Fashion!

I spend the afternoon going to two bridal galeries. SS2 has turned into a bridal gallery haven. Me and Chui Yan when to only two. They refused to give us the price list for their packages. It seems that they're so competitive they wouldn't give out their packages. What the hell... how am I going to remember all that?!

I think I'm going to hire my own photographer and buy her the dress instead. Might just be cheaper in the end. I looked closely at the gowns they rented and I think they did looked a little worn out.

Anyway... in the evening, I drove over to Mandarin Oriental. Triumph had a lingerie fashion show for their new brand, Valiesere. It's their high end lingerie. Price range about RM250 for a bra. I know, it sounds crazy but when you see it on a real model, it looks really good. I couldn't bring a camera crew because it was too sexy to put on TV anyway. I was the last person to walk into the press conference at the beginning as I was running late. Daphne was the MC and she was standing up front and greeted me with the microphone. Everyone turned around and was looking at me and I just waved and said carry on. Was kinda of wierd for awhile.

They only allowed the press to take photos and videos. Technically, I was with the press but if the photos are just going to end up in my blog, I decided not take any. I didn't want to get any of the models into trouble.

Sitting there, I was really impressed how confident the models were stomping their 'stuff' up and down the runway. Some of them were pretty well endowned, their assets bouncing up and down as they marched down the runway with their expressionless face. It was surreal. It felt like I was watching TV only I was sitting there watching all these models in real life. I thought 'damn, these women are really intimidating'. The music they were blasting over the speakers really vibrated the room and put attitude into the fashion show. This may sound wierd, but my mind wasn't really on the models but I was thinking about how I would shoot it with a video camera to make it suitable for airing on TV.

In the end, I decided it was almost impossible, unless I just put the lingerie on manequins, which I did the last time.

Daphne, 7 weeks pregnant and still looking hot. I touched up the background, the rest of her are real. This is what they wouldn't show you in FHM Malaysia.

This was the only photo I snuck in at the end of the fashion show. They had celebrity guest like Soong Ai Ling, Gloria Ting and Zen Wong. Check out what the model in the red is wearing.

Me, Daphne and Christie from Triumph.

I came back in the evening and my niece was making such a fuss. I told her I'll take her photo if she stopped bothering everyone. This girl just loves posing for the camera. Most kids are really hard to shoot, but I guess since she grew up with me, she's used to having her photo taken. She takes instruction easily as I direct her. This shot, I framed up with the RM5 Ikea frame.

Deal or No Deal

I ended up at the NTV7 studio today spending a good part of my day there in the studio. I've never been to the NTV7 before. I had to flip the map out to find it. I ended up getting lost somewhere in Glenmarie near BMW.

Anyway, Daphne didn't get through. In fact, she got disqualified. Damn it, bet on the wrong horse! Some other personality got it. I didn't really recognize the guy.

Daphne checking out her buzzer. Well, here's the dude that won. Mui, Mastura and me were shouting out the briefcase number to pick from the bottom. The guy didn't listen to his celebrity supporters that were picked for him because Mui and Mas got it right most of the time. It was pretty tense in the end and the guy listened to us till the end. He had terrible luck picking his own suitcase number. All I got was a sore hand from clapping for him. I deleted the amount he won because this episode doesn't come out until next year. You'll just have to watch to see how much he wins.

Deal or No Deal

Daphne called me the other day asking if I wanted to be her 'supporter' in Deal or No Deal. It's this game show they have on NTV7. She was gonna be a contestant. I told her I don't speak mandarin but she said it was gonna be in English so I thought, okay what the hell... I get to be on TV! Woohoo! My chance to be the irritating tourist on someone's set. I always wanted to do that, pretend to be one of those people who've never seen the insides of a studio before and take lots of pictures and ask how everything works... damn, then again I do that in my own studio.

I came home early today because I just felt really wierd. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought it was the cake I ate today. I came home, took the nap and woke up feeling like crap. I think I have a fever. I rarely get a fever so I don't know what a fever feels like. I told 2 aspirins and I can at least blog now. I just feel weak and my head feels heavy, like my neck couldn't support its weight. I could barely crawl out of bed to find the aspirin.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking before I sleep. I've been having sleepless nights. All these strange words start coming into my head. Words I didn't even know was in my vocabulary. Take for example hubris and omnious. I was laying in bed thinking about pride and the word hubris floated into my mind. I thought, hrmm... that sounds vaguely familiar. I had to get out of bed and go through wikipedia just to see what it meant. Anyway, hubris in the classical greek definition is to inflict shame/or harm on someone not for revenge but so one could feel good about it. For example, not letting someone cut into your lane while you're driving because you're too kiasu to let someone in front of you, as if you take pleasure in depriving someone of changing lane.

I know, I do that too... I'm evil on the road. What, cut in front of me? No way!

Omnious on the other hand was a word that came to me while I was looking at clouds. That's how I feel about them.

I didn't know I had such a wide vocabulary. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and they'll ask me what does that word mean and I'll think for a moment and I don't even know what it means sometimes. I just know it because I heard someone else using it. I'm such a show of sometimes.

Random Pictures

Lately, I've been carrying my digital camera everywhere with me. I strap it to my belt and hide it under my shirt. I'm trying to document my life, as hard as that sounds by taking pictures. It doesn't cost me anything to take the pictures. I just pop my camera out and snap away. If I don't like the picture, I delete it on the camera.

My Flickr account is full, I've uploaded too many pictures at the 10Megapixel size. Now I have to photoshop the rest of the pictures to smaller sizes.

I like taking pictures of clouds. This one I took at The Curve while waiting for Chui Yan. I just find them so omnious at times. If you ever watched Independence Day and War pf the Worlds, you'll know that the storm is a precursor to the coming of some dreadful aliens. Clouds can also be strangely beautiful, watching as a storm brew and beholding all the power that it holds.

I when for a brainstorming at UKM today with some of my colleagues. Paul always has the coolest t-shirt. The distributor of Lost, the TV series gave it to him. I just had to take a picture of it. Paul said, since he's caucasian, that's how he feels in Malaysia. Funny, but true. Amy here on the other hand, was a convenient "prop". I told her to point to the t-shirt instead of just having Paul standing there alone.

The brainstorming at UKM was for a new degree they're creating. The lady in the tudung and the guy holding the files are two professors there. I can't remember the lady's name but she speaks the most excellent English. I could just listen to her talk the whole day, she was so... pleasant. UKM wanted to create a new multimedia degree and wanted my company's input on what the industry needed. I thought it was a really good idea, getting the industry's input before creating a degree so it doesn't turn into another paper qualification.

This is what's left of today's show. I was supposed to produce today but instead they called me at the last minute to replace someone for the brainstorming at UKM. We did a party planning episode and I had someone bring loads of cakes and even a chocolate fountain. They didn't even save me a damn cupcake. When I called back and asked what happened to the chocolate fountain, Alfian said there were so many people crowded around it and the only thing left to dip in it was the Ulam. Damn it. I could have been fed, I could have been full of cake!

I spend a lot of time in the makeup room talking to my hosts before the show starts. Here's Inaz gossiping with Wardina.

Today, we had to take the company's van to UKM. Amy asked me about the Chevening Scholarship I applied for. Apparently, she found out I applied for it from reading this. I told her I did it only half heartedly. She said she was really dissapointed she didn't get it. I didn't get it either and I got on the reserve list. She wrote like a 7 page essay and I kind of felt embarassed to say I only wrote a 4 paragraph essay. Damn, sometimes I feel like Homer Simpson. Doh!

Anyway, it all doesn't matter. I got bigger plans for this year!

Compliments

The other day, me and a male colleague was walking out of our office cafeteria. We walked pass a female colleague of ours. I said hi and I also said to her she looked like she lost weight a little and she had a wide smile on her face after I said that.

After we walked pass, I told my male colleague actually, I don't think she looked like she lost any weight but I think that made her feel better. I added, it didn't cost me anything to say it, just to make someone feel better. My male colleague started laughing and said, now she's going to start thinking she really lost weight and what ever weight lost supplements she's been eating really worked and she's going to buy more... or worst, start preaching it to others.

Woops... I guess he might be right! In my office, almost all the women are on some sort of weight management program. They spend a few hundred ringgit buying all these but when I ask them if they want to take the stairs down one floor, they say they'll rather take the elevator.

These days I bring my new camera everywhere with me. I thought my camera phone was the bomb, but having a 10Megapixel camera was even better! I strap my camera to my belt and its usually hidden under my shirt. My favourite picture to take now, clouds. With all the thunderstorms we're having, I like shooting the wierd looking clouds we have just before the storm.

The only problem I have now is that I've maxed out my flickr account. They only allow me 100MB a month of uploads. I take the pictures at full 10Megapixel and I didn't scale down the size of the photos. Next month, I'm gonna start doing that.

today was a quite a slow day after lunch. I woke up at 8am. Usually, I budget just enough time to shower, get dress and rush out the door to work. However, I forgot I had cut my finger and I had to change the bandage on it. I remembered I had some vitamin E cream I bought when I had chicken pox. I broke open a capsule and applied it on my finger. There was quite a lot left over so I started rubbing it on my hand. Quite an oily experience!

Anyway, I got to work and managed to put a show to produce the show without any incident like yesterday (I'll explain later). Before the show, I had lunch with Mas in the cafeteria. After the show, I surfed the net and started looking at apartments. I listed down my criteria for my apartment search:
- Budget RM200K
- It has to be in PJ
- Toll free (which means I don't have to pay toll to get to PJ or KL, petrol price can go up or down, Toll always goes up!)
- Covered parking
- low density, I don't want to be staying in a place with too many people
- quiet neighbourhood. I spend a lot of time in my room, I don't like people screaming above and below me.
- low maintainance fees (not more than RM170)
- freehold if possible (leasehold if property below RM170K)

I've narrowed it down to a few options. Its Bayu Puteri, Palm Springs, Crimsons... mostly the northern part of PJ. I hear strong rumours my office is going to be moving to Shah Alam so I'll want to stay between Shah Alam and Bandar Utama.

On the top of the list is Bayu Puteri because the resident association is pretty good there, I saw their yahoo groups. Pretty active. Palm Springs I've read about the problems the residents are facing with the building management there and the crime problem in the area too. If it has improved then that'll be good.

Any how... today's afternoon was spend in the Curve with Mas. I wanted to look for a party shop for a story I was planning and I dragged her along. We didn't get to talk to the owner so we ended up at Starbucks surfing the net on her laptop. I hate using Apple, so alien compared to the Windows OS. It's like Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia. Its almost the same but they use different terminology. In Windows, they call it Program Files, in Mac, it's called Applications.

I don't usually drink coffee but since Mas was buying, I had this wierd banana latte. Wasn't too bad actually. After the wierd latte, I ended up in Ikea shopping for frames. I don't know what pictures I'm going to print yet but I have a kick ass digital camera now so I'm gonna start taking more photos. 10 Megapixel photos! I'm gonna print me huge posters! I saw at Ikea they have huge poster frames. I can get the photos printed at 1U for cheap at friend's shop. I already have a panorama picture taken from the rooftop of my house. I can see Genting, Crimson Apartment and the Bandar Utama condo's to the north from my rooftop. My house is on top of a hill, one of the highest point in PJ so its got a pretty good view from the top.

When I got back home, my mother tells me she wants to buy some rollers to fit under the metal cabinets. So I had to drive her all the way back to Ikano. If she had told me earlier, would have save me the time when I could have bought it earlier. I brought her to Ace Hardware. I'm turning into a real redneck, I love shopping at Ace Hardware... so many cool stuff! I had to remind myself to save money to buy only what I really needed.

Flooding in my house

My house got partially flooded today. The rain was so heavy, something must have broke in the gutters and water started seeping through the ceiling. My room was flooded in about 1cm of water. The walls are pretty badly damaged. Needs a new coat of paint.

Luckily my mother was fast enough and moved my carpet and other things in my room to higher ground before the water got to it. By the time I got home, my maid was already mopping up the mess.

While I was moving things back into position, the DIY rollers on my computer table broke. I used my penknife to cut out the rollers and the damn blade snapped back cutting my right index finger. There was an 1 inch cut on my finger and I was bleeding all the way to the bathroom. All I could do was hold my finger in an odd position to stop the bleeding. I must have sat in the toilet for 5 minutes holding my finger. It was a clean cut but I think it was pretty deep.

I put plaster on it already and I see blood still bleeding out into the plaster. I can't bend my right index finger so I can only type with 9 fingers now. Not easy I tell you.

Yesterday, I watched this HK movie, Protege. There was a scene where a the police are trying to bust a drug lab but there was a huge iron door blocking them. The detective puts his hand through a hole in the door to try and unlatch it. The bad guy sees the hand on the other side of the door and takes a huge mallet and smashes the guy hand. He keeps hitting the hand until it actually breaks of. Pretty gross. I was laughing as it was pretty morbid but funny in a cruel way. I guess getting my finger cut was karma.

Anyway, I re-did all the wiring for my PC. I tied up all the loose cable just in case it floods again tomorrow. I sure hope it doesn't!

On my way to Kota Bahru

At the airport blogging on my phone. Getting more used to typing on my
phone's keypad. Me and Chui Yan are taking an air asia flight to Kota
Bahru for her grandfather's 80 birthday. Our flight has been delayed
till 2pm. So much for rushing to the airport. Should have brought a
book along to read. All i have now is my phone to blog on and bitch
about air asia. It seems that everytime i take their flight from the
LCC it's alway delayed. Ok.. Not always but i remember the delayed
flights more than the ones that are on time.

Yeh! Today my birthday! Normally I don't like having big parties. I like having a quiet birthday doing absolutely nothing. Ideal birthday would be to play Medieval half the day and the other half sleeping.

Yesterday, my office celebrated the birthday of everyone from March. It was a pretty funny celebration because most of my colleagues are Muslims. When it came to the cake cutting, they started singing Allah selamatkan kamu... I thought it was hillarious. It was supposed to be a pot-luck where everyone brings something. I just brought my empty stomach.

Some of them asked what did I bring and I said I was going to bring two bottles of Stout and some babi panggang but I don't think anyone would eat it. Hehe, the truth is, I don't drink alcohol either and I'm trying to stay away from fatty food. The other day I bought a bottle of stout at Tesco just out of curiousity and when I got home, I sat in my room and took a swipe from the bottle. I couldn't even go through 1/3 of the bottle. It was awful. I'm just going to stick to Guiness Malta.

Today's plan... I think its dinner with the family and movie. Everyone's at work except me. I took the day of. My birthday falls on Cheng Beng (Qing Ming) so I hardly ever go the graves or visit my ancestors. I think it would be funny when I'm gone and if anyone does come to pay respect to me on Cheng Beng, it's also my birthday!

CanoScan LiDE 25, RM250

Canon Ixus 900Ti, RM1550

Mine=just bought

money=bonus

why?=shopping therapy

feel guilty

but feel good

for now

next=home