9 posts from 2006

Live post from Christmas outing. The songs are hot. Food is good. Pretty much what Christmas should be like. Eh?

24/12/06

Yesterday's Christmas party saw the first coming together of group James. There's this distinct feeling we're ready. We are.

James is ready

There's carols in the air. Was walking around The Curve last weekend and captured these folks singing merrily away. 

You know Murphy's Law? The one where everything that could possibly go wrong must go wrong, and at the wrong time? Well, Murphy had a field day yesterday on my life. Here's what happened:

I was due to fly out to Penang for media training. The flight was scheduled for 10:45 a.m. I woke up at 9:30 a.m. Ouch! So I showered and got dressed in a record 7 minutes. Ran downstairs and convinced John to speed-drive me to KL Sentral and hopped onto the train as soon as I could. I reached the airport late, and missed the flight. So, out came the wallet and RM 75 to pay for the next flight.

Thankfully, I reached Penang pronto and was able to rush over to the clients place on time. Or so I thought. The cab driver didn't exactly know where the client's place was and we spent the better part of 30 minutes looking for the client's place. I got there late about 10 minutes.

Now comes the cool part: in my rush to get off the cab, I dropped my wallet in the cabbie. When the guard asked me for my IC, my fingers reached into my pocket and drew a blank. SHOCK!

By now, the cab had sped off and I'm left in the lurch without an IC.

Good thing I knew the people inside. I was let in after a call from "upstairs", but that didn't solve the wallet problem. But nevermind, client matters first. The training was midway and a wallet crisis wasn't exactly a great excuse to stop proceedings.

Now, media training involves a fair bit of camera work. Basically, you record the client in a mock interview, watch him goof off, and then point out his mistakes. I'd say on a scale of 1 - 10 for importance, the camera is rates a 10. That day, the camera died. Not good.

Fortunately, all bad things can be turned good. So, I take this opportunity to highlight the Nokia N80's camera video recording capabilities. Whipping out my slick N80, I set it on record mode and demonstrate why MP4 playback rocks.

So, media training taken care of. The last remaining problem is the wallet.

You've never been this screwed until you realise you have an option between lodging a police report and missing your flight or trying to board the plane without an IC, failing, and then missing your flight.

I chose option three. There's always this off chance God might smile on you and make things work out. It did. Whilst I was urgently trying to find out from the taxi company if any cabbie had returned a battered wallet. No luck. They hadn't seen anything. But just as I was turning to leave, this cabbie was runing frantically over.

"Were you the one who lost the wallet?" "Yes." "Here you go. This is yours."

Cannot believe it. Mei Ling (boss) was stunned. For me, this is just one of those perks having God on your side. Murphy's law may rule, but God's a lawyer who knows all the loopholes.

PS. Sorry that I took so long to relate this whole thing. 

Pic Taking at Midvalley

Funny thing about Christmas is that people seem to want to take more photos during this season. Was with a couple of friends last night and we did the same thing - stop in front of a Christmas tree and snap a picture.

Walking past Midvalley today, it was the same thing. For some reason, shoppers are super-attracted to the Christmas setup right in the middle of the shopping mall and actually stopped to pose with the Christmas tree and snap a picture. More than half the people that did, snapped the pic with their phones. 

This seems to be an interesting trend worth investigating: do you actually do this?

Three Stooges

Okay, so it took me a while to post this interview, but watch it. It's worth the laughs.

ells are ringing, and whether you love it or you dread it, Christmas season is back. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and today's lunchtime soaking myself in this "Christmassy" experience and there's loads to hate and there's loads to love. Let me run through the first part of the checklist.

1. Presents

Everyone loves presents! Who doesn't like it when freebies are dropped right into your lap? And the mystery of cracking open your present for the first time and then discovering that huge box you got was due to the layers and layers of newspaper wrapped around it. Of course, give and you shall receive, but giving seems to be the worst part of it. If you didn't figure this expenditure into your early year budget, you'll be at loss to scrape together a couple of sens to splurge on gifts. On the flipside, if you don't give no gifts, you'd feel really bad and guilty when you receive them. Good or bad, it's a coin-toss.

2. Mad-hour traffic jams

I got lucky this time round. Lydia and I had just fought past the traffic to head into The Curve and lo and behold, a parking spot! God loves happy shoppers. I think. Anyway, where I work (MidValley) it's utterly chaotic with the Christmas sale going on. Just take a stroll down to the carpark and you'll see people who circle for hours looking for a place to park, just so they can spend more time queuing up to pay for presents. This is Good, coz I work here, am early, and don't go through the jam.

3. Re-gifters

Ever opened a Christmas present you received from a Christmas party and thought it looked fishily similar to something you saw someone else receive last Christmas? Yups. Re-gifting is all the rage nowadays. Mostly, my presents go into two piles - re-giftable, and the non-re-giftable. Mostly, things you can re-gift are generics like photo frames, candles, ornaments and paper weights. Mostly, these are the things you give away so other people can re-gift them. There must be a micro-economy of re-gifted gifts circulating around in church right now. Bad: you get stuff you eventually give away anyway. 

4. Shopping around not knowing what to buy

Either the presents don't fit the person or it doesn't fit the budget. Either way, you're walking around for hours not knowing what to buy or what to give. Bad.

All in all, this year's Christmas shopping hasn't gone too badly - except I bought absolutely nothing for anybody yet (except to little toys for myself - couldn't resist, had a credit card in hand... do the math). The walking was great, took the opportunity to burn some fat. Spent some precious time with Lydia. Now, what to get people?

Vader & Boba

Today was kinda the close of Group John Mark, the final marker to a long journey. It's particularly apt ending and I'd call it a high note because of a number of notable things:

1. Song Item

Despite many fumbles with the practices (where many people were kept waiting) I think this went pretty well despite the horror of horrors on the actual presentation! The microphone stops functioning when we're right in the middle of the presentation, and Seh Weng was at loss of what to do. Still, despite the two long stops in the middle, I'm proud our group plodded on to deliver what was perhaps the best presentation ever. Yes, we lost Yvonne's power vocals, and yes, we stuttered three times in the beginning. But hey, at the end of the day, it was a heartwarming presentation that touches the soul. Most of all what Anne, Lynn and James said at the beginning ("I want to thank God for giving me a loving family" - can never forget that!)

2. Water War

Okay, I was largely useless - collecting a mere couple of coupons (those things they call "flags") before being shot at and bundled out of the competition. But the best thing happened right here on that field. I met a remarkable young kid called Ah Ho. He's one of those kids who's too young for people to take seriously, yet too old to want to stay at home. He's got no siblings his age, and he pretty much gets free time to entertain himself anyway he likes.

So I invited him to play Water War with us. Needless to say, he loved it. Then I invited him to church.

He said he'll come and bring a couple of friends. I got his number, so I need to remember to call him. Meanwhile, if you're reading this, pray for me. One more soul for Christ is worth the salary you can earn in a life time

3. Group Dinner @ KFC

Well, since this was probably going to be our last time out together, let's go for a fine dandy and expensive dinner. I didn't have a say as to where to go, but I think John Lee made the decision for us - KFC. I was seated next to Anne for the dinner and she's the shyest girl ever. Not much to say.

So, as usual, I'm doing most of the talking (recounting how Randy was bullied as a kid in school and other things I forget) and people are just listening. Then it dawned upon us - why don't we put this on film! Well, we did just that and immediately had some success getting our first scandalous story out - the story about Yee Ling's controversial prettiness. Yup, it's all on tape. Just needs a bit of editing before I can post it up here. 

So, stay tuned!

N95 Workshop

Just signed up for Vox! And best of all, I CAN do this during working hours. Right here in KL Hilton at a Nokia multimedia workshop.

Heck, I didn't even know "Vox" existed before today. Did you know you could go post photos on the Web with your phone, edit and blog about what you're doing real time? I knew this, but didn't actually bother finding out.

But today I did. And boy, it IS cool. You've gotta try this out.