Singapore Science Center

Here are some of the vids I took at the SCC:

Rotating Tesla Coil

Tesla Coil super spark

Wireless energy transference

Tesla Coil goes Ka-boom!

SCC has a IMAX theater too, and we watched "Space Station", which was narrated by Tom Cruise, using actual space footage taken from Space Shuttle missions and from the ISS. The theater is not like the one in Berjaya Time Square, because the screen was round, like a football cut in half! Definitely a very difference experience, especially looking down the Earth from ISS.

Singapore Trip/Exchange 14 Ignite

So I was down at Singapore for about a week to attend the Exchange “14” Ignite, as well as to take some time off to get around and about. Here are some of the slightly more interesting stuffs that I saw during my trip. (56kbps warning!)

First up, for LCie: MOS burger!!! I think I had it for at least twice.

I was so excited that I ordered 2 burgers! Yay! But I was in a rush that I left the 2nd one on the table. Darn.

For Juls, CH and Ivy: Look at the big cannons!

For Justin: Star Trek in DLP was awesome! And with some UOB credit card the tix price would just be SGD6.

For Andy and Corra: Although it was on sale, it was still too expensive (for me) la. SGD240 for slippers? Ended up with Nike @ SGD55.

Singaporeans really like their arts. This was on the MRT station wall @ Chinatown aka Niu Che Shui. Took these while waiting for CK.

For Funj: Here was how the event look like. See? I saw in front row, good student leh. Cham didn’t like it at all though :P

For Funj: Without breaching the NDA, here is one shot of the Dell Latitude 17 inchers that everyone was using with 8GB of RAM. That’s almost 200 units in one room…

 

For Justin: They had the Maverick in transparent case! Is this authorized version or china ciplak?

For Daniel and LCie: Asahi beer from the tap! Damn smooth! SGD9.90 per pop. Too bad the ramen so so only. Thanks Joseph for insisting to pay for the dinner!

Toilet also got flat panel TV, don’t play play OK. Even my house is still on CRT TV :(

For Justin and Julian: Tons of camara bags, @ top floor Sim Lim Square. Not sure about pricing though. Kata, National Geographic, Tamrec, Lowepro – complete collection!

For LCie and LH: Went to Night Safari with Cham. Thanks LH for the recommendation! It was well worth the SGD22 tix. Came out and lo and behold, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor! You’d wouldn’t find this in Malaysia… (fresh anyway.)

For Funj: Only wish that I could lug these babies back! SGD160 at South East Asia computer store @ Funan.

For Julian: This is the Intuos that I saw, it was huge! Too bad I am artistically crippled :P

Ah here is the place where I had the Asahi beer on tap. Shokudo. I heard there is a outlet in KL?

For CK and Isaac: I went to the Singapore Science Center, and I think it was well worth the visit. SGD25 and we spend the whole day there.  SSC had a huge animatron T-Rex at the entrance. It was huge and very articulate, compared to the Dino and Monster expo at Midvalley…

Look closely. The model is even made to be “anatomically correct”…

All Red Alert fans: SSC has a real tesla coil on demo! Video @ next post.

Me and CK were very lucky as the Da Vinci expo was there and it was suppose to be the only stop in South East Asia. Too bad no pix allowed inside.

McSpicy (Singapore) = Chicken McDeluxe (Malaysia).

 

One more round of MOS burger before going back! Yakiniku Rice (beef).

 

For Edwin: I did get to Computex after 3 train line changes and 1 bus ride later…. Thanks for the info anyway :)

For Funj and Cham: Polycom units on sale…but why no stock one leh. Challanger @ VivoCity.

For Joey: The garden is actually on the roof of the building! @ViviCity.

Isaac would had love it there.

Pseudo lake garden on the roof – magnificent!

 

For LH: ALDO was on sale, 20% off.

For Justin: National Geographic’s signature outlet was at VivoCity – it has a zero Celsius chamber to test out their winter wears… but even a sweater costs SGD250…

For all burger/hotdog lovers: This is the ultimate place to go. Albeit the corny name, the burger I ordered was fantastic! Check next pix!

 

Ben and Jerry’s again! For SGD3 more on top of the meal.

This is the Super Burger. Aptly named, the meat patty consists of BOTH beef and pork. And I ordered extra bacon and eggs… inside the burger! Yom yom yom!

For all Sarawakians: Kolo mee rocks! @ LG2 VivoCity.

Wireless @ SG

Bumpy registration process but after finally gone in, pretty good performance for free Internet!



The hotel room one is either SG28/24hrs or SG0.50 per min....

Social Experiment

I wanted to perform a social experiment on the guys in the office, and this was my evil plan :)

1. Talked loudly about Street Fighter 4 for XBOX360 to get everyone excited,
2. Went out and buy the game, knowing that there is only one fresh set of batteries for one controller only,
3. Got the game back, started playing first thing in the office,
4. Then made an excuse to pass my controller to someone else.

Guess what happened:

1. They have not stopped playing, despite there is real work to be done,
2. And it's 10:30am, right smack in the middle of office hours,
3. And no one bothered to walk downstairs and buy a fresh set of batteries for the other controller.

And many of you wonder why employers always complain that employees are an ungrateful bunch :)

People Say That "Malaysian Government Hospitals Suck" For A Reason

I promised to write this entry a few weeks back, but my schedule has been shot out of the sky... Anyway, it's about our experience of having a baby at Selayang Hospital.

Actually, let me pen down all the mistakes they made first:

1. Did not want to take any action even Joey was overdue. There was nothing we could do about it, as it is hospital "policy" to wait 7 to 10 days overdue. The subsequent result is that baby Tim got too big too fast in the last week of pregnancy. Tim was born at 4.29KG, which according to my doctor friends, the attending doctor will get questioned by his/her boss for not monitoring the weight of the baby closely.
2. Joey's planned C-section was bumped last minute, due to the reason that "there were too many emergency cases in the surgical theater, therefore the anesthesiologist's schedule is full and our surgery has to be postponed". OK, sure - fair enough. But Joey had been fasting for more than 8 hours *and* without a drip, so upon hearing that news, Joey went ahead and had her meal. 15 mins later, the anesthesiologist walked in and was surprised that Joey was eating. Apparently the intern doctor (or "medical officer", as they are called in Malaysia) that broke us the news earlier was mistaken. Too bad, the surgery has to be postponed to the next day.
3. They got Joey's blood group wrong. And she almost got a transfusion with a wrong blood type, because she lost more than 1 liter worth of blood during surgery.
4. The nurses almost gave Tim BCG shot, TWICE. Apparently the nurses in the maternity ward and NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) did not communicate.
   

There are many more nauces to be told, but that's 4 major ones that I can recall. Stay tuned for more background stories.

HP OfficeJet 5510 - How to skip the dreaded "Print Align Page" screen after ink catridge replacement

Short answer - press "Setup" button + "OK" button at the same time.

Just want to post it here so I can remind myself the next time I change ink cart.

Welcome Baby Timothy!

Tim's under observation overnight. He weighed in at 4.29KG, hence the C-sect. Both Joey and Tim is safe :) We are due to check out of hospital on Friday. Thanks for all the congratulations and well wishes! It really means a lot to us~

Crazy Jam

When the cyclists is in town, this is what happens:



Stuck on one end, dead on the other.

Further down the road, I saw the traffic police blocked the road and no car could pass. The traffic was backed at least 10KM away.

IELTS

Couple of weeks ago I took me IELTS as part of my requirement for the Australian PR. We were suppose to be there by 8am, and we were frigging late getting out of the house.

It was an interesting experience to drive your pregnant wife from Kepong to KLCC (20KM drive) within 15 mins. I think we were more relaxed when we drove to the hospital for Isaac's delivery.

Anyway, when we got there (on time too), we saw this.



Holy moly. There were about 180 people taking the exam on the same day. Although there were 2 type of exams going on at the same time, i.e. General and Academic, most of the people there were taking the General exam. The former is for migration and later is for oversea university entry requirements .

Anyway, the result just came out and this is what I got.... Zeng1 zeng1 zeng1 zeng3.


I am actually very surprised with the result, as I could not understand how I would have fucked up my Writing section so badly. I wrote very very long, analytical, structured essays which I was very confident on.

Guess I had to buckle up my writing skills. More blogging, perhaps?

p/s For Australian PR purposes, they use the lowest score in any section. Means my final score is 7.0, not 8. That is just borderline passing mark. Hmm. We'll see how.

Bad Husband

Yes, it was time of the year for me to fuck up again. I forgot my wedding anniversary. Again. Which kinda makes it like every time since we got married.

And to make it worst, she gave me a great present:



Sorry for the crappy pic, but it's a Braun Buffel! My first real manly leather belt. No the pleather stuff that I had been wearing for ages.

I am really sorry dear! I will do better next time!

Very Cool Sun Servers

OK OK, pun intended with the title.

Anyway, we got these 2 loaner units for a customer PoC that we are doing for Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

This is the first time we have encountered any servers other than Dell, HP and IBM, so we had to take a look inside! Check out the wicked 16 banks of ECC RAMs with their own heat sinks!



And the slot load optical drive!



No wonder these babies won the best 1U rack server of the year award! Visually, it can almost rival the XServe. Almost.

Now all is left for us to harness these powers... is to find me some damn power/KVM cords and power them up!

Golden Apple

Well well, just after I put up my previous post, I found out that the new PolyBook is the new Golden Apple of the year. I'm a darn fraking genius.

Read all about it here => http://www.lowendmac.com/ed/ms-geek/09msgk/golden-apples.html

New Poly MacBook is Here!

I think it's the best time ever for Malaysian companies to make the switch to Mac!

Check it out => http://www.apple.com/my/macbook/white/

For RM3,699 it's practically the same thing as my RM6,606 aluminum MacBook, sans the metal of course. The previous MacBook was priced RM200 less, but now you got double the RAM and extra oomph in the graphics department!

Plus, I've been laughing away since the Konflicker debacle started :)

Choco

Joey and I came across this chocolate centric "coffee" house in 1 Utama, while trying to get Iz some new year clothes.

It's called theobroma Chocolate Lounge.

Joey, as the resident coffee addict, decided to go against convention and ordered their flat white:



Hmm - failed attempt at Coffee art. Although the cup was interesting though:



All their choco drinks has very pussy names, like Snow White, Fair Lady and Ms Coco. I decided to have the latter, with the derivative version of Mocha Frappe.



I've got to say, it's absolutely the best choco Frappe that I ever had! The Belgian dark choco was with the right bitter taste, and I can feel the choco bits melting as I am writting this.

Great stuff - well recommended. Ms. Coco Mocha Frappe for RM12.50, which I think is a fair price compared to the rubbish that Coffee Bean/Starbucks is charging me for.

Googled them and apparently they are Australian based. Here's their web site > http://theobroma.com.au/

Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuit

Before you feel violated, by expecting a positive food blog entry, turn away now.

I warned you.

So we discovered that there is a new American fast food chain that just opened their virgin branch in Malaysia, we had to try it for lunch. You all know that how much I love American fast food, Wendy’s being my current supa-favorite.

It’s located at TTDI, just across of the KFC. What irony. Some more 3 doors away from KFC, there’s a Ayamas outlet.

Back to the story, was eager to try out their wares, so I splurged and decided to add on their RM5.99 Cajun Fries.

And this is what I got for my 6 Smackeroos :

* My finger there for size comparison.

It’s very little for RM6 la wei! I even purposely asked the manager “Is this all the fries I get for RM6?”, and I got a murmur back as an answer. The fries tastes just like A&W’s curly fries, or McD’s twister fries. Just straight. (not gay?)

TMD. I haven’t even mention how slow the queue was. It took me 20 mins just to wait for 2 group of people in front of my to complete their orders. Come on la, this is not Wendy’s where they build the burgers from ground up. These are just god-damn-pre-fried-chickens, OK!

More disappointment for the rest of the guys:

9 pieces of “succulent” shrimps for RM9.90. They are so tiny that my zits are bigger than them.

Then, this is their version of “mashed potato”:

Notice the garlic in the not-so-brown brown sauce. Where got people use garlic as an ingredient for Mash!? Don’t get me wrong, I love garlic, but not in everything OK!

And even the main attraction, which are the fried chicken and “biscuits” are just plain so so only. The chicken was a bit dry, and the “biscuits” are just very very salty scone. Beats me why they choose to call them “biscuits”.

Now come the worst part, look at all the paper products wasted. Why did they have to put a piece of wax paper on every dish? Not environmentally friendly at all.

Here’s the bill, and proof of how much the fries cost:

WIR? No thank you. Sekali cukup. Unless I hear some more good reviews from other bloggers.