After breakfast, P and S sent me off at the train station near their home. I made my way back to the hotel to unload the clothes I bought the day before and set off to Harajuku park.

It was a Sunday and there’s a lot of people here at this huge park. Very different from the parks in Singapore.

You can hear people practicing their music in less crowded areas. Kids playing football. Teens making dance videos. A large group of old people playing ukuleles.

I headed down to Roppongi next, to check out an exhibition at the Mori Art Museum. I’m not into arty stuff. I just enjoy looking at things.

Last event of the day was to check out a matsuri at Asakusa. It’s crowded. Lots of stalls along the way. I bought lots of food here and brought them back to my hotel room for dinner. It was too much so I kept the remaining food for breakfast for the next day.

I did work harder than I was in 2010. But I never got around to getting that degree because I was given a chance to work overseas for a year and I was keen on taking up that offer.

Then I got approached with a job offer, with same pay but much better working environment, more challenging work.

Maybe in a year or 2 after things are stable with this new job, I will look into studying part-time again.

With freelance work and a new job taking up most of my time, I doubt I have enough spare time to pursue other things.

So this year, I shall focus on my Japanese language skills.

I took the N2 JLPT test on 2011 Dec. The results won’t be out till a few months later. If I pass, I might try for N1 this year.

The problem I’m concerned is even if I can get an N1 certification, it only means that I can understand Japanese well.

I know very well I can’t make up sentences in conversations well enough yet.

Also in my Japan trip in 2010, when I met up with my Japanese friends there, I had a hard time understanding what they are trying to say when they speak among themselves.

Native speakers speak very fast and are very different from what you hear on Japanese dramas and animes. From what I’ve heard, people who appear on TV and voice actors have undergone training in their speaking.

Hopefully the current SGD – JPY exchange rate recovers back to what it was 4 years ago. Currently it’s 1 SGD – 59 JPY.

Seeing photos of my friend’s trip there makes me want to go back there again.

Hmmm… It’s there where the real JLPT is.

have the tendency to want to tweet something philosophical when drunk.

:/

My first job interview didn’t go well. It was too technical for me to handle at that time. Needless to say, I didn’t get it.

But I wasn’t concerned, that place was too troublesome to commute to anyway.

Some time later, my math teacher from my polytechnic called me up and told me her friend was looking for a web developer. I went for the interview, showed the forum I coded during my polytechnic days in ASP, with a notepad, and got the job

I worked there for 8 years. (Since October 2003)

There were ups and downs, a very long period of stagnation because of my addiction to online-gaming and things happening that left me in a feeling of despair.

Thankfully, I pulled through.

The last 2 years have been very fulfilling. I revamped the way we churn out websites in my company. I designed a centralized CMS system so that we don’t have to install it for every website. A front-end system that simplifies and reduces the repetitive tasks that needs to be done each time we work on a website.

It was until recently, I felt the need for more money and my day job wasn’t giving me enough. A friend from my polytechnic days just so happened to approach me with some freelance work and I took it up.

Everyday after work, I would spend 2-4 hours at MacDonald’s, on my laptop, coding away on a CRM and invoicing web application. I could feel myself learning something new during each coding session.

I accomplished a lot each day and night to the point cheap SG$1.60 beer tasted satisfying.

Although things didn’t go well with the client requesting many changes and additional requests that required me to change a lot of my code, I told myself it’s just for the learning experience and just hang on there.

Word of me working on my freelance CRM project actually helped me land a job opportunity at a new startup company with flexible working hours and dress code. Overall, the pay would be slightly lower but the founding team will be given stock options.

I could now live the kind of life developers and programmers in Silicon Valley get to live.

I’ve officially tendered my resignation yesterday. In about 26 days, I should be able to start working at my new company. Can’t wait to move on.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
 - Thomas Jefferson

The scene was the top of a very tall carpark building which I’m pretty sure I’ve dreamed of it before.

I was trying to run away from some friends in that car.

Next thing I realized, this carpark building became very crowded.

Then somehow, I was already on foot, carrying the car with me as if it’s a suitcase. I was trying to get on a weirdly designed elevator, trying to go up. There are no walls on this elevator to prevent you from falling off. It’s like the castle stage in 8bit Mario where elevators keep coming up from the lava and you have to use that to jump over.

When I look down from this elevator, I see lava. But without fear, I grabbed onto the chain (that’s pulling this elevator up) with one hand and proceeded to jump in a zig-zag way upwards.

Then it’s like I just entered the attic of a very tall tower. It’s very dark all around. Something tells me to just make my way up. I walk along a ledge filled with things you would see on a wizard’s desk, scrolls and stuff all over this ledge. It kind of reminded me of my messy desk at home.

There were people sitting around and chatting.

I was trying to find a save point. But then I recalled in my mind that the save points were removed in the last version update. But still I tried to find one anyway.

In this dark tower, there were random small sparkling gems floating. I waved my hand near them and started “absorbing” them into my hand.

I looked around for more and found a huge blue crystal rock the size of my palm. I grabbed it and observed how it slowly shrank in size as I absorbed it.

I look at my hand and see a value of “10,000″+. Then see the blood veins of my hand turning blue. I knew I had “Atma Poisoning”.

I climbed up and came to a floor, walked past a bright smoky portal which I knew would lead me to a battle with a minotaur.

A RL friend who also plays FFXI with me showed up. Saying he’s trying to catch up on the missions and tells me he might need my help later.

We came to a few exhibits, there were no one else around.

These exhibits have holograms and are actually puzzles you have to solve.

After seeing my friend solve one, and it involves pushing a coke bottle down a hole, I move out of the place and came to a small village.

I tried to find a shop that sells an atma container and during the walk, I took out my iPhone and began looking up “Atma Poisoning” for more info.

I walked into a store and told the shopkeeper if she had any atma containers. Some guys there asked what happened and I said I was trying to complete “Wings of Altana” mission.

Then she took out some cheap looking long plastic container, took my right arm, used a pair of small scissors and snipped on the blue veins on my hand.

Blood flowed out, it was dirty red in color, as if a bit of blue paint was mixed in. My arm swelled up and lots of blood gushed out until the swelling reduced.

She then did the same for my left arm. The container was close to filling up and this was when I woke up.

I felt refreshed and happy because I just had a nice long fantasy-related dream.

I’ve recommended it to others even though there’s no benefit for me.

But I have a problem and a few others have the same problem too.

But you won’t make the patch for us because you have other more important things to attend to.

You said if we want that feature, we should code it and submit a pull request for it.

So I coded the patch, learned how to work with GitHub, submitted a pull request.

Other people who shared the same problem were happy.

Days go by and yet there’s no response from you.

I wondered if there’s a problem with my solution so I tried to propose an alternative.

But you said the original solution was fine, just be patient because you guys have real lives too.

Weeks later, still no response.

And now, I sit here wondering why did I even bother in the first place.

Just a small rant.

When I was a kid, hi-tech gadgets in movies amaze me.
The fact that it’s fictional, disappoints me.

Thanks to his vision and Apple, I get to enjoy a “futuristic” life while I’m still alive. The things they do should be the standard to be called innovation.

Light and powerful computers with a pretty user-interface.

A touch phone that reminds me of my schedule, communicate, stay up to date with the news, write notes, listen to music or watch a video. All this while on the move.

These 2 gadgets have become an important part of my life. Helping me to stay organized, learn new things, and earn some income.

A part of me feels that Apple will no longer be as innovative as when Steve Jobs was still around. Another, hopes that I’m wrong.

And I do hope I’m wrong.

Of course I do!

And today, Saturday, we arranged to meet up at Akihabara station.

Our first destination was a maid cafe which I wanted to go. S felt very shy going in while P seemed comfortable with it. We had drinks and conversed. S is a web developer like me too, and P is a fashion designer.

They brought me to shop for clothes around Harajuku. After hours of walking, we had stopped to rest at a coffee restaurant to decide where to go next.

We went to Tokyo Tower, followed by dinner at an okonomiyaki restaurant and then just as we were about to go our seperate ways at the train station, they invited me to stay over at their home!

It was a nice 3 floor mansion(?), advanced toilet, and even a small TV in the bathroom.

I was the first to go to sleep that night, in a nice warm futon for the first time.

I have not found a reason to dislike it so far.

If I really have to squeeze some out, it would be Firefox. But that is probably not Apple’s fault. (Firefox 6 hangs when I try to browse my history and other random moments). Or when you go into time machine mode, it slows down maybe because of the space effects in the background.

With SSD, everything works very fast. Startup, shutdown. Starting up software, etc.

With a 7-hour long battery life, it’s long enough for me to keep working until I’m satisfied. On my previous laptop, I had just a bit more coding to do but forced to stop because of low battery after 2 hours.

Thanks to the long battery life, I stopped shutting down. Just close the lid and next day, resume from where I stopped.

The keys are comfortable to type on. The touchpad is more sensitive than most other laptops I’ve worked with. The gestures are handy.

Love the thin size, light weight and aluminium body. Makes it amazing how they can pack 7 hours of battery life into such thin space.

Best of all, you don’t have to worry about device drivers. Apple has them all covered.

On Windows, I would have to go to every website of every device on my PC/laptop and download the latest drivers, BIOS/firmware for them if I want the best performance or bug fixes. On a Mac, the “Software Update” program will handle everything.

My previous laptop seems to have a bluetooth problem. After I updated the BIOS, it stopped booting up and Dell had to send someone down to replace the motherboard. Another problem is the USB port. It becomes ultra slow when you try to transfer a large file to a portable harddisk. I’m sure it’s not a power issue.

But it’s just 2 months. Let’s see if I can find any more problems with it.

Woke up at 2:30am to prepare for my flight which is at 5:35am.

Feeling confident that this trip will be fine this time thanks to my experience from a previous trip 3 years ago, I set off anxiously to the airport.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have slept that night. Because throughout the flight, I couldn’t sleep. But good thing is they now have little TV screens on the back of each seat so I was able to kill time by watching some movies on my flight there.

Arriving at the Narita airport, after going through customs, there’s one more stop where you need to open up your luggage for checking. This is where the first embarassing thing happened to me. I forgot the 3-digit number to unlock my suitcase.

I know it’s a familiar number but I got nervous and ended up mixing up the numbers in my head.

And when I finally got it opened, sometime during when the officer went through the stuff in my luggage, the numbers were adjusted again and I didn’t have the chance to memorize it. And because the numbers were shifted, I couldn’t close it!

Then his colleague suggested using this tape machine to help me secure the suitcase until I can get back to my hotel. But he wasn’t able to operate the machine and couldn’t get my suitcase tied up. So I had to carry my suitcase out the customs area and figure out the number outside.

I finally figured out the number after like 10 minutes of struggle.

Next task is to search around for the SoftBank outlet to collect the SIM card I rented online. After inserting the card into my iPhone, I looked at them and they seemed busy with something else. I thought that was it and so I walked away, but not too far away from the outlet.

The guy who attended to me came to tell me that the procedures weren’t over yet.

After signing some papers and testing to make sure the card works, I went to get my Keisei Skyliner ticket to Ueno, where my hotel is.

I totally forgot I had a fixed seat. And out of all the empty seats I randomly chose, I picked one which was assigned to someone else. The guy who showed me the ticket was kind enough to tell me to stay while he went to another seat in front.

After checking in at the hotel, which is located in a quiet alley, I discover that there’s no lift. I have to carry my suitcase up to the second floor. A suitcase which I know will get many times heavier once I get my shopping done.

Fortunately, for flights between Japan and Singapore on Delta, I could check in 2 baggages for free.

This time, I came with only 1 set of clothes, and was going to buy a few more at the Uniqlo here since it’s cheaper than Singapore’s.

My hotel room is a lot smaller than the one I had last trip, 3 years ago. A huge bed where one side is softer than the other.

On the table was an ADSL modem, with it’s power plug unplugged. Considering how old the place is, I thought this is what’s given to guests to get online. I plugged in the power, plugged in my own ethernet cable, no connection. ( It wasn’t until 2 days later, that I noticed another ethernet cable lying around on the table. Plugged that cable in and I’m online. orz )

I quickly unpacked some of my stuff and prepared to go to Akihabara for shopping, dinner and some phototaking.

Walking from the hotel to Ueno station takes less than 10 minutes. I’m so happy I booked at a good location.

Collected my 14 day JR pass at Ueno station’s helpdesk.

Navigating my way from the station’s helpdesk to the Yamamoto track happened so natural to me, it felt like I’ve been living in Japan for a long time.

At Akihabara, I spent 3 hours walking around various shops buying manga and CDs. Then I went to search for a nice place to have my first dinner in Japan. I found this ramen restaurant at UDX building and went in.

First thing I noticed was the ticket vending machine where you select what you want to eat and pay for it right there. I selected negi ramen and a cup of beer.

I sat at a corner, failing to realize it’s a smoking zone but fortunately, there weren’t any smokers around.

A girl tended to me and I handed her my tickets. She then gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, said something very fast which caught me off guard.

If I don’t pay 100% attention to someone speaking to me in Japanese, I instantly fail to understand what was said to me.

I started reading the piece of paper and realized it’s for me to select how I want my ramen done. There were many properties with various options for me to choose. I think what I circled was thin, slightly “spongy” noodles.

They were delicious. And probably because of the mood, even the beer felt good.

After dinner, I headed down to Shibuya and bought coffee from the Starbucks there. The second floor of this Starbucks has a good view of the cross junction in front of it where it’s always very crowded. Too bad it was crowded so I decided to just walk around the area.

In the middle of my walk, I got an unexpected phonecall from an old FFXI friend, L. He just happened to meet Z in-game so Z gave him my local rented phone number.

Along the streets, you could see some people bringing their own audio equipment and setting up their instruments in front of closed stores, for a mini-live performance.