Followed my dad's car to work today, and so was in the work area very early.. decided to visit my fav BKT stall instead of starting work early... the taste of yew char kway dipped in BKT soup is unbeatable...

Greed

Pain! Was greedy and refused to trim my long positions taken over the past month... SGD4k+ in paper gains wiped out today... :(

Kei

Look what a neighbour just bought... appears as if it could fit lengthwise in the width of the car porch...

DB5

Yummy!

Gotta start saving

T-4 weeks to holiday! It's my first year-end at this company, and I really hope that things will slow down, so that I can start making firm plans for the holiday...

HJ is so nam nuah (hokkien word which is pretty much untranslatable, but approximates to lackadaisical and couldn't-care-less I guess) that I'm making all of the plans for the trip, but the good thing about that is that we will go to the places I wanna go, and do the things I wanna do! :o)

You learn new things every day..

What the past 2 weeks in the army has taught me:

a. 1 chicken can make 9 pieces of KFC chicken - 2x thigh, 2x ribs, 2x drumsticks, 2x wings, and 1 breast...

b. this one I know already, but it's amazing how many people forget primary 3 science - when the eggs first come out of the hen, they are soft, and that's how the cockerel manages to fertilize it... so strictly speaking, if you are a religious one who believes that you cannot take an animal's life, etc., hen-only farm eggs are fine!

c. you will always get a better price when you trade in your phone at an ah beng handphone shop than at Singtel / M1 / Starhub - my 6230 would have gotten $140 from an ah beng instead of $100 from M1

d. just about everyone who bought a Nokia N73 has been having software problems with it!

e. if you have guts, you can tailgate another car very closely as it gets past the car park barrier
and the barrier will not come down 95% of the time, i.e. free parking!

f. some people snore louder than they speak

During my time...

Finally done with what I think is my second-last reservist training ever! Aching all over from the missions this week... more about that later perhaps, but now a photo of the quality of army food these days:

As you can see from the photo, army fish & chips now actually come with a wedge of lemon, and tartar sauce! During my time, we'd be grinning if the fries were actually soft enough to be edible without soaking in the soup first...

India

I had some matters which came up over the week whilst I was at reservist which needed attention, and it's bad but I'm the kinda person who works much better when I get to highlight and scribble stuff on the printed documents / emails as compared to looking at it on a computer screen...

Which all meant that I had to come back to the office... I drove here, only to realise that they had locked the front entrance, i.e. the lock at the bottom of the door, in addition to the cardkey access system... I hadn't brought my keys with me, and was cursing and swearing when I drove all the way home to dig up the key... luckily I wasn't able to reach my office manager on the phone when I tried to call her on the way down the lift, for I would likely have raised my voice if I had gotten the chance to speak to her...

Anyways, when I came back to the office after having gotten the key, the new security guard asked me to tell her my name and NRIC number... having spent a week at reservist, it was very natural to say alphabets by their international "codewords", e.g. "alpha" for A, "echo" for E, etc. And since NRIC number ends with "I", I said "[blah blah blah] India"... she looked up and gave me a death glare.... She was an Indian, and must have thought that I was making fun of her..

ooops.. :D

Happy Feet

I definitely wanna watch this show!

Anyways, we saw the trailer when we had a night's off last night, and you know what? To make the female penguins look more feminine (and I guess, recognisable), they would make the white belly flanked by the black parts hourglass shaped! See this photo for an example! Smart eh?

On a separate point, when me and my reservist buddies watch a movie during a night's off, it's always a race to the bottom in terms of the quality of the show we end up watching.. firstly, chances are someone has seen the good movies, and secondly, intense bargaining goes on before a compromise situation is finally reached... in all likelihood, the compromise is a horror movie.. we ended up watching The Covenant, which honestly wasn't that bad.. what was nasty was this chinese ghost movie we caught this Feb.. it was lame beyond belief!

Time...

Got a call from LT last night to say that YG's dad had passed away... he was only 50-something... it makes you really think about the mortality of your own parents... I kinda forgot about CS when I mentioned to YJ today that it's the first time in ages that the parent of someone my age had passed on, and I guess somehow I mentally excluded that situation because CS' dad had been ill for quite a long while... but YG's dad was ok up till last Wednesday... and I guess it's a little worse when I was just sitting at the same table with him 1+ month ago when YG had his ROM + tasting dinner, and seeing how he was trying to make conversation with the bride's parents...

Ong

I grabbed a bunch of hangers to bring to reservist, and guess what I found!?

So these hangers must be 10 years old! This particular one was amongst a huge bunch of hand-me-downs from Ong HL when my platoon mates ORD-ed in Dec 1996 and left me behind in the unit...

Ten Hutt!

Every year, the thing which I need for my reservist, and which I certainly brought home but cannot find when I need them, are my garters... in this case, they are green, and no one's going to put one dollar bills in them... so I've got no choice but to use 2 rubber bands on each leg until I get to camp to buy them tomorrow...

Pray for me that it either does not rain or rains all the time!

Beans

Breakfast du jour... surprisingly good! too bad the toast wasn't toasted enough... my own fault...

Root Beer Float

Photo of the office pantry fridge... a few of my colleagues obviously had a root beer float! And container we have in the pantry to collect used glasses had 3 tall glasses complete with long spoons..

Gump's

Someone told me to check out this store called Gump's when I'm off on my USA holiday in San Francisco...

Their Christmas stuff is really nice! But the prices definitely ain't...

hmm...

At dinner with CS last night, we finally found the answer on how / why you see that when one half of an old(er) couple makes a statement or does something which ordinarily would be begging for a put-down, the other person generally just ignores him/her...

Cos: (i) it's just easier / far less grief that way, if you can let it slide, and (ii) after more than 15 years of being together, there ain't that much nonsense you haven't seen before..

Makes sense?

Now and then...

Still haven't mastered using the camera in my phone... but this is the sight I see everyday on the way home... right next to my office... it doesn't look that sleazy inside (not that I've been in, but it's not that hard looking through a glass door into a a darkened area), but really funny seeing a 80s style place like this (complete with the red rubber mat that says "Welcome" big big) in the middle of the CBD...

Loot!

Back in the good old days, it was quite easy to make money off this site called MTurk... I'd accumulated around USD60 in credits, and was dying to find a way to spend it, and so I bought these! Finally managed to pick them up from a friend at lunch today... the Kermit is a golf woods head cover... cute right? Tho it'd deduct 10% off whatever credibility I aspire for on the golf course... heh.. As for the GMAT textbooks, it's 690 points or bust!

NBCB

Wah lau! There was an IPO which closed at 12pm today which I thought was the best of the trio closing yest and today....

I distinctly remembered applying for it, but it turns out I only transferred money from 1 bank account to another to aggregate the funds to apply for more shares, but omitted to apply for the shares itself!

It's a totally nasty day!!!!

NB

I was elated that, for the first time in my life, I was worthy enough for a stockbroker I know to offer me 10,000 placement shares for a certain IPO... but I didn't know that I could not also apply for the public offer of the same company, which causes both applications to be rejected.

There goes a few hundred dollars in potential profits, not to mention the $52 application fee and $60 bottle of wine I bought the said stockbroker...

I'm so cross!

Harry

Ain't it interesting that Eighth Wonder has decided to call its IR in Sentosa Harry's Island?