Dance like no one's watching

Two videos I uploaded after waiting for a very very long time.

Sigh… the quality dropped after the upload… stupid youtube.. sigh… the sound’s a little poorer than videos captured using my nokia N82… but on my pc, the visual’s actually much better.

Managed to catch the FIR concert on 8/8/2008 courtesy of ASA Tours (and my lovely mom and aunts who bought expensive tour packages from them).  :P  The concert was fantastic – a high octane performance and good audience interaction.  I was impressed with Faye… she could sing with a steady voice even when there were tears streaming from her eyes.  Heh.

The usual FIR hits like "Lydia", "Fly Away", "Get High", "Wo Men De Ai" were played to rapturous applause from the audience.  I was disappointed though that my favourite songs – "Love Love Love" and "You Make Me Want to Fall In Love" were not sung.

The audience also gave tremendous support (screams and applause) to guest star, Jam Hsiao Jing Teng.  Such tremendous was the support that I nearly forgot it was an FIR concert I was attending.  Heh.

Here’re the photos taken with the Panasonic Lumix FX33.

Am trying to upload 2 videos onto youtube so I can post them here.  It’s taking a very very long time.  Sound on the videos wasn’t very good either… guess the N82 has better sound capture, being a handphone.  *Shrugs*.

Sends search engines my way?

Sigh.  Before I got hit by the stupid spam hijack thingy, this blog was rated pretty high on google’s search engines.  Type "uptowngal" and the first hit would be this blog.  Now… this blog has gone completely under the radar.

I was told that google removed all the blogs / websites that were hit by the stupid spam injector from their search results.  But I’ve cleaned up the code, upgraded my WordPress (at the cost of the stupid permalinks failing) and still, my search engine ranking sucks.

Why why why?  *Sniff*.

Today is Iceman’s birthday… but the poor chap had to go to office extra early thanks to some heartless doctor who wanted a meeting at 7:30am.  Good grief.  Which normal human being turns up at office before 10am?  (Ok, I’m exaggerating here).

Anyway, Happy Birthday Sayang!!

*Hugs*

Two of my colleagues resigned this week.  One’s from my department and the other is from Booze Queen’s department.  The guy from my department resigned to pursue his dream of being an entrepreneur.  Nothing wrong with that except he doesn’t want to tell Bigmac what his plans are because he feels Bigmac will "poke holes" in the plan and eventually dissuade him from chasing his dream.

I find this rather weird.  After all, striking out on one’s own is a risky foray and if one’s plan has certain weaknesses, isn’t it better for these weaknesses to be known as early as possible?  The way this soon-to-be-ex colleague puts it makes it seem as though he has this dream and no matter how impossible it may be, he is adamant about going after it.  How different then, is that, from building castles in the air?

As for the gal from Booze Queen’s department, she has been absent from work many times in the past 5-6 months, giving the reason that she’s on "medical leave".  It started with a 1 day MC (Medical Certificate)… then progressed to 2 days MC – which initially got us worried because we thought her extreme obesity was causing her severe health problems.  However, in the past 2 months or so, we realised that her MCs tend to coincide with her short holiday trips to Malaysia.  And from 2 days, these MCs stretched to 4 days, i.e. Thurs + Fri and then Mon + Tue.

Over the last weekend, she did her Thurs + Fri, Mon + Tue MC thing again.  (She went KL and Genting).  This time, her boss got mad and insisted that she turned up in office on Wed.  When pressed for her MCs, she claimed to have them "in her bag" but yet she could not produce them when her boss insisted.  She said she couldn’t find them in her bag so they must be at home… upon which her boss asked her to return home to retrieve her MCs.  Went home she did… after which she sent her boss a SMS saying that she wants to resign.

Sigh.  Her boss was very kind and didn’t want to let anyone know about the rash resignation at first, thinking that she might change her mind and come back to work with a reformed attitude.  However, this gal has told another senior colleague that she has resigned so it looks like there’s no turning back now.

As things have taken such an ugly turn, we’re speculating that this gal may not even want to serve out her 1 month notice.  That said, I’m not sure if she has enough money to compensate the company for not serving notice… and to reimburse the company for all the unpaid leave she has taken.  (She has maxed out her annual leave and if we were to take it that she was on leave for every time she couldn’t produce an MC, she would definitely have to pay back the company for all the days she was MIA).

It is really unfortunate that things have reached such a state.  Employees resign from companies every day… so is there a need to burn all bridges when one leaves?  There’s a Chinese saying – 好来好散 – which loosely translates to "happy come happy go".  Just as one joins a company on a positive note, I think it’s best for one to leave a company on a positive note as well.  Why make things so ugly for everyone?

Doesn’t it look like one?  Hehehehehe.

Selected photos from Night Fest 2008!

Dancing couple in the air

This picture of a face is actually projected onto a water fountain.

Looks quite freaky in the photos…

There was this gymnast dancing, balancing, diving and doing all sorts of graceful moves around/above/inside this bowl of water.  I was quite scared everytime she dived in… (back flips, front flips, etc).  The water’s really shallow as you can see… was afraid she’ll snap her neck!

This ship looks straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean!

I wonder if the dancer was worried about crashing into the boat… ‘cos they were pulled by different groups of guys… heh. 

There’s a dancer doing cartwheels and stuff inside that big ball.. but it’s hard to see the dancer ‘cos of the glare of the lights.  🙁

Dancing atop a grand piano.

I loved the balloons more than the dancer in this item.  Hehe.

I loved the rich colours of this balloon.

It was difficult to get a clear shot as there were trees in the way.  🙁

I hope this Night Fest gets instituted as a yearly event!

Here’re some pictures took in the month of July (and the first 2 days of August)… finally got the chance to upload them.  🙂

This is apparently a Teochew dish… braised duck with kway teow soup or rice.  Side dishes complementing the dish are kiam chye (salted veg) and beancurd.  Never saw this in Singapore before… tried it in JB when Iceman & I went to check out wedding banquet venues.  (Reminds me of kway chap!)

This pic didn’t come out too well unfortunately.  There were these really miniature bananas.  Eye-catching.

Open air area near Peking City Restaurant in JB (one of our wedding dinner venue considerations).  Check out the pillars!  They’re made up of different coloured stones.

Fell 2 Fridays ago when the heel of my left shoe caught the hem of my right pant leg.  Sustained 2 big bruises on my knees… erm.. I thought the pattern of this bruise was kind of pretty… flowery looking… :P  (I’m fascinated by bruises).

There was this photo exhibition at the National Library today.  Rather small exhibition showcasing photos (old & new) and some documents (birth certs, vaccination docs, etc from yesteryear) reflecting the various "Singaporean moments".

Scrap all the glam shots of our city skyline.  This, was my favourite – (by Tay Wee Kiat Benjamin)!  For the non-initiated, this is a pic of a poor driver getting a summon from the traffic police for not putting a valid parking coupon.  Haha.

The usual glam shots…

Our armed forces… drinking Heaven & Earth green tea.  I think Heaven & Earth should consider paying the army to endorse their products… chao slacker…

5 stones!!  Anyone remembers how to play?  🙂

Hawker Licence

Ration Card

Iceman & I also checked out this restaurant called Food for Thought that’s located opposite the National Library.  Yummy food  and funny characters found inside…

Sigh.  I actually placed the camera on the table ‘cos I wanted to take photos of the food.. but we were hungry… and when I suddenly remembered I wanted to take photos… we had finished our main course and this was all that was left of Iceman’s mango cheesecake.

I did manage to get 1 shot of our 2nd dessert – Butterscotch Peach Crumble.  It has peaches & raisins inside.  Totally delicious!

Normal looking customer.

Same customer with a panty over her head… maybe the fan was too strong…

More photos of the Night Fest coming up!

Damnit!  Just realised I’m going to have to set aside time to fix the damn permalinks bug because unless WP 2.6.1 comes out REALLY REALLY soon, all my previous blog entries, where I made url references to other blog entires, would now become a broken link!  Grr…

A constant pain in the neck with using Meebo in office is that messages tend to go missing.  I’m not sure if this is a Meebo problem or my office network problem (dropped connection) but it is a real pain when you’re constantly unsure if your messages reached the other party.

The worst hit victim of this missing messages problem is Iceman (I suppose that’s ‘cos I talk to him the most on Meebo).  We’ve developed a habit of copying and pasting our messages if we don’t get a response after 5-10min.  Of course, sometimes, the other party is away from the computer and hence there’s no response.  But other times, this lack of response is because the other party never received the message.  Even the copy and paste text can go missing a couple of times… which means sometimes we can end up pasting the same message 3-4 times before it actually goes through.

On particularly bad days, Iceman and I resort to using Gtalk as an alternative IM to communicate.  Sadly, Gtalk disconnects pretty regularly too… but the mitigating factor is that when Gtalk is disconnected, there is an error prompt to notify me that the message did not go through. 

This missing messages irritation culminated in a really crappy incident last night.  I originally arranged to meet Iceman for dinner at 7pm, after which some last minute task came in from overseas and I had to resolve the issue before I could leave.  I told Iceman over Meebo to meet at 7:30pm instead… and I got an "ok, bye" from him and so I thought he got my message.  Unfortunately, Iceman’s "ok" was in response to an earlier message I typed… and he never got my message about changing the meeting time to 7:30pm.

When I finally reached at our appointed dinner venue close to 8pm, Iceman was starving and obviously puzzled why I was so late.  Then the whole missing messages thing came out and well, it was too late to do anything.  So when I got home last night, I decided to do another search on the Internet to see if there were any other IM alternatives (i.e. IMs that can get past my office firewall).  I found a website that had a whole list of the various web-based IMs available.  Amongst those listed were – www.ebuddy.com, www.iloveim.com, www.meebo.com, www.imhaha.com, imo.im, etc. 

I’m familiar with all except the last 2… and so I did a test on both.  Nothing really special about imhaha.com… but imo.im… aha!  I found a gem there.  There’s a downloadable imo.im programme that runs on Windows PCs.  It requires .NET to work and looks very very similar to Gtalk (which is small, neat and gets past most firewalls).  Tested it and it worked pretty ok so far – only 1 missing message occurrence.

This imo.im programme displays a "disconnected" status message when the IM is disconnected so as long as you don’t send a message when you’re disconnected, I think it’s reasonably stable.  Will continue testing it over the next few days but so far, it’s really lovely.  When the programme is minimised, it’s tucked away in the systray and I switched off the notification alert so nothing pops up when I receive a message.  The icons blinks discreetly in the systray and that’s it (just like ICQ).  Sweet.

I highly recommend this programme for all IM junkies!  🙂