Five minutes later, I finished and sent it off. Then the voice came back, “You haven’t updated your blog for a month! Get to it!” And to appease him (her? it?) I decided to copy-paste the testimonial here.

What I like most about Abbey College were the teachers. They work very hard to ensure that all students work to their best of their capabilities. Not only do they teach the syllabus thoroughly and clearly, they also encourage us to work beyond our textbooks. Apart from teaching, the Abbey staff are also extremely brilliant at helping us students navigate through the university admissions maze that is UCAS. I was given great support on constructing my personal statement, and the college organised mock interviews to ensure I’d be ready for my Cambridge interview.

The other great part of Abbey College are the students. Students from all over the world come to Abbey, giving it a uniquely international feel. The students are generally very friendly as well, and are great fun to talk to. I personally had a great group of friends with which I could discuss certain topics we were studying, or just as easily talk about the most inane conversation topics. And practically everyone is staying near other students, I never felt lonely or bored in Cambridge.

Speaking of Cambridge, the city itself is an amazing place to be in. Cambridge is quiet enough that you can study without interruption, but there’s plenty of things to do if you need to go out. The school itself is located far to close to many good restaurants, which unfortunately meant I gained a lot of weight early on. There’s also a cinema and bowling alley barely five minutes from Abbey, and the city centre with its infinite number of shops is a good place to spend your weekend (and money!). And of course, Cambridge University is tantalisingly close, which makes great motivation.

“Now start writing about your experience at Cambridge!”

Too lazy, I’ll do it some other time.

“NO! You procrastinate too much and you keep wasting time…”

On my first day of forced imprisonment, I found out I had bigger problems. I had to walk for minutes between classes. Classrooms were not made of gold-plated steel or ivory. We were expected to study. The school did not provide chefs from Italy. The school did not provide food at all. There were no massage sessions. The indoor swimming pool was non-existant.

I was appalled.

But something miraculous happened.

I enjoyed myself while I was there.

And 18 months after I began, I managed to survive! In fact, I thrived in the UK. To me, those months in Cambridge doing A-Levels were exhilaratingly fun and interesting. So I’d like to say my thanks to some people:

To the teachers of Abbey College, you are the greatest set of teachers I have ever had the pleasure of sitting down and learning from. Whereas when some teachers teach the information goes straight from the board to the notebook without ever passing through either brain*, when you guys teach I always understand and memorise things until the day before the exam. To Helen, Tanya, Chris, Darren, Heather, Stuart, Ross, Boz, Richard and Sue in particular, thank you for bearing with me for the many hours I was in your class, making sure I don’t fall asleep in class (well, usually), teaching beyond the syllabus, marking tons of exam papers and for being caring, concerned teachers. I couldn’t have done it without you. :)

To Andrew, thanks for introducing me to Doctor Who. And board games. Oh, and making sure I was never able to ever think I was good at maths.

To Julian, thank you for… um… doing whatever it is you do. And board games also, I guess.

To my brother, thank you for doing the laundry sometimes.

To my sister, thanks…?

Penultimately but not least, to all my friends, thank you very, very much. There’s so many of you and I don’t want to single anyone out (and if I listed all of you I’d definitely miss one out), so to all my friends I am grateful for the stupid things we did together; the homework and notes we suffered through; the silly nights spent together; the odd conversations held at staircases; the times we ran to classes; the many, many “Good luck”s exchanged; the cooking nights at Jiann Lee’s my house; the milkshakes; the informal LAN’s; the let’s-chat-while-unlocking-our-bicycle-and-standing-awkwardly-in-the-cold chats; the May Ball; the charity event; the long walks; the short walks; the food shopping trips; Nando’s; NANDO’s; the terrible games of pool; playing Shadow Hunters, Settler’s of Catan, and the many other board games; that night when you pumped me full of alcohol; for letting me sleep on your couch and leech your internet; and for being generally the best friends one could ask for.

Last but still not least, to my parents, thank you for caring! You’re always there (even if you’re not wanted :p) to make sure I’m doing well. Thank you for working hard to make sure I have the best in education and life, and for making sure I grew up to be a responsible, smart, excellent, hardworking, humble, caring, interesting, handsome, amazi- (ok I’ll stop now) young man. You’re the best parents a boy could ever ask for. I love you two! :D **

Those were 18 months not easily forgotten.

* Ok, I stole this from the Cambridge Study Guide.

** You’re welcome.

This past Saturday started like most Saturdays: wake up at 11 am, stare drowsily at my iPhone and hit snooze. Go back to sleep but don’t actually sleep; instead, think about the meaning of life, the purpose of existence, a new Sentry-heavy Protoss build against Terran, food, how much time I’m wasting thinking about things in bed, and the universe in general. Also customary is the willingness to skip breakfast to enjoy a better blunch (if brunch is between breakfast and lunch, then blunch is between brunch and lunch).

I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing all my economics homework so I wouldn’t have to rush it on Sunday night playing Starcraft 2.

By about 5pm a bunch of us (10? or thereabouts) were at Yippee Noodle Bar ordering noodles (and the odd rice) to eat. Yippee noodles are delicious, give them a try. Then we went to Christ’s College for the play. All we were told when we got in was to follow the white signs to the theatre; our large group of brilliant future minds got lost twice. At last we found the theatre and sat down…

All of us. Some are hiding :/ Picture by Stephanie Cheng.

While waiting for the show to start I was also wondering what the CUMaS meant. Cambridge University Malaysia Society? Then why bother putting a lower case ‘a’ in the acrony- oh. I see.

Seeing as the website, facebook page, ticket and programme book all had zero information on the play’s story, the only thing which allowed me to guess the story was the title, “What Are Friends For”. I had some ideas:

• A touching story about how friendship connects people. The value of friendship in our lives.
• Dramatic comedy about friends in Malaysia.
• Explosions and aliens.

I was pretty sure that the first idea would be the actual play, but that most of the male population would enjoy the third option.

Anyways, the play happened to be about four friends from high school who went their separate ways for college. It starts off with them reuniting during their summer holidays in Malaysia. Then inject drama, relationships, and comedy into the story.

And the result is a surprisingly good story about these friends and their lives. The writers managed to interweave four storylines (the friendship, and three of the main characters families) together without making people confused. At the same time, the story is surprisingly realisticly told, and it truly made me feel that the events could have (and definitely does) happen in real life. Parents controlling their kids’ lives, trust among friends, broken families, troubled childhoods; it’s all there and I enjoyed every moment of the story.

Some highlights (paraphrased from memory):

• Mrs. Lim: “That boy ah, studying at that university with an animal inside ah- what’s it called? Cowford ah?”
  Sue Ann: “…”
  Sue Ann: “He’s studying in Oxford.”
  Crowd: *uproarious laughter*
  Sue Ann: “It’s almost as good as Cambridge. *pinches fingers in the air* Almost.

• Any scene which involved Ashvin and Sue Ann alone. This will single-handedly raise girls’ expectations on how guys should compliment them.

• The hilarious breaking-the-fourth-wall Facebook monologue which was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant writing which is impossible to replicate here.

• The final conflict scene where the main characters meet and end up screaming, shouting and accusing each other. Great scene.

• Cute, young boy on stage who couldn’t stop laughing and made everyone’s hearts go “AWWWWWWWwwwwwwwwww sho cuuuutte” for the three minutes he was on.

After the show (which sadly, will never be shown again :[ ), we stood outside for a while taking pictures (blegh). Then we began the slow, long walk back to my house. Over the course of the 40-minute walk (which should have taken 20 minutes), we rejected Pizza Hut, were slurred by a drunken hobo, a relationship was revealed (taking the number of relationships in our group from 3.5 to 4. :p ) and most sane people went back to their houses. But about 11 of the 25 actually made it to the house. We played football (on the PS3), played poker (without actual money) and played a drinking/confession game (without any alcohol).

._.

But in the end, after knowing a little more of each other and knowing a few new magic tricks, everyone left by 2am. I went to sleep happily after enjoying the awesome day and the charming parting smile :)

Long fun day :D will have to blog about it soon.

March 13, 2011 10:58 am via Seesmic for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@jiannmeng

Tan Jiann Meng

• A*AA in A-levels, excluding Economics.
• Grade S in both STEP Paper 2 and Paper 3.

Let’s analyse:

For A-levels, I already have an A* in Mathematics so that’s in the bag. For Further Maths, I must score an average of 80% in 6 papers (called modules) out of 9 that I’m taking. (Not exactly; I already have a 97% in Further Pure 1, so the average I need for the remaining papers is slightly lower, plus I can rearrange my Mechanics 1 or 2 paper into the Further Maths grade instead of Maths if needed.)

For Physics, I currently have 295/300, or 98.33%. To get an A (80%), I need another 185/300 in A2, or 61.67%. This should not be difficult.

For Economics, I could fail it and it wouldn’t matter in terms of my offer. I’d lose all my pride though.

The STEP papers are something else. Whereas all the above are achievable (I would even dare call it… “easy”), STEP papers are… difficult. An example is in order:

STEP Paper 2 2009 Question 1

Two curves have equations x⁴ + y⁴ = u and xy = v , where u and v are positive constants. State the equations of the lines of symmetry of each curve.
The curves intersect at the distinct points A, B, C and D (taken anticlockwise from A). The coordinates of A are (α,β), where α > β > 0. Write down, in terms of α and β, the coordinates of B, C and D.
Show that the quadrilateral ABCD is a rectangle and find its area in terms of u and v only. Verify that, for the case u = 81 and v = 4, the area is 14.

There are 13 questions for each paper. 8 are pure mathematics (like the one above), 2 are probability and statistics questions, and 3 are mechanics questions. They will mark your best 6 answers to any questions, with up to 20 marks per question. In general, to get an S, I will need to answer five questions fully and a sixth partially in STEP 2, and four questions fully in STEP 3. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, the above question (and the whole of STEP 2) can be answered using only knowledge from the Mathematics A-Level subject, whereas STEP 3 requires Further Mathematics knowledge. Technically, if you’ve done your SPM Further Maths, you have enough knowledge to answer the question above. Good luck.

My entire focus for the next six months is to study sufficiently to achieve an A* in all subjects, and spending the rest of my studying time on STEP. It should be pretty fun.

Fun Fact: The full name of Trinity College is: The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

Dear Applicant

I am very pleased to inform you that you have been made a conditional offer to study at Trinity College. Many congratulations!

…

Speechless. Just absolutely speechless.

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.”

I looked at the clock on my desktop: 6.30pm. I thought:

‘Why should I be bothered to go out and buy dinner from some restaurant, eat it right there and then, and walk all the way back? Why should I have to leave my room to obtain sustenance for my continued living? What have I done to deserve that sort of punishment? Surely there must be some better way of scavenging for food?’

‘Why, of course! There’s this website from which you can choose from several different restaurants, pick good, delicious, hot, steaming food, enter your address, and BAM! The food arrives at your doorstep 45 minutes later. What a marvel! Technology has solved all of mankind’s problems! Never again shall anyone suffer the indignity of walking to eat!”

‘Burgers! Nuggets! Fries! The food which all* students love, and all* adults hate! So I just enter my address here… click send? Yes… confirmation! It’s coming, the food is coming!’

*phone call*

“……Nando’s? Right now? Ummmmmmmmmm-”

‘Quick thinking required! Should I stay with my ordered food, wait in my quiet, book-filled room and avoid social interaction for the rest of the day? Or is the benefit of eating delicious chicken cooked with lemon and herb with some mediumishly spicy sauce, peas and the most delicious fries ever known to mankind, worth the trouble of cycling in the cold, windy weather, climbing up the bridge, in the middle of a traffic jam? Yes, it is worth the trouble.’

(By now my “Ummmm…” had stretched on to almost one second. I clearly think too slowly.)

“-mmmmmmmmmm ok”

‘Wait what do I do I just ordered food now what how do I cancel can I even cancel the food wouldn’t it be rude to cancel I don’t even have their phone number what am I supposed to do oh wait the website why don’t I click on the help button and see if there is some way to cancel oh wait there is awesome just call this number’

(5 minutes of waiting while on hold, talking to customer service, quoting the order number and telling them the sad, sad reason why I would elect to not want to eat such delicious food)

‘Ok, that’s done with. Time to go: personal item check! Watch; yes. Wallet; yes. Keys; yes. Phone; yes. Phone in pocket, keys in pocket, watch on wrist, wallet in pock- no wait it doesn’t fit in my pocket. Tsk. Jeans pockets, why are you always so narrow? What do I do?’

‘Well. It’s a short ride. Put it in your jacket pocket. Just make sure you check on it every few minutes to make sure you don’t drop it while you’re cycling.’

Ten minutes later:

‘Ok I’ll order a 1/4 chicken with 2 sides. How much is it? How much do I have?”

*pats pocket*
*pats pocket again*
*pats pocket again again*
*frantically throws jacket and checks all possible pockets simulataneously*
*runs out of Nando’s*

Then I check the entire area outside Nando’s. Upon failing to find any black wallet lying on the ground, I walk back into Nando’s. My great friends, instead of consoling me, convince me to cycle all the way back, then cycle on the same path where I presumably dropped my wallet.

My friends obviously want me to exercise.

Of course, no wallet was to be found. Maybe one day, people will just leave wallets lying on the street instead of picking them up. One day.

I still ordered the 1/4 chicken with 2 sides. It was delicious.

When I returned to my room, my burger, nuggets and fries were waiting in my room.

I had just left school on my bike, cycling merrily down the road. At the traffic light I stopped behind a guy riding a bicycle with no seat.

The guy was riding a bicycle with no seat.

He just stood with his legs on the ground and waited patiently for the light to turn green. Then as soon as it was green he started pedaling, without seating down. I stared, awestruck by the guy riding a bicycle with no seat.

I just followed behind him, watching his legs go round and round. He never sat, never looked tired, and accelerated faster than me. I had to cycle quickly to catch up, then he turned right. That was the last I saw the guy riding a bicycle with no seat.

As I rode home (on a bicycle with a seat), I contemplated the meaning of life. I pondered upon how insignificant our lives are, smaller than a speck of dust in the scale of the universe. I also thought that the guy riding a bicycle with no seat was awesome.

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.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010. I leave the house to go to school.

Note the snow (click to enlarge)

10 seconds later, I turn the corner.

Snowfall; it's pretty.

Then

THE SNOW POURED DOWN
IMAGINE A RAINSTORM
BUT ALL THE RAIN TURNED INTO SNOW ON THE WAY DOWN
AND THEN IT HITS YOU IN THE FACE

I had to take out my umbrella and shield myself. Two minutes have passed since the last photo.

This is the same road as the previous picture, but further in front.

Looking back.

So I walk, umbrella shielding me, for 10 minutes until I reach the Abbey College building on Station Road. I ask the receptionist for an envelope addressed to me, but apparently it hasn’t arrived.* So I leave the building and head to Regent’s Terrace, where my first class is.

Well that was fast.

*shrug*

Cambridge, where snow can come and go in 15 minutes.

*The envelope was there, it turns out the receptionist filed it wrongly. I collected it about 4 hours later.

Then I forgot to close the cover.

After a while, the water boiled.

Then it kept boiling. I didn’t notice.

Then it continued to boil. Strange.

Then I looked back :O ‘I forgot to close the cover!’

I quickly turned it off.

Then I noticed all the steam condensed above the kettle. Everywhere above it on the shelves.

And it’s all wet. About half a liter of water condensed around my kitchen T.T

Time to wipe stuff I guess.

I’m studying A-Levels, doing Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics and Economics. To make it clearer, I’m doing: Maths, More Maths, Scientific Maths and Maths About Money. You can probably guess my favourite subject.

Now I’ve been here for just over two weeks. I”ll talk more about life in Cambridge next time, but for now, let’s rewind to the 1st of January, New Year’s Day, which is also the day I left KL for good. There was the numerous, numerous goodbyes before this. Some were nice goodbyes, and some were very, very sad goodbyes…

But anyways, that day my parents and I left from the LCCT on AirAsia. I know many of you think, “AirAsia?! That cheap-lak plane? Aiyo, so uncomfortable… how you survive?” and probably “AirAsia sucks!” as well. And in a way, you’re right… they take off from a small, hot (not much air-con) airport, they charge you for everything (including water), they only let 15kg of luggage (MAS does 20kg, and 30kg for students)… but when you buy AirAsia XL, it’s all worth it. Really. Take a look:

These seats also recline to become a bed. Awesome.

The flight took 8 hours, mostly spending my time fiddling around with the MacBook. The airport was Stansted Airport in London. Stansted is to Heathrow what LCCT is to KLIA, except Stansted actually looks really, really nice.

Anyways when I walked out of the airport, I experienced my first ever winter! It’s hard to des- actually, no, it’s easy to describe:

COLD

We slept in the Radisson Hotel, right next to the airport. The three minute walk is really easy, except for the fact that:

1. It was cold.
2. We had to carry 9 bags of luggage between the three of us.
3. It was really cold.
   

Cars around the airport.

Signboards.

The Radisson hotel is… (click!)

The next day was Saturday, so my dad rented a car (\o/) to drive us to Cambridge. But the best part of the morning was seeing this:

Never before have I seen such a skyline...

As for the car:

Car frost! I love winter!

Interestingly, most cars in the UK are manual. Imagine that! A first-world country where (I think) automatic cars are not the most popular.

We drove about 20 minutes to Cambridge, thanks to the nifty little gadget called GPS. If GPS wasn’t invented, the world would be pretty lost.

Eyes on the road, eyes on the road, looking like a fool with your eyes on the road. (I kid, I kid)

Thank you GPS-thingy!

Finally we arrive in Cambridge. My accomodation is a small apartment called Purbeck House. I’ll post much more about this next time.

After I settled down a little, and after my mum made a full appraisal of the room (she is very good at doing that, in fact, I think all mothers are good at that), we drove to the city centre of Cambridge. There’s a supermarket called Sainsbury were we bought tons and tons of foodstuff. When we piled them all on the cashier, I remember this conversation with the man behind us:

Man: Dear God, that is a lot of food. Do you have a big family?
Me: Oh, no. I just moved in here, I’m living on my own.
Man: Oh.

I think we bought: bread, cup noodles, plastic utensils which looked like metal, plates, cups, sharp knife, water kettle (the electric ones), chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, biscuits, dish cleaning liquid, detergent, tea towels, containers, soup powder, hand soap, tissue paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes, hot chocolate powder, shower gel, shampoo, paper plates…

Ok I can’t remember everything. But there’s a good half of what I bought.

Once we transferred everything into the car, we ate some Spanish food nearby, nearby being the key word because somehow, the temperature dropped ever more. I can’t exactly remember what it was we ate, but it was pretty delicious. And then it snowed.

You can't see the snow very well... unless you click on the picture!

It’s my first time seeing snow! I ran out and let the snow fall on me for about 10 seconds. Then we walked quickly to the car because it was cold. Snow is awesome if it wasn’t freezing.

I think I spent the rest of the day doing nothing in my room…. oh I remember. I was admiring my 4MBps internet connection in my room. :D My parents went off to the Doubletree Hotel in Cambridge to sleep.

Sunday was spent the same way, except we did more walking around town. They bought me a new pillow too :/

Monday was the first day of school… I’ll leave the schooling stuff to a new post. That day my parents went off to London for their “holiday” which they spent looking at property. Fun.

Skip two days of school. On Thursday they came back, and before they took their flight home, we ate at a Peking restaurant called “Peking Restaurant”. I know, it’s a catchy, original name.

That's the last meal we had :(

And then they went home… and I was all alone in the UK.

That’s the fun part of course :P

There’s been quite a few other happening in the three weeks after SPM. For my own chronicling purposes, I’ll be writing about the slightly more mundane things here.

Just before SPM I got my driving license! Unfortunately SPM arrived and so did any hope of me driving. Well, after SPM my father let me drive his Golf GTI around, as long as he was sitting in the front seat. I’ll be frank, I was quite nervous at first because it’d been so long since I drove in the test, and a Golf is quite different from a Kancil. Like the indicator signals are on the left instead of the right, and the accelerator and brake pedals are about ten times more sensitive. I pity anyone who rode with me (that’s everyone in my family :/) that time, for they surely had a bumpy ride all over the place.

In those three weeks I drove around the neighbourhood. It’s liberating 8D. I finally got to drive myself, and that freedom is just exciting. Sadly now that I’m heading to the UK I can’t drive for two years until my ‘P’ license expires. Sigh.

My father was nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. He didn’t win, the guy from Sapura Holdings (which is about 20 times bigger than every other company nominated) won, but at least I can tell everyone that my dad was one of five nominees for being awarded an award for being good at selling stuff. Datin Frieda, chairwoman of Cempaka Schools, was there for the woman Entrepreneur award and she won (the only other nominee owned a small textile company I think). Good for her :D

Time to go! It's a nice tuxedo.

My dad + his friends.

One funny story, only for those Cempakans who know what I’m talking about. Cempaka had at least two tables at the extremely formal dinner at the hotel, but everytime Datin Freida showed up on stage or on video, the adults at the tables would do the Tepuk Cempaka. It’s great to see the enthusiasm at such a formal occasion :) (Clap-clap clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap).

My family is soon moving to a new house! Currently I live in Duta Nusantara, a nice cosy gated community. We’ll soon be moving to a bungalow about 5 minutes away in Damansara Heights.  It’s so much bigger than my current house…

Funnily, it turns out that Datin Frieda owns the neighbouring house. I guess you never really escape from her.

I have a laptop now! 2.8 Ghz Intel Duo Core, 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM 15-inch Macbook Pro. It’s made of awesome and win.

Another story coming up: when my dad went to Bangsar Shopping Centre, he found out that a Apple store (Mac Studio) was opening there that day, so he booked the mine and my sister’s laptops there before the store actually opened. When we returned there at 2pm, the outside of the store was filled with people waiting in line for free iStuff. Then later the opening ceremony started for some reason, there was a lion dance before Christmas, since Chinese New Year is obviously nearby (2 months is near right?).

Now imagine the narrow corridors of BSC, with the really loud Chinese gongs they use for lion dances, and then remember all the people waiting for the store to open. Not fun, but we already booked the laptops so we had to wait. But the lion dance went on and on with no end in sight (much like this blogpost actually…) and after about half hour, one of the employees actually let us in to pick up laptops. This means that we were literally the first customers into the store, and best of all about a hundred people watched us go in, buy some computers, and leave before the opening ceremony finished. Probably the closest I have ever felt to being a celebrity.

(Boring technical stuff ahead)

Somehow they made a silly mistake and gave me OSX Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. Those idiots >:( So we had to go back and they actually gave me the upgrade CD, with no licensing limits on it. Hah! If anyone wants a free upgrade to Snow Leopard when I come back from the UK, tell me and I might be able to help :D

Also, my dad bought Windows 7, which after wrestling with video drivers for a while, finally managed to play TF2. I think my life is complete.