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To cycle from there to back again!

Awesome! We cycled about 12.5km all the way to Clementi and then back again. When I reached home, my legs felt like jelly and felt like it was about to fall off.

Well, thats what you get for not exercising for years! I was so tired that I went to bed early from the exhaustion.

To be honest, I was more amazed than anything as if we took the bus or the train from where we started, it would take a good half an hour to 45 minutes to reach the destination. If taking into the consideration for waiting for the bus to arrive, and queueing up and other things.

Compared to public transportation, cycling felt different too. We could slow down and look at the different sceneries, breathe in the fresh air and stop where ever we wanted to.

We travelled mainly by the AYE highway (quite dangerous I know, but unfortunately the sidepath wasnt big enough for bicycles) and used the pedestrian path as much as we possibly could.

Thankfully, it was still a ghost-town because of the Chinese New Year and there were hardly anyone around the sidepath and there wasnt that much traffic on the road.

I could breathe in the ‘jungly’ smell of Teban and see the scenic view of Pandan River. Nothing beats the feeling of the simple joy of rolling downhill on the bicycle with the wind in the face.

We reached Clementi in about 30 mins. Ahh .. clementi. The place where I spent alot of time, during my days in Jurong Institute. Plenty of memories here as I walked around the area with my brother.

I told him of how I had to leave the house early to get to the Clementi Interchange to get to school on time. And how we spent time roaming around the different shops when we needed a break from all the studying.

There were hardly any shops opened but I reminisced about the area.

There were so many memories.

Like the time when we still had A&W Restaurants here. A couple of friends and I would go there on Tuesdays to order mugs of Root beer (in those lovely frosted mugs) and Coney Dogs and sometimes waffles with ice cream on top.

I also encountered stupid situations like having blind dates over at A&W. Ahh the carefree stupidity of youth. In fact, many of my teenage blind dates happen at fast food restaurants. I wonder if I should make an advertisment script for that 😛

Camera zooms in to a girl in A&W, gingerly sipping her root beer and looking expectantly for her date to come.

A boy comes in, with a loud shirt and overdone hair – he just looks odd!

Girl is repulsed until he whips out…

A coney dog!

And they both beam at each other and the girl bats her eyes, just for good measure

Erm … Okay, that sounds like a horrible advertisment. Furgedisaidabouddit.

We dont have A&W in Singapore anymore. It was still nice to remember the memories there.

We walked around and explored the area and saw many changes. Some shops has moved, like KFC wasnt at the cinema building anymore. The shopping center seems to be gone and a mysterious pizza hut and a Karaoke Lounge just popped up on the building where they shared with the polyclinic and bigbookshop.

But no dramatic things much has changed there and it looks pretty much the same as it was about 10 years ago. Err … even smells the same.

My bro and I stopped by the hawker center. By now, we were extremely thirsty and needed a break. Fortunately for us, there were still a few stalls opened and I decided to have dinner there too.

I ordered Indian Styled Mutton Chop (which is basically marinated meat in spicy tomato sauce, usually served with fries and half fried egg)

It wasnt that tasty though. It was tad bit too crispy when it should have been soft and melt in your mouth. The portion didnt justify the price either. ($4 for that? Bleh)

Bro had sop tulang which was basically cow bones cooked in savoury sauce. It takes skill to eating it as there are still precious meat left on the bones and the insides of it are the best thing to eat.

It was pretty alright. It wasnt the best sop tulang that I’ve ever had, but it was decent. the best ones would be the ones in arab street or that hawker center where Juli and Hema and I discovered when we wanted to buy tickets for our penang trip… Oh I’m craving for good sop tulang now …LOL! Maybe I could persuade someone to go out with me later 😛

—

While eating, I had a thought though. About the promotion of Singapore culture. Tour agencies can promote all of the landmarks that they can here, but there is hardly anything authentic about the whole situation.

What they do, is nothing really special. Organized tours … Ho-hum! In the end, they would go back and think that there is nothing to it here. It would be so much better to experience things in the local’s context.

Eating at hawker centers like a local. Having the chance to mingle with the locals. Living in a flat, like a local. Even enjoying local hobbies.

Which travel agency has ever promoted the joys of “mahjong” or “community center events” or even “karaoke competitions”. I know that it sounds very radical but we wont know till we give it a try, right?

Something that the Singapore Tourism Board hasnt done yet and which I’m looking forward to.

I mean, all the Haw Par Villas and the Sentosa Resort is fine but we also need something authentic. I’d like to show my dearest something that I enjoy doing, and going to, on a personal basis.

Anyway, I’ll stop here for the moment. Till the next time.

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Cycling is fun :)

Reformatting the computer isnt as painful as I anticipated. Not when the important data has been backed up, everything is a breeze. No drama, no screams and no tears. Not what I expected.

How uneventful.

Anyway, a happy Chinese new year to all whom celebrates it! The school where I worked at had a lovely Chinese New year celebration which started with a visit from some children from Korea. The kids were so adorable! I could just eat them up! I love their colourful costumes and how precious they were.



And there was this little boy that I had to refrain myself from kidnapping. Oh gosh, when he smiles, it just melts my heart. He looked *just* like a kid version of the Korean actor, Bae Yong Jun. (Not that I watch Korean shows, he just reminded me of him, is all)



Can I keep him?

—

Spent the day yesterday cycling on a whim, with my brother. Its been a while since I cycled. I’ve always enjoyed a nice relaxing cycle. Since it was chinese new year’s eve, not much shop was opened. The place was like a ghost town. There were not many people around exept for us and the few occasional pedestrians.

We cycled all the way to IMM, a hypermarket that I liked to visit. And parked our bicycles at the corner. We entered the building. Again, it was so deserted. There wasnt much shops opened (but there were still a number of people around who were probably trying to do some last minute shopping)

I joked to my brother that this would be perfect for a science fiction show.

Me : Maybe there was a big biological warfare going on.

H : Then we should be dead too.

Me : No! No! We have this immune system that made us impervious to the chemicals

H : Riiiiiggggghhhhhhhhtttt …. *rolls eyes*

But we had a lovely time talking and exploring around. Just bonding. Something I miss because since I was working, I didnt have that much chance to spend with my family. I’d like to do that more.

We went to explore Daiso, a shop that sold each item for $2. I got me a toy for Diana (whom I think would be bummed out by now, she’s been sick, you see) and these adorable frogs.

—

Anyways, Jurong is such a lovely area to cycle. Beautiful scenery, lovely breeze. Perfect for cycling. I think I’ll go cycle again this afternoon 🙂

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Computers hate me!

Computer problems again.

And it won’t go to my OS at all after restarting and will stay at that blue screen.

I think its because of my overzealousness in trying different softwares again. The ironic part is, I’m conducting a course on ‘protecting your computer’ this afternoon. Looks like I’m going to do another reformatting when I come back from work today.

Oh, I’m ambivalent now.

Anyhows, a few nice things did happen to me.

My Ng, one of the heads of the department, gave the female staff, wild orchids that was planted in the school. It’s so delicately pretty. I love the rich colour 🙂

And look! Japanese Kit-kats! A colleage passed me some as his girlfriend visited Japan last week and brought some back. O I love the cherry blossom design. Too pretty to eat.

And to top it all, I earned some money from selling a cartoon of my Nimmo and friends character from zazzle.com! It’s not a huge amount, but its a start 🙂 *smooches customer*

Anyway. Back to compy. Need me a new computer. Someone sponsor me please. I’ll be the perfect embassador. Call me Acer. Call me Fujitsu. Call me Sony.

ANYBODY! Call me … Please?

No?

Ah .. well, back to work.

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Exploring the 3D worlds of Secondlife and There.com

Freaking Firefox automatically closed my window before I was done typing! How rude! *angry*

I’m gonna beat you up! I’m gonna give you a fiver and beat you up good!

Image hosting by Photobucket

Thank you, thank you. A moving experience indeed.

Anyways, I’ve been working on my new layout for my website, rinaz.net which hasn’t been updated for the longest time. Initially, I wanted to do a layout that looked like this:

I’m quite fascinated with rounded corners. However, after much tinkering around by myself and then bugging my dearest, I saw that multiple rounded corners wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. It was even nightmarish to do.

I had to stick back to something I was familliar with. But I did leave the outer table with rounded corners. And it looks something like this :

What do you think?

Online, I live in a virtual 3D world called, Secondlife. Secondlife is a beautiful world where you could travel and explore, create items as well as intereact with people. Almost the same as real life, without the social stigmas that we encounter daily.

I stay in a beautiful neighbourhood called Arcata with my partner Cartcart. Our house faces the sea and it’s a spectacular scene every time there is a moonlight, sunrise and sunset.

Somtimes we’d go exploring to see whats new in the neighbourhood. For me, it was exciting to see the different changes that people did. To me, these houses, as virtual as it is, was still an expressive part of their selves. And to see these houses show a little bit of the owner’s personalities.

Like this particular house that we stumbled to, I think that the owner was a warm and affable quality judging from the funny things that the owner kept

Cart : Why are we on top of this cactus?
Rinaz : I don’t know! *shrugs*

And sometimes I’d meet old friends. Like Merlin whom I’ve been friends from the days of Cybertown, another 3D world but it uses an older technology, VRML.

Merlin in 2003

Merlin in 2006

And sometimes I’d encounter the most surreal situations in Secondlife. Like the day when I met a novice magician who could conjure up different items. He made it rain fruits and vegetables and a multiple of animals. Holy cow!

But sometimes, one of the best things to do in Secondlife is to just chill out with some friends. Like in this instance where Jeremiah and Jessica and me, chilling out in Jessica’s beautiful house, watching a streaming movie

Sometimes, I’d go to there.com, another 3D world. It’s similar to Secondlife, but the biggest difference is that There.com is a PG rated world. Graphically, there.com is more cartoony. It is still beautiful and I enjoyed travelling around there with different transportation, like the hoverboards and buggys

The people there, are relatively nice if you knew where to look.

And it was always great to explore the different places in there. Like the castles of Tyr, the Crystal Plants and Hoverboarding in Saja. Very pretty worlds. I wonder what’s to come for the future.

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Rinaz Podcast – Episode 2

[audio:episode2.mp3]

My interview with the beautiful and talented Mariah Carey!

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This episode was sponsored by Hizza Put. The most delicious pizza you’d ever tasted.

—

Anyway, I just caught an episode of American Idols on the telley the other day and saw alot of things with different eyes this time. Admittedly, I did participate in the first Singapore Idols which was organized in 2004.And now, when watching it, its still quite entertaining, albeit I’m a little bit cynical when I watch it.

I believe that the Idol series is more about looks and hype compared to talent.

You see, behind the camera’s there are things that arent shown. For example, before we went for our invidual auditions, we were grouped into groups of 10 or 15. So during the wait, we’d practise and give each other motivation. The guy who was sitting beside me, had the most melodious voice and great composure and confidence and I liked listening to him. Another girl in my group, couldnt sing so well but she was pretty. We gave each other best wishes when we finally went in tn audition room.

After the ordeal, we’d have to wait again to see if made it to the next round. They’d call out our numbers if we made it. To my surprise, the guy with the voice didnt make it. However the girl did. Honest to goodness, its not a case of sour grapes but I didnt think that was fair.

Singapore Idols stopped being entertaining to me after that.

Bring back Asia Bagus who featured real talent by SE Asians. Bring back talent shows that isnt biased. At least in Asia Bagus it was more authentic without people trying hard to emulate the whole American Idol scene. It was more real. Mediacorp isnt being very true when it did that.

Ah I miss Mediaworks station. Why’d it have to go away?. Oh well.

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Hot Chocolate!

I am officially addicted to this

Comes in Hot Chocolate, Cappuccino, Mocha and French Vanilla (yum!) For less than two dollars, starbucks and coffee bean had better watch their back 😮

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I actually broke a Nokia phone

2 weeks in the new year and I think I’ve settled down a little, more or less. Back to regular blogging!

rinaz.net
The Nokia 3310

My first coloured mob phone, my beloved Nokia 3310 finally busted. It started with the motherboard having problems, making it non-chargeable using the regular method then recently, it wouldn’t ring at all, rendering in many missed calls.

Okay mostly it was really my fault since I’m such a rough person and tend to drop it a lot. Phones should really be built with rubber cushions at the exterior for people like me.

I had to cave in and get a replacement mob phone and decided to finally get a second hand Nokia 7260.

The interesting thing about Singapore is that there are many shops that sells and repairs mobile phones. Just the other day while walking in Jurong East during my lunch break, I counted that there were at the very least 10 of these kiosks selling mobile phones. It made me wonder, if it is such a lucrative business or will it flounder like the bubble tea business during the year 2000?


A big crowd at the mosque for the morning Hari Raya Prayers


Sacrificial sheep which will be distributed to the poor


Boys watching the sacrificial rites

Anyhow, it was 10th January, Hari Raya Haji, and it was the norm for the family to visit the paternal and maternal clans. After the morning prayers, we went to our paternal and then our maternal clan which was located in Tampines.

I saw a mob phone shop. After contemplation, I went in and asked to examine the phone and finally gotten the phone after trading in my old phone for the price of SG$160

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

It was a pretty cool phone with radio features, camera features and voice recorder, among other regular features that is expected of Nokia. To me, once you’ve tried a Nokia, you’ll never go back to other phones. After all, Nokia has the human technology.

I played around with it and here are some of the photos that I snapped with it :





The pictures look fairly decent. Of course not as sharp as a regular camera, a little watercolour-eque but for a phone, it was rather good.

I liked the voice and video recording features too. I made my dearest’s voice into my ringtone!

With the right software, I was even able to create my own ringtones and my own wallpaper. I’m so geeked out at this. Previously, I’d have to pay an insane amount for personalised wallpaper and ringtones.

Using the right cable, the Nokia 7260 uses C4-42 (which you can get cheaply from yahoo auctions) and you could transfer data to and from the computer.

I use the Nokia PC suite for the phone data and the Miksoft Mobile AMR converter to create the ringtones

Anyhow, being a second hand phone, I saw that there were some stuff that’s left in there by the previous owner and going through it, I saw that the previous owner was a Malay female and judging from the pictures that she snapped, she was in her early 20’s. (I deleted all her pictures, messages and videos as wouldn’t be nice to keep them)

But going though the messages was like a little soap opera between her and her boyfriend.

“I luvs you so much! Muakz! Muakz! Muakz! Muakz! Muakz!”

“Why do you have to see him? That makes me so jealous! You are my girl!”

And stuff like that continued. People should remember to delete stuff like that before giving their phones away.

And speaking of broken phones. Guess what else I broke this week 🙁

Yes. Another shoe. After breaking multiple shoes in incidents such as this and this. My chicken shoes is part of the next dearly departed.

I love my chicken shoes so much. How can this happen? I was just walking home and the seams just busted out. It could be the overly rainy days that we were having that made the glue melted and my shoes fall apart.

Sigh

I’d better take pictures of my current shoes before they go for their eventual death too.



Green Espadrilles from Tinkerbell for $25 dollars


Camel suede shoes from Noda for $15


Purple Crochet ballerina shoes from Mondo for $25

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Goodbye 2005. It has been a good year


Picture snap thanks to Wishfulone

The start of the new year. My goodness, how did 12 months go by so quickly like that? I don’t think that I even got comfortable with 2005 yet! However, there were a number of highlights in the year 2005 to remember by.

January:
Moving in the new school campus for West Spring Secondary, where I used to work at.

February:
Registered for night classes with the hopes to improve myself. After a hiatus of many, many years.

March:
Entered into very bad depression, caused by many different factors, such as the problems with my previous job, and the psychological effects from my severe acne problem.

April:
Got my canon EOS 350D! And took loads and loads of pictures thereafter.

May:
I was terminated from my previous company. Well, good riddance to them, the only reason I stayed so long was because I liked the previous school I was attached to.

June :
Got a new job in a better, and more established company!
Started my photography classes and my brother’s basic military training graduation.

August
Took a leap and travelled half-way around the world to meet my dearest for the first time in real life.

September
My blog post about my dearest got into Tomorrowsg! Hee hee hee hee!

October
After a long year and a half, I finally passed my Motorcycle Riding Test.

November
My maternal grandfather passed away.

December
After a long engagement, best friend Hema, got married and it was also Cart and my first year anniversary 🙂

Goodbye 2005! It has been a good year, full of interesting and enriching experiences. Some bittersweet. Some beautiful and unforgettable. All that I wouldn’t ever want to trade for anything else.

And what are the things to come in the year 2006? I’ve many things that I planned to do this year, the nimmo and friends webcomics, writing articles for publications, going in depth with photography, trying to learn actionscript and loads of other things …

I’ve many things I’d like to do! But first things first would be my upcoming A level examinations. And I’d like to try to do good this time … and I might have to sacrifice a little.

Anyhow, bro and I was out last weekend with the intention of going to the Vespa Showroom to look at the different scooters that they had there. I’ve always wanted to get green GT200 for the longest time but wanted to see it for real before the actual purchase.

It was a beautiful day. Skies were blue, and big fluffy clouds graced the sky and I was happy and revved up to finally get to sit on my beloved scooter.

To our dismay when we finally got to the building, only to find it locked and closed. It was so upsetting that I had to jerk the gates repeatedly to see if it really was locked. It was as if someone played a prank on us.

We decided to head back and took the bus that will take us home. Fortunately for us, we saw a huge motorcycle gallery while on the way and I quickly asked Nazry.

Wanna go take a look?
I don’t mind
I don’t mind either
Lets go!

He quickly pressed the buzzer and we dropped by and explored the place. Ohh .. there were loads and loads of motorcycles around, in many different colours, shapes and sizes.

There were several men looking around a specific model of a bike and asked the sales person some questions. There were so many bikes! Almost bursting with them that even the exit had at least 10 bikes being displayed outside. Even the walls and ceilings had bikes hanging precariously with metal bars.

At this time, I was feeling quite overwhelmed by the amount of bikes that there was there. There were so many, that I didn’t know where to start. And the signs on the bike didn’t help much either. I couldn’t understand a thing! All the technical specifications were so alien to me, it felt like the first time I bought a computer (I didn’t have much computer knowledge then) and finally just settled on a computer that seemed easy to use.

But nevertheless, I did see some interesting bikes, some with really large radiator looking devices in front of the engines. Some sprayed to look like a yellow cab taxi. And there were even one interesting bike I saw that looked so plastic, I wondered how it could ever even run.

Bro seemed to fall in love with this one


Gosh look at how excited and happy is

It was an interesting looking bike, with footrests. Nazry thinks that it exudes the ‘cool’ factor with the interesting body-frame and the movable seats. Personally, I thought it looks a little odd and a bit flimsy. He asked the salesman, how much the bike costs. “$10k” was the reply. A bit much for me.

We left after spending about an hour or two in there. I think next time, I should ask someone who’s more experienced in bikes to accompany me. It was truly overwhelming.

We went to Jurong Point for lunch when bro felt like playing a game in the arcades. I accompanied him and looked on, while he played this game called “Ghost Squad” and I was amazed to see him shoot down the enemies one by one.

This must be what the army trained my brother for 😛 He was so fast that even before the enemies appeared, he was well prepared to aim and shoot them down. A true marksman.

Bro had a strange costume for his character player though.

A man in a panda costume with a cat stuck behind him. “What the heck is that?” I asked him, with a note of disbelief. “Why, only high level people could use this costume!”, he replied proudly.

And he looked triumphant as he completed the entire game.

Anyhow, it was a lovely and relaxing day. It was pretty good. And I enjoyed myself. Before I go, I think I’ll post a picture of my mum, just because I like this picture of her.

Goodnight!