when you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you
social.therapy.mirror.search.random.space.Archive for October, 2007
Congrats Wendy and Leo being wife and husband!!
Thanks for inviting us and here are some of the pictures from that night. The rest you can grab from Facebook. That’s right Wendy Lang…facebook, facebook, facebook, facebook, facebook…and one more time for good measure, facebook!!
For those who missed the church wedding, namely Gabrielle Tay, Adrian, Gary Gan, Clement Teo, Marc Ha and Janice Wong:
Wendy walking with her bro; Playing with effects and got a 1960’s shot; Wendy and Leo happily walking out of church.
And there were of course the fun shots…
The event hall @ Chijmes – nice place. Wendy didn’t have a good account manager handling the occasion though. Pssst…I heard her name is Jenny Ng. Boycott!! OR at least ask for a better account manager to handle your wedding. You didn’t hear this from me though.
Group photos!
Toast to the audience. Leonard is thinking “heh, this is easy.” Wendy is thinking “don’t spill it on my $20,000 dress, can already.”
And finally girls being girls…they had to have the “kawaii” photo moment.
And now I have the pleasure of presenting…the Apple object
Simply known as the iPhone.
So this isn’t intended to be a review/preview of the iPhone. More of a”first” look, or possibly 23,45067th look, if you are an Apple fanatic. Btw, all pictures taken with a Nokia N95 and a Exilim Z70.
First off, I like what I see. The graphics, icons, logos, intuitive UI is really simple to learn and start to use. Honestly, this is a device that I didn’t even bother with the manual. I left the box packaging in the office, if not I would have taken photos of that as well. If there’s one thing Apple figured out, it’s how to make their product stand out from the minute you put your hands on the box.
Couple of screenshots showing the calendar, the clock, photo gallery, general settings, iTunes and email. Functionality is rather bare though, I have to admit. After using the Nokia N95 for some time and getting used to widgets and freeware applications etc, it feels rather basic to only have applications dealing with time, place, weather, sms being on the main screen.
Someone I know would read this and go “That’s cos all the Americans ever do with their phones is make phone calls. They get stumped when it plays music or takes a picture.” Would you agree?
However, two applications that Apple did do right belongs to that category called Internet (through Safari) and YouTube. Both are icons placed on the main screen and the attention to detail here is pretty evident. I wish my Nokia N95 would surf the net and view YouTube the way the iPhone does. Allow me to show you why.
Webpages are beautifully render-ed and when you flip it horizontal (Apple terms it “cover flow”), the screen resizes to fit.
Earlier, I mentioned attention to detail on the browser. Actually I meant everywhere they decided to put an icon to designate a task. The one thing that strikes me over and over again in the iPhone, is that there are hardly any words. If you want to do an action, click on an icon that 8 out of 10 times, is an image that tells you what it will do.
Like when you open two browser pages, you get this ->
Finally if you are wondering about the size of the phone, it fits nicely into my jeans pocket and the palm of my hand, but in case you still need dimensions they are:
- Height: 4.5 inches (115 mm)
- Width: 2.4 inches (61 mm)
- Depth: 0.46 inch (11.6 mm)
- Weight: 4.8 ounces (135 grams)
Or you can look at pictures and “agar” it out.
And finally, if you really want more information on how it looks like on video, you can check out the iPhones website for their “how to” guides. It shows the functions available and actual product. Click here to go to webpage.Btw, I like their website layout alot, especially with the fingertips movies. Why can’t the other vendors do this and save all the worthless usage of paper? Ahh..the poor trees.
Damn, it’s too basic. I shall keep the faith with articles like this one. The iPhone needs applications and functionality!! Looks and touchscreens only last that long. *makes a short distance between fingers…a really small short distance*
Quick photo-upload – Gary’s birthday celeb@ Brewerkz
Here’s the group photo from Gary’s “surprise” birthday celeb last month at Brewerkz. He kinda figured out really quickly that it was a surprise.
Probably because 1) there were at least three ex-texties that have not met each other before together since becoming “ex” 2) we just “happened” to be in the same area that he and Janice were having dinner at 3) we didn’t look surprised enough.
Happy birthday again bro! Try and stem the tide of dying brain cells. Would like some kind of intellectual conversation when we are 60.
The birthday boy and his lady, Janice.
Good dinner at M Hotel…
…”The Buffet” yesterday which led to indigestion today.
First time I have ever bought Eno fruit salt to help with indigestion and surprisingly it worked! I find myself thankful to GlaxoSmithKline for producing something that works the way it is supposed to and which allows me now to drink my coffee in peace.
LT 10 birthday celebration!
So we trudged to Sentosa last Sat to this little restaurant called Coastes to celebrate the LT10 Oct babies’ birthdays. Can’t believe how much Sentosa has developed over the past three-five years! I remember driving there as part of a convoy of cars back in NUS when we (i.e. LT10 group) were really bored, tired of slacking in school and all we had were about cars. Think I was the last car at some point and I kept telling myself “don’t look into rear view mirror”. Didn’t help that no one wanted to follow me in the car back then. They all wanted to stick to the ‘lead car’.
We made our way to Coastes via the “new to suaku me” monorail connecting VivoCity to the Beach Stop. Fine. It’s called the Sentosa Express, a little birdie called the website just educated me.
Anyway, there’s a story behind Coastes, which I feel obliged to share. I called them up about 3 weeks before last Saturday to make a reservation for about 20 pax. They told me that they didn’t take reservations and dry-ly told me that if I wanted an “exclusive” table that I needed to have a minimum spend of $3,000. I was like “WTF!”. So of course, I was rather enthusiastic about telling them “no” as well. To cut a long story short, Tze Wei had to go an hour earlier. XP followed him to get a free ride. And we had 2 people try hold a table for 20 people on a Sat night. Which is tough …anywhere else but Coastes. They must have had enough empty tables to fit another 3-4 groups of our size away from the crowd but they wouldn’t take our reservation. We should have gone to Cafe del Mar instead.
Back to the birthday celebration, it was fun to have the whole group out together. It gets really tough to gather 20 people for a Friday night out especially when 50% of them do not check emails. Here are the pics!
So we reached Coastes and it looked like kinda “not as fantastic as we thought” that YL kinda had to ‘rub’ her eyes. Or is the correct word ‘dab’?
Birthday babies
So dinner started and Sam and I actually did come up with a challenge for them to win between $70 – $100 to do the following:
1. To find and kiss an angmoh. If he/she kisses lip to lip, then bonus $10.
2. To convince a bartender to give a free drink to the birthday kid. Just the effort of trying is enough to pass the task but if they actually get the free drink, then bonus $10.
3. Scavenger hunt of 3 items (items to be photographed) - a bikini, a tattoo and someone wearing braces. Bonus of $10 given if they can get a picture of a Siloso Beach Resort room key/key card.
But of course, no one really tried doing any of that. Maybe weshould have raised more pot money? So by democratic rule minus the birthday babies, we decided to get them some flaming fun instead.
The sequence we are all familiar with as follows:
And time for the customary group shot. So retro.
Then it started raining, so we adjourned to my place for drinks. Instead we ended up playing Wii at 1am.
That was the beginning of course. This was what happened at 4am. Or was it 5am?
But end of day, we always have fun. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. *grin*
PopOut 2007
I had a rather interesting evening yesterday attending PopOut 2007. It was held yesterday at the Suntec Convention Centre and is an event organised by TDM.
Didn’t take any pictures so this is going to be a text-only entry.
Continuing to be impressed that Singapore actually has a solid community of entrepreneurs ready with commercially viable products. Not that I doubted the intellect of our local talent but rather I have always narrow-cast myself into the services area of start-ups. My yardstick has always been about whether a service can be sold. Barring the arguements on passion vs. revenue, I am still inclined towards commercial viability. And in this day and age, “hard” products can also be marketed as “soft” services.
Anyway, the presentation that really impressed me was by Harry (hope I didn’t spell the name wrongly). He is the creator of site bookjetty.com, an amazing site that aggregates results of available books from various online resources. Among them amazon.com, National Library of Singapore and get this, even the National Library of Congress.
Now, while realistically speaking, me in Singapore will find it hard to want to travel to US just to get a book available there, at least I know that the book exists. And in this day and age of international friendships, or rather, just friends that are filthly rich and love to travel, it might not be so far-fatched for someone to help obtain a copy of a book from another country, LEGALLY (I stress) lift/copy the necessary information and pass it on.
The site catalog has several other cool functions like book reviews, ranking systems, tagging systems. Another functionality that blew me off was the SMS/Print function that lets you send a free sms to yourself or print a search result complete with the book title, book code and library abbreviation in-country. And how Harry did this was rather innovative as well, using another site’s sms engine, but that’s for the PopOut 2007 attendees to know. =)
Someone go invest in this guy already.
