Light Saber Trial

BAN '06

It's Valentine's Day and also Brothers' Appreciation Night at Highrock. Last year, the brothers of the Young Adults' Ministry put on what I heard was an elaborate event in honor of the sisters. This year, the sisters did the same for the brothers. As for me, I get a sweet deal :)

雨过天晴

It's a Blizzard!

You know things are bad when they start using construction equipment to clear snow.

Suicide Prevention Weekend

In lieu of the random long holiday at Chicago, a bunch of friends from the Windy City came down to Boston for the weekend! :)

Alex, Irene, Sonia

Samurai Champloo

At the recommendation of Tianyu, the man who introduced me to Bleach and Naruto, this is my latest anime endeavor. It's hip-hop, samurai action, and dubious Japanese history all rolled into one. I'm on episode 8 right now, and so far the story is pretty pointless, but the characters are nonetheless pretty interesting. :P

Derren Brown

As you can see from the immense frequency of posts these past 2 days. I am procrastinating from actual work. Anyhow, I just watched a video called "The Heist" hosted by this guy called Derren Brown who is based in the UK. In the program, he essentially manages to somehow psyche a bunch of middle management executives into commiting armed robbery without them even being aware of it. It's nuts! He's the same guy who managed to make this guy think that he was fighting zombies in a real-life arcade game.

You can download the full "Heist" video here. It's a 300+ MB so it'll take a while if you have cable or forever if you have dial-up, but it's worth the wait!

Thai Commercials

A bunch of Thai ads recommended by Bless, a fellow student in the RSEA program...

1) Slimming
2) Yellow Pages
3) Suicidal Dog
4) Bank
5) Eyesight
6) Workaholic
7) Visa

Also, I was recently introduced to this streaming website which is based in China and gives you access to a ridiculous number of Chinese TV channels (3 channels dedicated to the great Stephen Chow!), as well as stuff from the US that is available there. I was stuck watching Prison Break (filmed in Chicago!) for some 3+ hrs yesterday! They even have some shady stuff like continuous streaming of a bootlegged Syriana!

Chinese New Year Dinners

Last night I went to this massive gathering of Harvard Singaporeans in lieu of Chinese New Year. It was one of the most claustrophobic meals I've ever had as we occupied pretty much 1/3 of this rather small Chinese restaurant. The picture on the left depicts one of two tables at the dinner. Below is a photo from a CNY dinner with some people from my church.

Eugene On the Way to South Africa

On a lighter note, Eugene Seah arrived from Colorado yesterday enroute to South Africa where he's going to be spending a week vonlunteering at an orphanage before starting work. So a bunch of us met up last night for Korean BBQ followed by ice-cream at Christina's. I am still somewhat shocked by the ability of 2 (maybe 3) guys in this group to finish a pint of ice-cream by themselves. I once thought this talent was only present in certain extraordinary girls, but I guess I have been proven wrong.

Yesterday night, under the tutelage of Daryl Lim and Nokia, I also kind've figured out how to play Mahjong. Now it's time to try it out on a PC before being eaten alive by real people.

On a side note, I played Risk from beginning to end for the first 2 times in my life over the past weekend during a Church retreat. I never knew that Risk was such a high-commitment game. Each game lasted almost 4 hrs! No wonder I never completed a game before. Quite exiciting, but probably not worth invest in a set coz it'll be hard to find people willing to burn 4hrs rolling dice.

Arab-Israeli Conflict

This post is somewhat delayed (a week to be precise), but nonetheless, I thought it was interesting enough to pen down. So about a week ago, I went to watch Munich with Wenwei. For those unacquainted, Munich is about the alleged Israeli retaliation to the massacre of Israeli atheletes by Palestinians during the 1972 Olympics. I thought the movie was one of the best that I had seen in quite a while. With the exception of a rather awkward sex scene that is interspersed with flashbacks of the Munich incident, the film effectively presents a somewhat balanced account of the dilemmas facing both the Palestinians and Israelis as they use violence in pursuit of peace.

The following day, I had my wisdom teeth extracted, after which I went home and watched Kingdom of Heaven. I've had it lying around for quite some time now but never really got down to watching it, so it was really coincidental that it was also essentially about the Arab-Israeli conflict, albeit almost 900 years earlier. While the storyline is pretty unbelievable, the action is nonetheless engaging with an enormous siege battle ala The Messenger. Anyhow, again the question of violent means for peaceful ends was raised.

Amazingly, that very night I was watching BBC and there was a report that Hamas had just swept the Palestinian elections, much to the surprise of observers around the world. Now, I'm not going to give some stunning commentary on the implications Hamas' new-found political power since I know next to nothing on the issue save remnants of knowledge from History 7. However, this chain of events (2 movies + news report) certainly highlights the complicated issues surround peace in the Middle East and the frustration experienced on all sides of the conflict.

The Loss of Wisdom

Ouch... I already am stupider to beginning feel.

Teo Heng's Birthday

Just got back from a meal at Penang, the closest thing to a Singaporean restaurant here in Boston. So now I have Hainanese chicken rice, Cha Kway Teow, beef rendang, pineapple rice, and some other assorted goodies digesting in my tummy. The occasion was Teo Heng's Birthday/end of exams for us folks in the faculty of arts and sciences. One interesting thing about the people present this evening is that all of them spoke Chinese. Yes, all the non-Asian folk in the picture, as well as a bunch of girls from France who turned up later. And it wasn't Chinese with a funny accent. It was really decent sounding Chinese. Plus many of them were doing research in Chinese literature. This really puts me to shame man :P

Fold a Shirt in 4 Seconds

Check out this amazing technique of shirt folding! Too bad I already did my laundry yesterday...

Blast From the Past

California Weekend

After 3 years of good intentions, I have finally made the pilgrimage to Stanford, my #1 choice for undergrad. I flew over on Friday and only just got back today to begin studying for my one and only final exam of the semester. Over these past couple of days, I managed to meet a whole bunch of people, many of whom I haven't seen in ages! Many thanks go out to Zhongjie, Michael and Tammy who were kind enough to provide me with shelter and good company during my time at Stanford and Berkeley.

U of C+ at the infamous In-and-Out: Zhihui, Dolly, Yujuan, Ling Ling, James and Alex

Delta Wing-mates: Zhongjie, Zhouquan and Eugene

My two OCS roommates: Zhongjie and Weihuang

Weight Loss for Dummies

A couple of days back I watched The Machinist, which reaffirmed my admiration of its star, Christian Bale. The movie is basically about this guy who hasn't slept for a year and has recently been receiving cryptic notes that start to really mess with his head. In terms of genre, it's pretty much a cross between Momento and The Game, both of which are superb films. Anyhow, a key element of the film is that the main character is ridiculously thin. Considering that we're talking about a guy who would play Batman only a year later, his massive weight loss and subsequent recovery is nothing short of amazing!

For those of you who are interested, I would recommend some of his other films like American Psycho and Equilibrium, both of which have not been terribly popular at the blockbuster, but nonetheless have a charm of their own. This guy really specializes as playing characters who are somewhat psychotic, and hence I was really glad that he was casted for the most recent Batman Begins since the part suits him to a tee.

2.5 Weeks of Bliss

What is known here as the "Winter Break" has come and gone and right now it's back to work for us poor folks who have exams and paper deadlines after the holidays. :( I have spent the past 2 days trying to squeeze blood out of stones writing about China-ASEAN relations and still have some 10 pages to go. Well, I guess all good things must come to an end...

The past two and a half weeks have been pretty amazing not just because I had a legitimate excuse not to care of school work, but more importantly because my girlfriend, Adriel, flew over from Singapore to keep me company over these cold winter days. Ok, it wasn't all that cold, especially since we went to Puerto Rico for a week with the dynamic duo, Gabriel and Zhimin.

We managed to take in both the city life in Old San Juan, where we had a lovely apartment with a partial view of the sea, as well as the more laid back pace on the island of Vieques, where we managed to swim with a bunch of glowing plankton in Mosquito Bay. Despite the frigid water, the experience was truly amazing! It was literally like bathing in the stars. (btw, although there has been increasing light pollution in the area, the night sky there is still pretty sweet!)

After getting back to Boston, we took a couple of days resting before taking a day trip to New York. Being the second trip for the two of us, we check out 'alternative' attractions like the Earthroom and the Forbes Magazine Galleries, both of which were rather interesting in their own way. I also made a second failed pilgrimage to the ridiculously crowded Serendipity cafe, which kindly informed me that the wait was gonna be a short 5 hours. More waiting was in store for us at MoMA which was offering free entry since it was Friday. The line was seriously shocking. We just kept walking like there was no end till we found ourselves on the other side of the building.

Upon returning from New York, I copied the photos from my camera into the computer and then proceeded to delete them from the memory card. Little did I know that the copying process was truncated so I lost more than 1/2 of all the shots I took there. For any of you dumbos like me, there is hope. After spending an afternoon looking for free programs to revive the lost memories, I found Zero-Assumption Recovery, which did the job very nicely.


New Year's Eve was spent with Quanhui and Anthony at this Italian/Peruvian restaurant called Taranta. The service was pretty bad, but probably coz we were the youngest people in the entire restaurant.

So I guess that's the general idea of what's been going on for the past few weeks. Now it's back to writing papers and doing readings. I know I should be happy right now since everyone who is working seems to miss their academic years... alas 生在福中不知福

Buy Nothing Christmas

So today at church, my pastor gave a sermon on gift giving over Christmas. He pointed to the common problem of how to buy a present for someone who already has everything, or doesn't really need anything right now. The answer is so incredibly simple that we often dare not even consider it. Simply put, to the one who has everything, the best thing you could get him is nothing. Living within the zone of what alot of us like to consider "middle class", most of us already have more than we need, yet we constantly strive to accumulate more and more stuff. Perhaps it is time we started giving to those that really need it. So instead of exchanging gifts among friends and family who already have everything, why not spend that money on giving to the less fortunate? This saves you all the time and energy spent looking for stuff that neither party actually needs, and at the same time provides for people who actually are in genuine need. Of course this assumes that your friends and family don't measure your concern for them by the things you buy them in the first place...

Room With Obscured View

A snow storm is raging outside now. I just walked back from a meeting with my professor who assured me that if I die on the way home, she'll still give me a grade. It's nuts! There's thunder and lightning too! Never seen that before... dunno how I will make it to Bible study tonight.