Okonomikaki's blog

Finally, the last post for today.  Given how little I have posted in the last few months and in this year, I have been quite productive tonight. LOL :)

Well, like I said in my two previous posts.  I will be cross sharing some of my posts on my personal blog on this blog called Okonomikaki (https://okonomikaki.blogspot.sg/).  If you're Singaporean and familiar with Japanese cuisine, you might understand why the blog is called what it's called. :)

あああ... 疲れた

Ahhh... so tired today. Am happy i managed to get a seat on the train home. But am unfortunately stuck between a tired schoolboy who keeps nodding off and hitting my shoulder and, an aunty who has a huge bag of stuff and is kind of pressed up against me. It doesn't help that the school boy's music is so loud and his earphones so crappy, i can hear his music through my earphones. Annoying. :(

I'm getting use to the work schedule and have currently worked out a schedule outside of work that will include some time for me to do stuff i enjoy. Currently, i only manage to reach home at between 830 to 9 pm each day. After dinner, a short catchup chat with my parents and a shower, i make myself a cup of coffee and watch anime. :)

It has really been a while since I've had time to watch anime. Actually it's been a few years. Meanwhile, i keep collecting anime wiithout watching them. :) Between work and studies, i've only had time for tvb or japanese dramas which i watched with my mum as she doesn't watch anime.

The new work schedule, however, means that i don't watch stuff with mum until the weekends since i return home so late anyway. And mostly we watch short japanese dramas, specials or movies.

Hence, this year, after several years of not watching anime, i have finally finished Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu which i really enjoyed. The anime had a rather experimental way of telling the story. The broadcast order of this anime was not in the same order as the episode numbers which means that the story was told in a completely non-linear fashion. I'm not sure if this works better for this anime but it is an interesting idea and each episode was strong enough on it's own to keep one watching even if you're wondering why you have some missing info.

Anyway... i'm a little tired today. Work was kind of tiring. So i will continue this discussion on my new schedule and the animes i've been watching in another post. :)

Beijing Day 3 Part 1.

Beijing Day 3 Part 1. We woke up at 630am this morning to go climb the Great Wall today. It's a little drive away from the city. When i got there i was quite blown away with the magnitude of the wall. It's really amazing and quite beauty. The climb up was really taxing but they've installed hand rails so it made the climb easier although it was still really steep and awfully tiring. We didn't make it to the top, just 3 quarters of the way up. The climb down was even worse as some of the steps were quite high and there were a lot of steps. I loved it though. I've always wanted to see the Great Wall and now i have. :-)

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

Flowers by the road.

Flowers by the road. Each morning I wake up early to swim or cycle as i'm working towards going for a trek next year. And each morning that i do cycle i always pass by patches of wild yellow flowers by the road side. I love these pretty flowers and i know i'm not the only one who likes them. Everytime the grass cutters come, the grass will be crop short by the time they leave but the flowers still remain. :-)

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

Mid autumn festival.

Mid autumn festival. Another test. Still trying to get the title and body text separation correct without going into my dashboard. Anyway this photo was taken at the clarke quay area on the day of mid-autumn's itself. Enjoy. :-)

Update: hmmm... still didn't quite work. I still keep having to go in to my dashboard to fix the title of each entry. Ah... well... this will just have to do and I'll just have to go online and fix them when I get a chance.

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

The experiment continues.

The experiment continues. I'm thinking of trying to mobile blog a little when I travel to beijing next week. And so am still working out all the quirks of mobile blog, hence another short nothing kind of entry. Anyway. Here is a picture of the sun through some trees. I exercise every morning and it was particularly pretty today and thought i'd share a little bit of sunshine with you. Have a great weekend guys. Cheers. :-)

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

Modern Beauty - Ada Choi

I'm currently in McDonald's waiting for a friend. My other friend has borrowed my ds and so i'm some what bored. So decided to do some blogging. Above is a not terribly well shot photo of one of the Modern Beauty salons in Singapore. Not sure if you can make out that Ada Choi is those posters. She's the spokes-person for this salon. I'm not into these things but figured you tvb series loving fans might get a kick out of it. Recently i've seen a few tvb series and have been thinking of writing capsule reviews as a full length review may be too time consuming. I'll be off to beijing next week for another vacation. Will try and write them before that. Ok. That's it for now.

cheers


- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

The Nintendo DS Opera Browser

Usually I like to place pictures in every entry on the blog but this time it isn't going to be quite that easy for me. The reason is because I'm using the NDSL's Opera Browser to write this entry.

I only just got the browser and have just started playing with it. I thought that this woud be a good time to test this browser out since I'm currently still working and have a little time to kill but don't have my laptop with me.

I'm currently rather liking this application and even liking it more than the Sony PSP's browser. Of course it has been months since I've gone online on the psp but even then I wasn't particularly in love with the experience.

The biggest beef I had with the psp browser isn't actually the application's fault. It's really a hardware problem. Now, I do think the psp is a good handheld, especially if you like your games to look good but surfing on the internet isn't one of it's better features. The reason is simple. The psp doesn't have touch-screen. This is the biggest reason why I really much prefer the ds when it comes to going online. The touch-screen makes typing out an entry like this a breeze especially when compared to the clunky and time consuming way of doing it on the psp. On the ds, one simply uses the stylus to tap on the screen to spell out words. It is that easy. The psp requires a combination of moving the d-pad or joy-stick and mashing on the A button to type out some thing. Correcting mistakes can be a chore on the psp as you have to move the cursor one letter at a time unlike simply using the stylus to tape at the point where the mistake was made.

There are of course a few cons. The ds opera browser is not free and certainly not cheap. The ds itself does not have enough ram for cacheing so a slot-2 ram cart is necessary to run the application. This is probably why the browser cost more than SGD60 in the shops.

The other imperfection of the browser isn't actually the browser's fault. It is really a hardware problem. The ds's screen isn't really that big and although the dual screen helps, it's still not the most ideal if one wishes to surf for an extended period of time.

Still in the end, I think that if one has the extra cash, want internet access on the go, has access to a wi-fi connection outside your home and owns a ds, this application is certainly worth the money. At the very least, it may help you keep your blog just that little bit more updated. =)

cheers

Vietnam - entry 1

Fuji v10 - Ho Chi Minh City, first shots of the city

Hello all, I'm back in Singapore again. I returned from a trip to Vietnam on Tuesday night but have been busy with work and was unable to post a little update on the blog till now. Will be working quite a fair bit for the next week or so and will be lots of late nights so updates might be on the slow side. I know, I know... am really getting behind on my Guizhou and Sichuan updates. Am also working on a new TVB review for "A Change of Destiny" and hope to have that up soon too.

Anyway, the trip to Vietnam was actually to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the surrounding areas only so it's not really a very extensive visit of the country. I had a good time though and liked a lot of the food that I ate there.

I have to keep this short as I do have work to do so I have to stop for now. So take care you all, till next time. =)

cheers

Holiday =)

Image from wiki

I'm off to Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan for a holiday tomorrow. Won't be back till next week. =)

See you guys when I get back.

cheers

Karaoke-ing

(photo of us at the K-Box, taken with my Sony Ericsson K700i)

Last night, I finally experienced what so many people in the world have come to enjoy all over the world since the 80s. That is, getting high on alcohol and singing loudly into a mic in an enclosed room accompanied by friends while watching an MTV with minus one music blasting over the speakers. Yup, it's karaoke, a form of music entertainment that become popular in Singapore quite some time ago and something I've never really tried.

I'm not even sure why I've never really tried it. My uncle was big into karaoke and he tried to get my entire family into it on two occasions years ago and although I gamely tried to sing 500 Miles at his home, no one else was interested and that was about the extent of my experience. I don't even consider it a proper karaoke experience, just felt like a sing-a-long at a campfire.

Earlier in the week, a few of my colleagues asked me if I wanted to join them at a karaoke session at K-Box at Paradiz Centre. It is one of the bigger, if not the biggest, karaoke chain in Singapore I believe. Well, at least even I have heard of K-Box. Since I had never been to one and also because it was Lee Cheng, who had just quit, who asked me to go, I agreed. So after work, eight of us made our way to K-Box. We were going to eat at the foodcourt nearby but the constant and heavy rain all day yesterday ensured that traffic down the PIE was impossible and by the time we got there we only had time to buy takeaway. So we decided to grab some Prosperity Burgers from McDonald's, which are quite sinfully yummy if I might add and headed into K-Box.

Pix of the Prosperity Burgers (courtesy of McDonald's Singapore)

Initially, I was really a bit shy as while I know most of the songs that were sung last night, I didn't know any of the songs well and even though my colleagues urged me to pick a song, I held back. But by the time Pooch persuaded me to sing the Beatles Let it be with her, the gin tonic had already made it's way through my system so after Faye Wong's 執迷不悔, Lee Cheng quite easily conned me into picking a Stefanie Sun Yanzi song to sing. She said she was going to help me sing 我要的幸福 but she cheated and I ended up singing it mostly by myself.... grrrr. =) Although, the others complained that I was too soft, I think I was quite loud =D, at least I sounded loud to myself. =) Whatever the case, even though I did a piss poor job at singing the song, I did enjoy it immensely. Even though I didn't pick another song to sing last night I still had fun listening to the others who all sang rather well and with great enthusiasm. The evening ended on a high with me joining in the chorus, rocker action and all, to S.H.E.'s Superstar.

I really had a blast last night and if they invite me to another karaoke session, I'll say yes. Meanwhile, I'll have to drag out my Stefanie Sun karaoke MTV collection and learn to sing more than just 我要的幸福. I think I have a Mavis Hee (许美静) karaoke MTV dvd somewhere and I have tons of cds too.

I'll end off this entry with these words...卡拉永远OK. It's the title of an Alan Tam song which I feel is quite appropriate for an entry on karaoke.

cheers

Short Update

As you can tell I've changed the template and updated the sidebar. Hope you like it.

Also, I'm not sure if my Comments are showing up fine and all and I changed the setting and saved it again. My Dashboard is still telling me funny stuff and I think I may have lost some Comments. So anyway, if you were trying to leave me a Comment, I'm sorry, I think it may have gotten lost in cyberspace. If you feel like it, you can try again. I think it should work now as I've just tested it.

Alrighty, am off to try and get an early night's sleep for once. =)

cheers

Procrastination

So.... still remember that in my previous entry I said that I was going to clean up my room and that if I got bored with that I might update the blog with more on my Guizhou trip? Well.... I lied. =D

Not only did I not do a single thing to make my room look less messy than Neo's home in The Matrix, I also did not update the blog with anything on Guizhou. Instead I spent my time doing nothing, chewing a lot of the chewing gum I brought back from China. =)

I was also watching some very old TVB series starring very young looking but now veteran actors like Liza Wang, Patrick Tse and Ray Lui just to name a few. It's actually not a bad series and I remember the song from my childhood. It's sung by Liza Wang and in pinyin the title of that song and the series is "Wan Shui Qian San Zhong Shi Qing". The English title of the series is "Love and Passion", something I didn't know till my mum rented the series.

I'm not much of a Liza Wang fan. These days I usually find her massively annoying but she's actually okay here. The one I really like in this series is Ray Lui who is good and very cool and you can't help but wonder why Liza Wang's character would pick wimpy Patrick Tse's character over him. =) Actually, to be fair, I know why she'll marry Patrick lah but I like Ray more. =)

Anyway, I've been working some more on the photos I took in Guizhou but I probably won't have time to update the blog for a bit as these photos have to be ready by tomorrow evening. I'm suppose to go attend a family Christmas dinner thing at my aunts' home and my sis-in-law will be there and I really do need to give her the photos on a dvd as I promised.

I've also been reading up a bit about Guizhou and doing some reading on the internet about it. I now wish I had recorded my Guizhou guide's commentary as I don't remember 3/4 of what she said about Guizhou. When I was going through the photos, I actually didn't know the name of one of the lakes we went to. A bit bummed about that. =(

Anyway, it is over and out for now. If I miraculously do finish on working on those photos I may continue with my Guizhou trip entries but we'll see.

cheers

recent updates...

I've made quite a bit of progress on my final project for my Maya course. But sadly, I've not really had the time to update the blog as I'm simply too busy to do it. But when I have time to, I will hopefully be able to upload the final picture of Set 1 and the 3 characters I've created so far. I still have Set 2 and animation and have a 20th Nov dateline. So I really am quite pressed for time.

Got bulldozed into doing some additional work at work next week and am really not terribly happy about it, nor am I looking forward to more work preventing me from finishing up my Maya project. But the marshmallow in me made it difficult for me to refuse to do this favour for people I consider my friends.... sigh.... I need to be nastier. :)

Lately, I've managed to watch some TVB series as I worked on my projects. Have finished Face to Fate, Maiden's Vow and Love Guaranteed. Of the three, I would say that Maiden's Vow was the worst and most over-hyped of the lot. It began with a nice concept but the script was terrible and it couldn't seem to decide how to tie 4 generations of a single family properly. In the end, it ended up being a superficial link, that is, they are 4 generations of a family, that is their link... yeah... whatever. Face to Fate turned out to be the most enjoyable of the three. While the series didn't exactly boast a very unsual storyline, the execution, the development, the performances all came together to form a very nice whole.

Anyway, that's it form me for now. I have to dash in a bit and need to get ready to leave. :)

ta ta

Lazy Days....

Been a little lazy these few days but now am impatient to getting back to really working on Maya. Moreover, I will have to hand in another assignment next week so I can't really laze about too much.

But the last few days were very relaxing and rejuvenating. Went cycling and swimming, watched an ATV tv series (Legend of Fang De and Miao Cui Hua), did some Maya homework and generally did everything in a leisurely pace.... nice. =)

A little bit about Legend of Fang De and Miao Cui Hua. This series stars Patrick Tam as Fang De (Fong Tak) and Amy Kwok as Miao Cui Hua (Miu Cui Fa). Amy Kwok has been one of my favourite HK tv actresses for a very long time. I like her almost as much as I like Ada Choi. Amy has a really great onscreen smile and everytime she smiles in that goofy but endearing fashion, my heart melts. =) All in all, it wasn't a bad series. Amy and Patrick were very good in their respective roles and they had a lot of chemistry. Their characters were also rather interesting with Patrick's character and another male character (Chan Chin Pang's Lui Lou Fu) being the most interesting in the series. I also really like Fong Tak's mother and the actress who plays her. She, Amy and Patrick had a lot of chemistry too and the three were quite hilarious together. Chan Chin Pang was also really good as Lui Lou Fu and Lui Lou Fu himself is a very interesting character. The Mainland actress who plays Chan Siu Wan, Mui Cui Fa's shi-mei wasn't bad too.

The major letdown for this series was in the last section after the birth of Fong Sai Yuk. If you know your Chinese tv series and your Chinese folk heroes then you'll know that Fong Tak and Mui Cui Fa are Fong Sai Yuk's parents. The first portion before the great 18 year leap forward deals with the lives of Fong Tak and Mui Cui Fa when they were young and when they first met.

The series succeeds in the beginning not just because of the very good performaces from the leads but also because it had a whole host of interesting characters and relationships. Except for Luk Tung Tong, the big bad guy in the beginning, none of the major characters are 100% good or 100% bad, instead, they are deeply flawed. But the series doesn't get bogged down in a quagmire of overly serious issues. Instead, the series mixes in the right amounts of drama and comedy to give these characters far more dimension then the usual tv series.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem many Chinese tv series suffer from and that is, they don't know when to stop. They really should have stopped after the birth of Fong Sai Yuk. The latter section involving the young people got rather boring as their story seemed so ordinary and juvenile compared to the generation before their's.

Alrighty, that's it for now. Before I go, here's two pix of my toy collection. =D

cheers

What a long day...

Ahhhh.... what a really long day at work. Slightly depressing too, sadly. I had an opportunity to go to the Singapore XBox 360 launch party but the person who was supposed to get my friend and I in was sick and so in the end it was a no go. I won't pretend that I was not incredibly disappointed. I think I was depressed for hours after I found out and threw myself into my work so I wouldn't have to think about it. Kinda silly but in the end it took an ep10 of Fate/Stay Night and the opening of Ichigo Mashimaro ep4 on my way cool Creative Zen Vision to cheer me up. =)

I've been gaming for years and while I won't call myself hardcore hardcore, I'm still pretty keen on it so I was really excited to find out that there was a possibility of going. It would really have been a bright spark in an otherwise so far none too great week.

Maybe I'll get lucky with the PS3 launch much later this year or early next year. =)

My Very First Entry

So I've finally decided to take the plunge and start blogging. Having kept a diary in my youth and having no shortage of comments and opinions which I've quite passionately presented and defended for years, I thought perhaps it is about time I start my own blog so I can force everyone to accept that there is only ONE way and that is MY way. =)

Anyway, I don't want to be that long winded. This is my first entry and I really only wanted to write up something so that I can see what it'll look like on my currently empty blog page. =)

enjoy