chaka chaka

a new day, a new year.  as usual my discomfiture in releasing details about private stuff (to an extent) stems from the fact that the great internetz is anything but. oh, hello spiders. did you know that bots contribute more than 80% of my traffic at any odd day of the week? yup, that’s right.

the birthday and the week leading up to it was Cowabunga! simply because there are no other words to describe it. a daily surprise countdown: little (and not-so-little) things from the person i love most in the world; the finale: a super-pariah, uber-mabuk, 我像 lambie/please speak english, drinking session with my new and old friends. no, seriously, to all those who called me lightweight, you try downing 2 pints of hoegaarden + 1 graveyard + 1 flaming lambo + 4 random shots then you walk a tightrope in your Jimmy Choos while balancing seal pups on your face. so from my vantage point, which was face-first in a puddle full of stomach acid, i saw (or rather, i would have seen it if i stayed conscious) those whom i should continue hold close. i love you guys. thanks for taking care of ‘lil ‘ol smashed me. :)

new year’s eve was bloody beetroots at life centre. @khairulnz blew us off because of the traffic that existed in his head. @hailat was probably not feeling well. and despite retiring my aching feet by 2am like an aunty, my day & night ’twas fun you obviously didn’t have on new year’s. because i’m a snob like that and the world revolves around me, not you.

and that’s all i have to say about that. that, and wannabe writers should do less writing and more salsa-ing or leg-spreading or refine their cock-sucking techniques and shut the flying fuck up.

danke, 2009. you were very good to me. /hugs

the first part of the long leave commenced with a road trip to malacca. yes, we all roll our eyes at the little town that spawned, since the last count, 2,134,518 lomo photos and even more artsy fartsy DSLR shots. post-worked and posted to death. which is why the posse road trip was sorely missing one mr music and one miss rabbit (who scurried off to the less-travelled pulau ketam instead).

so malacca is, in the loosest sense, a home town of sorts. sketchy family history about supposed baba nyonya heritage, teochew wanderers touching points along the west coast, and the annual ching bing (qing ming to you) trip which i’ve never participated in, all tie me back to the state. plus i am head-over-heels for the lard-soaked chicken rice balls. probably the strongest proof of my heritage, methinks.

closed my eyes and picked two cameras to accompany me on the trip: the beloved LC-A+ and the paradoxically under- and over-rated golden half.

expired centuria dnp lends a rather strong purple haze to all photos (tested in a few trial rolls) which i’m not particularly fond of. i guess despite my occasionally pink hair, i’m a conventional girl at heart.

the weather was blazing, which just screamed for a fixed-speed toy cam and a tribe toyota brolley.

how obliging.

overpriced baubles and the throngs of KLites aside, the town has also fascinated me with that delicious creepiness old abandoned buildings have. as you peek through a crack in a mildewed door, you start pondering the “whys” “hows” and especially the “whos” of this dilapidated shell of a house, even expecting to be greeted by an unblinking otherwordly eye (because that’s what always happens in the movies, ok).

these place are supposedly unclean but with my starbucks-numbed senses i couldn’t and haven’t felt a thing. maybe just a little imagined loss and despair which in all probability stems from me trying to inject some romanticism into my yuppie life.

still, annual pilgrimages to the place has made me a little sick (though we could pin that on the horrid horrid satay celup).

chicken rice balls. check. st paul’s church. check. techni trishaws. double and triple checked. eye on malaysia. maybe not. baba house. hmm. cendol. check. geographer. limau limau. jonker after 8pm. it’s as if time elbowed its way forward just to stand still.

a sparkling, gleaming white tomb of a 500-years dead and gone and forgotten malay warrior. i dare you to make sense of that.

but then again, i’m merely rambling, waiting for my hair to set. which it just has.  i wish i were a peranakan princess.

blackberry apps warm the cockles of my geeky little heart.

4 copywriters.
3 making a mad scrabble to clear leave before the year end.
1 poor sod who’s used up his quota (and then some).

as my dear butterfoot succinctly put it:

Jook u are my idol !! http://twitpic.com/qvsza

good luck, take care, all the best, my friend. you’ll need it.

so does straightening, colour-correcting, level-tweaking mean you’re cheating? or are you failing yourself by not making your celluloid snaps better? is it a compromise of skill of you don’t get it perfect in that one shot? or is it pure bull-headed, “cutting my nose to spite DSLRs” pride to shun technological enhancements?

20/11/1987 – 10/10/2006

The blackberry craze that hit KL must be a strat planner’s/researcher’s absolute wet dream. Or nightmare. Depends on what grade they are, methinks.

Take me as your solitary dipstick subject aka one-person focus group. Not an “early adopter”, not a smartphone user, hate(d) blackberries, couldn’t give a shit about the current group trend (re: iPhone posse in the office).

Of course it started with bloggers. Which fucking campaign doesn’t ride on the blinged up coat tails of these over-hyped camwhores? Then celcom (cleverly enough) targeted the pseudo indie/elektro group and what have you klubbers by including (baby’s) ah xu. Nice one.

My little echo got a blackberry. And pressured me sweetly with the lure of FREE chat. First learning: don’t underestimate your secondary target.

Being the google freak that I am, I started researching. BIS. Blackberry compression. Push email. BB Messenger. Met ah hiong sometime between this voracious googling and a pitch to fondle his Bold. Switching back and forth between apps got me weak at the knees. Then on monday, dragged by mr music, I touched the Curve 8520 and loved that it had no balls. Sold! Second learning: a no-fucking-brainer, sell a good product.

I now have two lines: voice & texts + BIS. Why? Because Xpax has an awesome daily unlimited plan which is actually giving me 2nd thoughts about chucking the SIM. Third learning: be generous (Maxis, you kiam siap bastards).

So, this phone *ahem* device is not my life. Yet. According to my office tablemate, he hasn’t seen me put the fucking thing down since. But fuck you all, I’ve installed bb app world (not available to malaysians) so I fucking rock. I also get to chat with the lovely baby any damned time I please. How awesome is that?

Posted, of course, from my BlackBerry@ wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile, yo.

This is quite complicated. Some server communications error ocurred bla bla invalid timestamp appears and apparently the only way to fix it is by fiddling with the xmlrpc file. Ah hiong, help!

dawn went for a haircut for the first time in a year (and no, a measly trim does not a haircut make). i was having a bad day and so i begged her to take me along.

there was some sort of office bet going on that she wouldn’t dare get a mohawk-type do. HA-HA!

suck it up, bitches. a haircut that actually made her money. how awesome is that. shaved sides which can be covered by a cute bob/fringe. yeah, my design because i’m just fucking awesome that way.

our hairstylist, ray sun, is another diva. not as big a superstar as ming (who never picked up my phonecalls), but probably 10 times the stalker.

this is my new hair, which surprised no one. half the people i met probably didn’t even notice it changed again. i like shaved sides but the only problem, which i believe everyone encounters, is that i can’t fucking seem to style it the same way. it’s been 3 days now and it looks absolutely nothing like this at all. fuckmylife.

check out my eye bags. have i been working hard or what?