Been a pretty busy week for me, here is a summary of what I did. It has been sometime since I posted something about my life. This is going to be a very long post.

Nokia Christmas Crimes 2007
Got invited by Dinesh to the Nokia year end party called Nokia Christmas Crimes 2007 which is located at Thumper in Goodwood Park Hotel. Li Xiang got drunk after drinking her own glass of white wine and 1/2 a glass of my white wine. It was quite a funny moment. The food was good, the prizes was good, I think they gave out Nokia N93i as prizes in certain games, but the only thing bad about it was I didn’t get to win any prizes. We were the first one there and I did not win the early bird draw =(

Nevertheless, the door gift was quite good, 2x 5 Chrismas Cards, 1x egrips (sticky tape to stick on the back of your handphone so that when it is placed on any slanted surface, it will not slip) and 1x USB travel charger made by Swiss Travel Products

Singapore Polytechnic: World Skill 2008 Sharing Session
I have been invited by Mr Christopher, who is in charge of me during my World Skills 2004: Web Design Trade, to share my experience during World Skills 2004, which I passed the qualifying rounds and got into the finals but not good enough to represent Singapore to compete against the world. The first session was the 5th December 2007 and the last session was the 12th December 2007 (2 sessions only). I shared with them some of my experience, what they can expect, how and what to prepare, show them some of my work and did a walk through of my “GaMerZ Gallery Viewer” source code.

This year there are 5 people that are from SP who are going to compete in the Web Design trade. Of which 1 of them is my brother and the other is his girlfriend, Huimin. 1 of them is good in flash design, the other I heard is good in programming and the last one I am not too sure about it. Nevertheless, I would like to wish them all the best for the qualifying rounds next year.

Been good to go back to SP, I met up with Christopher for lunch at Food Court 6, ate my favorite seafood soup with noodles. Saw several lecturers (Georgina Phua, Leon, James Ang and Ng Boon Yuen) and they still recognize me which I am quite surprised. SP has changed pretty much. Now there is shelter all the way from School of Info-Communications Technology (now it is known as School of Media and Info-Communications Technology) to Dover MRT. There are more study benches throughout the school, the lab pretty much stays the same except for their computers which they upgraded to Pentium 4 3.2GHz in T2034. But something never change is that the Internet is STILL SUPER SLOW!

And somehow I think the network administrator is sleeping. I connected my notebook to the hidden WiFi and after 15 minutes I got infected by a virus, the same virus which infect my brother laptop few weeks ago. Apparently the cause of it is because my D:\ is shared and writable by anyone. I have no problem with this setting in NUS, my mom office and even at my own home. Eventually, I reformatted my laptop which I did not even hesitate to do so because it is loaded with so much Java crap due to my CS3214. I think I must make it a habit to reformat after every semester.

Singapore PHP User Group Meetup (December 2007)
The even was held at NUS Extension located at 12th floor in Park Mall. I didn’t even know NUS has an extension there. LOL Anyway, I was invited to give a talk or rather a sharing session regarding developing WordPress plugins with PHP which I did. I spent like 30 minutes on it even though I got 40 minutes. I guess I spoke pretty fast and go through the presentation very fast. After looking through the video playback, I realized that the speed of my speech is average but maybe still fast for some people but the changing of my screen is very fast, I did not let the audience capture what is on the screen and before they know it, the screen is changed again. I would like to apologized for that.

Hong Kong
My parents, my brother and his girlfriend are off to Hong Kong for shopping on the 15th December 2007 and they are coming back this week on the 20th December 2007. They got me an authentic Louis Vuitton card holder. It is cheaper in HK then in Singapore because there is no tax, unlike Singapore GST or Thailand VAT.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Nowdays, we like to watch movies back to back, we caught at least 2 movies back to back this month for 3 times. This time it was
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium followed by Alvin And The Chipmunks. Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was quite disappointing and I would rate it below average because other than the interesting type storyline and visual effects, I see no other good points about it.

Alvin And The Chipmunks
The OST for this movie simply rocks, I love it. The movie itself is funny and at times heart warming. The character animation was good, the furs of the chipmunks and the way they move was animated well. I recommend this movie definitely and after the movie, if you like it, go get the sountrack either from your nearby music store or your nearby music site.