Author Archives: Kevin L

For those who are not sure, Vib is not gone, and neither is Propagator or this subdomain going to sink into a state of total passive-ness. I was out this few days, slacking away instead of mugging at home. I was going to the Art Museum on Friday (because they have free admission on tha day from 6pm – 9pm), when I saw two rats fighting out on the patch of grass beside th pavement to my bus stop. Armed with a camera (which I intend to use when I am at the museum), I took half a dozen shots of the two creature fighting like crazy. One of the photos I took even revealed some blood on one of the rat’s nose.

Here’s one of the best picture I shot. No blur, no mess, and almost perfect lighting. The dumb thing is the cigarette butt in the picture. Stupid Singaporeans, they know they probably get fined when they litter on the pavement since it is so obvious so they simply dump their ‘butts’ on the grass patch. What a nuisance! So much for a gracious society.

I thought the rat on the right has quite a nice pose, but a pity its tail was too long to be captured fully. Its limbs are all visible and I was quite close to the two guys when I shot them. I saw the same couple chasing each other a few days back when I was going to the venue of my community service, also near the bus stop. I guess they never finish fighting.

In life, some pairs of people, friends, buddies, or enemies, they will fight each other out, comparing in almost everything. In the end, they finish their fight realising how everything have been meaningless though all those competition has helped allowed them to rise in the society. The lives they wanted were simpler.

Yes. I am back, but not for long. I am still in Singapore, not overseas, not with Mib and definitely still going to school daily. I have not been blogging lately due to the immense workload that has emerged after this rather long June Holiday. I have to announce that my blog shall cease to have new posts until further notice, though Dr Croc may still post essays or articles.

This temporary cease in operation may last for about 4 months, when I complete all my education for the year. The good news is that after that, I may be writing so much, on a daily basis that no one would have the time to finish reading the posts. Anyways, Vib will be unable to reply any request, comments, or shouts for the time being.

Though not as plain as Mib’s blog, I always thought my blog lacked pictures. Not fanciful ones that crash the browsers loading your page or images that repeat in almost every post. And of course not a colorful background depicting a sky then having ‘Icy Wind’ as your blog title. Those are all disgusting. By the way, having no images or graphic in your blog theme actually sux too. Compounding on the fact that you draw some big, red, pixelated Chinese Seal image on so many of the posts. Yuks!

I thought I would start a ‘column’ on my blog. It is by an imaginary character named ‘Dr Croc’, and he will talk about education, or those childish stuff that I usually won’t write. When I say childish, I am referring to things related to children. I am thinking of drawing some political cartoons of ‘Dr Croc’. You will soon know what I mean exactly. A crocodile is chosen mainly because of the simplicity of it and also the multiple dimensions in which you can interpret its personality. You can say it is a slacker, but it is also an opportunist – there is almost no limits to the way you can talk about it.

Since this is the ‘exam and tests’ period, I will only return with more graphics during November. But in the meantime, you can actually see what Dr Croc have to say about stuff in Singapore. For those sensitive people, Vib is NOT Dr Croc. Whatever he says do not represent me! By the way, all the images or graphics of Dr Croc or related are my original works. Please do not steal them and put on your blog without my permission!

I only realised recently that the date and time stamp of my blog is totally messed up and I suspect it had been so since I upgraded the wordpress blog. I didn’t have the time to amend all of the post so I merely corrected the time of the posts that are on display on the first page. I don’t think it poses any problem but it does look strange that I am blogging at around 3am in retrospect.

I don’t usually talk about food on my blog but I will do that today – now that I realised that food is another profound art waiting for more youngsters to probe into. I went to the Coffeeshop No. 286 or whatever it is called for lunch this afternoon and ordered Teh-Peng as a beverage for the meal. For those non-singaporeans, Teh-Peng means Iced Tea with milk (Breakdown for dumber people: Teh – Tea with milk, Peng – Iced). I have been drinking Tea with milk since I was young and I only take it with ice when the weather is somewhat hot.

As I waited for my order to be processed by the absent-minded cashier, who asked me what I want when I approached the counter, asked again when I paid the money and one more time when the person in charge of making the drink asked her. Well, that I am quite used to. I observed the person making the tea. First, she added extremely thick tea into a cup of water, adding evapourated milk as she poured in the tea from the stocking kettle (this one you don’t know I can’t help – too local). Next, she scooped about three quarter teaspoon of condensed milk into the cup, stirred frenzily. Finally, she scooped in about half a soup-spoon of coarse sugar (not brown one) into the cup before stirring again and pouring the contents into a bag of ice for me to take it away.

Just a cup of tea, so many processes and mixture of different flavouring (though all are supposed to give a sweet taste). It is no wonder why the sweetness we taste is usually different at different coffeeshops. The key to obtaining the best tea is probably having the best permutation of the proportion of milk, tea, sugar or any other flavourings. There is still so many other kinds of tea and combination of ingredients for us to discover: Teh-Si, Teh-O and coffee too – Kopi, Kopi-Peng, Kopi-O, etc.

Okay. Erpz.net was down yesterday. We have been having this problem since we changed host. Well, it is not our fault but we still have to apologize to readers. This is sarcasm to the host if you haven’t noticed.

Since it is the holidays, I haven’t really been doing anything productive. I fiddled with photoshop again and got this picture as a poster for my film, that should be completed by the end of this month (but will probably not).

I used a yellowish base as background then scattered the leaves with the preset ‘leaves brush’ in Photoshop CS, followed by the ‘grass brush’ at the bottom of the poster and added another layer with a green shade, and set it to ‘color’. Add the text and poof, I got this thing. Sounds much easier than it is done. I did experiment with the colors to obtain the best combination. But guess what kind of comment I get from my sister?

Looks like a ‘World Green Day’ poster to me.

I thought the green is supposed to give the poster a natural touch because everything in the film is simply too stiff and it is also supposed to make viewers feel calm. Green is supposed to soothe. Unfortunately, being Singaporeans, they just link everything that’s green in colour to being environmentally-friendly.

If that’s so, what is the Chinese Black and White painting of bamboos all about? Frankly speaking, from a scientific perspecive, plants looks green because the leaves absorb every other colour of light except green light. Plants hates green light – it provides them with almost no energy at all. If you shine green light on a green plant and expect it to grow, I can tell you that you are definitely stupider than this dumb fat blogger who denies that his lipid content is increasing.

Gravitational pull increasing. Yeah, right. Wait till you damage the bathroom scale. They did start lying to you by showing you the same weight all the time.

Just something interesting here for all to think about: Bingyuan’s blog – a post on decisions. I didn’t know Bingyuan would type such things. Then again, I am confident he copied that story from somewhere. Anyway, the story isn’t logical because if the track is not used, there shouldn’t be any controls that allow one to change the course of the train.

Back to what I am trying to talk about – PC Show. Okay, it is the same every year, they feature everything from mouse, to keyboard and MP3 Players but almost no computers. And I am not talking about laptops. The whole fair is made up of human, people and crowds – nothing much about computers to see. I believe 5o% of the people went there to see their fellow specie. As for me, I was searching for the memory card at the perfect price (which is supposed to mean zero, but never mind) for my fourth auntie who enjoys travelling.

Personally, I don’t usually do such deeds for people, but since I may have to borrow the memory card from her sometimes, for my own use, I decided that it was fair for me to do the shopping and choosing. I got a 512Mb one at a fairly expensive price of $78. It was a SanDisk one. I think that’s the best price it can go unless you are thinking about Lexmark or whatever crappy brand. I don’t usually care about the brands but recently, with the rise of imitations that produces real lousy products, I decided that branding is sometimes important. But not always – especially when it comes to software. Yes, that’s right.