Birds or human - aren’t they similar?

I’ve recently just moved place. I used to live next to uni until last Friday, but the plan to go overseas next month means we (me, and two other housemates) would have to pay empty rent for a couple of months if we stayed on. Plus to our surprise, the rent for next year also went up by $140, that’s around 25% increase from the current rent! My theory is that because of the financial crisis, people couldn’t buy properties, and can only rent instead. This also goes with people who lost their estates recently. Where are they going? Well, that’s obvious.

We started the process around Sunday. We scheduled the removalist to come on Wednesday morning, thinking that we should be finished packing by then. The plan was to move the stuff to a rented garage. Cleaners were scheduled on Friday morning, and we left Thursday to be empty so that in case we have anything we need to do before we move completely i.e. got more stuff to move, we can still do it then. We’ve got mail redirection set, and so we should be set, were we?

No way! The week was filled with sleepless nights. Monday was the eye opener - decluttering wasn’t easy especially if you have a time frame of two days. My estimation of “I think we’ll finish in a day or less” was wrong, so wrong that everytime I opened an unexplored section of the wardrobe that I sighed in despair. I didn’t realise how much stuff I have accumulated in the mere period of 10 months. Probably I’m a horder, it runs in the genes it seems.

So yes, as expected, Tuesday night was a long night/morning, ended with a visit to McDonald’s at 6 am. The breakkie didn’t symbolise completion of packing, but just enough packing for the removalists to move the big things like sofa, beds, dining table, etc. The removalists came early at 7 pm, but instead of two bulky guys, we’ve got the opposite. Not too bad with handling the boxes, but after moving the mattress and the sofa bed, they were pretty much exhausted. The move took 4.5 hours which comes with a substantial price tag, but I guess there is no way we could’ve done it ourselves. We did some more cleaning and managed to produce more boxes by Thursday, so we move more stuff to the garage >.<

Friday morning we carried a table top and shoe racks to the garage via bus. Because the goods took a fair bit of space, I hit several people in the process but thankfully they all can do with some ’sorries’. Cleaners came on time and we were too tired, all three of us sat down and dozed off on the corridor outside the apartment. Passerby would have found it weird, but we couldn’t care less. Not at that time anyway.

After we gathered some energy, we found chucking things out wasn’t an easy job either. Vinnies didn’t accept mattress and any electronics, therefore we have to carry it to the Salvos which was about a block away. The electronics were finally left on the side of the road in front of the apartment. This was all done using a Coles trolley which we pushed along from Randwick. It took a while to get the trolley from the supermarket to our place, but it was definitely worth the trouble.

I wondered about all those properties I’ve seen on inspection day. My apartment now looked like them. Bare with no personalities, no soul, like a head without face. The previous inhabitants must have gone through a lot of trouble to do the defacing. Amazed at the frequency of people moving in and out and how much suffering it might have caused them.

I left all windows ajar, I made sure no fire and no lights were on. I said goodbye to the place I used to call home. I shed some tears and I tried to move on. It was a nice place with lots of memories in it, four years to be exact (Minch has lived there all the way). I got the feeling again - the same feeling that I always get at the end of the year, just that this time it’s a little too early. Feeling of my life’s changing again and the hopelessness to resist it. Do you get that? I wish I get better at it, and be a stronger marty. More change is coming as I will graduate at the end of this year.

Migration finished around 6 pm on Friday. I hope this doesn’t become an annual event. Now to sore back and muscle pain.

Good on them then, they shouldn’t be feeling sad because I am not worth it. I’m feeling a little bit sad but yet indifferent about leaving the place. It is just that I didn’t do what I think I should have done. Six months is a long time to be stuck on a desk doing nothing much than surfing the net (ok maybe I’m exaggerating a little), but yet it was short enough to make me unstirred about whatever had happened and was happening. Until now, until it is too late to make a change.

¹

my face progression in IT

There are several causes to this that I can see on my perfect hindsight. As usual, I stuffed myself with too much things to do, without realising that I am very unorganised. I mean, I have known that all along, but I never thought about it properly. For the session that has just passed, I have a 9 to 5 job every day. Nonetheless I took a job as a lab supervisor for 2 classes at uni. I have a course on Wednesday and that goes from 6-9pm, and I was also doing Thesis A throughout the session. On top of everything, I took a president position in BITSA, a student organisation for the degree that I am doing. Just the contact hours are enough to make me tired most of the nights and to sleep extremely well, but the worse part was that I couldn’t discipline myself enough to do all my homework on the weekend.

It all went kaboom when recruitment hit me. Suddenly I had to fill in so many application forms, despite the fact that they were all asking exactly what I had listed on my resume. Cover letter was a biatch and I hated making them. Luckily I didn’t have to go through many assessment centres, thanks for going through a scholarship degree that has been well known and established since 1989. I did, however, have to go through quite a fair bit of interviews. Each of them may only take an hour or so, but I still have to prepare for them hours before hand. After the interviews, usually I felt so anxious too.

By the time I managed to score a job, things at work had started changing. I then had taken a fair few days off here and there. My colleagues were starting to doubt my reliability of being in the office everyday, and because of that, what started from not having that many jobs, turned out to be worse. At the same time, uni work had gotten a lot busier because it was getting closer to exam time. Assignment was due, thesis proposal was looming. I thought “Screw this, I didn’t sleep much last night doing assignments and yet here I am at work not doing any much useful”. So I started adding more “work” into work. I was more productive in my overall game, but my work commitment gradually fell through the roof.

I chatted less to my colleagues and went out less with them. Our usual conversations were not there anymore, and I gave up on trying to be a better employee. I waited until today come.

And it has, but it isn’t a day that I can look back and said that I am satisfied with myself.

1. http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1018480

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment. ~Doug Larson

I’ve been thinking about this word for a while. Just like how the universe wouldn’t get formed if even just one of the physics constant was a little bit different, it always makes me wonder what other life I can have if it didn’t turn up the way it did. Would I be happier now? would I be happier later? or is there even any difference?

Do you often wonder about this?

Happiness of course is whatever you want to define it as. To me … it is a state of which I am satisfied with myself. People keep on saying that happiness is a journey, not a state. But to me it is a state, so be it. I am talking about happiness that is more to just being content. It is not a state when you were happy when you eat your favorite ayam goreng, or when you get pooed by a bird (it’s a lucky sign according to the popular chinese belief), or when you manage to get a decent job. Once you are happy, you will be happy for a while because it is an accumulation of joyful events in your life. That kind of happy. I know I’m not being as clear, but my mind is currently clouded anyway.

It’s easy to define what was happiness in the prehistoric era. The challenges for those times were to avoid being eaten by other animals, and to feed the stomachs. Therefore the moment of living itself brought happiness to The Flintstones. Challenges correlated with happiness. Once culture and civilisation played a part in human’s life, suddenly filling our stomaches required us to get a job. So, we of course had to get a job. We did that, and then we were happy, again. A typical life of someone who lived 1000 years ago would be: born -> got a job -> (maybe procreated because that also made us happy :p) -> held the job for the lifetime -> died. Simple.

Happiness is a need for all of us. The prehistoric people were at the bottom of the pyramid, and Maslow said it is a normal progression to crave for more satisfaction in life when all the lower satisfactions have been reached. At the top of the pyramid, there are self-actualised people. Most of us fall into this category - people who are working toward fulfilling our potential, toward becoming all that we are capable of becoming. But here is the thing: what is it that each one of us are capable of becoming?

I am graduating this year. I have yet to come to terms with it. I won’t have ’student’ as my occupation anymore very very soon. I won’t be able to pay concession fee anymore (damn), and there are few more tidbits that come with it. The end of uni opens up a big hole about what can I become? Decisions have to be made at the end of the day, regardless of how much I wonder what it would be like if I decide otherwise². Ignorance is bliss and I wish I won’t spend more time thinking about it. Hobos sleeping on the road only worry about whether they can get food and a place to sleep for the night. Why the hell do I need to worry more?

Well I hope I will be able to find my happiness, sometime even in the faraway future, and I hope everyone who have to make similar decisions as what they are capable of will be, because thinking about it too much will make life less enjoyable.

ps. Gargh my last post was two months ago! &#@%#*! Work, recruitment and thesis are really stealing my time away…

1. photo by lusi
2. it reminds me of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Despite what I am doing now, the holiday was fulfilling. I went to two countries which I have never travelled to, and found cool observations that were totally different to what I was used to. Japan was for 10 days, and US for about 3 weeks. Not a bad time-waster activity eh? :p

Ja Pan

the soft-toys enjoying the view from shinkansen

It was a quirky country - for no matter how many times I’ve heard about Japan, I was utterly amazed at their idiosyncracy. So much to mention about this land; I don’t know where to start. To begin with, everywhere in Japan was very clean (as what you would’ve typically heard), but there weren’t many rubbish bins around! I could find one in front of the convenient stores (good old seven eleven) but most of the time my bag served another functionality as a waste pod.

One of the best part of staying in Sheraton was the heated toilet. I regularly spent quality time in the bathroom, and this feature has just brought it to a new level. I could spend ages on the seat, reading books or sometimes carrying squirtle (my laptop) to play around. The bowl came with a remote control that I could control even from outside the bathroom door. Dryer, bidet, different water pressure, you name it. It’s all there. The one in Shinagawa Sony Building was even better. It had a flushing sound button which, as the label suggests, triggers the controller to make a flushing sound. What for? That is what I still couldn’t figure out until now +_+

from the left: stop button, 2 buttons to clean the bum, bidet, dryer, then pressure controllers

Everything in Japan was well designed. The power plug had a automatic rotating cover to make sure that unused plug would be safely covered at all times. The ticket machine received the tickets whichever way I slid it through, no need to look for where the arrow is pointing. The sewer cover was beautifully decorated with sakura pattern and other patterns.

sewer cover in Nagoya-jo (see the castle in the middle?)

What made me realise is that it doesn’t take that much effort to do, but most of the time people don’t think about it. The tables in the restaurant have little ledges underneath the table top for ladies to put their bags on. It doesn’t take that long to attach those ledges, but it is rare for us to think about it that far. Most carpenters probably just stayed with the common way. They assume, if something is already mass-produced for a long time, it will be good enough to stick to the previous design. Design starts at the beginning not at the end; it’s not an afterthought¹. They need correct attitude to open new ways of thinking like the Japanese.

Another example of their prominence would be their train network. I imagine it would take at least 50 years for Sydney cityRail to achieve something equal to what Japan currently has. This was how complicated Tokyo’s train network - stations every 2-3 km allowing residents to go to every nooks and crannies in the area. JapanRail also had another network which include Shinkansen and other slower trains. Shinkansen could go as fast as 300 km/hr, really makes Sydney trains run like snails. In terms of schedule accuracy, the train would get there exactly to the minute (including inter-state ones). Ah life will be so easy in Japan, at least in terms of transportation.

But here is the quirkiness. Japanese are mostly slim and slender, thus I can hardly see any potential for the Biggest Loser to be popular there. Yet their most popular sport is Sumo. When it is in season, Sumo-chans go on match everyday, and Sumo-shows are broadcasted almost the entire afternoon. They are huge and fat. There is nothing muscular about them, except when they are fighting. The curtness of the match shows Sumo-chans immense power and control to triumph against their opponents in that split second. It reminds me of cockfights in Indo; feed the chucks so they would win. Exactly the same but definitely more addictive than watching cockfights. I still watched Sumo-chans until when I was in SF, thanks to NHK.

The Japanese were ridiculously polite. I was amazed at the guy that always stood outside the hotel lift and bowed to every guests entering and exiting the elevator. He was always smiling. The shuttle bus driver would say ‘Hai, doumo arigatou gozaimasu’ to every single person that went off the bus. That is about 20 times per run. Imagine he does 4 runs every hour, for at least 6 hours work: 6 x 4 x 20 = 480 ‘Hai, doumo arigatou gozaimasu’ per day! This guy was always smiling as well. Sometimes the politeness was just too much to bear and I wished they could be more like normal human being.

Conversation was not extremely easy though, even though I can speak a little bit of Nihon-go. I used to learn the lingo over 5 years in Indo, but the last time I touched the book was about 5 years ago. Hence I could hardly form a proper sentence at the beginning. I learned to use body language especially to the older people, so that they will correspondingly respond the same way (at least I could understand better then). Japanese will rarely respond in English no matter how much they understand them. Maybe because they consider it to be impolite to speak with broken english. Knowing Japanese was useful especially when I went outside Tokyo.

Japan is rich and stunning, travelling there was excellent. There was no need for tours and it was extremely safe. I felt a lot safer there than I do in Sydney. If you are looking for a place for a holiday, I would suggest this destination. Sometimes JetStar has some sales, like to go to Osaka for $380 one way :p I am tempted go again…

ps. I am less inclined to write about my US trip since you can easily see the US-culture (or the non-existence of culture) in the TV and the Net. There were nice scenic views and great buildings there, but other than that, it was mostly man-made within the last century (especially the sky in Julius Caesar Vegas).

1. http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2006/08/from_design_to_.html

1. If you haven’t read the book, you won’t be able to follow the story, the pace was just too fast.
2. If you have read the book, you will be dying of sorrow inside the cinema, read my spoiler rants.

I was expecting something like a three hour movie, yet it was 1.5 hours. This coming from a thick fantasy book with rich stories of a world vastly different from ours with extensive history context ~ big mistake. Totally huge mistake, there was not enough scene for any character developments, not even for describing the world sufficiently. Such a waste!

My rants will contain spoilers, so if you still want to watch it, don’t read on. The Golden Calamity gets only 42% on the tomatometer.

(more…)

I had a bad day when I went home after work on one of the past days. The bus driver was slow, the traffic jam was horrible. All in all was caused by my chit-chatty mouth. I talked too long to a friend whom I haven’t met for a while.

My place was a bit far from the city, so I had to catch 2 buses to get home. First bus was a public one and the second was a private. I was late for 7 minutes and the bus only came every 30 minutes. I got books but it wasn’t a comfy place to read (no seat, and it was wet because it was pouring before then) *slump*.

So then 3 minutes later at 6.10 pm, I decided to walk home with a prediction that I will reach home around 6.30, but at the end I arrived home at 6.45. It took the same amount of time if I had waited for the ride instead. Why did the journey that usually took me about 20 minutes became 45 minutes? Because I carry a fair amount of weights… My handbag weighed 2.5 kg and my other bag with laptop in it was 8 kg. If you are wondering why I was carrying such heavy bags, you can glare at squirtle (my laptop). He was cute but heavy nonetheless :S

Carrying bags weighing about a quarter of my body weight wasn’t extremely easy and it costed me sore arms and shoulders the next day. I first put the heaviest one on my left shoulder, kept moving and changing its position constantly. I lasted 15 minutes till I finally gave up. I switched it to my right shoulder and voila! I didn’t feel any uneasiness, and I didn’t have to change the position of the bag even once after that. It was a weird joy like when you just recover from runny nose, things are superbly normal - I felt I could walk the same as if I only carry a small bag. My right shoulder was hell lot stronger than my left’s.

I have a lot of asymmetric body parts: non-existence right eyelid, smaller left foot, lenkier left fingers, not to mention differences caused by my right-handedness. My right fingers were that stubby that any ring on them would look ugly, thank God the left one appeared more normal. It was very hard to put eyeliner on my right eye. Leaving it on only the left eye just made me look like panda. My left foot made me never able to wear any strapless shoes - if the right one fitted, the left one would be loose, left fitted, right too tight. Damn, life was full of disappointments.

My effort to balance my right eyelid stopped after a few painful days of wearing home-made shaped sticky tapes to construct the line as similar to my left one. My high school computing teacher would ponder on my unusual glittery eyelid everytime he saw it. Back in Indo, I would have to boil kettle for hot shower, so I would use my left arm muscles in order to make it stronger. Didn’t really have any effect though. I would try to write or catch balls using my left hand but in things like juggling, I still have a lot of issues trying to coordinate my weaker limbs.

Dan Brown’s introduced 1.618 as a divine proportion in his most famous book: The Da Vinci Code. He claimed that divine proportion, or phi (its mathematical notation) governs some of the basic ratio in human body such as elbow-to-arm, thigh-to-leg ratio, and more of others . Despite all the critiques of this suggested ‘fact’, it is easier to accept that God might have some kind of blueprint when He/She/it created humans at the beginning. But the truth doesn’t seem to be the case. Each person is different, each person is unique. Asymmetrical body parts are also another one of human characteristics. I eventually realised that there is not much point to alter any parts of my body just for appearance *doh*.

The question remains though: for the health purposes, should I use more of my stronger limbs because they do the job better or should I bother training my weaker parts to have better balanced posture and body?

Look at all parts of your body now and you may notice new special features if you haven’t done so yourself.

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run though each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, ‘Hi’?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race.
Do take it slower.

Hear the music
Before the song is over.

~ David L. Weatherford in The 4-Hour Workweek

I bought this book based on a friend’s recommendation. It has been a slow reading for me because Timothy Ferriss, the author, has a style which at first I found him boastful. His aim is to instill a can-do attitude for everyone to do the stuff he’d done, and more! I am a reasonably confident person, but his achievements that he discussed in the book were just hard to believe. The first 50 pages are hard to digest before I finally got into his rhythm. Maybe this is one of those books that I shouldn’t judge by its cover, or even by reading initial chapters of it.

These are some of the things that he has done:

• First American in history to hold a Guinness world record in tango
• Princeton University guest lecturer in entrepreneurship
• National Chinese kick-boxing champion
• MTV break-dancer in Taiwan
• Athletic adviser to more than 30 world record holders
• TV host in Thailand and China
• Shark diver
• Motorcycle racer

and he was 29.

The book explained about his technique and ideas. All of the ideas in the book are very well reasoned but the best idea for me is about mini-retirements.

I remember the boredom I had in the 4-months summer holiday after my HSC. The thought of going to uni seemed to be so exciting, in fact the thought of doing anything new would be exciting. I was desperate for getting the activities I used to get at school. In my long break last year (lasted for 3 months), I felt the same thing. I missed the social life I got from going to uni. I felt miserable from being unproductive.

If you have had the same experience, now imagine that in your 20 years retirement. I used to take it for granted that I will have to work 40 years and then enjoy my 20 years of retirement - then I can travel here and there, buy anything I want, etc. But if I can’t even fill up the 3 months void I had, I surely won’t have a fantastic retirement. I was so used to external deadlines put on me, but I didn’t have any control of putting my own deadlines to myself. This is usually the problem. That is why mini-retirement about 3-6 months is better. There is no reason why you have to keep the best to the end of your life. Plus if you haven’t trained yourself to retire, then you won’t be able to be good at it in the future.

The book answered how can I finance myself to get 3-6 months out of the office, how can I get the time to travel while still having my 9-5 job, how I can train myself to get something productive out of it and lot more other ideas (how can I outsource my life, how to learn any language in 3 months, etc). It is a very practical book, closely linked to Tim’s own life. Sometimes it felt as I am reading an auto-biography, but a more useful one.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants to get the most of their lives. Life is just too short to be spent on working full-time for 40 years.

What started as a total stranger, ended up to be a life-long friend. Quite amazing if I look in hindsight of what has happened because I have never thought that things would have turned out this way.

Thanks for being kind to me :)

We’re all a little weird. And life’s a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up in mutual weirdness and call it love. ~ Anonymous

Ironing takes a bloody long time, and what’s worse than spending >20 mins to iron one shirt just to find the back part of the shirt wrinkled because you tried to iron the sleeves? It is annoying. I now spend about <5 mins for a shirt, pretty happy about it but hoping to do it even faster if I can. It is not an enjoyable activity after all, but it just has to be done :(

I have two techniques: express and standard. The express one will take <3 mins and the standard will be <5 mins on average. Which one to take depends heavily on the type of material and the shape of the shirt.

Some materials with polyester are extremely easy to iron, even before you put the iron on it, it looks kinda smooth already. Higher percentages of polyester will make it even easier. 100% cottoned garment is a pain. It will usually take so much of your time trying to straighten it. After a long time ironing, it still sometime doesn’t look ironed. Sigh sigh sigh!

The shape of the shirt matters as well. Guys’ shirts tend to have straighter lines and less tucks. Girls’ on the other hand have darts/frills here and there which make them harder to iron.

Some rules of thumb to remember:

• Use iron with steam. Ironing without water is a nightmare. so steam irons are the best. Takes a lot less time than alternatively sprinkling water and ironing. The iron I’m using is Sunbeam with vertical steam technology.
• Get a proper ironing board, it does increase your ironing productivity as it makes you easier to pull and push the garments around. Board for traveling is ok I suppose, just make sure you have the pointier section on your left. This is very handy on ironing shoulder areas.

handy pointy section

• Always iron the smallest area first e.g. collar or sleeves. It is the easiest to be taken down first and being small, it is harder to get wrinkled by future movements. Even if it does, the wrinkles will be less likely to be seen when the shirts are worn.
• Use your left hand a lot (right hand if you are a lefty). You only need to make a locally level area to iron that particular area of the shirt, do not spend a lot of time to make the entire surface that you are ironing smooth first.
• Do not iron areas that already are smooth. Ironing does not mean that you have to cover every single cotton on the shirt, if it looks smooth already, then stop and go to the next pile of your laundry.
• Chuck away your perfectionist obsession. No matter how good you managed to iron the shirt, when it is worn, the smaller wrinkles will always show so don’t waste time on trying to remove those. Plus how often do you see girls with messy skirt (because they sat on them) or guys with wrinkled back on their shirts? I am sure that often happened, but have you ever put much attention to them? I highly doubt it.

Express way

You can do this if you are in a hurry or you know you can do it. It is not as tidy as if you do it the usual way so again don’t be too perfectionist otherwise you’ll spend longer using this way than the standard way. Basically express way saves you time because you will end up ironing less area of the shirt by ironing two layers at the same time.

1. Button up about 3-4 buttons on the shirt, enough for you to lay the shirt in a straight-ish way on the board.
2. Straighten the left sleeve with your hands. Iron it and then do the back of that sleeve.
3. Move to the right sleeve and do exactly the same.
4. Iron the body facing up (collar facing you) from the top to the bottom. See this pic:
5. Similarly, do it for the left side of the body.



6. Once you have finished that, slide the shirt (still buttoned) such way that you can iron just the back layer of the shirt. See pic:



7. That should remove the wrinkles at the back because the button at the front would have hindered you from ironing the back properly.

Standard way

If you don’t like the result of the express way, then do the standard way. This is more robust. It works with higher ironing-difficulty shirt =p These are the steps:

1. Iron the collar first as it is the smallest area of your shirt.
2. Straightened the left sleeve with your hands. Iron it and then do the back of that sleeve.
3. Move to the right sleeve and do exactly the same.
4. Now we are going to do the right shoulder. Arrange it to be like in the pic:



5. Smoothen the area as much as you can. Then move the shirt to iron the back part of the shoulder such shown in this pic:



6. Again, try to iron the area as much as you can, but the minimal target is to reach the middle line of the back of the shirt.
7. Do the same for the left shoulder.
8. By this step you will find that the shoulders are all smooth. Let’s go to the main body part of the shirt.
9. This is usually the easiest part to do. So start from the left-front body as shown in this pic:



10. Follow your own hands until you do a full circle of ironing from the left-front body, to the back, and then to the right-front body. You will find that the whole left-right directions that I provide here provide a movement continuity. You don’t have to follow them but as you do this way more, you will find that these directions minimalise the efforts needed.

Ok, you’ve reached the end of this very very long entry, hopefully you can find it useful. Please let me know if you try it yourself! :D

On another note, I’ve been listening to Natasha Bedingfield’s new album: NB. Check out Pirate Bones, Soulmate and Say It Again if you have time. The melodies are nice and the lyrics not too bad, even thought I would like to have more depth on the latter two songs. In this album, she was a young woman who were focused on her love life in the midst of busy life style. Expect a lot of strengths and determination in the songs. Pirate Bones is excellent :D
Click here to go to Natasha’s myspace. Sadly Pirate Bones is not there, but Say It Again and Soulmate are.

I thought because it has been a while, I will also do several updates from entries in the past:

my work @ the Bank: my manager finally get the idea and started to open some doors for me. My work is now getting enjoyable. It feels so much better when I look at my pile of work (that has now exists) to chose which one that I can do at the time, instead of thinking ‘ah, only have one work to do, and I have a full day work tomorrow. Should spare it for the future…’. I have proven that whinging is not a waste of time, as long as you whinge to the right person. In hindsight, if I have whinge more to my manager instead of other people, I might have gotten to where I am now much faster.

skin picking: even after frequent critiques from both Stef and Minie, I am still not able to stop it. Help >.< I now managed to hold until my fingers recover a bit more, but the biggest challenge is to not pick on the recovering skin because it’s thicker, and juicier…, and yummier =S

wisdom teeth: it is so naive of me to think that I could have the operation at week 10 uni calendar, which was about 3 weeks ago. I couldn’t even get any appointment with the dental surgeon until Nov 7th! That’s about a month waiting in the line.

More updates to come :)

You’re the most perfect yet, most definitely that I’ve met … ~ Natasha Bedingfield in Say It Again.