I love Lydia a lot and in this, our 7th year together, we get to celebrate our Valentines Day in a simple way for the first time as a married couple.
Just to share a picture of us eating at Carl’s Jr:
And… not to forget, the best Valentine’s gift ever (for now):
Just a quick short post to say “Thanks dear, love you forever!” Always will.
So I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks already. “Want to get a domain or not?”
The plus point about having your own name as the domain is… well…”glamour-lah” (It’s glamourous). The minus point about having your own domain name is it costs money.
But I’m the type of person who will ponder, meandre and brood over decisions like this, but inevitably inch towards biting the bullet. Today, I bit it.
Started the day asking people about which domain service to use. Suan said Paul’s service very reliable. Then Kel told me to go check out www.exabytes.com.my. Ran a Google search and in Malaysia apparently there’s like tonnes of registrars (like www.webserver.com.my).
Finally, I settled on GoDaddy because its a name I know (heard it over Coolness Roundup) and because I had a coupon that made my 3 year registration cost only US$ 21.45 (can you beat that?).
The next step was to get Blogger to publish to my domain. Thankfully, this was a really simple step with the full instructions here. All you gotta be is a bit patient. I wasn’t, so I was bugging people over MSN and moaning because all I could see for 2 hours after registering was this “parking” page (the page that tells you davidlian.com is coming soon).
Well, as you can see, it works now. And I feel so legitimate. It’s like… I’ve moved off free-service-land into owning my own lease-hold apartment. I’ve actually got my own web-address.
Okay, so people, to celebrate my new domain. Can I say, this makes me super happy and that if I could, I would have entered the Happy Moments contestwith this post. Because it’s hard to express how you feel when you own your own domain name (instead of letting some squatter squat on it). It’s just happy.
Gone done myself some painting for me latest army. And I’m so excited, I have to share them here.
These Grey Knights are the best of the Imperium and the Emperor’s finest. Got a bit of static grass on them. I’ll have to pull that off tonight… o_O
This weekend was filled with aching legs, leech bites and bruises.
For the first time in about 3 months we went mountain biking again. We were all pretty happy before setting off on the trails as seen in the picture below. We were going to have a go at “Dream” (the name of the trail) at FRIM.
After pedalling in past the gates and towards the trail proper, we stopped for another pic. Still looking very gung-ho and ready forthe challenge.
15 minutes into the trail, Jason turns back and looks at me and says: “You hyper-ventilating?”
“Uh…*breathe* breathe* … no, not really… *breathe* *breathe*”
“Okay, if you’re hyper-ventilating, better stop, take off your helmet and catch your breath for a bit okay?”
“Uh… *breathe* *breathe* okay.”
About 5 minutes after that I fell of my bike. Heh… guess I’m just not as fit as I thought I am.
Got back up and continued down the trail again. This is me, still looking cheerful. I *attempted* some basic Mountain Biking maneuvres – Jason and Yuke Bin – were teaching me since they were basically the gurus of the group, but fell down a couple of times. Can’t take a bend yet or do a switch-back. Can’t even pedal off a ramp and land properly (resulting in me getting stuck half-way up the ramp and falling off my bike again).
But we persevered through the entire course (about 2 hours of biking) and the reward was a high-speed chase down tar roads to get back out ot the main entrance. There’s nothing like having the wind in your hair, going at top speed and knowing that you’re not likely to get knocked down by a car. It’s just simply joy.
The rest of the day actually deserves a part two in itself so I’ll setup a second post later when I get around to it.
It was already pretty late and I was all tired out – was sick, you see.
But then, I got a little bit of cheer in my mail:
Yup! The box of glade guard I won from listening to podhammer! I guess listening to podcasts does pay off.
thanks Jeff!
Talk about the biggest coincidence ever!
Today as I was scrolling into through my old posts and wierdly noticed an extra comment on a post I made in August about googling myself on the Internet. Apparently another David Lian did a google of his own name too and found me.
Check that post here.
No one may have joined him in his cries for “Merdeka” yesterday at Parliament, but Lim Kit Siang’s point didn’t go unheard. A story published in the New Straits Times today said:
CRIES of “Merdeka” rang seven times through parliament yesterday as Lim Kit Siang tried to prove a point on patriotism.
NST says “tried.” I say, point well taken.
Even as Malayan Peninsula begins its next 50 years of independence, the concept of patroitism still takes on a one-dimensional perspective.
For most Malaysian school-children, myself included, singing patroitic songs is almost a guaranteed childhood experience. I remember standing under the hot sun singing “Malaysia Berjaya” and “Demi Negara”at a bunch of teachers sitting in the shade.
Of course, in secondary school it became “Wawasan 2020″ and a couple of other songs that I can’t recall.
Someone believed that singing Patroitic songs would make us more patroitic. Oh, and we were taught that when such songs were sung, we’d need to stand up erect to show our patroitism.
Veteran actor-director Jo Kukathas once poked fun in her parody “Atomic Jaya”, stating that Malaysian’s could invent a new patroitic song every time they had something to hide or had a cause they needed to rally people around.
But patroitism is more than just a song and dance. Sure, it’s easy to get people to say “we love our nation” and wear the Malaysian flag with “pride” but that’s as far as it usually goes.
Not many Malaysians are too concerned about our nation and that shows from the lack of interested voters. A paltry 12 million voters in the last election showed just how much people cared about our Nation’s future.
This is not good for the country. If we want to be Malaysians, we need to start caring about issues, challenging the status quo if it isn’t right and ensuring that the appointed public officials are doing their job.
It’s time to vote. And vote intelligently.
… setup a cab company. Seriously!
So I’m Singapore for a couple of days for a couple of meetings and a Nokia event (which is happening tomorrow) and this time round, I got booked into Rendezvous Hotel which is quite a ways from the Text 100 Singapore office.
That meant transport. And in Singapore terms, it also meant “Taxi.”
Yesterday night, when I arrived and had checked in, it was off to dinner. My ex-colleague Felicia made a kind offer to take me to dinner, only that I had to meet her at the taxi stand near China Square. We were supposed to meet at 9:30, so at about 9:20 I popped downstairs to wait for a taxi.
The sign by the taxi line suggested that a taxi should arrive in 5 minutes. 10 minutes, no taxi passed by. One angry man who’d been waiting there for longer than I stomped off, presumably to now take an evening jog to wherever his location may be.
It was now 9:30 p.m. so I decided to take walk to the main road and try to catch a cab. Maybe better fortunes there. I strolled down the road just outside the hotel, carefully avoiding a couple of scantily clad ladies by the side of the road just chillin’ in front of Hotel 81 (where you can pay by the hour for rooms – what an innovative system!) but failed to flag a taxi down. There must have been at least 20 taxis passing by and every single one was busy or on call.
Okay, the clock was ticking fast. It was now 9:44. I caved. I sent a quick SMS to Felicia apologising for making the poor girl wait at the taxi stand for such a long time and got the hotel to call me a cab. Surcharge was SGD4 for just booking the cab alone. The whole trip cost about SGD 10 – normal for your average Singaporean native, but for poor Malaysian like me…a bit mahal lah.
Tonight, the same thing happened again. Went to this Tanjong Pagar road to have dinner with Nicole and catch up, checked out her neato office at GE Tower and then ran off to try to reach a bike shop on time. Too bad the bike shop closed early, so I waited at the Tanjong Pagar taxi stand to patiently try and catch a cab.
Lining up in front of me was this lady who was just furious that some booked cabbie couldn’t find the Taxi stand. Forgive me for eavesdropping, but after listening to her painfully explain where the taxi stand was, even I knew how to get there!
So basically, there were four of us looking to get a cab back. Myself. An auntie with groceries. And a couple just after work. I was the first in line and we waited a grand total of 15 minutes to have like more than 20 cabbies pass us by before one finally stopped.
With much vigour and excitement, I skipped to the cab driver to get him to send me back to Rendezvous, but he flatly refused.
Apparently, he had taken on another booking and Rendezvous was out of the way for him. Darn! You’re at a taxi stand and you can still take bookings? What happened to picking customers up from taxi stands?
I caved immediately after and it was another SGD 10 back to the hotel.
Moral of the story? There seems to be a shortage of cabbies in Singapore and an overwhelming demand for cabbies. Maybe there’s room for one more cab company?
It was getting late. Work was tiring me out. Felicia pinged me on MSN. And, before I knew it, Fel started going on and on about how great FaceBook is, and after listening (or reading) to enough of her yammering, I relented and setup my own FaceBook account (world holds its breath – yay!).
So here’s what it looks like:
Cute huh?
Anyway, for the uninitiated, FaceBook is undoubtedly one of the hottest ways to get connected. If you’re Malaysian, chances are you’re already on Friendster (Malaysians are the No.2 race on Friendster, in case you didn’t know). Well, FaceBook is a lot like Friendster, but so much more… INSTANT! You can ping friends, draw up a calendar of where you’ll be and when, start chain letters and basically anything there is an application for.
Your dashboard is basically a collection of Widgets you allow to run on your front page. This can be a Twitter-like interface, a calendar-tracker or a Flickr badge – a bit like your blog but with a lot more interactivity.
I also like the was friends and organisations are organised. Thanks to a nice little plug-in that allows FaceBook to search through my Gmail contacts, FaceBook instantly identified my friends who were already on FaceBook and suggested groups that I should join. Entered my Text 100 work e-mail and bingo! I was on the Text 100 FaceBook community.
Okay, I think I’ve said enough. Go try it out, now. And, when you do, ADD ME!
Because of the sudden SURGING popularity of and peer pressure to (from popular blogs such as Amilia’s and Nicole’s) rate your blog, I also got this blog rated and it turned out to rate as a….
Haha… sigh.
On the basis that I only used the word “death” twice and “kill” once. We need more hilarious rating schemes for blogs. This is lame.
