Gemini Rue was a good point-and-click adventure game. Kind of short but fine nonetheless.
The plot was probably supposed to have a great twist except it got pretty obvious somewhere around the middle of the game when one of the NPCs mentioned how they could send multiple patients out. That's when I strongly suspected that the protagonist was one of those, especially when he appeared to know nobody but his brother and his friend.
I felt it could have been a better surprise if it wasn't mentioned until the end the way they didn't mention the transplant, but what's done is done.
I think if they got the good plots, they could probably make more of these games with that engine. It can't be too hard with those retro pixelated graphics.
Watched "The Watch" and I'm sorry I did. Why do I even bother watching Ben Stiller movies?
So the Starhub tech came over and replaced the router to a D-Link one.
Now the speed is slower on my iPad for some reason although it feels pretty alright on my bro's laptop and my PC.
Speedtest told us the download speed is slower now at about 50Mbps but it's not a major issue.
However, I'm getting irritated by the slow speed at which my iPad's updating all the apps that haven't been updated due to NO INNERNET.
Strange that my tablet's having inconsistent speed.
According to the tech, both the routers Starhub offer are just as bad, and according to our online research, the complaints on the D-Link router are increasing as more people are beginning to use it.
Meanwhile, I do not expect Starhub to even contact me again nor will the next bill reflect any changes to the numbers.
Conclusion: I'm switching to M1 in March. Goodbye, Starfug. Hello, 35% off everything.
Yea I just realized it was 35% for 5 lines, not 45%.
...
Okay, everything seems back to normal. Router died twice during the course of the day but that's probably because it couldn't handle the number of connections my utorrent allows. Generally slower too. Inferior stuff.
But I can live with that for a few more months. At worst, there's always the option of getting my own router but that is going to be extremely inconvenient to troubleshoot since the ISP won't be able to help.
After watching 2 seasons of Undercover Boss, I was initially surprised at how practically everyone working with those bosses had some kind of sob story.
I thought the crew had probably sifted through lists of employees or something to pick out people like that for their show, but later realized it wasn't the people but the questions.
The thing is, everyone always has a family; if they don't, that's a sob story by itself. Whenever a person with a family hits adulthood, he/she or the family would have gone through one dramatic event or another.
They just need to be asked the right questions.
I still doubt that all the bosses cried sincerely. I mean these guys are incredibly sociable people with huge networks in order to be where they are. You can't possibly know hundreds of people and still not hear of stories like these, yet they appeared as if they haven't seen anything like this on TV.
Wednesday 30 January 2013
Monday 28 January 2013
Rant 1101 / Ten More To Quadruple Ones
So I got really annoyed by the lack of home internet during the weekend and sent them a wall of text about this issue myself. Previously, my bro handled that and it didn't really go anywhere.
Although I'm unable to get a copy of my initial online feedback, I'll just post the rest here. Names have been changed to protect the identities of minors.
To which I replied:
For some reason, another person took the place of this customer service personnel,
Basically, they aren't going to do shit to compensate for this, hence my reply:
Yet another customer service representative took over.
Anyways, I've already made up my mind that I WILL switch ISP unless they compensate us beyond the degree that I suggested. Obviously I'm not telling them that and neither do I expect them to be generous, so I'm already looking through all the past promotions to have an idea what to expect from M1 in March.
I still have this impression that M1 isn't really much better than the morbidly obese green pipe, but it really does make economic sense to make the switch. In fact, I would have been thinking about this earlier if I hadn't signed up for this contract last year, and that was around the same time as my mother's passing so I really didn't consider my options carefully then.
Gemini Rue looks like a pretty good game. So far so good. The fact that I could right click an inventory item while already right-clicked on an object outside wasn't very obvious. Interesting plot, or maybe I'm just out of games that I'm interested in due to NO INNERNET.
So I'm letting my office close for the Chinese New Year next Tuesday if my staff can finish all the final orders by then. Otherwise, I'm closing on Wednesday. By "closing on" I mean that's the last day of work and that day, in the past, had always been for nothing but simple cleaning of the office and not any actual work.
I don't actually care if they do any work on the final day as long as there is no outstanding order left unfulfilled but some cleaning would be nice.
My staff had reminded me that my mother used to close on the 26th of this lunar month and that's the Thursday, but I'm letting them go earlier because they're starting to develop this perfect memory of my mother in which she's got no flaws. I can't compete with that, so I'm doing whatever that's harmless to compensate. In this case, I'm closing a day earlier at least, two if business is as slow as I feel it is.
Although I'm unable to get a copy of my initial online feedback, I'll just post the rest here. Names have been changed to protect the identities of minors.
> > > Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:03:30 +0800
> > > From: customerservice@starhub.com
> > > To: X@X.com
> > > Subject: Re : Broadband Services : Feedback
> > >
> > > Dear Mr X
> > >
> > > We refer to your e-mail on 24 January 2013.
> > >
> > > We would appreciate it if you could perform a hard reset on your
> > > Huawei HG256s Home Gateway and see if the problem still persist.
> > >
> > > If the problem still persist, we would appreciate it if you could
>
> > > provide us with a convenient date and time(at least 3 days in
> > > advance) so that we can schedule an appointment to swap your Home
>
> > > Gateway again. Please take note of the below available timing
> slots:
> > >
> > > 9am to 11am
> > > 11am to 1pm
> > > 2pm to 4pm
> > > 4pm to 6pm
> > >
> > > If you have further question about StarHub MaxOnline services,
> please
> > > e-mail to this address or fax in to 6720 5000.
> > >
> > >
> > > Best Regards
> > >
> > > A
> > > Customer Affairs
To which I replied:
> > Incoming E-Mail from X@X.com
> > Subject: RE: Re : Broadband Services : Feedback
> > To: customerservice@starhub.com
> > From: X
> > CC:
> > Received on: 27/01/2013 4:42:45 PM
> >
> >
> > Dear Mr A,
> >
> > I believe this issue has already been described to people on your
> side through another email address. In the last email it was stated
> that you or your colleagues were aware of this problem and you would
> call back on this to set up another appointment, and that was sent on
> either Thursday or Friday.
> >
> > I'm unclear as to how bad communication is between you guys and I
> probably don't want to know either, but as long as it does not mess
> things up even more for your end, I'd like to have the earliest time
> slot possible. If it cannot be earlier than 9-11am on Wednesday
> (assuming you can book today, a Sunday), then I'll take it. Very
> soon, it's going to be a whole week since the issue began and my
> family has practically hit most of our mobile data limits, so you can
> see why there is some degree of urgency here.
> >
> > As for the reset, it has been done every morning since the issue
> began. I'd also like to mention that neither this nor the swap done
> by your technician on Thursday, work order number 1-00000000000, has
> worked so far, hence I hope you understand that at the moment, I'm
> strongly inclined to switch over to another ISP regardless of the
> contract termination fee, which can easily be offset by the price
> difference since Singtel charges only $50 for its 150Mbps plan and M1
> $59 for 100Mbps.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > X
For some reason, another person took the place of this customer service personnel,
> Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:50:32 +0800
> From: customerservice@starhub.com
> To: X@X.com
> Subject: RE: Re : Broadband Services : Feedback
>
> Dear Mr X
>
> Thank you for your email.
>
> We wish to explain that for hard reset of Gateway, you may refer to
> the following:
>
> - With the Gateway powered on
> - Use a paperclip to press and hold the "Reset" button for 20 seconds
> at the back of the Gateway
> - Release the "Reset" button and the Gateway will go through a reset
> process.
> - Wait about 5 minutes for the Gateway to reboot.
>
> Secure your wireless connection and ensure no other configuration on
> other settings
>
> - Ensure your computer Internet connection is established
> - Open your web browser and enter 192.168.1.1
> - Username/Password : admin/admin(default)
> - Click Basic > WLAN
> - Security Mode: WPA-PSK
> - Ensure your WPA Pre-Shared Key(Your wireless connection password)
> - WPA Encryption: TKIP + AES
> - Click submit.
>
> Meanwhile, we have scheduled the appointment for our technician to be
> onsite to troubleshoot on this coming Wednesday, 30 January 2013
> between 9am to 11am.
>
> In addition, we have informed our technician to replace your Huawei
> Gateway to D-Link Gateway instead.
>
> If the issue is resolved after the factory reset, please inform us
> and we will cancel the appointment. If not, the appointment will
> proceed accordingly.
>
> We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.
>
> If you have any questions on StarHub MaxInfinity services, please
> email to this address or fax in to 6720 5000.
>
>
> Yours sincerely
>
> B
> Customer Affairs
Basically, they aren't going to do shit to compensate for this, hence my reply:
Dear Mr/Ms B,
Nothing personal, I know your job isn't the easiest, but I am just not satisfied with what your company's policies are making you do. Is this the best you can offer? You're going to leave us without the broadband connection for over a week? Worse, you're going to change the device to the even more notorious brand, D-Link?
The least you could have done would be to waive part of the bill since your product's issue has, for so long in such a critical period, prevented us from using the service we signed up for, not to mention all the inconvenience this has caused us. Aside from disrupting my work, it is so annoying to do any pre-CNY preparation online through this mobile broadband with its slow speed and regular disconnections, particularly in the evening.
But you know what? Just go ahead and do whatever you feel is best. Come March when the IT Show is here, I'll do whatever I feel is best.
Best regards,
X
Yet another customer service representative took over.
Dear Mr X
Thank you for your email reply.
We understand your issue faced and sincerely apologise for the
inconveniences caused due to the MaxInfinity service.
However we would appreciate it if you could allow us to first resolve
the technical issue faced, afterwhich we would discuss the
compensation request again with you further.
We thank you for your understanding on this matter and hope that the
latest service call arranged would resolve the issue.
If you have any questions on StarHub MaxInfinity services, please
e-mail us at this address or fax in to +65 6720 5000.
Yours sincerely
C
Customer Affairs
Anyways, I've already made up my mind that I WILL switch ISP unless they compensate us beyond the degree that I suggested. Obviously I'm not telling them that and neither do I expect them to be generous, so I'm already looking through all the past promotions to have an idea what to expect from M1 in March.
I still have this impression that M1 isn't really much better than the morbidly obese green pipe, but it really does make economic sense to make the switch. In fact, I would have been thinking about this earlier if I hadn't signed up for this contract last year, and that was around the same time as my mother's passing so I really didn't consider my options carefully then.
Gemini Rue looks like a pretty good game. So far so good. The fact that I could right click an inventory item while already right-clicked on an object outside wasn't very obvious. Interesting plot, or maybe I'm just out of games that I'm interested in due to NO INNERNET.
So I'm letting my office close for the Chinese New Year next Tuesday if my staff can finish all the final orders by then. Otherwise, I'm closing on Wednesday. By "closing on" I mean that's the last day of work and that day, in the past, had always been for nothing but simple cleaning of the office and not any actual work.
I don't actually care if they do any work on the final day as long as there is no outstanding order left unfulfilled but some cleaning would be nice.
My staff had reminded me that my mother used to close on the 26th of this lunar month and that's the Thursday, but I'm letting them go earlier because they're starting to develop this perfect memory of my mother in which she's got no flaws. I can't compete with that, so I'm doing whatever that's harmless to compensate. In this case, I'm closing a day earlier at least, two if business is as slow as I feel it is.
Sunday 27 January 2013
Rant 1100 / Lutefisks For The Lutefisk God!
Managed to catch the stream of the Ultimate Empire Showdown on Twitch.tv and my bandwidth on this Saturday morning was sufficient to handle it without a hitch.
Most of the problems were on the server side which I had already expected, so the event was ok to me.
On the scoreboard, the three challenges were won by the VS on most of the servers. On Connery where the Youtube celebrities played as the leaders of the factions, VS won two out of the three challenges.
Some would say that its a clear sign that the VS is OP and needs a nerf.
From what I could see, I also learnt that it really wasn't such a big deal that I was unable to join in the battle due to my internet issue. The server population level of Connery was "High" on the SOE server stats page and the continent where all the fun was, Amerish, had at least over 300 people in the queue to enter it.
This means it must have lagged significantly even if I could get in without crashing which some queueing players complained about.
The event was actually plagued by problems, starting from the audio that kept breaking throughout the event (LevelCap's victory speech was inaudible because of it), and then there was the stream crashes caused by the ten thousand fans trying to watch the stream and spam cheers on the same chat simultaneously. It took roughly half an hour, maybe just less than an hour, for the stream to be fixed and it took another 10-20mins for them to allow viewers to chat again without crashing the stream.
Poor NC failed at everything but I didn't like how the commentators and the "floor correspondent" kept teasing the faction and the leader, SeaNanners, about it at the end. Sportsmanship man, sportsmanship!
I know it's funny how NC won not a single challenge and got third place in the popular vote, but a mention of that would have been enough.
It's the first time SOE held such an event for this game, so hopefully things will improve next time and hopefully get better commentators. One didn't really feel professional (ie polite) while the other didn't appear to have a lot of experience with the game at all.
My iPad's been on the entire day constantly charging and running Blockheads so that I can finish processing all the ores I've collected from my trip halfway across the world. I literally ran and swam back to my starting point where I have all the fully upgraded facilities to get everything done.
I could also build them from scratch but that felt like too much work compared to what I did.
The entire day was spent doing nothing but making tools for the rest of my journey. Really shows how slow the game is if I don't spend money on it.
Been forgetting about Max Payne 2 after my overseas work trip. Now I can't run it.
I have no idea why because I don't recall doing anything to it. I repeated the few special steps that got the game running the last time but it no longer works.
I may need to reinstall it.
Also been thinking about which phone I should get. Initially I wanted an old model of the iPhone, maybe the 3rd gen since iPhone 4 is still around S$500 with a 2-year contract.
But apparently they don't sell that anymore.
I've also considered not getting a phone with a good camera but I will have to keep my current phone as my camera.
Right now, I can trade in my phone for S$150, so unless I can get a phone that has a good camera and is smoother than the Nokia N8 with this trade, I'll probably go for an old Android phone.
TBH I'd really prefer to trade in this phone because it just makes life simpler, so I'll probably be willing to throw in another S$50 beyond my $100 budget and lower the minimum resolution of the camera to around 8 megapixels, the same as the iPhone 4S.
Most of the problems were on the server side which I had already expected, so the event was ok to me.
On the scoreboard, the three challenges were won by the VS on most of the servers. On Connery where the Youtube celebrities played as the leaders of the factions, VS won two out of the three challenges.
Some would say that its a clear sign that the VS is OP and needs a nerf.
From what I could see, I also learnt that it really wasn't such a big deal that I was unable to join in the battle due to my internet issue. The server population level of Connery was "High" on the SOE server stats page and the continent where all the fun was, Amerish, had at least over 300 people in the queue to enter it.
This means it must have lagged significantly even if I could get in without crashing which some queueing players complained about.
The event was actually plagued by problems, starting from the audio that kept breaking throughout the event (LevelCap's victory speech was inaudible because of it), and then there was the stream crashes caused by the ten thousand fans trying to watch the stream and spam cheers on the same chat simultaneously. It took roughly half an hour, maybe just less than an hour, for the stream to be fixed and it took another 10-20mins for them to allow viewers to chat again without crashing the stream.
Poor NC failed at everything but I didn't like how the commentators and the "floor correspondent" kept teasing the faction and the leader, SeaNanners, about it at the end. Sportsmanship man, sportsmanship!
I know it's funny how NC won not a single challenge and got third place in the popular vote, but a mention of that would have been enough.
It's the first time SOE held such an event for this game, so hopefully things will improve next time and hopefully get better commentators. One didn't really feel professional (ie polite) while the other didn't appear to have a lot of experience with the game at all.
My iPad's been on the entire day constantly charging and running Blockheads so that I can finish processing all the ores I've collected from my trip halfway across the world. I literally ran and swam back to my starting point where I have all the fully upgraded facilities to get everything done.
I could also build them from scratch but that felt like too much work compared to what I did.
The entire day was spent doing nothing but making tools for the rest of my journey. Really shows how slow the game is if I don't spend money on it.
Been forgetting about Max Payne 2 after my overseas work trip. Now I can't run it.
I have no idea why because I don't recall doing anything to it. I repeated the few special steps that got the game running the last time but it no longer works.
I may need to reinstall it.
Also been thinking about which phone I should get. Initially I wanted an old model of the iPhone, maybe the 3rd gen since iPhone 4 is still around S$500 with a 2-year contract.
But apparently they don't sell that anymore.
I've also considered not getting a phone with a good camera but I will have to keep my current phone as my camera.
Right now, I can trade in my phone for S$150, so unless I can get a phone that has a good camera and is smoother than the Nokia N8 with this trade, I'll probably go for an old Android phone.
TBH I'd really prefer to trade in this phone because it just makes life simpler, so I'll probably be willing to throw in another S$50 beyond my $100 budget and lower the minimum resolution of the camera to around 8 megapixels, the same as the iPhone 4S.
Friday 25 January 2013
Rant 1099 / Internet Cold Turkey
So far, I've only gone past the South Pole in Blockheads and reached the next landmass.
Also upgraded the portal to diamond but I don't have enough to get even the ruby pickaxe, let alone the diamond one.
Took forever because I keep losing my boat. Next time, I'm getting 3-4 of them in my inventory before setting off into the unknown. I have enough slots for it but the lag caused by the water and melting ice screws things up.
When I hit ice and keep pushing against it, somehow the ship would shrink back into inventory-size and sink. If I don't pick it up back again (done automatically by standing on it), it would sink. The graphics lag makes it such that it does not get picked up even though I'm right on top of it.
Then I'd have to swim slowly across the frozen ocean. It's a good thing the temperature doesn't hurt me, maybe because of my fur coat, although I'm not sure how a fur coat protects me against sub-zero icy seawater.
Actually most of the time is spent creating tools, mainly spades and pickaxes. I do a lot of digging because I dislike swimming. The game has nothing in the sea but ice and I can find more useful materials underground, so I dig under all bodies of water that I come across.
Someday I'd create a highway in the sky as a shortcut between oceans, but right now I'm focusing travelling around the world. At the moment, I should have less than half the globe left to explore.
Tried Red Faction: Guerilla but there's just one horrible problem with the game: there is really no way to increase the field of view (FOV) beyong 95 degrees.
I need about 100 or more to avoid nausea as I play.
So now I like the game but it makes me extremely uncomfortable to play.
Hence, I turned to Dungeons of Dredmor. It's harder than expected but after 3 failed attempts, I think I've finally gotten the right combination of skills to begin with.
Also tried Elven Legacy but my brain isn't willing to work very hard right now, or it would be a great game.
It's one of those "tactics" games like where you fight with multiple units against the AI in turns. I think one of the more outstanding features of the game is that the player brings along his old units to each stage, creating a strong incentive to keep the units alive as much as possible.
Otherwise, in between stages the player can also buy new units with the reward money. This money can also be spent upgrading those units. The problem with buying new units is that even though the classes may be upgraded, they lack the additional skills that experience can bring as they level up during battle.
After a while, I started to realize that it's actually not that important to hit the gold award by finishing each stage as quickly as possible without exploring the rest of the maps because I'm certainly feeling the pinch in my budget right now especially after losing an unit or two every stage, so much so that I had to choose between buying a lower level unit and moving on with a vacant slot.
These have been the games that I turned to ever since my internet died.
Other than that, I've also done some research on whether I should move to M1 and the answer is that it's a feasible option in terms of money.
The termination fee for my home fibre broadband is going to be about S$280 total when I go for the M1 promotions during the coming tech expo in March.
My mobile's contract is ending in June, so that can wait a little.
The M1 100Mbps fibre plan is about $25 cheaper, but the 5GB mobile broadband plan is an additional $20. There is currently a bundle promotion to get both but the mobile broadband is limited to 1GB and I don't feel safe with that.
Hopefully, with the recent service breakdown, M1 will offer some good promotions in March.
The alternative is to not have the separate mobile broadband and instead, get a 3G mobile plan. However, that seriously depends on which phone I can get and I have no idea if I can get a good phone with the kind of budget I have in mind.
The Nokia Lumia 920 is still far beyond my current budget and I don't expect the price to drop much by March, and this makes me reconsider getting a top-notch camera in my phone.
Yes, I can trade my current N8 in for $150 but I'm still uncertain.
Without the need for a good camera, I can go with pretty much any smartphone that doesn't perform too badly like the N8 does.
I guess I'll have to see what promotions M1 comes up with in 2 months.
My transporter calls me "老板", my workers call me "towkay" behind my back and now one of my suppliers have become so happy I'm getting that kind of crap from that end too.
I haven't been able to stop my transporter from addressing me like that so I call him the same in return, since we're both bosses of our own little worlds anyway.
My workers have always addressed me by "Mr [last name]" since that's the only way I know to be appropriate from my memories of my father. Yet when they're happy, they still call me 老板, and between each other and to outsiders, they use the term "towkay" since they're Hokkien speakers.
Last week, I sent like about S$4k extra to one of my suppliers because I was pissed at myself for repeatedly sending them slightly too little, anywhere between S$10 to S$150, in my previous payments (I really don't want to appear to be that kind of guy to them) and because the Chinese New Year is coming.
So just now I was addressed as "老闆" during my discussion with the Hong Kong supplier about my next order on Whatsapp (hence the traditional Chinese character 闆). Immediately I told her I'm too young for that and even "Mr [last name]" feels too old to me, so it was changed... to "boss". I hope this is only a temporary issue.
How does an advance payment $4000 make a supplier that happy? The business must be smaller than I thought!
My staff, I would understand if that kind of thing can make them ecstatic, but a supplier deals with far more money than that on a regular basis. $4k shouldn't impress people of that line of work, but I guess I must be wrong.
This year is problematic. It's my first year deciding on my staff's bonuses and I'd love to be generous, but not to the point of overspending like my mother probably did. I had always thought that I could get my accountant to tell me how much I made in 2012 before I make the decision but I just found out she's coming over only after Chinese New Year, the festival that's perfect for handing out bonuses.
My mother had been doing that since the beginning and my staff are used to it. Paying them later would make them unhappy unnecessarily. I can use my personal estimates to calculate but I just don't feel as comfortable with that.
Doesn't really matter. If I hand out too much, I'll just eat into the profits of 2013 by a little, then we'll see how things go from there.
This year has been alright. I made a few big mistakes so they should more or less offset whatever else I had done right. What a major setback it had been when I underestimated the traffic during the end of the year after the lull of the lunar Seventh month (Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival reduces traffic for the entire month). I'm not sure if I had made a net loss but I don't think I did. Regardless, my staff believes 2012 had not been a bad year so they expect a bigger bonus than the previous year.
No matter, I'll talk to my accountant about coming over earlier next year.
Also upgraded the portal to diamond but I don't have enough to get even the ruby pickaxe, let alone the diamond one.
Took forever because I keep losing my boat. Next time, I'm getting 3-4 of them in my inventory before setting off into the unknown. I have enough slots for it but the lag caused by the water and melting ice screws things up.
When I hit ice and keep pushing against it, somehow the ship would shrink back into inventory-size and sink. If I don't pick it up back again (done automatically by standing on it), it would sink. The graphics lag makes it such that it does not get picked up even though I'm right on top of it.
Then I'd have to swim slowly across the frozen ocean. It's a good thing the temperature doesn't hurt me, maybe because of my fur coat, although I'm not sure how a fur coat protects me against sub-zero icy seawater.
Actually most of the time is spent creating tools, mainly spades and pickaxes. I do a lot of digging because I dislike swimming. The game has nothing in the sea but ice and I can find more useful materials underground, so I dig under all bodies of water that I come across.
Someday I'd create a highway in the sky as a shortcut between oceans, but right now I'm focusing travelling around the world. At the moment, I should have less than half the globe left to explore.
Tried Red Faction: Guerilla but there's just one horrible problem with the game: there is really no way to increase the field of view (FOV) beyong 95 degrees.
I need about 100 or more to avoid nausea as I play.
So now I like the game but it makes me extremely uncomfortable to play.
Hence, I turned to Dungeons of Dredmor. It's harder than expected but after 3 failed attempts, I think I've finally gotten the right combination of skills to begin with.
Also tried Elven Legacy but my brain isn't willing to work very hard right now, or it would be a great game.
It's one of those "tactics" games like where you fight with multiple units against the AI in turns. I think one of the more outstanding features of the game is that the player brings along his old units to each stage, creating a strong incentive to keep the units alive as much as possible.
Otherwise, in between stages the player can also buy new units with the reward money. This money can also be spent upgrading those units. The problem with buying new units is that even though the classes may be upgraded, they lack the additional skills that experience can bring as they level up during battle.
After a while, I started to realize that it's actually not that important to hit the gold award by finishing each stage as quickly as possible without exploring the rest of the maps because I'm certainly feeling the pinch in my budget right now especially after losing an unit or two every stage, so much so that I had to choose between buying a lower level unit and moving on with a vacant slot.
These have been the games that I turned to ever since my internet died.
Other than that, I've also done some research on whether I should move to M1 and the answer is that it's a feasible option in terms of money.
The termination fee for my home fibre broadband is going to be about S$280 total when I go for the M1 promotions during the coming tech expo in March.
My mobile's contract is ending in June, so that can wait a little.
The M1 100Mbps fibre plan is about $25 cheaper, but the 5GB mobile broadband plan is an additional $20. There is currently a bundle promotion to get both but the mobile broadband is limited to 1GB and I don't feel safe with that.
Hopefully, with the recent service breakdown, M1 will offer some good promotions in March.
The alternative is to not have the separate mobile broadband and instead, get a 3G mobile plan. However, that seriously depends on which phone I can get and I have no idea if I can get a good phone with the kind of budget I have in mind.
The Nokia Lumia 920 is still far beyond my current budget and I don't expect the price to drop much by March, and this makes me reconsider getting a top-notch camera in my phone.
Yes, I can trade my current N8 in for $150 but I'm still uncertain.
Without the need for a good camera, I can go with pretty much any smartphone that doesn't perform too badly like the N8 does.
I guess I'll have to see what promotions M1 comes up with in 2 months.
My transporter calls me "老板", my workers call me "towkay" behind my back and now one of my suppliers have become so happy I'm getting that kind of crap from that end too.
I haven't been able to stop my transporter from addressing me like that so I call him the same in return, since we're both bosses of our own little worlds anyway.
My workers have always addressed me by "Mr [last name]" since that's the only way I know to be appropriate from my memories of my father. Yet when they're happy, they still call me 老板, and between each other and to outsiders, they use the term "towkay" since they're Hokkien speakers.
Last week, I sent like about S$4k extra to one of my suppliers because I was pissed at myself for repeatedly sending them slightly too little, anywhere between S$10 to S$150, in my previous payments (I really don't want to appear to be that kind of guy to them) and because the Chinese New Year is coming.
So just now I was addressed as "老闆" during my discussion with the Hong Kong supplier about my next order on Whatsapp (hence the traditional Chinese character 闆). Immediately I told her I'm too young for that and even "Mr [last name]" feels too old to me, so it was changed... to "boss". I hope this is only a temporary issue.
How does an advance payment $4000 make a supplier that happy? The business must be smaller than I thought!
My staff, I would understand if that kind of thing can make them ecstatic, but a supplier deals with far more money than that on a regular basis. $4k shouldn't impress people of that line of work, but I guess I must be wrong.
This year is problematic. It's my first year deciding on my staff's bonuses and I'd love to be generous, but not to the point of overspending like my mother probably did. I had always thought that I could get my accountant to tell me how much I made in 2012 before I make the decision but I just found out she's coming over only after Chinese New Year, the festival that's perfect for handing out bonuses.
My mother had been doing that since the beginning and my staff are used to it. Paying them later would make them unhappy unnecessarily. I can use my personal estimates to calculate but I just don't feel as comfortable with that.
Doesn't really matter. If I hand out too much, I'll just eat into the profits of 2013 by a little, then we'll see how things go from there.
This year has been alright. I made a few big mistakes so they should more or less offset whatever else I had done right. What a major setback it had been when I underestimated the traffic during the end of the year after the lull of the lunar Seventh month (Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival reduces traffic for the entire month). I'm not sure if I had made a net loss but I don't think I did. Regardless, my staff believes 2012 had not been a bad year so they expect a bigger bonus than the previous year.
No matter, I'll talk to my accountant about coming over earlier next year.
Thursday 24 January 2013
Rant 1098 / Going To Miss The Ultimate Empire Showdown On Saturday
TUE
Found this game called "L-Man" again!
Finding a copy of the game was surprisingly easy, and although it only consisted of a suspiciously lonely LMAN.exe file, it turned out to be better than expected because I didn't get the voice-over back in the day, only the music.
It even had DOSBox built into the file so all I needed to do was install and play.
Fantastic.
This game revolves around a typical high school student with a typical habit of stealing panties during the night. Except he had the ability to turn into a superhero, L-Man (presumably short for "Lizard Man").
In the game's universe, zoomorphic humanoid aliens with special abilities once built an advanced civilization on Earth. A long time ago, there were 5 alliances among these aliens, the Bats, the Tigers, the Foxes, the Frogs and the Lizards.
At some point, the evil immortal Bat alliance broke the peace for its ambitions, causing the other 4 to ally against it. A thousand years they fought, thus the aliens were almost destroyed and the survivors went on to live among us in human form.
Our protagonist, L-Man, was the last Lizard descendent.
The gameplay is quite simple: there is the Attack button and the Defend button.
Under "Attack" there are multiple options arranged to their power level. The "Defend" option leads to multiple different options, usually consisting of block and energy regeneration.
Due to the lack of variety among the attack options, there really isn't much strategy involved. Normally I just try to attack till I run out of energy and then regenerate followed by more attacks.
To compensate for this simplicity, this game uses humour to keep the player entertained. With the protagonist being an underwear thief, it's easy to tell the kind of humour that it contains.
I might just stream it some day, but right now, my internet's down (again), the problem being that it's unable to connect to the DNS server, according to the Windows troubleshooter.
Even though it gave me an automated message saying that Starhub was aware that there is a service disruption in my area, emailing them got me an appointment with the technicians as if they weren't aware of it.
I have no idea why this is happening.
So the technician's coming in on Thursday and I expect the gateway device to be changed again free-of-charge.
This is getting ridiculous because it's only been a year or less since I signed up for this 2-year contract. Two changes in a year? Yea sure it's free but it almost nearly caused me to miss the Planetside 2 Ultimate Empire Showdown on Saturday if I hadn't emailed the ISP.
I don't get the automated message on the phone but I think it was put there erroneously. It's been 4 days and it's still not fixed, yet nobody is complaining about it online.
At least I have this mobile modem and my bro's got his 3G phone.
Speaking of which, I will consider switching to M1 and see if their 3G mobile plans plus a simple home fibre internet plan will cost less than my current 2G phone plan plus home-fibre-cum-mobile-modem bundle.
It's only 6 months before I can recontract, so that's not very long now and I'm really looking forward to changing my phone.
The biggest issue with the Nokia N7, to me, isn't the Symbian OS but that it is so slow. It takes forever to rotate if I'm on a call or typing a message and it's horrifying if I rotate with the numberpad on display while on a call.
To be fair, it's great as a camera and it only cost me about $60-plus on top of the 2-year contract. This time, I'm going to get a phone that's actually got good reviews because now I know what I need in a smartphone, and that's the smoothness I am getting from my iPad.
So probably an old iPhone model.
THU
This is ridiculous. The technician came over and did some stuff while I went to work. My bro later told me the technician didn't charge any money and told him it will reconnect in a few hours.
I came back later that afternoon and found that it was still not up.
My bro had already called them by then and the Starhub call center guy told him he would call him back later to set up another appointment.
That did not happen.
This is fucking ridiculous!
I'm going to miss the Ultimate Empire Showdown on Planetside 2 on Saturday morning!!!!
So I gave them a piece of my mind through their online feedback form. I don't expect a reply but I'm honest when I told them that I'm quite ready to switch over to another ISP regardless of penalty fees.
In fact, if the coming appointment (which hasn't been confirmed yet) doesn't fix things, I will do it the next time I see a M1 promotion and bring my mobile account with it. That will probably be in March when the next tech expo happens.
M1 has that Multi-line Saver discount if I have 3 or more lines with them and the fibre internet is considered one. Ever since my bro moved to M1, we've both been eyeing that, so it's not going to take much to nudge me in that direction now.
Moreover, the prices offered by M1 are much lower than that of Starhub, so even if I'm charged a hundred or two by Starhub for cancelling the contracts, I'm still going to make it back through the price differences.
For making me miss the Ultimate Empire Showdown, an event that I've been looking forward to for over a month, the penalty doesn't even matter regardless of whether I make it back like that. I might even get an equally-priced plan just for the heck of it!
Utterly ridiculous! Three technician appointments in less than a year!
Speaking of M1,if I were to bring both my fibre and mobile accounts over, I'm going to have to sign up for a mobile broadband plan separately because their cheapest mobile plans only have 2GB of data. I need far more than 2GB especially if I expect to continue using Teamviewer.
In that case, I'll have 5 lines once I merge with my bro's account and that's a 45% discount on everything!
Found this game called "L-Man" again!
was probably one of the most memorable Chinese games I've ever played. I can't even remember when I got it but I do recall liking its music enough to burn its music tracks into a CD to use with my portable CD-player.
They were also the only music I liked that my father kind of listened to for a bit during a long coach journey in Malaysia until I told him it was from a game.Finding a copy of the game was surprisingly easy, and although it only consisted of a suspiciously lonely LMAN.exe file, it turned out to be better than expected because I didn't get the voice-over back in the day, only the music.
It even had DOSBox built into the file so all I needed to do was install and play.
Fantastic.
This game revolves around a typical high school student with a typical habit of stealing panties during the night. Except he had the ability to turn into a superhero, L-Man (presumably short for "Lizard Man").
In the game's universe, zoomorphic humanoid aliens with special abilities once built an advanced civilization on Earth. A long time ago, there were 5 alliances among these aliens, the Bats, the Tigers, the Foxes, the Frogs and the Lizards.
At some point, the evil immortal Bat alliance broke the peace for its ambitions, causing the other 4 to ally against it. A thousand years they fought, thus the aliens were almost destroyed and the survivors went on to live among us in human form.
Our protagonist, L-Man, was the last Lizard descendent.
The gameplay is quite simple: there is the Attack button and the Defend button.
Under "Attack" there are multiple options arranged to their power level. The "Defend" option leads to multiple different options, usually consisting of block and energy regeneration.
Due to the lack of variety among the attack options, there really isn't much strategy involved. Normally I just try to attack till I run out of energy and then regenerate followed by more attacks.
To compensate for this simplicity, this game uses humour to keep the player entertained. With the protagonist being an underwear thief, it's easy to tell the kind of humour that it contains.
I might just stream it some day, but right now, my internet's down (again), the problem being that it's unable to connect to the DNS server, according to the Windows troubleshooter.
Even though it gave me an automated message saying that Starhub was aware that there is a service disruption in my area, emailing them got me an appointment with the technicians as if they weren't aware of it.
I have no idea why this is happening.
So the technician's coming in on Thursday and I expect the gateway device to be changed again free-of-charge.
This is getting ridiculous because it's only been a year or less since I signed up for this 2-year contract. Two changes in a year? Yea sure it's free but it almost nearly caused me to miss the Planetside 2 Ultimate Empire Showdown on Saturday if I hadn't emailed the ISP.
I don't get the automated message on the phone but I think it was put there erroneously. It's been 4 days and it's still not fixed, yet nobody is complaining about it online.
At least I have this mobile modem and my bro's got his 3G phone.
Speaking of which, I will consider switching to M1 and see if their 3G mobile plans plus a simple home fibre internet plan will cost less than my current 2G phone plan plus home-fibre-cum-mobile-modem bundle.
It's only 6 months before I can recontract, so that's not very long now and I'm really looking forward to changing my phone.
The biggest issue with the Nokia N7, to me, isn't the Symbian OS but that it is so slow. It takes forever to rotate if I'm on a call or typing a message and it's horrifying if I rotate with the numberpad on display while on a call.
To be fair, it's great as a camera and it only cost me about $60-plus on top of the 2-year contract. This time, I'm going to get a phone that's actually got good reviews because now I know what I need in a smartphone, and that's the smoothness I am getting from my iPad.
So probably an old iPhone model.
THU
This is ridiculous. The technician came over and did some stuff while I went to work. My bro later told me the technician didn't charge any money and told him it will reconnect in a few hours.
I came back later that afternoon and found that it was still not up.
My bro had already called them by then and the Starhub call center guy told him he would call him back later to set up another appointment.
That did not happen.
This is fucking ridiculous!
I'm going to miss the Ultimate Empire Showdown on Planetside 2 on Saturday morning!!!!
So I gave them a piece of my mind through their online feedback form. I don't expect a reply but I'm honest when I told them that I'm quite ready to switch over to another ISP regardless of penalty fees.
In fact, if the coming appointment (which hasn't been confirmed yet) doesn't fix things, I will do it the next time I see a M1 promotion and bring my mobile account with it. That will probably be in March when the next tech expo happens.
M1 has that Multi-line Saver discount if I have 3 or more lines with them and the fibre internet is considered one. Ever since my bro moved to M1, we've both been eyeing that, so it's not going to take much to nudge me in that direction now.
Moreover, the prices offered by M1 are much lower than that of Starhub, so even if I'm charged a hundred or two by Starhub for cancelling the contracts, I'm still going to make it back through the price differences.
For making me miss the Ultimate Empire Showdown, an event that I've been looking forward to for over a month, the penalty doesn't even matter regardless of whether I make it back like that. I might even get an equally-priced plan just for the heck of it!
Utterly ridiculous! Three technician appointments in less than a year!
Speaking of M1,if I were to bring both my fibre and mobile accounts over, I'm going to have to sign up for a mobile broadband plan separately because their cheapest mobile plans only have 2GB of data. I need far more than 2GB especially if I expect to continue using Teamviewer.
In that case, I'll have 5 lines once I merge with my bro's account and that's a 45% discount on everything!
Sunday 20 January 2013
Rant 1097 / Should I Bother?
Somehow I had no mood to do anything for the rest of the week after I got back.
Mostly been playing Planetside 2 and this Terraria-like game on my iPad called "Blockheads".
This may be the only game that I actually really like, although like Terraria, I suspect I'll lose interest in it once I'm done exploring the entire world.
Despite the size of the world, it's quite lacking in features. For one, the sea is empty. The other is that minerals close to the lava aren't particularly precious so there's little incentive to go down there other than to get burnt.
Still, it's the only game of this type that's free on the iPad, excluding the shitty free version of Minecraft.
The only real issue with this game is that it consumes power like nothing I've ever seen in my tablet. I can easily go through all 100% of the battery in less than a day with nothing but Blockheads running!
Now my fridge is empty and I have a huge backlog of samples to inspect for my work, yet I just don't feel like doing anything at all. I even ate instant noodles just now, something that I haven't done in like a year, because my food supply has been reduced to macaroni, rice and those and some other packaged meat products. Even my cooking oil and rice are running out.
Something is wrong and I don't know what.
I found a website for offering freelance work. Fantastic!
Mostly been playing Planetside 2 and this Terraria-like game on my iPad called "Blockheads".
This may be the only game that I actually really like, although like Terraria, I suspect I'll lose interest in it once I'm done exploring the entire world.
Despite the size of the world, it's quite lacking in features. For one, the sea is empty. The other is that minerals close to the lava aren't particularly precious so there's little incentive to go down there other than to get burnt.
Still, it's the only game of this type that's free on the iPad, excluding the shitty free version of Minecraft.
The only real issue with this game is that it consumes power like nothing I've ever seen in my tablet. I can easily go through all 100% of the battery in less than a day with nothing but Blockheads running!
Now my fridge is empty and I have a huge backlog of samples to inspect for my work, yet I just don't feel like doing anything at all. I even ate instant noodles just now, something that I haven't done in like a year, because my food supply has been reduced to macaroni, rice and those and some other packaged meat products. Even my cooking oil and rice are running out.
Something is wrong and I don't know what.
I found a website for offering freelance work. Fantastic!
Wednesday 16 January 2013
Rant 1096 / Meaty Mooncakes
First day
First day in Shanghai was quite normal. Mild traffic obstruction on the way to the hotel but otherwise as smooth as my previous visits.
Except this was the first time I arrived in Shanghai during the busier hours of the night, so I was able to see the city in a more vibrant atmosphere.
That's when I realised there's that whole road of malls just 500m south of my hotel.
I've never looked there because my previous visits were more focused on the north and I never had the time and energy to look anywhere else.
Not this time. I had booked this trip half a year ago in anticipation of end-of-season sales but did not expect to have that much stuff in my office by this time of the year due to my own misjudgement.
Now I have plenty of time to shop around.
The most interesting thing I saw was the pork moon cakes. Most vendors wasn't having a lot of business except for one that had a relatively ridiculous queue despite not having ridiculous prices - they were 3.50 yuans each.
The next most interesting thing was the preserved thing I believe is octopus slices which were individually packed.
Third was the Crocodile clearance sale where the discounts were as low as 90%. Yes, it was PACKED. I didn't even bother to look at the clothes after a glance at the crowd at the entrance.
Anyways, this trip was not completely problem-free. Again, I had forgotten something significant but not highly important. The last time, it was the router. Now, I had neglected to bring its charging cable.
Fortunately, I had long developed the habit of keeping it fully charged whenever I can remember to do so, hence I have roughly 3.5 hours of Internet time to last my week of travel, although hopefully the Internet access will be wireless at the HK hotel so that I won't have to worry about not having enough battery to check in for the final flight online.
I can, of course, just use the free wireless access at the lobby but I don't like to occupy the sofa for too long. Moreover, I don't like to have people walking behind me when I'm online.
So this is why I'm again blogging on the Notes app.
BBC just reported that a recent study estimated that half of the food produced in the world each year is wasted.
OMFG!
So BBC is still talking about the rapes in India. Apparently, it's actually a valid argument in India to question why that girl was out so late that night.
That's how the rapists' lawyer is defending them.
Tbh the journey here was pretty good. The first flight from SG to Pudong was on a 747, probably my first in a very long while. I didn't even know until I checked my itinerary from Expedia after I noticed how nice the flight was.
First, the seat slides forward instead of simply having the back tilt backwards.
Second, there was a good amount of leg space which I later realised was to compensate for the forward-sliding seat.
Third, it had that nice personal entertainment system that I remembered fondly from a long time ago.
There were also a few things I liked that had nothing to do with the plane itself.
The meal was pretty nice; they used short-grained rice instead of the usual stuff.
The other thing was that the flight wasn't crowded at all. In fact, I did not have to share my armrests with anyone throughout both flights, also a first... Probably since forever.
Then at Pudong, despite my fatigue I remembered to get dinner which I purchased at the Burger King. For less than 60 yuans, I got a double whopper, a fish burger and a tender grill.
60 yuan = 12 SGD
The taxi trip was the smoothest ever. I knew where to go and the driver knew almost exactly where it was when I said the name so that I only have to correct the block number after he tried to confirm the address with me.
At the hotel, I had a tiny problem when I underestimated the deposit required which forced me to take out my CNY stash in an envelope in my bag which I really didn't want to reveal in public.
After I was getting ready to leave the check-in counter for my room, the man told me I was given a free upgrade but I was not allowed to get a last-minute extension.
It was not as great as it was supposed to be.
The pros:
- two single-plus beds combined
- the room is even more spacious
- corner room, so less neighbours and more windows.
- 50% bigger wardrobe
- a stand for the luggage
- a bathtub!
The cons:
- the condition of the room is the worst I have ever seen in my three stays here.
First, the wall around the luggage stand was filled was black scrape stains. Next, the wooden wall next to the kettle had a huge white stained that's clearly caused by steam from the kettle. Third, the Internet cable was faulty although I managed to use the one that connected the TV's router to its modem. Fourth, one of the standing lamps was faulty. Fifth, the shade of one of the bedside lamps was crooked. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it had been broken and was hastily repaired with black tape. Sixth, the tub's tap was slightly faulty and continued to run even when the shower was in use. Seventh, the basin contained many black scrape stains.
But the bathtub compensated for all that. I haven't used a bathtub since 2010, when I shared the room with a few other people.
When I asked the guys at the counter during the check-in process if there would be any problem if I ordered food delivery, the told me I would have to collect it at the lobby.
That had never happened before. Even when the delivery company called that one time to inform me that the hotel stopped the delivery man from entering, I solved that by yelling at the front desk on the phone asking why they were stopping the food delivery.
As for tonight, the delivery man managed to get to my room without any issue again.
But now I decided not to push my luck too far. Since it was so cold, I ordered extra food so that I won't have to worry about tomorrow night. Usually the tiny size if the fridge prevents me from doing this, but now I can simply leave them at the window.
It's between 4 to 6 degrees Celsius today, so it's as cold as the fridge even when the sun is up. At night, it's 1 degree. By keeping my curtains closed, the balcony might as well be a natural freezer. I also tried to make sure all the food kept for the next meal was cold dishes because I don't have an oven here.
I do have an idea on how I could reheat food, which is to use the hot tap water, but that's troublesome and hot food can get soggy while cold food don't.
Kinda forgot to make sure I didn't order too many spicy dishes and I did not expect Hunan cuisine to be this hot. In one dish, after picking out all the red chilli, I realised a lot of the green bits were chilli too.
But the candied goose liver was awesome and only cost 18 yuan. It's supposed to be plain liver slices cooked in honey, although I believe it's more likely that they were probably just boiled in sweetened water. Still, they were good enough that I finished them despite feeling full. I think I will try this with pork liver at home.
It's so cold here, I can barely move around in my room with only one layer of clothing. The hot bath and shower really helps but this does not last throughout the night. Thank goodness I don't have the habit of taking a leak during the night. That would really suck.
Second day
Ok, the cold had done something to my pores. I felt a stinging sensation on my arm during the morning hot shower and noticed that a lot of my pores on my arms were swollen.
I have no idea what this is but I suspect I should really get body butter for times like this. I had not thought to bring this so the only moisturiser I have is for the face. Could work but not as good.
Checked in at noon for my Sunday flight to Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the process was plagued by lag and at least ten seats have already been taken.
Fortunately, both of my flights from this point on will be on 777s, and together with the fact that I don't expect heavy traffic now, I don't think it's going to be crowded.
I'm not sure if I have ever been on a 777 too, so I will be finding out soon.
So two experts on Bloomberg and maybe BBC have said that the American politicians don't seem to be very eager to solve the underlying issues that had caused the 2008 mortgage crisis, with one of them describing them as "becoming more European".
Basically, whatever problems exist in the American financial system, they are still there, covered, partially forgotten and still festering. The way things are going, it's not a matter of "if" but "when".
In other words, it's not a good idea to invest in the US over the medium term, regardless of what Warren Buffett has just said.
On Europe, Cyprus : the latest domino to fall in that continent. Obviously, whatever the Europeans have been doing, shit's still on the fan, yo!
As for France, apparently it's being viewed as increasingly uncompetitive. This problem is not expected to be solved as the labour system is not flexible, causing Hollande's recently proposed labour reforms to be unlikely to be passed.
Oh, and there is some risk of the UK having its ratings cut in the near future.
In China, CPI's still rising. Exacerbating the Chinese economic situation is the coldest winter in 28 years, causing food prices to rise. Apparently, China may get reluctant to let its currency rise further.
Worse, there is some evidence that MAY indicate that China has been manipulating data just like Greece before its fall.
Japan's Abe may be splurging on the economy, with a large chunk on rebuilding the north and a smaller-than-expected portion on defence despite the recent spat with China, this has been done before and never have such measures worked for the country.
Yea I've been watching a lot of Bloomberg at night over here since I did not bring enough entertainment over with me.
Right now, all these make me glad I'm Singaporean.
They say that Apple is not doing very well in China, but whenever I went past the Apple store, it's always filled compared to the much smaller Samsung and Nokia stores.
Went back to that mall-filled road south of my hotel. I'm still not sure what its called but I think it's the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street. All I know is that it ends at Xizang Middle Road.
Bought some preserved meats. I really didn't know how the system worked, so after I hung around in the crowded shop with the packets in my hand to watch them. However, I couldn't tell for sure because they were all talking in Shanghainese. In the end I watched the vendor hand a clipboard to a man who then went to a cashier whom I did not notice before.
That was strange because that vendor had a bowl of cash and I saw him taking money from some of the locals. So I watched the male customer more closely to see what was happening, and that was probably when the vendor shouted to get my attention before taking the packets off my hand, telling me the prices of each, writing the final bill on a clipboard and finally directing me to the cashier.
I paid, the cashier used his stamp on the bill which was really just a sheet of A4 paper that was reused for all customers, and I exchanged the clipboard with my purchase which the vendor had bagged for me.
I still have no idea why he handled cash for some customers.
Anyways, the meats were cheaper than I thought. I bought a 500g-pack of boneless chicken thigh, a 500g-pack of bone-in duck thighs and a pack of four meatballs with a whole salted egg yolk each.
I think it was 83 yuan for all that. I've only a vague idea of what to cook with them.
Also bought some meat moon cakes. The pork ones were 4 yuan each although there was one that was selling at 3.50 and had that very long queue.
Bought 3 pork and 3 crab ones.
Overrated. Or maybe I was full. I found the meat to be too bland for the crust.
22:08
Blackout. Wtf? Heater's gone out but I'm buried under two layers of thick blankets anyway. The only issue is that it's too quiet.
There was a bit of commotion outside my door, probably from my neighbours. I thought about calling the front desk but figured it would be swamped and that I would be overreacting. Opened the curtains for some light and saw that other buildings next to us were fine.
22:13
Everything's ok again. Still, my impression if this hotel has worsened.
Third day
Checked various maps to find the exact location of my grandmother's columbarium whose address an uncle had emailed me.
Turns out it will be a long trip via MTR and light rail to get there, but I'm glad I picked a hotel that's close to a MTR station.
One thing about this hotel that I did not expect was that its website is telling me that it's going to be cheaper to take a cab from the airport to reach it than by train. Apparently, the cab fare is estimated to be around $30 compared to the $100 an airport express ticket costs.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find my Octopus card, but then again I'm not sure it's still usable anyway after all these years. Regardless, I'm getting a new card when I get to Hong Kong.
Checked out Nanjing Pedestrian Street yet again because I have no interest in Qipu Road for my work needs anymore.
Now that I've combed the place more thoroughly, I realized that on weekdays, everyone only seems to visit the stores on the ground floor. Some of the second storeys had some traffic but anything above were practically empty.
There is only real traffic there on weekends.
If they can survive like this, they must be making some serious money down at the first floor.
As for the preserved meats shops, damn those places are packed everyday!
Same for the Apple store.
The hotel stopped my delivery guy :(
I think the only person who actually cared was the manager. I didn't actually see his tag so I don't know if he was the manager or assistant manager, but he was younger than the other guy who also seemed to be in charge and he spoke better English.
So maybe he's the manager.
And he stopped my food supply.
So I went down, asked the guy for plastic bags, and he replied that they were hard to take. Assuming he meant that they were packaged in a way that they would be hard to hold even in plastic bags, I told him I'd get him in.
The doorman was easy, but the manager stopped me immediately.
After a bit of talking during which I almost failed the mission and things almost got heated up between the manager and the deliveryman, it ended up the latter packing the containers in the plastic bag.
Yes, that was very stupid; he could have done that outside without any fuss.
Tipped him two bucks only because I didn't want the coins. My CNY wallet is already weighed down by enough of those.
Anyways, Yunnan cuisine is spicier than I thought. In one dish, after picking out all the red chilli, I discovered that a lot of the green bits were chilli too!
Ugh...
The pig's trotter was nice and the rest of the food I ordered was generally ok, but it's way too spicy for me.
Also bought some interesting convenience food from a nearby convenience store.
I did not know chicken wing tips as a form of preserved food were actually a commercially viable product but here they are. I have a feeling the packaging, shipping and preservatives cost more than the tips themselves.
Ok, I stopped blogging completely by that day. The rest I'll just type here in the comfort of my own room.
The trip to Hong Kong was easy and I had a mild surprise when I boarded the plane.
What I reserved when I checked in online:
What I saw when I sat down:
Nice!
Doesn't CX charge an extra US$25 for these seats? But due to some error, this was not a 777 and hence, 39A turned out to be this seat!
At least, I think it wasn't a 777. The seating arrangement was 2-4-2 and it's also the best explanation I can think of to explain why I got this seat for free.
Moreover, when I reserved this 39A again for my final flight back to SG, it was the one shown in the first image.
Left some stuff in the hotel in my haste. I got my timing mixed up due to not enough sleep in the morning and thought I had more time than I actually did.
My flight was at about 11am, so I had to be at the airport by 10, so I should leave the hotel by 9, so I should get up at 8.
Then in my morning confused state, I thought I had to leave by 10.
At 9am, I was done with everything and was about to relax on the chair with my coffee. That was when I looked at the time, ran through the timings again and in the process, discovered the anomaly that was the absent time slot meant for travelling from the hotel to the airport.
Fortunately all these were planned to give myself a small buffer at every step, so instead of arriving too early, I was quite punctual.
I didn't even need to be there an hour before boarding, only 45 minutes because I had already checked in online. If I didn't have any baggage to check in and had the boarding pass printed, I could even arrive 30 minutes before boarding.
In my haste to get out of the hotel, I forgot to check the fridge.
Although the front desk did ask me whether I had used anything at the minibar, the fact that I left anything there did not cross my mind.
It was only on the taxi to the airport that I recalled I had two bottles of soft drinks there. Since they only cost less than S$1.50 total, I didn't give a damn.
I only remembered about the 3 steamed buns (2 pork and a mushroom) there during the flight. Those, I gave a little bit more of a damn because the inflight lunch was so small as usual. Moreover, I had never tried them throughout the 4 days there.
Still, I'm glad I didn't leave anything important there.
HKIA felt a little strange to me. I've been there before but I had never went arrived there alone.
The week before, I had emailed an uncle to ask where my grandmother was. His wife then emailed me the address after he called and tried to get me to write down the address. During the call, he also offered to take a day off on Monday to take me there, but I managed to reduce his offer to just a dinner.
When I got my baggage at the airport, I called him for two reasons.
First, if he could get some excuse to not come out for dinner, I would just buy takeaway at the airport and spend a quiet evening in my hotel.
Second, I felt it was rude if I simply ignored him after he made the offer.
In the end, I went out for dinner with the both of them. My cousins were busy.
The dinner was just a simple one and again, I did not pay for it. I think I was too tired to come up with an argument. Moreover, it's not my nature to be generous and I am inexperienced at this sort of thing.
Just FYI, it's a custom for this side of the family to try to foot the bill of meals. Usually, it could get cause quite a ruckus as all the adults shouted at each other reasons for why the rest shouldn't pay or why they themselves should.
Without having dinner with them since I was young, I'm not well-equipped for the debate at all.
I think it's a Chinese tradition that got lost during the Westernisation of Singapore but still remains in some parts of Hong Kong and perhaps China.
Since my mother's passing, this uncle has paid for two meals with me because I have always given in to his arguments eventually. I'll need to be more insistent next time, with or without a valid reason.
At least I gave them the bottle of body butter from Vardi and Migdal. Cost me about S$60, or roughly half the price of the meal, so it's a slight consolation.
The hotel was actually less convenient than I thought after looking at the map.
Although the Central MTR station was close to Hotel Mini Central, I needed to take a long detour or take this long flight of stairs. Even the shorter routes had many short flights of stairs consisting of 2-5 steps each.
That really sucked.
Fortunately, my laziness made me take a cab from the airport, so I didn't have to lug my 19.4kg luggage (I looked when I checked in the suitcase to see if I had hit the 20kg limit) up all those stairs.
Btw I did hit the limit on my flight to SG even though I had estimated that the stuff I added in only weighed about 0.5kg. However, the scale at the check-in counter said the total weight was 20.4kg. Fortunately, they were nice enough to ignore that extra 0.4kg, although I have this feeling that if it had been 20.5kg, they might not have shown me mercy.
For CX, the charge of extra weight goes by 1.5% of a single trip ticket of the route it's going per kg.
For a trip to Hong Kong, a return trip would have been about S$250. A one-way ticket then would be about $150. The excess baggage charge would have been roughly $2.25 per kg for me.
I paid about $570 for all three tickets of this trip. The flight to Shanghai was really a flight from SG to HK followed by a flight from HK to SHA. Hence $570 was for two flights between SG and HK plus two flights between HK and SHA.
Anyways, I only found out about the inconvenience of the stairs when I left the hotel to find my way to the station. Since I have never tried to train my legs, going up really sucked.
The room itself was quite different from the last two hotels I've stayed at so far.
The glass bathroom wall I expected. I'm still surprised it's glass.
That's the only space I could find for my luggage. The walls are surprisingly thin, so I could hear the guests next door talking till midnight on the first night and them leaving in the following early morning. Hearing both male and female voices, and with the bathrooms like this, I half expected to hear kinky noises eventually, but that fortunately did not happen; the guy left for another room nearby at midnight. That would have really interrupted my sleep.
Can you imagine the view when you're taking a shit there?
This is the view when you're taking a shit there. Totally awesome if you're alone like myself or if you go as a couple. Totally awkward in any other situation. Totally bad idea to go as a family.
Toilet is tiny but clean enough. The marble and glass walls really make it a decent bathroom despite its size. I couldn't sit on it normally because the wall was too close to the throne, and I imagine anyone with longer legs might also have difficulty sitting down with the door closed.
Yea, ugly ceiling. They could have at least used a cheap ceiling instead of nothing.
Now this is really nifty. Too bad I didn't have an empty bottle. I didn't know until I checked out that they didn't check the rooms before allowing me to leave, or I would have taken the bottle inside with me.
The view outside the bathroom window behind the curtains. Also, this place was having some kind of renovation works in this area and we were all advised to keep the curtains down... except the curtains didn't cover the windows completely, so it's still quite possible for anyone out there to take a peek.
The works ended the same day I checked out though.
The next day was a tiny bit more interesting. With my aunt's email screencapped and a map in hand, I found my way to the general vicinity via MTR and light rail. An old lady tried to ask me for directions but I had to tell her I'm not a local. Moreover, I am not proficient at all at reading traditional Chinese, so I could tell which name on the map was the one she said.
Fortunately, a friendly young lady offered to check the map for her and it resulted in quite a long conversation between them during the trip as they sat behind me.
The old lady and her husband alighted only a stop before I did.
As I am still not an expert at checking maps, I walked like 500m in the wrong direction along the correct road before I finally found the street name. It turned out to be only about 50m away from the light rail station.
Once I started seeing large signs with the name of the columbarium, I followed them till I found the gate. Then I began to snap photos of everything all the way to my destination and then all the way back to the light rail station.
This is to facilitate my future visits in case I never go back for the next decade or more. Moreover, my brother or any relative who might ask me will be able to easily navigate to that place with the excessive amounts of photos I took of the entire route.
Since it was still early, I took a short walk at the nearest mall, which was a tiny place filled with the typical shops selling daily necessities. I also considered exploring some other parts of Hong Kong but somehow felt too tired for it.
I think I really was tired because I slept 12 hours that night, from 7pm till 7am when my alarm sounded.
For dinner that night, although I bought a few buns from a Maxim's confectionary in one of the MTR stations, I thought I'd just take a walk to the nearby Cafe de Coral for some hot food.
Cafe de Coral is a major fast food chain in Hong Kong specialising in mainly Chinese cuisine, although nowadays, Japanese, Korean and Western food is also served.
It's pretty much like the kopitiams in Singapore without the kopi and with a fast food restaurant system. I could also compare them with the zi char in SG but their menus are very rigid unlike the zi char where the menu is flexible and you could ask for your own custom dishes if you know what you're doing.
Anyways, it was my first time ordering food there and I had to desperately keep my mind alert to look out for hints on how things worked over there.
First, the ordering was simple - there was already a long queue at the entrance where people first checked the giant menu displayed at the entrance before queueing up.
Second, the payment. I did not know whether I had to pay before or after getting the food, so I stared at the guy in front of me as he ordered for his three friends and himself. When I saw him taking money out of his wallet, the mystery was solved.
Third, the food. At the long counter, the left side had a sign stating it was for the collection of roasted meat dishes, and there was a typical clear plastic box/cage/whatever with roasted meat and steamed chicken hanging inside. The right said "Beverages" in Chinese, and these made me very confused.
Worse, there was no queue. The group of friends in front of me were not queueing up for some reason and was just standing at one side to wait.
So what was I supposed to do with the ticket the lady who took my order handed me?
Hence I waited around and then saw the old man who was behind me walk to the beverage side.
I quickly walked behind him, but watched as he handed his ticket to the lady behind the counter who then said something into the mic.
The process was as messy as a misleading sign implied as she gave food to people who weren't in the queue. Presumably, they handed her their tickets and left the queue to wait for their food instead of waiting in the queue.
I rested my hand with the ticket on the counter and waited but she did not take it. I later realized it was because there were like 5 orders ahead even though only the old man was in front of me.
To be honest, I did not know whether I was supposed to hand her the ticket because there was the possibility that she only handled specific parts of the menu that didn't include the pork chop rice I ordered.
However, I was slightly assured by how the old lady behind me also rested a hand on the counter with the ticket between her index and middle fingers just like I did. I was probably doing it right.
Took a few minutes but she eventually snatched the ticket from my hand and said something into the mic. After a while, she told me they had ran out of pork chops and asked if I could accept fried fish fillet as replacement. Since I always prefer fish (I don't cook fish a lot at home other than salmon) when I eat out, of course I said yes.
The food, which I later ate in the hotel, was only average.
Also bought a lot of Japanese fish sausages from Okashi Land since it had outlets in all the MTR stations I went to in this trip. I found the cheapest one to be HK$14 for a packet of 5, making each sausage less than S$0.47 each.
I'm not 100% sure it's more expensive here but I am very sure it's hard to find in Singapore.
Anyways, I finished the one packet I bought at Central and 4 more at the airport. However, it cost $30 for 2 packets (presumably more if only 1 packet) at the second location. Still, HK$1 wasn't a huge difference.
The trip back to SG was pretty uneventful.
Checking in my baggage resulted only in the airline staff asking me why I'm still using the temporary card after being an Asia Miles member for months and three trips.
So after getting the boarding pass, I went to the Asia Miles counter to find out like she suggested. I've never actually bothered to ask because it's a free bonus if I ever got anything. However, since I had an hour to kill, I went to the Asia Miles counter to enquire.
The problem turned out to be that I've been travelling on discounted fares all these months and none of these accumulate points. Without earning a single point throughout, I do not get the actual membership card.
During the flight, I had an hour left after the movie I picked ended. That was when I discovered this documentary called "Undercover Boss" in which CEOs and such high level executives would disguise themselves and work with the lower level employees for a few days.
I found it intriguing because it showed me how bosses should think, something I've been trying to find out on my own.
First day in Shanghai was quite normal. Mild traffic obstruction on the way to the hotel but otherwise as smooth as my previous visits.
Except this was the first time I arrived in Shanghai during the busier hours of the night, so I was able to see the city in a more vibrant atmosphere.
That's when I realised there's that whole road of malls just 500m south of my hotel.
I've never looked there because my previous visits were more focused on the north and I never had the time and energy to look anywhere else.
Not this time. I had booked this trip half a year ago in anticipation of end-of-season sales but did not expect to have that much stuff in my office by this time of the year due to my own misjudgement.
Now I have plenty of time to shop around.
The most interesting thing I saw was the pork moon cakes. Most vendors wasn't having a lot of business except for one that had a relatively ridiculous queue despite not having ridiculous prices - they were 3.50 yuans each.
The next most interesting thing was the preserved thing I believe is octopus slices which were individually packed.
Third was the Crocodile clearance sale where the discounts were as low as 90%. Yes, it was PACKED. I didn't even bother to look at the clothes after a glance at the crowd at the entrance.
Anyways, this trip was not completely problem-free. Again, I had forgotten something significant but not highly important. The last time, it was the router. Now, I had neglected to bring its charging cable.
Fortunately, I had long developed the habit of keeping it fully charged whenever I can remember to do so, hence I have roughly 3.5 hours of Internet time to last my week of travel, although hopefully the Internet access will be wireless at the HK hotel so that I won't have to worry about not having enough battery to check in for the final flight online.
I can, of course, just use the free wireless access at the lobby but I don't like to occupy the sofa for too long. Moreover, I don't like to have people walking behind me when I'm online.
So this is why I'm again blogging on the Notes app.
BBC just reported that a recent study estimated that half of the food produced in the world each year is wasted.
OMFG!
So BBC is still talking about the rapes in India. Apparently, it's actually a valid argument in India to question why that girl was out so late that night.
That's how the rapists' lawyer is defending them.
Tbh the journey here was pretty good. The first flight from SG to Pudong was on a 747, probably my first in a very long while. I didn't even know until I checked my itinerary from Expedia after I noticed how nice the flight was.
First, the seat slides forward instead of simply having the back tilt backwards.
Second, there was a good amount of leg space which I later realised was to compensate for the forward-sliding seat.
Third, it had that nice personal entertainment system that I remembered fondly from a long time ago.
There were also a few things I liked that had nothing to do with the plane itself.
The meal was pretty nice; they used short-grained rice instead of the usual stuff.
The other thing was that the flight wasn't crowded at all. In fact, I did not have to share my armrests with anyone throughout both flights, also a first... Probably since forever.
Then at Pudong, despite my fatigue I remembered to get dinner which I purchased at the Burger King. For less than 60 yuans, I got a double whopper, a fish burger and a tender grill.
60 yuan = 12 SGD
The taxi trip was the smoothest ever. I knew where to go and the driver knew almost exactly where it was when I said the name so that I only have to correct the block number after he tried to confirm the address with me.
At the hotel, I had a tiny problem when I underestimated the deposit required which forced me to take out my CNY stash in an envelope in my bag which I really didn't want to reveal in public.
After I was getting ready to leave the check-in counter for my room, the man told me I was given a free upgrade but I was not allowed to get a last-minute extension.
It was not as great as it was supposed to be.
The pros:
- two single-plus beds combined
- the room is even more spacious
- corner room, so less neighbours and more windows.
- 50% bigger wardrobe
- a stand for the luggage
- a bathtub!
The cons:
- the condition of the room is the worst I have ever seen in my three stays here.
First, the wall around the luggage stand was filled was black scrape stains. Next, the wooden wall next to the kettle had a huge white stained that's clearly caused by steam from the kettle. Third, the Internet cable was faulty although I managed to use the one that connected the TV's router to its modem. Fourth, one of the standing lamps was faulty. Fifth, the shade of one of the bedside lamps was crooked. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it had been broken and was hastily repaired with black tape. Sixth, the tub's tap was slightly faulty and continued to run even when the shower was in use. Seventh, the basin contained many black scrape stains.
But the bathtub compensated for all that. I haven't used a bathtub since 2010, when I shared the room with a few other people.
When I asked the guys at the counter during the check-in process if there would be any problem if I ordered food delivery, the told me I would have to collect it at the lobby.
That had never happened before. Even when the delivery company called that one time to inform me that the hotel stopped the delivery man from entering, I solved that by yelling at the front desk on the phone asking why they were stopping the food delivery.
As for tonight, the delivery man managed to get to my room without any issue again.
But now I decided not to push my luck too far. Since it was so cold, I ordered extra food so that I won't have to worry about tomorrow night. Usually the tiny size if the fridge prevents me from doing this, but now I can simply leave them at the window.
It's between 4 to 6 degrees Celsius today, so it's as cold as the fridge even when the sun is up. At night, it's 1 degree. By keeping my curtains closed, the balcony might as well be a natural freezer. I also tried to make sure all the food kept for the next meal was cold dishes because I don't have an oven here.
I do have an idea on how I could reheat food, which is to use the hot tap water, but that's troublesome and hot food can get soggy while cold food don't.
Kinda forgot to make sure I didn't order too many spicy dishes and I did not expect Hunan cuisine to be this hot. In one dish, after picking out all the red chilli, I realised a lot of the green bits were chilli too.
But the candied goose liver was awesome and only cost 18 yuan. It's supposed to be plain liver slices cooked in honey, although I believe it's more likely that they were probably just boiled in sweetened water. Still, they were good enough that I finished them despite feeling full. I think I will try this with pork liver at home.
It's so cold here, I can barely move around in my room with only one layer of clothing. The hot bath and shower really helps but this does not last throughout the night. Thank goodness I don't have the habit of taking a leak during the night. That would really suck.
Second day
Ok, the cold had done something to my pores. I felt a stinging sensation on my arm during the morning hot shower and noticed that a lot of my pores on my arms were swollen.
I have no idea what this is but I suspect I should really get body butter for times like this. I had not thought to bring this so the only moisturiser I have is for the face. Could work but not as good.
Checked in at noon for my Sunday flight to Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the process was plagued by lag and at least ten seats have already been taken.
Fortunately, both of my flights from this point on will be on 777s, and together with the fact that I don't expect heavy traffic now, I don't think it's going to be crowded.
I'm not sure if I have ever been on a 777 too, so I will be finding out soon.
So two experts on Bloomberg and maybe BBC have said that the American politicians don't seem to be very eager to solve the underlying issues that had caused the 2008 mortgage crisis, with one of them describing them as "becoming more European".
Basically, whatever problems exist in the American financial system, they are still there, covered, partially forgotten and still festering. The way things are going, it's not a matter of "if" but "when".
In other words, it's not a good idea to invest in the US over the medium term, regardless of what Warren Buffett has just said.
On Europe, Cyprus : the latest domino to fall in that continent. Obviously, whatever the Europeans have been doing, shit's still on the fan, yo!
As for France, apparently it's being viewed as increasingly uncompetitive. This problem is not expected to be solved as the labour system is not flexible, causing Hollande's recently proposed labour reforms to be unlikely to be passed.
Oh, and there is some risk of the UK having its ratings cut in the near future.
In China, CPI's still rising. Exacerbating the Chinese economic situation is the coldest winter in 28 years, causing food prices to rise. Apparently, China may get reluctant to let its currency rise further.
Worse, there is some evidence that MAY indicate that China has been manipulating data just like Greece before its fall.
Japan's Abe may be splurging on the economy, with a large chunk on rebuilding the north and a smaller-than-expected portion on defence despite the recent spat with China, this has been done before and never have such measures worked for the country.
Yea I've been watching a lot of Bloomberg at night over here since I did not bring enough entertainment over with me.
Right now, all these make me glad I'm Singaporean.
They say that Apple is not doing very well in China, but whenever I went past the Apple store, it's always filled compared to the much smaller Samsung and Nokia stores.
Went back to that mall-filled road south of my hotel. I'm still not sure what its called but I think it's the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street. All I know is that it ends at Xizang Middle Road.
Bought some preserved meats. I really didn't know how the system worked, so after I hung around in the crowded shop with the packets in my hand to watch them. However, I couldn't tell for sure because they were all talking in Shanghainese. In the end I watched the vendor hand a clipboard to a man who then went to a cashier whom I did not notice before.
That was strange because that vendor had a bowl of cash and I saw him taking money from some of the locals. So I watched the male customer more closely to see what was happening, and that was probably when the vendor shouted to get my attention before taking the packets off my hand, telling me the prices of each, writing the final bill on a clipboard and finally directing me to the cashier.
I paid, the cashier used his stamp on the bill which was really just a sheet of A4 paper that was reused for all customers, and I exchanged the clipboard with my purchase which the vendor had bagged for me.
I still have no idea why he handled cash for some customers.
Anyways, the meats were cheaper than I thought. I bought a 500g-pack of boneless chicken thigh, a 500g-pack of bone-in duck thighs and a pack of four meatballs with a whole salted egg yolk each.
I think it was 83 yuan for all that. I've only a vague idea of what to cook with them.
Also bought some meat moon cakes. The pork ones were 4 yuan each although there was one that was selling at 3.50 and had that very long queue.
Bought 3 pork and 3 crab ones.
Overrated. Or maybe I was full. I found the meat to be too bland for the crust.
22:08
Blackout. Wtf? Heater's gone out but I'm buried under two layers of thick blankets anyway. The only issue is that it's too quiet.
There was a bit of commotion outside my door, probably from my neighbours. I thought about calling the front desk but figured it would be swamped and that I would be overreacting. Opened the curtains for some light and saw that other buildings next to us were fine.
22:13
Everything's ok again. Still, my impression if this hotel has worsened.
Third day
Checked various maps to find the exact location of my grandmother's columbarium whose address an uncle had emailed me.
Turns out it will be a long trip via MTR and light rail to get there, but I'm glad I picked a hotel that's close to a MTR station.
One thing about this hotel that I did not expect was that its website is telling me that it's going to be cheaper to take a cab from the airport to reach it than by train. Apparently, the cab fare is estimated to be around $30 compared to the $100 an airport express ticket costs.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find my Octopus card, but then again I'm not sure it's still usable anyway after all these years. Regardless, I'm getting a new card when I get to Hong Kong.
Checked out Nanjing Pedestrian Street yet again because I have no interest in Qipu Road for my work needs anymore.
Now that I've combed the place more thoroughly, I realized that on weekdays, everyone only seems to visit the stores on the ground floor. Some of the second storeys had some traffic but anything above were practically empty.
There is only real traffic there on weekends.
If they can survive like this, they must be making some serious money down at the first floor.
As for the preserved meats shops, damn those places are packed everyday!
Same for the Apple store.
The hotel stopped my delivery guy :(
I think the only person who actually cared was the manager. I didn't actually see his tag so I don't know if he was the manager or assistant manager, but he was younger than the other guy who also seemed to be in charge and he spoke better English.
So maybe he's the manager.
And he stopped my food supply.
So I went down, asked the guy for plastic bags, and he replied that they were hard to take. Assuming he meant that they were packaged in a way that they would be hard to hold even in plastic bags, I told him I'd get him in.
The doorman was easy, but the manager stopped me immediately.
After a bit of talking during which I almost failed the mission and things almost got heated up between the manager and the deliveryman, it ended up the latter packing the containers in the plastic bag.
Yes, that was very stupid; he could have done that outside without any fuss.
Tipped him two bucks only because I didn't want the coins. My CNY wallet is already weighed down by enough of those.
Anyways, Yunnan cuisine is spicier than I thought. In one dish, after picking out all the red chilli, I discovered that a lot of the green bits were chilli too!
Ugh...
The pig's trotter was nice and the rest of the food I ordered was generally ok, but it's way too spicy for me.
Also bought some interesting convenience food from a nearby convenience store.
I did not know chicken wing tips as a form of preserved food were actually a commercially viable product but here they are. I have a feeling the packaging, shipping and preservatives cost more than the tips themselves.
Ok, I stopped blogging completely by that day. The rest I'll just type here in the comfort of my own room.
The trip to Hong Kong was easy and I had a mild surprise when I boarded the plane.
What I reserved when I checked in online:
What I saw when I sat down:
Nice!
Doesn't CX charge an extra US$25 for these seats? But due to some error, this was not a 777 and hence, 39A turned out to be this seat!
At least, I think it wasn't a 777. The seating arrangement was 2-4-2 and it's also the best explanation I can think of to explain why I got this seat for free.
Moreover, when I reserved this 39A again for my final flight back to SG, it was the one shown in the first image.
Left some stuff in the hotel in my haste. I got my timing mixed up due to not enough sleep in the morning and thought I had more time than I actually did.
My flight was at about 11am, so I had to be at the airport by 10, so I should leave the hotel by 9, so I should get up at 8.
Then in my morning confused state, I thought I had to leave by 10.
At 9am, I was done with everything and was about to relax on the chair with my coffee. That was when I looked at the time, ran through the timings again and in the process, discovered the anomaly that was the absent time slot meant for travelling from the hotel to the airport.
Fortunately all these were planned to give myself a small buffer at every step, so instead of arriving too early, I was quite punctual.
I didn't even need to be there an hour before boarding, only 45 minutes because I had already checked in online. If I didn't have any baggage to check in and had the boarding pass printed, I could even arrive 30 minutes before boarding.
In my haste to get out of the hotel, I forgot to check the fridge.
Although the front desk did ask me whether I had used anything at the minibar, the fact that I left anything there did not cross my mind.
It was only on the taxi to the airport that I recalled I had two bottles of soft drinks there. Since they only cost less than S$1.50 total, I didn't give a damn.
I only remembered about the 3 steamed buns (2 pork and a mushroom) there during the flight. Those, I gave a little bit more of a damn because the inflight lunch was so small as usual. Moreover, I had never tried them throughout the 4 days there.
Still, I'm glad I didn't leave anything important there.
HKIA felt a little strange to me. I've been there before but I had never went arrived there alone.
The week before, I had emailed an uncle to ask where my grandmother was. His wife then emailed me the address after he called and tried to get me to write down the address. During the call, he also offered to take a day off on Monday to take me there, but I managed to reduce his offer to just a dinner.
When I got my baggage at the airport, I called him for two reasons.
First, if he could get some excuse to not come out for dinner, I would just buy takeaway at the airport and spend a quiet evening in my hotel.
Second, I felt it was rude if I simply ignored him after he made the offer.
In the end, I went out for dinner with the both of them. My cousins were busy.
The dinner was just a simple one and again, I did not pay for it. I think I was too tired to come up with an argument. Moreover, it's not my nature to be generous and I am inexperienced at this sort of thing.
Just FYI, it's a custom for this side of the family to try to foot the bill of meals. Usually, it could get cause quite a ruckus as all the adults shouted at each other reasons for why the rest shouldn't pay or why they themselves should.
Without having dinner with them since I was young, I'm not well-equipped for the debate at all.
I think it's a Chinese tradition that got lost during the Westernisation of Singapore but still remains in some parts of Hong Kong and perhaps China.
Since my mother's passing, this uncle has paid for two meals with me because I have always given in to his arguments eventually. I'll need to be more insistent next time, with or without a valid reason.
At least I gave them the bottle of body butter from Vardi and Migdal. Cost me about S$60, or roughly half the price of the meal, so it's a slight consolation.
The hotel was actually less convenient than I thought after looking at the map.
Although the Central MTR station was close to Hotel Mini Central, I needed to take a long detour or take this long flight of stairs. Even the shorter routes had many short flights of stairs consisting of 2-5 steps each.
That really sucked.
Fortunately, my laziness made me take a cab from the airport, so I didn't have to lug my 19.4kg luggage (I looked when I checked in the suitcase to see if I had hit the 20kg limit) up all those stairs.
Btw I did hit the limit on my flight to SG even though I had estimated that the stuff I added in only weighed about 0.5kg. However, the scale at the check-in counter said the total weight was 20.4kg. Fortunately, they were nice enough to ignore that extra 0.4kg, although I have this feeling that if it had been 20.5kg, they might not have shown me mercy.
For CX, the charge of extra weight goes by 1.5% of a single trip ticket of the route it's going per kg.
For a trip to Hong Kong, a return trip would have been about S$250. A one-way ticket then would be about $150. The excess baggage charge would have been roughly $2.25 per kg for me.
I paid about $570 for all three tickets of this trip. The flight to Shanghai was really a flight from SG to HK followed by a flight from HK to SHA. Hence $570 was for two flights between SG and HK plus two flights between HK and SHA.
Anyways, I only found out about the inconvenience of the stairs when I left the hotel to find my way to the station. Since I have never tried to train my legs, going up really sucked.
The room itself was quite different from the last two hotels I've stayed at so far.
The glass bathroom wall I expected. I'm still surprised it's glass.
That's the only space I could find for my luggage. The walls are surprisingly thin, so I could hear the guests next door talking till midnight on the first night and them leaving in the following early morning. Hearing both male and female voices, and with the bathrooms like this, I half expected to hear kinky noises eventually, but that fortunately did not happen; the guy left for another room nearby at midnight. That would have really interrupted my sleep.
Can you imagine the view when you're taking a shit there?
This is the view when you're taking a shit there. Totally awesome if you're alone like myself or if you go as a couple. Totally awkward in any other situation. Totally bad idea to go as a family.
Toilet is tiny but clean enough. The marble and glass walls really make it a decent bathroom despite its size. I couldn't sit on it normally because the wall was too close to the throne, and I imagine anyone with longer legs might also have difficulty sitting down with the door closed.
Yea, ugly ceiling. They could have at least used a cheap ceiling instead of nothing.
Now this is really nifty. Too bad I didn't have an empty bottle. I didn't know until I checked out that they didn't check the rooms before allowing me to leave, or I would have taken the bottle inside with me.
The view outside the bathroom window behind the curtains. Also, this place was having some kind of renovation works in this area and we were all advised to keep the curtains down... except the curtains didn't cover the windows completely, so it's still quite possible for anyone out there to take a peek.
The works ended the same day I checked out though.
The next day was a tiny bit more interesting. With my aunt's email screencapped and a map in hand, I found my way to the general vicinity via MTR and light rail. An old lady tried to ask me for directions but I had to tell her I'm not a local. Moreover, I am not proficient at all at reading traditional Chinese, so I could tell which name on the map was the one she said.
Fortunately, a friendly young lady offered to check the map for her and it resulted in quite a long conversation between them during the trip as they sat behind me.
The old lady and her husband alighted only a stop before I did.
As I am still not an expert at checking maps, I walked like 500m in the wrong direction along the correct road before I finally found the street name. It turned out to be only about 50m away from the light rail station.
Once I started seeing large signs with the name of the columbarium, I followed them till I found the gate. Then I began to snap photos of everything all the way to my destination and then all the way back to the light rail station.
This is to facilitate my future visits in case I never go back for the next decade or more. Moreover, my brother or any relative who might ask me will be able to easily navigate to that place with the excessive amounts of photos I took of the entire route.
Since it was still early, I took a short walk at the nearest mall, which was a tiny place filled with the typical shops selling daily necessities. I also considered exploring some other parts of Hong Kong but somehow felt too tired for it.
I think I really was tired because I slept 12 hours that night, from 7pm till 7am when my alarm sounded.
For dinner that night, although I bought a few buns from a Maxim's confectionary in one of the MTR stations, I thought I'd just take a walk to the nearby Cafe de Coral for some hot food.
Cafe de Coral is a major fast food chain in Hong Kong specialising in mainly Chinese cuisine, although nowadays, Japanese, Korean and Western food is also served.
It's pretty much like the kopitiams in Singapore without the kopi and with a fast food restaurant system. I could also compare them with the zi char in SG but their menus are very rigid unlike the zi char where the menu is flexible and you could ask for your own custom dishes if you know what you're doing.
Anyways, it was my first time ordering food there and I had to desperately keep my mind alert to look out for hints on how things worked over there.
First, the ordering was simple - there was already a long queue at the entrance where people first checked the giant menu displayed at the entrance before queueing up.
Second, the payment. I did not know whether I had to pay before or after getting the food, so I stared at the guy in front of me as he ordered for his three friends and himself. When I saw him taking money out of his wallet, the mystery was solved.
Third, the food. At the long counter, the left side had a sign stating it was for the collection of roasted meat dishes, and there was a typical clear plastic box/cage/whatever with roasted meat and steamed chicken hanging inside. The right said "Beverages" in Chinese, and these made me very confused.
Worse, there was no queue. The group of friends in front of me were not queueing up for some reason and was just standing at one side to wait.
So what was I supposed to do with the ticket the lady who took my order handed me?
Hence I waited around and then saw the old man who was behind me walk to the beverage side.
I quickly walked behind him, but watched as he handed his ticket to the lady behind the counter who then said something into the mic.
The process was as messy as a misleading sign implied as she gave food to people who weren't in the queue. Presumably, they handed her their tickets and left the queue to wait for their food instead of waiting in the queue.
I rested my hand with the ticket on the counter and waited but she did not take it. I later realized it was because there were like 5 orders ahead even though only the old man was in front of me.
To be honest, I did not know whether I was supposed to hand her the ticket because there was the possibility that she only handled specific parts of the menu that didn't include the pork chop rice I ordered.
However, I was slightly assured by how the old lady behind me also rested a hand on the counter with the ticket between her index and middle fingers just like I did. I was probably doing it right.
Took a few minutes but she eventually snatched the ticket from my hand and said something into the mic. After a while, she told me they had ran out of pork chops and asked if I could accept fried fish fillet as replacement. Since I always prefer fish (I don't cook fish a lot at home other than salmon) when I eat out, of course I said yes.
The food, which I later ate in the hotel, was only average.
Also bought a lot of Japanese fish sausages from Okashi Land since it had outlets in all the MTR stations I went to in this trip. I found the cheapest one to be HK$14 for a packet of 5, making each sausage less than S$0.47 each.
I'm not 100% sure it's more expensive here but I am very sure it's hard to find in Singapore.
Anyways, I finished the one packet I bought at Central and 4 more at the airport. However, it cost $30 for 2 packets (presumably more if only 1 packet) at the second location. Still, HK$1 wasn't a huge difference.
The trip back to SG was pretty uneventful.
Checking in my baggage resulted only in the airline staff asking me why I'm still using the temporary card after being an Asia Miles member for months and three trips.
So after getting the boarding pass, I went to the Asia Miles counter to find out like she suggested. I've never actually bothered to ask because it's a free bonus if I ever got anything. However, since I had an hour to kill, I went to the Asia Miles counter to enquire.
The problem turned out to be that I've been travelling on discounted fares all these months and none of these accumulate points. Without earning a single point throughout, I do not get the actual membership card.
During the flight, I had an hour left after the movie I picked ended. That was when I discovered this documentary called "Undercover Boss" in which CEOs and such high level executives would disguise themselves and work with the lower level employees for a few days.
I found it intriguing because it showed me how bosses should think, something I've been trying to find out on my own.
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Rant 1095 / Where Are My Glasses?
Finished Max Payne 1. The length feels just right because by the last few chapters of the last part, I was getting bored and ready to just finish the game without going for anything else like listening in on the conversations of the mobsters.
SAFRA is offering the supermarket vouchers again! Big problem: they're being offered during my coming overseas trip.
They are being released on a specific date and from my previous experience, they are sold out within hours of release, so I have no chance of getting them, especially when they have stated explicitly that the purchase must be made in person.
My plan was to get them while buying a new pair of combat boots and PT shoes since I can only get a new pair of shoes this year. This would have been the perfect chance to get so much out of a single trip!
Oh well.
I think I will have to find some way to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner at one go because I am now very sure that it is the meals that are causing me to lose interest in games on my holidays.
It's not the eating, but the preparation and the time needed to think of things to cook with what is available.
Moreover, I have also concluded that I cannot simply make one dish for all three meals. I have tried stew for two meals. Nope. It was boring enough that I had to cook something else as a second dish, like scrambled eggs.
In addition, I do not like to get out of my house on holidays because I prefer to feel and be very lazy for the entire day, so I'd rather not go out and buy.
I can, of course, call for delivery, but I only have one call a week and sometimes I am just too lazy/busy to cook on weekdays.
This means I need to make 2 dishes in the morning, and they must last the whole day and not be too complicated.
Not 2 stews.
SAFRA is offering the supermarket vouchers again! Big problem: they're being offered during my coming overseas trip.
They are being released on a specific date and from my previous experience, they are sold out within hours of release, so I have no chance of getting them, especially when they have stated explicitly that the purchase must be made in person.
My plan was to get them while buying a new pair of combat boots and PT shoes since I can only get a new pair of shoes this year. This would have been the perfect chance to get so much out of a single trip!
Oh well.
I think I will have to find some way to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner at one go because I am now very sure that it is the meals that are causing me to lose interest in games on my holidays.
It's not the eating, but the preparation and the time needed to think of things to cook with what is available.
Moreover, I have also concluded that I cannot simply make one dish for all three meals. I have tried stew for two meals. Nope. It was boring enough that I had to cook something else as a second dish, like scrambled eggs.
In addition, I do not like to get out of my house on holidays because I prefer to feel and be very lazy for the entire day, so I'd rather not go out and buy.
I can, of course, call for delivery, but I only have one call a week and sometimes I am just too lazy/busy to cook on weekdays.
This means I need to make 2 dishes in the morning, and they must last the whole day and not be too complicated.
Not 2 stews.
Sunday 6 January 2013
Rant 1094 / Presbyopia?
Okay, after all these time I spent playing as infantry in Planetside 2, I finally started to feel serious about aircrafts, more specifically the Scythe.
The aircrafts are actually pretty damn hard to use and the scythe is hard because it has the fastest lateral movement and upward acceleration in the game. Like I said before, it's got the best agility among all the aircrafts of the three factions.
My biggest gripe with this aircraft is that yaw control is horribly slow compared to the agility of the roll and pitch controls.
In other words, instead of simply turning right, I have to roll clockwise (roll till my "up" is the right) then pitch up.
The complexity of this maneuver is compensated by the fact that I can, when necessary, accelerate left and right quickly with what I called my "upward acceleration". If I can master this aircraft, missiles are going to be easy to dodge.
...
I learnt that I should re-bind a few of the keys so that the pitch can be controlled by the mouse 4 and 5 buttons. This is way faster than dragging the mouse up and down because the sensitivity cannot be increased although I have to grip the mouse a little differently in order to press both the keys with my thumb.
Now I can do awesome 360 flips although I still have difficulty controlling it. This is important for dodging homing missiles since they are never that agile.
I still suck at flying but at least I'm starting to get the hang of it. Right now I need to save my certs for rockets because the default weapon is terrible. To make things worse, since it's so hard to control the aircraft, it's nearly impossible for me to kill anything with my aim.
Tried Max Payne 1. Now I see why it's got such high review scores.
Max Payne is a third-person shooter about an undercover police who gets framed. So far I'm still in part 1 but it really feels less like a shooter and more like a crime thriller.
The game isn't exactly hard when I can quicksave at any time and reload till I'm satisfied.
...
It's so good I don't even need the music which is screwed up due to compatibility issues with my Windows 7 64-bit.
I found out that there was music only in Part 3.
So my right lower eyelid's been twitching a lot lately. I figured it's probably because it's tired, which means I need to get a new pair of glasses.
The optometrist is only across the street. The prices are probably low but he's not that accurate. I haven't had any bad experience with him so I don't care. His shop is conveniently located and that's all that's important.
Apparently my eyesight has improved. In one eye, my myopia even improved from -250 to -75.
This is nothing new because the records show that my eyesight has always been improving in that eye since my second visit in 2005.
That, by the way, was also my last visit till now.
The optometrist did not recognize me but he did recall selling the frame, which is no longer in stock. Upon checking my glasses, he even expressed surprise at the perfect condition of the frame, except all the printed stuff was gone.
These days, he only sells frames with rather flat and wide temple arms (the parts that go over the ears) instead of the classic thin type that I wear.
Anyways, the improving eyesight was not completely good news. Since I don't usually wear my glasses at home, it should have been deteriorating over the last 7 years. Although it's possible that somehow my eyes have been getting stronger for whatever reason (eg diet), there is also the probability that this is a symptom of an early onset of presbyopia, what one of my primary school teachers used to jokingly call "old flower eyes", a transliteration of the chinese name for this condition.
According to the optometrist, this is not impossible for someone my age; the youngest customer he had to have this condition was 26.
Had quite a bit of difficulty picking a frame. Initially I favoured half-frames but according to the optometrist, I should get shatterproof lenses if I pick those because the lower half is not protected by the frame, and shatterproof lenses will cost a bit more. Moreover, my glasses do fall sometimes because I tend to neglect them when I'm home.
At about 200 degrees or less, most indoor activities do not require glasses.
Nobody has ever really explained to me why it's not good for the eyes to do so, and I had always thought it was because it causes strain in the eyes.
Hence the optometrist explained that it's not only that, but that it makes me unconsciously use only my better eye to see.
In the end I just picked a plastic one just because it's has more resistance against perspiration. Moreover, I really didn't like most of the metal frames that he had.
If I don't like it in the future, I'll just hand him my current frame to replace the lenses. Right now I can't because I don't have a spare pair to use and he doesn't offer the 1-hour service like some of the more expensive optometrists do.
The aircrafts are actually pretty damn hard to use and the scythe is hard because it has the fastest lateral movement and upward acceleration in the game. Like I said before, it's got the best agility among all the aircrafts of the three factions.
My biggest gripe with this aircraft is that yaw control is horribly slow compared to the agility of the roll and pitch controls.
In other words, instead of simply turning right, I have to roll clockwise (roll till my "up" is the right) then pitch up.
The complexity of this maneuver is compensated by the fact that I can, when necessary, accelerate left and right quickly with what I called my "upward acceleration". If I can master this aircraft, missiles are going to be easy to dodge.
...
I learnt that I should re-bind a few of the keys so that the pitch can be controlled by the mouse 4 and 5 buttons. This is way faster than dragging the mouse up and down because the sensitivity cannot be increased although I have to grip the mouse a little differently in order to press both the keys with my thumb.
Now I can do awesome 360 flips although I still have difficulty controlling it. This is important for dodging homing missiles since they are never that agile.
I still suck at flying but at least I'm starting to get the hang of it. Right now I need to save my certs for rockets because the default weapon is terrible. To make things worse, since it's so hard to control the aircraft, it's nearly impossible for me to kill anything with my aim.
Tried Max Payne 1. Now I see why it's got such high review scores.
Max Payne is a third-person shooter about an undercover police who gets framed. So far I'm still in part 1 but it really feels less like a shooter and more like a crime thriller.
The game isn't exactly hard when I can quicksave at any time and reload till I'm satisfied.
...
It's so good I don't even need the music which is screwed up due to compatibility issues with my Windows 7 64-bit.
I found out that there was music only in Part 3.
So my right lower eyelid's been twitching a lot lately. I figured it's probably because it's tired, which means I need to get a new pair of glasses.
The optometrist is only across the street. The prices are probably low but he's not that accurate. I haven't had any bad experience with him so I don't care. His shop is conveniently located and that's all that's important.
Apparently my eyesight has improved. In one eye, my myopia even improved from -250 to -75.
This is nothing new because the records show that my eyesight has always been improving in that eye since my second visit in 2005.
That, by the way, was also my last visit till now.
The optometrist did not recognize me but he did recall selling the frame, which is no longer in stock. Upon checking my glasses, he even expressed surprise at the perfect condition of the frame, except all the printed stuff was gone.
These days, he only sells frames with rather flat and wide temple arms (the parts that go over the ears) instead of the classic thin type that I wear.
Anyways, the improving eyesight was not completely good news. Since I don't usually wear my glasses at home, it should have been deteriorating over the last 7 years. Although it's possible that somehow my eyes have been getting stronger for whatever reason (eg diet), there is also the probability that this is a symptom of an early onset of presbyopia, what one of my primary school teachers used to jokingly call "old flower eyes", a transliteration of the chinese name for this condition.
According to the optometrist, this is not impossible for someone my age; the youngest customer he had to have this condition was 26.
Had quite a bit of difficulty picking a frame. Initially I favoured half-frames but according to the optometrist, I should get shatterproof lenses if I pick those because the lower half is not protected by the frame, and shatterproof lenses will cost a bit more. Moreover, my glasses do fall sometimes because I tend to neglect them when I'm home.
At about 200 degrees or less, most indoor activities do not require glasses.
Nobody has ever really explained to me why it's not good for the eyes to do so, and I had always thought it was because it causes strain in the eyes.
Hence the optometrist explained that it's not only that, but that it makes me unconsciously use only my better eye to see.
In the end I just picked a plastic one just because it's has more resistance against perspiration. Moreover, I really didn't like most of the metal frames that he had.
If I don't like it in the future, I'll just hand him my current frame to replace the lenses. Right now I can't because I don't have a spare pair to use and he doesn't offer the 1-hour service like some of the more expensive optometrists do.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
Rant 1093 / Homing Missiles Are The Future Of Gaming
Been trying the toner I brought from the Korean hotel after reading up a bit on it.
It appears to be the mildest kind of toner which basically is just a moisturising fluid. Not really sure how I should use it but since I'm too cheap to get cotton swabs just for this, I'm applying it with my hands.
Smells pretty good. No wonder it's also known as rosewater.
I was also forced to use the soap bar I got as a freebie from Vardi and Migdal. I was actually merely asking about them out of curiosity since there were like a dozen bricks of them on display together with a knife clearly meant for cutting them.
But he immediately offered me two pieces as a freebie for my purchase, so I picked at random the Chocolate Mint and Ocean Blue. Gave the first piece to my housekeeper as a Christmas gift because I really don't need more soap after the 10 litres I bought from Qoo10.
The problem was that they couldn't be stored for long. It seems they melted even when stored in my wardrobe and were seeping through the paper gift wrap, so I had no choice but to use it.
Nothing special about it as far as I can tell. Just a simple piece of soap. Maybe it's got Dead Sea minerals but I don't even know what it's really good for.
The third thing I've just started using was the free hand lotion I got from Watsons when I signed up for the membership. Maybe I'm getting old but my hands can no longer stand the strong soap and dishwashing liquid much, causing me to have annoyingly dry palms often.
I might need more of this someday. Or I'll just get more body butter or moisturiser. Right now I still have a few ancient cans of moisturisers (lost one during my Korean trip because my saline nasal spray exploded in my checked-in luggage during the flight and the water seeped into everything in the ziplock bag)
Sure it feels girly but I dont want to waste them since they were all free and those freebies, other than the soap bars, aren't exactly good as gifts.
What is now left on my "need" list is only cotton berms/shorts for home use. I have pretty much all the necessities that I can think of stocked up for months. Except for spare light bulbs, but those are easy to find in my neighbourhood.
My "to do" list, on the other hand, is pretty long. For one, I still haven't called the contractor to fix my air-conditioner.
Both Geneforge 1 and 2 seem to have a common theme. I wonder if it's the same for all the rest of the games.
In the two games I've played so far, there is a sentient race created by the Shapers, a guild of practitioners of a form of life magic that sounds very similar to futuristic genetic engineering. The creatures are known as "serviles" who basically do all kinds of low-level labour like farming.
In the first game, after their abandonment by the Shapers on an island, they formed three distinct groups with different beliefs. The first, known as the "Awakened", developed the idea that they and the Shapers were equals. The second, the "Obeyers" stuck with the original belief taught by the Shapers that they must always serve the Shapers. The third, the "Takers" decided that the Shapers were complete assholes for abandoning them like that and they would fight their creators if they ever came into contact with them again.
Similarly, after getting an explanation from the leader of the second group I met in the second game, I realize that they were almost the same. Again, the Awakened were there; the Obeyers had died out in a way in the last game but were replaced spiritually by serviles who had never left Shaper control; the Takers turned into extremists and changed their name; finally there seemed to be a group that was under a rogue Shaper and fought the rest of the Shapers.
I'm not sure if the last group had its own distinctive belief because the serviles there might as well be the same as the original serviles since they served a Shaper.
Clearly, the common theme is the philosophical question of how we should treat a sentient race we have created. I guess in reality this should apply to the AIs, if anyone ever creates a truly sentient AI.
Now that I have over 760 certs in Planetside, I can't decide what to spend them on.
I've recently took a liking to the Light Assault class for its mobility since it's the only class with jetpacks.
The real issue with this class is that it can't do much damage, so I was trying out the only other weapon I thought was good, the Solstice SF, a carbine with an adjustable fire mode for all situations - single shot semi-auto for sniping, 3-shot bursts for medium distance and full-auto for close quarters.
But when I tried it on trial mode, I found its power to be no different from the default weapon we begin with, the original Solstice. With this sort of damage, it's completely pointless to snipe with it. 1-3 shots won't kill shit, so I might as well just stick with what I have now.
According to the Planetside 2 wiki, they do have the sama firepower. For 500 certs, I'd only be paying for the extra fire modes.
Worse, all the other primary weapons have roughly the same firepower, so there's little reason I should get a new weapon for my light assault class.
Hence I'm considering spending them on my current second favourite class, the heavy assault. More specifically, I'm going to get a better anti-armour weapon. Not sure if I should get anti-air or anti-tank. My bro recommended anti-air while I was initially thinking about anti-tank.
I encounter tanks more frequently than planes, but planes are usually more lethal than tanks, especially the frigging Mosquitoes from TR.
This is all about whether I want to be more "strategic" or a better cert-farmer. With a better anti-air weapon, I will be a more valuable asset to the team, particularly in defending our territories against sieges. On the other hand, I'm sure I'll be getting more points with an anti-tank weapon upgrade.
I can't take both because I can only use 1 at a time.
What a dilemma.
Anyways, I've been making over 100 certs per day for the last two days of the weekend while still having time to play Geneforge 2. Feels good man.
To be honest, I'd still rather get an anti-infantry weapon but since they're roughly the same for all the classes that I like to use, I don't really have a choice.
Moreover, the strategy recommended on the wiki for light assault suggests that getting a weapon upgrade for that class is not the best idea out there. The whole strategy is about getting utilitrian things like the movement speed upgrade and C-4 explosive, not the kind of stuff that would aid in a straight firefight.
Then again, playing the light assault is more about mind tricks, ie surprise butt sex, than a fair fight. With the mobility, I discovered that I could fight the enemies from directions they do not expect, mostly flanking them and above them, like reaching them from areas where there are no stairs to climb.
...
860 certs! 140 more to go!
But now I'm torn between the Nemesis and the Annihilator. The Nemesis can only lock onto aircrafts, has about 30% more damage, slower missile speed, shorter missile range and can fire without locking onto anything. Locking on means the missile homes in onto the target when fired.
I think that the biggest advantage of the Annihilator is that it can lock onto any vehicle, ground or land. With it, I won't get many kills but in a team fight, I'll be surely getting more kill assists. However, I'll be better off with the default weapon that does not lock onto anything and has a trajectory (aka bullet drop) when I'm alone since I cannot fire without locking onto anything.
The reason is that the heavy weapon can usually be used on infantry as a close-range 1-shot-kill weapon, but since the Annihilator is the only one of its class that cannot fire without locking on and the entire class does not lock onto infantry, it cannot fire if I'm holding it expecting a tank and encounter infantry instead.
What do?
It appears to be the mildest kind of toner which basically is just a moisturising fluid. Not really sure how I should use it but since I'm too cheap to get cotton swabs just for this, I'm applying it with my hands.
Smells pretty good. No wonder it's also known as rosewater.
I was also forced to use the soap bar I got as a freebie from Vardi and Migdal. I was actually merely asking about them out of curiosity since there were like a dozen bricks of them on display together with a knife clearly meant for cutting them.
But he immediately offered me two pieces as a freebie for my purchase, so I picked at random the Chocolate Mint and Ocean Blue. Gave the first piece to my housekeeper as a Christmas gift because I really don't need more soap after the 10 litres I bought from Qoo10.
The problem was that they couldn't be stored for long. It seems they melted even when stored in my wardrobe and were seeping through the paper gift wrap, so I had no choice but to use it.
Nothing special about it as far as I can tell. Just a simple piece of soap. Maybe it's got Dead Sea minerals but I don't even know what it's really good for.
The third thing I've just started using was the free hand lotion I got from Watsons when I signed up for the membership. Maybe I'm getting old but my hands can no longer stand the strong soap and dishwashing liquid much, causing me to have annoyingly dry palms often.
I might need more of this someday. Or I'll just get more body butter or moisturiser. Right now I still have a few ancient cans of moisturisers (lost one during my Korean trip because my saline nasal spray exploded in my checked-in luggage during the flight and the water seeped into everything in the ziplock bag)
Sure it feels girly but I dont want to waste them since they were all free and those freebies, other than the soap bars, aren't exactly good as gifts.
What is now left on my "need" list is only cotton berms/shorts for home use. I have pretty much all the necessities that I can think of stocked up for months. Except for spare light bulbs, but those are easy to find in my neighbourhood.
My "to do" list, on the other hand, is pretty long. For one, I still haven't called the contractor to fix my air-conditioner.
Both Geneforge 1 and 2 seem to have a common theme. I wonder if it's the same for all the rest of the games.
In the two games I've played so far, there is a sentient race created by the Shapers, a guild of practitioners of a form of life magic that sounds very similar to futuristic genetic engineering. The creatures are known as "serviles" who basically do all kinds of low-level labour like farming.
In the first game, after their abandonment by the Shapers on an island, they formed three distinct groups with different beliefs. The first, known as the "Awakened", developed the idea that they and the Shapers were equals. The second, the "Obeyers" stuck with the original belief taught by the Shapers that they must always serve the Shapers. The third, the "Takers" decided that the Shapers were complete assholes for abandoning them like that and they would fight their creators if they ever came into contact with them again.
Similarly, after getting an explanation from the leader of the second group I met in the second game, I realize that they were almost the same. Again, the Awakened were there; the Obeyers had died out in a way in the last game but were replaced spiritually by serviles who had never left Shaper control; the Takers turned into extremists and changed their name; finally there seemed to be a group that was under a rogue Shaper and fought the rest of the Shapers.
I'm not sure if the last group had its own distinctive belief because the serviles there might as well be the same as the original serviles since they served a Shaper.
Clearly, the common theme is the philosophical question of how we should treat a sentient race we have created. I guess in reality this should apply to the AIs, if anyone ever creates a truly sentient AI.
Now that I have over 760 certs in Planetside, I can't decide what to spend them on.
I've recently took a liking to the Light Assault class for its mobility since it's the only class with jetpacks.
The real issue with this class is that it can't do much damage, so I was trying out the only other weapon I thought was good, the Solstice SF, a carbine with an adjustable fire mode for all situations - single shot semi-auto for sniping, 3-shot bursts for medium distance and full-auto for close quarters.
But when I tried it on trial mode, I found its power to be no different from the default weapon we begin with, the original Solstice. With this sort of damage, it's completely pointless to snipe with it. 1-3 shots won't kill shit, so I might as well just stick with what I have now.
According to the Planetside 2 wiki, they do have the sama firepower. For 500 certs, I'd only be paying for the extra fire modes.
Worse, all the other primary weapons have roughly the same firepower, so there's little reason I should get a new weapon for my light assault class.
Hence I'm considering spending them on my current second favourite class, the heavy assault. More specifically, I'm going to get a better anti-armour weapon. Not sure if I should get anti-air or anti-tank. My bro recommended anti-air while I was initially thinking about anti-tank.
I encounter tanks more frequently than planes, but planes are usually more lethal than tanks, especially the frigging Mosquitoes from TR.
This is all about whether I want to be more "strategic" or a better cert-farmer. With a better anti-air weapon, I will be a more valuable asset to the team, particularly in defending our territories against sieges. On the other hand, I'm sure I'll be getting more points with an anti-tank weapon upgrade.
I can't take both because I can only use 1 at a time.
What a dilemma.
Anyways, I've been making over 100 certs per day for the last two days of the weekend while still having time to play Geneforge 2. Feels good man.
To be honest, I'd still rather get an anti-infantry weapon but since they're roughly the same for all the classes that I like to use, I don't really have a choice.
Moreover, the strategy recommended on the wiki for light assault suggests that getting a weapon upgrade for that class is not the best idea out there. The whole strategy is about getting utilitrian things like the movement speed upgrade and C-4 explosive, not the kind of stuff that would aid in a straight firefight.
Then again, playing the light assault is more about mind tricks, ie surprise butt sex, than a fair fight. With the mobility, I discovered that I could fight the enemies from directions they do not expect, mostly flanking them and above them, like reaching them from areas where there are no stairs to climb.
...
860 certs! 140 more to go!
But now I'm torn between the Nemesis and the Annihilator. The Nemesis can only lock onto aircrafts, has about 30% more damage, slower missile speed, shorter missile range and can fire without locking onto anything. Locking on means the missile homes in onto the target when fired.
I think that the biggest advantage of the Annihilator is that it can lock onto any vehicle, ground or land. With it, I won't get many kills but in a team fight, I'll be surely getting more kill assists. However, I'll be better off with the default weapon that does not lock onto anything and has a trajectory (aka bullet drop) when I'm alone since I cannot fire without locking onto anything.
The reason is that the heavy weapon can usually be used on infantry as a close-range 1-shot-kill weapon, but since the Annihilator is the only one of its class that cannot fire without locking on and the entire class does not lock onto infantry, it cannot fire if I'm holding it expecting a tank and encounter infantry instead.
What do?
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