Monthly Archives: February 2004

sentosa//tomorrow

I will be going to Sentosa for class outing tomorrow. Sentosa is an island located in the south of Singapore. I go there quite frequently in the past. Now I am returning to this place.

I never understood Sentosa’s appeal, if there’s any. To me, it’s a boring place. Right now, it’s even worse with so many things there aren’t construction.

We supposed to meet at 11. Zhi Yuan suggested that we go there earlier to play volleyball [and check out the girls in bikini].

But, you know, I am not interested in playing volleyball. I don’t like the game. I rather kick the volleyball like a football or use the beach volleyball court to play badminton. I can imagine myself being hit by the damn volleyball now. Balls always have an affinity to me. They always come flying my way and I have to find all ways to avoid it.

Pei Shan, Zhi Yuan and Yong Liang were even practising volleyball at school so as to perform better in Sentosa beaches. They’re so enthusiastic.

I hate to disappoint them. I doubt many will be there. I imagine around 8 people to be there only. I think some will leave early too.

The last time I been to Sentosa was a year ago with the Chemical and Life Sciences Club people. It’s more like an ice breaker activity. We’re just there to get to know our friends better. The only thing I can remember is Ming Hao being enthusiastic about eating in Burger King. So I went there with him and settled our lunch there. And then.. We left shortly.

I wonder if I’ll end up leaving early this time too. If it’s boring… I might. [Wait, there's peer pressure that'll make me stay.]

studying//initiated

It wasn’t a good day to begin with in the first place. I woke up at 6 in the morning and start to read through my Basic Immunology notes.

Yesterday, I was right in front of my computer doing my formal report. I haven’t even complete now. Apparently, I have no idea what’s going on in school. I read the experiment worksheet from the front to the back and then back to front. Still have no idea. And Yong Liang, my practical partner, is needing my part of the work before he can further his part. [The formal report is pair work.]

There is a 5 hour break in school and it’ll be a good time to study for my Basic Immunology test. It didn’t happen as I plan. My clique suggests to book a discussion room to study in the library. Having heard that suggestion, I knew I wouldn’t be able to study.

It would have been nice being right, but I wish I weren’t this time. One of the members of my clique is surprisingly noisy in the discussion room. Joking. Laughing. Talking. Writing on the whiteboard. A rather active person.

How the hell can I study under such unfavorable conditions? It is not inducing me to study. I am just in the discussion room in order to not be a wet blanket. I suffered because of that. If I were to say I don’t want to see them while studying, it would have sounded mean and unfriendly.

I can’t study with a group of people talking about other things other than my studying subject. The noisy one was talking, and the only time he is quiet is when he is listening to his music. He blasts the ear piece that everyone can hear his songs. One was trying to study too; One was half-asleep already. And the last one… he needs to read aloud to study.

It wasn’t long that I found myself chatting. I should just delete the noisy one and the guy who needs to read aloud from the picture, it’ll be quite perfect.

When the judgment hour is nearing, I really need to study. I fail to do that still. I went into the lecture theatre where the test is at.

Mr. Bob gave out the papers. I was shocked. I knew I was going to fail. Fail badly this time. I was angry with my friends. Frustrated, I reached for my bag and retrieve Mr. Bob’s notes.

day//initiated

I plugged the ear piece into my ear [well, it's not called "ear piece" for no reason] and set off to school. It’s a routine thing.

I left my home 40 minutes before school starts. Unlock my gate and start wearing my foot wear [I suppose you know where these goes to now]. I even lock my gate the exact same way. I left my home, blasting my music.

I walked a short distance and start to review what I’m supposed to bring for the day. Usually, I end up heading back home because I forget to bring something out. Yesterday I forgot my Visual Basic .NET textbook, sometimes I forget my lap coat. There are times I wore sandals out of my house when there’s practical lessons in the bio laboratories. [You have to cover your foot fully while working on experiments.]

It depends on the music I’m listening to. If it’s slow, I walk slowly. If it’s fast, I walk fastly [okay, "quickly" makes a better word]. I learnt not to listen to Misia on the way, because I always feel the world is such a nice place and I would like to walk slowly to enjoy it. I listen to people like Shiina Ringo. She makes me feel motivated and she seems to be screaming “you should up your gears and move faster”.

My 15-minutes walking journey ends at the train station. I took the train to school and it takes around 15 minutes too. I like taking the train, squeezing and getting squeezed in the train. Watching the people who can’t board sadistically from the inside of the cabin of train, thinking I’m so lucky.

The morning is all about rushing. At least in Singapore. Everybody squeezes and pushes just to get in the train. I do the same.

After 15 minutes, I’ll reach Dover station, that’s where my school is. I look around for Shawn, sometimes for Ben. I used to only wait for Shawn when he messages me to wait. So one day, I didn’t receive his message. [You see, I always receive his message to wait.] I didn’t wait for him, and did not inform him. I went to class straight. And then I receive a call starting with the question “Where are you?”.

Opps.

The call ended with “Fuck you lar“.

On a side note, I was nominated for Silent Fear Awards [link removed] for the categories:

* Best Site Name
* Well Designed
* Best Layout

The voting is up again, it was down previously. Please do support me by voting here, since I egoistically nominated my own blog, lol. Do check out the other nominees too.

duplication//initiated

Yong Liang passed me the SPEED album last Thursday. I didn’t ask for it, I am quite skeptical about SPEED doing a come back. SPEED is a popular Japanesegirl group that broken up so as to further their studies. [Rumor says there are disagreements in the group that cause it.]

I secretly owned one of the SPEED compilation albums called “Dear Friend 1″. It’s one of the two compilation albums released moments before their split. The second album was cleverly titled “Dear Friends 2″.

I really liked that album of mine, but I didn’t share with anybody. Nobody suspect I was listening to this type of music as I listen to English music mainly.

Enough of that, so Yong Liang offered to lend me the album. I’m quite surprised because no one offered to lend me their CDs before, lol. Then he told me it’s copy-controlled.

Great. Can’t copy. [He previously asked if I want him to burn a copy for me, I turned him down as I prefer it in WMA format, my portable CD player reads WMA.] I announced to him that I have my ways to get it ripped into my computer.

My method:

# Place the copy-controlled CD into scorching hot water.
# Put a teaspoon of pepper and 2 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce.
# Stir well and put some strawberries inside.
# Put everything in the oven and set the oven at 200 degree Celsius for 20 minutes.
# Remove it from oven and it’s ready to serve to the CD drive’s tray.

Anyway, I didn’t do my method, I just popped the disc in my CD drive and Windows Media Player (WMP) just popped up. I commanded WMP to search for the names of the tracks. The search is successful, WMP auto-fills in the names and even the composer too.

I clicked on the “Copy Music” button. I was in for a surprise.

Not that WMP explode [boom!] or something.. It copied! There was no message whatsoever, it just copied. So much for a copy-controlled CD.

The same thing happened for the Blue CD – Guilty. It supposed to be copy-controlled but I did a CD-to-CD Copy and the CD worked fine. The same thing happened to 5566′s new album, I copied and ripped. It allowed me to. [I am not into Blue or 5566, it's my brother.. I want more Shiina Ringo.]

So what’s this copy-protection about, can anyone tell me?

bang//not

It’s several weeks after that I wanted to make a comment about William Hung. Being a civil engineer student,William Hung tried the impossible to battle against fellow contestants in the American Idol audition. As expected, the impossible is indeed impossible.

There is no doubt that William Hung is brave. I mean, who would dare to bang in front of national TV; what’s more, in America which has something like – correct me if I’m wrong – 300 million people. William has been a great sport frankly. There is nothing bad about his personality.

However his innocence, courageousness and humble beginnings backfired. He appeared naive, silly and more silly. The narrator even told him to bang somewhere else. What has the poor Chinese did to deserve these embarrassing moments?

Everything.

He should have watched a couple of episodes of American Idol and think hard: is my singing of any standard? He tried hard, he probably knew he’ll be the joke of the town, correction: world.

He sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” in front of 3 celebrated judges. One of which is Randy Jackson, who spend more than half the time covering his head with an A4 size paper. Judge Paula Abdul is probably thinking what to say to make that poor guy feel encouraged. The last judge, Simon Cowell, swallowed much of his sarcasms and didn’t say much bad things for once.

I laughed in front of my 34-inch television. I told myself he’s going to make it big. Not in the music field, but in CNN, CNBC, BBC, Fox News and all other news channels.

He became extremely famous. My local television channel, Channel 5, telecasted American Idol 3. Part of the screen shows distracting SMS-es, where the nothing-to-do home viewers sent in, claiming that they want William Hung to be back in American Idol to participate.

That is totally unacceptable, at least to me, likely to Fox too. It’s sad to see William being laughed upon, but there’s no need to make William into the American Idol. That itself is unrealistic. It is absurd and plain stupid. I wished the others can just wake up. Stop this William Hung crap, don’t support him. It’s not worth it at all. I see nothing good in him except his entertainment in the rather boring audition.

Show business is a harsh world, not for innocent kids like William. He makes a good comedian and a good sport. He belongs to Saturday Night Live (SNL), not American Idol! Just knock the door of SNL producers, he’ll be part of the show in no time.

music//finish

1 Reply

I won’t be posting Japanese music lyric translations for a while. I sort of ended my run too. I planned to post 10 of these. I post every Friday until the there are 10. The feedback has been quite positive so far, but last week, I posted number 10.

So this week, there’s nothing. I decide to post some credits instead.

I listen to some Japanese songs, some of which have rather strange lyrics, so I posted them. I never did translations, I do not understand Japanese. I took lyric translations from fan pages etc. Sometimes, the web fails me and I ended up typing the lyrics out by copying the subtitles from the video clip.

The songs come from different sources, I shan’t talk much about it, lol. Some came from video clips. I use m&g Software’s AVI to WAV extractor 3.5 to extract out the sound from the video. [The software is free by the way.]

For song cropping, normalizing of volumes and fading in and out, I use either Ahead Nero Wave Editor or Sonic Foundry Sound Forge. Both are good programs, I use the latter more though.

Songs are encoded in Windows Media Audio 9 for smaller downloads at a quality loss. I use Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Series to encode all my music. [This is a free software too.] Windows Media Audio sounds best at lower bit rates as compared to other formats.

Some posts include still image captures, these are captured by Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 Series. [This is another free software.] Images are later cropped or edited by Macromedia Fireworks. [Photoshop committed suicide, great..]

These are the past postings [Most of the music are removed already, sorry.]

# music//ichi [Ayumi Hamasaki - Real Me]
# music//ni [Yukino Satsuki - Densetsu no Onsen GAME (Legendary Hot-Springs Turtle)]
# music//san [NICEGUYJIN - Hai, Irasshai! (Hello, Welcome!)]
# music//shi [Funta - Wake Up Angel ~ Negaimashite wa Mugen Nari ~ (Wake Up Angel ~ Wishing for this is unlimited ~)]
# music//go [Aoi Tada - Wo Qui Non Coin]
# music//roku [Yuuichirou Sakuraba - Hitoribocchi no Haburashi (Lonely Toothbrush)]
# music//shichi [Gackt - To build a fire (To feel a fire)]
# music//hachi [Judy and Mary - Kujira 12 gou (Whale #12)]
# music//ku [Maki Goto - Genshoku GAL Hadeni Ikube! (An Authentic GAL Should Be Bold)]
# music//ju [MiniMoni - Okashi Tsukutte Okassui (Making Sweets: Strange)]

I enjoyed posting these. I’ll do these weekly posting thingy in future too.

Yesterday, I posted a quote that has been posted a day before. I forgotten to change it to a new one in my template. Opps.

interesting//fellow

Some people coin new terms. [I was refering to George W. Bush, he coined some rather amusing ones like "misunderestimate".] My classmates instead amended existing ones.

It is purely sarcasm, I tell you. When someone says “you’re so interesting”, it actually means “you’re full of shit”. A quarter of my class seemed to agree that Ben is the most “interesting” person. Benmust be quite disappointed.

Zhi Yuan says things like, “It’s Ben. Expect the unexpected”. Ben is pretty much a gamer. He plays lots of games, especially adventure and RPG [Role Playing Games] ones.

“I am level 99, H.P. 999,” he reported to me when I requested for his status.

To Ben, everything explodes. His favorite word is“boom”, the sound of explosions. The water fountain can go boom, the computer can be boom, and even the school can go boom. Boom!

Ben’s favorite phrase is “dot dot dot”, used to suggest the other party is speaking of something rather corny. It’s like I am chatting with him over MSN Messenger or something. He literally says “dot dot dot”. I used to say that in secondary school, but not often. I said it differently from Ben, mine is “dot <pause> dot <pause> dot”, well, basically I pause longer.

Sometimes, Ben exclaims “question mark” when he is confused. [I never exclaim that before.] It’s really amusing when I first heard it.

But these amusements fail to amuse me now, I’m tired. He does tell some jokes too. Most of his jokes are downright lame and corny. I can’t help but to feel a sudden discomfort when I hear his lame jokes. 2 types of lame jokes, one of which is lame and funny, the other is lame and lame. Benspeaks the latter.

But people are starting to make fun of him. Calling him “interesting”. Sometimes I say that he’s “interesting”, he’ll say “shuddup lar” [Shut up]. Oh, he’s angry. I’ll be quiet.

He’s rather gullible too. He went on a basic theory test for driving. Zhi Yuan insisted that the road sign for train tracks refers to the airplane zone. Yong Liang nods and agrees. Shawn starts to laugh at Ben because he doesn’t know that road sign refers to airplanes.

Believe it or not, but Ben believed that it’s the airplane zone road sign!

“Interesting” fellow, lol.

[Ben is a nice person. A person too nice in fact, to end up being joked upon. And why is he nice? Well, he never owe me money more than a day.Shawn still owes me 6 bucks..]

On a side note, I was nominated for Silent Fear Awards for the categories:
* Best Site Name
* Well Designed
* Best Layout
Please do support me by voting, since I egoistically nominated my own blog, lol. Do check out the other nominees too.

UPDATE: Voting has ended.