Though I’ve always been keen on to participating, it is only this year that I finally had the confidence to attend this event. Moreover, this could possibly be the last time that I participate in something like this.

Registering for the event was easy enough. All I had to do was to surf the website, give my particulars choose the activity that I wanted and I paid $28. I chose the Aerobics Challenge 1 which consisted of the CardioLatino, CardioBlitz and Kickboxing.

A week before the actual event, I collected the Official T shirt and the number tag.

That day was quite memorable to me as in the middle of my journey to Millenia Walk, the heavens decided to pour its blessings on me. Even with my raincoat on, I was soaking wet. My sneakers went squish throughout as I walked in the upper-end shopping center.

Unfortunately for me, on the actual day, I was rushing off from home and I’ve completely forgotten to bring my number tag along with me.

And thats when the mayhem started.

I reached Ngee Ann Civic Plaza at about 3pm. I’ve already missed an hour, having attended the Talkback session earlier on. Thus I was a little flustered upon reaching the registration booth.

Me : Hi! I need help. I forgot to bring my number tag, can you help me?

Me : Wha? Ok fine.

At that point of time, I felt snubbed that they were so unwilling to help me. I was wearing the official tshirt! Why would anyone be lying just for the sake for entering the arena!

Luckily for me, I was carrying the eee pc and I went inside the shopping center to try to find a connection.

It was such a waste of time! Even though there were supposed to be about 7 to 10 open wireless@sg connection, I could not connect to any of them!

I spent about 30 mins walking around different areas and still nothing. Even asking the information counter was fruitless when they told me that there were no internet cafe in the shopping center.

I felt really frustrated and was really going out of my mind and felt so helpless that even as a grown woman, I began to cry out in public. The interesting thing was that no one even looked at me, which was a relevation as I thought we were the busybody type of society :P

It was comforting to hear Mus and Vandalin’s voice on the phone when I called them up. They helpfully snapped a picture of my email and mms’ed it to me.

Unfortunately, the mms never arrived. With only one hour left to go to my event, and not wanting to waste my time and effort getting here, and money paid for the event, I picked up the courage to march up the manager.

Me : How could you just push me away? Why cant you guys make and effort to help me! I am wearing the official tshirt! What other proof do you need!

Manager : I’m sorry, but this is a paid event. We cannot anyhow let people in.

The manager and I were both extremely pissed at this point of time. And then I remembered that I scribbled my confirmation number in my trusty manual PDA.

Manager : A confirmation number! You should have told me that earlier!

Finally she took my IC, gave me a new number tag and I was just in time to participate in the last hour of kickboxing. Which was good as I has so much anger inside that I kicked! I punched! I jabbed with all my might.

GRRR!!!

But in anycase, it was a very good workout as it was the most intensive workout that I had ever had. Even more challenging than any of the cardio that I’ve attended. I’m not sure if I would be able to survive the complete 3 hours!

But was such a thrill for me to see so many rosy cheeks around me. You should have been there. These ladies were truly glowing - its difficult for even the best mekap to recreate this.

Look at that! Thats gorgeous!

All in all, despite the drama earlier, I did enjoy myself. I dare say that it was one of the best workouts that I’ve ever had and though I’m feeling a little bit of an ache, its a good ache and I’d love to attend more events such as these.

Moreoever, look at the fabulous goodie bag that I got after the event!

Here are just some of my swags as I pretty much already consumed all the food related stuff in there. I love my new bag. And looks like I don’t need to buy a new waterbottle! And there’s even mekap! Woohoo! Feels good to be a woman :)

I survied the Amore Woman’s Day Out! And now I will collapse and die.

Have you ever been to the Woman’s Day out? What do you think about the event?

Related links :

• Woman’s Day Out Website
• Amore Fitness
• Singapore Sports Council

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested :

• I feel good
• I am fat
• Cardio? No sweat!

Next to me is Keith De Souza and Barathi Jagdish who are both the hosts for Fresh! - A programme on the radio that I tune in each morning on the station 938live.

Each weekday morning, they would open up an interesting topic to be discussed with the listeners, usually about current events and I emailed them about my thoughts some while back in response to a caller who thought that the Singapore National Anthem should be changed from Malay to English.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a reply from Barathi that my email was read on air and an invite to participate in their live talkback outdoors session. I asked around if there were anyone interested and thus, I was accompanied by the two handsomes Mus and Vandalin.

It was a very interesting session for me. At the risk of sounding geeky, it felt like a Secondlife discussion! - we sat in down to listen to the panelists and can join in the discussion at any time.

And I really enjoyed hearing the different thoughts and opinions, regardless if I agreed with them or not.

The first topic of discussion was :

Are we a sporting nation? Do we support our local athletes enough? Do we encourage our children to take part in sports? Are we ready to host big international sporting events?

We were joined by National Swimmer, Teresa Goh, her dad, Senior Parlimentary Secretary of the MCYS, Teo Ser Luck, as well as sports editor, Raj Kumar.

There was a parent that said that schools should be more proactive in spotting out young talents and to groom them into sportsmen with more sports activities to be made compulsory in schools.

And I thought to myself, why do we always have to depend on the schools when it should be the task of the parents more. If you see that your child is good and interested in an activity, regardless of what it is, why wait for the school when you can do something about it?

And Mus added, an institution could have the best policies in the world, but if the child isn’t interested, there isn’t much point to it.

The second topic was :

Is the job market too competitive? What employment issues do you face? Do women face problems going back to work? What do you feel about the employment of foreign talent?

We were joined by MP for Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC Josephine Teo. (I couldn’t catch the other panelist’s name. Will update when information is known)

I was a little cheesed off when there were one foreigner commented, “Why are Singaporeans so afraid of us taking over jobs when they are not skilled enough to fill them up?”

Say what?

In any case, it was quite an experience to sit in a discussion. Its been a while since I’ve seen a real life debate and I really did enjoyed myself.

Thank you Mus and Vandalin, it was wonderful to have your company and insightful thoughts. Can’t wait to go to the next one :)

Related Links :

• 938live Website
• Gloria Jeans Website

Sidenote : Can anyone notice something interesting here?

What I love about the 88 eyeshadow palette is that you can experiment with different looks without worrying about wasting your makeup. At about $26 per palette it is even more affordable than the 2-4 colour eyeshadows being sold in regular stores.

My problem with many eyeshadows is that many of them aren’t vivid enough on my eyes. But personally, I think that the quality of the 88 palette eyeshadow is just as good and perhaps even better than the ones in regular stores in the sense that the colour payoff is surprisingly excellent.

Take a look at this!

Nice?

I love it! Its bright and cheery! I did not even add in any eyeshadow primer to it!

Though I’m not as good at eye makeup as most of the ladies in Cozycot or the makeup guru’s out there, I really think that this looks nice.

Let me show you how

I chose these three colours as circled in the picture.

Step 1

With the darkest colour, the turquoise, glide it through at the base of the eyelids. Don’t worry about complicated terms like “winging”, or V-shape”. As long as its on your lower lids, its good to go.

Step 2

Make a surprised face like this!

Then take the lime green colour and sweep it over the curves of your eyeball. This will naturally blend with the top of the turquoise. Its starting to look good now!

Step 3

Finally add the beige as a highlighter, below the eyebrow which acts as a guide. Gently blend the meeting colours so as to not have harsh lines.

And then add eyeliner and mascara if you want to and you’re done!

Simple right?

Even a makeup dummy like me can do it. If rinaz can mekap, so can you!

It was so unreal that it took us some time to the information to sink in. I really thought that Claudia was pulling my leg when she sms’ed me her congratulations.

But in the end, we finally saw the official email. Jurlique and I were both grinning from ear to ear when we finally hand the touchsmart in our hands.

And very recently, I was at the Samsung Innov8 event and participated in their photo taking contest whereby contestants were to take pictures with the theme of what inspires me about the phone.

Thus, I was walking around with Wishbone and I asked for her help as I re-enact some scenarios. In my mind, I already knew what type of shots I wanted to get.

Even though I was not confident of winning anything, I thought I’d give it my best shot anyways. I even told Wishbone, “If I win (which I know I wouldn’t) I’ll split this phone into two with you.”

There were heaps of picture display which I took time to admire. In particular, I like Leonard’s picture of him with one eye shut with a silly grin - as the Innov8 had the smile shot and anti-blink function.

After we’ve done our presentation, we waited with in anticipation at the results and turns out that I was one of the winners for the Samsung Innov8!

I was most excited, surprised and happy that my hair started to magically curl.

Looks like I have to split the phone into two now :P

But before I split it into two, I’ll post a review about it. I’ve been using it for about a week now and so far I’m liking it a lot.

Whee!

Sidenote : Actually, there isn’t really a point to this blogpost. I just wanted to share the good news. Feel free to come over and play with my new toys :)

Anyways, I spend the last days cleaning my room (and found something interesting) as well as helping out in the kitchen.

With all the onion chopping and the chili blending, my hands feels as if it is on fire!

Regardless, on this Hari Raya, I would like to wish everyone Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri, maaf zahir batin! Forgiveness for our wrongdoings and words which are uttered accidentally :)

Related links

• What Hari Raya Aidilfitri is about
• I’m always a sap when watching the petronas raya ad.

And as always, come listen to this ultra classic raya song :)

I prefer to be a speed demon myself rather than watching other people race :P

In any case, this is a montage of the scooter charity aid 2008 that I joined in on the 13th September. This is the 4th year for the convoy to raise funds for the Tabung Amal Aidilfitri for the needy.

Scooter Charity Ride 2008 from rinaz on Vimeo.

What do you think?

Related link :

• Charity Ride 2007

Thus, when I was given the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet on loan for a some weeks thanks to Supriya of Text100, I took to it like fish to water.

At first glance, its a really beautiful gadget with its grey blue exterior. Switching it on, it did not take too long to get used to the interface. Even though it uses a linux operating system, it was pretty easy that anyone who knows how to use a handphone would be able to handle it.

Being pocket sized, I find myself carrying this gadget often and especially to events when I could do live microblogging using twitter or plurk.

It has to be clarified though, that the N810 is not a handphone. There is no slot for a sim card. Thus I was perplexed on how to connect to the internet on demand. But I am pretty sure that it was possible, as I’ve seen youtube clips of people being able to connect to gprs maps using the device.

Hence, the only way that I could connect during this review was to rely on wifi connections. But so far it hasn’t been much of a problem for me as I have wireless connection at home and fortunately for me, wiress@sg was rather reliable at the places that I patronized.

And though the N810 is sometimes compared to the popular UMPCs, I feel that it would be like comparing it apples to oranges as they are both in different leagues.

One of the notable part of the N810 is that it shares a developers website where you could download softwares coded by people who uses the maemo platform, which the N810 uses. I love open source! It was a nice touch to be able to find additional softwares like games as well as applications like pidgin so that I was able to chat on msn and gtalk.

However, one bugboo to take note of is that at this point of writing, N810’s latest operating system - The Diablo OS2008 does not support Pidgin. Personally, I find it a shame as instant messaging was a function that I use very frequently.

And another thing that bugged me was that although it played youtube videos well, trying to play clips on the more graphics intensive vimeo was laggy, making it uncomfortable to view.

Regardless what I liked best about the N810 was the sound quality. Both the speakers and microphone was excellent as I could hear and speak with no problem at all. Thus it was a joy for me to use the skype function on the N810, which probably what will make me miss the N810 the most.

What would make it better would be if there were a video-conference function in skype. And at this point of time, there is none and I don’t think that there will be in the future.

The device being small, I could just chuck it next to me and lie down comfortably on the bed while talking to Cartcart. His voice was comforting that inevitably, I’d be fast asleep a few minutes into the conversation.

I haven’t been doing any late night skyping anymore since returning the review unit. Its not easy to lug my desktop to bed!

Anyways below is a quick overview on the interface as well as its different functions :

An overview of the Nokia N810 from rinaz on Vimeo.

My apologies for the quality of the video. It was 4am at the time of recording and I was plagued with the flu. But such a sexeh voice I have there! :P

Have you used an internet tablet before? What do you think of it?

Links :

• The Nokia N810 official webpage
• Maemo developer’s site

Like tech? You may also enjoy my video reviews of :

• Premiere Elements
• The Eee PC
• Vimeo
• Logitech Quickcam