Google Earth!

Wow! It is finally here! Impressive!

It comes with as an initial free version. A workable planet wide Earth whereby the user can just fly in to any spot and preview the satellite map at that area. I had went to a few areas, the results were fantastic!

Have a look at these areas:
- Beijing (Forbidden city)
- Hongkong (the whole place! Is beautiful!)
- Paris (Effiel Tower)
- Rome (Colluseum)
- New York (the 3D landscape is so impressive)
- Baghdad
- Sydney

The list just goes on.
Most of the 3D buildings are concetrated in the major cities in the US.

Download and have a look. Challenge yourself to see if you can find Everest, Victoria Falls, Kilimajaro, Great Wall, the Pyramids, Easter Island, etc...

Check out the Google Blog site! Where news and recruitment are published!
How I wish I can work at Google...

So impressed!

Food! Glorious Food! : Bukit Timah Market

Wah Bukit Timah Market, the fabulous food center in the middle of Singapore, serves the best food in the world! Yes! In the world! I mean what is italian food? What's in french crusine? What japanese food? Anybody famous foreign chefs who had tasted authetic Singaporean food will beg for mercy. Serious!

If you don't believe, do make a trip down to the best stalls all over the island. In this case, let me give a recommendation of the old and famous Bukit Timah Market.

Have you heard about the MRT carrot cake? The fried carrot cake to be packed into a series of rectangles! The chilly paste that comes with it is fantastic! Today I even saw some ang-mos eating them. I mean even the Taiwan Food recommending variety show recommends this!
Bukit Timah Market Carrot Cake in Yahoo News!

How about the soft and tender Hokien Prawn noodles? This one makes my mouth waters. I ate this in my secondary school days, all the way to my poly days, and never got sick of it. The chilly is great! You got to try it! The mee, the soup (yes! there is a little soup at the bottom of the plate where the mee soaks in.), the egg, the little prawns, the sotong, and the Chilly, all combine into the best Hokien mee in the world. I had try hokkien prawn noodles all over Singapore, famous one too, but none comes close to this! It is just that the judges, the critics, the makansutra recommender, have not discovered this stall yet! They had been around for a long, long time.
No. #1 in the Hokkien mee category! Wallace's food guide website.

And the super, but not oily Cha Kway Teow! Its fantastic! You got to try it! The rich noodle taste is there in it, together with the egg. Better than most of the famous Cha Kway Teow stalls!
No. #2 in the Cha Kway Teow Category! Wallace's food guide website.

There are so many good offerings at Bukit Timah Market! From satay beehoon, to beehoon, to fish slices soup, to porridge, to popiah, bak chang and kueks...

But anyway, this is from the porridge stall. Ordered by my father who loved the porridge there.


Fish Porridge served in claypot, with a boiling bowl of frog legs in soy sauce, with ginger and onions.

Mouth watering?

Here's another close-up.

Notice the boiling hot contents, the sweet, yet a bit sour due to the ginger, soy sause, marinating the contents with its flavour. Even the onions and leeks inside the claypot are soft to the core.


Nothing to do with the above topic on Food
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But then, commenting for myself, I don't really go for frog legs porridge lah. Not because I don't like the taste. But I can't bear to see them killed because somebody like me just want a meal. I mean fish and chicken are already killed in the factory. But for frogs, they are kept live and killed only when there is an order. Most hawker center will keep a huge fishtank with frogs inside. When a customer order 1 or 2, the shop owner will just grab anyone of the frogs and killed it, skin, it, clean it, and then cooked it. Have you ever look at the eyes of those frogs? They stare at you, as if connecting with you, and you just realised that they have a life! Can you imagine the piece of meet that you find in your bowl of porridge is still moving about and jumping around half an hour ago?

Batman's Wise Wisdom

Wah, watch Batman Begins. Quite good. The whole show was full of violence. Gotham city looks like slum, worse than the eerie and always dark Gotham city of episode 1.
The mass rapid system sucks, the streets are dirty and decaying, and the whole environment gives the viewer a sense of hopelessness, crime, violence, darkness, a life as street urchins stuck on the streets. The rich getting richer and powerful, the police getting scared and political.

As far as I am convince, I will never immigrate there!

But what strikes me most was the phase that the leading lady told Batman (aka Brunce), and what Batman told her near the end.

"You are not who you are on the inside, but what you do that matters."

This is a powerful statement! And I literally mean POWDER-FUL! Full of refreshing and cooling pricky heat powder, splashed on your face! It is great!

Most of us try to xiam (avoid) the mushy emotional part, the giving or showing of positive and affirming emotions, the gesture of I love you, or I care for you, and to the extreme, the parading of concern or love to someone we hold dearly in our hearts, to the whole world. Instead of doing that, many actually come to and settle on the conclusion (at least to themselves) that deep inside, they love their spouse, their children, their parents, their whatever... and that is sufficent. Well their love ones should know of it. While this may be true, and the target might even be aware of this, but still it is lacking!

We see so many parents putting up a straight face, never daring to show love and affirmation, or even a simple priase, to their children. But expecting the children to know (which in most cases, they do) and that is sufficient.
We see spouses doing that too. Never even lifting a finger to help the other or to listen to the other when the spouse is troubled or down, and yet thinking that the relationship will last forever! That's foolishness.
I'll bet all the money Singapore Pools had earned for a month, that there will be some form of 3rd party/extra-maritial affairs, or thoughts or intent on that, to happen in the relationship.

Instead, we should all learn to show in our actions. To put pirority in the affairs and well-being of the loved ones, and automatically, our actions will match our thoughts. We will be doing meaningful things to our loved ones, and life will move forward again.

Which of course also, brings me to reflection on myself also.

Ballet Cat at Fort Canning

Cat doing ballet.

Everybody is sama-sama

Hiaz... I saw my ex-colleagues on the streets, my ex-bosses too from my previous company, in a separate incident.

It seems like everything is still the very same for them. The schedule cannot be met, the project dateline had been shifted many many times, many generations had come and go. My ex-colleagues are still angry, and pissed off with the management, the workload (9pm to 11pm almost every evening!), the everything. It affected them so much, that it seems to get into the very soul of them. That "cak-sim", that fustration, that general sense of being unhappy with the whole world, the whole world sucks, type of feeling that one gets when conversing with them. I remembered I was too, having this plague. It only clears after I had left that good-for-nothing place, and had joined another firm, and then now, yet another, moving and healing, and changing, and learning, and equipping myself as I went along.

The project is still not finished! The project that I was involved in 2 years ago! Wow! Had brought it to an acceptable level and just requires a bit of tuning when I left. So many generations had taken up the challenge, understanding the problem, taking up the almost immpossible task of designing the system to meet the way immpossible-to-fullfilled requirements, and to deal with the highly politcial customers! The generations, my successors, had changed for a few batches by now. The junior, learning fresh graduations during my time had left as an experience engineer by now. Even the politician customers had changed 2 or 3 batches!

I conclude then that life will still be the same if we stay at the same place, do the same thing, think the same thoughts, befriend the same group of people, etc, in anything in life. Change, or an improvement in one's conditions, will never comes in unless one makes the decision to. It is similar to the main concept, theme, underlying message, highlighted in the book, "Who moved my Cheese". And in this fast changing world, or for the sake of moving on and improving oneself, change and self improvement, is crucial.

Just as a reminder or an old saying, also in a strategy game I had played sometime ago : Total War - Shogun :
"To see further, climb to the next level of the tower.

Terminology in the Beng-e-logy World

Below are some of the great lingistic evolution of the "common tongue" in our very own backyard. It shows how the great expressive language of Bengs and Lians had grown silently over the years without even a challenger from the likes of Quenya.

Anyway someday, I'm going to do a common tongue for us all... and you bet, I'm going to create a "Lord of the Lui" (a.k.a. Lord of the $$) using this language.

Anyway some of the highly expressive terms.

Steady Pom Pi Pi
Meaning a person, being so steady, or so cool when under fire, or in difficult circumstances, such that either :
- the person still whistle as if everything is alright.
- the guys and girls around him/her blew whistles or simply whistles in awe or in encouragement

Swee Swee Bo Chao Cui
Meaning everything is so perfect, so ok, that it looks like gliding or skimming on the clear, calm, waveless, water surface.

Song Song Kao Jurong
Everything is so bliss, so bless, so comfortable, and so smooth sailing with no incident or hicups in between that the travel proceeds in one smooth bound, all the way to Jurong. Jurong being one of the extreme endpoint (right in the west) for many on this island. (Doesn't applies to me, cause I live in Jurong actually.)

Siong Siong Buay Leen Chu
Meaning so trouble-prone, so many hicups had happened, basically anything that can go wrong, goes wrong. It cause the stress level of one to go up, such that the person is so perturb till he/she fails to recognise his/her house.

Zhun Zhun Ca Beehoon
Meaning so accurate, so correct, that it looks like frying beehoon. Beehoon is a thinner version of the noodle, and typically made of flour or rice. To fry a plate of tasty beehoon well, one must be highly skilled. Able to gauge the amount of oil, water, to disseminate throughout the wok at the correct timing, and at the same time, able to predict and extrapolate the delta time from when the beehoon, turning soft from its hard dry state, will burned and overcooked.

Pattern Cuay Kay Badminton
It means so many different patterns, so many different strokes, or methods of engagement, so many variant of concepts, so many different versions, so much more than the infinite strokes used when playing the game of badminton.


Ok. That's the lot for today. Please learned by heart, ok? In case someone from the street utters something like that suddenly, at least you will be able to impress your spouse/friend/colleague/boss/classmate/teacher with the explaination.

I'll continue with more in part 2 soon.

Triops had grown.

The Triops had grown! It had been barely a day and now the biggest triop is almost 1cm in length! That's a fast rate of growth.



Picture here taken with Triop feeding on a bits of triop food, from a crushed ball of triop food. Noticed the outline of the triop.



This is the original picture.

The Tripos had Hatched!

The Triops had hatched! I had placed them in the little fishtank, and filled it up with 1.35 litre of water. They hatched on Monday morning!

On Tuesday, they were just little specks swiming around in circles around their own private area where they hatched and now, these little critters are a couple of mm in length! So fast!

Swiming around, gliding near the bottom of the tank, they move around looking at the bits and pieces on the tank floor, and devouring the little crushed bits of Triop food scattered around the tank.

Oh so cute! Words can't describe the feeling, when you see them folicking around the tank. You'll be so proud of them. Ahhh.... talk about simulated fatherhood.



I counted 3 large ones and a tiny one that probably missed the bus and hatched later. But there got to be more!

Grow my little ones, grow.... Be strong and bold, and take on the world that is around you. You have the right to be here and share the world with those already around you.

Hmmm shall I named them?

Hope Rekindles

Hope that was once warm, once kind, feels warms in your heart. No matter where you are, who you are with, what happened to you, you'll always felt that there is still this little city inside your heart, a city on a hill, a city that will never fall. Because of the simple reason that hope is in the city. Hope lives in the city, in your heart. That warm engulfs you and empowers you to be brave and bold and to do what you thought you can't do.

But alas, there come times when the door of the city is opened. Whether opened from within, or opened through pressure from outside, it doesn't matter after sometime, the city doors were opened. Hope seems to vanish, its light seems to be diluted. Its warm seems to be lost in the midst of the crowd pouring in through the door.

But hope that had resides in the city, will always be there. Once in a while, a ray of light shines through, warm flows out, through the rubble, through the crowded streets of the city. Above the noise, barely audible, yet felt by all. It reminds and it delights. It delights not the overcast mood, but the sweet soft whisper in the heart. It energise slightly, and gives strength as in good food. Through little, it gives a small hinge of energy to feel hopeful. To feel hopeful again. To be hopeful and to understand that the hope will one day regain its stand in the city. The city will shine and will be a like a light, placed on top of a hill, shining away the darkness in the pathways of the fellow journey makers, to make their walk slightly safer, and significantly warmer.

Hope that was once lost, but regained, is precious beyond anything can comprehend.

Nananca Crash

Hahahaha This is a great Game!

A great site.

Nanaca Crash

Have a look.

Life as an ant

Haiz.... work again.

Why is it work, work, work, work, work, and then rest for 2 days.

Just another faceless, member of the great workforce community for 5 days, and then back to 2 more days of playing my own individual again and before you are fully rested, back to more work, work, ...

I gotta think of a way to break out of the loop! This mindless, this endless, this pants provoking, this head numbness, this headache and tiredness towards the evening, this wanting to sleep more, this... this... this type of life is driving me to a wall. Kind of a typical life on this tiny little island.

Yes a kao hiah, a ma yi, a litle ant carrying an oversize pix-axe rushing along long tunnels together with countless many other ants, trying to win the time clock that is ticking away.


That's me, somewhere in the crowd.


That's somebody who had repeat the cycle for a long long time.

Maybe I should start a double life, maybe be a mindless ant member of the workforce colony in the day, and a night, a superhero jumping around the skyscraping towers. Hmmm... Or perhaps something else. Something more significant, more meaningful, something where I can tell my children or grandchildren, "look, last time your fale/gran fale was ...". Hmmm...


Btw, this website sure looks interesting. Hmmmm... maybe I should
try to apply for citizenship for this one.
Second Life Virtual World

LOTR in Hokkien

Hahaha... this is very funny. Very well done.

Poor Sam.

LOTR in Hokkien

Surviving in the Workplace

This so true... and so cute.

How to survive in the workplace admist the heavy and crazy workload,
the gossipy colleagues, and the ever watching boss.

Survival At Work

Si Beh Tan Chiak

What lau, si beh tan chiak (literally translate to very earn a living, or... just to earn a living take out so much of me) !!!

Everyday work, so tired and so many things to do. No time for my personal self.

Had so much articles, just no time to write and upload it.

Seems like my blog will always have to be updated around the weekends.

What to do...

Re-Definition of Terms (Workforce)

Hai... everything has changed.


The below are a summary of what seems to be... significant changes, in the job market, and the re-definition of terms in the work force.

In a way this "analysis" seems to reflect the current trend that workforces are facing around the globe. Starting from the developed countries, adn moving on to the developing countries, and then to the third world countries.

Redefinition of terms

Past Definition Present Definition

1) Solid ricebowl? => Variable Ricebowl
That's a thing of the past liao. Gone are the days whereby, "if you work hard, then you've be taken care of by the organisation." This just isn't true anymore. Look at what happens when a cruch comes a long. Most company will offload the additional "fatty parts" to make the organisation a little leaner, so as to save up on cost, save face, and save their own jobs. If you so happen to be classified as a fat, then the result should be predictable.

2) Long term service award? => Toilet Paper
Employees were once proud to show off their long term service awards, or whatever souviners they had collected along the way. Hanging them up at strategic places for all to see. Errr.... you know, things seems to be much different now. Those with long terms service awards seems to hid them. Some of the younger and more notable warriors in the workforce seems to refer such long term service award certification as toilet paper. Hmmm... toilet paper, yes toilet paper! To be discarded after used.
Yup! A job recruiter once told me things are kind of different now. If an interviewee were to moved to a new organisation after say.... 7 to 15 years in his/her previous organisation, the hirers would most probably be thinking that the interviewee "cannot make it", and is probably the unwanted "fats" (See 1.) in his/her organisation and asked to leave after so many years of hiding at some corner, in the company.

3) For Boss and Organisation => For Limpeh and Me
Long time ago... actually not that long time lah... most employees in the work force (irregardless of how high their positions are within an organisation) used to work and slog for their company. For the good of the company, for the good of the boss, (if the boss look good, I'll look good.)
Hmmm... this is not true anymore. Skills gained in the workplace are really important now. Cause companies are unstable nowadays. Bosses maybe there today, but tommorrow they may not be. Some employees seems to spent so much of their effort "por-ing" (curry flavour) their bosses, hoping to get some good returns from their effort. But when the harvest is due... their boss are not there anymore.... hahahaha either get cut off or left for greener pastures.

Ok that's it for now. Will continue the second part of Re-Definition of Terms soon. :)