAO.

Excerpt:

A computer expert has described his astonishment at seeing the BBC's 24-hour news channel interview a taxi driver — in the mistaken belief it was him.

Guy Kewney — a white, bearded technology expert — was astonished to see himself appear on screen as a black man with an apparent French accent. He was even more shocked to see himself unable to answer basic questions about the legal battle between the Beatles' Apple Corps and Apple Computer over the use of an apple symbol.

Cookie Monster does some soul searching

COOKIE MONSTER SEARCHES DEEP WITHIN HIMSELF AND ASKS: IS ME REALLY MONSTER?

Me know. Me have problem.

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn't normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

(From McSweeney's)

Mr Tur Kwa the Forum Avatar and my new No-walkover Poll

Wah, Mr Tur Kwa is also found in forum avatars now. Wow. Liver was never this popular.

And I was thinking, since many of you did not have a chance to vote in this election, here is a poll so that you can exercise your vote on a critical issue that affects all our lives...

Jeff Lopez vs Bak Chor Mee man (Youtube)

Wah so fast the spoofs come out already ah! Check out this funny clip at Youtube, done by Jerzy8! He also did a tribute to Jeff Lopez, The Man and His Ideas, in this other post of his.

(If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

From the author: A tribute to mrbrown.com's Jeff Lopez, the man and his ideas. Long live tur kwa!

Long live tur kwa indeed. Hahaha!

Honey, I Blew Up the Matter

Update: I just love some of the suggestions by your readers! You guys are more bo liao than me!

Minority Report: Everybody Runs

Dude, Where's My Form?

Fight Club

From Singapore's premier online news service, Sammyboy's Al Fresco Coffee Shop (requires registration):

These are some film/book titles inspired by the James Gomez Saga:

I Not Submit

The Wayang

Rebel without a Form

The Form, the Envelope & the Certificate


I had a few of my own:

Sorry Not Enough

The Form, The Liar and the CCTV

Star Wars Episode 4: Return of the Form

Sorry, I could not resist. Ok, ok. I'll move on.

DDOS attack on my host

Update: Fixed.

Sorry for the intermittent uptime of this site. My provider, Typepad is having some technical problems.

From the Typepad status blog:

Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.

I am sure they filled out their forms properly. We'll have to wait for the footage from their CCTVs before we can confirm that.

Jon Stewart pwnage on CNN's Crossfire (Youtube)

Another classic clip by Jon Stewart when he bitchslapped the team from CNN's Crossfire, in October last year. To quote a commenter, Jon went "on someone else's show, live, told them they suck and proved it". That is pwnage indeed. (If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

Can also be seen at Media Matters for America and ifilm.com.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on blogs (Youtube)

A little old but still very funny clip from The Daily Show on bloggers, broadcast in Feb last year. (If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

Can also be seen in Quicktime at a mirror here.

So CNA got podcast or no?

Ey? The CNA doing videocasts for GE piece that Miyagi referenced seems to be spoil liao.

Never mind, can read it here:

Tuesday April 25, 10:17 PM
CNA: Videocasts on GE to be available on Channel NewsAsia website

SINGAPORE : Videocasts of the General Election, shot using 3G mobile phones, will be available on the Channel NewsAsia website everyday starting from Nomination Day.

These clips will be produced by bloggers representing both the pre- and post-independence generations.

"Here (with videocasting), you can put a little bit of your own personal comments and see whether you are convinced by the issues being argued," said blogger and Channel NewsAsia producer Au Yong May Lin.

"I'm trying to capture a different angle of the elections, something that is more colourful, something noisier and funnier," said blogger Farid Johari, Channel NewsAsia art director.

What viewers will also be seeing is news as it happens on the ground, as the bloggers will be uploading their clips on the Channel NewsAsia website instantaneously.

Simi is "I am the Law"?

Seth asked in a previous post where in DoTA do you hear "I am the Law!" and wondered, "What version you playing, man?"

In answer to the version of the DotA map we play (and no, sixphere, it is not 5.84b), it is currently DotA Allstars v 6.30b, which I think is a little buggy.

I am surprised, I thought everyone would recognise the voice of Mortred the Phantom Assassin (see annoying animated gif on the left), which is based on the Warden in Warcraft 3. Here are some of her other quotes.

"I am the iron hand of justice."
"Let the hunt begin."
"Understood."
"I can taste their fear."
"Justice shall be swift."
"They shall not escape!"
"Let justice be served!"
"I am the law."

I have to say that my favorite quotes are from the two-headed Aggron Stonebreaker the Orge Magi, who says:

Head 1: "I'm with stupid."
Head 2: "Me too!"

And the quote from Slithice the Naga Siren, who says:

"Would you like to feel the ocean spray in your face? (spits)"

Crazy traffic and pedestrians in India on Youtube

I never wanna drive here, or even cross the street.

Watch for the white car from the top right. That guy champion.

(If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

Do NOT enter your email passwords into PlayBingoLive!

Please hor! Do not respond to emails asking you for your email addresses and PASSWORDS! I have been getting a lot of these emails from compromised email accounts out there.

There has been a recent one going around where the email subject says "Check it out", and in the email body, it says "Sign up so we can play". Some people actually clicked on the link in the email, and worse, filled in the blanks with their email addresses and PASSWORDS!!!

When you do that, the spammer has access to your email account, and proceeds to email EVERYONE in your address book with the same spam email.

Mr Miyagi did it, and all his Gmail contacts kena (he has since changed his password), both my email accounts kena from his one mistake. Fortunately, I ignored the emails.

I know of at least one person who not only entered her password into the page, she stayed around and PLAYED BINGO for a while, wondering why nothing happened! In fact, she played for a long time, and wondered why Mr Miyagi did not come online to play Bingo with her.

Then again, this is the same girl who, many years ago, upon receiving an email encoded with an autoplaying sound file of Mr Miyagi saying "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?", actually leaned forward and talked back to her computer.

Kua kua..

This is just a current version of this scam. The next ones may have a different message. But the bottomline is to be totally skeptical of sites that ask for your email address passwords. NEVER give those out especially from unsolicited emails.

And don't even get me started on the ebay and paypal phishers.

Titanic 2 spoof trailer on Youtube

Brilliantly done. Jack's back.

(If you cannot view it here, click on this text link to video.)

the mrbrown show is a Popular Odeo!

Zhng My Car from the mrbrown show is mentioned by rabble, Odeo's lead developer (photo of him here), on the Odeo Blog, as one of the most popular odeos.

Thanks for the shoutout, rabble!

Saladin, the animated series

Hot on the heels of Singapore's first 3D animated film, Zodiac, the Race Begins, which screened during Chinese New Year, comes a 3D animated series from Malaysia, called Saladin, based on the life of Salah al-Din Yusuf bin Ayyub. Saladin was one of Islam’s most legendary figures, who united and led Muslim factions in the past.

Funded with a couple million bucks of financial support from the Media Development Authority, Singapore's Zodiac received less-than-stellar reviews, and having seen it at the DVD stores, I am not exactly surprised. But then I read that besides us, some lucky folk from China, Thailand and Eastern Europe will also get to see enjoy it, because Zodiac has been sold to these countries wor.

If you go over to the Saladin site and watch the rather generously long trailer (6 whole minutes!) for the Malaysian series, you cannot help but feel that Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is putting its funding in the right places (more news coverage here and here).

From the trailer, this looks like a series that will rock. Creatively, I have some problems with it, like why does Saladin look like something out of Disney or Dreamworks (kind of a Prince-of-Egypt white-guy version of the man, I feel)? And why does he have to speak English with an "Arabic" accent? I mean, Chinese characters in English cartoons don't speak with a "Chinese" accent, so why should this renowned 12th century Kurdish Muslim warrior speak with that "Middle-Eastern" accent?

My creative misgivings aside, the technical work of this animated series is stunning. Fire and water are rendered with CGI beautifully. Wood flies across the screen as ship meets floating fire bombs. You can feel the weight of the Crusaders' armour pulling them down into the waters as their ships sink from the explosions. It made me mutter, "Wah lau eh, Malaysia really BOLEH, man!"

I wonder, why we can't produce work of this calibre? Is it for the lack of talent? I don't think so, because I have seen some stunning 3D animation work by a local dude done for his polytechnic's final year project. I kid you not. And if I have a chance to, one day I will share it his video clip with you.

Meanwhile, I cannot wait to see the 13-parter series from our northern neighbours. Go Malaysia!

The Singapore Sci-fi Movie you never saw

So we were surfin' around, looking for DVDs to buy, when we came across this title, Cyber Wars, coming out on April 11.

Wah, looks so CYBER (even got the name Cyber in its title), so we watched the trailer loh. Wait! Was that Singaporean actor Lim Kay Siu? Singapore got Sci-fi movie meh?

Well, apparently yes. Seems that Cyber Wars is actually a reworked version of movie named Avatar (IMDB link) which was made in Singapore.

Here is a review (check out the Pokemon badge prop used here) and blog mention of Avatar. Strappingyounglad, the blogger, says "I cant wait to see Avatar... so i can go jam a pencil in my ear and dig out my eyes..."

Can't be that bad, right?

I mean, they have characters with stylo names like heroine bounty hunter, Dash MacKenzie (see the Japan-market Trinity-like poster here), a Cyberpriest, and Goggles Man (NOT related to VR Man, much missed TCS sci-fi TV series).

A friend told me when he watched the movie way back then (he was given free tickets), he noticed that when the actor closed the door of the "sci-fi vehicle", the prop car shook.

Ok, so it was a stinker then. But hey, got Joan Chen half nekkid what. Surely that counts for something.

Engrish menu

Funny until stomach pain. Taken from a real Chinese real menu.

I would like to have an order of Cowboy Leg Beautiful Pole please. Though that plate of Strange Flavor of Inside Freasuse looks tempting too.

More menu fun here.

Sent to me by friend, Sita.

Always check your attachments before hitting Send

"Oh, shoot. Did I just send that internal media briefing document to journalists?"

Cue: heads roll.

via Tomorrow

Excerpt:

A Temasek document, entitled "2006-03 Taurus Q&As" - which was designed to help its executives answer media enquiries on its 12% stake in Standard Chartered - was yesterday sent as an email attachment to some journalists instead of another file. The document contains 59 questions and answers and was prepared by staff to anticipate questions that might arise from the acquisition. Given that Temasek has rarely done Q&As with the media, the exercise represents a somewhat unique insight into what the Singapore state investment agency currently perceives its perceptional issues are and its own stance on these issues. In what follows we have reproduced the entire Q&A section. It is unedited, except to state in square brackets where answers were left blank.

Ministry of Home Affairs calls Ministry of Sound

Maybe the phone lines got static leh, you know, like the telephone got some virus, so when the police said "your party may shut down traffic" it was heard as "your party will be shut down"?

I know how annoying that can be, because everytime I drive into the CTE tunnel at Havelock, my M1 handphone signal will almost always cut.

From: Fridae:

According to Mr. Clement Lee, executive director of Ministry of Sound’s parent company LifeBrandz, Mr Kelvin Yeo, Compliance Management Officer from Tanglin Police called on Friday evening after office hours demanding that the club cancel the event, failing which enforcement officers would come to the club on Sunday to shut the party down. The reason given by the police to Mr. Lee over the telephone was that the party would "promote gay activities."

From TODAY:

A police spokesperson, however, denied that they had intervened in any way.

What they did after receiving "information from the public" about the party on March 24 was to contact the Ministry of Sound's management to "obtain more details" to plan for possible "traffic or law and order situations that might arise".

Said the spokesperson: "At no time did we advise the management of the Ministry of Sound to cancel the event."

Hokkien Speeding song

Thanks to the brilliant Linkmeister, Lancerlord, who found this gem of a Hokkien song, a ditty about the importance of safe driving (no, REALLY).

Stuff like this should become National Treasures, I tell you. Dammit if I knew who sang this, I'd BUY the CD.

As Miyagi says, you must blast it while driving down your favourite expressway.

Zhng My Camp!

I am speechless. Really, jaw dropped. Almost word for word parody of Zhng My Car 1!!! Excellent work! Miyagi and I are just amazed that you guys transcribed the audio script and then acted it out on video! (text link to Youtube page) We are flattered, Cai!

Excerpt:

Got the ideas from mrbrown podcast zhng my car. Created a Zhng my Camp for 33rd Boys Brigade Annual Camp 2005

Like Mr Miyagi, he does not get his car back too

A funny Dr Ken and Bobby Lee (Korean comics from Mad TV) skit on Youtube (text link here for full size). It reminded reader Ray of Mr Miyagi (last seen, er, heard, in our latest podcast, Zhng My Car 7).

Also funny, Dr Ken performs the History of Rap.

Another funny one is comedian Dave Chappelle's parody of Apple's Switch ads on Comedy Central (warning: explicit content). And while you are on ellenfeiss.net, check out the super cute Japanese Switch queen, Momoko Kikuchi.

Rough translation of what Momoko says, from japanesestreets.com:

My old computer was like this huge thing you know. And well, I was writing this e-mail to my friend. I was trying like real hard to do it in English. I was just about done… and it all froze up. Everything I wrote… GONE. Haaaaaaahhhh. I thought ‘this thing is really garbage!’ Now I use a Mac. It never happened to me once yet. Isn’t that like WOW?!” – KIKUCHI Momoko, Student.

FREE Free Culture Show

Free Culture artist and activist Colin Mutchler will be conducting a show on Creative Commons, at Lasalle College of the Arts today. Go and catch his show and learn about this important and exciting issue.

Venue: Lasalle College of the Arts (check out the map), Studio Theatre (ground floor of Performing Arts Block)

Date: Wednesday, 22nd of March (TODAY)

Time: 6.00pm

Mutiny at a cafe

Mutiny by disgruntled employees at this cafe chain called Blenz, in Vancouver, becomes a lightning rod for other employees from the chain. The comments are just as interesting as the post itself.

In this age of the high impact high propagation internet technologies, companies who don't treat their employees well may find all their dirty linen broadcast to the world, overnight.

Also discussed in Livejournal.

Of course, this will never happen in Singapore, because we have such a pro-employee union protecting our interests.

Zhng my Singlish

Wah lau eh, the mrbrown show podcast also can use to teach English language one ok? Steady pom pi pi, man. I damn the flattered, can?

Excerpt:

But the more interesting part was the guest speaker Dr. Chen - where she discussed about "Singlish" haha or Singapore Collq. English (SCE). I was simply 'jaw-locked' when she flashed the properties of Singlish on the slides; she actually catagorised the structures and words used in Singlish into the technical classification of a language. haha.. And she mimically imitated the Singlish style of speaking as she was a local lecturer that sent the class into some laughter.

In some part of the lecture, she played a clip taken from the "MrBrownShow" blog to explain the structures in Singlish to us. haha...

Love in Warcraft

Never pick up "chicks" in World of Warcraft. Funny as heck, even if you don't play the game.

Excerpt:
From January to February, for three weeks in game I had my Warrior, Looks, offer herself as a Girlfriend to anyone pathetic or gullible enough to take me up on the business. To my surprise, business was good.

My goal was to see how many "boyfriends", for lack of a more demeaning term, I could maintain at one time. The rules I set for myself were not to spend any gold at all on the loves of my life, and never implicitly ask them for gold or items.

Adidas Yellow Series

Check out this particular model from the Adidas Yellow series, which has a slanty-eyed bucked-tooth image on the tongue and the word "Fong" on the back of the shoe.

I can't wait for the Adidas Niggah series to come out.

via tian

Loose Change: a scary 9/11 documentary

Scary shit.

Underworld: Evolution

Kate Beckinsale looking super hot in black tights (as my wife put it, "like the Hush Catwoman toy figure on your shelf") and using every weapon in an FPS computer game; vampires and werewolves ripping each other's guts out; and a Lord of the Rings kind of beginning (vampires in stylo armour all, I almost wanted to shout "Watch out for that werewolf behind you, Aragorn!").

What's not to like about Underworld: Evolution?

I watched it with the wife and my bunch of comic-lovin', card/board/computer/console gaming-lovin' mates. You know your offline and online lives have blurred when during the scene where the human SWAT team is hunting for the big bad vampire, three voices, including your own, can be heard whispering, "Free frag! Free frag!".

And then the inevitable, "She is level 10 character trying to fight a level 60. Cannot one, sure die."

Too many hours of WoW can do this to you.

Just make sure you watch Underworld again before watching this, or else you will have to try to remember important plot details from the first movie to follow this sequel. It took us the car ride home to connect all the dots completely.

Wife: "Who was Victor again?"

Our friend Dave: "That one lor, the fella who kena his head sliced 45 degrees by Selene one."

The plot was pretty cool in the way it built on the first movie. And I have to say, I enjoyed this sequel more than the original.

Too bad they still insist on showing scenes where the vampires need to use torchlights (or, in Selene's case, an advanced Cyalume stick) to see in the dark, just like the subway scene in the first movie.

Wah lau eh, vampires that cannot see in the dark... harlo???

Microsoft iPod packaging parody

A very funny video from YouTube. Click on this text link to see the video at full size.

CBS4 undercover TV crew uncover police intimidation in South Florida

All the undercover TV guy does is ask for a complaint form to file a complaint against a police officer. And the intimidating reactions from the cops in the South Florida police stations he visits are astounding.

Watch some of the videos. They also have transcripts of some of the conversations.

One Sergeant who was seen in one of the videos tried to get temporary injunction in court, to stop the TV station from airing his story. The judge denied the injunction.

Excerpt:

CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form.

The I-Team conducted an extensive hidden camera test, carried out by a police abuse watchdog group called the Police Complaint Center. Remarkably, of 38 different police stations tested around South Florida, all but three had no police complaint forms...

In the I-team’s undercover investigation, there was one incident in which our tester went in to file a complaint. After several times asking for a form, being told "you're not leaving without a form," he was asked to leave and actually walked off the property, to the point where the officer reached for his gun, put his hand on his gun and said, "Take a step closer, and see what happens.".

Cool remixed default Nokia ringtones

The talented Tracker from Howard Forums compiled this collection of Nokia ringtones which are actually remixed versions of the standard Nokia ringtone.

Check this example out!

Each of the tones in this set come in three formats: AAC, MP3 and OGG. Use whichever one your phone supports. The Series 60 supports AAC and the filesize for AAC is the smallest, so you may want to use that format.

Do save it on your memory card if you want to save space on your mobile phone.

I liked them so much, I did a little remixing of the remix myself. I took one of them and added Isaac singing his ABC song, with Apple's Garageband.

Download the ringtones here (winrar archive).

via Mobile Diva Darla Mack

She will pay you with her Gbuy

According to tinkertailor, Google is going to come out with a payment system to compete with Paypal and it is going to be called... Gbuy.

I shall refrain from the obvious Hokkien jokes that tinkertailor could not help sharing, because I am more cultured than he is.

What next? Google does an Ebay and calls it Gbay?

Buy on Gbay, pay with Gbuy!

I is Uniquely Singapore, ok?

Wah, the mrbrown show is considered Uniquely Singapore leh!

But chao turtle, how come got Miyagi's blog and not mine? Har? Har? Where is the Comprain Dept?

Can't get you out of my head

Overheard by She Who Must Not Be Named, in the office, by one lady colleague to another:

*"Aiyah 你很吵 leh! 整天在那里 maya hee maya ha!"

I guess not everyone is a Numa Numa fan. Haha (or in this case, maya ha ha).

*(loosely translated: "Gosh, you're noisy, sitting there all day singing maya hee maya ha!")

I Wish I Knew How to Quit You

Presenting multi-Oscar nominated short film (and even a pending Mediacorps Star Awards nomination), a tribute to Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, the short film Broke Mac Mountain.

Shot "with painstaking detail to replicate the sweeping panoramas and majestic beauty of Mr. Lee's cinematography", this short is emotionally draining in its depiction of forbidden love. I was in tears by the end of it, ROTFLMAO in tears.

Also check out Brokeback to the Future.

Search engine referrals

Some recent search engine referrals...

Someone Asked Jeeves: "Is It Safe to Insert Objects in My Penis" and ended up with my blog as the first hit.

Someone searched Yahoo for "cheongsam master singapore channel news asia".

Someone searched MSN for "college girl suck cock in singapore" (ahem).

Someone googled "seventies hairstyles".

Ann Kok unveils twin Timebombs

This animated gif of Mediacorp actress Ann Kok baring her inner feelings was done by an enterprising Sammyboy forumer.

Upon looking at her pair of lungs (padded Triumph 3/4 Maximizer), another forumer remarked that the PAP may want to look into her two "Timebombs".

1337 Star Wars

Star Wars dubbed in 1337 (Leetspeak).

My fave bit? Supreme Chancellor Palpatine telling Anakin Skywalker "I need your help, son." subtitled as "Level 50 senator LFG".

Update: Check out the Lucasfilm Cease and Desist letter sent to the makers of this video, also converted to Leetspeak, as mentioned by reader Ronny.

Chris Rock on "How to not let your ass kicked by the police"

An oldie but a goodie. (MA18: Contains vulgarity)

Daryl on Bloggies 2006

Bloggies panelist Daryl Sng reveals the politics and seedy underbelly of how the blogs for the Bloggies 2006 were nominated, and the desperate bloggers sleeping with him for votes.

Kidding lah.

Read Part 1 of his exposé.

Also, congrats go out to Simon of Simonworld and Tokyo Times for getting nominated in the Best Asian Blog category. Go read all the interesting blogs nominated.

Oh, and self-appointed Bloggies pundit Cowboy Caleb muses over the choices (jeles is liddat one, haha!).

Flowers for De Wedding

An online wedding florist with a most appropriate URL... deflowerhouse.com. Nuff said.

(Found by Yewjin, what were you doing there, dude? Heheh.)

Other funny domain names:

Italian power company, Powergen: www.powergenitalia.com

Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: www.molestationnursery.com

Pen Island, online pen company: www.penisland.net ("Don't be fooled by those imposters at www.penisland.org, or www.pen-island.net, we're the real deal!")

Choose Spain, online Spanish Holiday Rentals: www.choosespain.com

Experts Exchange: www.expertsexchange.com

Cumming First United Methodist Church: www.cummingfirst.com/organ.html

Paul Graham on Blogging and Open Source

This podcast of a presentation by Paul Graham showed up in my iTunes del.icio.us feed subscription (iTunes podcast feature + del.icio.us feeds= Very cool stuff) and I curiously clicked Play to listen to it, only to continue listening to the whole darn thing, all 32 minutes 45 seconds of it.

Paul Graham is a popular author (Hackers and Painters) and Lisp programmer, and in this OSCON 2005 presentation, he discusses what business can learn from open source. He uses blogging as an analogy for open source, and explains why "amateurs" very often do a much better job than "professionals".

Go to the ITConversations page to listen to the MP3 audio of his speech.

You can also read an essay he wrote based on this talk.

Yeah, I know he made the speech in August 2005 and I am a little late getting this, but hey, time-shifting is like that.

Excerpt:

On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat — that blogs are just a fad.

Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"

Fun with Japanese Subtitles

Go to foshata! to do your own subtitles for Japanese commercials. Hilarious fun.

Mine is FSH2644 and my three lines were:

"I wonder why the train is not here yet."

"If Buangkok MRT could be opened, why not Woodleigh?"

"Open Woodleigh MRT too, you wankers."

via asiapundit

Dear Papa, please give me $1000 to play music on my little blog

I tell you what, young bloggers, here is some advice. Instead of streaming that pop song you need to pay license fees for (at a low low price of $1000 for 10 songs or less, EVERY YEAR), how about playing some podsafe music to play for your site. There is a lot of great music out there for you to discover, and music from the big labels is not the only deal in town.

More news and views from deblock and Han. Try podsafeaudio.com or podshow.com for some good music.

Excerpt from ST:

'We increasingly see more bloggers who upload music onto their webpages,' he said.

'We want to encourage them to come forward to our one-stop centre to get licensed, for a reasonable fee.'

For websites where the song cannot be downloaded or have any advertising, owners have to pay $1,000 a year for playing 10 songs or fewer, $5,000 for playing 11 to 49 songs and $10,000 for over 50 songs.

This is a 'competitive rate', said Mr Melvin Tan, the licensing manager of Compass, which protects the interests of composers and lyricists, and administers royalties to them.

Let Agony Aunt Bambi help you with your girl problems

Gillian Tan made a funny spoof driving school commercial that someone submitted to Tomorrow.sg.

Over at her site, there is also an even funnier movie, Live with Bambi, your favourite relationship helpline show, hosted by Bambi who "dishes relationship advice with no professional knowledge whatsoever". Bambi featured an example of the women men should avoid, the Possessive Freak or Stalker, (Janice, 27 years old, loves roses) who was both scary and funny at the same time.

*Shudder*

Memoirs of a Geisha spoof

Bobby Lee as Sayuri in the Mad TV version of Memoirs of a Geisha. Watch it on YouTube, or just click the above image to play.

My eyes, my eyes!

Random Duh moments

Some random duh moments:

SMS duh moment

Burglary duh moment

Walmart automated movie suggestions duh moment (also mentioned in Boing Boing)

Funny Classified ads from the UK

You can find more funny classifieds here.

The Uniquely Singapore Subsidy

You people ah, give you subsidy and you ask me how much the thing cost and say actually is not subsidy. Must I always explain that just because it is a subsidy does not mean I don't make a profit? This is called The Singapore Subsidy.

From the ST Dec 20, 2005:

NKF said it saved patients more than $3.5 million by offering them lower drug prices and subsidies. This was not true. It made close to $1 million each year, in 2003 and 2004, in gross profit from the sale of such drugs.

The gross profit margin worked out to almost 40 per cent each year. And that was because NKF did not pass on the rebates it got on its bulk purchase of medicine.

For example, it said one drug cost $25. It gave patients a $13 discount and charged them $12. But NKF paid only $8.20 for the drug. It pocketed a 46 per cent profit.

From the ST 21 Dec 2005:

Instead, Mr Subramaniam, the accountant, said the way the NKF treated the definition of subsidy and the way KPMG did were from"different perspectives".

The NKF defined subsidy as the difference between the amount a patient would pay for treatement and drugs elsewhere in Singapore and the amount they paid the NKF. "In my understanding of NKF's view, subsidy must be tested against the market rate and not the net amount incurred."

From the ST Aug 6, 2004:

HDB pricing keeps new flats affordable to most Singaporeans

I REFER to the letters, 'What goes into pricing of HDB flats' (ST, July 23) by Mr Hiong Kum Meng and 'Subsidy should be based on flat's building cost' (ST, July 27) by Mr Mohamed Rafiq Hamjah.

Mr Hiong concluded that the increase in HDB resale prices has outstripped wage growth, based on a comparison of changes in the Resale Price Index with changes in average nominal wages between 1993 and 2003.

We would like to explain that resale flats are transacted in the open market on a willing buyer-willing seller basis. The prices are not set by HDB. Prices can fluctuate, depending on factors such as the economic outlook, employment situation and sentiments in the property market.

What is important is that HDB prices its new flats so that the majority of Singaporeans can afford one. From 1993 to 2003, the prices of new four-room flats increased by 2.6 per cent per annum, below the annual increase of 5.3 per cent in average wages cited by Mr Hiong. New-flat prices did not rise as steeply as resale-flat prices, because HDB prices new flats below their equivalent market price, that is, at a subsidy.

Mr Mohamed asked why HDB's subsidy for new flats is related to the market price and not the building cost of a flat. Today, first-time HDB flat buyers can buy either resale or new flats. Those who opt to buy resale flats from the open market can take up a housing grant of $30,000 or $40,000, which allows them to enjoy a discount off the market price of the flat.

Those who opt to buy new flats from HDB also enjoy a discount off the equivalent market price of the flat.

The difference between what the buyer pays HDB for his flat and what it is actually worth in the market is a direct and real subsidy provided by HDB to the buyer.

Like the housing grant for resale flats, the provision of such a market-related subsidy in the case of new flats has enabled HDB to keep its flats affordable for the majority of Singaporeans.

DESMOND WONG
Deputy Director (Marketing & Planning)
for Director (Estate Administration & Property)
Housing & Development Board

Typepad outage, mrbrown enters Time Warp

In case you were wondering why my blog was displaying an entry from 9th December since yesterday afternoon, it is because Typepad, the hosted blogging service I am using for mrbrown.com, had a major outage due to a "catastrophic failure" that crippled its storage system. It lasted for more than 12 hours and they just got it back up at 3pm PST (about 7am Singapore time). The outdated version you saw was a backup of my blog they used, which was a few days old, with commenting turned off, while their support staff worked to bring the service back up.

My pages are up to date again after republishing (I found out I had thousands of pages on my site), but some of the photos may be missing. These will return as the Typepad folks restore our photos from their backups.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused and thanks to the friends who called to tell me, "Eh! Your blog kena hacked ah? How come become backdated one?"

Of course my first reaction upon finding out that Typepad and my blog was down, was to er, launch Typepad and blog about it...

I felt so helpless because I could not blog about exciting stuff like, you can now get Gmail on your mobile phone.

Slashdot has a piece on how the explosive growth of the blogosphere is straining infrastructure to its limits.

More news on this from Forbes and The Register.

The outage also made "Typepad" the number one search term on Technorati.

Technorati tags: Singapore, Typepad, Six Apart

Ebay auction for 8-foot LEGO Star Wars Rebel Attack Cruiser

This Rebel Attack Cruiser from Star Wars Episode III is on auction at eBay, all 8 feet of super-detailed LEGO goodness. So far the bid is USD16,000. I have small children in my home who will reduce this Cruiser into tiny bits faster than a superlaser beam from the Death Star, and my flat is too small, if not I also go and bid. Really.

"Own a one-of-a-kind 8-foot LEGO Rebel Attack Cruiser™ model designed by LEGO Master Builder Erik Varszegi..."

100% of the proceeds from this auction will go to Habitat for Humanity International's Hurricane Relief Efforts.

Something Asian to listen to (plus one non-Asian one)

Dragon Radio is hosted by Tony Reno and he plays music from around Asia, and also interviews artistes.

Audio file for Dragon Radio Week 30

Subscribe to the Dragon Radio podcast feed.

Over at PenangHokkien.com, get a taste of Penang-style Hokkien from this podcast (I believe the ONLY Penang-style Hokkien podcast in the world).

Audio file for Penang Hokkien #18

Subscribe to the Penang Hokkien podcast feed.

Rubyfruit Radio (main site is here) was recommended by Shan of Small Fry Podcast (I am a big fan of her show) and is hosted by Heather from Atlanta, Georgia USA, devoted to playing the best in female indie artists. Her slogan is "All Girls All the Time" and damn, her girls play great music. Not an Asian podcast but too fine a show not to recommend.

Audio file for Rubyfruit Radio Episode 11

Subscribe to the Rubyfruit Radio podcast feed.

Meanwhile, voting is still on at the Weblog Awards site till the 15th of December (USA time), and while I have no hope of catching up with XX's lead of 3000+ votes (no, Mr Gave-Me-9000-Fake-Votes reader, do not deploy your cheating engine again, whoever you are), at least I have an extra digit compared to Mr Stone Motherless Last, muahahahahahaha!

On a side note, Asiapundit has started a daily review of potential Asia-related gifts, and I gotta say, that's one Chink-eyed racist stereotype on the Wok 'n Roll board game. He also has a link to oldie but goodie video clip of a slurpy commercial (The audio is Not Safe for Work).

Oh, and I want to think Jaywalk for saying, "I am sure mrbrown and miyagi are just having some fun over it (i.e. the awards)". You get it, Jay-W, sniff, you really do!

Technorati tags: singapore, mrbrown, podcast, podcasting

Random Asian links

In other news, Myrick of Asiapundit concludes that I was not in any way involved in the Weblog Awards cheating because I don't have the smarts or the time to rig a contest (thanks for the vote of confidence, dude! Haha!). Of course, I need not remind you that, just like the NKF still needs money, I still need votes, people! I don't have enough reserves to make up for my shortfall of 2000 votes! Just make sure they are legit ones, ok?

And if you feel really sympathetic, you can cast your vote for Miyagi then, he got chio bu photo.

And yes, Chris, that bugger Miyagi still owes us the beers.

Looking at Australia (kinda part of Asia): Supermom Axegal compares two news photos from Australia. Tezza shares a darn good link from TSSH the Cronulla riots, and Sydney resident Adam Rosalky has some comments about the commenters of the violence. And then I read bbc.com and see that Sydney police 'to get new powers'. Chey, I thought what new powers, can shoot anti-yob lasers from their eyes or something.

Wati is a Singaporean living in Kobe, Japan, with her husband Roy, and she shares this cool video clip of the opening of Midori Denki (an electrical retailer) and also gives us a look at Kurisumusu (Christmas) in Japan. Since we are on Japan, check out this really cool presentation on the Web Development Process done with cute little toy characters.

A World of Warcraft: Year in Review (kinda)

Check out this funny look at WoW by Something Awful.

Pictured here, the leaked picture of the next Alliance race, the Pandaren.

Xbox 360 debuts in Japan to screaming fans... not

The image on top shows the crazy crowds fighting for an Xbox 360 in the US. It was the same craziness in the UK when the 360 launched there. And the image below, the more restrained response from Japan.

(via Gizmodo)

Sydney Cronulla beach race riots

Metafilter mentions the Sydney race riots, where some 5000 people got "upset that a lifeguard or something got beat up by a bunch of 'middle eastern looking' people", and started a riot. There is also an interesting discussion on what exactly is a "Wog".

Comments in that Metafilter thread:

"How dare those white people riot? Everyone knows rioting's only for people of color!"
...posted by mr_crash_davis at 11:35 AM PST on December 11

"I used to live in Sydney for awhile, but never was a permanent resident. While I was there, Cronulla had a reputation for being a beach of good-ole-boys - hard-drinking, close-minded, violent, and very insular. There is some sort of tattoo that they all have, the surfers there. I was once waiting for a bus in downtown Sydney, on my way back to Coogie, and a very drunk Cronullan tried to pick a fight with me, asking me whether or not I was fag. I told him I wasn't and he went on and on, telling me all of the bones he would have broken had I told him that I was. They were quite a bunch. To those that are Sydney residents: does it surprise you that this happened? Is this way out of the ordinary?"
...posted by billysumday at 12:03 PM PST on December 11

"These hoodlums should be exiled to an island in the middle of the ocean to start a society amongst themselves...no, wait..."
...posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:27 AM PST on December 11

Some reactions from smh's news blog, and more videos and coverage at ABC's site.

Cheating at the polls

Kevin of Wizbang has brought to my attention that Xiaxue's and my Weblog Awards votes have been tampered with.

To correct the earlier padding done by the evil-doers, some 9944 votes have been removed from my total, and about 5048 votes removed from hers. In my case, the cheating came from three IP addresses, one of which accounted for 7385 votes.

Hello, very lame, can?

Want to vote, vote. But don't cheat. This is an international thing and the last thing we want is Singapore getting a reputation for vote scrubbing.

It's Geiko not Geisha

The Peking Duck has a post that links to a great article about the real Geishas (the correct term is "Geiko") objecting to the Hollywood depiction of their world in the movie and book, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Excerpt:

For most people, even in Kyoto, the closest they will get to the mysterious demimonde will be watching the star-studded "Memoirs of a Geisha," released in the United States Friday and in Japan Saturday under the title "Sayuri."...

The book was criticized by its subject, former geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who accused Golden of making the legendary Japanese hostesses seem like prostitutes.

For the "geiko" of Gion, their profession is far more nuanced. Some past geishas in other districts offered sex and the geiko say that foreigners often mistake them for prostitutes because of their showy outfits.

The geiko believe they are far different, preserving a sophisticated tradition and creating a fantasy world in which modern concepts such as gender equality have yet to enter.

As soon as they finish Japan's compulsory education at the age of 15, girls in Gion start training in the performing arts, gracious social etiquette and conversation skills, which all will be necessary when they host customers at a tea house's hosting room.

They are soon called "maiko" -- dancing girls. Becoming more skilled in dancing and performing musical instruments, usually around age 20, they finally assume the title of geiko.

Vote and get upgrading: Swings in every home!

Thank you all for the support you have shown so far! It has exceeded my expectations.

But the campaigning must not cease, because as you know, Singapore elections are notorious for having short campaigning periods. So we must make the most of the time we have.

Just like Miyagi has mustered his cat Jake and even famous stars to promote his vote, mr brown must also find new things to swing the elections, and what better way than... yes, Swings!

Every home should have one, and every blog too! As part of our multi-million dollar upgrade plans, we are upgrading "deserving" estates with indoor swings just like this one! (Where does mr brown get access to ALL this money that the opposition cannot touch? It's a mystery!)

Who cares that you don't see your MP (or even know what his name is) until the elections come around? Just remember that you will get upgrading and all kinds of goodies!

And lest anyone thinks this blog is not Asian enough to be part of the Best Asian Blog category, here are some links to interesting Asian blogs and news. Like "How to Eat Sushi", shared by Simon of Simonworld.

In other news, US casino magnate Steve Wynn has pulled out of the Singapore casino wars. I guess he got tired of dealing with "the thunderbolts of wisdom from Mount Olympus". Some people might say, "like that he Wynn liao lor!"

Marmot shares some Korean blogging goodness with posts on UPI's Martin Walker giving his take on the upcoming East Asia Summit, and a Korean SUV voted the biggest automotive atrocity ever ("so ugly it makes children cry").

International Man of Mystery (and also fellow Tomorrow.sg buddy), Preetam Rai, points us to some cool podcasts for those of us who want to learn Mandarin.

That's all we have for this Asian roundup. Remember, you want upgrading? You want a playground in your home? You don't want your estate to become a slum? Vote daily till the 15th of December!

(mr brown wishes voters to note that upgrading and the indoor swing for your blog is subject to availability. Anyway, if you don't get your upgrading from this blog, there is always the other upcoming election you can count on.)

Weblogs Awards: Two days later

Update: Miyagi too, has to look to his chio bu for help.

Well it was fun while it lasted. Thank you guys for the support and for trying.

Leading the Asian vote at the Weblogs Awards was nice, but I knew there was no way to stop the Xiaxue juggernaut, once word went out to her loyal blodgers. And they vote daily too. Sigh.

I promised election goodies, she promised June's boobies. Like this how to fight? Hahahaha!

Poor Asiapundit, Myrick was so depressed that his votes were less than the number of contributors to his group blog, he fired them all.

So I tried to think of ways I can secure the win... I know! Redraw the electoral boundaries! XX's blog is now part of Canada! And I will start a GRC system! And I will enforce the Film Act! No political films allowed of bloggers participating in this contest (except me, I am allowed to have films done about me, they are called documentaries).

I think all this is not going to work. I have to take out my trump card now. The weapon used by politicians through the ages!

It's baby photo time!

Cute or not? Here is another shot of Joy.

Ok, now go and vote daily. Hahahaha! At least go and read the other fine Asian blogs featured there lah.

The Weblog Awards 2005

The Weblog Awards 2005 by Wizbang is back, and I would like to thank whoever nominated me for the Best Asian Blog category, together with esteemed blogs like:

Sassy Lawyer, The Marmot's Hole, Hemlock's Diary, Sinosplice, ESWN, the shaky kaiser, Xiaxue, Hongkie Town, Shanghai Diaries, asiapundit, Our Man In Hanoi, Frog in a Well, Simon World, and Mr. Miyagi.

Do check them out if you haven't already. Last year, only one Singapore blog was nominated (and she won), but this year there are three.

The polls close December 15, 2005. You may vote once every 24 hours in each poll.

Er, I have set aside $150 million (Monopoly money) for upgrading your blog!

The MRT train will now stop at your white elephant blog, even if less than 2000 households read your blog!

And you will get Lifts that stop on every page of your blog!

What more can you ask for? Go vote now! You may not get to vote in the coming Singapore Elections, what with the frequent walkovers and all, but you can definitely vote (every day, even) in the 2005 Weblog Awards.

You can even buy your own pr0n company from eBay

Looking for a new business opportunity? Is your dream to direct award-winning films? Want to turn a hobby into a business empire?

Now you can! Run, don't walk, down to eBay and bid for your very own porn company! Hey, Singapore already has casinos, why not a porn industry? Dammit, you could be a pioneer, man!

Starting bid is US$100,000. Cheap cheap cheap!

Comes with:

• Intellectual property which includes the masters to all their movies, archive footage, photo shoots and a remaining inventory of 12,000 DVD pieces.
• A complete set of movie making equipment. Including the important soft-light kit.
• An industry editing system. A state-of-the-art system which you will need to edit either your archive footage for compilation re-release, or for your future projects.
• Corporate office equipment and furniture.
• A pre-paid credit with an Adult Entertainment Lawyer with over 25 years experience.
• An established real estate network which allows you to use upscale locations for your future shoots (shoot in Ludicris' party house!).
• An established relationship with all your favorite and current Adult Stars.
• An instructional course in Adult Entertainment from a professional Adult Entertainment Director. You will learn everything you need to know to direct and produce the very best in Adult Entertainment.

The eBay ad says, when running at full capability, this company has the potential to produce 8 movie projects every month. And that this Company is not being sold due to financial reasons but due to the moral issues between family members and partners.

I loved this line: "Therefore, we strongly recommend that you consider the moral issues of owning an Adult Entertainment business as well as the financial."

via Lucian from SPUG

Hooters employee wins Toy Yoda for selling most beer

From the St Petersburg Times: Dream car is a ‘toy Yoda’

Excerpt:

Jodee Berry, 26, then a waitress at the Hooters in Panama City Beach, won a contest to see who could sell the most beer in April.

Manager Jared Blair told waitresses that the contest was a regional promotion, according to the lawsuit, and that the top 10 waitresses from each restaurant would be entered in a drawing. The person whose name was drawn would win a "new Toyota automobile," the lawsuit says Blair told them.

More bash.org

More gems from bash.org.

#577451
[DmncAtrny] I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING."
[DmncAtrny] And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
[DmncAtrny] and run like hell

#580701
[iibbmm] Stupid World of Warcraft.
[iibbmm] I have no money, I have no skills. All of the hot hot elvin women are dancing with the big warrior guys. It's college all over again.

#77904
[Sui88] 67% of girls are stupid
[V-girl] i belong with the other 13%

#1578
[calin] we had a guy at school that wore black lipstick.. and was all gothy.. and then one day we caught him buying an assvibrator
[ecoli] ew.
[ecoli] wait, you "caught" him?
[ecoli] like, you were behind him in line at the assvibrator store?
[Aero] he doesnt answer
*** Quits: calin (No route to host)

#547569
[M8525888]: here, you gotta press a and e really fast
[M8525888]: æ
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[Ryoji 17]: ae
...
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[M8525888]: æ i o u
[Ryoji 17]: ae
[Ryoji 17]: ae

Very strong support for NS leh!

Now, I am not sure if the outcry against Melvyn Tan's sentence was because of "very strong support for national service", or it was really because people, especially the menfolk, were just pissed off at the double standards.

Want to suffer must together suffer! Want to geng then all geng together! All for one and one for all!

Support simi support.

Since we are on the topic, Mr Wang has an interesting insight on denouncing your Singapore citizenship ("The Singapore constitution forbids male Singaporeans from renouncing their citizenship until they turn 21. Effectively this imposes the NS obligation on all of them, since enlistment is at age 18"), and more on the Melvyn Tan case.

Actually, when you think about it, Melvyn is now a British citizen coming back to Singapore as a Foreign Talent. Not bad leh. I also want to be a ex-Singaporean Foreign Talent.

ST Forum
Nov 30, 2005
NS: Mindef studying adequacy of penalties

I REFER to Mr Henry Ong Ling Tiong's letter, 'Firm stand needed: Fine or jail' (ST, Nov 26), where he suggested that punishments for national-service defaulters in the Enlistment Act be reviewed. Members of Parliament have also filed a number of questions.

It is heartening to note the very strong support for national service shown by the public in its reaction to the case of pianist Melvyn Tan.

Mindef has been reviewing the Enlistment Act to bring it up to date. This review includes a careful study of the adequacy of the current penalties to allow for firm action to be taken against those who do not fulfil their duty.

Mindef will give a full response on the matter when the review is completed.

Col Benedict Lim
Director, Public Affairs
Ministry of Defence

You Can Be A Better Boyfriend!

Learn how to be a better boyfriend from this blog by Jessy Delfino.

Some gems include tips like:

"Hey boyfriend. If you love your girl, you will buy her jewelry."

"Get a job!"

"No one likes a bossy pants."

"Make sure you don't smell."

Excerpt:

GOOD BOYFRIENDS DON'T GO TO JAIL

If you have the urge to go to jail, just think twice about it. Good boyfriends do NOT go to jail.

Think about what happens while you are in jail, boyfriend. Your girlfriend is sad and alone. That guy who had his eye on her anyway (and you know that at any given moment, there are at least 10 - 15 of those guys, depending on how hot your missy is) knows you went to jail, because he read it in the crime blotter or whatever. So, keep that in mind as you're getting ready to rob a bank/break and enter/pull off a heist featuring a Merecedes and three bald, well-suited fellows/freedom fight the system.

Top Thirty Chuck Norris facts

Check out these little known Top 30 facts about Chuck Norris.

Also check out the Top 30 facts about Vin Diesel and Mr T.

Excerpt:

Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris is not hung like a horse... horses are hung like Chuck Norris.

Aliens do exist. They're just waiting for Chuck Norris to die before they attack.

Sony CDs infect your PC with evil rootkit software

There is now a blog, SoryElectronics.com, to track the fracas surrounding Sony's use of a dangerous piece of software called a rootkit that can make your PC vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, as part of a scheme to restrict the usage of music that comes on Sony BMG's CDs.

For a timeline of what happened, go to this Boing Boing post.

Even mainstream business reporters like Mathew Ingram of Canada's "The Globe and Mail" condemns Sony for this act.

And don't even think of using the "Uninstaller" provided by Sony after much public pressure. Some researchers have found that using Sony's rootkit "Uninstaller" to remove the malicious rootkit their CDs infected your PC with, will leave your PC vulnerable in other ways too.

What a royal mess.

Now you know why mr brown does not buy Copy-controlled CDs.

10 Most Powerful Women in Blogging

David Krug, aka LiberalCowboy did a post on the 10 Most Powerful Women in Blogging, and he listed Xiaxue at Number 5.

Wendy Cheng has one of the largest internet followings for a twenty-something from Singapore. While none of our adult panelists even had ever heard of her, our teenage panelist all gave her number one votes to catapult her way into the middle of the top ten. If she ever decided to get into this on a more professional level she could rise to number one overnight.

But he also listed Joi Ito at Number 8.

Joi Ito of Technorati (http://joi.ito.com ) has her hands in a lot of Web 2.0 companies, some you might not even know about yet. This makes her damn powerful. Often times the one you don’t know that well is the most powerful. My personal favorite because she seems to help people get shit done.

I am sorry to break the news to you, dude, but Joi is a guy. At least he was the last time I met him in KL. Hahahaha!

Joi blogged about it too, and his comments section is full of funny remarks. I liked this one:

"Oh, Joi, there’s no need to deny it — we’ll still love and respect you when you let the real Joi out."

And this one too:

"Sometimes the best woman for a job is a man."

Why you must not tell people you like Anime so much

Todd Roy of KWOON goes to an Anime convention and meets some, er, hardcore fans.

With the help of Tian, they made this video clip of the Anime dorks he meets there. Don't drink water while watching the video. You have been warned.

After seeing this Rei Ayanami, I will never be able to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion the same way ever again.

"I am in a plug suit, I have to go into my Eva and kill the angels."

My eyes! My eyes!

A little known role of unions

Wow, a trade union that actually puts priority on workers and their jobs. Singapore really leads the way in everything, man.

So what was their priority before this? Opening supermarkets?

Actual quote from my friend M when I showed her the headline: "Maybe it's not the union arm leh, maybe it's the supermarket arm that wants to help the workers leh? Hahahahaha!"

I have such witty friends.

In other news, Little Cart Noodles features the stoopid ST letter of the day.

My mrbrown email is down (it is back up)

Update: my mrbrown mail is back up (as of 13th November 2005, 11pm). If you sent me any email between the 11th of November, 9pm, and the 13th of November, 11pm, please resend, thanks.

My email at my current domain is currently down for the next 48 hours, due to a server outage. Please email me at my gmail addy if you need to reach me these few days, thanks.

Student sues school for punishing him for his blog

In Singapore, if school not happy with a student's blog, student will kena suspended and blog gets shut down.

In USA, if school not happy with a student's blog, and punishes him, student sues school and wins.

Excerpt:

A New Jersey school district will pay $117,500 to a student who was punished for creating a website that included critical statements about his middle school.

The settlement of the lawsuit brought nearly two years ago follows a decision by a federal judge ruling that Oceanport school administrators violated Ryan Dwyer's free speech rights...

"While my parents and I are happy the case is resolved, most importantly, I'm hopeful this will help ensure that free speech rights of students aren't trampled on again in the future," said Dwyer, who is now in 11th grade...

"Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression," Barber said.

Cool Sony clip made by 18-year-old

18-year-old Tyson Ibele of Minneapolis, Minnesota, took 11 days to put this neat Sony clip together. You can see the clip at the Make LLC site (look under Portfolio, it's called SONY-Transform-spec), and read the forum thread where he talks about his work. For example, rendering took approximately 3 days in total, on 15 different computers.

I wonder if he will do a clip about Sony's rootkit DRM. Heh.

(via Chys and shawntim from SPUG forums)

There was a little CG humour in the sig of one of the CGSociety forum posters that the geek in me could not resist posting here: "It took God 7 days to create earth because he was rendering with Radiosity, Raytraced Shadows, Sub Surface Scattering and Caustics."

Excerpt:

Hey everyone!

Here is an animation I just finished today here at MAKE. Although it wasn't actually created for Sony, the idea was to see what it would be like if we transformed several of their products into each other.

The total make time was just under 2 weeks (about 11 days in total). That included modelling, shading, animating, rendering, compositing and editing.

Singapore's chief executioner revealed

Interesting, I never knew a hanging in Singapore pays $400 per gig. Also educational for those who never knew how hangings are carried out in Singapore.

Australian newspaper, The Australian, reveals this in a story about the man who will perform the execution of Australian drug trafficker Van Tuong Nguyen. Until now, I don't believe we have ever seen Singapore's Chief Executioner, Darshan Singh.

I understand from the story that it has been hard to find his replacement, which is why he is still being asked to hang criminals at age 73.

Some of Singapore's top civil service jobs are hard to find replacements for, it seems. Hey, maybe that's why some of our talents are employed waaaaay beyond retirement age.

Excerpts:

Mr Singh has officially retired from the prison service but is called upon to carry out executions, for which he receives a fee of $S400 ($312).

Until now, his identity has been a closely guarded secret in Singapore...

...A colleague and close friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Australian that Mr Singh wanted to give up his hangman's responsibilities and live quietly in retirement but the authorities were having trouble finding anyone to replace him.

"He tried to train two would-be hangmen to replace him, a Malaysian and a Chinese, both in the prison service," the colleague said.

"But when it came to pulling the lever for the real thing, they both froze and could not do it.

"The Chinese guy, a prison officer, became so distraught he walked out immediately and resigned from the prison service altogether."...

...Mr Singh reportedly spends time getting to know the condemned prisoners, especially those who do not receive visitors or religious support.

"He is a very kindly man and although it's his job to end their lives he does feel for them," his friend said. "Mr Singh tries to comfort them if they are completely alone in the world at such a horrible time."

(Thanks to reader sha for the link. Someone also submitted it to Tomorrow.sg)

The Small Fry Podcast: some great Singapore independent music

Bringing you the best sounds of local music, The Small Fry Podcast just blew my mind at how much good Singapore music there is out there. Produced by Hwei Shan, the show is such a breath of fresh air.

I stumbled upon this puppy in Odeo (I later found it in Jimmy's site as well).

Listen to the latest episode, Episode 10 here.

Subscribe to the The Small Fry Podcast feed.

PodAsia.net podcast on how to shop in Sim Lim Square

Matthew Holden of PodAsia.net has a great 29-minute podcast on how to buy from Sim Lim Square and Funan IT Mall. This was done 2 weeks before the National Day Parade 2005, and you can hear the tanks rumbling by in the middle of the recording. The show also has some neat music interspersed throughout the show (Duran Duran!).

Listen to Matthew's 29-minute podcast here.

Subscribe to the PodAsia.net podcast feed.

Sushiradio podcast on Singapore "night zoo"

Thomas Wanhoff, German journalist, of sushiradio.com does a 13-minute podcast walking tour of "Singapore night zoo" (The Singapore Night Safari).

I loved the bit when he commented on the bad people using flash photography and frightening the animals:

"So the guy heard what I say and he is running away now, because there are always some safety guards here, and if they see that you are using flash light, they will catch you... and maybe bring them (you) to the tiger area."

Listen to Thomas' 13-minute podcast here.

Subscribe to the sushiradio podcasts feed.

How much is your blog worth?

My blog is worth $934,313.70.
How much is your blog worth?

If it were real money, that would be nice. Haha. Oh, and Daryl analyzes its geopolitical significance.

(via Lancerlord, Lord of the Links)

More from my guest blogging on Miyagi.sg

In case you didn't go over to check Miyagi's blog, I have added a few updates in the last few days (his RSS feed is acting up and not updating, so it will have to wait till he returns).

Don't miss a chance to see Miyagi looking miserable with underwear that won't dry, and looking like Darth Helmet, failed Sith Lord. Also check out the Aussie idea of an army canteen and the latest shot, Miyagi's fellow reservist Down Under, Corporal David Tan sending a sweet hi to his darling Renee of mintia.blogspot.com.

For that last post, Miyagi was bribed incentivised with a beer. Eh, send MMS to Singapore for mr brown to post it on his blog cost marnie one leh. One beer already very cheap liao.

Quick go and sms your hubby or boyfriend in Australia reservist with him to give him their photo (and a beer) for more blog dedications. Er, you should probably do that 5 days later, because the men are moving out again for another 5D4N exercise and are unlikely to have any mobile signal until they return.

Maybe I will write my novel later

An ode to procrastination, something every writer has probably faced.

(via Enigmaya)

Excerpt:

i write everyday

i'm been working on my novel

here's a typical 'session' of me working on my novel

TODAY: Journey of a car-crazed toddler

Latest TODAY column: Journey of a car-crazed toddler

Excerpt:

We are just lemmings. We know this happens every time. COE drops to some new low, and car-obsessed Singaporeans rush to the showroom to order their new cars (I am sure some even wrote their orders on little pieces of paper and threw them into the crowded showrooms at the salesmen). Then yes, the low COE becomes high again.

And yet, we rush to the showroom anyway. Thinking maybe, hey, the idea didn't occur to the other 2 million car-obsessed Singaporeans.

Will my son be like this too? I am seriously thinking of getting him interested in buses and trains. Then he will grow up thinking highly of public transport. Unless the new MRT station near his future housing estate gets Buangkok-ed.

Captain Capitalism: To bleep or not to bleep

Captain Capitalism teaches the kiddies why cussin' is bad for you.

Quite a funny clip from Atom Films.

How many ways do I love thee?

I added a little post to Miyagi's blog, as part of my role as his guest blogger, while he is away on reservist.

I decided to try my hand at writing a love story.


Excerpt:

Her lips said she didn’t want to see me anymore. But her eyes told me something else. I could tell from the way her pupils dilated, that her eyeballs were saying “Stay, please!”

One outgoing US envoy's speech: Two headlines

Outgoing US envoy to Singapore, Frank Lavin, gave a speech at his farewell dinner.

Headline from MSNBC's Financial Times section:
"US envoy slaps Singapore over freedom of speech"

Headline from Straits Times, Wednesday 12 October 2005, Home page 3:
"Singapore resilient: outgoing US envoy"

Excerpt from MSNBC's piece (not found in the ST coverage):

The ambassador told an audience at a farewell dinner that he was "embarrassed" when police asked him if he wanted to press charges against six demonstrators protesting the Iraq war in front of the US embassy in 2003. Singapore bans demonstrations of five or more people.

"I said 'no.' I mean, go ahead, hold the signs and say something if you want to," said Mr Lavin, who will become under-secretary for international trade at the US Commerce Department.

Halloween party by the Barflies

Cowboy Caleb and his Barflies are organising a Halloween party, called Virtual Insanity, on Sunday, 30th October 2005, at Coco Latte, to raise funds for their Liquidblade server and their adopted charity, Women Make a Difference's (WMD).

Yes, the mysterious Cowboy will actually be there so you can finally meet him and kick him in the balls. Surely that alone is worth the SGD$15 entry fee. I recommend being inebriated before trying to unmask Cowboy. He is not blessed of countenance fair but I am told he looks better when your mind is clouded with strong drink. Rumour has it that he will be coming dressed as a sexy succubus.

If that doesn't scare you this Halloween night, I don't know what will.

Details available at the party's official website (not bad hor, party also got own website).

How to be a Successful Evil Overlord

Never be a failed Evil Overlord again. Make sure you read How to be a Successful Evil Overlord by Peter Anspach.

My favourite ones:

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragon of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

56. My Legion of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

70. When my guards split up to search for intruders, they will always travel in groups of at least two. They will be trained so that if one of them disappears mysteriously while on patrol, the other will immediately initiate an alert and call for backup, instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

84. I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.

90. I will not design my main control room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.

Excerpt:

Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I've read about in books or seen in movies invariably gets overthrown and destroyed in the end. I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists, or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time.

You can never have too much hard disk

Update: This guy is even more hardcore, he posted his photos and instructions for installation. And yes, caveat emptor: even brand new hard drives can fail, and poorly-designed casings can kill your drive too. James the guru points out that poorly-ventilated cheapo enclosures can kill your drive due to overheating, especially if you let it run all day. The man speaks from experience (he has a server rack in his house, for goodness' sake). I make no guarantees for this enclosure (I am trying it out myself). but so far it is running cool (the thing has an 8-inch cooler fan inside).


Found this neat 3.5-inch enclosure (Zoom Xtreme MS-35CB) that supports USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 at Funan. I put a Maxtor 200Gb IDE HDD in it and backed up everything I had on the Powerbook. I haven't seen many enclosures that support the faster Firewire 800 port that is found on all new Powerbooks and Mac G5s, so this was a nice find, though it cost $30 more than the version with just USB 2.0 and Firewire 400.

It also comes in Graphite colour. There are several versions of this case, I believe, the cheapest being the USB 2.0 only. There is also a USB 2.0/Firewire 400 version, a USB 2.0/Firewire 400/Firewire 800 version (mine) and a SATA to USB 2.0/SATA to SATA version.

Casing is aluminium alloy, has an 8-inch turbo fan inside for cooling, on/off switch, and comes with a vertical stand, power supply and all the data cables you need.

I formatted mine for "Mac OS Extended" but you could format it as FAT32 for PC and Mac usage too.

Backup your stuff, or lose it. Hard disk prices have dropped so much. This 3.5-inch external drive cost me less than the 40Gb 2.5-inch portable external drive I bought a year ago. And that same portable drive now costs less than half what I paid.

Zhnging is a way of life

After reading blinkymummy's overview of Zhng and listening to our Zhng My Car podcast, Vandice remembers a friend who spared no expense in zhnging his Yamaha YZF-R1 bike.

I used to zhng my ride too, but it got too expensive to continue, and I found that it added very little to the price I sold my car for when it was time to get another. My other zhng obsession was my mobile phone, and I had more covers for my Nokia 8210 than anyone I knew. My favourite one was a green transparent one that had liquid inside. Combined with the white LED lights that blinded everyone in the cinema when the phone was touched, my 8210 was a sight to behold.

Excerpt:

Other than bragging rights to owning the most fanciful bike in the group, I failed to see how he was going to benefit from all the expensive mods, especially the extensive work on the engine and exhaust. HHF wasn't a Pasir Gudang racer-type. In fact, law-abiding HHF was positively gentle with his queen. We lost him during one outing because he refused to break the speed limit to catch up with the rest after missing a green light. And he was riding a beast that could easily hit 100 km/h in 2nd gear!

200Gb iPod Nano: instructions inside

Are you already filling up that new 4Gb iPod Nano? Here are instructions on how to make your very own 200Gb version of it! Sure, it makes the Nano a little bigger, and the battery life goes right down to 6 minutes (ATA Hard disk drives do suck up a lot of juice), but getting 50 times more space is worth drilling your iPod Nano for, surely.


Instructions at Uncyclopedia (via Gizmodo)

Fewer retrenchments in Singapore now, kinda

Interesting Sammyboy forum reply to a ST forum letter on being terminated.

This Miss Boon recently wrote to the ST Forum about her Notice of Termination:

Is it common for companies to sack older workers

I had been a loyal employee of McDonald's Singapore for the past 22 years and had risen from a Trainee Manager to Senior Restaurateur.

I had a reasonably good performance record over these years. In the past 12 months, my performance rating was excellent.

Recently, I was shocked to find myself given a Notice of Termination and was told to leave the company immediately without being given any reason...

Which prompted lambaste from Sammyboy's forum to write his own reply to her:

Dear Ms Boon

So sorry to hear that you have lost your job after 22 years with MacDonalds. It must have come as a bit of a shock for you, but the truth is that termination of service contract is common practice in the market place. You will understand that you are considered a junior managment staff. And as such ,you are proabably not protected by the labour laws that protect ordinary workers.

Even so there is really not much protection for the ordinary worker here. Singapore is very much an "employer advantaged market" compared to many places. In Malaysia for example to sack someone you literally have to be certain of the grounds or you face a lot of problems from the authorities.

You were probably expecting and/or hoping that the company would "retrench" rather than terminate your employment. This is exactly why many managerial staff slog on for their companies in the hope of getting that package with a golden handshake after decades of service.

Ms Boon — the realism is that such practises common in the 1970's 1980s and 1990's with multinationals and also at some later stages copied by some government related type companies-are no longer the order of the day especially so with many multi-nationals. (Although I am told some GLCs and government-related companies still continue this archaic practise — if that is true I don't know why!)

Retrenchment is not the preferred form of parting ways for employers these days simply because it is costly! A more pragmatic approach is "termination of the employment contract". ie simply to say" you are hereby informed that as of (date) your services are no longer required... in accordance with your employment contract , hence your last day shall be..."

Neat and tidy and inexpensive!

So for those who think they are entitled to some compensation for decades of loyal service — please drop that notion, less you suffer from cognitive dissonance and disappointment followed by depression when you finally get your "parting of ways" letter i.e. termination of service!

Ms Boon perhaps you should offer your services to Delifrance or Burger King... or smaller outlets like Coffee Club and Dome whereby the work enivronment may be less stressful — BUT remember don't expect to be retrenched with a windfall- those days are over except for some who maybe are in glcs.

But really!... the least MacDonalds could have done was to give you a good MacDonalds send off party and free vouchers for free MacDonald meals to last you the next 22 months. It's a small token to give, for 22 years of loyal service.

In another thread on the same topic, Sam Leong himself says:

I fail to understand why so many here are taking McDonald's to task when the company has done nothing wrong whatsoever.

In fact, they paid her a salary for almost a quarter of a century! Assuming she was paid an average monthly salary of $1800 during that period, she would have earned a whopping grand total of $514,800!!!! (excluding employer's CPF contribution and any bonuses beyond the standard 13 month component) a huge sum by any measure.

Had she invested just 30% of her monthly salary wisely, she'd now be sitting on a small fortune courtesy of McDonald's.

I hate it when people blame everyone except themselves whenever some misfortune befalls them. If Singaporeans could learn to take control of their lives instead of living in a fool's paradise, the country wouldn't be the shithole that it is today.

Credit Card Oops

In a Sunday Times piece where their reporters used fake signatures to test the vigilance of local stores, the front page image used as a lead-in to the article showed the back of a reporter's real credit card with:

1. The reporter’s real signature
2. The reporter’s credit card number and all other details on the front of card (which you can see, because of the indentations) and
3. The credit card’s CVC code at the back of the card.

(The reporter has since deactivated the card.)


Caught by the eagle eye of Dominic Soon, found via Tomorrow.sg

Lifelong Learning and employment in Singapore

Interesting thread at Sammyboy's Kopitiam, on the state of lifelong learning and employment, especially for those aged 40 and above, in Singapore. Perhaps we need to adopt the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.


From Davidking:

Before the PAPPY govt launched the life long learning campagine, I have alread started my own life long learning since 1982. Till now. I am holding the following qualifications :-.

1. Diploma in Admin Management -UK. (IAM)
2. Diploma in Marketing -UK, (CIMUK).
3. City & Guild - Date Processing- UK.
4. MBA (Marketing)- UK.
5. MBA (Finance) -Aust.

Due to my age now, I can hardly find a decent job and one my friend, age 35, holding a ACCA, still jobless for 2 years.


From Garagoh:

Losers like you should wake up to the fact that having a string of letters after your name is no guarantee of career success...esp when such "qualifications" from from instititutions of no repute ! Take heart that for every one of you griping and blaming the PAP for their personal shortcomings, another 2-3 other Singaporeans are quietly doing well..getting promoted, buying cars and homes.

In a fast moving economic landscape, there will be winners and losers. The gahmen of the day can only show you where the water is..you have to learn how to drink. No doubt there is a high proportion of farking losers wasting their time complaining on this forum. The reality is out on the streets...winners are everywhere.

Instead of blaming the PAP and foreign workers, ask yourself honestly why you have not been able to get a job. Take a long close look in the mirror.


From LeongSam:

He's reached his use-by date. It's the same the world over.

When you reach 50, the 20+ years of experience is considered to be a hindrance rather than an asset to any potential employee. It like mileage on a second hand car.

Employees, especially those in middle management positions, should start planning to achieve financial independence while they're earning relatively good salaries in their late 20s and early 30s.

Who says Government agencies have no sense of humour?

From the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority press releases section:

Illegal Breast Enhancement Busted by ICA

It was not silicone, it was not saline. The implants came in the form of Dormicum and Domi.

2. The "D-cups" were detected on 28 September 2005 at around 3.40pm, when one of our officers noticed that a female traveller was behaving nervously at the Arrival Bus Hall of Woodlands Checkpoint. The traveller was then directed to the office for further checks...

Guess that operation went tits up. Remember kiddies, smoking is bad for your boobs.

Actually, if you look through the ICA press releases, there are quite a few gems in there. Here are a few more I found:

ICA Exposes the Seat of Deceit (Malaysian man caught smuggling in contraband cigarettes from Malaysia by hiding the cigarettes under the rear passenger seat of his son's car)

ICA Makes a Clean Sweep of an Illegal Employment Syndicate
(The 20 immigration offenders caught were all employed to work as cleaners and dishwashers at the food outlets)

Yucks! The Things People Keep in Their Undies!
("Probing further, two pieces of VCD and two pieces of DVD, suspected to be uncensored and obscene, were found stuffed in the subject's underwear, ensconced in the crevice of his butt cheek. Two 6-tablet slabs and one 4-tablet slab of Dormicum were also "fished" out from subject's groin area." Nuff said.)

History of Singapore in Wikipedia

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", has many interesting entries about Singapore and our history. There is a page for Goh Keng Swee, MM Lee Kuan Yew, and also the History of Singapore.

There is also an entry for Chin Peng and The Emergency.

Go have a read, compelling stuff.


Excerpt:

Self-government (1955 – 1963)

The leader of the Labour Front, David Marshall, became the first Chief Minister of Singapore. He presided over a shaky government, receiving little cooperation from either the colonial government or the other local parties. In May 1955, however, the Hock Lee Bus Riots broke out, killing four people, and consequently would later seriously discredit Marshall's government. In April 1956, he led a delegation to London to negotiate for complete self-rule, but the talks fell through due to British concerns about labour unrest and communist influence. Marshall continued to pressure the British, before declaring that if the British did not give Singapore self-rule, he would resign. However, the British were not concerned about his resignation, and because he did not want to back out on his word, Marshall eventually resigned. His successor as Chief Minister, Lim Yew Hock, launched a crackdown on communist and leftist groups, imprisoning many trade union leaders and several pro-communist members of the PAP under the Internal Security Act.

The British government approved of Lim's tough stance against communist agitators, and when a new round of talks was held beginning in 1957, they were amenable to granting almost complete self-government. A State of Singapore would be created, with its own citizenship, consisting of persons born in Singapore or the Federation of Malaya, British citizens of two years' residence, and others of ten years' residence. The Legislative Assembly would be expanded to fifty-one members, entirely chosen by popular election, and the Prime Minister and cabinet would control all aspects of government except defence and foreign affairs. The British-appointed Governor was replaced by a Yang di-Pertuan Negara or head of state.

芙蓉姐夫 Flash MTV

A Flash music video featuring 芙蓉姐夫 (Furong Jiefu), the "husband" of 芙蓉姐姐 (Furong Jiejie, fake English spoof here). MTV is in Chinese.

Bad Logo Choices

Found this via Frederik Samuel's Advertising blog.

Bad logo choices made by a DVD rental shop, a dentist (seen here), a German port-a-potty company and pharmacy in Japan.

I also like these series of pics of an ad on a bendy bus.

Blogopoly: The Sedition Edition

In the light of the current Blogger Troubles, Merv made his version of Blogopoly, the board game.

via tomorrow.sg

Fear Factor: Singapore Blogger Edition

Singapore has four climates.

Climate of Hot.

Climate of Hotter.

Climate of Hottest.

And Climate of Fear.

"So something something gahmen something something bloggers something something a climate of fear?"

If we had to do a keyword search for Singapore, these would probably be the most popular terms:

clampdown
blogger
climate of fear

Just once, for a change, I'd like to see news reports that state, "This incident contributed to a climate of a-little-bit-scared in the Singapore blogosphere."

So if the two bloggers only posted their racist comments on a forum and not their blogs, would we see the term "Forumer" used?

Possible headlines: "Two forumers charged under Sedition Act over racist remarks" or "Two bloggers charged under Sedition Act over racist remarks in forum"

The Gahmen is watching

entwined loves to read Rockson's comments (warning: strong language and sexual references) as much as his posts. Some of the commenters are extremely witty themselves. This one was a hoot.

In case you cannot see what is on the screenshot (click on image to enlarge), here is the bit encircled:

xY :> said...
hahah rockson.. ur entries always very interesting! dun worri lah.. gahmen where will catch you?!

Monday, September 12, 2005 7:52:16 PM

gahmen said...
will

Monday, September 12, 2005 7:55:08 PM

Quite appropriate given the current blogger troubles with the government.

via entwined

South Park brown

This is myself as a (totally not seditious) South Park character.

South Park Studio via Daryl "da pimp" Sng

In other news, Terz shares his English teacher's wisdom, Friskodude has a neat Google Earth shot of Esplanade, Huileng got so engrossed in World of Warcraft she expected her toddler daughter to put back daddy's credit cards into his wallet, and I found out last week that a Level 2 World of Warcraft noob character should not wander into a village filled with Level 6 giant spiders. Confirm die one.

Two charged in court for racist content on their blogs

Update 2 (13 Sept 2005): The issue is now on Slashdot front page leh! And Miyagi.sg is mentioned in one of the comments, which seems to have brought poor Miyagi's site down (Miyagi's blog was down after a power failure in LA, and it is back up now). Talk about the Slashdot effect, man. Wah, Miyagi is famous on Slashdot liao.

And it seems the Americans have not forgotten Michael Fay's backside, or our infamous chewing gum laws. To which I say, good thing the two were not spewing racist remarks WHILE chewing gum at the same time then, or else it will be gum chewing Sedition.

(Yes, I know, it is not against the law to CHEW gum, just to sell it or import it.)


Update 1: They were charge for their content on blogs and forums. Mr Miyagi has a view on this. And here is the CNA report: Two bloggers charged under Sedition Act over racist remarks.

"The charges read that Lim had, on 16 and 17 June 2005, posted anti-Muslim remarks on the general discussion forum of [deleted because matter is at issue at court].

Koh was alleged to have done the same on 12, 15 and 17 June on another website, [deleted because matter is at issue at court].

In doing so, they are alleged to have committed an act which had a seditious tendency.

This is defined as promoting feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races of the population of Singapore."

About the act itself, Sammyboy himself says: "Based on the the list, just about every mother's son and daughter who has ever posted any messages here will soon be in jail."


If anyone has more details, post in the comments here. I will update this post when I have more info.

Publishing race hate in any medium, be it blogs, email, print, tv, radio, or a piece of paper you put on people's car, is a criminal offence in Singapore, and I believe in many countries, like the UK.

Something to bear in mind, whether you are a blogger or not.

Cowboy din get no avatar

Yes, you can now add your own avatars in Tomorrow.sg. Except Cowboy (see the comment thread on the left). Hahahaha!

Just go to edit account page and upload your pic (50x50 pixels, 30k max) there.

Ok lah. We had our fun with Cowboy. He can now have his own avatar too.

Swearing is too risky for S'poreans

Just like one forum letter writer felt that skydiving is too risky for Singaporeans, another writer joins the fray and lambastes LIME magazine for recommending Rockson's blog (do NOT click on this link, your mouse will explode hor) in their September issue.

I suppose LIME should have placed some kind of warning about his strong language and adult content. Ya lor, so bad, LIME go and recommend the teens and kiddies to this horrigible blog. WTF.

(Er, that stood for "World Trade Federation")

Then again, people will still go there anyway, even after they have been warned. Then read already come back and complain.

I think Mediacorp Press should thank SPH for helping to make their LIME September issue sell even better. I already have my copy, and it comes with a free neat SAF transparent folder. Can use it to put your certificates and result slips when you go and apply for that F-15 pilot post.

DVD player that plays almost anything

Just got an LG DK 9723P DVD player for SGD$139 and so far it looks quite good. I have to say, DVD players have certainly plunged in price.

The 9723P is touted for maximum playability. Played almost all the DivX files I threw at it except those using Ogg sound. One of my anime series had the subtitles cropped off below (discussed here), but I semi-fixed the overscan by changing the aspect ratio on my TV to 16:9. The rest of my anime played ok.

Yeah yeah, I know DivX 6 is round the corner, but I figure what the hey, when it becomes the standard, then time to change the player. For now, the ability to play my DivX files on my TV without having to hook up my Powerbook is worth the price of admission alone. And you don't want to have to teach the wife over the phone how to hook up the laptop to the TV to watch her favourite series. Now I can say, "Switch to the AV channel, pop in the disc, and hit play, dear."

An Aussie forum has a thread on this model.

Video and Audio supported include DivX, MP3, SVCD, VCD and WMA. Media supported includes CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD+RW. A/V Connections: Coaxial Digital, Component Video, Composite Video, Optical Digital and S-Video.

And yes, it is multi-region, a concept very alien to my New York colleague when he was visiting. Apparently, it is very hard to find multi-region DVD players in USA. I remember telling him, "Dude, don't worry about your player, no shop sells region-coded DVD players here. NOBODY would buy it otherwise."

Also nice, the progressive scanning and the component video outputs come at the right time now that my Panasonic Tau Giga can support it. The old Philips Matchline workhorse of mine only supported S-video, so it did not matter. The 2004 Appleseed movie looks absolutely fab with progressive scan and component video (and sounds great in Japanese DTS too). Here is a link to the Appleseed movie site.

Harlan McCraney: Presidential Speechalist

In the August 2005 issue of The Digital Journalist, Beverly Spicer has a link to Comedy Central's hilarious spoof of presidential spin doctors. Featuring Harlan McCranney, Presidential Speechalist for President Bush.

See the Quicktime movie here or from iFilm.com.

More SWF Videoblogging: Wendy seeks her Muse

Updated with more compatible video encoding. Now PCs can see the video too.

What goes on in the fertile and literary mind of Singapore's greatest blogger? Nay, Singapore's greatest writer?

Watch Wendy struggle with her inner Muse, as she tries to write her next epic.

Click on this link to watch part 3 of our SWF video clip (Quicktime video, Filesize: 1.8mb, Time: 00:02:22).

More SWF Videoblogging: Ode to the Lemon Puff

Updated with more compatible video encoding. Now PCs can see the video too.

In our continuing Singapore Writers Festival videoblog literary series, I attempt a poetry reading in my best literary voice. So I grab the nearest piece of literature for this literary moment, the nutrition information from a packet of Khong Guan Lemon Puffs biscuits.

Miyagi later told me that my reading was "moving".

Click on this link to watch part 2 of our SWF video clip (Quicktime video, Filesize: 1.1mb, Time: 00:01:29).

Bloggers at SWF Videoblog Part 1

We had some free time in the Writers' Lounge, after our Saturday first session at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) and decided to play around with Miyagi's new Apple iSight camera.

The result was a series of videoclips that is possibly the beginning of our vblog. And for those of you waiting for our next podcast, Miyagi and I will be working on it soon. After we get some sleep (I fell asleep sitting up just now, while waiting for my wife at Tampines Isetan's ladies shoes department).

Oh, Cory Doctorow has a great collection photos of SWF on his Flickr page. Check out his photos of the steamboat and the Ice Kacang he had. He was totally blown away by Singapore's cheap and good food, and Sim Lim Square.

Click on this link to watch part 1 of our SWF video clip (updated from MP4 to mov video, Filesize: 2.5mb, Time: 00:03:11), from Miyagi's server.

Overclocking Yourself

Sometimes we geeks spend so much time squeezing out as much performance as we can out of our computers that we forget to boost the most important piece of hardware.

Tom's Hardware Guide has an important column on Overclocking Yourself, complete with detailed benchmarking of drinks like Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Coca Cola, and good ole coffee.

Excerpt:

There comes a point in every programmer's life when the strings and tags no longer make sense, the eyes feel heavy and the fingers numb upon the keyboard. We here at THG appreciate how the daily wear and tear takes its toll on the human body. Just as we believe that with enough liquid nitrogen anyone can go to 6 GHz and beyond, we believe that you too can be given an energy boost to take you through those long crunch nights. You know, the ones when the spit has hit the fan, you're a day off deadline and have to go hunting for a single tiny bug in 100,000 lines of code?

Happy Teachers' Day!

To my mom and all teachers out there, Happy Teachers' Day! I hope you guys got many nice presents and thank yous from your students.

(Yes, I know I am late. It has been a mad week.)

How Teachers' Day was celebrated in the Singapore blogosphere:

Both of Daryl's parents are teachers and he sends shout-outs to them.

Tym slept in and reflected on her Teachers' Day.

Mr Q got a cake (more of his photos here).

Hejin said her school's celebrations were a hoot.

Technorati tag: teachersday

BlogDay 2005 is TODAY!

BlogDay was initiated with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to know other bloggers, from other countries or areas of interests. In that day Bloggers will recommend about them to their Blog visitors.


Here are my five grober BlogDay links:

Eight Diagrams (USA)
Eight Diagrams is the blog of Wayne E. Yang, a freelance writer/photographer based in the US. He has written for The North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, SFGate.

Global Voices Online (USA)
Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Bingfeng Teahouse (China)
Bingfeng is based in Shanghai. I love the Friday Girl Blogging but I tell everyone I read it for the articles.

Tokyo Times (Japan)
Observations of a gaijin, Lee Chapman, in Japan.

Yellow Peril (New Zealand)
莫志明 is an Auckland writer. She is first-generation New Zealand-born Chinese, and her English name is Tze Ming Mok. Her parents are from Singapore (via Yunnan province and Burma) and Malaysia (via Guangdong province, Vietnam and Thailand).

BlogDay posting instructions:

• Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
• Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2005
• Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
• Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
• Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2005 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

Technorati tag: blogday2005

Interview on CNA's Prime Time Morning

Mr Miyagi (he got new URL liao, ok? At miyagi.sg) and I will be on Channel NewsAsia's Prime Time Morning show tomorrow, Monday the 29th of August. I think we will be on after 8.45am (when most people are safely at work).

We will be interviewed about our participation in the Singapore Writers Festival.

I am trying to convince Ben to read one of his erotic love poems on air, but he says Singapore is not ready for it.

Don't play play leh

Klingon Fairy Tales

From McSweeney's, by Mike Richardson-Bryan. Also funny in their latest issue, Your Children are Destroying the Neighbourhood by Elizabeth Urello.

Excerpt:

"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"

"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"

"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It"

This Spartan Life

Damian Lacedaemion hosts a talk show called This Spartan Life, except that it is done entirely in Halo 2. Yes, you heard me right. The whole thing takes place in the virtual environment of Xbox Live.

The show has its own Solid Gold Elite Dancers (seen in this image), a DJ who spins 8-bit Gameboy tunes, and also has guests who are interviewed by Damian as they walk through the maps of Halo 2. In the first episode, Damian interviews Voyager founder Bob Stein and experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh.

In between an interview, clueless Halo 2 players enter their game (which is really the show being recorded) and start shooting at them, not realising that there are people who just want to hang around a Halo 2 game to talk and record a talk show.

The bit where host Damian takes out an annoying sniper while chatting with Bob was priceless.

Feedster

Kenny informed me I am on Feedster's Top 500, number 240, thanks dude! I believe Tomorrow.sg and Xiaxue is also there. So since they give logo, I put lor. Haha.

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

The world is a safer place now that P. Diddy drops his P

Some random links that made me laugh and/or think:

• "Noodz" littlecartnoodles shares the earth-shattering news that Puff Daddy aka P. Diddy is now aka Diddy, because he felt like the "P" was getting between him and his fans.
• Behold, a complaint letter sent by a dumbass.
• Finicky Feline sees a most unusual job ad.
• And finally, some food for thought as Seah Chiang Nee reflects on the damage that this Presidential Election (or non-Election, as some might say) may have wrought.

Excerpt:

I think the nation and every Singaporean have lost something. On the morning after, people are either angry or baffled.

For one or two emotional weeks, both sides seemed to have forgotten about the dignity of the presidency, and that the issue is not just about Mr. S.R. Nathan or Mr. Andrew Kwan.

It's about the future of a revered, crucial institution.

One Singapore Minute mentioned in Digital Life

One Singapore Minute gets a mention in Digital Life, ST's technology pullout. There are more than 350 photos in the pool, as of this post, which is really encouraging, because the project is only halfway into the month.

See larger version of the article here.

Thanks to Lancerlord for spotting and scanning this.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

Acting doesn't get any worse than this

I just found this Quicktime movie trailer for a Christian movie, End of the Harvest, and it is hilarious.

The evil music in the background, the dialogue and the acting just cracked me up.

See the trailer here.

Example of the dialogue:

Dude A: "I have a topic for yer"
Dude B: "Yeah, what's that?"
Dude A: "The end of the world."
Dude C: "What about it?"
Dude A: "I think I know when it's going to end."

Singapore style Presidential elections

Who sez there is no election? Go to Sintercom and vote for your President, Singapore style, right now!

And I know some of you still think that Optimus Prime should win, with his galactic leadership and all, but will his employment history or fellow Autobots do him in too? For instance, the hotheaded Dinobot, Slag, was known to resent the authority of Prime.

If Prime wins, maybe this is the press release:

The Presidential Elections Committee's decision to issue a Certificate of Eligibility to Optimus Prime has come as no surprise to many.

Prime is frequently described as the keeper of the awesome Autobot Matrix of Leadership, an eternal symbol of hope in the battle for peace in the Universe.

Some are concerned about the demands of the office on Optimus Prime's health, but they believe he will continue to keep up the good work he has done over the last six years caring for the people and promoting charity work.

Calling Singapore Home: Revisited

Sometime in May, I linked to enuwy's blog where she wrote about her desire to be a Singapore citizen after being a PR for so long. She was born and educated in Singapore and lived here all her life, except for three years in the Uni.

You may wish to know that her application for Singapore citizenship has been approved. Congrats to enuwy!

Excerpt:

After all that fretting, worrying, pondering, teeth gnashing, and generally hoping that a country I call home would not turn me away, it's finally happened.

National Day Season

limegreenspyda, a 26-year-old Singaporean currently pursuing a postgrad degree in Design in Victoria, Australia, reflects on the season of National Day.

Excerpt:

i just found out about mr brown's new onesingaporeminute meme. that sure makes me miss singapore a lot more than just watching the NDP.

these familiar shots give me a sense of intimacy with the island-state i acknowledge as 'home'.

Hock Kee House and The Red House

Wah look how much the LTA loves you, residents of Hock Kee House! At first, you thought your property is freehold with a 999 year lease. Then suddenly, they call you to a meeting without really telling you what the meeting is for, and break the news to you. You have to move out in one month because the Circle Line work around your residence and place of business may destabilise your building.

So much love and concern for your safety. Finally, after all this time putting up with the dust, the inconvenience and the loss of business, relief is in sight! Gahmen will give you compensation and all you have to do is just pack up and leave.

Since we are talking about Houses, The Red House at Katong, once home to a quaint bakery, is going to get a facelift to restore its former glory. The property is one of the wakaf — or endowment properties — in Singapore looked after by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore or Muis, and they hope to increase the rental income collected and use it to help the poor pay their medical bills.

I am all for conservation, and upgrading, and helping the poor with the rental income, these are noble goals. But really, must we have another food court?

Yes, The Red House will return as a food court, the icon of modern Singapore. Yum.

Not.

Blogging about blogging

I am trying to cut down blogging on blogging, but Tym sent me a neat link by W. Caleb McDaniel on "Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading". I thought it was quite cool the way the author drew comparisons between the journal-keeping by antebellum American reformer Henry Clarke Wright in the 1800s and blogging today.

Excerpt:

Wright died in 1870, already a relatively forgotten reformer. Yet—and I speak from my own experience in 2005—his reflections on writing are eerily evocative of what it is like to blog. Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution "to write down what I see and hear and feel daily," his use of journals to "let off" rants of "indignation," his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the "greater part of the day writing in his room." Was Wright a blogger? Are not his journals the fossilized originals of a species?

If you scoff at this suggestion, this is probably because you hold this truth to be self-evident: In the course of human events, blogging is the newest of newcomers.

Then we swing over to the very funny Alex Blagg, who tells us that "Your IM Conversations Aren't Interesting", and unless your name is bloodninja, you are no longer allowed to post your IM conversations.

Even the comments left on Blaggs's post is funny. Like this one and this one.

Die lah. What will we blog about?

Excerpt:

Like most things in life, everyone thinks what they and their friends have to say is unique and amusing. I assure you, it is not. If you manage to make some clever IM joke in the long, boring desert of banality that is your IM conversation, you really don't need to cut and paste the transcript and share it with the world. Seriously, we'll live without it. The truth is, they always sound pretty much the same:

Tomorrow editors' dinner

We met, we ate, we worked out some issues.

Idler has an open letter to the Tomorrow.sg team. And Wendy, you are too kind.

Excerpt:

We were just eating, when he looked at the menu while commenting, "Wah, the food here not bad ah? I must bring The Wife here some day."

I cannot remember, but I think LMD asked him whether or not he eats out often, and brownie replied, "Yeah lor, every Friday....

"Once in a week must make her feel special mah. Because weekend is for the kids already, no time for her."

Sim Lim is an evil place

Sim Lim Square is an evil place because you go there to find out why your PC is acting up (turns out it is a faulty 4-chip 256mb piece of RAM), but walk out the place with your PC encased in a new black Cooler Master Centurion V aluminum casing, with a new 200Gb hard disk inside (the old 80Gb was acting flaky), a new Logitech Ultra-slimline keyboard (old MX Duo mouse melted on the cradle charger/transmitter), and a Razer Diamondback Plasma Limited Edition gamer's mouse (1600dpi baby!!!).

Like I said. An evil place.

Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager

This is a fun Java app I found on The Baby Name Wizard book site, called NameVoyager. Type in your name and see how popular it was over the decades. The FAQ is here.

Very very cool. Try it here.

Look! We so clever political party because we now got podcast!

Dear Singaporeans, we are having a historic moment! An opposition party, the SDP, has created a historic event, by recording a historic podcast, and not only that, a historic POLITICAL podcast!

Never mind that currently, it is only an mp3 file sitting on a site. It shall be named RadioSDP! Never mind that podcasts are supposed to delivered via an RSS feed, it is still historic. I am sure, the historic RSS feed will be added later, warranting another declaration of historic-ness.

And their hosted mp3 audio file, sorry, podcast, is also historic because it is a way to bypass the broadcast laws of Singapore! So of course it is necessary to declare this fact as loudly as possible, never mind that it will now invite the Gahmen to come up with a law to deal with this.

"The podcast is a way for the Party to by-pass the state-controlled media in Singapore. Airwaves in the country are monopolised, cable television is owned by a government-linked company, satellite dishes are banned, and the press is controlled by the ruling party. The Internet remains a medium that the Government finds it hard to censor, although it has enacted many laws aimed at curtailing the use of the Internet for political purposes."

SDP: "Legislate THIS!"
Gahmen: "Ok."

"The Media Development Authority confirmed that podcasting does come under the current regulatory framework. It is still studying developments in this area, it told Today."

As they say in some political circles and think tanks, "Kua kua...".

Classic Hokkien song

Found this on Galvin's blog, via Tomorrow.sg.

It is a fantastic Hokkien song called Ji Pa Ban (One Million Dollars). Complete with lyrics, translation of lyrics, and the MP3 itself! Sing with me!

Excerpt of lyrics:

Nah sih gua uh ji pa ban, ji pa ban,
Gua uh ji pa ban, jit si lang tio khin san,
Bo khong bo lang jai, kong tio chin pai seh,
Chiak kak hia nih tua hanh. ko mm pat je puey kee

(Chinese lyrics below, via Beifeng.com)

一百萬
詞： 曲： 原唱：黃一飛
提供者： 李紅真 添加/審核： 李紅真

若是我有一百萬一百萬 我有一百萬 一世人就輕鬆
無講無人知 講到真歹勢 吃甲彼呢大漢 擱不曾坐飛機
打拼彼多年 無車無厝擱無愛人 看人娶某擱做生意
有錢擱有勢 若是我有一百萬 我要坐飛機
我要遊世界HAWAII曬太陽 日本吃壽司
若是我有一百萬 我要買車買厝山珍甲海味
啥人卡福氣來乎我做某 若是我有一百萬 一百萬
若是你有欠用錢 開嘴免客氣 若是我有一百萬
我要坐飛機 我要遊世界 義大利飲咖啡 路邊吃Spaghetti
若是我有一百萬 我要買車買厝買店來收租 閒閒免做工
帶狗去散步 若是我有一百萬 一百萬 若是你有欠用錢 開嘴免客氣
若是我有一百萬 一百萬 十千八千拿去用 免還嘛無問題
若是我有一百萬 一百萬 口白：朋友啊,你想一百萬真多啊!

Agagooga experimenting with new post format

Agagooga is experimenting with breaking up his super long daily posts into smaller chunks, on my advice. Go and tell him how much you like it that you can now link directly to his collection of Conversations, his thoughts on RSS feeds, and his take on being a hall person. All without needing to scroll through 5 pages of text to get to the bit you want. And easier to tell your friend which post is the one he records all the funnies he hears in lectures, rather than say, go to Post X, and scroll past four "***"s.

And oh, leave more comments and stuff.

New Paper interview

I thought, since Mr Miyagi shared his New Paper interview answers, I would post mine too. In response to the New Paper piece, Chandler, Sheylara and Threez wrote some thoughts on the extensive Sunday New Paper blog coverage. (Scan of TNP taken from Chandler's blog)

Ivan Fernandez of the New Paper also wrote in this blog issue of bloggers:

"They are faceless. And largely out of focus... They hide behind cyber masks, but bare their hearts of darkness."

Quick, grab your torch and pitchforks, the Faceless Zombie Bloggers of Darkness are coming!

My answers to TNP's questions:
1. I am 36 and an Internet Consultant.

2. I have been writing online since 1997. Somewhere along the way, someone pointed out to me that what I was doing on my site was blogging, so ok lor, blogging it shall be.

I think blogging here has evolved in many ways, and now you have blogs by people of all ages, and covering all sorts of topics and interests. It MAY have started out as a young person's diary thing, but the local blogosphere has pretty much followed the global trend of evolving into many forms.

3. Ah that. I felt it was amusing and reacted in an infantile way lor, I invited my readers to help the accuser find some non-infantile blogs for him to read. I thought it was an interesting exercise because many bloggers wrote insightful and soul-searching posts on this issue (ok, some went to the accuser's blog and left angry and silly infantile comments, but you can't avoid that). All in all, I thought everyone had fun exploring and deconstructing the beast that is the Singaporean blogosphere.

Any truth in this? I don't think so. Sure we don't have as many "serious" blogs as the US, but we have them. Given time, the numbers will grow. For now, it is just nice to see more people blogging and reading blogs, and expressing themselves freely. Why create a pigeonhole for our nicely growing communities of blogs?

4. Not really. I do think that many of the popular blogs are socially and politically aware. They just express it in their own ways. You cannot fully appreciate my SNE series without knowing a little about local politics, for instance.

5. I have tried navel gazing, but I cannot see my navel because my tummy gets in the way. I think people who accuse local bloggers of navel gazing are still thinking of blogs as diaries. I read many local blogs that are written by domain experts on topics which have nothing to do with what they took for breakfast or how they feel about love (not to say these are not valid blogging areas either).

I give you a few examples:

www.james.seng.cc (technology)
www.dsng.net (language)
www.singaporesoxfan.com (baseball)
www.preetamrai.com (travel and culture)

6. I think that time may come, this uncovering scandals thing. But already, you see better commentaries online on politics than you read in the papers sometimes. (Although some of it may be a little vulgar.) And I also have better photos of the Lau Pa Sat fire than any local paper, because I was there when it happened.

Given time, I think we will see more citizen journalists come out of the scene here. For now, we are still exploring the medium and enjoying some of the freedom of expression it brings.

Oh, and maybe some of us are waiting to see who gets hammered first, to determine where the OB markers exist (if they CAN exist online in the first place)

7. I suppose like in any medium, sex and humour sell. I see a lot of that in TV and newspapers here too. But there are just as many female and male bloggers I read that do not do the sexy photos thing or write funny. And they do not lack the hits (if that is even a good measure of a blog's value). I think it is easy to create a stereotype if you look for these blogs to highlight in the media.

I mean, you rarely hear of the famous blogger who writes about technology and domain name strategy in the papers. But that fellow is there, and he is well-read by a global audience too. And I can tell you, he is famous.

8. Again, that takes the assumption that all bloggers are online public diarists. Many bloggers with authority write on specialist topics and blogs are merely their medium of distribution. You wouldn't call these bloggers exhibitionist, would you?

9. I very young what. Who said I old? Heheh.

People blog for a myriad of reasons. You can be of any age to blog, because at the end of the day, it is just a platform for self-expression and personal publishing, distributing your content to one to or to many. If there is one thing I have learned from being part of Tomorrow.sg and discovering so many Singapore blogs and blogging communities, is that bloggers come in all ages, shapes and sizes.

Again, the emailing friends question assumes that blogs are online diaries only. But ok, for people who share their lives online with friends via blogs, I can tell you that many of them use Livejournal, which allows them to lock posts to make them private only to their friends. And using this method, a group of friends can have private sharing of each other's lives in a more interactive way than email can ever hope to accomplish. The reason some diarist bloggers are still using public blog systems like blogger.com (where posts cannot made private) is because blogger.com is easier to use, but many may eventually try to find lockable blogging systems to use, once they realise that their personal blogs are actually in a public space.

blinkymummy visits ITE Regional Campus

Urban planner blinkymummy, who recently had a Fight Club moment, visits the ITE Regional Campus in Simei, and was impressed at how far ITE has come.

Excerpt:

When I first joined my org in 2000, my first major case was to help ITE find sites to consolidate the 14 campuses they have across the island. 5 years later today, I visited the newly completed Regional Campus in Simei, which had been operational for 6-7 months.

阿風's National Day Dance MTV

Cloudywind, the same chap lady who did the infamous Infernal Affairs NKF parodies, is back with his her take on the NDP 2005 song, Reach Out for the Skies (am I the only one who thinks this year's song sucks? Give me "Home" anyday).

The music video contains hilarious dance scenes from Stephen Chow movies, and now that I've seen it, the moves really look like the NDP ones.

So as not to kill his her bandwidth, I have mirrored his 4.8mb Windows Media Player movie here.

Bloggers in the news

Update: Singapore's largest circulating Chinese broadsheet, Zaobao, also ran a piece on Mr Miyagi and myself today (28 July 2005) entitled 博客uncle红了. I will see if I can get a scan.

Here is the link for now.

Excerpt:

　　本地博客不只是“下雪”这位小姑娘红，还有两位“uncle”很火红。Uncle 的称号不是记者替他们取的，是几乎每5分钟就要说一次笑话的他们如此自嘲的。

　　36岁，化名“褐先生”(Mr.Brown)的李健敏和以“Miyagi先生”（Mr Miyagi）为笔名而广为人知的李士耀，在本地青少年博客群里，的确因年龄而非常出众。但他们的出众也是因为他们拥有除了少年族群以外，更成熟（20岁至30多岁）的读者群。

Sandralicious got featured in Shin Min (Wanbao), that paragon of journalistic integrity, and is not too happy at being called a scheming 20-year-old posting pictures on the net so that she can lure wolves into her net.

Our Bloggers.SG Convention was covered by Associated Press ("Singapore's Net-dwellers gather for first official 'off-line' conference").

Excerpt:

SINGAPORE (AP) - Spread out over the nightclub dance floor, Singapore's Web journal community officially gathered off-line for the first time to put faces to the popular Web pseudonyms and discuss important blogger issues - including how to avoid a ruinous government lawsuit.

For more than five hours Saturday about 200 people - some hunkered over laptops - listened to Singapore's most famous Web writers in person as a big-screen television beamed a chat room taking questions and comments from cyberspace.

A Bangkok Post piece on terrorism ("Challenging the slew of online militants") mentioned the Con as well, and, er, me. (Thanks to Double Yellow for the heads-up)

Excerpt:

In another instance, a social commentator for Singapore-published Today newspaper caricaturised as "Mr Brown'' essentially started out as a blog celebrity.

His acknowledged public status is no surprise, considering that Singaporeans are perhaps the most progressive in the region to embrace blogs as a newfound subculture. Its residents recently staged the first-ever annual Singapore Bloggers Conference in early July.

Aside from being approached by the local press (in his comments section since he left no email), Rockson also got quoted in an AFP news report, "Singapore spends big on no name change", in a South African online newspaper, Mail & Guardian. The quote comes from his post on Marina Bay.

Excerpt:

Not surprisingly, many Singaporeans were quick to lambaste the government's latest publicity efforts as an utter waste of public funds.

"Waaah, you so clever ... [you] think and think and think and come up [with] this new old name," Rockson Takumi Tan wrote on his popular blog. -- AFP

World's ugliest dog, Sam

Some of you may not know this, but Daryl has the honour of having the cutest dog in the world, at least on Google. Typing this (click link) in Google, will net you Coconut, his little cutie pie.

However, if you google for the "world's ugliest dog", you will not really get Sam, as the first entry. This is a shame, because Sam has proudly won the title "world's ugliest dog" for three years running now. Go to this site to see Sam in all his glory.

(via Joho the Blog)

More bash.org

Some new finds from bash.org:

#515363

[rhys_rhaven]: I have pictures..thousands of them. but most are art...i got katies harddrive.
[rhys_rhaven]: ....
[overlord_overkill2007]: ah i se
[rhys_rhaven]: i dont understand how she can walk into a church
[rhys_rhaven]: tons, and tons, of slash
[rhys_rhaven]: gay guys, gay guys f**king, gay porn stories, guys on guys, guys kissing.
[overlord_overkill2007]: ewww
[rhys_rhaven]: guys humping guys, female ass domination, guy slaves, butt sex,
[overlord_overkill2007]: ewwwwwwww
[rhys_rhaven]: oh it gets worse. she has no file structure!!!!!
[rhys_rhaven]: what kind of sick woman doesnt organize her files?!!!
[Daniel]: EWWWWWWWW\

#478519:

[shane] there is a special place in hell, down the hall from hitler, for real player

#115:

[BlackDeth] i like stalked this girl sorta :D
[BlackDeth] like once she asked me for a ride home from work
[BlackDeth] and i took her home... i dropped her off at her house
[BlackDeth] and shes like... wait a minute..how did you know where i lived?

#459217:

[hoLy] Ouch
[hoLy] my friend is giving me a tattoo with a bic pen and a knife right now
[hoLy] hurts so much but he almost finished
[hoLy] Hes finishing up the I in SATIN
[Ruff] ...
[hoLy] Yeah, so it'll say HAIL SATIN
[hoLy] This is gonnna be awesome

Things Not Overheard at a Conceptual-Art Gallery Opening

I love to read McSweeny's Lists. The one below is by Jason Persse.

Excerpt:

Things Not Overheard at a Conceptual-Art Gallery Opening.

"Does naming the work 'Chaos' belie the artist's reliance upon a sparse, monochromatic field, or am I just a pretentious douchebag?"

"Well, that's obvious, but what do the other three midgets represent?"

"Let me get this straight—the artist is gay and German? You just blew my mind."

UK Soldiers have to shout "Bang Bang"

Chey, these British soldier so upset for what? Singapore NSMen shout "bang bang" ALL the time.

From the Telegraph, Soldiers forced to shout 'bang' as the Army runs out of ammunition

Excerpt:

He said: "There is nothing more dispiriting than soldiers having to go on exercise and shout 'bang, bang' because there is not enough blank ammunition. Any benefit from the exercise will be lost because soldiers just won't take it seriously. Why should soldiers who are being sent to Iraq, where their lives will be endangered, be forced to shout 'bang' in training because someone in the Ministry of Defence can't do basic arithmetic? It's a disgrace."

Mr Miyagi is a Burfday Boy today!

What the heow? It is Mr Miyagi's burfday leh! Quick, use your ingterneck and go his blog to wish him Happy Burfday or emu him!

Or if you have his number, like Isaac here, you can oso call or sms him.

(Image taken by Fayeth, thanks for taking such a great shot of my boy!)

Xiaxue's email and blog has been hacked

Update: Anna Wonkytong's blog has also been hacked into. I suggest all of you take some precautions and change the passwords for your blog and emails accounts, just to be safe. Especially if your passwords were easy to guess. Some script kiddie out there is trying to show off.

Last night, some wanker, with too much free time and a whole lot of malice, hacked into Xiaxue's Gmail account and deleted 3000 emails in there. Many of those emails contain important information and contacts.

And then the hacker went into her Blogger account, and deleted 3 years worth of work, 12 blogs in total.

If I am not wrong, this falls under the Computer Misuse Act and is possibly criminal.

This totally sucks. Whether you like Xiaxue or not, or approve of her writing, this is an absolutely evil thing to do to anyone. I hope they catch the asshole who did this.

On a cautionary note, do use a password that is not easy to break, especially with your important email accounts. Avoid using your birthdate, IC number, or anything that is associated with you. Have some numbers and special characters in your password to fight against dictionary attacks.

From onlinedct.com:

• Don't use passwords that are based on personal information that can be easily accessed or guessed
• Don't use words that can be found in any dictionary of any language
• Develop a mnemonic for remembering complex passwords
• Use both lowercase and capital letters
• Use a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters
• Use different passwords on different systems

Lastly, backup your email and blog. You can use a site sucker to download a copy of your blog.

Hokkien folk song

Found this Hokkien "folk song" left by an anonymous reader in the comments section of Rockson's infamous NKF-CB post, now containing more than 750 comments (crikey):

福建民谣:

有个杜莱真老兰
六十万元作无兰
被判不对还兰兰
样子不知西密兰
踢他出去干那兰
如今不敢再怪兰
名字改成真度兰
最好改行去甘兰

Gamer site editor gets ambushed by TV show

Gamer site 1up.com's editor, John Davison went for a TV show recording on Donny Deutsch's show on CNBC, "The Big Idea", and walked off the set when he realised he had been set up.

via Joho the Blog

Excerpt:

I've never walked off the set of a TV show in disgust before, but this week I did. There's a first time for everything, I guess. I was in the studio for a live-to-tape session of the Donny Deutsch show on CNBC, "The Big Idea" on Tuesday morning this week. After enduring it for about 10 or 15 minutes it was clear that the whole situation had been a set-up from outset.

Digital Life on Bloggers.SG

Warning: this post contains some swear words unsuitable for children.

Straits Times Digital Life cover the Bloggers.SG conference fairly extensively and I have to say, it was a good read. Cowboy Caleb thinks so too, and Lancerlord has the whole thing available on Flickr for your reading pleasure. Worth buying today's paper for, I tells ya.

As the eloquent Cowboy puts it:

"Just goes to show how much difference a little research, hardwork and friendliness gets you when you talk to bloggers. Now our bloggers seem like real people with real lives and interesting hobbies - not some reluctant reticent introverted geeks that the Sunday Times would have you to believe."

But the thing that made me laugh out loud was Joel's writeup, where his name was listed as Big F*** and his blog URL as http://bigf***.blogspot.com/. I think this is going to be a real challenge for mainstream media as they cover sites or blogs with swear words in their URLs or names. To asterisk or not to asterisk, that is the question.

At the same time deeper inside the Digital Life supplement, there was a reference to NKF blogs and Rockson's infamous post, complete with the URL, http://rockson.blogspot.com/2005/07/nkf-boss-got-cheebye-12-months-bonus.html.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are witnessing the first time the CB word is used in a local paper. For international readers, "cheebye" is a hokkien vulgarity that refers to a woman's genitals. The bizarre thing is that Bigfuck's URL and name were asterisked, but Rockson's use of CB was not.

Also funny was the unfortunate way the Rockson URL was truncated.

I can also imagine the the frustration of readers as they try to type Bigfuck's URL using the three asterisks and getting nothing. In fact, I think Joel is livid that people will not find his site typing the "starstarstar".

At least they will get to Rockson's post correctly.

tinkertailor: The Calm in the Eye of the Hurricane

yes of course we’ll need space to walk. great you’ve widened the stage. can you shift the whole platform back all the way, so the cable can reach the last seat and the front row audience don’t have to strain their necks to much? yes i’m mr ong. oh the food is here already? jay, can we move the tables outside for the refreshments? are there enough chairs to fill up this area? ok we’ll have the refreshments inside. excuse me, can you open that door so that they can push in a trolley? can we have someone open the rooms upstairs please? where are the power points? where are the microphones? oh you’re mr low, nice to meet you. can we go through the food checklist? so the pizza is the vegetarian dish? the food is very cramped don’t you think? jay, can we use this portion of the bar counter to put the refreshment drinks? mr low, go ahead and put the drinks here. hey jean you’re early! you can put your stuff there and wait for the rest to come. who said we have to move the drinks away? let me speak to him. sam, jay told me we could use the bar counter - we really need the space as we don’t have enough space on the table - it’s just the drinks don’t worry your bar will be safe.

I saw this photo in Daryl's photoset from Bloggers.SG and felt that it captured the very essence of tinkertailor's role in and contribution to the success of the bloggers' conference.

Choosing to be in the background, tinkertailor was the anchor for the thousands of decisions and activities that happened throughout the day itself. Something many of us did not see as the Conference played itself out almost effortlessly.

Dude, we could not have pulled this off without you.

Read the rest of his stream of memories here.

Talk Rock with Rockson

Reader Lavender sent this link to the blog of Rockson Takumi Tan, which has been making the rounds in the Singapore blogosphere and forums.

The language is coarse, and the content is politically incorrect and very unsuitable for the young (which is why I took so long to decide whether to post this), but this Ah Beng blogger and his eloquent rant on the NKF incident, obviously struck a chord with Singaporeans. Judging from the comments left in his post, more than 300 in two days, most people felt he said what they wanted to say themselves.

I have been reading his blog with a mix of secret glee and guilt myself, since his Finicky Feline days. One or two people even claim to have seen him in person. Others believe he is not a real person, but the figment of an active imagination. Some say he is really Cowboy Caleb (who vigorously denies it). Some even believe that Lawrence, his computer-savvy friend who helped to set up the blog, and Rockson, are one and the same person, ala Fight Club. Conspiracy theories abound.

But love him or hate him, the guy is funny, crude, insightful and astoundingly clueless, all at the same time.

And his formerly obscure blog has gained overnight national fame (or infamy, depending on how you see it). He even appeared in today's Straits Times, who did not print his URL, but just referred to it by its name, Talk Rock, alongside Tomorrow.sg.

I have been keeping an eye on his counter, and his blog has seen more than 60,000 page views in two days, which means he averaged 30,000 page views a day! That is more traffic than my own blog has ever seen in one day.

As testament to his strong language, I had trouble finding a paragraph I could use as an excerpt that did not have a vulgarity in it. This one below was the best I could find.

So, Singapore, please meet Rockson. Rockson, meet Singapore.

Excerpt:

I do not hate charity organisation, I think people must help other poor and sick people. But f**k lah, you mean when on the tv the people who earn $1000 a month donate and the number on the NKF tv show jump $100,000 to $200,000 to $300,000..... when reach $600,000 of donation, is only cover this CEO salary?

No wonder Zoe Tay have to do so many ch**b** stunt!!!

More NKF goodness

Jerry Lim shows us that there are peanuts, and then there are peanuts. (via mrs budak)

Agagooga says the current public outcry over the NKF reminds him of Communist China.

Mr Wang Zhen, whose opinion I also respect a lot, says I missed the point, and also gives a great tutorial on legal procedure.

Lancerlord discovers the NKF is really hot, so hot that on Technorati, it is now in the top ten searches.

Through good times and bad

Hecate learns just how much her parents love each other.

Excerpt:

I was talking to my parents just now, and I heard the sweetest conversation ever in my entire life..

Basically my dad confessed that throughout their 23 years of marriage, he has never really given my mom a good life. Yet my mom, upon hearing this, just said that she doesn't mind, and that she has been there with him through the good and bad times, and that whatever they have, be it good or bad, its always shared between the two of them, and that she never regret her decision to marry him.

A roundup of NKF views

Here is a roundup of views and news on Day 1 of National Kidney Foundation (NKF) vs Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) so far:

Straits Times: NKF CEO's $600,000 pay revealed in court (ST's online news is paid, but this kind of news, they put on their free asiaone.com. Heheh.)

CNA: NKF's administration brought to public scrutiny in case against SPH

SPUG: NKF CEO got a 12 month bonus last year!!

Threez: NKF BUST: DOING GOOD FOR MONEY?

mrs budak: WTF? NKF CEO pay

Le Mason: Blardy hell...

Sammyboy: NKF/SPH Battle - Main Thread

College does not hire bloggers

An anonymous humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest (in USA, not Singapore. Singapore's Midwest is Bukit Timah), writing under the name of "Ivan Tribble" for The Chronicle of Higher Education, has a piece entitled "Bloggers Need Not Apply".

The piece is about how educators are using applicants' blogs to disqualify them from positions.

Via Joho the Blog

Some Elevation 280 blogging

Shion has short videos of the Freestylers and some hot chicks dancing near him.

Spiffy has some nice photos of herself and her friends.

burbur didn't enjoy it.

nudi-noi and her friend took a break before going back into the fray.

Hellsbel managed to last all the way to the post-Elevation get-together.

Spend a family day sunbathing on the street

Why sunbathe by a boring pool or at a crowded beach when you can do it at an exciting location like our world-renowned SAFRA Club Concrete Beaches™?

Now at all SAFRA clubs, we offer you a choice of the Roadside Family package, with a great view of the cars and fire engine coming to deal with a chemical incident, and the Carpark Couples package, where you get a lot all to yourself and your loved one.

Gas masks not provided.


Inspired by laksa_boy's post post at Sammyboy forums. News background below.

54 treated in hospital after inhaling leaked chlorine gas at SAFRA club

SINGAPORE : 28 people were sent to hospital with breathing difficulties after gas leaked from a plant room in SAFRA's Mount Faber Clubhouse.

The Health Ministry says 26 others sought treatment from the hospitals on their own.

A total of 14 were admitted, 25 under observation and 15 were discharged.

Some 500 people, including both staff and guests, were evacuated when the leak was detected at about 11am on Saturday -CNA

SAFRA Mount Faber reopens, but swimming pools remain closed

...Of the 54 people who received treatment for breathing difficulties, only one remain hospitalised for observation - a child at the KK Women's and Children's Hospital.

Fumes drifted out from the plant room to the rest of the clubhouse.

A contractor had mistakenly mixed Sodium Hydrochloride, or liquid chlorine, with hypochloric acid, causing a chemical reaction -CNA

London bomb blasts

The people who did this are barbaric monsters. Our condolences and prayers go out to the people of London.

Simon looks at the media responses.

Daryl cannot understand the evil that drives people to do this.

7-8 is worried about his father in London

From Caleb, Wikipedia page on this tragedy and a Flickr group.

Bloggers.SG 2005, the first Singapore Bloggers' Conference gets a mention in The Straits Times

The first Singapore Bloggers' Conference, Bloggers.SG 2005, will be held on 16th July 2005, Saturday at DXO, a club located at the Esplanade. Full details at Tomorrow.sg.

The Straits Times also ran a story on it today (click on image to see larger newspaper clipping).

Sheena, you are too kind. While you say I am your blog idol, I have to say YOU are the real idol. Anyone with the heart to volunteer her time to help special needs children deserves to be the True Idol.

And don't worry, girlfriend, I help you hunt down your One True Love, Calm One. Who knows? Jay-Chou-lookalike Calm One may be the next uniformed hunk of the week, in your Mr. Shagedelicious series.

IOC gives London the 2012th 2012 Olympics

Update: Very smart and England very powderful reader, DW, pointed out my faux pas in calling it the 2012th Games. Paiseh hor, I change already. Next, a France-powderful reader will point out that my anyhowly use of faux pas was incorrect, as it means "a violation of accepted, although unwritten, social rules".

So London won the vote to host the 2012 Olympic games. And Paris is shocked.

Thank goodness. It has been a bitch trying to get to Robinson's to look at toys during the Great Police Stakeout of Raffles City.

Some say it is because of the great video London showed.

Some say Paris lost because of the fears of protests and strikes that may happen there.

Chey, if it was protests, demonstrations and strikes that the IOC were concerned about, they should hold the next Olympics in Singapore.

Singapore confirmed will have no protests, demonstrations and strikes.

First of all, Singaporeans have already forgotten what is called protest.

Secondly, want to protest, especially during a major international event happening in Singapore, must get licence, which will not be granted anyway.

Singapore for a Protest-free Olympics 2014! (Update: ya lah, I know it is 2016, but Singapore very on the ball one, other people take four years, we two years enough liao.)

And as you can see from this photo, Singapore also have London.

14 going on 15

Hejin is 15 (this year) and writes eloquently about pimples, surviving a whole day without the internet, and snubbing half-witted boys who send her SMS messages that do not make for witty discourse.

Read her blog here (don't worry, no mixed caps and missing vowels).

Eh, I didn't know nowadays school can wear lipstick take picture one. Must be those new independent/autonomous schools and their fancy education methods. Heh.

Excerpt:

Lately, this particular guy I got to know recently has been sending me SMSes. Of course I fancy the attention showered upon me!

However, the catch is, he's an extremely half-witted and unintellectual boy whose messages never get past half the screen. Well, maybe when he sends those uninspired and unoriginal, sickly-sweet and insincere forwarded messages....

Just yesterday, after I told him I just had my A Math tuition, he sent me this:

"Oic. So how was it."

RIGHT. YOU ASK ME HOW WAS TUITION. How exactly is tuition supposed to be like? Oh, gloriously fun! I learnt all about the oh-so-interesting Remainder Factor Theorem while my leadened eyelids were threatening to collapse over my eyes while my poor nose has to endure the asinine scent wafting from my tuition teacher's body! Not to forget that he is such a sore sight to the eyes!

SPG blog blocked by Gahmen proxies

Update: Ok, so far, I have been told that the following organisations cannot get to SPG's blog: CPF Board, SAF, ST Electronics, LTA. Those that can: EDB, IDA.

I just received word that Sarong Party Girl's blog has been blocked by Gahmen proxies, which means esteemed members of our Civil Service and Stat Boards cannot access her blog.

Can anyone verify this?

Why? Gahmen scared civil servants get corrupted by her nipples and her sexy stories issit?

Top Ten Google headlines you don't want to read

Here are ten Google headlines you don't want to read, my favourites below:

August 22, 2006
Google Says "Sorry" for Giant Gmail Data Leak

May 13, 2006
Google Admits Satellite Imagery "Mostly Fake"

April 18, 2006
Google Engineer Caught Artificially Slowing Down Search Results for Years; "Only a nasty prank", Engineer Says

January 20, 2006
Google Announces Motto Change; Now "Only evil when necessary."

Jap AV Star Yua Aida's blog

Mail Order Bride gave me the link to a Japanese AV Star's blog (mostly SFW except for a stray nipple, er, no kids please). It is the official blog of Yua Aida, porn actress (this is so going to pump up my Google visitors). My interest is purely academic, of course.

The funniest bits were the comments left by a Vincent from Singapore.

Like:

you look cute in the photo.. but the hairdo looks kind of funky.. is it a new movie you are making? what a busy life you have.. don't overstrain yourself... you have a boyfriend? ha.. hope he takes care of you well..

And under this post entitled "This year it is the first sea in Japan", Yua says, "However it was cold still, the funny", and Vincent dedicates a poem to her.

Pardon the bad translation, I ran it through Babelfish.

Excerpts of comments by Yua Aida's biggest Singaporean fan, Vincent:

u look so beautiful inside...

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月05日 13:34

hmm...din know whether my previous message got in a not.. haiz..Yua do u understand english? ha.. if you do PLS reply me.. one reply from you would push me even harder to learn japanese...

nice photo you have there.. thou the background is abit dull..but the focus is more on the gorgeous girl in the pic.. You Rox ~!

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月05日 13:40

are the message auto added? or have to be approved my webmaster.?

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月05日 14:42

hi YuA.. time is 11.42pm now ...in Singapore.. at around 11.42 this morning you entered your first entry for the week in your diary.. so are you asleep yet? came across some non-nude photos of you online... and downloaded them.. too bad i cant find your photobook in Singapore.. hopefully can find it in Hongkong..which i am goin this coming May..ha.. Seems like there is alot of similarity between you and me... same age...same blood type... i like drawing..but i am not a pro like you... and your height is the same as my galfren.. (if everything about you in this webpage is thru)..ha.. Dunno whether you will ever see this email.. or even understand it..but hopefully.. u saw it and u understood it.. and hopefully if God permits... write an email to me... your smile roxs foreva~!

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月06日 00:52

you went to America? the photos in ur album >

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月07日 02:07

it's 3am now.. studying for my exam which is in the afternoon.. its showing UEFA Champion League on tv now... Chelsea vs Bayern Munich... but a force is preventing me from getting glue to the soccer match on tv.. or even my studies... discovered tat this mysterious force is you... Yua.. oh my god... call me an idiot.. or BA GA as they say it in japanese.. talking so much in this diary of yours.. not knowing any japanese.. not knowing whether you will reply... wondering what i typed would sound blabberish to you.. but i dun care.. i'm juz so much in love wif you.. how i juz wish god can grant my wishes.. make u appear in front of me.. dan i can tell you everything i felt bout ya.. tok bout everything in this world..

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月07日 04:10

here's a peom for ya ..YuA and nitez~!

I sit up late at night..
I close my eyes so very tight..
My mind drifts away..
As I picture a bright and shinny day..
There you are..Standing not that far..
Your eyes so beautiful..Just like two shinning stars..
As you smile..A very beautiful smile..My heart fly's for miles..

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月08日 01:06

con't

As day quickly fades to night..You grab my hand so very tight..
We walk on a moon lit beach..With the stars shinning so bright..
God this feels so right..
As we walk for miles holding hands..
We walk through the moist sand..
I turn my head..And see an angel..
I try to speak but my words are tangled..
As you softly speak into my ear..I hear..Three words I hold so dear..
I open my eyes that I held so tight..
And my face and heart shines so bright..
As I say to my self I Love You...Goodnight.

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月08日 01:07

私は私がタイプしたものの言うことがわかったらさまよう、 。 私は私を答えることができることを望む。 オハイオ州の神... 彼女の応答を私... 許可しなさい 彼女はとても甘い、 美しく、天使見る...]

translatored using a eng to jap conversion machine.. took so long to find it.. hope it works.. *cross fingers*

Posted by Vincent.. at 2005年04月08日 18:20

Electronic sign maker

I was playing with this sign maker, quite fun.

How to dance like a white guy

Learn the moves in easy steps! (Quicktime movie, 2.6mb)

Call to order now.

All Your Base Are Belong to Queen

All Your Base Are Belong to Us, done as a Flash music video to the tune and style of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

It is (somebody set us up) the bomb. Got guitar solo even.

Hello Kenny Goodbye minishorts

One Malaysia blogger returns home while another goes on holiday. But before minishorts left for Kuantan, she did a Blog Rating System post (The rating terminology used is Malaysian, ours would be G, PG, NC16, M18 and R21).

This was in response to an email she received from a concerned mother, who held her partially responsible for letting her profane and unsuitable blog be featured in The Star newspaper, thereby allowing her two young adolescent children to discover minishorts' blog and to see it as a role model blog.

From the email she received:

I feel you do bear some of the responsibilities for this. By allowing yourself and your website to be highlighted in a national newspaper, you have knowingly and willingly allowed children to have access to your website which you clearly know contained unsuitable materials for young minds.

Eh, how come my blog is 18PL (like our R21)? My site is very pure, ok? Where got sex, violence and profanities? Ok, there was that one naked penguin photo, but I am certain my blog is Disney!

And in case you are wondering what minishorts was talking about when she insists I am not 12, it was in response to my comment here. Heheh.

Excerpt from the Blog Rating System post:

The Minishorts’ Blog-suitability-for-Readers Rating System

U: For all ages. Very clean, almost Disney. But might have kissing scenes from time to time. No worries, no profanities.

18SG: For 18 and above only. Sometimes with profanities. Violent content, might cause readers to burst out in anger and start banging head against monitor incontrollably.

18SX: For 18 and above only. Sometimes with profanities. Sexy, and raunchy, and might cause readers to turn horny. Ooh, very, very bad.

18PL: For 18 and above and very mature minds only. Heavy topics like politics and life, usually. Sometimes with profanities. Sometimes with sex. Sometimes with violence. When you read sites like these, you just might turn violent and start humping the computer.

A brown music moment: da flava

She brought you Timmy Perez and her lovely voice.

Now listen to some of da flava's neat Garageband compositions:


against those thugs (the mp3 here)

drum and base (the mp3 here)

Kenny Sia's "Which Malaysian Blogger Are You?"

Congratulations mr brown, you are...

Kenny Sia of kennysia.com

You have it all, or so you think. Big balls, big bird, big everything. Also a big heart and ever-ready big hug to give out to everybody who needs one. But you didn't know this. You're the one who need a hug the most. So hugs to you!

Which Malaysian Blogger Are You?

Jim, you chao turtle

Update: Finicky Feline demoted me from her No. 1 position and watched it at least 8 times. Her readers also discuss the philosophical and geopolitical implications of my little DJ jig.

Never let a blogger video you with his camera phone, or you may find this on one of his posts.

Hahahaha.

Fine, I uploaded my copy too. Want to malu may as well malu all the way.

Look who else has a column for TODAY

This Mr Miyagi, so copycat one. I write for TODAY newspaper, he also must write for TODAY newspaper. Like hor, getting all the hot chicks swooning over him is not enough, he must also be a columnist. Some people, so greedy one.

But haha, my caricature nicer than his (they draw me got more hair). Ok lah, go and read his new regular Wednesday column anyway. It is quite the funny. Got talk about the Ingterneck and about blogging.

Excerpt:

For instance, you can say things like "Wah lao! That musical was so bad, pay me money also I will never watch again!", whereas you know a print reporter reviewing a musical, for instance, would not talk about walking out on a performance as he or she found it to be absolute rubbish.

One blogger titled a review "Gut-wrenching performance — in a bad way", so you can see that there is little mincing of words in the blogosphere.

Blogger Manifestos and the awful truth

textrapolis has an interesting post on various Blogger Manifestos.

He points to Andrew Sullivan's piece on Why online weblogs are one future for journalism.

And also to David Weinberger's manifesto parody:

1. Life is uncensored.
   Life is uncensored, but my clients and my Mom may be reading my blog.
2. You have no right to judge me.
   You have no right to judge me, but judging you is totally fun.
3. I love writing about other people's lives.
   I love writing about other people's lives when it makes my life look good...

And also lists Sean Carton's Bad Blogger Manifesto:

1. I will post what I want, when I want, for whom I want.


2. I will not take ads. Nothing against ads, but the hassle with
   dealing with them and the ugliness they bring isn't worth the effort.


3. I will not be an outlet for press releases. If you want me to flack for
   you, pay me.


4. I will not put my life on hold to keep this up. I already have a job. I don't need another that doesn't pay...

In other news, David Weinberger comes clean with the truth: he is not keeping up with your blog.

Other Father's Day posts

Here are some other Father's Day posts from around the blogosphere:

Andrew:
Whatever happened, I hope he knows I've not screwed up badly in life and I don't blame him for anything that happened in the past.

vandice:
爸，您为了我们奔波劳累了那么久，也该休息了。过两年我就毕业了，让我扛下这个家吧。

Kenny Sia:
It's common practise for us kids to call out "Pa chi, Mi chi" (Dad, eat. Mom, eat) as a form of courtesy to our parents when we have our dinner. The day after the wake, I broke my own heart when I called my father to eat even though he's no longer around.

It's been 7 weeks, and I still miss him.

Rebecca MacKinnon:
I'm not sure what my life would have been like if I hadn't grown up with a fabulous father who has always been present and actively involved in his childrens' lives.

Huileng:
Anyway, that was a no action day for my father. I hope he does not feel unwanted! I know what, I will go and buy him some durians later.


Anthony:
Make no mistakes. I love my dad to bits. He's just very...undemonstrative. Were he a Roman, he'd have rised through the ranks with great ease. So when I got off the phone with him after talking to him for a full 15 minutes, I was surprised to say the least.

Adrian
At age 20, bedridden and broken with no recovery seemingly in sight, I saw my Dad cry for the first time in my life.

Lancerlord:
My Dad by Paul Peterson (.wav) Happy Father's Day, LancerDad.

mrsbudak
I can't remember much of my dad today. I only remember the pictures he took with me. In the pictures, he seemed to be very proud of me, while I would either lie in his arms or sit in the pram, looking very grumpy all the time.

Cowboy Caleb

Last week, my dad gave me a list of songs and told me to go download them off the information superhighway. The list he compiled contains all sorts of obscure songs which he vaguely recalls listening to as a boy. As a result, most of the title and artistes are totally wrong.

gaston

Only people who have lost people really dear would've grasped it. The Tragic Calling Of Absent People. It is customary for Chinese funerals to require the Eldest Son, or the Firstborn Son to head the most important ceremonies during the wake and funeral. This includes, -whenever the urn or coffin requires moving- calling out to him or her, "Daddy! We're Going To The Burial Site Now! Follow Us Closely!". Or "We're Crossing A Bridge Now! Hold On Tight!". Chinese people believe that the newborn spirit is weak and gets lost easily, hence the need to shout for them to locate your voice as you move and they try to follow in the netherworld plane.

barffie

The day we were supposed to collect his body for the funeral, I stayed back in school with my then best friend to finish up our art project. I didn’t tell anyone about it and I didn’t want to go home. That’s how I missed my dad’s “closing coffin” rites. I remember bawling my eyes out in the bathroom when I realised my mistake. My 2nd sister brought me to his coffin to ask for forgiveness. Even then, I struggled to call him Dad. He was my Lao Fu Zi for way too long. Much too long. But it was too late, perhaps.

My niece was barely 3 months old then. She is now in Primary 1. It’s been that long.

I just hope he’s in a better place now. “Papa, wo yao jie hun le. Xi wang ni bao you wo men… Xie xie…”
Happy Father’s Day.

I am sorry.

PCK Musical: give me free also I dowan?

Seems like there are quite a number of less than glowing reviews of the Phua Chu Kang (PCK) musical, Once in a Lifetime, if these reviews via Tomorrow.sg are anything to go by.

Even on Ebay, the bidding has not been fast and furious. Three $85 tickets for $120 also attracted no bids. So jialat ah?

The reviews:

Kenlyen

Suck My Pop Culture

Thinkcink:

Did I mention this was a government-supported musical? Well, the love was mutual, it seemed.

Case in point, a song and dance item within the first couple of acts in the musical on the importance of CIVIL DEFENCE (briefly mentioning TOTAL DEFENCE) in Singapore. Complete with cutesy re-enactment of emergencies where civil defence protected one’s family and loved ones blah blah blah. Please. This is not a f-king National Education school skit, people.