Category: My Good Life

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My Hobbies Oil Painting

My 9th Oil Painting – Monument of the Unopened (Day 208 of Being a Teetotaler)

Last Sunday marked the 208th day of I being a teetotaler; this oil painting is 208 days in the making.  My story of “From a Borderline Alcoholic to a Teetotaler” will be posted here another day, I promise.  Today I wish to write about a hobby that I’ve left behind for about one and a half years.

Ever since I told Cynthia that I refrain from use of alcoholic liquors, on more than one occasion when we were scratching our heads on what gifts to bring along, she always pointed to the bottles of the unopened wine.  “I don’t understand why we can’t give them away since you are not drinking anymore,” she would comment.

For the past 208 days, I have five bottles of white wine, one bottle of red wine, one bottle of VSOP, and two cans of cold beer lying somewhere in my home.  I am not opening them because I have made a decision and I wish to stick with it; I am not giving them away because I wish to paint and immortalize this moment.

I swear when I lined up the bottle readied to start painting, I had this sudden urge.  But that urge was soon overwhelmed by the smell of the turpentine.  Do artists get addicted to oil painting because of this thin volatile essential oil?  That certainly gave me the lightheadedness.  How I miss oil painting.  To get the perspective right, I had to sit on the floor.  Not a very comfortable position to paint.  But it is good to try something different.  In retrospect, I don’t think I have got the color of the white wine bottles right.  Perhaps next time, I will do a better job.

Click here for my oil painting “gallery”.

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My YouTube

1st Random Video Filmed During Band Practice

This is for you, my loyal readers, my undying fans.  Erm.  I hope nothing will change after this broadcast.

The fact is, for the past number of days, my mind has been spinning as though I was mind-plucking the invisible flower petals murmuring “I show you”, “I show you not”.  And.

I did show this video to some friends of mine.  To see what the reaction is like.  Thank you for your brutal honestly and your encouragement.  My favorite constructive feedback is to pump some irons.  That, I can gladly do.  And it is very doable too!  Results not guaranteed.

OK.  The choice is yours.  Wanna have a peep?

Categories
Linguistic My Hobbies

Hard Work Pays Off, Sort Off – And My Degree in Spanish Is Ingeniería y Ciencias Informáticas

I hope none of my colleagues at my office reads this.

Anyways.  I know I have been massively lagging behind in my Spanish class.  But I was inspired by Women’s 400m Butterfly.  Never mind trailing behind in the initial three laps.  It is how much burst energy you have in the last lap that counts.

This morning, I was determined to practice how to write the number 0 to 20 in Spanish.  Cynthia can memorize the spelling in two runs.  My first language is Chinese.  And I learn the language by memorizing the pattern of the character construct, not the sound of the word.  So, I am in for the brutal repetitive drilling exercise to get it.

This morning, I was summoned by my director at another office building.  To sit with him to go through something.  Before we even began, he was summoned by his boss for a brief meeting.  I could …

  1. Space out and look stupid.
  2. Feverishly texting my friends and look busy.
  3. Take over my director’s computer and Google the latest Olympic results.
  4. Or I could …

I opened my laptop, created an Excel spreadsheet that generated random numbers between 0 to 20, pasted these random numbers to a Word document, set the language to Spanish, and started to type the numbers in Spanish (see picture above).  The first set was slow.  By the time I reached the 100th number – I kid you not – I typed like a native.

From 0 to 20 that is.

My effort sort of paid off.  Anna, our Spanish teacher, asked me to write some Spanish on the white board.  Guess what I wrote?  OK.  You get the drift.

I like today’s lesson.  We all shared with each other what we studied and what our professions are.  Overloaded with Spanish words, certainly.  But it was fun not in a Bingo sense like the last lesson.  But getting to know some new friends that is.  There were four of us working in the banking industry!  Amazing.  Time to pass the CV around!

Now, why do the nouns ”˜office’, ‘restaurant’, and ‘factory’ take the feminine word form while ‘hospital’, ‘supermarket’, and ‘hotel’ take the masculine word form?  I still haven’t got the hang of it.  To further illustrate, a female architect is arquitecta.  A male architect is arquitecto.  When Anna taught us that a male lawyer in Spanish is abogado, I couldn’t help but screamed ‘avocado’ as a reflect action.  That got everyone laughing.

Oh well.  Baby steps.  I know I can do this!  ¡Adiós!

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Travel Blog

Speed Touring Chennai Pt 2 – Pictures by the Sea (Mamallapuram)

If you recall, last month I shared with you the pictures from the city of Chennai.  Today, I wish to share wiith you the pictures I have taken during my visit to the UNESCO World Heritage Site – Mamallapuram.  Since last year, I have attempted to track all the World Heritage Sites I have visited.  And I certainly wish to visit as many as I can.

To view the picture collections, please click onto the links below.  I do enjoy visiting these historical sites.  Kind of make me ponder what would someone’s life be like hundreds of years ago.

Related Article: Speed Touring Chennai India

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Music Journal My YouTube

Hella Good Is Hella Tough! Here Is Our Voodoo Mix

I did not wake up this morning and went, “Ah, I am going to make a video blog today”.  Our new drummer Wieke has made a request to play No Doubt’s “Hella Good” as she wishes to – in her own words – implement some of the ideas or techniques into our band’s materials.  So I spent some time last week to learn the song.  Boy, I am really not good at playing cover songs at all.  But I guess it is one for all, all for one.

Cynthia, our talented bassist, has decided to put aside part of her Sunday to figure out how Tony Kanal plays the bass line.  And I said to myself, why not make a video out of this little insignificant day of ours?  And we did jam on the National Day holiday after all – though it was just the two of us.

OK.  This version you see is just a rough demo.  The original intend is to record our interpretation of “Hella Good”, shoot it over to Wieke and Jason to do their parts.  On a side note, recording the acoustic sound of the Indonesian Gendang was not easy.  I think it turns out OK.  We joke that this version should be named as the “Voodoo Mix”.  The sound is so tribal!

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Linguistic My Hobbies

Bingo, Played In Spanish

If I was single and in Spain, by the end of lesson three, I shall be able to go beyond hi-how-are-you, what’s-your-name, where’re-you-from, when’s-your-birthday, to … what’s your telephone number?

Except, I wouldn’t be able catch 100% what her number would be.  D’oh!

The reality is this: Last evening, Cynthia and I have spent an hour or so to do the Spanish homework.  One activity was to listen to a recorded track and learn how to speak 0 to 20 in Spanish.  I swear by the second repeat, Cynthia was able to memorize all the words and started to speak.  I was like … wait, what is after uno again?!  Actually I do know the answer.  Simply because it spells like DOS – disk operating system.  D’oh!

Again, what excited me today was when our teacher Anna talked about the origin of Spanish language, how it evolves from Latin and Greek.  As for the rest of the lesson, I was doodling most of the time.  I didn’t get the whole class feeling hungry like the previous time.  Someone asked our Japanese classmate in Spanish on how to say the word ‘chicken’ in Japanese.  We ended up talking about Chicken (Tori) Teriyaki.  Everyone was suddenly very animated.  I think we shall forget about the number 0 to 20 and go straight to ordering food in Spanish.

Oh well.

We played Bingo in Spanish and need not to say, I was utterly lost.  Cynthia won two games as I suspect that most of us were kind of lost too.  Anna gave us a preview of the various verb forms and I went uh-oh.  Here is an example for you.  ‘I speak’ is yo hablo, ‘you speak’ is tú hablas, and ‘he/she speaks’ is él/ella habla.  The fun begins with nosotros hablamos (we speak), vosotros hablais (you [in plural] speak), ellos hablan (they [men or a mix of men and women] speak), and ellas hablan (they [women] speak).

On a lighter note, my pair of Avril Lavigne tickets has arrived!  It’ll be on el siete de Septiembre.  Fun time it will be in exactly one month’s time.

OK.  Time to go to bed and dream of … cero, uno, dos, tres … tori, teri, yaki …

Categories
Diary Drama Foreign Movie Reviews

Under the Same Moon – Who Wouldn’t Want This Boy As One of Your Own?

A less than ordinary day of mine began with Cynthia’s facial appointment at Vivocity.  Armed with a book and my music collection, my plan was to sit down at a cafe somewhere and space out, which is what I am good at doing when I am alone – spacing out.  So I was at Coffee Bean – a local cafe – with my glass of coffee looking for a table.  Full house.  I turned to an old Chinese couple who, I supposed, have more or less finished their drinks.  My plan B was to quietly hide at one side of the round table, listen to my music, and read my book.

We ended up chatting for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.  I seriously have no idea that I can actually speak Mandarin!  And certainly have no idea that I can understand that much Mandarin either given my Cantonese root from Hong Kong.  Amazing.

But that is not the end of the story.  Soon, this old couple’s son arrived, together with wife and a baby.  Now, for a brief moment, faced with a family of three generations at a cafe with me being a total stranger, it was kind of awkward.  I looked around, full house still.  OK.  I had a hearty chat with mainly the old couple’s son, for another forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.  We exchanged contacts before we parted.  I am no Owen Wilson.  But I swear I was thinking of the movie “Wedding Crasher”.  A truly enjoyable chat; way better than spacing out on my own.

Some human emotions do melt hearts.

The Mexican movie “Under the Same Moon” (Spanish title “La Misma Luna”) that we watched later in Vivocity melts hearts too.  I didn’t have a high expectation.  In fact, I chose to watch this because Cynthia and I are currently learning Spanish.

Several video editing glitches and slight over-dramatized plot aside (seriously who really think that stories by, say, Sophie Kinsella is realistic but yet we all love the plots), the emotions and the dilemmas people faced are as real as it gets.  The acting by and large is admirable.  And I wish to single out the acting of the little boy Adrian Alonso here.  There is a whole array of despair, determination, and delight for Adrian to act out in tears and in laughter.  Cynthia did cry and the film got my eyes watered.  It’s so easy to love this character – for his street smart approach and genuine devotion to the people around him.

This movie is a journey of a little boy finding his way to his mother separated by a country border.  The plot is well paced with the stories from the two sides of the border well gelled with one another.  Certainly a pleasant movie to watch and one that most can relate to.

PS. I recognized the little boy from the big screen but couldn’t pinpoint who he is.  Only Cynthia can recall such a detail: he has acted in “The Legend of Zorro”.  Now I know.

Categories
Diary

One Little Episode, One Lesson I Relearn

The packaging of this new product I’ve gladly purchased without a single thought right after this rather insignificant, vastly unfortunate incident of mine has the stickers of “Save Your Life” pasted everywhere.  I am not sure if this marketing tag line over dramatized the magnitude of the potential repercussion of not having it.  But I got the drift.

One lesson I’ve relearned from the following two frequently appeared excuses in my head …

  1. It only happens to someone else (whatever it is)
  2. There is always tomorrow

… is: action on the decision I’ve made today after weighing all the risks, consequences, and cost.

There is no point, I think, to cry over spilt milk.  Sure, we all hate to rework or to do the same thing again.  But since I have to do it again anyway, I take it as an opportunity to do a better job.  As for what’s lost, it’s lost.  Move on.

On a side note, I have no idea why I am so averse to “new” technologies.  I have yet to try webcam and I still have no idea what Skype is about.  I always have this impression that backing up data is a pain.  In fact, this new product Maxtor OneTouch (see picture above) is really what it is: backing up my data with one touch.  Even better, it can be set as a scheduled task that runs behind the scene.  And I can use it to back up the data from multiple computers, with one touch.

OK.  This thing is going to “Save My Life” should my hard disks die on me again.

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My Favorite My YouTube

My First v-Blog: A History of Chips (That Matters to Me) – Season 1 Finale

Just how long this video remains public depends on how thick my skin is.  And you will be surprised how thick my skin is not.

PS: It is almost like a little miracle that this video sees the day of light.  This morning, my rather new computer died on me – like any of her predecessors who have a habit to throw a tantrum at me every so often – and there go all the working video files that are now in unknown status.  Fortunately, I have uploaded this video to the Internet during the weekend because I know in the name of technology, things always screw up as we draw nearer to the milestones.

This recorded material was initially made for podcast.  I got carried away, turned it into a video, and added an excerpt of an original song of mine -100% original materials from beginning to end.  Recently upgraded my computer, I was inspired by how technology has advanced since I was a little boy.  I did some research and attempted to match the number of transistors the computer processors that I have owned to the neuron counts of the animals in our planet.  It was no easy task as few scientists find counting the neurons of, say, a cat has is useful, set aside publishing the data on the Internet.

When I told my friends around me that I was making a video blog, most thought that I would be videoing myself talking in front of the camera.  Look, I am a more documentary kind of guy and I prefer to stay behind the camera.  Not all of my blog entries comes with a picture of me.  I merely apply the same mentality here.

Hope this video blog is not too horrible that you have to throw up halfway watching it.  It is helluva tedious journey and boy, I need some time to recuperate.  With this video as the end point, I wonder if this adds more texture to the mini-series blog entries that I have published.  It was meant to be another way round.

Oh well.

My 1st v-Blog Mini-Series:

Categories
Linguistic My Hobbies

¿De Dónde Eres? ¡Singapur! – So I Sotong My Way Through Yet Another Spanish Class

Towards the end of the lesson, as Cynthia was conversing with our teacher Anna in Spanish on the topic of countries and nationalities in a convincing fluency, I was looking at the world map so nicely drawn on my Spanish book and couldn’t help but to imagine a game of RISK with my dwindling troops scattered at four corners of the world.  Soon, in this lost battle of I against me, all I heard was a foreign language that I was clueless about.  As though I was warped into another planet, lost in another reality.

But wait, weren’t Cynthia and I at the same class with supposedly the same progress?

OK.  It was not all hard work.  I like the part about Spanish culture that Anna took some time and shared with us some of the basic demography of España: the ancient Celtric tribes that settled at the north (Galicia), the capital city Barcelona of an autonomous community (Galicia) that borders with France, and the south of Spain (Andalusia) that is just a good swim away from Morocco.  Anna asked us what else we wished to know besides the different peoples in Spain, the Flamenco dance (that is well known as a Spanish dance but in fact only popular in Andalusia at the south), and the 9am to 1pm / 4pm to 8pm working hours (siesta in between), my immediate response was: food.

That got everybody in the classroom feeling hungry, including Anna.  Not my fault!  It was an innocent question!

The hard part was learning the list of countries, nationalities, and the masculino and femenio forms for the males and females.  For example, Spain is España, a Spanish man is Español, and a Spanish woman is Española.  In plural form, we have Españols and Españolas.  The rules that change the nationalities into the two forms are not that hard; the way a nationality is spelled out is.  Some countries are totally unrecognizable.  Who would have thought that the words America and American are Estados Unidos and Estadounidense in Spanish?  I personally wish that the lesson stresses more on the pronunciation of these Spanish words rather than the rigorous exercise of pen-and-paper.

I guess it will take me a long while to memorize and speak what I’ve learned this lesson.  No wonder I spaced out towards the end.  How Cynthia managed to memorize on the spot and speak is totally beyond me.  Perhaps her brain is wired in a different way.

Medic!