Category Archives: Personal Life

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.

这绝非胡言乱语，这是个歇后语 – 我发明的。不知怎么的，在巴士站口渴了，喝着水，就想到这有趣的‘歇后语’。请别误会，我绝不是在骂任何人。有也是骂自己，巴士过了站才发现自己差点要迷路了。结果足足花了15分钟在走路，才到达目的地，真是白痴。

“憋尿解渴 – 白痴”

就这样，短短一句，随你们要骂谁，都用得着。

Should I declare erpz.net dead? Maybe not. Perhaps I should announce that Mib is gone – though that’s not true. There simply isn’t anything great to talk about at this period of time. Oh yes, there is the bus fare hike. But can we prevent it? No, so why bother to talk about it – the company wouldn’t care anyway. The monopoly is there and you can’t say, “Hey, I am not going to take your bus anymore!” Well, actually you can say that, but not without adding, “I am going to walk! Wait a minute, how far is Bukit Timah from Tiong Bahru?” Erm, there is this little talk about bad attitude taxi drivers over at Terry’s blog, but that doesn’t apply to everyone. Especially those like me, who rarely take taxis to avoid overspending.

Well, I do have a bad experience with cabbies – the reason why I hate to take cabs alone. When I was still rather young, I took a cab along Upper Aljunied Road with a few friends because we lost our way there. Our destination is quite near: Kallang Stadium. That dumb cabby knows where to go, did not grumble, but I guess he was too bored and thought too highly of my friends and I. He started cracking dirty jokes and laughing deviously at himself. Previously, we didn’t really understand what he is talking about. So there was a little forced laughter. My friend, who wasn’t very decent himself, didn’t even laugh. I don’t know whether he was the one who start those jokes but he certainly don’t look very comfortable then. Fortunately, we reached there rather quickly, and zipped through the crowd at Kallang Stadium, not wanting to remind ourselves of that dirty fellow.

As for bus drivers, I have a feud with this idiot who drives Bus Service Number 186 at an unknown time slot. I haven’t seen his face, and I cannot recognise him, but I know I hate this guy, and it should be a guy – if my eyes didn’t fail me then. It was a tiring afternoon at school and I was pissed because of some management stuff in school and I was waiting for that bus at the Serene Centre bus stop. It is not exactly outside Serene Centre but it is quite near it.

I waited for 8 minutes, the bus came. I walked towards the kerb and flagged as the bus was around 40 metres from me. I put down my hand when it was about 10 metres away from me. I then look at my shirt because I realised that there was something wrong with the third button. Damn it! The bus just zipped pass and even when I flagged again, it slowed down, I caught up with it, then it zoom off again. I hate this guy! I ended up having to change another bus because I know that the next bus wouldn’t come until another 30 minutes.

Okay, I am getting pissed as I am recounting. I better start forgetting about this event. Oh yah, I forgot that the title of this post is ‘Lessons Again’, so I must talk about going back to school today. Well, everyone was fine. The hateful ones were as hateful. The kind ones were as kind – I asked for help with Maths and that guy helped. Yes, that’s all. In life, some thing don’t tally, I guess the title of the post need not really tally with the contents.

假期虽忙，今日还是答应了母亲，与她上巴刹去买菜，吃早点。新加坡所谓的早点，是炒米粉，炒面，这一类食品，而非‘点心’。今天特地到中笆鲁巴刹 – 本来这‘ba’, 是头上一个‘山’，下边添个‘合’；翻了词典，发现真有此字，但电脑上却没有，没办法，只好用了同音的‘笆’字。我们主要到那儿去是为了买菜，但听娘说那儿卖的虾面不错，便也就到那儿去尝尝。确实不错。

中笆鲁巴刹其实正在翻新，我们所去的，是暂时搭建的巴刹。虽说是暂时搭建的，设备还是非常完善，决不缺桌少椅的。卖衣的那儿还有试衣室呢！唯一缺的，大概就是空间吧。那儿的摊位，都挤得要命，但这也好，摊主们都在聊天，完全不把‘竞争’放在眼里。

像娘如此管闲之人，认识的人还真多，走不到两步就在跟人到招呼，聊个一二。那些婆嫂，见到我，必对娘说这三句，“这你儿子呀？长得还真高呀。现在读哪儿？”另外添的还有，“怎今天有空陪妈妈到巴刹来？”对于现代‘疼爱孩子’的新加坡父母，巴刹有如是什么禁地，孩子们有空该在家温书，怎么到巴刹来学买菜 – 准是没前途！他们就是以这种眼光看着我。

好了，买菜。

Charles’ theory doesn’t only apply to lifeforms or whatever mutant creatures that might really exist in the very world we live in, it also apply in almost every single part of life. Evolution is something like improvement, but most importantly, it is a change. Supposedly positive one but not necessarily so.

For those who didn’t notice that things does evolve, let me make a simple analogy here. I was originally thinking about food, but I decided that it would be interesting to talk about Air-conditioners. I remember when I was young, Aircons wasn’t really cool, so on advertisements, the different companies will compete at the coolness level. They will try to outperform each other in the aspect of making better cooling system. From ammonia to whatever gas they use, they simply try to make the air that flows out of the machine be at the most suitable low temperature. And soon, the companies came to an equilibrium.

So they started another war. Some dumb company started off saying that their Aircons makes less noise than others. So they forgot about ammonia or freons and turned to the fans. They tuned the blades, switched the axis and twist the plates, did whatever they can in their advertisements to make sure that the consumers were convinced that they make the quiest Aircons. Alright, they now have Aircons that makes no sound at all other than the little ‘beep’ when you turn them on or switched the temperatures. But that wasn’t enough.

Another lame company came along, I think its name starts with a ‘D’, or maybe it was a ‘S’. Whatever it is called, they start telling their customers that their Aircons clean their air. Okay, now it is a battle of purity. Other companies dropped their blades, and heavy machinaries and went into making filters. There was sponge, PVC or whatever synthetic form of trap, that were trapping the dust in the air that is unfortunately sucked into the Aircon. Well, they also managed to make Aircons that spew air, which are almost perfectly clean.

Sorry that the story is so long, even I am bored by it. Now comes along some company that starts with ‘F’, who says their Aircon produces some catechins or whatever and negative ions or don’t know what, which are healthy to the human bodies. Things have been evolving all the time, don’t expect things to be the same as last time. And it is this, that forces us to change and adapt to the environment and surroundings.

My marks for this term evolved, but not my position. Is that a good news? I think not. But my friends told me that is already good because it also mean I am not getting worse. There is this friend of mine obtained a better score than the previous term but dropped by 9 positions. And that is how ridiculous the system is. Too bad, things are evolving into a crazy stage. Even the supposedly best hasn’t make it.