It is Friday, 11th July 2008 in Singapore (GMT+8). The iPhone 3G has been released in New Zealand as well as Australia and more countries are coming up next due to different time zone.

While in Singapore, there are rumors that the iPhone 3G will be released later instead of in September 2008. I highly doubt this rumor is true. If you read the whole thread, there is also another rumor saying that iPhone 3G will be released on 11th August 2008, exactly 1 month after the iPhone 3G is released in the US.

There is now an iTunes store in Singapore but there are only apps for you to purchase, no music or videos are seen in the store. You can choose Singapore under “My Country” which is located right at the bottom of the iTunes Store page. I have just created my iTunes Singapore account, you need a credit card and a Singapore address.

Now I am waiting for the iPod Touch Firmware 2.0 which I have to pay USD$9.90 for it. Apple seriously always screws early adopters and a perfect example of it is those iPod Touch users who paid USD$19.90 for the January 2008 App Pack and now they will have to pay USD$9.90 for the 2.0 firmware. And to make matter worst, the January 2008 App Pack is included in the firmware 2.0.

We bought a Asus F8Sg laptop from South Asia Computer at Funan for my dad.

At the moment, he is using his friend’s laptop to Skype with us and hence he is constrain by the timing and duration of each Skype call. Since there is wireless Internet in his apartment and even better still the wireless access point is installed in his room. We think it would be better to have his own laptop and hence we got 1 for him.

The original price is SGD$1,899.90 and since we are paying by cash, we manage to bargain till SGD$1,850. The free gift is one black 160GB Western Digital Passport Portable Hard Disk Drive worth about SGD$120.

Brief Specifications:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 (2.1GHz)
• 3GB of DDR2 RAM
• 250GB Hard Disk Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce9300M G with Ext 256MB VRAM
• 14.1 WXGA Screen (1280×800)
• 1.3M high-resolution Swivel webcam
• Built-in WLAN 802.11 a/g/n with Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium

Had a short trip to Kukup, Malaysia with my 9 of my polytechnic friends, Li Xiang, Laily, Suqin, Wayne, Robert, Kee Yong, Serene, Terry, Wenxin.

This is my second time to Kukup, the first time was 11 years back, in 1997.

About Kukup:

Kukup Laut, a very unique and a century old fishing village built entirely on stilts on the sea surrounded by water, is the southernmost village found at the southwest tip of the Peninsular of West Malaysia, and suppose to be the southernmost village found in the Continental of Asia. Located about 70 kilometers away from Johor Bahru, and 20 kilometers from Pontian, Kukup Laut has only one road to access by land. It may be reached by sea boarding ferry leaving World Trade Center in Singapore daily. The entire village is linked by jetty also built on stilts on sea. This place is famous of its seafood. It’s geographically and ideally shadowed by one of the world’s largest mangrove swamp island – Kukup Island along which numerous fish-farms bob up and down on the surface of the Kukup Sea.

Google Map: Kukup
Source: Kukupnet

We paid SGD$70.00 per person for a 2 day 1 night stay there including transport to-and-fro from Singapore and 4 meals (Lunch and Dinner, Breakfast and Lunch for the next day) The pickup point can be either Jurong East MRT station or Kranji MRT station as both of these stations are near to Woodlands Checkpoint.

We met at 9am at Jurong East MRT, Wayne was late a little and Wenxin forgotten to bring her passport. So we told the female driver to go to Woodlands Checkpoint first while Terry accompany Wenxin home to take her passport. There was a huge jam (as usual) at Woodlands Checkpoint, we cleared the custom eventually and waited a while before Terry and Wenxin cleared the customs. While waiting, the female driver keep coming to tell us are we ready or not but we keep pushing her away saying 10 more minutes. Seriously she got a fucked up working attitude problem right from the start when she picked us up at Jurong East.

When we got into the mini-van, Terry apologized to us and the female driver mumbled something in Malay which we don’t understand.

Anyway, it takes about 3 hours drive to reach Kukup and we reached Kukup about 1pm. Our “water house” was quite deep in, so it took us about 10 minutes to walk in.

Our first impression of the house was, it was huge. The house has 4 rooms and can easily sleep up to 20 people and contain at least 30 to 40 people. And since there are only 10 of us, it was a good thing as we have a lot of space.

While waiting for the late lunch at 3pm, some of us played Mahjong while the rest played Saboteur. Lunch was fried beehoon and chicken curry and the desert is green bean with sweet potato soup.

After the late lunch, we went to take a walk outside (the place we alighted earlier on) as there are some shops and an under construction new jetty. Bought some drinks, snacks and ice cream.

Dinner was BBQ seafood and it is served at 7pm. Dinner consist of stingrays, prawns, satay, otah, fishballs and chicken wings. The chicken wing there is very nice.

After dinner some of them went to sing Karaoke which either the pirated discs are spoiled or the player is lousy as the song skips and some of them are out of tune.

Eventually we went to put firecrackers which we bought earlier on. We spent like RM$108 on the firecrackers. It is illegal to sell or put firecrackers in Malaysia and Singapore but I think since this attract people from Singapore to go over to Malaysia just to put it, the government of Malaysia are not really bothered about it as it helps them boost the tourism.

We watched Lord of The Rings: Return of the King on Channel 5 and after that Guess Guess Guess on Channel U. Some of us concuss while watching Guess Guess Guess while the remainder went to sleep after that.

Woke up at 9am on the next day while we have Nasi Lemak and Roti Prata for breakfast. After breakfast, we went to pack our things and gathered in a room for chitchat and to calculate the expenses we spent.

Left the house at 12.30pm for lunch at the seafood restaurant. I am curious why there are so many Singaporeans who drive all the way there to eat seafood as there are a lot of Singapore registered cars parking around it. Personally, I think the seafood there sucks or perhaps we are not used to it. Long Beach in Singapore can beat it anytime.

The lady boss told us that we still got a boat trip perhaps to the fishing farm but we told her that if there is time we will go as the mini-van is coming to pick us up at 2pm. In the end, we did not go.

On our way out of the restaurant, we saw our neighbours whom just stay beside our water house. We started a conversation and realize that they are only paying RM$70.00 which is like half of what we are paying. But then, they are Malaysians and they drive there so no transport is provided for them.

The driver this time was a young male Chinese driver and he is the exact opposite of the female driver that we had yesterday. His service was excellent and he even brought us to eat durians at the road side and no he is not earning any commission for bringing us there.

The traffic was ok when going back to Singapore except there is an accident along a highway in Malaysia that makes us stuck in the jam for 30 minutes.

We reached Singapore at about 5pm. We asked the driver to drop us at Causeway Point was we wanted to watch Hancock. The movie starts at 7.45pm but lasted only about 85 minutes. The movie was not bad and the visual effect is fantastic.

From now onwards, I shall bring my ez-link card and at least 1 credit card as it felt terrible when I got only about SGD$20 with me, somehow I don’t feel “safe” at all.

If you asked me will I visit Kukup again, I would say perhaps 10 years later as once you are there, there is nothing much for you to do and maybe that is the reason why all the package are only 2 days 1 night.

Check out the photos taken from my camera:

*UPDATE* I got quite a few emails for the contact, I thought I might as well post it here.

• Ours: http://kukupnet.tripod.com/house.htm (look for Mr Gay Kui Seng)
• While we are there, we came across a more beautiful house, we are not so sure of the price, but you can check out http://members.tripod.com/~kukupnet/haitang.htm.
• You can also try out Oceanic Sky, look for ET Lim (+60197107000) or Ken Koe (+60167303000)

Just thought of blogging this last night before I went to bed.

Did you all actually count how many monitors, televisions and computers are there in your household?

Here is a breakdown of mine for a family of 4 living in a HDB 4-room flat.

My Room:

• 1x LCD Television
• 2x LCD Computer Monitors
• 1x Desktop Computer
• 1x Laptop Computer

Brother’s Room:

• 1x CRT Television
• 2x LCD Computer Monitors
• 1x Desktop Computer
• 1x Laptop Computer

Parents’ Room:

• N/A

Living Room:

• 1x LCD Television
• 1x LCD Computer Monitor
• 1x CRT Computer Monitor
• 2x Desktop Computers
• 1x Laptop Computer

Kitchen:

• 1x CRT Television

Total:

• 2x LCD Televisions
• 2x CRT Televisions
• 5x LCD Computer Monitors
• 1x CRT Computer Monitor
• 4x Desktop Computers
• 3x Laptop Computers

I am a sucker when it comes to changelog. I document almost every changes I made to my WordPress plugins’ under their respective changelog and I am hopping to bring that good habbit to this site as well.

It has been 1 month since the launch of lesterchan.net Version 3.0. Along the way I fixed many bugs and added a few new features to the site.

1 month later, I present to you lesterchan.net Version 3.10.

Version 3.10 (4th July 2008)
Index

• NEW: Reorganised “Welcome to lesterchan.net” box
• NEW: Seperated My Computer and My Desktop in “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Posts from My WordPress Plugins Blog to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Posts to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Comments to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added user IP below Last Visited date
• NEW: Added a link to my Twitter profile
• NEW: Renamed “Lester …” to “Lester Chan on Twitter” and moved it to “Welcome” box

Blog

• NEW: Renamed “x Comments” to “x Responses”, “1 Comment” to “1 Response” and “No Comments” to “No Response” as reponses are made up of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks
• NEW: Trackbacks and Pingbacks are displayed separately from the comments and they are counted seperately as well
• NEW: Prefixed a “arrow point right” icon to the “Read More” link
• NEW: Suffixed Word, Image and Video count to “Read More” link
• NEW: Added “By Author” in Blog Archive page
• NEW: Added a Star icon beside my name when commenting
• NEW: Added Gravatar to comments
• NEW: Added Tag support for breadcrumb navigation
• FIXED: Duplicate crumbs when doing paginating Category/Date/Author
• FIXED: RSS feed URL now points to Feedburner
• FIXED: Spread the listing of categories and tags into 3 columns instead of a single column

Menu

• NEW: Menu items (not boxes) slides up and down when toggled
• NEW: Menu fading in and out when changing from left to right
• NEW: Paypal donation image now shown by default
• NEW: Added “Quick Links” menu box in order to access my plugin page within 1 click
• NEW: Renamed “Others” to “Network” and moved it from “Navigation” to “Quick Links” menu box
• FIXED: “Menu Settings” menu box icon now reflect the position of the menu sidebar
• FIXED: Menu is now able to move to the left and back to the right in IE7

General

• NEW: Added Google Analytics tracking code
• NEW: Combined portfolio.css and gallery.css with style.css
• NEW: Optimized style.css

Site

• FIXED: Associate links within “lesterchan.net Network” with Lester Chan instead of GaMerZ
• FIXED: “lesterchan.net Network” Link Category named wrongly

Portfolio

• NEW: Added “Lester Chan’s Webpage”, “AllEventsGroup.com”, “FirstFood.com.sg” and “Raffles Airline HR Management System” to websites
• FIXED: Removed Demo link for WP-Wap as it is no longer in development

Gallery

• FIXED: Gallery image description is now centerized