Monday, January 22, 2007
first impressions
my first thought on the first day i walked into arachnid, was "ohhhh yeaaaah, this is someplace i would like to work." u know why?
the pool table.
it being my first job and all, i set off last monday with the theme from "the a-team" in my ears. within minutes of signing up, i got told a nice joke. there were 2 newcomers before me, one of which was suresh singh, but when i shook his hand he introduced himself as sam. here's one cool guy not afraid to laugh. later as waihoong rocked in, his first instruction was "watch tv." no kidding. soon i protested, which was when i got sicced onto a job with winnie. now winnie, is cute enough but what i slowly realized was that her features remind me of 4 or 5 people all at once. no kidding. so i spent monday working on the one job, feeling kinda dislocated and finding my way around.
tuesday was a jump into the deep end. the only word i had of the meeting was a fwd'ed email to my hotmail, nothing official. i didn't know half the people on that job and some haven't even met me. 10 minutes before, in a lapse of foresight, i answered the call of "tschk tschk!" which is kinda like an open invitation to another slightly-clandestine kind of meeting, held in the stairwell. came back to my icq and winnie missing: uh-oh. wasted no time shitting myself, picked up my notebook and just went. into a meeting room half-full of half-strangers, i walked in feeling like a gatecrasher... fresh with the smell of dead smoke.
first impressions. it will not happen again. the deep end. becoz i was simply the youngest and greenest with only a vague grasp of what was happening, and trying to catch on as i went. joanne and yuetmee laughed a lot and loudly, which at least put me at ease.
btw icq - is what we use for internal IM. it's like a cult following, and the stretch of 25 mirabilis lit up green was a long-forgotten sight. i still get a petty kick out of comparing icq numbers, becoz i have the oldest icq number. but if their info is anything to go by... i'm the youngest in the whole damn company.
the next days sort of blur together. new jobs, new people. i'm finally able to recite every name on the floor, roughly in order of their desks. nearly everyday i joined irwin and his "brainstorms", down at the mamak. the programmers are also a fine bunch, but a lot of the time i'm on a different wavelength to their jokes. yensie: knows her shit. she's very clear about things from start to finish, the big whole complete picture, from design to tone to backend programming. i feel safe working with her, however i got a mild diao-ing for being hijacked by... weiyee and cliff: brainstorming with these guys made me think about things i never thought about. together they're like a pretty deep well of experience, and i'm like the noob drowning inside.
ben: is the voice of the party. u can't miss him - he's the loudest. john: a towering swede with a refreshing accent, who says "no laaah" and "got what?" with quintessential malaysian conviction. lay: taught me to say "d'u know where cow's milk comes from?" in hainanese. don't ask. cheeheng: being one of the longer-serving 'nerds, he wields his undisputable status as resident dj, this side of the floor. shyng!: is friendly and pleasantly accommodating. desmond: is of the opinion that a triple-sevens blackjack gets u a hardcore sevenfold payment. meng: has an obsession with dwarves. mohan: will supply him with the number to persatuan org-org kerdil msia. and waihoong: still on bloody warcraft at midnight friday.
oh, in my spare time, i watch american idol. there u go. my first week gone... it was challenging and altogether a field of new experiences, and i am learning, and i am happy. but... i've still not touched the pool table.
anyone?!!?!
the pool table.
it being my first job and all, i set off last monday with the theme from "the a-team" in my ears. within minutes of signing up, i got told a nice joke. there were 2 newcomers before me, one of which was suresh singh, but when i shook his hand he introduced himself as sam. here's one cool guy not afraid to laugh. later as waihoong rocked in, his first instruction was "watch tv." no kidding. soon i protested, which was when i got sicced onto a job with winnie. now winnie, is cute enough but what i slowly realized was that her features remind me of 4 or 5 people all at once. no kidding. so i spent monday working on the one job, feeling kinda dislocated and finding my way around.
tuesday was a jump into the deep end. the only word i had of the meeting was a fwd'ed email to my hotmail, nothing official. i didn't know half the people on that job and some haven't even met me. 10 minutes before, in a lapse of foresight, i answered the call of "tschk tschk!" which is kinda like an open invitation to another slightly-clandestine kind of meeting, held in the stairwell. came back to my icq and winnie missing: uh-oh. wasted no time shitting myself, picked up my notebook and just went. into a meeting room half-full of half-strangers, i walked in feeling like a gatecrasher... fresh with the smell of dead smoke.
first impressions. it will not happen again. the deep end. becoz i was simply the youngest and greenest with only a vague grasp of what was happening, and trying to catch on as i went. joanne and yuetmee laughed a lot and loudly, which at least put me at ease.
btw icq - is what we use for internal IM. it's like a cult following, and the stretch of 25 mirabilis lit up green was a long-forgotten sight. i still get a petty kick out of comparing icq numbers, becoz i have the oldest icq number. but if their info is anything to go by... i'm the youngest in the whole damn company.
the next days sort of blur together. new jobs, new people. i'm finally able to recite every name on the floor, roughly in order of their desks. nearly everyday i joined irwin and his "brainstorms", down at the mamak. the programmers are also a fine bunch, but a lot of the time i'm on a different wavelength to their jokes. yensie: knows her shit. she's very clear about things from start to finish, the big whole complete picture, from design to tone to backend programming. i feel safe working with her, however i got a mild diao-ing for being hijacked by... weiyee and cliff: brainstorming with these guys made me think about things i never thought about. together they're like a pretty deep well of experience, and i'm like the noob drowning inside.
ben: is the voice of the party. u can't miss him - he's the loudest. john: a towering swede with a refreshing accent, who says "no laaah" and "got what?" with quintessential malaysian conviction. lay: taught me to say "d'u know where cow's milk comes from?" in hainanese. don't ask. cheeheng: being one of the longer-serving 'nerds, he wields his undisputable status as resident dj, this side of the floor. shyng!: is friendly and pleasantly accommodating. desmond: is of the opinion that a triple-sevens blackjack gets u a hardcore sevenfold payment. meng: has an obsession with dwarves. mohan: will supply him with the number to persatuan org-org kerdil msia. and waihoong: still on bloody warcraft at midnight friday.
oh, in my spare time, i watch american idol. there u go. my first week gone... it was challenging and altogether a field of new experiences, and i am learning, and i am happy. but... i've still not touched the pool table.
anyone?!!?!
Sunday, January 07, 2007
rooku
scalpel in hand
the surgeon pauses - to sneeze.
i saw this on a poster in the train. really like it.
it was part of Moving Galleries, which has been on for a while. but it was still in the trains. apparently, connex had 20 trains carrying posters of art and poetry by victorians. and according to the website i saw, rooku is "...an Australian variant of the short Japanese form called haiku. Rooku poetry was chosen for Moving Galleries because it successfully captures a moment or and idea and lends itself easily to humour, without the usual rules of haiku."
interesting.
the surgeon pauses - to sneeze.
i saw this on a poster in the train. really like it.
it was part of Moving Galleries, which has been on for a while. but it was still in the trains. apparently, connex had 20 trains carrying posters of art and poetry by victorians. and according to the website i saw, rooku is "...an Australian variant of the short Japanese form called haiku. Rooku poetry was chosen for Moving Galleries because it successfully captures a moment or and idea and lends itself easily to humour, without the usual rules of haiku."
interesting.
riddle me this
a salute to Art! and visual double entendres.
everyone i've showed this to does not get it, or it's hovering just outside grasp.
this, on the other hand, is dedicated to the girl who changed my life.
lala.
everyone i've showed this to does not get it, or it's hovering just outside grasp.
this, on the other hand, is dedicated to the girl who changed my life.
lala.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
how i spent my new year's
what is a year? it is an anniversary of our surviving one revolution of the earth around the sun. and it is an uncontested milestone which we use to look back and review, and to look forward and resolve, in an attempt to measure our puny human progress. but otherwise, it's just a day like any other.
like any other sunday. we convened for afternoon pool, and adjourned to terry's. ty immediately ensconced himself at the laptop, and terry zoned out on his pillows on the dual screens of his nintendo ds... both in time-honoured tradition. like wtf? it's the eve of the new year damnit! and being thus ostracized, i hopped onto the ps2 and played freezepop's "less talk more rokk" at least 5 times, and "sweet child of mine" at least 8 times. hey, when u can't beat them...
taipan for dinner. fine, a big dinner this time, which left us kinda full. in the car i said i felt like walking, so terry drove to a parking lot a little further, and we got out and lepaked our way to the dvd shop. the stretch of empty parking was all the clue that that was a different sunday to all sundays in the year. otherwise, everything was going according to the time-honoured traditional plan. the mould of monotony was sealing us in... so in a moment of rebellion, we ambushed terry and hijacked the car keys and did an impromptu drive up to genting. woooot!
nah, it didn't happen like that.
back at terry's they both latched onto their respective computer screens again, and i took a nap - time-honoured tradition, didn't i say? - and woke up to the sg wang fireworks on 8tv. we went to the attic balcony to watch the glow in the sky around terry's neighbour's new floor. u see, the 2-storey house was renovated into a 3-storey, an obnoxious obstruction in our panorama of usj and at least 3 firework venues. what a bitch. but now, an event of strangest portent unfolded.
we sat down to play 5 hours of gin rummy
.
where ty won $213 and i won $33, making terry the grand loser of $123. in plastic chips, of course. then we redivided the chips into their packing cases, resplit the double decks of cards, and turned the sleepy, sombre mood around by going to a mamak breakfast. and after that, another impromptu drive to subang airport to watch the sunrise. i mean, what's the significance of a midnight countdown compared to morning light? it's the bloody dawn of a new year!
nah, it didn't happen like that.
even the mamak breakfast didn't happen. i simply drove home at 6+ am (and it was cloudy anyway, didn't see any sun till about 10).
thus it comes to pass, nearly a week later, that i find i have subconsicously formed my new year's resolution. which is simply that, next year it will be different. i will give in, whenever the tension of potential change arises. i will break the boring. and i will actively follow through with all machinations of my moulieu mind.
**************
in other news, LDP tolls have escalated 60% in one sitting! visit malaysia year, what? gotta milk those tourists... also, check out this link... for whatever it's worth.
like any other sunday. we convened for afternoon pool, and adjourned to terry's. ty immediately ensconced himself at the laptop, and terry zoned out on his pillows on the dual screens of his nintendo ds... both in time-honoured tradition. like wtf? it's the eve of the new year damnit! and being thus ostracized, i hopped onto the ps2 and played freezepop's "less talk more rokk" at least 5 times, and "sweet child of mine" at least 8 times. hey, when u can't beat them...
taipan for dinner. fine, a big dinner this time, which left us kinda full. in the car i said i felt like walking, so terry drove to a parking lot a little further, and we got out and lepaked our way to the dvd shop. the stretch of empty parking was all the clue that that was a different sunday to all sundays in the year. otherwise, everything was going according to the time-honoured traditional plan. the mould of monotony was sealing us in... so in a moment of rebellion, we ambushed terry and hijacked the car keys and did an impromptu drive up to genting. woooot!
nah, it didn't happen like that.
back at terry's they both latched onto their respective computer screens again, and i took a nap - time-honoured tradition, didn't i say? - and woke up to the sg wang fireworks on 8tv. we went to the attic balcony to watch the glow in the sky around terry's neighbour's new floor. u see, the 2-storey house was renovated into a 3-storey, an obnoxious obstruction in our panorama of usj and at least 3 firework venues. what a bitch. but now, an event of strangest portent unfolded.
we sat down to play 5 hours of gin rummy
.
where ty won $213 and i won $33, making terry the grand loser of $123. in plastic chips, of course. then we redivided the chips into their packing cases, resplit the double decks of cards, and turned the sleepy, sombre mood around by going to a mamak breakfast. and after that, another impromptu drive to subang airport to watch the sunrise. i mean, what's the significance of a midnight countdown compared to morning light? it's the bloody dawn of a new year!
nah, it didn't happen like that.
even the mamak breakfast didn't happen. i simply drove home at 6+ am (and it was cloudy anyway, didn't see any sun till about 10).
thus it comes to pass, nearly a week later, that i find i have subconsicously formed my new year's resolution. which is simply that, next year it will be different. i will give in, whenever the tension of potential change arises. i will break the boring. and i will actively follow through with all machinations of my moulieu mind.
**************
in other news, LDP tolls have escalated 60% in one sitting! visit malaysia year, what? gotta milk those tourists... also, check out this link... for whatever it's worth.
