BBQ @ East Coast Park

BBQ @ East Coast Park, 21 Oct 2006

Firstly, thanks to everyone who made it to the BBQ.

Sorted in order of arrival...the people who showed up
Helen, Darren (Helen's hubby), Desmond, Dawn (Helen's colleague), Karen, Jiahui, Jiawei, Meifeng, Cuiyan, Qinwei, Shimin (My youngest sister), Jiemin & Xiaohui (Jiemin's GF).

As usual, everyone is habitually late. Things didn't exactly went as planned as usual. Desmond bought a new type charcoal that burns cleanly and the water dispenser that did not materialise, but hey ! The PSI (84 average) wasn't too bad and it didn't rain.

There was also this great evening sea breeze till 7pm that gave us a hard time getting the fire going. But once the fire reached the critical self-sustaining point, it was a smokeless fire. The aweful BBQ syndrome (the smell on your clothes) was missing, good riddance ! That's thanks to Desmond's lucky choice (or rather no choice), we had more people around the fire than at the table. The high carbon charcoal burns cleanly without smoke and soot, which will from now on, replace the cheap end of the mill charcoal we are used to.

Hopefully, the new menu suited everyone's taste. I have drew up the food menu with inpirations, or rather copy & paste from the Hawaiian BBQ now at Turf City. Throw in a couple of all-time favorites while doing the last minute shopping at Carrefour Suntec City (Helen, Darren, Jiemin, Xiaohui, Desmond) on Friday, we got the new and improved menu which cost only $12.50 per head. The sore missing all-time favorite was Otah.

Our 3 Ds-cooks (Darren, Desmond and Dawn) did a good job, so I didn't get a chance to make the food inedible aka charred. Kudos to Desmond, Darren and Helen for marinating the meat till the wee hours of 1.30am on Friday after the exhausting shopping spree. We have never been more glad to ditch the almost unused bottle of BBQ sauce we have bought. We no longer have to take the lazy way out : to put BBQ sauce on every single piece of meat.

And we shall not forget Jiemin's contribution of a tub of margarine and Xiaohui's laden for the drinks.

****

Some happenings :

For those who didn't know, Jiawei is now in NIE, training as a Chinese teacher. Mrs Seah will be so proud !

Desmond's tried to launch light sticks ICBMs at me while I was taking a stroll on the beach. But the he ended up getting a earful from 2 ladies near where I was standing when his ICBMs were proven to be as accurate as Mr Kim's made-in-North Korea missles. All 3 strayed off-target by 5 to 8 metres.

For those who didn't hang around till the end, Jiemin made an annoucement that he will be ROMing in the morning on the 24th December 2006. That's a fast whirlwind romance, really fast boy. Time to prepare Ang Bao for his customary wedding, I know he plans to hold one.

****

The night went well. All looks good, and not much food got wasted. Everyone was tired and some of us have to work on Sunday so we called it a day at 12 midnight. As good citizens, we cleaned up the place before we zao.

Afterthoughts

As time goes on, it became apparent that I should call these gatherings TGPS class gatherings anymore. In this case, we have 4 non-classmates (34% of turnout) and the group who usually turned up is pretty much the same. Using the current name alienates the new friends we have, and I believe we should expand this group of friends. As such, please think of a new name for this, as "Jiakhang's & friends gathering" sounds so lame.

Oh please contribute some Ang Kong as I did not take any during the BBQ

Hollywood's misuse of technological breakthroughs is pissing me off

Hollywood's misuse of technological breakthroughs is pissing me off

Hollywood's main job is to entertain us, and very often, new devices are featured in movies. Assuming the device worked as Hollywood advertised, by breaking as many as the known laws of the universe as required to make it work, I find it really hard to believe that the main character in the movie ......

FAILED TO ABUSE THE DEVICE !!!!!!

...... If only I can lay my hands on the device !!!!!!

Here's some examples

Click

In Click, Adam Sandler plays Michael Newman who is a architect who overworked himself for promotion and ultimately, as a business partner in his job. Ignoring the fact that he can be such a bastard to Donna Newman (Kate Beckinsale) aka the hot babe in PVC suit in Underworld, he displayed supreme stupidity when he got a universal remote control which does a couple of amazing things which affects the things around him.

1. Mute, or change volume of target object to Adam
2. PnP (Picture in picture view) of the world to Adam
3. Rewind to any part of Adam's life and play it back like a video
4. Fast forward himself or an object by going on auto-pilot mode
5. Pause the world and makes changes to it

And guess what, he is a complete moron to use the Fast forward button most frequently. It's is a complete waste of a device which is really a god-send. Instead of fast-forwarding, he should be pressing the pause button ALL the time !

By pausing time, relatively to the rest of the universe, you can do so much more in the same period of time ! Having infinite time will be so godly, just think about it ! Every single button on the remote is god-like powers !

The Prestige

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) were rival magicians whose intense competition ends up with Robert Angier winding up with Tesla's special creation for him : A device which can duplicate anything !!!!!!

The only catch is that the duplicate can appear anywhere within a couple of metres from the original to a hundred metres or so. No big deal, can always work around that, especially when the same duplicated item always ends up at almost the same spot as the hats and cats have shown at Tesla hideout. Instead of abusing the device, Tesla gave it away to Robert Angier, who in turned used it for entertainment...and killed himself everyday in the process.

The device can duplicate stuff right ? The most obvious thing is to duplicate $$$ !!!!!!! As a dumb cash-strapped scientist in the movie, he failed to literally make his own money. You can duplicate money, gold, diamonds, anything precious or valuable and he gave it away. He had to cheat Robert Angier for fundings and he couldn't think of it? I am totally stunned. Hey he is so broke that he have to provide his services to his host town for his lab electricity bills. With infinite cash, he can have his own nuclear plant to duplicate even more $$$ !!!!!!

He is a complete moron !!!!!!

Arrrgghhh Hollywood script writers are taking me as an idoit !!!!!! I want to be rich and rule the world ! Haaahaaa give me the remote or duplicating machine you dumbass !!!!!

... got carried away

Jia Khang the blur king

Do you read your bills ? I don't. And when i do, I do it because I have to. I just GIRO linked all my bills and make sure I got $$ to pay for them.

Andy, my Product Manager told me that my mobile claim was rejected because the accounts folks wants to see both pages of my mobile bill. You see, Singtel's mobile bills comes in 2 pages, printed on 2 sheets of paper.

Or I thought it still is, until this morning.

At 7.30am in the morning, 10 October, Tuesday, no matter how hard I try, I could not find the second piece of the bill which should have my second page of my bill. After digging through my 2004-2006 Singtel phone bill collection, I realised that I do not have the 2nd piece of my bill since 2006.

Until I saw the small print at the bottom of page 1,

Please turn over

Crap, they printed page 2 on the other side of the paper now. Ok, I know.

Sweet Revenge at Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut Dinner @ Thomson Plaza

It's 7th Oct 2006 Saturday, 7.30pm.

After my last lousy experience at Pizza Hut @ Ang Mo Kio, I gave the resturant chain another go at their Thomson Plaza outlet because we are giving our Siew Ling auntie and our lovely cousin a treat.

We ordered a triple chicken fiesta meal with a custom salad. While eating the pizza, we were told that the wrong pizza was sent to us, and we were given the correct triple chicken pizza on top of the 5/8 eaten pizza we have on our plates to make up on it.

Well, that's honest folks at pizza hut ! Honestly, none of us remembered what we had ordered anyway. Add a HSBC credit card discount and it's only $42 nett for a meal for 5. Cheap !

And the pizza is very good. Go get it if you haven't do so yet !

Boredom under the moon

6 Oct 2006, Mid-Autumn Festival Celebration Gathering

This will probably be the last TGPS gathering for this occasion, the 2nd year which we have this event. Many things didn't turn out well, and it's a disaster by any standards.

31 people informed.
16 responded.
6 turned up.

The ugly haze went from 40+ something PSI to 160+ PSI in the same night.
The sparklers didn't sparkle for more that 3 seconds.
People were simply too tired that day.

That's it folks, this is the last Mid-Autumn Festival gathering that I am organising.

Screwed Transcab Booking Experience

This is the most screwed taxi booking I have ever made so far, made to Transcab after a birthday dinner with my sisters.

I made a booking for a Transcab at Anguilia Park, Liat towers taxi stand. The booking was confirmed at about 9.45pm and I was told that the cab 5373 will reach in 5 minutes. I don't expect the cab to show up in 5 minutes but after 15 minutes of watching cabs from other taxi operators picking up customers who made taxi bookings after I did, I got pissed.

I am glad that I did, as the operator who took my call said that the cab 5373 did not manage find me at the taxi stand, and left after failing to speak to me on the phone. Hey ! That's new. I didn't even get a missed call or an incoming call on my phone and the operator claimed that the taxi driver tried to call me on the phone. I accepted his doubtful words and got another cab to come instead as it's useless to debate this point. The usual "The cab will be coming in 5 minutes" phrase was used, though it's really hard to achieve in practise. Maybe it's a dumb company policy to do so.

The next cab did show up in 10 minutes, which is reasonable. During conversation on the ride back home with the taxi uncle, he pointed out that the (Transcab) taxi drivers are not able to call customers as they do not have customer's numbers. To contact the customers, they have to do so through the operators. Well Comfort drivers are able to do so, but Transcab can't ?

This clearly shows several points of conflicts. Cab 5373 was supposed to be at the taxi stand, couldn't find me, made a call, failed to get through and left.

1. Cab 5373 did not came to the taxt stand at all.
2. The only Transcab that came around were carrying customers already, just passing through.
3. If cab 5373 is making a call while trying to locate me, I should have seen the cab.
4. If cab 5373 actually tried to make a call, I should have a incoming call or missed call.
5. The 2nd taxi driver claimed that drivers do not have customers' contacts, which conflicts with the words of the operator.
6. Even if the driver do not have the customers' contacts, they should have updated the operator to check the situation, but nobody did anything.

Come on, if you want to lie to me, at least come up with a better story. Either the operator messed up, the first driver screwed up, the operator and the first driver tried to play punk or both the drivers and the operators didn't tell the truth.

My experience with Comfort is positive compared to Transcab. When Comfort can't locate me, the driver can still call me up and make arrangements. Transcab ? Somebody(s) screwed up and everybody keep quiet. Very impressive.

[Deleted Transcab number from phone]