teddy-risation™ turns five!

That’s a simple and not-so-elegant typographic poster I’ve designed for the 5th anniversary. Well, to think of it, this blog has been through all the thick and thin of times for the past half-decade. I morphed from a adamant, rowdy, inconsiderate teenager to a person who has a better idea of what to do in life in the future. Experiences over the past 5 years sculpted the me today – reflected in a gradual change in my blogging style and entries. I used to not care about what others say about me back then. I didn’t care if my words hurt people. Now, I’ve learned to be more compassionate and considerate, and more importantly, learn to shut up when it’s the right time :)

Here’s a recap of what I’ve achieved over the past year, in chronological order:

1. Embraced Firefox 3.0. That’s so 2008. Now go grab Firefox 3.5, folks!
2. Wrote an article on Photographer’s Rights. Know your rights a photographer is entitled to.
3. Embracing my new life in NTU. See Loving Every Single Bit of It and Can I stay for awhile?
4. Embarked on mini morning photoshooting trip on campus, and sent Huilin off to Warwick, London :(
5. Turned 19, and my uni mates threw me a fantastic surprise party. Not to forget, I lost my phone on my birthday eve.
6. Got a new phone. Why? See #5.
7. Obamania! Yes we can.
8. An owl invaded my room, pooped over the floor and left me in a state of shock. Ah, the joys of living next to a forest.
9. Released a new blog layout, teddY-risatioN™ Eta.
10. Death of Oscar Grant. Police brutality on the rise?
11. My first typographic poster – greeNTU – is up on the campus walls! *dances around*
12. Weird dream, period.
13. I ventured into infrared photography. I’m currently using a Hoya R72 filter, alongside with my Sony Alpha kit lens.
14. The widely, wildly popular and notorious NTU stabbing incident – and yes, I study there.
15. Susan Boyle dreamed a dream… and that shot her to stardom!
16. Went on a photoshooting trip in Kuala Lumpur with my long-lost primary schoolmate, Jeremy.
17. Yay, revamped my blog layout. Here comes teddy-risation™ Theta!
18. On vacation, headed to Genting Highlands and then the Perhentian Islands (post not ready yet, my bad!)
19. RIP Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon and Billy Mays.

Sorry that I don’t have much gimmicks for you guys! Okay *inhales deeply* here’s one of the few moments I’m going to scare little kids with my face again. Here’s a photo of my cousin and I, taken at a local park a few days back. I’m currently enjoying the homestaying experience with my uncle’s family, which will – sadly – come to an end this weekend :/

Cousin and I.

Have a great weekend! Pssst, yes, I know I know I know I don’t look like a 19-year-old. I prefer to be described as being one that’s “looking youth” :)

The Fonty Friday feature has been canceled this week due to my busy schedule. Everything will be back to normal by next week!

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RIP, Michael Jackson.

Michael was found collapsed at his rental home in Los Angeles on the morning of June 25, 2009. 911 emergency services personnel found no pulse on Michael. They rushed him to the UCLA Medical Center, and Michael slipped into coma shortly after that then pronounced dead at 2.26pm.

In a few hours, his death spread like wildfire. Fans of the legendary pop icon flocked to UCLA, crowds overflowing the sidewalks and spilling onto crosswalks and streets alike. Many paid their tribute by dressing in his style fo costimes, complete with white cotton gloves on their hands. Late into the evening and night, people held up candles, blasted the songs that rocketed and solidly positioned him as the king of pop. People danced to the beat, hoping the very best to keep his legend alive.

M.J and I

What Michael Jackson meant to me – I only remember that his face, songs and dance moves. His famous Black and White MTV played over and over again over the television – the words “It don’t matter if you’re black or white” etched a deep impression in me. I still remembered gawking at the amazing visual effects in the MTV, ranging from transitioning from a dance stage to a real stage set in the middle of wilderness with natives riding horses storming the scene. I remembered him dancing along with an Indian dancer in the middle of the street. I can recollect the ground-breaking face-morphing sequence, featuring esctatic Tyra Banks whose career was just about to take off. Of course, not to forget him showing off his sleek dance moves on a deserted street, screaming and shouting, smashing glasses (the studio had slurs digitally superimposed on them to justify his act of vandalism).

In my childhood years, everybody with a name Michael will be called Michael Jackson. There’s this boy who lives behind my grandma’s shophouse, and you bet, his name was Michael and we’ve always been teasing him to replicate MJ’s dance moves. Of course he can’t – the only thing he did was to grab his crotch and shake it. Haha!

Rest in peace, Michael. Even as the organic part of you dissolves and fades away, your legend, your music, your personality, will remain as part of us, our culture, our history and our lives.

Fonty Friday

Miso, by Mårten Nettelbladt, is a typeface designed specially for architecture drawings. It’s slim, compacted form allows you to fit it into every single nook and cranny in your diagrams.

Fonty Friday - Miso

Have a great weekend!

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Infrared photography captures the image of a scene using lights of near-infrared wavelengths – the camera sensor, or film, is sensitive to infrared light to a certain degree, but only for near-infrared (far-infrared has wavelengths that are too long to be detected). Typically, a digital camera manufacturer will place an infrared filter before the sensor to prevent infrared light from reaching it. To many people’s dismay (or is it ‘delight’?), some clothings are actually transparent in the infrared range – that’s one of the reasons why infrared filter is used. In addition, infrared will mess with the auto-focusing mechanism in the camera, and leave hotspots behind due to differential refractory index, causing the light to bounch off differently in your camera lenses.

One easy way to capture a scene in infrared light is to place a filter that removes light in the visible spectrum, and only permit small amount of red light from the visible range to pass through, alongside with infrared. Due to the presence of the infrared filter in your camera, high exposure time is required, even under bright daylight.

For the following photos, I’ve used a Hoya R72 filter (55mm in diameter) and screwed it onto my Sony A200 18-70mm kit lens. A hot spot in the center of the photo is somewhat visible originally, but this can be circumvented by some photoshopping skills. The photos are taken during my recent trip to Genting Highlands, a popular getaway destination in my country located just an hour’s drive away from the capital.

I have only selected a few nice ones to show – the rest can be seen in my flickr set, Genting Highlands, in a different light. You can also view my Infrared collection too.

Directions, please?

An overhead road sign above the old route that people use to travel down the highland. Since the new pass opened, this road is now used to service the apartments and the police station. It’s now the road less travelled. I have no idea why the sign appeared orange though. Perhaps it’s the way it reflects infrared?

Go karts, in infrared

The Go Kart’s tack shot in infrared. The original photo shot in normal light can be found over here.

Flying Coaster, in infrared

The Flying Coaster (what an unoriginal name IMHO) is the first of its kind in Asia, and the management boasts that more than a million people has rode on that thing. The amusement park wristband, while granting free entry to all rides in the amusement park, does not allow you to board the coaster for free – you will have to pay for the ticket, albeit at a discounted rate. Here’s the one shot in normal light.

Genting Highands, in infrared

A gorgeous view of some of the hotels in the highland resort, from an outcrop near the lakeside. This photo is taken further up the pedestrian bridge, see the other photo.

Corkscrew + Sunset = Awesomeness

This is, without any doubt, my favourite infrared photo I’ve produced so far. There is little photoshopping done to this photo, except for artificially increasing the dynamic range and then color burning the sky a little for the dramatic effect. Everything else, including the lens flare, is real. The sun was setting rather quickly behind the roller coaster and I was on a final walk on the Dinasour Land hill before I retire to other parts of the amusement park. Grabbed my tripod and took around 10+ test shots, and this one turned out to be the best.

Are you involved in infrared photography too?

Just a question – if you’re also playing around with infrared photography, feel free to post links to your works and share some tips and ideas. I’ll be more than happy to list your work :)

You can also ask questions on how infrared photography is carried out, and I’ll try my very best to answer them. I’m currently working on a tutorial, but it’ll take a week or two before it’s done.

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All of the photos can be found in the complete Flickr set I’ve made for this trip – Genting Highlands June ‘09. You can also view it in the gallery. Only a handful of selected photos will be featured in this post.

Interjection: Fonty Friday

Here’s this week’s dose of good type – who says that monospace fonts are ugly? Raph Levien, the designer behind the monospace typeface Inconsolata draws inspiration from some Japanese gothic fonts, making it more legible at small font sizes.

Told you, monospace fonts don’t have to be ugly to be called monospace.

A short introduction

The photos I’ve taken during the trip are processed differently from my usual photos – I experimented with my new post-processing actions, which is crafted to make photos slightly darker, smoother (thanks to Noise Ninja), has higher contrast and a pseudo-HDR touch to it. Now, read more to view the photos!

Day 1 – Of flowers and water

I arrived at Genting Highlands in the early afternoon of Thursday, in tow were my grandparents, parents and brother. Clear, clean mountain air immediately filled up lungs as we unloaded our luggage to the smiling luggage guy greeting us at the steps in front of the lobby. Mist spilled from the tunnel leading up to the hotel into the waiting area, white puffs of crystalised air we exhaled. Just. Heaven.

I combed the walls of Coffee Bean for empty sockets, heaved a sigh of relief as one awaits to be plugged in. As brother plopped his lazy bum on the seat, I ordered two honey sticks, 50 cents each, to justify our presence. It will be nice if we bought something from them, in a way to say thank you for your wifi connection, I thought.

Later in the day I visited the park alone, equipped with my Konica Minolta f/1.7 50mm lens. This is my first time trying my hands on closeup floral photography using this new baby. It didn’t turn out half bad:

Flowers and bokeh. Yummy!

The bokeh effect was beautiful. I thought that its beauty only shows when you’re photographing lights. Now the myth is debunked – I like how the leaves blurred away gracefully from the flower.

Splashing, splashing water.

One more thing I love about my bokeh lens – it’s huge aperture allows around 2x more light to reach the camera sensor than my 18-70mm kit lens, so it’s definitely a plus when it comes to photographing water. Ember has a few really nice water shots (#1, #2 and #3), some of which are done with his bokeh lens as well – thanks for the pointers, Ember!

False Heather, Cuphea hyssopifolia

False Heather, known by its scientific name Cuphea hyssopifolia, is a flowering shrub native to the Americas. It doesn’t flower as much as those planted in the hot and humid capital, but oh boy, they definitely bloom in the cool, wet highland climate. The tiny flowers are one of my favourite subjects of photography – not too big and overbearing.

Day 2 – Of people, of rides

The fun starts on Friday – I visited the amusement park. Now the management is smarter in finance management and raises the entry ticket price on school holidays. The wristband I wore costed me around 50 bucks, and I’m in to take photos only, not to hop on to any of the rides. But, it’s definitely worth it.

I spent an hour or so exploring the wave-swinger located directly in front of the entrance, and started shooting away.

The smiling dude and... Velma?!

The canopy of the ride starts to spin very slowly at first as it raises the riders to a higher height, before accelerating and then tilting, sending the riders into a screaming frenzy. The guy looked in my general direction and, spotting my camera, flashed a photogenic smile. And to the right was… Velma?! I laughed a little when I realize the resemblance when handpicking the photos.

Up and away

Riders fly above spectators standing outside the perimeter of the ride, designed such that the riders’ legs will not hit anyone of them. Since the canopy of the ride tilts, it is not every time that the riders hover close enough above the spectators that they get into the frame.

Koi feeding

A pond full of koi at the bottom of the huge waterfall eagerly awaits for visitors to feed them with overpriced fish food sold from a nearby stall. As long as they enjoy feeding the koi, I guess their parents don’t mind forking out a few bucks.

Entertainers smiling for the camera

This shot took a little more courage than usual. I spotted them somewhere near the waterfall (the place where the kids fed the koi) but didn’t have enough courage to ask them to pose of a photo. I trailed them all the way to the other end of the amusement park and they greeted and visited the stalls of other park employees, and even chatted with some of the ride operators.

Go Karts

The inspiration of taking this photo came from the tilt-shift photography post Grace wrote some time ago. I love the angle of her photo of the Go Karts, so I visited the bridge above the tracks and took a similar shot.

Turbo Drop

Initially it operated in the same manner as Space Shot, which uses compressed air to rapidly propel riders up the tower then gently lower them with a series of air-cushioned bounces back to the loading platform. After a fatal accident (the management bribed people to shut them up), the ride mode was switched to that of a Turbo Drop – compressed air is used to lift the car to the top of the tower, at an approximate and average speed of 12 miles per hour. The car is held for multiple seconds, before it is released, dropping almost to the ground. The mist cleared for a brief moment, so grabbed my camera and took this shot when I was queuing for this ride. Yeap, this is the only ride I took in the amusement park during my whole visit, but I rode it 8 times!

Dangling by a thread, and in 10 seconds...

… they will freefall towards the ground from a height of 185 feet. The falling feeling is scary, but exciting – you’ll find yourself floating a few inches off your seat because of the negative G.

Corkscrew and Go Karts

It’s turning dark. The lights went up, while the sky is still a little brighter than usual (because it’s a highland, the sun sets a wee bit later). Corkscrew, which is unfortunately closed for maintenance that day, looms above the tracks.

The glowing flying machine

When the sky turned dark, the real beauty of the wave-swinger emerged. Hundreds of lightbulbs mounted to the plates on the ride sparkle in the darkness, spinning at the same dizzying speed as the riders were rotated.

The glowing flying machine, bokeh-ed

A bokeh shot of the canopy of the wave-swinger. The lightbulbs add this amazing touch to the photo :) bokeh FTW!

Shell Lamp

The shell lamp sits lonely in the hotel lobby when darkness falls. I can hear a pin drop.

Down the hotel corridor

I lived in room 12126. Anyone wants that room? It’s huge, has a sofa, one extra wardrobe, gigantic working desk and costs just $30 more than the other rooms down the hallway. Teehee!

So that wraps up my trip!

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Nebula! - a t-shirt design

Kyle (@Eckstatic) shared this link on Twitter to a T-shirt design by designer & illustrator, Shalimar Luis. Not does this particular T-shirt design by Shalimar has striking, beautiful colours, but also a good play with type. I totally dig the Rugrats-esque appeal of the font and the background stars, which remind me so much of the cartoon :)

Nebula! - a t-shirt design

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As you’re reading this post, I’m most probably be scuba diving off the white sandy beaches of the Perhentian Islands. If the weather is unforgiving, I’ll be cooping in my own little hut at Bubbles Resort (what a cute name, isn’t it?). My aunt travels to the Perhentian Islands every year with her best friend, and this year she’s very nice to extend an invitaiton to my brother and I to join them on a road trip. We’ll be travelling from Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia where our homes are located at the outskirts of the capital, across the Malaysian peninsula over to the east coast. It’s a 5-day-4-night trip – we’ll be spending the first night at her friend’s house, then two nights at Bubbles Resort on the island proper, and then another night at a place I’m yet to hear of, and home sweet home.

I’ve went on a shopping rampage yesterday at LowYat (a shopping center specialising in tech and gadget-related stuff, offers really great deals) – spending $400 on a decent Velbon tripod, a backup CF card in case I run out of memory and a spare compatible battery for my A200. I guess I’m getting really excited about the trip because I’ll be lugging most of my camera equipments over, including all my filters and etc, so do expect photo spamming after I get all the things sorted out when I return.

I’ve been spending some time post-processing photos I’ve taken from my recent Genting Highlands trip, so here’s a little teaser before I upload the whole lot of photos in a future update (stay tuned!).

Spinner, a wave-swinger ride, made by Zamperla.

Fonty Friday!

For this week, I’m featuring the font Delicious, designed by Jos Buivenga. What I love about Delicious is the unique italic typeface – instead of being just slanted roman (like skewing the normal font), it is a true italic. Characters are equally distinct from each other, and my favourite will be the ‘&’ character. Awesomeness!

That’s all for this update! I will be back by Sunday :)

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Scenes from a rooftop by Paul Johannessen

“Scenes from a rooftop” is an amazing time-lapse video made by Paul Johannessen, with photos taken from his office. Paul worked with a Panasonic HVX200, in 1080 using interval recording mode. He then splices out one shot every 4 to 8 seconds, and combined them to a video. He even wrote the music himself – wow!

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I’ve typed around 500+ words before this paragraph but it all got wiped out by dear Firefox who conveniently chose to abort abruptly a dozen of seconds before the first scheduled autosave takes place. Did some anger management on Twitter before I start all over again. I swear I’m going to start saving drafts in a paranoid manner from now one.

It’s Friday again! This is a scheduled post though – at the moment being I’m away from home and is vacationing at Genting Highlands¹ again. At this hour today, I will most probably fulfill the responsibility of a shutter bug and snap madly away at virtually almost everything in the outdoor amusement park, if the weather permits. If Lady Luck decides to give me a cold shoulder and bless me with lots of fog, mist or rain, you will find me happily cooped up in the comfy sheets on the hotel bed or sucking on a honey stick at Coffee Bean downstairs.

I haven’t been updating my blog with photos lately – partly because I was stuck at home and not going anywhere else (and working on Claudia’s project), and also because there’s nothing much to shoot in my house . My grandparents came down last Sunday to stay with us for a week or so, my brother and I temporarily relinquished our occupancy of our royal beds to them, and slept on mattresses next door. We’re sleeping in a computer room, which didn’t turn out to be a bad thing because both of us get to use our computers and sleep a little later than usual. And ‘a little’ is a rather subjective term – to my parent it means… let’s skip that part.

I’m spending most of the gorgeous afternoons in the nearby pool working out (I prefer pools to gyms. The unavoidable, dreadful gun shows belittles me, or at least, makes me feel  belittled). Not totally hardcore about the tan and I still swim when it’s cloudy – I would rather take it as a ‘training’ for my oncoming trip to a tropical island, where snorkeling and swimming in the sea will be rather physically demanding.

Back to my grandparents’ visit, mom was busy making sure that they eat and sleep well, that they’re entertained (with daily 2-million-decibels karaoke sessions) and happy. On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, we packed lunched and visited my grandaunt (grandma’s sister) – I would say that she’s a wonderful, strong, humourous, caring and kind lady, a little mysterious at the same time. She has been through a lot in life, and despite all those hurdles in life, she is still very generous when it comes to smiles and acts of kindness and graciousness. I simply love her!

Old family photos

After lunch, grandaunt made tea for all of us and on a lazy Wednesday afternoon (I swear at that moment it felt like it’s Sunday!). We sipped on tea, browsed through old family photos that grandaunt brought us, watched some TV, took a short nap, chit-chatted before it’s dinner time and we had to leave. The photos above were taken decades ago – the kids in the photos are now all adults. In the middle photo, the cute, tall girl in blue blouse and who placed her hands on her hips was my aunt, and the ones next to her is my aunt, who appears in the photo right below, taken many years ater.

Mom and the POÄNG armchair

Here’s a photo of my mom on Ikea’s famous POÄNG armchair, reminiscing the good old times ingrained in photos. She called me over and pointed a picture – look, how much I wish I’m that slim now! She was referring to a photo of her younger self. Being very close to my two aunts and my grandaunt, she’d get invited to go on vacations with them, acting as a part-time babysitter during the many trips she’ve embarked on.

Credenza at the corridor - a HDRi

My aunt has a great taste of interior design and art – she handpicks everything when it came to furnishing this home. Recently, they’ve just completed renovating the dry and wet kitchen area at the lowest level, and I absolutely adore the tiles she used. From the photo of the credenza² you can see how much effort she has invested in making her house looking like a showhome – when the students she tutor came to her house, they’d exclaim, complete with oooohs and aaaahs, about the beautiful, intricatly decorated interior. I guess her worst dream is to have a bull rummaging through her house!

For some reason, I totally dig the lamp she picked for the credenza. Cute with a whiff of childhood feel, the stylish support separates it from other normal, bland and ubiqituos table lamp. She picked a shallow dish to keep her keys – an excellent idea not to use a bulky key storage and yet keeping things organized.

My late uncle. I really miss him a lot.

On the ivory-white bookshelf, there’s a compartment where they placed a photo of my late uncle and his then girlfriend, and a small statue of Buddha. Everytime when I see his photos in albums and in their home, a tingling feeling rises up my heart. I still miss him, afterall. Although he has left us many years ago, memories of him playing and singing to the tune of his guitar and him tickling me with his long fingernails remains etched in my mind. When I talked to my brother about him, it’s surprising that both of us have the same impressions and memories of him – the guitar-player and tickler :) I feel so sad and sorry about his loss. Okay, my eyes are getting a little teary now.

The living area

This is the living area of my aunt’s home – gorgeous, isn’t it? She bought the complete set of ivory-white display cupbarods from Ikea, which complements the yellow-brown paint she used for the walls. On the shelves there were more photos, vases of flowers, nifty handicrafts and storage boxes. I like the way she organizes the thing! p/s: That’s my brother Adrian on the left, lounging on the sofa feeding contents off a comic book.

Fonty Friday!

Being on vacation doesn’t give me the excuse of halting the Fonty Friday feature. For this week, I’m featuring Colaborate, a fantastic slab serif³ typface designed by Ralph Oliver du Carrois. I’ve used it as the logo font in my theme’s (teddy-risation™ Theta) logo.

Have a great weekend, folks!

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Selgas Cano office, in the woods.

Selgas Cano office, the interior.

Which of the office spaces posted by Lu attracts you the most?

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Ell hails from the state of Kelantan, which is on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula. I was a little surprised that he came until he explained that he’s currently living with his uncle near town, and he has an awesome part time job which mainly requires him to remove carbon-copy papers from a stack of documents and watching anime online at the same time.What dream job!

Tee is also living near town, with his uncle too! He’s currently working in this American cuisine restaurant opposite the Kelana Jaya town lake. He works the evening shift and it’s kind of painful to hear from him that because of raunchy, unruly customers who refuse to leave even it’s past closing times, he reaches home around 2am. Outrageous, but he’s still looking upbeat and all, no big eye bags so I think he’s coping fine :)

Kay brandishes two mobile phones – one of which is an iPhone and I was totally gawking over it secretly (no longer a secret now though). Seeing him multitasking between the two phones is really hilarious!

We talked and talked and talked for hours in Sushi Zanmai, drinking rounds and rounds of bottomless green tea as our mouth run dry after every couple minutes of non-stop talking. Kay ordered this huge bowl of Japanese fried chicken and cold soba combo, which he found a little hard to stuff it down at one go so we ended up hogging the table for at least two hours – not to forget, another friend of theirs, Cee², dropped by for lunch.

The gargantuan plate of chicken teriyaki that came along with the cold soba Kay ordered

Kay also ordered some sushi to go along with his cold soba, and if you eat it without wasabi it’s not fun:

Wasabi and soy sauce. Oh, and that's the hand of Kay.

We had so much green tea – I had around 5 or 6 glasses – that all of us were hunting for toilets after settling the bill. All thanks to the Saturday crowd, the long queues snaking amongst the stagnant crowd littered with craning necks reading for movie times scared us away. The gawking 45-minute waiting time at the 20+ lanes bowling center didn’t help to make us feel a little better. Finally, we went to the arcade, where a curious crowd gathers around the para para paradise dancing machine watching this group of cosplay girls waving to the beat. Kay chuckled out a laugh as we watched on.

After exchanging some tokens, they tried their luck with some sniping game, where they’re supposed to take out some criminal in a hotel or in a ferris wheel from the ground. Instead of taking others out, the bad guys kept taking them out… and they generously fed the game machine with more tokens. I realized my stupid mistaken when I non-hesitantly bought 5 tokens and had no idea how to spend them – and all of them went to the Bishi Bashi Champ, where you hit the red, green and blue buttons like a mad man on a drunken rage. It was a good workout for the arms though – I bet if you spend enough time playing it, you wouldn’t have to head to the gym to actually have calluses growing all over your palms.

After Cee and Tee left, Kay, Ell and I hunted down possible venues where they’ll be organizing the university freshmen guide/handbook to our juniors (I’m still in a daze that I’m actually turning year 2 next year). We approached the staff from Starbucks in Borders bookstore and MPH bookstore, and they unanimously gave us the same response – “email their marketing department”, and for us who are budget-conscious, the word marketing means expenditure and some degree of capital outlay. Big nono. In the end, we went to meet the floor manager of a rather high class but glaringly vacant food court in The Gardens – they didn’t mutter a word on the pricing part and Kay decided to give it a shot when he emails them his application. Good luck, dude.

Patrick’s surprise 21

Patrick’s birthday party. Kay, Ell and I actually arrived around 10 minutes late because we coincidentally bumped into a second Ell (in case you haven’t realized it now, all the pseudonyms are the approximate pronunciation of alphabets, which logically represents their actual names). We went to New Zealand Natural for their huge 30% discount (it was the 30th of the month), where the second Ell brought his two other friends over. Kay, Ell and I shared this $17.50 (plus minus a couple of cents) regular tub, containing around 6~7 scoops each for cookies & cream and frozen mango fruit yoghurt. The yoghurt was melting way too fast and was ruining the cookies & cream – whoops, my bad! It was my idea to get the mango thing. When I told them about this interesting beverage my college drinks stall aunty supposedly invented (blended, crushed oreo + water), we all stared at each other and then peered into the tub of melting cookies & cream. LOL!

We rushed over to The Italliannies, WernChiet, his other half and a few other invited guests were already there. I met GuoZhang over there – he looked so different from his previous trip to Singapore and I totally didn’t recognize him at all – not to mention embarrassing myself, hah. We made a quick dash for the toilet and when we returned, Patrick was already there! Damn, we missed his entry – the look on his face would have been priceless. We sat on a same table with a guy (I only remember that he’s a 1988 baby), his girlfriend Sophia, another guy and Jon. I remembered Sophia because we were sitting opposite to each other and were talking away about her mass communication course in HELP college and my life in Singapore – and Jon because Shaz told me the other day that the designer behind his green, electric blog skin was nobody else but Jon.

I think I’m the youngest. I was born in 1989. I was a quite shy at first, and I guess it was written all over my face going something like “Hi my name is Terry and I’m too shy to bring any conversation further.” Blah, I’m bad at gatherings, especially when meeting new people. Thank God Kay and Ell attended, whos at beside me which really did an awesome job in calming my nerves.

The dinner went pretty well – the smart 1988 baby suggested that we share several dishes and a pizza to split the cost since their single servings are too large for our individual stomachs to handle. That was an excellent idea because the supposedly for-one-only spaghetti bolognaise ended up being shared between five guys. Woah.

Patrick, the birthday guy!

Then the moment came – the über-friendly crew of waiters brought the cake in, complete with candles and started to sing the birthday song. Patrick stood on the chair and after making his wishes, tried to blow the candles and then it came to me that those were trick candles that Shaz bought! They had those tiny little sparks in there so they’ll reignite the candles that were blown out – brilliant. Pat had a great time slathering his salivary gland secretions all over the cake, which I did take a bite later, I’m so proud of myself, hah.

Patrick doing the great blow jo... I mean, blowing work.

The waiters and waitresses are very nice and helped to distribute the tainted birthday cake (with you-know-what), and many of Pat’s ex-schoolmates started to leave messages on his poster (yea, Shaz got a couple of them printer and hung them around the venue). I heard that they’re having their finals real soon, so whoever you are, good luck! The rest started to leave soon after, leaving me and around 8 to 10 other people remaining at the venue. That’s also when I finally get to introduce myself to Chris – I’ve heard so much about him online but have never met him in person before. He’s a totally down-to-earth guy, dressed pretty casually and completely at ease, but he’s so soft cookie to deal with, that’s for sure. I did a little pack up for them until my parents arrived and had to run, so a big thanks to the remaining people who helped Shaz to move all the stuff back to his car.

Happy belated Fonty Friday

Sorry for the late Fonty Friday feature again! Anyway, a reader of mine sent me an email yesterday asking how to install a font. It’s actually quite easy – for those running Windows XP, you will have to unzip the file and get the font files out. Copy them into a folder named ‘Fonts’ in your Control Panel. You might want to switch to Classic View first to make searching for the elusive ‘Fonts’ folder easier. For Windows Vista, it’s a breeze – right click on the font file and an ‘Install’ option will appear in the menu. After installation, you can delete the unzipped font files from their initial directories. To uninstall a font, simply search for the font in the ‘Fonts’ folder and remove the file.

Back to the Fonty Friday feature, we are having a sans-serif font called Aller, designed by Dalton Maag. It has this excellent blend of sharp edges and smooth corners, making each character very reader-friendly. The vertical alignment of numbers reminds me of Georgia – quirky but not confusing. I always love the difference in the baselines of different digits in Georgia – the same goes for Aller.

Oh, and I stumbled upon this funny image on Digg the other day – I shot the serif.

I shot the serif.

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