Darth Vader With An iPod

2008 Commonwealth Essay

“Now, when I was your age,” I smiled, hoisting my grandson onto my lap, “we had a planet to call home”. “We had?” my grandson asked, exited about the new piece of news I had just blurted. “Yes, and a wonderful one at that,” I added. “What happened, grandpa?” I paused, my mind wandered on. The vivid memories of past days began to flood before my eyes, every detail crisp.

I was transported back to the events of April 17th 2030, commonly referred to as the day of reckoning, the end of Earth itself. The efforts of environmentalists like Al Gore were all in vain. No one could stop the inevitable. On that fateful day, I woke up to a rattling TV set, the president’s face shone bright. His message rang loud and clear. At that very instant, I jumped out of bed, woke my family up, gathered as much of my precious belongings as I could carry and ran down to my hovercraft. As we jumped in, a huge gorge dug itself beside us, molten lava spewing out. I kicked on the gas and put the peddle to the floor, speeding towards the nearest evacuation centre. My baby was wailing in the back seat of the hovercraft.

A mass of people greeted us. A deafening roar overhead turned our attention towards it. A 100 mega tonne body of metal bursts into the gapping void above. We would soon board one ourselves and take the journey into a new life.

Seated in the belly of the metal behemoth, looking out the window, I saw an army of ants scurrying around down below. When it came time for launch, I clenched onto my wife’s arm as our seats shook violently, as we were hurled up at a booming velocity. I now knew what being cooped up in a sardine tin felt like. As we exited the atmosphere, I looked out once again at the ball of blue mass we once called home. But it wasn’t a blue ball, it was now a flaming red planet shrouded in a thick cloud of grey smoke. An out roar of people crying filled the entire craft as we now headed to our new home, a cluster of space stations laid on the outskirts of the solar system.

I suddenly felt a tucking at my sleeve and was teleported back into reality. My grandson’s face now showed his angry side – he had a short fuse. “What Happened?!” I looked down at him and sighed, “We did”.

Laughing Baby

You HAVE to watch this!

Visiting My Grandparents

(CA entry: A moment you enjoyed with your family)

Family ties are very important to my family. That's why we constantly make an effort to visit my grandparents once a week, usually on Saturdays. We would visit both my maternal grandparents, paternal grandparents and all relatives who would also drop by. As my father is Malay and my mother Chinese, I get to experience and live in both cultures, broadening my horizon to both cultures.

Festive occasions are a plenty in my neck of the woods. I celebrate both Muslim and Catholic holidays, the most recent ones being Hari Raya Haji and Christmas. These are the best times to gather as a huge family and catch up on happenings in each other's lives.


Only a fraction of my paternal relatives


Maternal grandparents and some distant relatives

The next upcoming celebration is Chinese New Year, where I hope I can snap more pictures (they wouldn't let me before).

AEP Project - Poster Design

(CA1 entry: A difficulty you faced)

Projects have been piling up the past few days, the most urgent and time consuming one being the AEP poster design project and essay. My group, consisting of Li Keen, Hanmo and Marcus, stayed back today to do it in the Media Lab. My group was in a state of panic, trying to combat the time restriction and trying to arrange a date where we can all meet up. So we eventually rushed everything today.

As I had to go to the mosque today for my Friday Prayers, I could only meet up at 2pm. My whole group was there, with the exception of Marcus who had NCC Land training today. Kang Sheng and Tze Yang were also present to do their posters. Thinking that I could start straight away, I dived right into my seat, only to find out that there were many problems with the Mac computers. For one, the Safari internet browser was not loading the webpages properly and there were some errors with Photoshop CS2, the program we were to use to create the posters. My group was halted by all the problems. We started trying to 'troubleshoot' all the possible errors. Finally, after half an hour of clicking through program pages, the internet finally worked... for a while, but long enough for me to get my necessary pictures for the poster design. Photoshop finally worked, with the occasional harmless error messages. My group then started piecing together our posters.


An almost finished poster which I composed (spelling error in poster, woops), one of four in our groups series.

We managed to complete two posters, with one still being edited. The last one would be done on another day.

Amore E Musica

(CA1 entry: A moment you spent alone doing something you enjoyed)

I am a man of many hobbies. My weird hobbies can range from photography to building and programming Lego robots. But one of my most favourite hobbies has to be listening to music!

I love buying albums and completing a collection of albums of any given band. I have recently completed my 'Linkin Park' and 'My Chemical Romance' collections. I feel a sense of satisfaction when I complete a collection of albums.

Just yesterday, I had gone hunting for the final album needed to complete my 'Linkin Park' collection. The album titled 'Fort Minor: The Rising Tied' was very hard to find as it was an old installment and produced in smaller quantities compared to the other albums.


'Fort Minor' is a sub-band set up and featuring 'Mike Shinoda', the rapper for 'Linkin Park' as a plan to let other famous bands like 'Styles of Beyond' collaborate together to write and compose new songs. He also felt that he could not express his hip-hop side fully in 'Linkin Park'.

I had a stroke of luck yesterday at a CD shop in Parkway Parade. I actually did not go there to look for CDs but to actually complete an art assignment for school. We (my friends and I) were tasked with taking pictures of posters. I had gone to the 'Sembawang' music shop to take a picture of a poster pasted up in the shop and accidentally crossed paths with the CD by accident. After purchasing it, I went home and quickly ripped the CD into an MP3 format for my iPod music player. I then spent the rest of the day remembering all the lyrics of the songs.

My next goal is to complete my 'Jay-Z' collection. This will be a hard feat as his oldest album dates back to 1999!

How Far We've Come (Kaiser Mix)

Hi. I just created and uploaded my own remix of the song 'How Far We've Come' by 'Matchbox Twenty' using the Nu-Myx program included in their bonus MVI DVD from their latest album 'Exile On Mainstream'. Enjoy!



U-MYX.com

More at the microsite

iPod Touch-Abled

As the founder of this blog, I am proud to announce that this blog has been viewed successfully on an iPod Touch over WiFi. Everything on the blog is practically the same except for all widgets which use 'Flash' as the iPod Touch does not have a 'Flash' plug-in. This finding raises the possibilities of this blog viewed on other hand-held devices or on game consoles like the Wii (not tested).

First Day Of Choir In 2008

Notice anything different in the 'About Me' section of the blog? I have just been transferred to Tenor 2 from my previous section, Alto 2. Choir had a re-audition today (along with secondary trails for the Sec 1s), the first time this year that we are having choir practice. My falsetto (the 'girly' singing voice that most people have and don't want to admit) was wavering a lot and thus I had to be transferred. Jun Chong (JC) who was also from Alto 2, was also transferred to another section, but Bass 1 instead. We had both previously complained about difficulty singing in falsetto, and finally was transferred to more appropriate sections.

I felt like a Sec 1 again standing in Tenor, not knowing my parts well, nervous to sing out in case I make a mistake. A consolation was at least I was quite close with some of the Tenors and they helped me with some parts. Looking forward to my future in Tenor and hopefully qualify for the competition group performing in the Czech Republic later on in June.

Creating A Blog

Although I created this blog 8 months and 9 days before this post, I can still remember the first time I logged into Blogger. Back then, I had no clue about HTML, but from extensive research and help from my uncles, I have mastered all the basis of HTML.

My first template was a Scribe XML template which came with Blogger. I toggled with HTML and added a nice background which I was very happy with. But the cramp space of a two column blog made everything cramp. I soon found out a way of adding another sidebar, making it a tipple-column blog. But this in turn posed a new problem. As to provide maximum space for widgets and posts, I had to set the blog to be 900 pixels wide, as wide as a regular computer screen. Therefore, the background was hardly visible (on computers using a standard size screen, although still visible on wide screens) and the white blog which was left behind was too plain. I then decided to change to a black Minima triple-column XML template, the current one you see now.

I am very proud of the overall outcome of the blog and its efficient use of space.