This song, We Live In Singapura, sang by Hossen Leong has been around since last year (if I am not wrong). But I only knew about it this year. But anyway, I think Hossen Leong is a very talented guy

Since it is Singapore 42th birthday, I would like to bring the video back.

Happy 42th Birthday Singapore and may we have more good years ahead.

A man checked into a hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an e-mail to his wife.

However, he accidentally typed a wrong e-mail address, and without realizing his error, he sent the e-mail.

Meanwhile….Somewhere in Houston , a widow had just returned from her husband’s funeral.

The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting condolence messages from relatives and friends.

After reading the 1st message, she fainted. The widow’s son rushed into the room found his mother on the floor and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I’ve reached
Date: January 31, 2004

I know you’re surprised to hear from me. They have computers here; we are allowed to send e-mails to loved ones. I’ve just reached and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing you TOMORROW!

Yours,
Loving Hubby…..

Source: ppingg of Hardware Zone Forums

CS3214 Workshop
Been so busy for me for the past few weeks, need to enjoy my last bit of holiday before my school starts. Anyway, my school has not yet officially started, it will start on 16th August 2007. But currently I am attending CS3214 Workshop and it happens everyday from 1st August 2007 to the day my school starts from 10am right up to 5pm. Unofficially, my school has started for me.

CS3214 is like a Final Year Project (FYP) in polytechnic by it is just a module on its own and it is worth 8 module credits and I think it is much more tougher than FYP. And the “best part” is that we have to code in Java. I have no idea why schools in Singapore is so pro Java, seriously Java sucks, it is so fucking resource consuming. And in order to code it, I need a computer with at least 1GB of RAM if not I will take like forever to compile the final codes. And the laptop I bought last year just barely meet the requirements.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Caught Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 2 weeks ago at GV VivoCity, it was quite bad and rather draggy/boring and it lasted about 150 minutes. I got a feeling the subsequent 2 movies will not be that good too.

Flashpoint
Caught Flashpoint which stars one of my favorite actor, Donnie Yen (甄子丹). The show was good, there were fight scenes almost throughout the whole movie which lasted about 90 minutes and those fight scenes were very well calligraph by Donnie Yen himself.

Those who love SPL: Sha Po Lang and Dragon Tiger Gate, will love this.

Portable HDD
Finally gotten myself a DIY portable harddisk drive, it is a 160GB Hitachi 5400RPM 2.5″ HDD with Cutie DX casing. It cost SGD$208. I am going to use it to backup my CS3214 codes in case my notebook cannot take the load that Java gives it and decided to give up on me. I can’t afford any mistakes here as my grades are at stake.

Went to Singapore Indoor Stadium to watch The Year of Jacky Cheung World Tour 07. It was my first time watching a concert.

Was there about 2 hours earlier (the concert suppose to start at 8pm) and there are plenty of carpark lots available. I was monitoring the carpark and I concluded that to confirm find a parking lot besides the Singapore Indoor Stadium (there are plenty of car parks, I am talking about the nearest carpark), it is best to come 90 minutes earlier.

As for dinner, the best is to have dinner first before going there because the restaurants there are VERY LIMITED and they are not cheap as compared to other restaurants. I ended up waiting Nissin Cup Noodles with LiXiang at 7-11 because it is the cheapest alternatives, even though the cup noodles cost $2.25 each.

We bought a pair of $88 tickets for $190 because it is sold out everywhere and we got this lobang from Hardware Zone: MarketPlace Classified/Garage Sales.

As usual, being in Singapore everything gets delayed, the concert got delayed till about 8.30pm before it started.

The concert lasted for 2 hours and 45 minutes and after that there is 45 minutes of Ann Kok encore. It is during the encore part that he sings most of his oldies.

The concert/encore ends with the song 祝福 which brings the atmosphere to the max, I think I love that part the most. I recorded that part, but I think I will violate some law if I upload that part to Youtube.

He speaks mostly in Cantonese but from what I gathered from Hardware Zone, during his concert on Friday, he speaks mostly in Mandarin. So whenever he speaks I have to ask Li Xiang to translate it for me because I have no idea what he is talking about as I do not understand Cantonese.

Overall, the concert is very worth it and definitely beats listening to the CD at home (which I always thought it is the best alternatives). The ambiance and atmosphere are 2 important factors that make the money worth.

Next time when I go out to work, I will definitely get the most expensive ticket, but now being a poor student, I should just be satisfied with the cheapest ticket.

To be honest, throughout the whole concert, I only know a handful of songs, most of the songs are alien to me. LOL

Of course my favorite song by him are ä¸åƒä¸ªä¼¤å¿ƒçš„理由, 吻別, 祝福 and 等到花儿也谢了.

It is a pity he didn’t sing “In Love With You”, which he duetted with Filipino singer-actress Regine Velasquez.

By the way, there is no special guest.

Here are some photos from the concert.

Ticket

Stage - Actual

Stage - Zoom In

Jacky Cheung With Dancers

Jacky Cheung Alone Giving Speech

Ticket prices are: (SGD) $198, $168, $128, $88 (Avg: $145.5)
Seating Capacity of Singapore Indoor Stadium (during Concert): 7,306 - 7,968 (Avg: 7, 637)
Number of days concert is held: 3
Estimated revenue: 3*$145.5*7,637= $3,333,550.50

I wonder how much of the actual money goes to Jacky Cheung.

Had dinner at Pasta de Waraku again, but this time I am going to blog with more information and pictures!

Pasta de Waraku - Japanese Casual Pasta & Cafe Restaurant
#02-82/83 The Central
Tel: 65348085

Top of the Menu Cover

Bottom of the Menu Cover

Mini salad comes with every pasta

Al’ Aglio Olio Japanese Style (SGD$10.80)

Chicken &amp Mushroom Soup Pasta (SGD$14.80)

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) - Coke

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) - Corn Soup

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) - Pork Salami & Tomato Pizza

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) - Spaghetti Alla Bolognese

Just in case the information is a little vague, the pizza set is SGD$19.80 and comes with a glass of coke or wine, corn soup, a mini pizza and a mini pasta.

Die Hard 4.0
Caught this movie on Saturday. It was 150 minutes long and the movie was not that bad, slightly above average, as expected, it was an action packed film with actions almost through the whole movie. Maggie Q only lasted 1/2 way through the show maybe since she is an Asian and this is an American flim. LOL

Pasta De Waraku
Located at 2nd level in the newest shopping center in Singapore, The Central, Pasta De Waraku serves Japanese Pasta and it is by far the best pasta I have eaten and prices there are very reasonable, the price ranges between $12.80 and $16.80.

Pete’s Place
Celebrated my mom’s birthday at Pete’s Place. It is located at the basement in Hyatt Hotel. Pete’s Place serves Italian food and they have a very good buffet spread. This is the 3rd time I have been to there, prices for weekend lunch is about $45 per head and just by eating a single dish from the spread, is enough to fill your stomach.

CakePHP
I have been coding an in-house billing system for Frro.net for the past week and I am using CakePHP to do it. It is my first time using CakePHP and I am quite impressed by it. No wonder it is called “The Rapid Development Framework for PHP”. As a first timer to CakePHP, I am able to pick up things quite fast. When I first started coding, I am not really comfortable with it because I spend more time finding out how to do some stuff rather than coding. But as time goes by, I am more familiar with it and coding had never been easier as CakePHP will do most of your work.

Transformers
I am not really a fan of Transformers Cartoon or rather I did not watch much Transformers when I was young. But I love Transformers the movie, it is the best movie I had watched since Lord Of The Rings. The CG was fantastic, the storyline was good, the action was almost throughout the 140 minutes long movie. 2 thumbs up. Can’t wait for part 2 and 3.

iPhone
My uncle who is working in LA has a taste of iPhone and this is what he wrote to me. Just to share it with you guys

» They sold 525,000 phones since Apple launched on June 29, 2007 at 6:00 pm.
» I tried the phone and it’s quite impressive except the price US$499 for 42 GB and US$599 for 8GB.
» Everything is touchscreen and it’s visual display is beautiful just like a mini laptop computer.
» The cons is it gets heated up quickly after pro-longed use and gets hot and never very ergonomic to your hand. Speaker phone not great but ok in terms of sound level.
» A lot of people said it’s better to wait for the next generation because they probably will fine tune it. It’s not always good to buy a first generation gadgets because they bound to have little problems. But I must say, it’s pretty impressive

Premix/Remix 2007
Here are some more pictures from Premix/Remix 2007 taken by Nic and Leon.

Nokia N95 8Gb Edition
According to Just Another Mobile Phone Blog, Nokia N95 8Gb Edition was discovered within some text in the XML file on the Nokia site.

EDIT: Totally false:

ok people, it really is time to forget this thread, There is NO N95-8GB hard drive handset, Nokia Wont be doing this 100%, Its is another model in the work running under the n95 software profiles, UAPROF Developers have renamed the profile to keep to device name secret! So lets all still talk about N95 because its not going to change in spec! ok

Samsung K3
I have the Samsung K3 with me for about 1 week and here are some pros/cons I have discovered.

Pros
» Sound equalizer is a very good feature to have
» Sound quality is definitely better than iPod
» User interface is some what similar to iPod
» It is as thin/small as iPod Nano
» Uses drag and drop via Windows Explorer instead of some crappy applications *cough* iTunes *cough* SonicStage.

Cons
» Songs are listed by file names instead of by artists/albums/songs
» I think the headphone wire is a little to long for comfort.
» For some reasons, the file browser does not detect pictures or text files whereas when I use the main menu to access them I am able to do so.
» OLED screen not as sharp but power saving

Note: I have not tested the battery life yet.

Remix 07 is an event organized by Microsoft for Web Developers, Web Designers and Web Business. It is held at The Arts House @ The Old Parliament. It is a 1 day only event which is held yesterday (Friday, 29 June 2007).

I received an invitation from Nic Fillingham from Microsoft Asia Pacific to attend both the Premix 07 and Remix 07. I am really grateful to him for getting me the tickets for Remix 07 for free as it is a paid event and has been sold out quite early.

Premix 07
This is a bloggers event held the night before Remix 07. It is held at Geek Terminal which is located at 55 Market Street (Ex Keppel TatLee Bank HQ).

I met Estee from The Digital movement a group (I think that should be the right word to use) which is into Web 2.0. I am so looking forward to going to this type of events.

I met Leon Brown also from Microsoft Asia Pacific. He is a funny guy =D

Anyway back to topic, the Premix 07 is like a preview of Remix 07 which feature 2 speakers like:

Beau Ambur: CEO from Metalliq which demonstrated on what Microsoft Silverlight can do and that really took my breath away when he showed us Top Banana Silverlight Application where you can edit video on the fly and on the web using just by using your web browser.

Lee Brimelow: Sr Design Technologist from Frog Design showed us a couple of applications done using Windows Presentation Format (WPF). Imagine frameless applications with 3D that does not lag your computer and of course animations. That also took my breath away.

I won myself a XBOX360 game. But the best thing is that I do not have an XBOX 360!!!

The Minestrone soup from the buffet was good

Premix Stage

Leon Brown & I @ Premix

Nic Fillingham & I @ Premix

Remix 07
Conference started at 8.30am and I was there early but Nic was even earlier. I met Lucian Teo who was the Head of Web Management from MOE who was also from Web Standards Group Singapore. I thought it is hard to find people which is also into Web Standards in Singapore, but that proved me wrong. LOL.

The conference was split into 3 tracks mainly Web Designers, Web Developers and Web Business. I attended the Web Developers session and they mainly thought about Silverlight 1.0 beta, Silverlight 1.1 alpha , ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET Futures, Expression, Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”.

I was so amazed by ASP.NET and the amount of code needed to produced the same thing on PHP is like 10:1 or even more. But I have to admit that I hate it when developing websites becomes so easy as it was never easy for us as we coded every single line through notepad instead of an IDE where you just press tab and the IDE knows exactly what you want and fill the remaining line for you.

I was more interested in Silverlight than ASP.NET because I think it is more relevant to PHP (that is what I do). All i have to do is to include a silverlight.js which is around 16kb (I think it should be uncompressed), and have another Javascript to init the silverlight object and ensure that my silverlight object reference to the .xaml file correctly and I am good to go. I am really amazed on what the little XAML file can do. You can have gradient and animations inside it and best of all it is all text. Imagine that.

I hope they will have it again next year! It was excellent and really an eye opener. I am very impressed by the talents they have at Microsoft.

Remix Stage

My Badge

I have added some pictures from Remix07 to my galley: Remix07 @ The Art House

I think you can read more about Remix07 at:
» Nic’s Blog
» Web Standards Group Singapore’s Blog
» Peter Du’s Blog
» Ong Jiin Joo’s Blog

If you guys blog about Remix07, feel free to post in my comments so that I can add it here.

Thai Glico Dinner
Had the annual Thai Glico Dinner at Wan Hao: Chinese Restaurant which is located at Marriott Hotel. The boss seems to like Wan Hao a lot and I think this is the 4th of 5th consecutive times we have eaten there. A $1000 per table (they always booked 2 tables) dinner and free flow of whatever drinks you like is just too good to resist. Food is more than great, it is excellent. In regards to pricing, it is very expensive =(

Samsung YP-K3
I want to thank Kelvin Lee, Delicia Tan from Edelman and Serene Chan from Samsung for the great lunch at Carnivore and of course the sponsored Samsung YP-K3 MP3 Player. Thank you guys so much! I will feedback you guys about the MP3 player and help spread the word. See you all soon at WCG this August.

Surf’s Up
Caught this show out of a sudden today at GV Marina. The show was quite boring, but the CG is good, especially the water effects and animations. Respect goes out to all the CG artists.

WP-DownloadManager
If anyone of you is wondering what plugin/script I am using for my Downloads Page, it is called WP-DownloadManager (I just named it) and it is available for download. This WordPress plugin is still in beta stages.

For more information, check out WP-DownloadManager 1.00 Beta.