the wait is over!

received my new toys in the post yesterday :D ie the dell axim and swisstech tools:

haven't really had time yet to play around with the axim, but i'm aiming to migrate from the loaner revo to the axim in the next week or so. the swisstech tools i've added to my keyring, making it noticeably bulkier and heavier!

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am working on a dedicated photo blog, but it's taking longer than i expected. maybe if i had a bit more html know-how to tweak and customise the defaults 'hello' serves up - perhaps the whole photoblogging thing isn't quite as fantastic as i first though :p still, it's pretty good. and it's free. that's hard to beat!

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i've played sports twice in one week! that's gotta be rare as far as the past few years have gone... badminton last sunday afternoon (just a bit of a casual backyard affair), and basketball today (a few slightly less casual games with people who usually play 'seriously'). i'm feeling tired and sore... and my head hurts a bit too (but that might partly be due to sleep deprivation from the last few days... or should i say months!)

am currently waiting for my turn to get a (hopefully) relaxing massage from my dad :)

almost there...

it's nearly 5pm... i'm still finishing my sandwich from lunch.

one more day of flying solo next week, then hopefully i can relax a bit more!

watched hero last night on dook's wall... the ad-hoc home theatre didn't work too badly :p interesting movie... think i'll delve into the rest of the dvd while it's still sitting in house. as someone commented, zhang ziyi probably didn't really need to be in the movie... but she does contribute nicely to the scenery ;)

pump, by coco-cola amatil

i have a bottle of "pump" (purified, ozonated water); its taste reminds me of coconut.

i'm in a bit of a ghost town at the moment - supervisor's away for a week, other people who have desks in this area are all away/out on site somewhere. it's so quiet...

we have a new general manager though... funnily enough he comes from the same place where i had my first job! not that i recognised his name...

i heard that my immediate manager is wondering if i'm happy, and whether i'm looking for other jobs. what should i say? hmm... la-di-dah... guess i should get on with doing some work.

shopping spree

in the last week or so, i have spent

• $1100 for plane tickets to singapore
• ~$570 for a new axim x30 with 2 years complete care cover - i can drop it or wet it to my heart's content (i mean accidentally, of course!), but no losing it or having it stolen :o
• ~$35 for a utili-key and micro-tech tool set. ever since losing my nifty eyeglass screwdriver tool last month (the screw-in design means it can be a bit too prone to coming loose from the attachement), i've been tossing up between getting a replacement from sunglass hut (it's included in a $17.95 "care pack" thing), or going for a utili-key that i saw at thinkgeek at around about the same time of my loss. sure i could have bought it from them then and there, but at USD$10 for a key and almost double that again for shipping, i thought i'd look around. which is when i found them on ebay, and finally settled on the key + tool set for about USD$25 including shipping.

the key/tool set was meant as a little birthday treat for myself. the PDA is an unexpected bonus :p (and the air tickets were a prior commitment.) anyways, that's like a whole month's wages in my current job... don't i feel poor now!

plus i'm yet to get my lil' paws on any of these items... hmm...

*twiddle thumbs*

Put Your Hope In The Lord

Lord, out of the depths I cry
Lord, hear my voice
Hear my cry for mercy
If you were to show to me
A record of sin, O Lord who could stand?
My soul waits for the Lord
More than the Morning

Put your hope in the Lord,
His unfailing love
He will redeem you for sure
And lift you up
He will forgive you for your sin
And he will comfort you
Put your hope in God, the Lord!

© 2000 Mark Peterson (lyrics to a song based on Psalm 130)

grey clouds

feeling a sudden onset of emotions, i scurry to the bathroom.
hands on my face as i cry, i hear the drop of tears on the sink.
boy the tears must really be flowing!

roused by the vibrating phone, i fumble in my pocket to retrieve.
composing my breath to answer, i take the short call and realise:
it's the tap that's been doing the dripping!

the capacity to find humour amidst sorrow - is that a good sign?!

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yes i do value correct spelling served with goodly portions of useful punctuation. however i shall retain the prerogative to blog in lower case and flout grammatical rules/conventions at my fancy. you can eat my blog or leave, a blog which btw is now decked out with the blogger navbar in signature blogger blue. the search function doesn't seem to be working... yet?

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more on the (anti)-phishing front. good resource, but am rather doubtful they'll ever achieve their motto. there are simply too many ignorant people in the world for that to happen.

children of the revolution

home from a full-on weekend of BLT, head still bulging with information and thoughts about the future and growth of chinese churches in brisbane. then spent half of last night "wrestling" with my revo in the hopes of making it better, but it had the opposite effect (see below). tried to get an early night's sleep but twice woke up following rather vivid bad dreams (not quite nightmares). which is a bit odd, given that i don't often dream (or if i do, i'm usually not aware of them!).

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i suppose i should be thankful that it's lasted this long. after the last few tear-my-hair-out-in-frustration episodes, my revo did seem to settle down. almost a year on however, it has thrown another tantrum. this time, with a little help from it's owner, the tantrum has been accompanied by a towel... :/

so i'm eyeing off one of the latest model dell axims - the x30. the only other contender is an older model x5 going on ebay and currently sitting on about $200 less than the price of a new x30. think i'll sleep a few nights on this one. meanwhile, thanks to the power of (lamenting one's plight via) msn names, i should be getting a loaner revo tonight that will tide me over until i've transitioned to something more permanent.

vocation?

i spent half of this morning doing something my manager asked me to do. i was asked to do it because the person who was supposed to do it is away sick. more than halfway through, i discover it had been done already.

now i'm sitting here trying to fill out my performance review form, and having to think about how i rate myself and what "successes" i've had in various fields.... bleh.

so i took a break to read from boundless, and am now mentally tossing around the idea of how 'Frederick Buechner wrote that we discover our vocation at the intersection of our own deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger'...

one thing immediately springs to mind as to where the world's deep hunger lies. where lieth my own deep gladness?

afterburn

posting a photo cos i can... and it's so easy :p

this shot was taken about a month ago to commemorate a mammoth effort of burning bonanza. 3 months in the making (mostly because i didn't have time!), the photo shows my output of 103 burned CDs - thanks in large part to a CD copying tower i borrowed which sped things up significantly once i made my master copies. i even went to the effort of making professional looking labels! but they're quite fiddly... sure beats writing it all out by hand though!



don't worry, i didn't infringe any copyright laws... the CDs were produced from recordings i made of the talks from our church camp in april. this was before i had my jukebox, so it was a time consuming process of real time recording of the source on MD, real time analog transfer to a PC, and subsequent editing. not that the jukebox had replaced my MD recorder yet - i've not been satisfied with the input levels on the unit so am sticking with my MD as my primary recorder for the time being. but at least i can use the jukebox to record stuff from the MD and transfer the wav file to my PC digitally. it might be an extra step but it frees up my PC from being tied up with focussing on sound recording.

will get the chance to road test both MD and jukebox recording this weekend at the BLT conference. then i can compare the results and see how i can best use the jukebox. more work to add to my pile! hrm...

hello photoblogging! yeah!

hooray! i've got photoblogging happening!

here are a few selected photos from my recent trip to sydney... click to see larger.


the entree: upon arrival, a quick pit stop at a newly opened krispy kreme doughnut shop... here you can see part of the 'conveyor belt' of doughnut production happening behind a perspex(?) wall. if you stand near the front counter long enough the staff usually offer you samples, so i contemplated just taking the samples we got given, and leaving! after all... i only wanted to try a sample... :p


the main course: watching the lion king at the capitol theatre. what a treat! pity they didn't allow photos inside the venue...


the dessert: a mid afternoon snack at the cho dumpling king in chinatown. this place was quite packed for 2:30 in the afternoon - we waited nearly half an hour to be seated. small, very cosy, and yeah pretty nice food :)

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man i don't know if this is just the novelty speaking but this photoblogging thing is so cool! i love it :D suits me almost to a tee... if i'm still feeling keen later on i might go and post up some other stuff from the last few months, although doing too much post-dated stuff feels somewhat at odds with my perception of the spirit of blogging :p

two years on...

it was about two years ago that this blog started... for the past few days i've been wanting to do a birthday entry - that being one of the opening posts of this nebolocity. have been putting it off due to a lack of time and enthusiasm, but now that i'm sitting here on the tail end of a public holiday... :)

actually i went back and re-read some of the entries from august 2002, and it kinda struck me that some things don't seem to have changed that much. or maybe it's more that they've resurfaced? which in some sense accounts for the lack of a celebratory spirit last friday...

• i wore black; black top, black pants. the funereal colour perhaps spoke of how i was feeling leading up to, and on the day. i did have a white t-shirt underneath - this had my name (in chinese) on it, so that was for me. ironically enough the character can and usually does mean something to do with "happy"...
• on thursday afternoon, my manager and supervisor were having a chat, in the middle of which their voices went hushed. i heard something about bringing in food for morning tea the next day, and i wondered if they were talking about me/my birthday. as my supervisor left for the day, she mentioned to me that we'd be having cake the next day for [another colleague]'s birthday. then i recalled that yes i think do share the same birthday as another guy at work. ok... maybe mine will go quietly at work... and for the first hour or so it was like that. but then my manager found out from HR that it was my birthday as well, and not long after HR sends out an email announcing the birthdays for friday and the adjacent weekend, so that was the end of any secrecy. our section had some cake and pikelets, which went down quite well :)
• the previous night, "bruce" was the first to wish me an early happy birthday over msn. she tried to arrange to take me out, but we couldn't find a concurrent free slot from our respective schedules, so chalk up another one for busy-ness.
• actually, even earlier that night, algae asked what i was doing the next evening, and seemed mildly surprised when i said "nothing"... truth was i didn't really feel like organising for anything to happen, but wouldn't have been against something happening.
• before spf left to return overseas, she left a gift for me. she actually tried to hide her, but i caught her out :p anyways i had strict instruction not to open it until my birthday... and at about midnight (friday morning) i rang her. she wanted to be the first to wish me happy birthday on my birthday, and then told me to go get the present and open it...
• during the day on friday i received smses, emails, msn messages and a couple of e-cards from friends. some of the funnier/more memorable happenings were:
• had been chatting to dckt, who was saying he wanted gmail. i told him he needs someone in the loop, and he said he was out of the loop. moments later i asked him what address he wanted his gmail invite sent to, and he was soon in the loop. later on he realises it's my birthday, and feels bad for not remembering... and that it was i who had given him a gift :p
• also received a call from aunty M, who rang my mum at home to get my work/mobile number. totally unexpected and a pleasant surprise... funny how a friend's mum remembers before the friend...!
• x2 with another friend and friend's mum, but this time the mum only found out because she sent me an invite to be on her birthdayalarm birthday book... on my actual birthday itself! oh the irony and timing...
• i became the beneficiary of a fairly impromptu visit from some friends, who came over for an anime (i finally got around to watching patlabor! pity it wasn't as engaging as i thought it might be) and some desserts. i believe i have the shtes to thank for that kind gesture :)

so anyways this is just a bit of a catch up post. there's more in my head but thus far it shall remain beyond the realms of nebulocity. going to try to get some photoblogging happening now... will give me something to feel productive about!

not phishworthy at all... which is a good thing!

haven't been reading other blogs lately, but now that my lunch times are a bit more free... :)

and so i found out about The MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test and decided to test myself to see how much of a sucker i might be to phishing scams, and to my relief i scored 100%! 100% meaning i correctly differentiated between legitimate and fraudulent emails in all the test cases presented. good to know i'm safe for another day... if only the rest of life were this 'easy'!

悲喜交集

无可奈何。。。 痛心

*sigh*

flatlining vs. fattening

tired.
weary.
lethargic.
apathetic.
and rather can't-be-bothered like.

it's not just because i've been on holidays, though the thought of returning to work tomorrow doesn't quite fill me with anything close to resembling excitement..

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where did the extra 2 inches and 5 kilos come from? take it back! please return to sender... with interest :p