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!