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Yau from Singapore

September 25, 2003 by HB

My friend Yau came down to KL yesterday and I got to meet him at Lot
10 where he was with his gf. I didn’t have time to talk much though,
because of work but I’m glad to meet him finally. 🙂 It’s always good
when people who have something in common talk. It was great. The shot
was taken by the Lot 10 security guard and it’s very blurry, sorry
about that. It tends to happen when people press the shutter release
instead of tap it (causing shake).

Anyway, I have much work to do today, I’ll reply the comments during
the next update. Thanks for all the well wishes, I’m fine now (bar a
distinct lack of serotonin). 🙂

Okana – a 2F production

July 21, 2003 by HB

This is from the photo shoot a couple of days ago at my old high
school. It seems insignificant, a featureless piece of masonry, but it
has personal significance to me. The memories this photo evokes are all
from Form 2 (14 years old) and there are three I can remember with
great fondness. I won’t share the first two *cough* but the third one
is the class drama production we did that year. Our class (2F) did a
play based on Cinderella. The script (and the performance) was called Okana
which is the nickname of Karen, who played the female lead in the
production. I remember waiting with the rest of the cast (all are my
classmates) at the very place you see in the photo above before moving
into the room to the left (not pictured in the frame) for our practice
sessions. I remember the production having a lot of dance sequences,
including one choreographed to Rednex’s Cotton Eye Joe. =D My partner
was Margaret Lim, and I think her feet was injured many times during
the practice sessions for the ballroom dancing scene. Heh.

(from left)
Front row: Jackie, Karen, Justina
Middle row: Peter, Velvet, Ita, Mdm Yeo, Rita, Margaret, Wei Ing
Back row: Daniel, Adrian, Huai Bin (me)

Photo courtesy of Karen [geocities.com].

Here is a photo of the entire cast together with our English
teacher, our advisor for the play, but we basically had full control
over the play. Her job was to go through the script with a fine toothed
comb to see if there are any “inappropriate” scenes. 😉 I don’t
remember her being present our practice sessions except for the full
dress rehearsal at the stage in the school’s hall (at that time). It’s
a nice memory, those were the days, a bunch of 14 year olds having fun
and getting a production together. 🙂

If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eye Joe
I’d been married long time ago
Where did you come from? Where did you go?
Where did you come from Cotton-Eye Joe?

Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve rearranged some things during the
optimization last night. I put the “Blogs” in alphabetical order and
put some sites into “Personal Websites” because they aren’t really
weblogs per se, but they’re my personal friend’s sites. Anyway, I’ve
also been applying for jobs in the KL area these couple of days. After
thinking it over and discussing with my parents and girlfriend, the
plan is to get a Masters degree while working part time in KL. I’ve
been browsing through a lot of online job listings, and it seems that
there are a lot that requires something like 2 to 3 years of work
experience in the related field. Hmm…I wonder if my Industrial
Experience year qualifies? 🙂 The ones that are targeted at fresh
graduates seem to offer a salary that I’m not prepared to accept. Also,
I’ve been tweaking (har har) my resume/CV and I wonder if I should put
this site down in the resume. That could be a good thing, but there are
two things which concern me.

The first is the fact that the site does not support some Mozilla
based browsers like Netscape due to their lack of full W3C CSS
specifications support and that could give a negative impression to the
HR manager reading the page using those browsers. The second is the
fact that my blog has a guest author who writes about things which most
companies would not approve of. It could prove to be something that
counts against me even though I always make it obvious that there are
two people writing on this blog – I write using the nick ‘hbpoh’ while
veritas writes under ‘veritas’ but this is not readily visible since
the text is small and at the bottom of each post. What do you think?

DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE

July 19, 2003 by HB

coz you might spill your drink. 😉 Gotta love that song from NOFX. Anyway, here’s what I did Thursday night and Friday night.

Thursday

Counter clockwise from left:
Huai Bin (me) = purple t-shirt with black sleeves (to hide my track marks)
Daniel = floral print shirt, partially obscured (sorry)
Alice = black top
Alan = blue with no sleeves
Bing Jong = grey with collar
Ing Tai = white Vodaphone

P/S – The hiding my track marks thing is a private joke, it’s not to be taken literally!

Counter clockwise from middle:
Alan = blue with no sleeves
Huai Bin (me) = purple t-shirt with black sleeves
Daniel = floral print shirt
Alice = black top
Bing Jong = grey with collar
Ing Tai = white Vodaphone

P/S – Don’t ask me why I’m always biting my lip, I just do it sometimes. :p

I went to Yes Music Cafe with a couple of friends where Tsingtao
beer flows aplenty. It’s a karaoke place that has great pumping music
“feng tau” style during the intermissions. Anyway, too many ethanol
containing beverages were consumed, and I wasn’t exactly the soberest
person in the world when I went into my car. It’s a good thing the
place is near my home and it was very late by the time we left so not
many lives were potentially endangered while yours truly was behind the
steering wheel. Technically, I knew I was unfit to drive and it’s
irresponsible to do that, but personally, I’m a safe driver when I know
I’m under the influence ie drive extra slowly, signal lights way in
advance, triple checking for cars before making turns, concentrated to
sober up and analyze the roads for potential traffic etc. Justification
aside, I definitely won’t be passing any breathalyzer tests that night,
it’s in one of the top three Most Intense DUI/DWI Incidents (MIDI) in
my life. It’s a good thing nothing happened. I hope no one who’s in
MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) reads this. Thanks to Alan and
crew for following behind until I was home to make sure I was safe. Oh
yeah, in my lack of sobriety, I forgot to close the automatic gate,
only found out from my dad the next day. Oops…

Friday

I caught up with Ting Chuan, who was also back for the holidays.
Went to have (non-alcoholic) drinks at Bamboo House @ Premier Hotel, it
was the free drink vouchers from the time me and my gf had dinner
there. Anyway, saw the two girl performing group, there were only the
two of us inside so “This song is dedicated to those two gentlemen over
there”. I thought their music was great, and ah, the adjective to
describe their music would be very suitable to describe the aesthetic
features of the duo as well. 😉 I was kicking myself all the time,
because my digicam was broken and Daniel had already left so I couldn’t
take pictures. Too bad.

Saturday

I got a call asking me to go out right as I was typing the “Friday”
part, so here’s “Saturday”. I wasn’t planning to go out tonight so I
had to decline. I’m already in my PJs and tonight has been designated
The Day of Rest. Gotta run, got a plane to CRASH. Har Har. *cough*

Methodist High School @ Country Cafe

July 11, 2003 by HB

L-R: Johnny, Huai Bin (me), Daniel

L-R: Christopher, Huai Bin (me), Michelle

I went out for dinner today with Daniel, Johnny, Michelle, and
Christopher just now. I haven’t seen some of them for 5 years! They’re
all my ex high school classmates and we all happened to be in Sibu at
this time. We had dinner at Country Cafe – I had the Teppanyaki Chicken
dish and a Mai Tai. Here’s some shots from the night, it was great to
catch up with all of them. 🙂

Mai Tai. Mmm…

Teppanyaki Chicken

A reunion of sorts…

December 14, 2002 by HB

From left: Christopher, Johnny, Ming Tze, Huai Bin (me), Ting Chuan, Thai Ling, Boyd, Daniel.
On the right hand side: Siew Ting, who doesn’t like to be photographed but ended up in the frame anyway 🙂
Not shown (left early): May Ling, Susie

I went out for supper today with a couple of my ex-classmates. It
was good to catch up with the happenings of everyone. The juiciest
gossip of the day is the apparent fact that KATHERINE LAW and ALVIN TOH
is going out! Heh. The were two confirmed sightings (one by Boyd and
the other by Ming Tze) of them holding hands while walking around in
Wisma Sanyan. Both of the sightings resulted in a subsequent loss of
physical contact between their hands when they saw the sightees. I
thought I saw Katherine last time I went to Parkson too, but I wasn’t
sure. Anyway, apparently this is a bit of a hush hush thing (for
reasons unknown). Boyd, who lives together with Alvin in KL didn’t even
know about it until recently, although he did report a suspicious
increase in communications via SMSs and ICQ msgs between Alvin and
Katherine. It’s interesting that the two ended up together, you’ll be
as surprised as everyone was if you knew them. 🙂

Anyway, tonight started with Daniel picking Johnny and myself up at
around 8:30 pm. We went to Christopher’s house, and man, is that house
sound-proof! Horns were useless in summoning anyone, so I went down and
knocked on the door, with no results. I could clearly see 4 people
talking in the living room but despite my (loud) calls of “Auntie!” no
one could hear me. I did knock on the door a couple of times, but it
took 2 full minutes before anyone could hear me (!).

Well, we got Christopher and headed over to Ting Chuan’s house. We
had planned to meet up with Thai Ling and Boyd, and May Ling and Susie
were also going to join us. Ting Chuan had made plans with Ming Tze and
Siew Ting and were going to pick them up and join us at Taman Selera
Muhibbah in Pedada later on. Anyway, I’m going into way too much detail
here. The bump on my head must have affected me in strange ways. 😉
(more about that later)

Anyway, we all met up at Taman Selera Muhibbah and talked until
11:30 pm. Why am I going into so much detail? I ask myself.
Hmm…anyway I had two cups of my favorite drink – Shi Ta Tien Wang/Shi
Ta Kai Sing (literally: four great heavenly kings/four great
happiness). It’s an ice blended drink containing coffee, horlicks, milo
and tea (thus the name). There are two names for it partly because of
the competition for customers over there. It’s absolutely insane. Every
stall will send a representative to swarm you the moment you sit down
and show you their menu. Not only that, if they see you ordering from a
competiting store, they will saunter over and whisper conspirationally
that the particular store’s stuff is not fresh and they make better
stuff. Heh.

Anyway, moving on, I bumped my head very hard on this outcropping of
stairs in my store room while trying to extract my cat from the store
room. I think I forgot my name for a couple of minutes. 🙁

Mid-Autumn Dinner

September 23, 2002 by HB

I had a belated Mid-Autumn Festival dinner today with a group of my friends from high school.
The list of attendees are: Ung Hing, who arrived 1 1/2 hours late because there was a train
accident which delayed his train, Karen, Fu Liang (the only one who is not from our high school),
Thien Na, who drove her Lancer down from the city, Chuck Fong and his brother Chuck Yong, the
elusive Christopher, Adrian and of course me. We went to Ocean King in Glen Waverley and had one of
their banquets. Off my memory (which is slowly becoming erratic) there was abalone soup, prawns
with noodles, black pepper beef, fish (a meal isn’t complete without fish, or so I hear), spicy
breaded chicken, some tofu dish, fruits and tong shui. Thien Na and I had the misfortune of sitting
beside the rice holder so we were delegated to serving rice the whole night. Heh. The banquet only
came to about A$15 each, so that’s pretty good for the dishes that are available.

Group photo at Ocean King. I forgot to put force flash on, making the picture somewhat
noisy.

After dinner, we headed down to Intencity, an arcade just opposite the restaurant. Chuck Fong
trashed everyone with his Virtual On skillz and I dominated the Daytona race track. Well, perhaps
dominate is not exactly the right term because Thien Na kept catching up to me. Karen on the other
hand was nowhere to be seen. =D

Daytona action. Karen (furthest from camera) is devastated at her loss. Heh.

The fruity looking guns are from…

Point Blank.

It’s not even 10 pm yet, and Karen and Ung Hing are already sneaking off to get some quality
time alone behind the arcade machines. =D

The line forming to dethrone Chuck Fong at Virtual On.

Another victim falls to Chuck Fong’s Virtual On skillz.

Pedal Faster Karen!

You don’t want to meet us in a dark alley. We’ll probably force you to play Point Blank with us
or something. =D

I find pictures in my digicam that I don’t remember taking. Heh. =D

This is me and Thien Na. She sat in the row beside mine in Form Five. Interesting fact: All but
three of the people that came tonight are from the same class in Form Five.

The girls. I’ve been in the same class as Karen since Primary 1. Imagine that. =D

A partial group shot in the arcade.

Shu Yiing

August 30, 2002 by HB

My friend Shu Yiing came down from Adelaide with her boyfriend Andy
today. I was graced by their presence just now, along with Derrick, who
is Shu Yiing’s cousin, also from Sibu and lives in Richardson Hall. The
weird thing is Richardson Hall is very close to Roberts Hall and yet
we’ve never seen each other before. Also here was Selina, Andy’s sister
who is doing law in Monash University. Note that all of us are from
Sibu. Represent!

From left: Selina, Derrick, Andy, Shu Yiing, Huai Bin

Drive-by street killing

May 2, 2002 by HB

Oh look. The guy that got shot dead in Port Melbourne last night is…the son of Kath
Pettingill! If you’re not familiar with her, she is the leader of the Pettingill crime family of
Melbourne. She has vowed revenge when interviewed by 3AW (the radio station) and said:

“All I can say is to the two persons involved, they can run but they can’t hide”

Kath Pettingill

(Picture taken from The Age)

Read more here: Mother vows revenge and
warns Chopper

With this and the Margaret
and Paul King murders, it seems that the newspapers will be interesting these few days.