Got my F1 tickets!

Just got hold of my F1 tickets; had to collect them from the nearest Singpost office. It has been a long wait since ordering it through the phone as it embarrassingly crashed its online system when it was first launch on 28 Feb 2008. After a four months wait and having almost all my 7 pre-ordered tickets confirmed by the guys...It came in a box, and it carries up to 8 F1 boxes which contains passes for each day. So if you ordered 1 or 8 tickets, it will arrive in the same box and opening it up comes a nice surprise. Here are some pictures for those who have not gotten into the F1 race fever. My order of 7 tickets came in 7 black boxes with 3 passes per day included with different colored neck strap for each day. Now that's cool considering I got the cheapest kinds of walk about and they look the same as the person in front of my queue with the grandstand tickets.




As of now, Ferrari is holding strong for another back-to-back constructor's title with 91 points and the distance second place BMW Sauber with 74 points.

So come Sep 28 2008, you will see me wearing red and carrying my trusty Canon Kiss X2, walking around the track trying my best to get some nice shots, in hope of crashes since being the inaugural night race and a city race.

Go Ferrari! (so far 5/8 wins) Go Massa! (3/8 wins) Go Kimi! (2/8 wins)
Just 10 more races to go!

Loving my PS3 - why? Because its cheaper than its worth!

Love to buy stuff for what its worth. And the PS3 is well worth its price. Sony just announced losing over USD$3 billion on production of PS3!

So if you cheapskates who bought it cheap..even more worth it. Got mine early at S$799 with no discounts and no white color!!

The PS3 main components consists of its RSX Cell chip (a 90nm IBM processor),and Blu Ray Drive which initial cost is about USD$100 each. 4 x Elpida XDR DRAM (Elpida is Hitachi spin off whereas the XDR technology is a better product from the RDRAM days from Rambus technology). Not sure about the DRAM prices but going at a whoppping 8Gb per sec it has enough bandwidth to support the 3-D graphics, superb digital imaging and advanced multimedia for the PS3 (>4 times the peak bandwidth of DDR2 RAMs)

Coming from a semiconductor engineering background, Sony invested USD$1.83 billion into developing and producing the RSX Cell chip alone.

Anyway support my ricebowl industry, go grab a PS3 and hopefully Sony recovers from the games/movie revenue as the pirates have not moved into this region yet.

New York New York - Here I come

What's about the New Yorker - an article recommended by my sister as a must read as I geared towards visiting her there.

Hope with my trusty Canon Kiss X2, I would be able to capture the essence of the New Yorker.

Forget Oil, Solar, Hydrogen, Nuclear

Seeing Kel's latest gadget of a personal solar powered charger which is used to charge probably his mobile, MP3 player and PSP and possibly in future even our bikes.




This is truly an amazing breakthrough for the future - using chemical reaction through a membrane electrode system, a Japanese company called Genepax created a water powered car which can go an hour at 80kmh on a litre of water - using sea, rain or even normal drinking water. - Read more on Engadget.

I hear the oil prices and those cut throat oil producing companies' stock prices dropping soon.



In the meantime solar energy should be the way to go to reduce our carbon footprint- a small traveling fold up solar power pack which could possibly power up a laptop and perhaps Kel's future expansion plans.

What a weekend...

Finally found some time to blog about my weekends. Well the last weekend that passed again started on a Friday night where we chilled out at Kel's place and had a chance to taste Yiwei's Opus one which was fabulous. It is a joint venture between Mondavi and Rothschild in Napa Valley and the wine has a mixture of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. We couldn't find the capacity to start on Kel's Glenlivet 25 yr old, which will come the next day over at Alvin's place.

So we managed to assemble 3 setups and played Command and Conquer through the night till the wee mornings since we couldn't figure out the new World in Conflict game we decided to move on to(til date, we still haven't figure it out - shall leave it to the student to figure it out).

So after my latest distraction surfaced from Hokkaido, it has been more $ flying out of the pocket with my Canon Kiss X2 (Japan) aka 450D (Europe/Asia) aka Rebel XSi (North America). The best reviews for the camera is found here at dpreview.com. Kel managed to get the Kiss X2 with the Tamron AF18-250mm F/3.5-6.3 Di-II LD Aspherical (IF) Macro Lens for me at Sapporo for a bargain compared to Singapore prices.

Actually I have been staying off this DSLR option for a very long time, knowing the huge cost it will entail and especially so when 3 of my buddies converge on photography without me. 3 good friends who know each other through me, one being my primary school mate - Kun, one being my neighbour - Jase and lastly my FYP/Uni mate - KP. They have been hanging out so often and improving on their skills. But the last straw came when I saw my colleague's honeymoon pics of New York using a D40, it was breathtaking. And I might be heading off to NY this fall to visit my lil' sis, who has been working there. Shall bring my mom and aunt there while I shall snap some great shots and get some nice Jordans.


Anyhow, enough lamenting and onto more rookie photo shots as I managed to gather some great ex-colleagues and friends to share with me some skills on a Saturday as we head out to Singapore's latest attraction - The Southern Ridges. We headed out to Henderson waves, where in the gloomy drizzling afternoon, we tried out best to capture some nice shots. So Kun and Jase decided to last minute go fly kite, their latest "interesting" hobby.

The guys started taking out their lens and lugging the tripods and camera bags as we make our way across the bridge. Their gears were impressive as I shyly pulled out my old video cam bag which I cleared to put my camera in - Daniel later graciously lent me his spare Canon bag and dry box to tide me over till I get my dry cabinet and a proper cam bag.

The sky was not doing us favours as we couldn't really get good shots but the guys then shared with me the magically powers of Photoshop and not discard any images, which might turn out to be nice with some post processing.


So as I scout around looking for subjects, such as ants and eventually became a peeping tom to Roy and his wife who patiently waited while we embark on the Men's discussions and sharing of the passion for photography. The macro and studio pictures these guys have is simply breathtaking. So share with you readers who are into photography as well:

My amateur colleagues - Daniel , Andrew , YC, and Roy.

Seeing that the clouds did not clear, we made our move besides Andrew who decided to stay for some night shooting.

And away for some BBQ at Alvin's rooftop and playing with his Canon 5D gear and lens, I managed to take some cute shots of his son, Zachary.




And my trusty N95 to capture some great BBQ shots of prime beef and cheese scallops with much more food...and of course the long awaited Glenlivet 25 yr old from Kel.

I am injury prone

Ok read an article online which explains why I am injury prone.

Forbes.com ranked the top 10 sports using the estimated number of injuries for people of all ages. The rankings do not take into account varying participation rates, which partly explains why many popular sports yielded the greatest number of injuries.

The numbers show, surprisingly, that of all the activities you might participate in this summer, or throughout the rest of the year, basketball had the highest estimated number of injuries, with more than 529,000 during 2006, followed by bicycling, at over 490,000.

The injuries reported ranged from getting elbowed in the mouth during a basketball game to a fractured femur following an ATV rollover.

So my recent 2 injuries have been from the 2 most hazardous sports. Besides my finger fracture from a basketball game with colleagues 2 months ago; I was cycling in the park 2 weekends ago and got clipped by an idiot rental biker who tried to be Schumacher around a bend and decided to take me as a cushion. And left me a long skin scrape which now looks like a tattoo design. This adds on to the numerous scars and fractures I have gathered over the years from cycling, inline skating, basketball etc.

Now I know why I am injury prone, and being an avid participant in the top 2 most hazardous sports does make my life more rugged looking; and I thought rugby and soccer were more dangerous. Move aside faggots.

Victoria student killed - injustice prevails in Singapore

This is really sad when you see a alma mater junior die and injustice is shown because he was young and the killer was a farking top civil servant who can't drive and has no conscience.

Read this blog and please see how injustice has been served in Singapore.

I rest my case when people say "Justice is blind, and the poor deserves no justice".
Read the blog's comments as well, revealing that the killer graduated from NUS Law School...maybe she has friends in high places. Sigh...

History lessons

A true patriot film? Or just nonsense? Shan't write much, if you have 45mins to spare and you do need a lesson on Singapore history, do watch it.

Study: Men prefer being solo over a bad marriage

Reading this study... and speaking to most friends, I think it works for both men and women, but anyway check out the article here and interesting numbers below:

1) U.S. figures showed that in 1980 about 6% of men aged in their early 40s had never married but this number had now risen to 17%.
2) Online survey found there are three groups of bachelors -- about 8% who never want to marry, 62% want to marry but of which half won't settle for anything less than perfection, and about 30% who are on the fence.
3) 4 out of 10 bachelors did not want children compared to 3 out of 10 wanting to be a father. The rest were undecided.
4) While 72% of respondents said they were not afraid of marriage, about half of them said the situation that scared them most was marrying the wrong person.

By the way for those readers who were born from a totally different era from me, that's Han Solo in the picture, yes indeed he bears resemblance to Indiana Jones - both characters are played by Harrison Ford and yes that's about 30 years apart.
Well I wanted to use him to represent this topic because, yes his name is Solo and the fact that I will always remember this line from him in one of the Star Wars Prelogy “Wonderful girl. Either I’m going to kill her, or I’m beginning to like her.”

I think it's easier to kill or lose the girl than to like one. Many fans have singled out Han Solo as being cocky and bad-ass, yet sincere. No wonder he's always my favorite character.