No more Tao Huay (beancurd) for me

Ok brothers, no more drinking Vitasoy or eating Tao Huay at Geylang Yong He anymore! A Harvard School of Public Health study has shown that eating or drinking a lot of products containing soy and isoflavones can result in reduced sperm count among men.

"There was an inverse association between soy food intake and sperm concentration that remained significant after accounting for age, abstinence time, body mass index, caffeine and alcohol intake and smoking," the study said.

Luckily I've been cutting down on Soya for years now, since it was known to increase chances of gout.

Out of Australian NBL

I was about to post a few ideas to end my long awaited Trilogy post on the Slingers, before I get the bomb from the Singapore Slingers' press release. This is hot off the press, just came into my email box. Besides Sydney Kings and Brisbane Bullets pulling out, Slingers have now decided to leave the franchise and possibly taking on the likes of professional teams from Korea, Philippines, Japan or China instead. This is due to the rising travel costs of late due to the shitting fuel surcharges airlines have imposed on travellers to ensure profitability. Which makes it hard to justify flying teams across the oceans to play basketball.

Anyway looks like we have to look towards Slingers Challenge Series 2008/09, where teams go for prize money of $10,000 to pit against our newly formed squad. I was hoping to get a few more zeros and hopefully form my own squad to try at winning! Ha...or at least attract an NBA team over! If the amount is not enough to cover the air travel for visiting teams as well, I really wonder what kind of teams will be willing to travel for a basketball match and how far can it stretch.

Cuil - New word for search

Cuil - the latest search engine tipped to beat Google

This new Web search service is started by former Google engineers who have sharpened the searching tool by searching for and ranking pages based on their content and relevance. What they do is find a page with your search keywords, and stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Making helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want. Tom Costello is Cuil co-founder and chief executive.

I remembered when Google first came about and I was complaining about the other search engines like Yahoo which have flooded the website with ads and are slowing down.
List of search engines we used to have, that I still have in my old bookmarks; see if you can remember them, though I am not sure if all of them still exist:
1) Catcha.com
2) Altavista
3) Excite
4) Hotbot
5) PlanetSearch
6) Lycos
7) Webcrawler
8) Gnn.com
9) Project Cool
10) Goto.com

Anyway in case you are wondering what the hell is Cuil - It is an old Irish word for knowledge. Coincidentally, or not, Google launches their own Google Knol which is akin to Wikipedia. It was announced on December 13, 2007 and was opened in beta to the public recently on July 23, 2008. So be it Knol or Cuil, fire away to a speedier learning process.

Loving photography

No more picking on local politics and misplaced citizens' money - seriously with all the biased journalism, I don't care if its now a monk stealing charity money or government making "long term" investments anymore. Seriously, the world is just getting too chaotic or confusing, I am finding things to seek refuge from. Everyone should go pick a hobby - like go learn how to dance or pick up vocal/drama classes!

As such, I have been busy picking up photography of late. It is not just a mere 5 mins fervour, but something I have always loved, but never been able to afford it. It was the fact that I have been travelling so much, but never been able to capture the essence of the places I have been, and an ex-colleague managed to bow me over which their honeymoon shots in New York. And since I will be spending about a month there, I thought what the heck and since Kel was heading to Hokkaido, let's just get it. Seriously until I step into it, I got to realised how KP,Jase and Kun managed to burn $ so easily into this hobby. So I just make use of what little budget I have, which ex-colleagues advised pretty well on just getting the simple day-to-day stuff.

My gear so far is:

1) A Lowepro Stealth Reporter D300 - This is a great shoulder bag, big enough for 4 full lens, space for cards, all weather cover, top zip for fast removal of camera.
2) Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens - Lightest and I believe the cheapest EF lens available from Canon. Great for sharp shots like this:

3) Spare batteries and SD HC cards and a lot of creativity + patience.
4) Tamron 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II - This is a great buy advice from Daniel and Thomas, whom felt that I needed a travel zoom lens for my New York trip. And these are the pictures I have been taking from this great lens. Have fun seeing my pictures captured over the past weeks.

Just from this Tamron zoom lens.
At the Zoo:




At the Birdpark:



At the Fairfield Methodist Funfair:





Hope I can capture some great architecture shots over at New York.
Left one lens to buy - Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X (the world's fastest and sharpest ultrawide lens for small format digital cameras) - Just need to find the $ to get it, early Birthday present anyone?

Imperial Herbal Kitchen for my farewell

It was a nice conclusion to my 2 years plus stint at Xilinx. My US boss managed to fly to Singapore and join us for my farewell dinner which was held at Imperial Herbal Kitchen located at Vivocity. The eventual bill was a whopping S$1436, where we ate fancy scallops, Buddha Jump over the Wall soup, lamb chops, etc..it was just wonderful.

I like this restaurant. Given the fact my parents have brought me here as a child for my pre-exams nutrition meals back when it was located at Metropole Hotel. This was a restaurant where they prepare dishes which are healthy and can be specific to your needs. Need to be rejuvenated? Need to be working hard later in the night?? They have all the herbs and even a deer "whip" which will work wonders for you! That is if you are a guy! But ladies can have those replenish blood or beautifying, cleansing soup!

Terminator Salvation

It has been a salvation no longer needing to work in the east after over 6 years of working in that area though I have changed companies 3 times! But with the ERP popping all over town, I am "enjoying" taking public transport after such a long absence. Seriously to entice people to take more public transport, the gahmen better buck up. To take over 1hr to get to a location which I take 1/5 of the time to drive there and find parking, its seriously time wasting. I can't wait for the Circle line to start, as a station will be just outside my place as well as the future Thomson line.

Anyway here's a sneak of the upcoming Terminator Salvation - Christian Bale is getting all the good shows lately...

Bite the bullet

So with the rising costs around us, the government has repeatedly ask companies to pay one time inflation packages to help citizens offset their increasing expenses. Yet today - Finance Minister T Shanmugaratnam warns S'pore may face 2nd round of inflation if workers' pay is raised. More pay is not the answer!

Seriously, if more pay is not the answer, perhaps a reduction in GST, or ERP or even the waiving of fuel surcharges would help.

I do not understand the policies our government is undertaking, be it monetary or fiscal. The conventional anti-inflation strategy would be to tighten demand by cutting government spending or raising taxes. But this would drain income from an economy already suffering from higher oil prices. The result would have been a sharp rise in unemployment. And if government was to chose to counter the loss of income caused by the rising oil prices, they would have have to increase spending or cut taxes. Since neither policy could increase the supply of oil or food, boosting demand without changing supply would merely mean higher prices, which is what we are observing right now.

First of all our government is increasing spending on projects such as F1, new sports stadium for the Youth Olympics, IRs, saving foreign banks from collapsing; followed by raising taxes and withholding subsidies. So the strategy employed is totally unconventional, and confusing because we have to deal with higher goods' prices, higher taxes and competing with government projects for the limited resources (for example: its harder and more expensive now to get electricians or plumbers, skilled trades which are earning more from the extensive construction boom). Which basically means - we are screwed. No increase in pay, and paying for things which are going to be priced way above the means of the poor.

In my previous post, many countries have either stopped projects or increased subsidies to enable their citizens to cope with increasing living costs.

I am just wondering how Singapore would fare in the coming months. And I hope our Finance Minister has more up his sleeves besides telling the people to bite the bullet or source for alternatives - cheaper fuel, cheaper housebrands..my suggestion would be a cheaper government. A 20% reduction in the entire cabinet and MPs' salaries, allowances and expenses can go a long way. Or maybe hold a retrenchment exercise like my company and let go of stagnated or ill-performing labour in their ministries, especially those Superscale salaried officers.

Do what you have to do, to get what you want!

Was watching the Great Debaters, a film directed and acted by Denzel Washington(acting as Melvin Tolson) and funded by Oprah Winfrey, over the weekend. It was based on a true story of some African Americans educators in the 1930s. With Forest Whitaker acting as James Farmer Snr, an educator at Wiley College, one of only twenty five African-Americans who held Ph.D.s at the time. It was simply a great feel good movie which came across to me with bits of Mississippi Burning and Dead Poets' Society. You simply cannot go wrong with 2 Academy Award winning actors.

Just remember this line in the movie by James Farmer Snr to Jnr:

You got to do what you have to do, in order to get what you want.

This was in reference to him having to do his homework diligently, in order to get ahead in life; which I guess led him to much greatness later in life. I wished my dad had said that to me back during school days when I was playing too much! Haha but then again, in these times, James Farmer Snr's method wouldn't have probably worked and perhaps led to a greater rebellious streak in me.


Do try to get hold or rent the movie to watch.

Counting down...

我静悄悄地来,我匆悄悄地去...
想要看世界有多大

Sunday F1 pre trials

Ready...Get Set....



Vroom....

What's more fun than cycling 45km at east coast park on a Sunday morning? Driving 100km along ECP and watching a loser patiently burn in his new ride while I reved right ahead. Hahah... congrats on your new ride. Now be patient and wait out the 1000km and let me get my back lights first.