One last geeky post for the year

The age old conundrum: Do you get less wet if you run in the rain?

A boffin in a white lab coat has worked it out - we are geniuses after all!

...And not a second too soon

Now you can enjoy your New Year's Eve festivities a wee bit longer!!!.

Souce: BBC News

Inspired by MrsB

M and I have both agree that any given person's itunes collection speaks volumes about their personalities.

The following 20 songs are randomly selected by my itunes party shuffle (from a total of 3525 songs in my itunes library). What does it say about me? Thankfully, none of the 17 philipino folk dancing tunes turned up! ha!

I turn my camera on ~ Spoon (download it free!!! from Amazon)
Child star ~ The Unicorns
One of us ~ Joan Osbourne
Somethin' Stupid ~ Frank with Nancy Sinatra
Luka ~ Suzanne Vega
Nocturne in C Sharp Minor ~ Nigel Kennedy
Boom Shaka Laka (!) ~ Apache Indian
Leave Home ~ The Chemical Brothers
Living for the weekend ~ Hard-Fi
Cannonball ~ Damien Rice
Symphony No. 36:Adagio - Allegro spiritoso ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Raining in my heart ~ Buddy Holly
It's Crazy ~ Laura Fygi
Bentley's gonna sort you out ~ Bentley Rhythm Ace
The man who sold the world ~ Nirvana
She's got her ticket ~ Tracy Chapman
Michelle ~ The Beatles
The wailing boat ~ Maynard Ferguson
Drifting away ~ Faithless
灰皿の上から ~ ゆず

First I am known as 'the girl from Wala Wala' (and I've only been there like, twice in the whole of 2005) and now someone else dubs me 'the milo girl', just because when I first met him, I allegedly raved about the Milo dinosaur from the Prata Cafe for 20 whole minutes. I beg to differ ok! I only raved about it for 10 maybe.

Anyway, Alan finally succumbed to my nagging and we took off to Evan's Road for a prata supper. So he's off the hook for the rest of the year! hohoho. How can chinese coffeeshops ever make good Milo and Milo-dinosuars? I haven't tasted any. Their version of milo-dino is usually watered down and not chocolatey enough. Compared with those from Indian-Muslim prata shops. Those are the real thing man. True, its not something I would have often, but it does hit the right spot when I get my cravings. I think he got sick of me making little tut-tut noises whenever he orders milo from the corner coffeeshop at HV. Either that, or he was bought over by my christmas gift.

Must ask him if the pina colada flavoured one tastes good.

P.S Reuben and Mingko got me a nifty cocktail shaker for Christmas! I'll be making cocktails for sundowners this Friday. Taking orders now, let me know what you'd like and I'll consult the cocktail bible. Sorry folks.. good for readers of this blog working on level 2 of S2 and S1 and level 6 of S1A only. :D

Sarge Park

Update: Applecow's so inspired by this entry that she's gone and made SouthPark characters out of the lot of us!

This is me! I'd say a pretty good interpretation right from the wild hair down to the red jacket and 'ipod' with black earphones. lol.



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Sarge Park
Originally uploaded by island_girl.

How would Fat Freddy look like if he were a South Park character?

Admittedly, this question is not keeping me awake at night, but incredibly, someone else has wondered about it.

This is the outcome, dreamed up by his mate Thorpey. I would say, 9/10 for accuracy. He didn't have an option for grey/white hair, so this is the best there is. Although it will be even better if he were clutching a pint of beer. Thumbs up! :D

Want to see yourself as South Park character?

MoS

Mos
Originally uploaded by island_girl.

Well... I could not say no to a free invite, especially after plans to go Loofing were cancelled

So this huge superclub comes into town and threatens to blow the competition out of the water. But I'm just thinking, MoS is kinda old news now. Even the trends in the party capital of Europe, Ibiza is shifting away from mega clubs to more intimate settings. But what do I know. One look at me and you soon realise I'm not a regular 'clubber'. So don't take my word for it. By the way, I've never been to Ibiza either, just picked that last bit of news from an article I read some time ago and have lost the link since. Having said all those, I quite like the vibes of the 'Pure room' hereby dubbed the cool-as-ibook room. Its small and intimate. I hope they play some nice chillout music when the dust settles. I like the toilets too. Big clean and spacious. The carpets are nice and thick, but they can only last that way for so long before they get sick all over them.

Singapore looks set to embrace this latest entry to the club scene ( especially with the if-its-from-Amercia/UK-it-must-be-good! mentality). Sorta reminds me of has-been rock stars deciding that they need more spending money and decide to stage a concert in Singapore. Like the Backstreet Boys. Where were you guys at the height of your popularity! Air Supply is even worse, I can imagine them looking at their dwindling bank accounts every once in a while and wondering how they can make more money. I know! Russell tells Graham excitedly, let's throw a concert in Singapore. Those sappy suckers will fall for it everytime! And they come once every few years playing to a full house. sigh.

Anyway, I digress. MrBudak was there as a respectable member of the press.


Cool pictures here.

P.S The till was way overworked. A bought a jug of Pimms and was told that it was $57 . So he handed over a $100 note, and, get this. We waited 20 minutes for his change at the bar! As if that was not exasperating enough, he finally got his change back after several not so nice reminders and stares at the bar tender, only to discover that a jug costs only $49 and he could have just given a $50 note and walked away without all that grief! Truly a KNN moment.

P.P.S To commemorate this opening, I'm gonna give away my favourite Ibiza anthem, God is a DJ. Party on!

Ang-moh Kit Kats

Special edition Red Berry and Caramel Kit Kat!
Originally uploaded by island_girl.

And so my kit kat fetish continues to haunt me even in merry olde England.

Found this in Sainsbury's. I must say, they are delicious!

At least I can say that about the caramel one. The red berry one went to A who said it was 'nice'. But that's cos he prolly scoffed it in two mouthfuls instead of savouring it slowly!

Still have got mint kit kat at home. Photos up soon.


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And a sneak preview of my holiday!


The obligatory touristy shots at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich


In Bath

The pictures are not ready to be dumped on flickr cos I've got a backlog from New Caledonia. Plus more pictures taken from FF's camera which I nicked. So no pictures of the inside of the Linnaean Society meeting room, Highbury, and so on and so forth.

Soon!

Flickr updates

South Pacific sunsets and some of the critters we dredged/hooked/trawled from the waters.

No time to put labels or id them. But enjoy nonetheless!

Well.. I took my camera and powerbook to the hospital yesteday.

Not so good news with the camera because the moment the customer care lady saw the damage, all warranties were thrown out of the window as it was clearly a case of mishandling. And I could not offer a proper explanation how it happened and when and where. It is shrouded in mystery. Even my feeble attempts at trying to push the blame onto the filmsy case came to nought (but nice try though - thanks to slurp who gave me the idea). Perhaps it was abducted by aliens who didn't know how to cope with a superior piece of technology, crushed it in frustration and returned it to my bedside in disgust while I snoozed.

Oh well.

Total estimated cost of fixing the screen is about SGD200 (egads!). I hope my travel insurance will be able to bail me out of this. Bloody well spoilt my holiday too.

Powerbook was fairly straight forward. It is still under warranty. I finally sent it in after experiencing a highly stressful morning in which the external hard disk which contained ALL my data could not be read when plugged in and I was in despair and almost tipped over the edge. If I see the last 4 years flash before my eyes, that was the moment. Luckily, Chico the resident apple genius stepped in, did a brain transplant and I'm now happily typing away on the G4 powermac. Phew. Not without backing up the data first.

I mentioned the backing up to the receptionist at iShop at Orchard cineleisure and he gave me a knowing smile and asked "by firewire issit?" Like its some arcane procedure privy to only a few top brains.

Duh.

Jeans update. I snooped around looking for a replacement pair and was horrified to learn that prices had gone up by as much as a whopping 60% for my favourite label in the last 2 years! It's crazy now. Is it the weak Sing dollar? Or is the brand so 'hip and happening' that it needs to be reflected in the price tag? Too bad I'm no longer hip and happening enough to afford a new pair. As if I were hip in the first place anyway.

Boo.

Think I'll start my own rival denim company and name it P-Star or G-String.

Something tells me its not going to sell like hotcakes.

As if Monday's shindig isn't enough, I had a serendipitous encounter yesterday. Who should be in the NHM today but Sir David Attenborough! He was there doing a book signing for his new book, Life in the Undergrowth.

Of course, I wasted no time grabbing his autobiography and a DVD copy of his new series and joined a very long queue, patiently waiting for my turn. It was funny how this came about since its been a dream of mine to meet the man who first spawned my interest to read biology in uni and I've been telling anyone who would listen how great it would be to see him. But alas, when it was my turn to get my stuff signed, words failed me and I turned into a quivering heap. sigh. Sir David looked really tired as he had spent the whole morning in Reading and had rushed down to the NHM for the afternoon session. At 78, I guess I would be too if I had a schedule like that. But he always had a smile for everyone and took time to make small talk (bless him). Except for me, cos at that moment, I would have burst into tears if I uttered a word.

I'm kicking myself today for getting so emo during this once in a life time encounter. Don't think I'd be half as nervous if I bumped into Brad Pitt. Yes. I'm a nerd.

P.S Oh yes..I went to Highbury for the Arsenal Ajax match too! More pictures to come soon, but for now, I have to scoff my dinner and head out to a gig. Ciao!

P.P.S My magical mystery tour will end on Saturday. See you guys back in the lab on Monday!!!! :D

win some, lose some

A broken camera, a pair of ripped jeans from week 1 out of 2 in the UK, I think I'm still somewhat privileged.

Tonight, I have been very lucky to have scored myself an invite via PFC (who incidentally is a Fellow of the Linnaean Society) to a very interesting debate at the Linn. Soc. - yes.. the very same room in which Charles Darwin (and Alfred Wallace) communicated their revelations that have since changed the way we look at the living world around us on the 1st of July 1858.

Tonight was a clash of titans, the original proponents of the Phylocode as well as prominent defenders of the Linnaean legacy. Both sides did very well.. and it was a jaw dropping experience for me to be in the very same room as these mental olympians. I felt my IQ go up just being in the same room as them.

I started the debate sitting on the fence, but now, I've got to say, let's stick with the binomial system. If it ain't that broke, don't fix it.