Dear Dreams – Page 189

Receiving Calls

[Saturday, 16 December, 2006]

I tried to sleep early but it took me long to doze off as predicted.

After sleeping for five to six hours, I received calls from people to find out about the Haig Road’s flat. I confirmed Francis had helped us to advertise it on the straits times. My mind was almost in blanks and I could not answer some of the questions and had to apologise for being a newbie.

However, I did try my best to declare about the low commission for agents because it was JTC Corporation’s property. Many agents gave up after knowing about it. There were some really sincere agents for they did not mind the price but they did not get back to me after “discussing over it with their clients”.

Francis taught us it was enough to open the flat to show people but somehow, a few of them had asked me about the nearby amenities and even though I was hardworking enough to do a little research by myself, it was not enough. I did not find the nearest market and the sudden question stunned me but I honestly declared my lack of knowledge.

Luckily, everyone who called was friendly. After picking up a few calls, I got a bit used to what they would ask and could manage to reply quite fast. Anyway, most of the callers were women.

There was a guy who simply asked if I was the owner of the house and he was not interested at all after knowing the answer. I knew he must be one money minded agent who would only want to look for direct buyers and sellers so that he could make more money.

I received calls from about two direct buyers and one of them told me she read in the newspapers that buyers needed not pay commission to agents, which was quite nonsense. All agents like me were not taking any money from the company and that we had to pay for the advertising fee; obviously we were not working for free and even had to fork out money as if we were working in charity organisations.

Of course, for those agents like Kaelyn who worked for condominium companies, the companies would have the money to give them their basic pays and commission. There were different systems out in the market and some agents even collected two percents commission from buyers, which I still could not figure out why.

At night, there was a call from a lady who started nagging at the price of the flat. That was the market rate and therefore I could not do anything obviously. I was polite still since she was not aiming at me and I listened to her nagging for a few minutes.

The two early wasted calls deprived me of my sleep. It was a very tiring day.

The Door Pull-up Bar

[Thursday, 14 December, 2006]

The pull-up bar at the first room

My elder brother bought a door pull-up bar for nearly $30. It was extendable and both sides had to be screwed into the frame of the door.

I was not sure how strong it was and I doubted the firmness of the wall.

It seemed to be able to maintain even my elder brother’s weight for now and it had also held me in the air for seventeen pull-ups but with great fears.

I must admit I am really a coward now because I cannot afford to fall even from that low height. Ever since after the operation, my left ankle has been failing me, or perhaps it is me who has been failing it. After a few volleyball games where I repeatedly strained it, I get so depressed of my recovery.

Company Event

[Friday, 15 December, 2006]

Francis called me at around 1pm to ask if I wanted to go for the company’s event at Apollo Centre. Since I had nothing on, I decided to go as he said he wanted to introduce people to me despite Mingfa was not free. However, since my mum was buying lunch back, I waited and eventually got there at around 4pm.

I did not know where the place was actually at but since I guessed Francis would be somewhere smoking around and thus I checked the outside first. I was right. We went into the air conditioned place, at the “Meeting Point Pub & Lounge”. I supposed everyone except me wore pants.

Mingfa promised me to come down and accompany me for it was quite bored there. Then I managed got to see the boss who announced the plans for the next year and later, the presentation for award-winners. I also got to smoke a lot of second hand smoke.

Just before Mingfa arrived, Francis told me he was going to leave soon; I quickly told Mingfa but he was in the cab already. The food was nice but I did not take any because I had just taken my lunch. The satays were finished very soon.

As Mingfa arrived, we went inside to have a little chat with Francis. We had a small round of questions and answering before Francis left. We went to People’s Park Centre after finishing the glasses of super gassy Pepsi, which made us thirstier.

Mingfa’s old friend, Wenqiang, was working at one of the second storey’s game shops. He gave us a few free KFC meal cards. It was a promotion from Singtel to get a meal whenever anyone buys a Hi-Card.

Windows Media Player 11 and Windows XP

Windows Media Player 11 was released a few days ago or even earlier.

Out of nowhere, your windows might prompt you to upgrade, which you might happily click the agree button. However, for Windows XP users, please be caution that you have to validate your windows version before you can start using it.

For those who do not wish to validate your windows, you can of course do a rollback by choosing the earlier date of the System Restore, which is before the installation of Media Player 11. The path to the “System Restore” is…

All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore

Please be caution that the system changes made after the date you choose to restore to will be reset.

Scheduled Downtime at 1600h

The server has been undergoing DoS attacks today, which causes the latency.

There is scheduled hardware maintenance at 1600h for an hour. The main site might not be accessible but the blog will continue to function probably at a slower pace.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Jialing’s Impostor

There are many kinds of people in this world, and sadly, those weird ones do appear in the internet.
In this article I would focus on those shameless ones. Some people for whatever reasons, can resort to stealing pictures from others and claim to be the owners. This is common but I will condemn it if it is for more than a joke.
Can you imagine someone stalking you over the internet and stealing all pictures from your blog or even Friendster account, and set up a Friendster account using the stolen pictures? This is very common for those ugly bitches to gain online friends; but if that person uses your name and nickname as well, and even starts a second account probably due to overwhelming friend requests, it is scarce. And what if that person even sets the account to private, perhaps, does not want you to view the profile, how would you feel?
This is the case for my volleyball friend, Jesselyn Lim Jialing, also known as Jesuke, the cosplay lover. The impostor indicates at the fake accounts that she is from Japan, which is so pathetic. Many fools would of course believe the impostor because of Jialing’s hobby as a cosplayer, which she takes many pictures of herself in those animates’ dresses.
I seriously cannot figure out why that person can go into such depth. If that person is a girl, she can of course make many male friends because Jialing is a babe, but however, she probably can only remain net friends with those poor guys; if that person is a guy, obviously he is a gay.
We cannot deny the access of crooks to the internet, nor can we totally stop their evil doings, but at least we can hinder their progress. Everyone please go to the URLs http://www.friendster.com/17579112 and http://www.friendster.com/31924047 (url inactive and removed) click “report profile”, which is located under the main picture. This will at least kill all the unlawful and shameless efforts of the impostor.

Back to PHP Again

[Wednesday, 13 December, 2006]

Gilbert and I were supposed to go for a swim finally but I woke up only at 10am, feeling weird that he did not call me at 9am as agreed. Then, he told me he felt lazy. Since I went to bed very late, I started to feel lazy as well. In the end, we did not go out at all.

Nothing much was done in the drowsy afternoon until the early evening, my enthusiasm for building the website for my job erupted.

The first thing I wanted to do was to try out PHP. I had been using frames so often in my websites that it was difficult to display individual pages. There were of course some advantages but still, for more commercialised website, I decided to drop the old method.

I needed to keep all the pages constant, such as the side navigation and top banner. I wanted to maintain just a file like the frames so that when I needed to change the design or layout, I needed not edit all the pages.

It was hours of time consumed and yet nothing seemed to work out. Shamefully, I only managed to do the template using external text files, which was so unprofessional. I messaged Irwin who never ever denied my approach for help. We spent quite a long time trying to figure the problems. I did countless trial and errors and finally…

It worked.

Learning Day

[Tuesday, 14 December, 2006]

As Francis told me he was too busy to help Mingfa and I to advertise on the newspapers for our Haig Road flat, he said he would do it on Thursday or Friday. We arranged to meet up at Holland Drive’s coffee shop to pick up the skill of filling up the forms.

While I was about to leave my house, Weitat messaged me to borrow money. It was so weird for everyone should know I was unemployed for so long and yet they approached me. Even if I was rich, I would barely consider because of all the past encounters with my good friends who had even forgotten they owed me money; little plus little made a lot. Weitat was someone less forgetful but it was a very bad habit for a very rich man’s son to borrow money around.

Anyway, when I was on the train I messaged him with my unfamiliar phone slowly, “Siao ah? Why borrow money from the poorest guy?”

I reached the coffee shop at twelve sharp. Twenty minutes later, I called Francis who took around another twenty minutes to come down to ease my awkwardness from people looking for seats for their lunch. He started teaching me how to fill in the OTP forms with the special JTC contract.

After we had finished, Mingfa arrived with Weitat and the two CTSS boys. I tried to explain to Mingfa everything with Francis doing most of the talk. Then we switched table to the smoking area because Francis’ stamina could not keep up anymore. We got to ask him more questions.

It was around three plus when he left. I was amazed over how long we took to learn part of the stuffs about only HDB flats. All the paper work was quite tedious.

Mingfa and I joined up with the three of them and had our lunch. Then, they left for Clementi ITE for volleyball while I went back to office alone.

I waited there for quite long for the only computer I knew installed with the Propnet software was occupied by the same lady I met the previous time. I gave a call to Ou Xiang to check if she still needed to rent a house and actually woke her up right on time for her to rush to the air port. When I was about to give up and message Mingfa that I was going home, luck fell on me and finally I could get to the computer.

I began helping Mingfa to search for the prices of some flats he wanted to check. Then, I tried looking for some rental of flats in vain. I hung around there to do some research on district and left at around 8pm. This time, I took bus 145 instead, which stopped nearer to my house than bus 167. Then, I had some chat with the auntie working downstairs who had her leg operation almost the same time as me.

Since my mum had gone to Malaysia with my younger brother, I cooked instant noodle for my late dinner. It was not a smooth task for half of the egg dropped near the fire and later, opening of the oil spilled. It was hell mess.

Kaiwei’s Birthday Celebration

[Monday, 11 December, 2006]

This was a slow day for all the waiting. My younger brother was on leave for the beginning of the weekdays and his birthday fell on this day, which entitled the family dinner together.

At first, I was supposed to go and help Kaelyn with something but after sitting in front of the computer, too scared to start into any work that would be never ending that I was kind of rotting.

My mum posed there so long for us to adjust the setting of the camera for the darkness.

On the Tanjong Rhu Bridge where filming is often done at; facing Jumbo.

Facing the other side

Sadly, the clearest scenery picture I had taken that night.

Cosy Bay.

Snapshot.

The bridge again.

My younger brother was out with his friends at K-box and he did not come home as early as planned. The rest of us took a cab down to the indoor stadium where a Jumbo restaurant was located behind, just besides the river. The scenery was great.

While wating for the arrival of my younger brother, I started eating the peanuts together with the nice Thai chilli and my mum joined in after some questioning.

As my younger brother arrived after a long walk from the bus-stop, we started ordering food. There were craps throughout the dinner and even the china waitresses were blessed with the laughers.

Plain vegetable was nice. We had wheat prawns, and fish which was so slippery, and later, crabs. In the end, my hands were still clean.

After the dinner, which my elder brother paid for, we crossed over the Tanjong Rhu Bridge to Cosy Bay. The first thing I remembered was the story between Wilson and Kaelyn, which I should not elaborate on more.

Zoomed to the condominium from top of Cosy Bay.

Condominium over the other side.

Me, younger brother, mum, further “da sao”, elder brother. Credits to the rubbish bin.

Back of my brother’s k800i. Thanks rubbin bin again.

Down the tower, I found a heart. Can you see it?

We climbed up to the top and enjoyed the breeze and beautiful scenery; where we sat down to share a bottle of white wine. Before we left, we had some photo taking fun and we never relied on any passer-by to help us take group photos.

Weak Ankle

[Saturday, 09 December, 2006]

Mingfa and I were taking bus 187 from Tanjong Katong Road to Clementi and I was playing with my K800i. I was kind of addicted to the game Civilisation 3 after not touching it for years. The availability of it on the phone proved too much convenience but would certainly disrupt my rest during journeys.

When we reached Neil Road, Mingfa asked me to get down to transfer to a cab immediately as his Zhenghua players had reached Clementi ITE and that Mingfa was holding the key to the cage which the balls were kept. It became a fast journey but somehow playing on the cab made me giddy.

KKF

His Zhenghua players were impressive, whereas his three Clementi Town boys, who I almost forgotten, were quite friendly. Jingkun aka KKF came after some time. I supposed I was lack of sleep that I was quite slow. As the Clementi Town girls were playing with the Zhenghua boys, I continued with my game.

Sleeping Pigson

Later on, Wilson arrived and dozed off immediately. I had a very relaxing game after that with the kids. However, when the big matches came as the outsiders arrived, the requirement to jump gave me big problem on my left ankle. I felt so irritated for my operation was on my calf and yet the muscle was connected to give me weak ankle, and with the jumping weeks ago it was kind of sprained.

During the free spike, I only managed to do it nice for once. During the real games, I could not jump properly and the phobia had worsened it. I spiked countless balls onto the net and lost so many points. The floor was kind of more slippery somehow, which did not give me enough friction to move easily to save some of the balls.

When I was so pissed with everything, I decided to tip the ball instead and I managed to cause a huge impact where the ball flew swiftly towards the centre ground of the opponents’ court. Everyone was very impressed and I was quite proud of myself for once for my first ever tipping of the ball over, which was a powerful one. Mingfa told me I had fully stretched my hand, which was very good.

After winning the game again, I took my rest and started playing my game again. Towards the last game, I became a telephone operator. Then, we went to meet Meijun at Clementi Central, reaching near 10.30pm. We went MacDonald’s instead of the usual coffee shop as everyone was gathering there to watch soccer matches for free.

After hanging around there and hearing some of their funny stories during their secondary school days, Weitat drove me home together with Wilson, Jingkun and one of the Clementi Town boys who were going for a driving spree in the dangerous driver’s car.

The wish to recover from the ankle problem was huge.