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On the 21st of December we celebrated Niki's birthday with a bang! It all started out rather dull and slow when I reached Frenchay as everyone there were in the midst of cooking and preparing for dinner. The momentum started when someone came up with the idea of throwing flour and water at the birthday boy after dinner. The idea was to get him blindfolded outside the house and while he was unsuspecting it, we would douse him with flour and water.

It all went well in the beginning when we managed to blindfold him. While some of us were creeping up to him to dunk him, Niki suspected that something was amiss and quickly darted away like a rat. Fortunately some of us were able to get to him in time and then all hell broke loose!

Everyone was scampering and hollering about as everyone was trying to get at Niki while avoiding the flour and the water at the same time. Some of us bolted back to the house and barricade the door from Niki who was rampaging about looking for victims with a fistful of flour.

After the melee, Niki was presented with his cake and gift; a formal shirt in a wine gift box.



Jon doing the Matrix...


A more subdued Jon.





Blindfolding Niki for the main event.


Niki met the tree the hard way.


The birthday boy going on a rampage.


The aftermath of flour and water.











Worn out.

It's probably not much of an indulgence but then again, its not everyday that you get to delight your taste buds with some premium chocolates. :P

Not all of them were bought by me though. The Thornton's Classics were my birthday gift and boy were they good... The chocolate was smooth and velvety which is definitely much better than the common cadbury chocolate bars that overpopulate the store shelves. Once you have tasted a premium chocolate, you'd never want to go back to eating chocolates which are made mostly with sugar and hardly any cocoa in it.

Terry's All Gold is another premium chocolate which has a slightly difference nuance and taste compared to Thornton. Comparisons between both of them are inevitable but in all fairness, both of them are a collection of various different types from their respective assortments. However, I find that the Thornto's seem to have more body and flavour compared to the Terry's.

The rest of the chocolates; After Eight, Kit Kat and Toblerone are for me to indulge on whenever I feel like satisfying my crave for chocolates. Four 400g of Toblerones goes a long way...




Terry's Chocolate. Couldn't show you what's under the bubble wrap since they're already in my stomach.










A closeup of the Thornton's chocolate. Tempting isn't it? :p

Here's Rowan Akitson in one of his skits before he became a household name in Mr. Bean. I find this skit to be the best among his other skits due to the comic timing of the drumming and the creativity in using invisible props.

Due to increased efforts to stop scanlation sites, direct links to Dear Boys Act II will no longer be available. Its unfortunate but life for the manga enthusiast has become duller.

Most people may know the n95 as a big fat brick which can't hold a candle against the iphone in terms of chicness and design. While I submit that the iphone is a better looking phone than the n95, in terms of design, the iphone can take a back seat. Unknown to most n95 users (up until now), Nokia had embedded a chip called an accelerator. What it does is to provide the OS with information regarding the orientation of the phone which then enable the user to take pictures that are always upright. If you thought rotating the iphone/k850i rotates the picture from portrait to landscape was cool, the n95 will definitely make your jaw drop.

Now, with a 3rd party application called Rotateme, the n95 can essentially be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise and cause the pictures to rotate in the same manner. Better yet, the Series 60 v3 platform that the n95 is based upon supports landscape mode in all of its inbuilt application such as messaging, themes and so on. This means that rotating the display from portrait to landscape and vice versa is not limited to the gallery and web browser only unlike the iphone/k850i. If you haven't got a clue to what I was rambling on about, have no fear for there's a video on youtube demonstrating rotateme.

Kudos to the person who made this all happened: samir


Rotateme in use:



The best has yet to come as Nokmote is still in the pipeworks. (I can't wait for it to be released yet) Watching it in action is a lot easier than describing it you so I'll leave you to the devices of YouTube.



Nokmote in action:

The surprise party that we had planned for him went down the drain since he anticipated it since the beggining. Our plan was to ignore him throughout the day and pretend to forget about his birthday but apparently growing older by a year had made him wiser somewhat. =(

All was not lost as he couldn't phantom what we had installed for him to mark his 20th birthday. Gleefully, John poured half a glass of vodka which the birthday boy sportingly downed in one big gulp. Next up was the customary aluba and after that the cake was cut and distributed to everyone present. The party had to be cut short since an assignment draft was due the next afternoon. But then again, no one said that we couldn't organise a belated birthday bash... :3



The birthday cake before Vincent had got to it... (Note the position of the rubber band)



Vincent cutting/(posing with) the birthday cake. (As before, note the position of the rubber band)



SHOO!! Pushing away a stray rubber band which wanted a piece of the birthday cake as well! xD

Congratulations on the marriage and may both of you live happily in each other's companionship until the end of time. Unfortunately I couldn't be there, because I'm stuck in Bristol (well I would have flown back to attend the wedding but then again, money doesn't grow on trees :p) but nevertheless, I'm glad that both of you are finally together after 2 years of courtship (or was it 3?) but anyway, congratulations again on this joyous news.

PS: pictures will be uploaded shortly as soon as I manage to lay my grubby hands on them...



One big happy family.

Surprisingly this shot was taken on campus grounds.



A rather intriguing graffiti which I had chanced upon while sightseeing in the city centre.
Edit: this is one of Banksy's various works.

I've successfully integrated RSS into my blog so now you can be constantly up to date with the RSS.

The ipod came in a nondescript courier packaging and I almost jumped for joy when I got it because I knew the ipod was in it. The small packaging belied what was in the box, an mp3 player cum video player cum photo viewer cum portable hard disk with a massive 80GB worth of storage onboard. (well it's massive especially when you compare it to my measly but dependable 512MB creative.)

I had to resist the temptation to just rip through the packaging to get to the ipod but thankfully logic prevailed and I managed to snap a few shots of me unboxing the ipod.

Although dated, the creative did have a few tricks up its sleeves such as an integrated FM radio, a user defined equiliser,voice recording, an integrated usb port and it uses rechargable/replacable AAA batteries which the ipod lacks. FM radio and voice recording are optional extras which needs to be purchased separately and a propertiery usb cable is needed to connect and charge the ipod. However the creative lacks space and the ipod provides it in spades. 80GB is nothing to be scoffed at since I have a music library that's almost 20GB in size and that I'm running low and HDD space (again). So the addition of the ipod was a timely addition to my assortment of electronic gadgets.

However, I'll not be retiring the creative anytime soon as I will be using it whenever I will be engaging in physical activities as jogging with a disk based mp3 player may just kill it as flash based players contain no moving parts . Therefore, shocks and jolts will not harm it compared to a disk based player which is more vulnerable to any sudden and strong impact.





















The touted "cover flow" up close.

Those are the two cats sitting perched on the fence belongs to neighbour. On the outset they might seem pretty tame, but they actually fight a lot with the obligatory hiss and spat heard every now and then.

Before anyone jumps into any conclusion, those burgers you see there was 100% made by me and not ordered from Mc Donalds, Burger King or any other fast food establishments and neither is it their latest burger to hit the market. The bottle on the left is a Yazoo chocolate milk and the background is my laptop since I didn't have any other place to take the picture other than my table.

Waiting for the bus


Houses


More houses


Some building


And another house...


Some random photo

Somehow I managed to successfully whip up something edible and decent for dinner. Thankfully no one got food poisoning because of my cooking. =)


1st, we need the ingredients



2nd, we need models to pose with the chef =p



Cooking in progress



and finally the finished product: Pasta!



Cheers!!

And that, is how you cook pasta; Bristol style.

I've managed to tinker around with blogger's coding to come out with a new look for this blog. (Well I actually copy and pasted someone else's work since I'm totally clueless about coding xml, html and what not... so credit goes to blogandweb.com for providing the template on which I'm currently ruining with my grubby fingers.)
As it is, the look is not complete so expect some minor changes here and there but don't expect anything radical since I can't code in xml to save my life.

And now we will resume normal service where I get to ramble as much as I want to, and you (the reader) are stuck reading it. :P
After a blogging haitus of three months, a lot of things has happened so I'll try not to bore you by keeping everything condensed and light
So here goes...

I'm finally done with my finals exams! w00t! Although the results weren't exactly top notch, I'm still glad I didn't fail any subjects. Gotta buck up and do better next year or its curtains for me...

Got an internship with Citibank. Pfftt... yeah right. Since most of you guys think that all is well and glam there, I'll give you the lowdown there. At Citibank, interns = cheap labour. To quote from a senior of mine, "the work sucks, but the name is good". Couldn't have put it more aptly myself. But then, as the saying goes, 'every cloud has a silver lining'. I'll be nuts not to be complaining about the workload but then again, it sure beats having to stare at the cubicle wall and trying to make out shapes from the wall like what I did on my first day or being the office barista or even being an permanent accessory to the photocopying machine like some of the interns in other companies. (hint, hint) =)
Now then, what exactly do I do in Citibank for me to be moaning about the workload? By creatively putting it, I'm doing an internal audit to ensure that the integrity of the documents have not been compromised and to report for any discrepancies.
Confused? I thought so.
To put it in layman terms, I basically make sure that the required documents are in order based on the master list and the master list itself is no walk in the park. For those who are familiar with excel, .xls files are normally less than 1MB in size. The master list that I have is 5MB. o.O And that .xls is not padded with any multimedia content. No siree... just pure text, text and more text.
My verdict? Although the work load can kill the faint hearted, having supportive and easy going colleagues eases the work and it gives me the strength to solder while trying to cut a path through the jungle of files.
So before you go shooting your mouth about how much of a taskmaster your superior is, try working in Citibank for a change. It'll probably teach you the true meaning of overworked and underpaid.

Got my UK visa done in one go. Hurrah for that. I'm lucky enough to be able to get it done in one sitting as compared to those who had their application turned down due to a plethora of reasons. The application was fast and hassle free and the best part was the application centre was only a 5 minutes walk from my working place.

Still awake? Congratulations!
With this you are now able to withstand the most boring and crummy moments of your life i.e. attending a lecture after a heavy lunch. We all know how this one goes... ;)

Until I decide to sit down and bang up some words on the keyboard,
Cheers!

I'm currently experimenting with html to change the boring and homogeneous blogger look to something else. Bear in mind that I have no prior experience with coding xml so the whole "new look" thing might look like a messed up attempt to deface someone's blog. :P

Whoever who came up with that quote had definitely not watched the Matrix before. :)

Edit: Unfortunately the html codes for the games are no longer valid so this pots is now officially a stub.

The 500GB in all its glory encased within a Coolermaster Xcraft along with my laptop

That's 1337 speak for the uninitiated which means "My hard disk drive trumps your!" (yeah I'm darn proud of it :))
I just got a new 500GB HDD to stuff my stash in and guess what? There's only 10GB of it left. I'm sure some of you would be wondering how on earth did I manage to end up with only 10GB of space. The answer is simple; I just chucked all of my dvd's into the hdd and viola! 10GB of space left. Things aren't looking too good as I'll need to find an alternative method to store my future data.

Lost a second thumbdrive in a row. The first casualty was a 1GB Pendrive. And then my spanking new Kingston which was only in my hands for 3 months went missing. If it wasn't bad enough, it went missing along with my student ID since I attached my thumbdrive to the lanyard. If anyone were to spot a person with a green Kingston and the letters mH3nG engraved on it, please return it to me as I have some important documents in there. If this keeps up, I'm going to have to weld my thumdrive to my handphone... At least I haven't lost my handphone yet...

For those who are clueless as to what an AVR stands for, it the acronym of automated voltage regulater. Its main duty is to ensure that the computer gets a supply of electricity from the power source free from any spikes or surges which can fry your computer to crips. What this means in laymans terms is that I can switch on my computer 24/7 without the fear of coming back and seeing it eminating copious smoke from the back. In other words, like it or hate it, you'll be seeing me online almost every day. Cheers. :)

The forum is back! and hopefully this time it'll stay up too.
You'll find it here: FET's forums

Welcome back Karsa! I'd always knew he'd come back to #fet though I didn't know when xD. And now, hang on tight cos' 325 is going to be released soon enough.

For those who are patiently waiting for 325 and above to come out, you might need to wait for a while. Karsa our ever dependable tl went awol without a word and so far any attpemts to contact to him have been futile. All we need are the tl and the editing has already been done. So whoever thinks they can translate japanese into engligh, please pm me. Until then, don't mark #fet as dead yet! We will return...(once we can get hold of a tl...)

Ah, a new year has downed upon us. What a better way to kick off the new year than to blog no?
Last year was a pretty eventful year, dabbled in many things, namely editing and blogging and the UWE newsletter finally came out after months of hell and torture of going though editing and reediting it and now I can watch the juniors squirm under the load of coming up with the next newsletter for UWE. xD
Till then, HAPPY NEW YEAR! and welcome to the year of the boar *oink* :P