wyred dot nu

The Garden of Sinners aka 空の境界

When you have great works like this anime title, I don’t think the people behind it have any reason to worry about piracy.

Because after watching this, I went through a lot of trouble to locate one of it’s rare 1/8 PVC figurine.

At first, a local blogger was selling this at $90 SGD (66USD). I made a bid for it.

Another person decided to contest against me. We both continued out bidding each other for over a week.

The person selling has a rule that if someone offers twice the amount of the original selling price, bidding will end and that person will win the bid.

My rival offered $180. I lost the bid.

This then fueled my desire to obtain it. I asked friends to help me keep and eye out and make forum posts to look for it. Even asked the local figurine sellers to help me look out for it.

And one day, one of them found it in Japan and brought it back to Singapore. His price is $235 SGD (173USD) for it. After receiving news that he had brought it back, I went down to his shop immediately to buy it.

Till now,  I don’t feel a single ounce of regret spending so much on it. Each time I think about that day when I first held it with my hands, I can’t help but smile. That’s how much I love this series.

I’ve even managed to find it’s Japanese novels at Kinokuniya and bought them as well. There’s still copies available at both Liang Court and Orchard stores if anyone’s interested.

There’s a few 4-square comics on this series and I’ve bought a few of them.

I’ve also bought the “Seventh Heaven” album by Kalafina featuring the songs that appeared in this movie series.

In my upcoming trip to Japan in November, I will see if I can find the OSTs in the shops of Akihabara.

And now, with news of it’s Bluray discs coming out next year, I’m prepared to say goodbye to another $800 SGD (626USD) just for it.

And guess what caused all this spending spree?

The internet.

Most people seem to freak out when their purchase history is stored.

I don’t see what’s so bad about it.

In fact, because I’ve signed up for a membership card at Kinokuniya and that I shop from them so often, I’ve always hoped they would store my purchase history.

So I can make sure I won’t purchase a manga that I’ve already did in a previous visit. So they can make recommendations to me when a new series is released that matches the genres of manga I’ve purchased in the past. Or alert me when a new book in the series I’m collecting is out for purchasing.

There’s so many things they could do to make my experience with them a better one. And not just me, but many other manga lovers in Singapore.

But because it’s a Japanese company, and from my own observations, they seem to be afraid of trying such things in case it offends their customers, they probably won’t attempt something like this.

But I’ll drop them an email anyway and pray for the better.

Since my polytechnic days, I’ve wanted to have my own laptop. But I never got around to buying it because I was too poor.

Then after I started working and could afford one, I didn’t buy because the laptops back then were heavy, bulky, slow, ugly and still expensive.

Fast forward a few more years, there’s a lot of good laptops now but because there’s so many choices, and it’s so much trouble to compare all of them, I gave up.

And at this time, I don’t know if I will make good use of it even if I have one. So I borrowed a laptop from work to use. I went to a StarBucks outlet, ordered coffee and went on to catch up on articles that I’ve accumulated through the people I follow on twitter and stored at Read-it-Later.

It proved to be a good experience. I could focus on my what I want to do and not get distracted by that silly MMORPG I’ve installed on my home computer. Most importantly, there’s air-con. It can be so warm at home I don’t feel like getting work done.

And now, after much research, I’ve decided to go with a Dell m301z. It costs SGD $1199 (USD $870).

• It’s within my budget.
• Acceptable screen resolution, touchpad design and keyboard layout.
• Has bluetooth so I can tether to my iPhone and surf the net.
• Has good battery life. Easily lasts me 2-3 hours.
• A dual core 64bit CPU with virtualization support so I can try out MacOSX on a VirtualBox.
• 4GB ram.

So far it’s working really great. Everything’s smooth despite not having a dedicated graphics board. I don’t need one because I don’t intend to game on this laptop.

I wanted a dual core 64bit CPU with 4GB ram because I know I’ll be running lots of apps as I do development work on my personal website projects.

It comes installed with Windows7 64bit Home Premium. And we all know Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has made since the 3.1 days.

Yesterday and today, I spent 2 hours at Burger King getting all the things I’ve wanted to do, done. I’ve organized and synchronized my browser bookmarks between 2 computers at home, 1 at work and this new laptop.

I’m also done setting up apache/mysql/php so I can start working on a new version of Tarutarutimes-Online.

Just 2 days and I know that my money has been well spent. I just love this laptop! I named it Kanojo (Girlfriend in Japanese) after the female character in Houkago Play. In the 4-square comic, she doesn’t have a name and is just referred to as “Kanojo”. Sort of like “The Girlfriend”.

I strongly do not believe the saying that you don’t need a good camera/lens to take good photos.

Well, if you don’t care about the quality but just the composition, yes.

But in order to take photos with sharp quality, nice background blur, under various lighting conditions, you really need a good camera and lens. A good camera that will cost at least SG$3000 and lens at least SG$1000.

I may be wrong, but I would still stubbornly disagree until someone is able to convince me that I can take “National Geographic”-like photos with a Nikon D80 and cheap 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens.

I pushed myself a little too hard at jogging today.

To the point I fainted.

Judging from the position of the music on my ipod, I suppose I was out for 5~10 minutes.

I felt comfortable, had a dream. Then the image of my mum popped in and in my less than sub-conscious state, as if my body was moving by itself, got up and lied down on the nearest bench.

With my eyes open, I just stared blankly until I mustered enough strength to sit up. Then sat there for a while before I started walking myself home.

Went to a 24 hour clinic which told me I needed to go to the hospital.

Had a deep cut on my chin and little finger, kept bleeding, need to be stitched.

Doctor said I probably didn’t have enough sugar in my blood.

At least now my fears of being close to diabetic can be dismissed.

Today is the 4th day that I’ve stopped drinking coffee.

Trying to clear out the caffeine in my body so that I can once again enjoy that exhilarating feeling when one drinks coffee.

I feel like crap without my daily cup of coffee. Going to resume drinking after my…

Redang 3 days 2 nights holiday! This Friday, I’ll be leaving for another short holiday with a different group of friends. One of the events included in our travel package is snorkeling. Mmmmmm

I look forward to taking naps under the sun again. Waking up feeling refreshed to the sound of the waves.

However, it’s a holiday period now and it might be very crowded over there. :(

And what about beer?

Well, there was a small gathering of my secondary school friends at someone’s house and we had beer, cheese sausages and we chatted about the old days. This is when I discovered how I want to enjoy beer. With good company and good food.

It was such a good experience that I want to enjoy it again. But this time, an air conditioned room, friends, lots of beer and cheese sausages. And we’d just chat till the last can of beer. Ahhh…

Went to Bintan from the 8th to 10th May 2010 together with 4 other friends. Just a short getaway from the busy Singapore life.

We stayed at the Indra Maya villas of Nirwana Gardens. From what I understand, Nirwana Gardens consists of beach clubs, villas, resorts, and we chose to stay at the villas.

While my friends were checking in, I went out to the nearby beach. It’s the first time I’ve seen a blue sea. In Singapore, it’s a dirty green color.

At the beach, you can hear nothing but the sound of the waves. No children screaming, no cars, no boat motors. Very peaceful. We went during a non-holiday period so there’s not a lot of other people.

The waters are clear. If you try, you can see small fishes swimming around your feet.

This is where we stayed at, a private villa of our own.

With our own private pool!

And a buggy to drive around the place in! I had my turn to drive everyone around the place in this and it made me want to learn driving.

We ate, played in the pool, beaches, had karaoke, drank at a kelong style pub out in the middle of the ocean.

On the last day, we woke up early to go see the sunrise.

Each of us paid like SG$500 (USD$355. Includes food/transport) for the whole 3 days 2 nights trip. I feel it’s worth it.

There’s a few more photos in my flickr set here.

A friend of mine is pregnant.

She had a checkup at the hospital and was having her weight taken and it turned out to be 55.55kg. She seemed amused.

So one day during lunch, she told me about this and said she’s going to buy 4D for 5555.
(4D is a form of legal gambling in Singapore where you choose 4 digit numbers).

I said with a smile, “If you really win, I’ll give you another $10″. I didn’t sound like I was challenging her, or making fun of her choice of buying this number which has a very low chance of opening.

She said “Ok!” with a big grin.

I checked her ticket to see if she really bought it and she did.

I never thought of it as a stupid idea or a waste of money. I only found it surprising that she would really buy it.

One week later,

It was a small win, she won $50 for that number. Nevertheless, I kept my word.

It’s been 5 months. I rushed and bought the PlayStation 3 Slim, Lightning Edition the day it was released.

Because this  is my first PS3 game, it has set very high standards for me. I’ve borrowed games like Virtua Fighter and Tekken 6 from friends and none of the 2 match up to FF13′s graphics. I got sort of turned off at the graphics I couldn’t find myself playing them any longer.

A friend pointed out that it’s because the games are developed in 720p whereas FF13 is 1080p and this made sense.

After completing the story for FF13, which I find satisfying (the storyline), I didn’t see the need to continue playing to complete all the missions and get all the trophies. Then after a while, I decided to work on unlocking Lightning’s PS3 theme.

Since my PS3 has a cool picture of Lightning on it, wouldn’t it be perfect to install the Lightning theme you get from unlocking a certain trophy in the game as well?

So I began working on it. I started off by grinding for CP. And to do that, I would need the Growth Egg that doubles CP received.

To get Growth Egg, I would have to fight Neochu. It’s a tough fight as it has 5-6 smaller underlings that attacks you very fast.

So I tried Vanille – Fang – Hope, SAB-SEN-MED, and spammed Death on Neochu till he dies. Won on second try. I forgot to setup RAV/COM in my paradigms and so I had to slowly kill all the underlings with Death. Took me almost 20 minutes, lol

I went through a few more difficult missions and it’s these difficult missions that got me hooked onto FF13 for the past few weeks. I love the whole system.

I didn’t know until recently that having a SEN in your setup boosts the defence capabilities of your other 2 members and having 3 SEN makes it even better than 1. Same goes for the other jobs. There are times when you need to quickly switch to a 3 SEN setup to greatly reduce the damage from an enemy’s attack.

Because of previous FF games, I had this impression that the summons would be useless in this game as well. It turned out to be not too bad in 13.

When it seems that you’re about to wipe, you can summon and at the end, your party’s HP will be restored. You can also dish out a pretty good amount of damage during the summon. And when fighting Adamantoise type monsters, summoning will somehow cripple them for an easy kill. (゜Д゜)

And to make each difficult hunt easier, you have a range of accessories and hidden abilities (hidden traits that you can unlock based on a combination of weapons and accessories) at your disposal. Also, each of the 6 characters have their own unique weapons, abilities and traits which you’ll need to consider when aiming for a 5-star win on a mission.

Each time I failed a battle, I would go through my character and paradigm setup and equipment, upgrading when neccesary and keep trying until I won. This process is quite enjoyable and the feeling of achievement when you clear a difficult mission is there.

As of now, I only have 3 more trophies (defeat long gui, obtain 5 star on all missions, obtain all items) left to acquire to totally “win” the game!

When Microsoft became the biggest software company, many people began to hate them. Then they support Google.

When Apple’s iPhone became the most popular cellphone, many people began to despise it. And they support Google’s Android phones.

Now when Google becomes a huge company from dealing with web searches, email, videos, ads, etc, people started to hate Google.

From what I’ve been observing, everyone loves support the underdog. When it becomes successful, they move on to another.

Screw all of you.

Yes, I’m sick of people who hate the iPhone simply because a lot of people use it. If you don’t like it because it lacks certain features that you really need, I can accept that.

I get slightly annoyed when people say they like to hate things that are popular. Hold on, a lot of people like to hate things that are popular.

Maybe if I start an ad in the newspaper telling everyone that it’s popular thing to hate things that are popular, perhaps they will start to hate themselves and then kill themselves.

I did say before that I tend to avoid mainstream animes. It’s simply because I have limited time and I’d rather devote that limited time to watch non-mainstream animes which I seem to find more enjoyable than mainstream ones. It’s an excuse based on my personal preferences and not what the majority of people like to do.

In closing,