It's late. I should be in bed. I didn't sleep last night, stayed up the whole night just to finish editing episode 11. Finished at 11AM. I took a short nap and drove to the office at 3PM. When I got there, I started making calls in preparation for my first WHI show after a few months. Man, I felt so wierd... like trying to learn how to ride a bike again.

When I got to the AVID room and tried to transfer to tape what I edited, I discovered that my material wasn't in my portable hard disk. I had saved it into my local disk at home instead! Man, that sucks. Now I have to wake up early tomorrow morning and transfer it before I do voice-over tomorrow with Mano.

Today, I bought flowers for Chui Yan again. This was the second time I was buying flowers from the same florist in Aman Suria. Small little shop. They had rows and rows of Raya hampers.

While they were preparing my roses, I made small talk with them. I asked them what was their most expensive Raya hamper. They said it was RM540. I asked what goes in a RM540 hamper? She said it's not easy to find expensive stuff for a Raya hamper compared to a Chinese New Year hamper. Malays don't drink alcohol so they put a lot of expensive raya cookies and chocolates in it. I asked her if she put in any canned abolone then. She laughed and said no... she didn't think it was halal. haha. Well, just to be clear, abolone should be halal except I don't know about the preservatives that go into the can.

I like making small talk with strangers occasionally. Especially when I'm on the job. I get to learn a lot of things. Sometimes people I meet for the first time find it unnerving that I ask so many questions. The way I see it, better me asking the questions than them.

Like the other day I was on a shoot in UPM. I ended up at a server farm in the middle of no where. Since my cameraman was on auto mode I started talking to the manager there. I asked him what type of people work here. He says he doesn't hire many UPM students even though they are based right in UPM. The going salary for a degree student with 1 year experience is about RM3K. Damn, that's almost as much as I make.

The manager was complaining about the quality of graduates today. I asked him what was the dumbest grad he interviewed. He said he interviewed this guy who used to work with Streamyx and asked him how to install Streamyx. He when on to explain how to do it with the Streamyx installation CD and all... when the manager asked him how to install without the CD the graduate replied "without the CD, you can't install Streamyx... positive!". I bursted out laughing when the manager told me the story.

Sometimes making small talk with people helps you learn new things you never knew. In my job, it really helps in getting the inside story. Although at times I hate making small talk as I just want to be alone.

For example, when I'm in the office cafeteria and if I have a newspaper in my hand, I don't want to sit with anyone else nor will I allow anyone else to sit down with me. All I want to do is read the papers. I need to know what is going on in the world.

Anyway, while I was at the server farm, I saw this hanging from a car parked there.



See it? Look below the license plate.







Poor Patrick hanging from the bottom of a kancil bumper. Driving through the rain... mud, heat, etc. Makes me wonder if this is a chick's car or a guy's car.