+ Life | Blue Skies

This morning marks the official blue skies across Singapore as far as I am concern. What a beautiful Monday!

The morning started off bright with the sun shining through my bedroom window.

When I was waiting for the cab at my usual spot, I noticed the sky was clear of clouds. Just dramatic blue sky!

I had to take a picture of Pinevale Condominium across my block as the building earthy tones contrasted very much with the blue sky. Picture perfect! With my Panasonic S700i 1.3Mega pixel camera-phone.

I just go crazy with clear blue skies... go figure!

It reminded me of when I was on vacation in Cairns, Australia with my family. The open skies, the wide horizon, as far as the eye can see. Such an awesome sight, especially for people like me, a free spirit who is deprived of open spaces and limited to little pockets of nature to content with.

Man, I will definitely scan the photos there to post in my Escapade Blog. I have to scan them first though, since the photos were taken with my traditional film, Canon EOS 500 camera.

Came out at lunch-time and there again, bright cheerful blue skies over the factory building. I just had to tell all my lunch buddies about it.

They thought it was nice, but nothing to get excited about. They could not understand my simple joy and probably thought that I was "loaded" when I also snapped a photo of the most lame of scenery - a factory building.

That's just me. The simple beauty brings me joy.

I left work at around 6:00pm today. The sun was still shining, the skies, well had become cloudy, but dramatically.

As I passed the overhead bridge, I just had to snap photos of the sun behind the clouds. Very nice, divine like.

It reminded me of Andrew's cloud from Past Tense "Foreshadowing" and his recent "Far Away Thunder" posts. The pictures were dramatic and mysterious too. The words, made my mind wonder...

This gives me an idea. I will start taking photos of clouds, lots of beautiful cloud formations since the blue sky as the backdrop is awesome in it self.

Yeah, yeah, yeah more insignificant "insights", a waste of server space... but hey, at least I am making me happy. One extra happy guy in the world.

Yes, The Clouds - Heaven's dream, the life-giving portal that feeds the earth with water from the heavens... What am I blabbering about?

Mondays are my least favourite day of the week!

NOW I believe I am "loaded!" With joy...

+ Life | Longer Weekend

Incidently, My current Desktop picture for the few weeks

The weekend is here!

Basically there will be tons of stuff that go through my mind on what to do on weekends, but the weekend is just never enough to spend with extra time to spare. Yes, that is how greedy I am when it comes to weekends.

I "trick" myself, yes trick, that is how pathetically desperate I am to prolong the weekend psychologically, since I cannot prolong time itself.

I would ask my family (yes, I am that self-absorbed when it comes to maximizing the weekend) to go out with me after work on Fridays. We would go out for dinner and a stroll or go watch a movie. Just spend as long a time outside on Friday nights.

And when I wake up in the morning, I feel as though (really feel) it is a Sunday morning for a little while until I get my bearing either immediately after the sleepiness wears off, or late in the morning when I start to read the newspapers.

I will get happy to know that I have another day of such "waking-up" to the correct Sunday the next day.

That is how wonderful it feels to prolong a weekend with my method of self-psychological manipulation or chronic psychosomatic delusion (that was a mouthful, am I using them correctly... anyway...) I put myself to "squeeze" the extra hours out of an otherwise normal, 2-day weekend.

There, I said it. It is out there now. Well its great. It's the weekend again! Now to firm up the plans after sifting through the tons of stuff in mind to do and enjoy!

+ Life | Sunny Days

With the monsoon rain finally over, the cloudy days are floating away to give a turn to sunshine and blue skies.

Not so fortunate for our closest neighbour though. The state of Kelantan in Malaysia is flooding its low lands and are displacing many homes and families as I am writing this entry.

Hope their authorities can minimise the devastation it brings.

The first two months towards the end of last year and the first month of this year was a very wet one. We had a record continuous downpour of over 12 days with little reprieves from time to time, only to continue the downpour.

Incredible how gloomy the skies were for the whole 2 weeks!

Not my kind of day. I am a sunshine person.

Anyway, we just had to go with the program, so to speak. We made the most of it by staying indoors at home even on weekends, curled-up in our sofa and watched movies, lots of movies. With that came the binging as well, lots of snacks.

Fortunately I have my HomeGym to burn-off the extra calories as a result.

Puffy had my son's full attention as his playtime options was reduced to indoors only.

So the welcomed sunshine is heavenly! Never been so happy to see the morning sun shining down on my bedroom floor.

I notice the roadside trees and shrubs are starting to grow flower buds waiting to bloom.

The people start to stroll outside and the various clubs start to have soccer trainings again.

Just like spring-time in Singapore! A great opportunity for me to take more photos with the sun out.

Yes! Life is good.

+ Fun | Word Cloud

Saw it first at Barbara's Trying to Catch Up when she saw it from Running2K and then started to see everyone owning one.

Well, it sounded like fun so I jumped into the bandwagon and got myself one too, though short of ordering a T-Shirt. My apologies for using its services without buying one. Thanks anyway.

You can get one too for free at SnapShirts.com

+ Work | Brontok Virus

Today was definitely a non-productive, frustrating day for me at work.

After a good start of the day with a con-call with a customer in the US, I got to clear some emails from yesterday since I was off work to accompany may Mom for her precheck-up for her eye surgery.

She has cataracts on her right eye and is going to have it removed this Friday afternoon, 10 Feb 06 at SGH's National Eye Centre.

Then the impending thing happened. Just before tea break, my PC was infected with the Brontok Virus. A first from Indonesia. Thought you would be proud that an Asian from Asia did something impressive. Depressive instead. Good at doing no good.

From that moment onwards, I could do nothing productive after tea break and after lunch. I was stuck at my PC trying to eradicate the virus off it with the help of my IT Engineer.

Two other office people had the same virus too, except one was mercifully detected by our common Hauri Antivirus program. We were not fortunate at all. Did not open any attachment or anything. My MS Outlook email was routinely auto-downloading emails periodically when it struck and gave an error message.

My Winlogon file was replaced with the virus that rendered me not be Administrator of my PC any longer.

A check in Hauri Website indicated that they have an update for the antidote, but after downloading it and did a scan, the anti-virus program returned a nil detection. WHAT!!

I had to resort to my long trusted free AVG Antivirus program. My IT Engineer helped to download it and installed in on my PC. Once scanning was in progress, all the Brontok related executable files were detected and deleted.

Thank you Grisoft.com for the Free AVG Antivirus program. You are still the best in my dictionary!

A reprieve finally felt at bout 4:30pm. Did all important stuff that I needed to do before I left for work. Not a good day. Nothing good came from this at all.

How come smart people are so stupid as to waste their own talent and time to ruin other people?

+ Life | Weird Stuff

I have been tagged by Ellen from Coffee Granules and so I have to list my 5 weired stuff even though I am going to regret and embarrass myself after. So... here goes nothing.

My 5 Weird Habits:-

1. Itchy Throat. Will suddenly choke and cough violently in a packed and quite bus or train even if I have no cough at all. What pycho phobia am I having?
2. Itchy Fingers. I will somehow secretly re-sort a little, stuff like CD or Xbox Games titles on a supermarket shelve if it is mixed. A bit like the TV series Monk. What a psycho!
3. Finding Lost. When it comes to a fork path to find a place, I will surely go the other way, get lost, and back-track even if my gut feeling tells me that I should have gone the opposite direction in the first place. When can I trust my own instincts?
4. Fickle Memory. I can remember things that happened in the past 20 year ago with amazing details, but not remembering something so simple as what bus I took to a place last week. Is my memory ditching me?
5. Not Satisfied. When we dine out, I always feel that my wife's or son's choice of food ordered is a better choice than mine. I will secretly tend to feel that their portion is more than mine if we ordered the same dish. What the heck is that all about?

There! I listed them down. It is out there now. Thank god I had to list only 5. Else I think I will have fewer than none online friends now.

Below are the RULES of this weird chain:

1. The first player of this game starts with the topic “five weird habits" of yourself.
2. People who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits
3. As well as state this rule clearly.
4. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals.
5. Dont forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You are tagged” (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

Alright... now I have to tag 5 bloggers to reveal their own weird habits. Sorry ladies and gents, I have no choice:

1. Sister Celtic from Lopez Island Life
2. Barbara from Trying To Catch Up
3. Carol from A Revision
4. Alex from Life And The World
5. Uisce from Whiskey Talking

Good Luck!

+ Work | Red Packet

An Ang Pow and 2 oranges for me

It is the first day of work after a long, restful weekend.

So far the activity had been slow at the operations side and most of my office colleagues are still on leave off work. Some coming back tomorrow and some all the way till next week Monday. Lucky them.

The Company Tradition

Like every year, all those who report to work right after Chinese New Year will be greeted by our CEO with the traditional Chinese New Year greeting - a handshake with greetings followed by an Ang Pow or a Red Packet in Hokien dialect with a token of S$10.00 in it, and two oranges.

I am a Malay, but they treat me all the same.

All employees present today will get it directly from the CEO. Personal. Neat.

The Chinese Tradition

Not sure if I understand it correctly, but do not take it from me. The Chinese give out Ang Pow as a gift from the elders to their unmarried charges, while the two oranges are for good luck.

Even numbers are good for festive periods while the orange colour looks like gold, to symbolise wealth and wish you good fortune.

Many of my office Chinese colleagues, well... all of them are Chinese with the exception of only me, a Malay, would keep these oranges in the office's desk until these oranges both get dried-up to "keep" their luck close to them and for as long as possible and then throw them away after 15 days.

That is how long the celebration is.

For me, I eat my "luck." Yes, I eat it because I cannot resist Mandarin oranges. It is one of my favourite fruits.

With any luck, the digested oranges will keep me full of fibre and good health. That is how I use my luck.

With a heads-up announcement from the Operations Manager that our CEO was coming, the next thing I knew, he was already inside our office with his entourage.

The first firm, handshake from the CEO was followed by a trail of handshakes from the other big bosses, the "big guns" with New Year greetings.

A very nice gesture. Still very rooted in Chinese tradition for this modern, high-tech, public-listed company of more than 20 years in existence.

The day is still slow and not much of activities today since many companies are still not cranked-up to the fast-paced momentum yet.

You would hear Lion Dance drums on and off, here and there as the companies welcome the troupes to "bless" their organisation for better luck and prosperity for this Lunar New Year.

Heard from a friend the market going rate for a blessing costs S$370.00 this year. A small price to pay for the bountiful of wealth the company owners hope they will reap the Lunar New Year.

Lions blessing the canteen

The First Time

At lunch, I get to witness the Lion Dance giving blessings to the canteen owner. It was my first time actually witnessing the whole blessing session while we eat our lunch. Great! A meal and a show... an edutaiment!

The canteen has 3 alters - 2 small ones and one large, main one.

The 3 lions paid their respects to these alters before the headed for the drinks counter where the canteen owner stood to start the Lion Dance. Deafening drums and cymbils accompanied the dance.

It lasted about 10 minutes with some "offerings" of oranges and vegetables given to the lions to "eat" from the canteen owner.

None of my Chinese friends know what the significance of the offerings suppose to be. They were expecting a blessed Chinese word to be formed by the lion when it moved away from the offerings, but none seen.

The dance was nonetheless interesting, with the lions animated so lively with its stomach breathing, blinking eyes and fancy footworks, but it catched everyone's attention when it "eat" the scattered the orange peelings high and about as though satisfied with the offerings in zest.

Before you know it, another troupe of Lion Dance arrived just before the earlier one finished with its blessings. The two groups approached each other and did some challenging... teasing, the way I saw it.

And on with the next Lion Dance. Guess S$740.00 is nothing compared to the hope of prosper days ahead for the new year.

The universal saying is true... it takes money to make money.