11.20pm: I’m in the hotel. My dad hasn’t slept since 3am. He’s lying on the bed now, but a minute ago, he suddenly woke up, looked at me, told me to “look at the business aspect of the house”, mumbled a bit, then explained that it was for “making sure… minimum wage”. Then he fell back asleep. I am still quite puzzled by his advice, but I will never forget his words of wisdom.

11.22pm: I have no internet. This is a diary I shall be typing, hopefully regularly, and then uploading to my blog whenever I am fortunate enough to get internet access.

11.29pm: Always be prepared. No internet for 15 days? No worries. Just be prepared. Make sure to prepare everything you need using everything you have. For me, that means a lot of things can be done to waste the boring hours away:

• iPhone. Download apps. Tons of apps. I have 131 apps. 71 of them are games. Many, many hours can be spent here. One important app is VLC player.
• Laptop (Macbook). Have lots of stuff. Games: Plenty of offline, single-player games which I haven’t touched yet. Worse case scenario: Civilisation IV. That should net me a couple of hundred of hours of wasted time. Also, videos. I have Dexter, Firefly and Mad Men, Seasons 1,1 and 1, to watch. Transfer them to VLC Player on the iPhone, and I can watch them anywhere. There’s another 20-30 hours.
• Photos. Have lots of photos, and be quite OCD about arranging them. I have nice big folder called “Unsorted” with lots of holiday photos. Generally, I perform the following process on my photos: Look through every photo. Delete any non-unique photo or boring photo.  Adjust contrast and brightness (only) of every remaining photo. Save photo set at full resolution and compress the set. Copy set over to hard drive. Take photo set and reduce size to a maximum of 1500×1000 pixels for each photo. Save resized photos to iPhoto. Repeat for remaining photos. As of now: I have 5 gigs of photos to “process”. About 4-5 hours down the drain.
• Homework. … Actually nevermind, this won’t take up much time at all.
• New house. I have at least 6-7 cardboard boxes worth of stuff to move and arrange soon. This will probably never finish and I will still be unpacking things 3 months from now.
• Books. Yet to read: Revolutionary Road, To Kill A Mockingbird, Catch-22. To re-read (in case of Cambridge interview): A Very Short Introduction to Mathematics, The Pleasure of Counting.

There’s actually plenty more stuff, but it’s 11.45pm and I need to wake up at around 6am. Adios.

11.59pm: Ok, I was going to sleep. my dad woke up again, asked me what time it was, then lectured me about the importance of efficiency in business, used an analogy by comparing it to finding out about a movie (make sure there’s a good writer, etc.) then talking about how you must research a store). Then he closed his eyes and I asked him if he wasted to bathe. He said, “No,” and I said, “Good, Go to sleep.”

It’s been a long time since I last posted in the blog regularly. It’s strange you know… I thought that going to the UK would inspire me to talk about lots and lots of random things, like describing the new places I go to and showing off the interesting things which happen, but rather, the opposite happened and I became lazy. Too lazy to type a word about my life. It’s with great effort that I even got the will to type this post, but at least I’ve started, and my experience tells me that 99% of the work is just getting the will to start it.

So, yeah, I officially resurrect this blog from Limbo. I hope…

Stuck in Limbo:

I think everyone in the world knows about this by now:

It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes be spread over Europe.

Iceland goes bankrupt, then it manages to set itself on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it.

Patron: Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!
*Waiter pours volcanic ash into the soup*
Patron: What are you doing?!
Waiter: Creating a no-fly zone, sir.

It’s a bit early for Iceland volcano jokes. We should wait awhile for the dust to settle.

My holiday should have ended last week, but two flight delays later, I’m finally flying back to school now. As I sit here in the departure hall, I can look back at a wonderful holiday spent with family, friends and Raina :) Thanks everyone for the great time while
I was home… and I’ll be back soon for even more fun times!

I’m going to thoroughly enjoy my 2 weeks back in Malaysia. I didn’t realize how busy I was in Cambridge until today when I spent the last 9 hours of my life doing absolutely nothing productive. I miss doing that.

It was without a doubt the most exciting Chinese New Year trip to Singapore I have experienced in my life. Not hard considering it’s my only one. Here’s what happened :

Hours in car. Immigration at 2nd Link. Fairmont Hotel. Amazingly grand. Up to room. Stay there for 3 hours. Dinner with some friend of my father’s and 2 of their 4 children (other 2 were somewhere else (wisely)). Back upstairs. Sleep.

Wake up. Go to adjoining mall (Raffles Plaza). Eat at Kopi Tiam (a kopitiam shop). Look at stuff at mall. Eat lunch (I forget where). Take MRT to Orchard Road. Walk to Robinson’s, then Isetan, then Robinson’s and spend vouchers which were given by someone to us. Struggle to spend vouchers (:x). Pretend to be only slightly bored while thinking of menial thinks to relieve boredom. Choose clothes, try clothes, dump clothes. Battle with boredom. Walk and wait for sister/father/mother to choose items. Overcome boredom. Walk more and kill boredom. Nighttime. Take taxi back to hotel, and thus to mall, and to Shokudo.

*pause commentary*

Finally something interesting. Shokudo is Marche, japanese style. Us being the lucky ones, we went there on the same day a feature came out in the Straits Times. 15 minutes wait to enter. Then we received a card (much more preferable to a stamp passport, thankyouverymuch) to register our purchases. Ordering is simple, go to a counter, tell them what you want and wait.

Then take your food, place on table and go to another stall. Look for something vaguely interesting and order. Then, wait.

(Becomes a normal thing on February the 10th)

Then eat.

GARLIC FRIED RICE + BEEF TEPPANYAKI + RHOSTI + JAPANESE OMELETTE + ORANGE JUICE + CHOCOLATE GELATO = HUGE SUCCESS!

*resume normal commentary*

Back to hotel room. Sleep.

Wake up. Struggle to stay awake. Eat donuts for breakfast. Buy bread. Buy book. Go to hotel room. Read, wait and sleep for further 2 hours. Eat lunch. Pack items, leave hotel, go home.

Write boring blog post.

*fin*

Definitely as fun as watching paint dry. Then peel off. And finally crumble on the floor and decompose.

Moral of the story : Wait, and wait some more.