Category: Life

Came back from Bangkok with a sore throat. Few days later it worsened, went to the doctor’s and was diagnosed with flu.

The medicine is making me feel weak and I seem to get irritated easily over little things. :/

I guess setting the air temperature to 16 degrees Celcius (60.8 Farenheit) while sleeping under a thick blanket was a bad idea, lol

Food in Bangkok is good. That’s the only thing I enjoyed about it.

Did a bit of shopping at one of the huge night markets near my hotel. I forgot the name but that place is really huge. Bought a new belt there. Oh, and beer there is very cheap.

Next day before we left for the airport for our afternoon flight, my colleague and I went to Ma Bun Kong, another large shopping center. I bought a thick Columbia winter jacket for my trip to Japan. It costs 1000 Baht, which is about $46 SGD, $31 USD. I’ll try to remember to take a few pictures of it.

Feeling high and blur from the medication now. :( 

I mentioned earlier that I was to go to Australia to give training on the CRM software I’m working on.

Well, my client decided to send someone from their local team over. I was happy when I received the email that I didn’t have to go.

Then about an hour later, I received another email saying that I have to go to Bangkok, Thailand, instead. >_>

Anyway, one of my colleagues will be going with me so it’s not so bad this time.

I’ll be flying tomorrow, 25th Sept and will be back on the 28th Sept. I’ll most likely have internet access but I won’t be logging in to FFXI.

A friend of mine, whom I’ve met over IRC and one of the poeple who got me into FFXI, Sollanon (his FFXI character name), was celebrating his ORD and invited me over to his house for beef sukiyaki.

Every Singaporean needs to serve National Service (Military service) for about 2 years. ORD (I don’t know what the full word is) is when a person has finished serving NS and is free to continue on with his life.

I don’t have to serve NS because I’m Malaysian. Nya hahaha!

Anyway, on Saturday, we went down with another friend also from IRC and FFXI, Joachim, to the wet market in Little India to buy beef. They had the stall owner slice 7 Kilograms of about 1mm beef! Total cost: SGD$314 (207USD).

This specially prepared soup is where you dip your beef slice to cook it and eat right away. Kept at boiling temperature and we added some udon noodles too.

The raw beef slices! Each plate is 1KG, so yea, there were 7 of these.

Of course, 7KG of beef was not consumed only by the 3 of us. A few other of Sollanon’s friends were invited as well.

I was taught to eat them with raw eggs. You crack a raw egg into a bowl and stir it well. Then you dip your cooked beef into it and then eat it. It was delicious and I felt like I have eaten 1 years worth of beef in 1 day.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with this remaining time of my life.

When you think about it, life really is short and many things can happen anytime within the next 3 years. Before you know it, you have a child to take care of. Next, your grandchild sits next to you watching TV with you. Then time’s up. (lolhi-speedfastforwarding)

I’ve worked for my current company for 5 years as a web developer. It’s stable and the environment is good. I’ve never thought of switching careers but recently because of the ODEX fiasco, I’ve been thinking of doing something different. Something that matches my real interests: anime.

I’ve been wondering what sort of work I can do that can help me earn a living and at the same time, involves anime and help to improve the anime community. But nothing comes to mind.

Translator? I don’t think it’s a job that can support a family. And you’ll need to be very good at Japanese and English if you want to translate between the 2 languages. The responsibilities are high too. It’s not like fansubs where the group who made a mistake can easily re-encode and release a version 2 with corrected translations.

If you work at a anime distribution company like Singapore’s BlueMax/PohKim/Odex or America’s ADV Films, one mistranslation cannot be undone as hundred thousands of copies of DVDs are already printed and get sold.

Open an anime figurine store? There’s actually already lots of these stores. I sometimes wonder how they survive when their stores seem empty most of the time. One will also need to know where to get their products from and perhaps need a few contacts in Japan to bring in products.

A cafe? It’s not cheap to rent space. I have an idea for one but my idea requires huge space. Again, business knowledge is needed. And I will need lots of money for this, which I don’t.

Yup… still thinking… waiting for that eureka moment…

In the end, I can only slave away at my current place, hoping one day I strike lottery big time (I don’t buy those often though) and my burden will lessen.

Kept forgetting to blog about this.

Well, 2 weeks ago on the August 25th, I went down to the Japanese School at Changi for the Natsu Matsuri (Summer Festival) event. It’s open to public.

Most of the food there cannot be purchased with cash and you have to buy the coupons either weeks before the event or on the day itself. I chose the latter and ended up not being able to eat anything there…

The crowd was huge, too huge. Coupons were sold out. But thanks to the few friends I went with, they managed to get remaining coupons from other friends and we got ourselves some Tori Karaage (boneless fried chicken) which is delicious.

We didn’t stay for long as all of us originally planned on having dinner there. But without coupons, we got very hungry and left early.

We did stay to watch some of the stage performances for a short while.