Posted on

Ayam penyet is delicious!

I think I’m addicted to ayam penyet.

The first time that I ate it was during the hotel hunt with Juli and we stumbled upon this small restaurant, the Ayam Penyet House, next to the Hotel81-Bugis, facing Shaw tower.

The picture doesnt justify how tasty it is

When our dish arrived, it came with large piece of chicken which was deep fried and then smashed with a hammer (penyet means flat in Indonesian/Malay) – covered with a generous amount of chicken flakes and there were some pieces of tempe, cucumbers and a variety of crunchy raw vegetables. The best part was the red hot sambal belacan. It was spicy hot and I love it! Delicious!

My appetite was so whetted that I finished my rice disappered completely in just a few minutes.

Mmm!

Nowadays, there are many hawker centers selling them around the neighbourhood. They are pretty good and I’ve been eating it quite frequently. But I doubt that it could light a candle to the one that we went to at Bugis, namely because their sambal isnt hot enough!

Hot is when your nose starts sniffing and your mouth starts to twinge, your head starts to tinge and then you feel that high.

Yum!

Here is a video of some friends enjoying ayam penyet :

Have you ever eaten ayam penyet before? Do you like hot food? And how far is too hot for you?
Update : Check out a video of us enjoying our ayam penyet

Posted on

Phantom of the paradise movie

One late night, more than 10 years ago, I managed to catch this totally psychadellic show on tv. Eyes blurry, I saw a myriad of sights and sounds. I was completely transfixed.

It was the Phantom of the Paradise.

In a nutshell, the show is about a man, Winslow, a music composer whose music was chosen as an opening song for the a club called Paradise. He met a girl, Pheonix whom he found to be suitable for singing the part. However, the club owner, Swan had other ideas and hires interesting persona, like a singer that looked like he’d belong in the rocky horror show.

Apart from the over the top characters, and storyline, what really made the show memorable to me was the music. One of the song that got stuck in my head for the longest time was Old Souls, written by Paul WIlliams.

Our love, is an old love baby
is older than all of our years
I had seen in strange young eyes
familiar tears

It was one of the most memorable song for me, because of the tone and the lyrics – pure poetry.

That was why I was most excited to stumble onto it on youtube. Me and cart spent the afternoon watching the show and I enjoyed the music and the sights all over again.

Now that I’m a little older, my perception of the show is different compared to before. The movie, being made in 1974, was extremely 70’s like with its strong pop culture clothes and drug influence. And I never realised how hedonistic it was in lieu of the hippy era.

Nevertheless, the show was still as fabulous. This movie is a definite classic.

One thing that bugged me though, was why does the devil have such a feminine hand? Did they use a woman to replace him for that scene? If so, what good reason would they do that?

Or am I overanalysing this too much?

Posted on

Brinkster, please let met go …

Who ever knew that transferring of domains would be so cumbersome.

Several years ago, I used to subscribe to ewebcity as I was learning ASP. At the time, I had not much problems with it. In fact, I even enjoyed their simple interface and the live chat support that came along with it so much that I paid for their .personal hosting plan and bought a domain.

Ewebcity recently changed their name to brinkster. And about year ago, brinkster auto-renewed my subscription without prior notification. But at the moment, since I did not have any problems with them. In fact, I was ready to upgrade to their .professional package as I wanted to try out WordPress.

However, a quick check shows that it was actually quite difficult to set up WordPress as brinkster wasn’t capable of supporting .htaccess and neither do they have apache or litespeed server then.

But since brinkster already credited my money, I’d just stay on with it for another year.

And now that its been a year, I notified brinkster about my cancellation request on the 26th November. I also asked for a domain transfer to my new host. After several email transaction to date, my account was still active and I was charged money for it!

US$71! That’s about $110 in Singapore dollars. That was a lot of money to me! I could do a lot with that sum.

I thought that I could be clever and edit my personal details before the renewal date so that no money will be credited to my debit card. Interestingly, the programming there would not allow me to change my card details. Somehow, they still kept my personal details. This is so dangerous and intrusive to my privacy.

How can a company that won so many awards can be so bad at support? To date, I have spoken to two different billing consultants and at least three support consultants and yet nothing has been done about my account.

Update: After persevering for some days, the account has finally been closed on the 4th December.

Posted on

I miss my baby

I miss my baby.

When you came into my life. Everything seems so complete. I never knew there were an empty part of me and I was so happy.

We had wonderful times together, Sometimes I’d treat you bad but you were always faithful to me.

One day, out of my sheer obstinateness, I treated you harsher than usual. I made you run in the rain till you slipped and fell badly. You got hurt and had to be sent away.

I cried and I cried and I cried. But you never came back. You were gone. And now that you’ve left me, there is a void in my heart. I’m so sorry I did that to you! I was so cruel!

I miss you.

Come back to me.

I want you … I need you back in my life.

Please come back to me…

I love you.