Vesak Day - Visit to the new Buddha Tooth Relic Temple@ China Town

Today is Vesak Day, its a significant day for Buddhists (such as me).

So today I dropped by chinatown to visit the new Buddha Tooth Relic Temple which cost something like 20million to complete. It houses the scared Buddha tooth relic and is also a museum into Buddhism. The opening day happens to coincide with Vesak day, and is the area packed!

Its like trying to get into Zouk (heh clubbing analogy). I had to queue for over 1 hour. Good thing the crowd control was fantastic with water being passed out to those in the queue. Good thing cos there are really lots of elderly folks here too.

I will let this be a photojournal :)


Adrian arriving at chinatown


Adrian trying to find the start of the queue.... i was really far off btw


Adrian in the queue


Buddha tooth relic temple (that is what it says)


Getting flowers to pray

Adrian finally gets in


Prayer session: top view


Devotees entering


The scared tooth relic

Short clip of the monks praying (Special webcast for Peiling)

Bloody tiring day - Food Expo and more

Amazing how a half day at work can become so bloody tiring. Did not go to work in the morning cos I had an interview in NUS (More on this if the interview does make it to the papers). I ended up being a brownie deliveryman the entire day.

In order of brownies given:
7.40am: Sz@clementi MRT
9.30am: Huimin, Richard and Gean@nus
10am: Law and Kai an@nus
7.30pm: Genie@PS
8pm: Hendri@Wisma
8.15pm: Ridzstar who were on a date at this secret location

Anyway one good thing about working near Expo is being able to drop by for any event. In this case it was the Singapore Food Expo.... it was bloody crowded, I managed to grab some samples, then I was on my merry way (typical freebie grabber :p)



Food Food Food


Another sale at Expo


Someone trying to hide her face after they got found out :p (its amazing how innocent photos look scandalous)

Diet Using your Handphone!

I think this is really useful especially amongst us bloggers since we take pictures with our handphone all the time :p

"TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Wondering how much of a diet-buster that banana cream pie on your plate is? Some Japanese have a novel way to find out: Photograph it with your cell phone and send the image to an expert." .... full story

Beta Testers Needed: Brownies Part 2

Made another batch of rum brownies. This time i tweaked the chocolate and rum ratio, chocolate went up by 10% and i switched to a richer type.

Since all brownies look more or less the same... all are well... brown...

I decided to do some "creative" Photoshoots



As always, still looking for beta testers ( more the merrier). So just contact me or leave a comment.

Visit my online bakery!!! --->>> www.sweethut.biz sweethut.wordpress.com

Thriller - Indian Remix with "special" Subtitles

When I saw the one without subtitles I already thought it was hilarious, then my friend sent me the one with subtitles, and I was ROFLing. Its amazing how the guy was able to catch the lyrics :p

Yippeee Brownies are done

Finally I got a rather decent batch of brownies after last week's accident. (This goes to show when you do not calculate the heat transfer coefficient of your oven and co-relate that to the energy required for perfect baking you will flop!)

Well all this baking is cos:
a) I enjoy it
b) I am coming up with new stuff for my online bakery www.sweethut.biz
c) I just like baking.

Anyway at the request of nicole and the others of ping.sg, here are the pictures.







Not exactly the best looking right now, I am working on the taste and flavour first. Btw this is RUM brownie, which my mum thinks is very british ( dunno why)

I will be looking out for beta testers for my future cakes/cookies so those who wanna be part of this beta testing crew, pls email, sms, msn, twitter me.

I am looking for ppl who love deserts, will give feedback (I am not afraid of ppl telling my it sux), and preferable can discuss it in more scientific sense with me :p

p.s: These brownies are just the start, I will be improving them and tweaking around the flavours.

p.s 2: www.sweethut.biz and sweethut.wordpress.com will be having our father's day line of products so do check us out!

p.s 3: or just leave a comment :)

Equivox @ Raffles City

I seem to have a thing for using "@" in all my title posts. But what the heck, its good. You get to know the event or group of ppl and the location.

I digress...

Was at Raffles City today when i heard a familar beatbox sound as I walked past the performance stage. I thought it sounded like Timothy, who was my friend from NCBV, he always had a great voice and loved to do beatboxing. I turned to take a look, and lo behold... it was really Timothy.

Turns out that Timothy was part of this award winning acapella group called Equivox and they were performing.

I managed to grab a few videos of the performance, but sadly, my phone has poor sound recording quality so it would be hard to tell how good the singing is from the videos. Overall I think they did a good job performing, but perhaps its the sound system that is affecting them, cos often the lead singer's voice is so loud it over powers the rest who are doing the beat or other stuff. It is pretty hard to perform in a place where there is a crowd and the acoustics is probably not the best anyway.

Gd job Tim!

http://equivox.blogspot.com/

Videos

The first song I heard, not too bad but i cannot hear anything else but the lead singer.



Timothy showing his stuff, as always he is good.

Once again, apologies for the poor sound, not like i had planned in advance to record this.

Village Talk @ NTU

Amazing tiring week, thursday was blogout, then last evening (friday) was Village Talk, an event that brings together thinkers and movers from various fields and areas and gets them to TALK :p

I was super late for the event, missing the food and the first 3 spreakers, cannot be helped if you happen to get off work at 6pm and you work in changi. The add to my lateness, I took Hendri's directions on how to get to Techno Plaza, NTU, too literally. So I ended up at the opposite end of NTU and had to walked the entire way there.

It was pretty spooky arriving at Technoplaza as the main entrance area was not even lit up, so it kindda spooked me when the doors just opened automatically. Anyway the event proper was really nice, the speakers were really passionate about that they are doing, why they are doing it and many other issues. It really is kind of a wake up call, to check if I am still trying to follow my dreams or am i taking a rather long detour right now. Probably I am at the pit stop having a burger and soda.....

Pity I could not stay too long for any post event networking and talking, would have loved to get to know everyone better.

Cheers to the 2 organizers, Ridz and Kelvin

Payperpost Direct

Well, I decided to drop by the payperpost website after 1 week of inactivity, and interestingly enough, there is something new there. The folks at PPP have done some cool updates with the services and more importantly they introduced something called Payperpost direct.

First what are the "upgrades"? The first feature i is Bans and Benches. Now users have the option to 'bench' each other. It means as a blogger i can bench advertisers who do not interest me (eg: insurance) so that way my interface remains clean.

Post Reservations is another issue, how many times have most of us spent time doing a nice post, then we get that "all opps have been taken" message..... well they solved it. Dun care how.

Finally they removed Technorati rankings from the system.

More importantly it is the introduction of PPP direct. Its a way for advertisers to directly approach the bloggers to make a paid post rather then though the PPP website. That way advertisers can request a specific kind of post for certain bloggers. In fact PPP is only there to help facilitate the transfer of money. What makes PPP direct different? Other services like ReviewMe charge 50-100% markup and keep up to half the money, PPP Direct only charges a 10% fee, 5% of which goes to transaction fees for PayPal and credit card processing. That just means the blogger gets a bigger cut. Also using the PPP widget on your blog makes the negotiation and payment process simple and easy as PPP handles all of that. So if you are interested, go take a look at PPP.

The details:
http://blog.payperpost.com/2007/05/part-one-of-birdo-release.html

The overview video:
http://blog.payperpost.com/2007/05/payperpost-direct-overview.html

Ping.sg @ Blogout + possible scandals (AGAIN)

Just got back from Blogout... ok ok actually my home internet was down for 2 hrs so i played some games. Blogout was a great event, I met not only the ping.sg ppl, but familar faces from NOC, Jeff, Kaihong, Deliang, Aileen and also ppl that i just happen to know anyway. Great meet up, great panel, Uzyn did a good job!!! More on a possible scandal below :p

Anyway here are the pictures from blogout! Apologies for the poor quality, my camera phone could not handle the indoor lighting well.

Ping.sg's very own GENIE!!! *clap clap* Our resident blogger-singer :)
Her blog is www.genie.sg for those who wanna know more (her songs are inspired by her blog post!) yay bloggers rule



The Panel featuring tomorrow.sg, PING.SG, moblog and errr i forgot :p


Uzyn speaking to everyone on why ping.sg roxxxxxx




As usual the Ping.sg Scandal crew were up to our usual crap trying to comeup with scandals...

Why is Hendri having Genie's name tag HMMMMM...


Whose hand is that placing her name tag oh soooo gently on Ridz :p











As usual scandal photos are posed and non of that is actually true :p

shameless plug: www.sweethut.biz <--- my online bakery

Paranoia over Credit Card Safety

Credit Cards are really a convienient item, after all you can carry less cash around, pay for stuff online easily, get points for stuff :p (my mum loves this). The points are really great, even i like them. Its one of the ways we are definitely moving to a cashless society. But with great spending power comes great responsibility (crappy pun from spidy 3)

I always have this paranoia over credit card, its pretty extreme sometimes, like insisting that I will not give my number over the phone. Estee will remember that time i insisted on wasting time walking to the hotel in chicago to pay rather then give my CC number over the phone. Seiously i was worried, its just a matter of trust here, after all once that person has my credit card number, he can do ANYTHING with it online. Hence I chose to WALK the entire distance back to the hotel to pay rather then take the "easy" way out. Its better this way in my opinion, never tell anyone your number.

Aside from losing your card, you can easily lose your credit card number in many ways. Just watch this youtube videos "The real hustle" they really show various ways you can lose you CC number. Just going through your trash can yield such info for a thief.

Well good thing is my mum also agrees with me and we are gonna get a nice shredder, I am thinking of the uberized confetti cut type that REALLY shreds, not the pansy kind.

Found some nice articles on CC here:
0% Balance Transfers
The phishing threat hits home
Shredders: The Anti-Fraud Weapon
Fool reveals credit card cons


"This is a sponsored Post :) "

Viagra has another use :)

Its amazing what scientist find out these days. Apparantly the famous ED (erectile disfunction) drug viagra has another use..... and they found this out by testing it on hamsters. Amazing that they did not get a massive population boom in the lab :p I guess future jetsetters and frequent travellers to other countries have a reason to have a bottle of viagra with us :p (NOT THAT I NEED ANY OK)


"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The male impotence drug Viagra may be useful for treating jet lag as well, according to Argentine researchers who gave it to hamsters made to feel like rodent globe-trotters.

The researchers manipulated the schedule of turning lights on and off to induce jet lag in the laboratory animals, they reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adult male hamsters given Viagra, also called sildenafil, recovered from jet lag up to 50 percent faster than hamsters that were not given it, the researchers said. The scientists stopped giving the hamsters the highest dose they had been using in the experiment due to a certain side effect.

"However, we used the intermediate dose for the rest of the experiments because at that dose animals did not manifest the effects of sildenafil-induced penile erections," they wrote......" full story

I am weird

I must be the only guy who gets excited about going to Phoon Huat. It is this shop that caters to a baker's every need, its got almost everything you need to bake cool stuff for your friends, CNY etc etc

In fact I just a few new equipment and pans from Phoon Huat. No choice all my old stuff is back in Philadelphia with Shamantha. But then again I get to buy new baking stuff! Yay

This post is "sponsored" by my OWN online bakery www.sweethut.biz(Our linzer cookiers are good)


My brand new mixer


Some of the new stuff i got

No excitement over starcraft 2 for me

Despite all the excitement over starcraft 2 that I have seen not only on the blogosphere but around the internet, I just do not feel any excitment at all. Kindda unusual considering gaming was more or less my life. Well in theory I should be excited, like OMGWTFBBQ kind of excited, but it just ain't there, not when I saw the protoss immortals (cool name btw) or the stalkers (blinking is cool too) or when I saw the trailer of that big ass protoss ship that defeated 6 terran BCs (that is close to being broken).

It just did not feel the same, not like when WC III was launch or when i took part in the world of warcraft launch. Gah... maybe I am getting too old for gaming, or maybe after all that blizzard has put me through in WOW, the endless grinding for rep, farming for gold, doing 5 hr raids etc... I just am not interested. Maybe when the release date gets closer(perhaps only after I graduate or later), I might feel a bit more excitment. Guess I am getting old....

On the sidenote..... when the hell is warhammer online gonna be release.... argh.

PARTYING in Latvia

How do Latvians party? Well that question occurred to me on my flight over to Riga. So I decided that I definitely had to find out how.

The Answer? Latvians party really hard and really good. Nuff said.

Fortunately, there was a PeakTime party held in the school itself, hence being participants, team tetra threat was invited. Naturally being Singaporeans…. we were late.

The theme was called Casino, and the organizers really did bring in actual casino equipment, from a roulette table to a blackjack table. You cannot gamble from real money, but you use “PeakTime” cash which can be redeemed from drinks.

Well in this case pictures are way better then me typing crap :p

Startup@sg Semis - Here we go again

About 1-2 hrs away from my presentation at Startup@sg semifinals.... Getting real tired this week, after returning from Peak Time, I jumped right into my internship. In fact due to Peak Time and the internship, me and kai an were left with very little time to prepare for Startup@sg. But then again, we been presenting this biz plan during 446 in philly and at QEC 2007, so I guess it is not that bad since we already have most of the parts down. Just rehearse, get the timing right, go thru the plan again.

Oh well, here we gooooo again, more biz plan presentations!

Oh no more Zara for now!

Ahhh back to the topic of online shopping, made even more interesting by the fact I am not shopping at Zara for a while :p

As usual, online shopping is not online shopping if you just go online click on some stuff into a shopping cart and use your credit card. You need.......ONLINE COUPONS! Having these helps to make the online shopping experience more fun... and its cheaper too! All you need is the coupon codes

In fact I have relooked my brand preference, in light of the Zara incident, I decided to go with their main competitor Esprit (Esprit coupons here). It is gaining on Zara in terms on brand recognition, it is ONLINE, which is something Zara refuses to do, and if it is online... there are ONLINE COUPONS.

One such site that provides such coupons is Couponchief (link below)
coupon codes

They provide all kinds of coupons like stuff including some of the brands i buy:

American Eagle Coupons
Banana Republic Coupons
Urban Outfitters Coupons (great for college kids)



This has been a sponsored post.

Blur Judges and X-rated car washes

Saw these stories on reuters just before going to my internship... their oddly enough page has some weird stuff :p, just shows how disconnected some people are and why more ppl wanna go to australia :p

"LONDON (Reuters) - A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like "Web site" in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.

Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws...." fully story

"CANBERRA (Reuters) - A nude car wash offering an X-rated sideshow and topless cleaning in Australia's tropical Queensland state has been given the all-clear after police and officials said they were powerless to scrub it" full story

Polar Bear found in Stockholm shopping center

Forgot to mention this interesting incident at Stockholm, Weiyi was draging me and law into this shopping center when we realised that at the entrance there was a crowd..... cos a POLAR BEAR was in the way.... omg...

It was seriously a shocking site... a homeless polar bear....



So I gave it 4 kronos (1SGD) to get itself some food and went it to shop :)

p.s This is a publicity stunt to raise environmental awareness by some swedish group.

Who wants to seduce a celebrity?

No... i am not teaching how it can be done, if I knew it, I would have done it already don't you think so? It just happens that this online video website called GoFish.com, not the card game go fish but the online video website, is having this promotion which lasts for about 14 weeks. The lucky or unlucky celebrity this time is actress, Mirelly Taylor, the hottie who has appeared on movies such as Kiss Me Again and Serving Sara and television shows including “Las Vegas”, “Punk’d”, and “Numb3rs”. I watched Las Vegas and I find her quite hot, then i went to the actual Las Vegas (the place) and was kidda dissappointed :p
Free videos at GoFish.com
What makes this unique and interesting is how you get to "seduce" the celebrity. It is a very participative game where ANYONE can take part. Its definitely different from what other such "win-a-date" The celebrity will have 3 "call to action" which gives contestants an idea on what video to submit. Contestants than create 3 videos to answer those 3 calls.

For example: One of the most recent ones is to show how good a kisser you are by kissing a fruit, I guess some guy can try kissing a durian, after all no pain no gain :) (NO i am NOT doing that.....), now HOW to actually kiss is another matter.... sorry no experience here.

The best part of this is that users(those who are too embaressed to make any videos) of GoFish.com get to vote who they want to be the finalist. Nice to be able to participate still right?

So what are you waiting for? GO make a video and let me laugh at you :p

Latvia - Day 4 - Why I might not ever shop at Zara again

I decided to post about the final day of competition first instead of the Peak Time Party. Much lesser photos to sort through, and nothing much to say too.

Ok so after 2 days of business case simulation where Team Tetra Threat (my team) crawled our way out of the pits from 8th place out of 12 to end up 2nd at the end of prelims, we had to face the next round of business case analysis.

The semi finals' case was about an online accounting startup.

The finals' was about.... ZARA.... great... a team of 4 GUYS... need to do a case about ZARA.... what a "perfect" match. At least we did not get something like Loreal or other cosmetics, that would really rock.

Needless to say, we tried our best, and in the end, we did achieve 3rd, not too bad I guess considering we did party until 2am the night before.

Opps just realised the photos of the finals are not with me, just this 1 team photo:

PeakTime Semi finals - Online accounting

The Semi-finals of PeakTime was a case study analysis that had to be done in 1.5 hrs. That is seriously a mad rush, considering we had to analyse the case, come up with a solution then translate that into powerpoint for presentation purposes. In fact my team was still rushing out our slides up until the last second, it was amazing that we actually got something out.

The topic of the case study was online accounting. How can a start up firm in this industry break into and compete. So naturally, considering the team was 3 engineers and a finance guy, we had no choice but to engage in online research.

As always, google saved us, by throwing up infomation on various systems like this particular website: quickbooks accounting.

Using the data from that website and several others, we were able to gain insights into the industry. We learnt that online accounting has quite a lot of advantages like low cost and ease of use which can appeal to small businesses that often cannot afford an accountant due to tight budget.




*disclaimer: this is a paid post from payperpost.

Living in Latvia - Pubbing

Party and drinking seems to be pretty much part of Latvia, especially Riga's culture, the students here love to party. So my wonderful hostessess, Katrina and Svetlana, brought my team and also a few other competitors out to see the local pubs.

It took quite a while before we actually found a suitable pub, one reason is due to the fact that there were 16 people and also for some reason, some pubs do not serve tourists. Eventually we settled at this place called Casablanca, its a pretty decent chillout place, although not as good as this place that I had dinner(the waitresss was uber cute).

So here are some photos from the pub tour.





Got to get some rest now, PeakTime party in 3 hrs time.

Latvia - Day 2 - Finally meeting the competitors

Day 2 was finally the first chance i got to meet other competitors involved in PeakTime, its quite an international flavour considering teams from brazil, costa rica and taiwan are involved.

Today was mainly just a bunch of introductions, guest lectures and ice breaking games. So most of us were re-grouped and made to run all over Riga in your standard university style ice breaker game. But at least it allows most of us to learn more about Riga and its Culture.

Some pics of the group I was in:





Speaking of Culture, the main culture here is CLUBBING, yea its a party capital or something, so everyone loves to party. Sounds fun. So after everything, my team (as in tetra threat), went to grab a bite, and then headed to this nice fancy chill out place called skyline. Its up on the 26th floor of this hotel and its got a good view, good music and decently priced drinks.


Dinner!


Drinks




Tmr we will be visiting Riga's top club. so stay tuned.