Category: My Good Life

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I See I Write My YouTube

The Unofficial Coverage of Singapore Motorshow 2008 with Pictures and Video Clips

The first thing after I have clocked 848 km driving to PJ Malaysia and back for a band practice was to head directly to the Singapore Motorshow.  Check out the montage below and guess which one is my favorite model?

I have created a video using the clips I have recorded during the stunt performance.  The performance is really awesome and if you have some time to spare, do click onto the link below.

Related Entries: Motor Show Singapore 2008, Motor Show Singapore 2006, Super Import Nights – Worth The S$10 For The Cars And Babes? You Decide!

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Linguistic My Hobbies

I Survived 10 Spanish Lessons at Las LiLas School, Adiós!

How time flies when it seems like yesterday Cynthia and I first joined the Spanish lesson.  I may only get a fraction of what she got from our teacher Anna, I do learn a lot from Anna’s unorthodox way of teaching – letting the learners subtly define our learning objectives, allowing us to grow beyond the syllabus, and making each lesson fun.  Learning should be fun and it shouldn’t be restrictive.

Take today as an example.  Two guys from our class will be visiting Mexico for three months as exchange students for real.  So Anna started the lesson (our last in this course) with the scenario of these two arriving at the airport making friends with the locals.  So they meet this girl and …

At that moment, we were all tongue-tied.  Quickly we rewound to lesson one and asked me llamo XYZ, y tu (my name is so-and-so, and you)?  Next of course is where are you from, de dónde eres?  And then?

We all went blank.

Imagine, two guys and a Mexican lady, how about a beer?  ¿Quieres una cerveza?  How about asking her if she’d like to eat something?  ¿Quieres comer algo?  How to ask if you like me?  ¿Te gusta?  And if she does?  Me gustas mucho.

I love you is te quiero.

What else will our two friends need to know?  At the airport?  Where are the taxis, I suppose.  ¿Dónte están los taxis?  And the taxi driver would probably ask dónde van ustedes (where are you guys going)?  Hotel Hilton, we are going.  Vamos al hotel Hilton.  At the hotel, we may wish to ask where a decent restaurant is.  ¿Dónde hay un buen restaurante?  What time does it open?  ¿A qué hora abre el restaurante?

It is no fun with these two dudes dining on their own, is it?  We can always count on the friendly (and beautiful) Mexican ladies.  Would you like to dine with us?  ¿Quieres cenar con nosotros?  If the response is si, claro.  That is a yes of course.  Quizás is a maybe.

Over the dinning table, the girl may ask cuanto tienpo en mexico (how long are you staying in Mexico)?  And there and then in the class, we learned how to say the years (años), months (meses), weeks (semanas), and days (diás).

One of us asked how to ask the girl for a dance.  Anna told us that in Mexico, you have to ask the permission from her brother as seldom girls come out alone for dates.  Erm, OK.  ¿Puedo bailar con tu hermana?

May I kiss you?!  ¿Puedo besar la?

OK.  Maybe something should be left unsaid.  The dinner is lovely and when the bill comes, why let the girl pays?  Yo invito.  Literally means “I invite (hence I pay)”.  And when will we see each other again?  ¿A qué hora (nosotros) nos encontramos?  Or if the night is still young, why not catch a movie?  ¿Quieres ir al cine?

Our class went on and on creating fun scenarios, departing from our textbooks.  Our teacher Anna really enjoys our sense of curiosity and in her words of encouragement, we have gone far ahead of what beginner 1 class offers.  So here we are, 5 girls and 1 guy (me) heading to beginner 2 class next month.  Oh God, wish me luck.  These girls are smart, very smart.

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For the Geeks Game Reviews

Spore – My 1st 8 Hours

8 years in the making, 3 years of anticipation for the fans, I grabbed a copy of “Spore” in a heartbeat.  Check out these colorful pictures taken from within the game.  All these creatures and objects are created by me – from head to toe, skin color to the extra pair of eyes on the butt.

I am a meat lover so I create a carnivore [1].  In phase 1 of the game (Cell), my goal is to keep eating other creatures while avoid to be eaten by the much bigger ones.  The more it eats, the bigger it gets, and the more DNA it acquires, the more complex it evolves [2] & [3].  At this phase, it is cute, it is fun, it is 2D, and it plays like a good old arcade game.  I absolutely love it.

At the beginning of phase 2 (Creature), my creature leaves the ocean [4].  Given the option of socializing with other groups of creatures through songs and dances (no kidding) versus hunting down each species to extinction, guess which path I take [6]?

OK.  You don’t have to take the path of destruction but I want my creatures to be the blood thirst warriors.  Enter phase 3 (Tribal), my desire to dominate continues [5].  This phase plays like a real time strategy game while the previous one is more like a role playing game.

In phase 4 (Civilization), my creatures build houses, entertainment centers, factories (that I designed) and … weapons of mass destruction [7]!  We tear down rival civilizations one by one converting their economic cities into military ones, their religious ones too into military cities.  Need not to say, the game play is very much like a simplified, accelerated version of Civ.

What comes at the end of world domination?  It is time for my creatures with eyes on their butts to rule the galaxy!  First, I need a spaceship [8].

Then, I need to practice high speed flying in a 3D world [9]!

And, it is time to do some serious space travel [10].  At this phase (Space), the game is initially mission driven and there are enough things to do for the ‘end game’ such as advancing through the ranks, collecting rare items, and learning new abilities.  What is the end of this game like?  It is for you to find out!

For those who are curious, “Spore” is the first multi-genre massively single-player online game.  Before I log off, check out this quote from Will Wright, the game designer for Spore and the Sim franchise.  Some of you may be able to relate and have a good laugh on this (like I did).

We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. “Spore” has more depth than, let’s say, “The Sims” did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for “Sims 2”³, which was around 90, and something like “Half-Life”, which was 97, and we decided – quite a while back – that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of “Sims 2”³ than the Metacritic and sales of “Half-Life.”

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Diary

My 3rd Blogger Book Review at McGraw-Hill Education / Would You Like Me to (White) Lie to You?

Two things.  First, I am happy that McGraw-Hill Education Asia has published an excerpt of my book review at their website.  This is my third contribution to their site, and I don’t take this opportunity for granted for sure.  I feel blessed and I shall do better.  Do follow the link and check out other reviews too.  There are books from thinking to innovation, GE to Toyota, water reuse to Windows Vista, and more.

Second, after I have written the review for that book on ethics, I can’t help but to talk to the people around me on what I’ve learned (I do practice what I preached about learning and sharing).  Inevitably, it often comes down to the topic of ‘white lies’.

Before I continue, please allow me to recap: (1) ethics code is my personal code, a set of guidelines on what I should or should not do and (2) I am not using my own ethics code to judge or criticize anyone.  With that said, here are the interesting questions and responses I wish to share.

Question 1 – Is it OK for us to tell ‘white lies’?

Usually I get a positive response saying it is OK to white-lie.

Question 2 – Isn’t ‘white lie’ a form of deception?

Some may not agree that telling a ‘white lie’ is being deceptive.  Some point out that if it is harmless, it is OK to white-lie to someone.  And I think to myself: Harmless to whom?

Question 3 – Is it OK for me to white-lie to you?  If so, how much white-lies you can take from me?

According to what I have read, from one of the surveys conducted, most people think that it is OK to tell ‘white lies’ but only a minority feel that it is OK to be white-lied to.  So why the discrepancy?

I don’t know about you all (again, point 1 and 2 above).  But if you are my friend, I’d rather you don’t white-lie to me if possible even if you think it is harmless.  Let me decide on that.

Cool?

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Concert

Avril Lavigne Best Damn Tour (Singapore) – Pure Girl Power, An Entertaining Evening

An awesome performance, this girl can rock, plays guitar and piano, executes a somersault on stage, groves with her dancers, and believe it or not, she had a go with the drums.  101% high in entertainment value, Avril has grown so much since the day we watched her performed in SunTech.

I can certainly see how the change in the band lineup has affected the music arrangement in a positive way.  No longer does she sing the album as it is, the crowd loved it, and so was I.  Three albums under her belt, the concert was packed with familiar tunes that the (female) audience can sing with (her key is way above what normal male species can reach).

Is one and a half hour concert a bit too short?  Certainly it is for me.  Time didn’t passed, it vanished.  Before I knew it, the concert was ended.  Gosh, I can’t wait for Avril’s next tour.  If that music video played during the concert is one of her upcoming singles, perhaps her new album is round the corner.

Avril loves to hold her fist up in the air.  This is pure girl power I am tell ya.  I am happy that I have chanced upon her first album since day one of her career.  From complicated to the best damn thing, this young artist has done her home country (Canada) proud, for sure.

PS: Sorry for the lousy photos.  I wish I had a gigantic telephoto lens the dude at my row has.

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My YouTube

Video Clip of DJ Inquisitive at Zouk, Singapore for the DMC World Championship Country Finals

This is the video clip of DJ Inquisitive recorded at Zouk during the DMC World Championship Singapore Finals as promised.  And yes, he is good.  The reigning champ has defended his title and will head to UK to compete for the World Supremacy title.

After all the hard earned experience in the post production work for my band’s videos at the jamming studios not ideal for sound recording, I thought I was well equipped to do the job here.  Took me a long time to figure out that applying effects on an upscale mono low bit-rate audio clip introduces a lot of high frequency noise.  Also, quite a few video encoding tools out there don’t handle mono audio clips well.

On a more positive note in the name of sharing, to clean up the mono audio recording of this clip, I pass the original recording through a clean solid state amp simulator with a flat boosted EQ setting and a 4×12 cabinet to add clarity to the muffled sound.  I then pass this to a compressor with a soft knee and a moderately boosted output gain to keep the sound hot but not too distorted.  Feel free to share the technique you use to clean up the sound recorded from a camera here. Hope you’ll enjoy watching this video.

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Linguistic My Hobbies

Answer to That Quiz and My Spanish Class Continues with The World of Verbs And What Not

Thank you for all your creative answers for that little quiz of mine posted last Sunday.  It was a great fun just by reading them.  Darkspore and TK came really close to the answer of a reflection through a car (though I must say they have the advantage of knowing me in person) and therefore, dudes, I will cook that Cantonese meal I promise.  In the spirit of fun and charity, I will make them donate a handsome sum of money so that I can continue to fund this website and continue to delight you lovely readers out there.

I have a habit of taking random pictures as and when inspirations hit me.  I enjoy doing that because these pictures may come in handy in the future.  Like the one for my Sunday post on self-reflection, I thought it does suit the topic well (Cynthia did guess the association right).  This particular image was taken using my camera phone.  I did a rotation and crop the image to the right size.  And I surgically removed the dried leaf on top of the car.  Other than that, there isn’t much alternation to the original picture.

Spanish Class

I look forward to the Spanish class because after all the daily 9-to-5 bombardments in the office, the one thing I look forward to is my weekly 2 hours of dedicated time in learning a new skill.

Can passion be nurtured over time?  I hope so.

Cynthia has a natural talent in learning languages.  For me, I am going to once again deploy my hardcore repetitive drilling exercise.  I write, and write, till these foreign words are scribbled into my brain in black and white.

The variation of Spanish verb forms is just amazing and they have this concept of formal and casual,  permanent and temporary.  In English, we have “I am married” or “I am a man”.  In Spanish, the verb used for the former is different from the one used for the latter because to the Spanish, being married is temporary while being a man is permanent.  So, it is a little bit more complicated than “I am” in English.

And we have to learn by heart that shop, factory, and office for instance take in a feminine form while school, hospital, and farm take in a masculine form.  To introduce you as my friend if you are a guy, I would refer you as “un amigo mío” – literally means a friend of mine.  If you are a lady, all three words have to be switched to “una amiga mía”.  If I am to introduce you as a group of ladies, that would be “unas amigas mías”.  Otherwise, in a mixed gender or only men situation, “unos amigos míos”.

My 6th and 7th lessons are certainly more demanding than the previous one that we sang birthday song and what not.  But certainly we are expanding on what we can converse, in Spanish.

Below are samples of what I managed to squeeze into my brain before the lesson.

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Party

Reigning Singapore DJ Champ Ate the Rest of the Contestants Alive at Zouk

So I was invited to attend the DJ Championship Singapore Finals at Zouk and took some rather exclusive photos on the lovely ladies from TDK Life on Record.  Gosh, I love my ”˜job’.

Now, why would I wish to spoil the photo with my mug shot?  So I deployed my humble assistant journalist, my de facto model to record the moment of “yes we were there”.  Right after the shots, Cynthia grabbed my camera in one swift motion.  I was shocked by her eagerness to view my quite-possibly-award-winning pictures of the evening.  She held up the camera asked me point-blank with a smile, “I don’t look too bad compared to these models, do I?”

Uh-oh.  Red alert.  It is like that “Am I fat?” question that we guys have to face constantly in our lifetime – from our girlfriends, or sisters, or sisters’ girl friends, or girl friends’ sisters.  If I could choose, going back in time, between …

… the TDK Life on Record headsets these models were holding and my Sennheiser …

As the music was blasting on the dance floor, we tried out the two (headphone) models – ST-200, the street style Hi-fi studio headphones that comes in 3 designs (S$29.90) and ST-Pro400, the Professional DJ studio headphones (S$59.90) – and I must say they are pretty value for money.  They shielded most of the noise out and I was happily bobbing my head up and down to the music these (TDK Life on Record) models were playing.

As for the event, I don’t know which one is more distractive – the constant smooching from the couple less than a few inches away from my face or the constant technical problems faced by the DJs.  Nevertheless, it was eye opening to see them (the contestants) in action.  The blending of sound from the vinyl records played from two different turntables, the control of volume and speed and the precise timing of two music sources that can either be identical or different, the creation of the mad scratching sound, and the stop and go of the turntable in fabricating a dramatic entrance and exit feel – all orchestrated by the magical hands of the DJs.  And that’s not all.  The good ones are those who come with a personality, a pair of calm hands, and the creativity to construct a musical piece that rallies the mood of the crowd.  It is a skill, for sure.  Even with the markings on the vinyl records, things can go wrong.

When the reigning DMC Singapore champ, DJ Inquisitive, took the stage, he practically ate the rest of the contestants alive.  The crowd went wild.  Not surprisingly, he won the finals and will represent Singapore in the battling of the World Supremacy title in London.

Congratulations to all the contestants who made it out there on the stage.  And to DJ Inquisitive, best of luck in UK.  I will upload one video I have taken.  Perhaps on a Friday evening to get y’all in a party mood.

PS: Zouk cardholders get an S$10 discount off the TDK Life on Record headphones (ST-Pro400, ST-Pro300 and NC-100 models) at Cyberactive outlets.  Check them out if you are looking for one.

Related Post: Video Clip of DJ Inquisitive at Zouk, Singapore for the DMC World Championship Country Finals

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My YouTube

Video of Hella Good, 1st Session

OK.  This video is dedicated to our friends who have been so supportive for my home made Voodoo Mix of No Doubt’s “Hella Good” and eager to watch what it is like with drums and guitars.  To set the expectation right, this recording is our band’s first session playing this cover song (and very rarely we do so as we prefer to play our original songs).  If it was that good, I would be making a living at the club “Insomnia” instead of being a 9-to-5 arguable one of the fastest value-adding electronic postmen of the world.

We didn’t get a decent studio room this time so pardon the sound quality.  I did the best I can from the sound engineering point of view.  Hardly could I hear what I played or sang that day.

On a more positive note, Wieke did merge the essence of the “Hella Good” drum beats with that famous One Republic track and implemented into our original song “Kids From The Park”.  It was pretty funky.  Hope to share with y’all some time in the future.

PS: A big thanks to Selrol who took our video.

Related Post: Hella Good Is Hella Tough! Here Is Our Voodoo Mix

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Announcement Linguistic My Hobbies

Band Website Revamped Relaunched, Plus My 5th Spanish Lesson

Before I get to how I honestly, unintentionally got our Spanish teacher Anna blushed in front of the entire class, let’s talk about how I nearly felt asleep during the lesson.  I was revamping, relaunching our band’s website http://www.NoEyeCandy.com till two in the morning.  See that new banner featured in this post?  Besides a list of past events, each of my band member has written up something to share.  Most of y’all know about me, I’m sure.  But not them, perhaps.

Looking at that list of events – that probably only make sense to me – took me back to the fond memory lane of how our journey started.  As we begin to approach event organizers, I think it is a high time to put up something in public.  If we do make it, I will open up a new website like I have done it before.

Now, back to my Spanish class, on one hand I appreciate that learning a language involves the absorption of the basic albeit long set of verbs and nouns and grammatical constructs.  On the other hand, it has to be fun and relevant to today’s day-to-day life.  Correct?  While I understand the necessity of going beyond the number 0 to 20 as we have learned in the last lesson, learning a long list of not frequently spoken professions such as milkman and shepherd and even fireman seems a bit dry.  So I would – within the scope of the lesson – ask questions to take us beyond the textbook materials.

Questions such as … how to say “happy birthday” in Spanish?  Yesterday was Anna’s birthday.  The answer is: ¡Felicidades!  Feliz cumpleaños and we kept repeating, and repeating the sentence.  I would be very happy if the entire class say “happy birthday” to me, even if it is one day late.  And then I asked how to sing the “happy birthday” song in Spanish.  It is hard to describe in words.  The atmosphere was warm and there was lots of laughter.  We all sang the birthday song in Spanish a couple of times and got Anna blushing towards the end.  For those who are curious how it sounds like, the lyrics is as follows.  The third line literally translates to you-we wish-all or in English, we all wish you …

cumpleaños feliz
cumpleaños feliz
te deseamos todos
cumpleaños feliz