Just Couldn't Care

Sometimes, I just couldn't be bothered. Not to talk (much) but to make monosyllabic replies sounding disinterested and half-dead. Nothing really elicits an interest - games are just to kill time but without the rush or concentration, books only help keep the eyes focused somewhere but I don't read the words, whether I do stuff with or without company makes no difference, and I don't hear any music in my head, not even Eponine singing. Any prospective ideas are met with a 'fuhgeddaboutit'.

Just run through the motions of the day, putting on the different masks (most of the personas thankfully are tacit listeners) for the different environments and get some McDonald's Chocolate Sundae or some form of chocolate if that might help. It's really a good thing that the Prozac and Zoloft I have are actually expired stocks already written off the inventory and meant for destruction. 2 years old some more. Whenever I think about it I rationalize i) it's expired; ii) it'll take a couple of weeks to work, which by the time I might feel differently; iii) it could possibly make me 'slow'. The meds are really something like Discworld dwarven bread in that sense. One look, and you feel the strength to look for alternatives.

But yeah. Not giving a fuck. Not even where this post is going.

She Is, Is She?

Yes, well, we realise whenever we post about ambigrams the titles are rather silly. But since we've already started it that way we'll go on until we really run out of ideas, then we'll revert to normal titles.

Also, among our doodlings only 4 passed our satisfaction test: Daniel, Ryan, wingedman and rhyen (even RoB can still be read as 'qob' so even that considered fail).

Didn't expect to actually work on any ambigrams yesterday, but we thought of playing around with the name Jennifer - since the J-R looks easy. Also wanted to play about with some other fonts rather than in...how do we describe this?...'lines' like how wingedman/Ryan/rhyen was done. Picked up the pencil and...

We were pleasantly surprised at what came out.

Of course, the rough doodle needed to be done up nicely - and we've only our trusty long ruler and 4H pencil to work with. Wouldn't know how to do this up on the PC but we like doing it manually too - they become bookmarks for us in the end.

Interesting enough, for wingedman's and Daniel's we did up the entire thing without much measuring etc - just 3 lines to indicate the central axis, and the upper and lower grid. With Ryan's and rhyen's we spaced them out evenly in grids to make it more symmetrical (or maybe we were just worried about our shakey hands).

We'd made it a wee bit too big to fit the entire notepaper :s

Same goes with Jennifer's (and we've also picked up a nagging phobia to spelling this name wrong). While templating it we kept nagging ourselves that such attention to symmetry not necessary lah, you want perfect symmetry go learn how to do it on the PC. Another worry is that, while on the quick sketch it may look good, sometimes it looks funny when we do a proper large one. But this one turned out rather nicely.

Hey, we knows we texted you to ask your favourite colour, but we found out no turquoise or robin's egg-blue ink, bubblegum blue okay?

They Are, Are They?

Like we posted earlier, we weren't happy with how RoB's ambigram came out - and so we tried working on it.

So between gaming with ayheng and rhyen at Mage on Saturday we worked at getting RoB's and Ryan's ambigram - but the more we slogged at it the more dissatisfied we became.

The 'N' doesn't really look like a 'N'. This two didn't pass.

Anyhoo - decided to doodle a bit and worked on a different take, and came up with something better for Ryan. Will need feedback.

We're happier with this one.

rhyen has posed a challenge to make an ambigram of 'rhyen'. Here's our take:

We wanted to do a different R-N combo with this, and we might rethink the centre 'Y' when it takes our fancy. Now since you challenged us to make yours, you owe us chips with black pepper sauce at Mages :D

Sumer Is Icumen In

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wode nu
Sing cuccu
Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu
Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu
Cuccu, cuccu
Wel singes thu cuccu
Ne swik thu naver nu

No we don't mean the Eternal Summer (although it does remind us plenty of A Home At The End Of The World).

28 Weeks Later Shrek The Third Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End Mon Petit Doigt M'a Dit Hors de Prix Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Transformers The Simpsons Movie Evan Almighty

What better way to bring in the summer movies? Damn Victoria Station for being within arms' reach - we've already picked up 3 albums: Linkin Park's Minutes To Midnight sometime back, and Maroon 5's It Won't Be Soon Before Long and Madonna's The Immaculate Collection (yay our iPod gets fatter and fatter) today. Our only gripe is with LP's Minutes To Midnight - after careful listening we heard the 'missing words'. Then we added our own 'missing words', because LP's album never had the 'Parental Advisory' label on the covers before.

Anyone wants to buy our copy? We'll sell it for RM30. 'Course, we suppose you'd want to get your own PA copy or would've already 'obtained' it online...and we'll also have to scrounge/wait for the explicit version to arrive (if ever).

Also itching to get a couple more linen clothings (goodness knows how our brain picks up this little itches) - to keep our GAP linen shirt company. This itch must be controlled - linen isn't as breezy to wear as we would like it to be and Malaysian weather just doesn't make it really worth it.

Oh dear, must catch By The Pricking Of My Thumbs tomorrow.

On The Seventh Day

It's Sunday. Our day of rest. Since we've gotten office hours we've been cherishing (although some people will call it wasting) our weekends by sleeping till late afternoon, then living like a night owl.

It's our routine where come Friday night we'll be actively up and pottering around with something or other - either running down to Old Town Kopitiam in Cheras for the BoardGameCafe meetup or alternatively at Mage Cafe, or prolly even having a night out with other friends who'll tell me it's Madonna night or summat, or prolly even just stay home and bust out the consoles for a night of mindless Street Fighting/Kombatting. Saturday is also a late day late night thing.

Come Sunday night, of course, we'll have wee problems getting our circadian cycle back to normality. *Sigh* And next Friday, wash, rinse, repeat.

It's a vicious cycle.

Anyways, it's Sunday. The seventh day. And the Holy Bibble explains it well.

Head over to read the full webcomic.

Daily In, Daily Out

We have rather dry eyes - not too sure if this was a product of poor contact lens practise (yes, we're guilty of wearing lenses for over 8 hours, in the shower, while sleeping but that's about it - we be creature of hygiene) or if it was something inherent all this time where our lacrimal glands proclaimed the Age of Drought.

The first time we ever popped in contact lenses was in Glasgow (we'd gotten the B&L brand, Softlens?), and upon walking out unto Buchanan St. it was as if our world just suddenly expanded - the clarity of everything was just mind-boggling! The streets were wider, the sky was brighter, the people were bigger, the colours more vibrant...you get the idea. Having your eyes opened for the first time, kinda thing.

However, we've stopped wearing them once we started working, for a couple of reasons - both linked to the fact that we have dry eyes. First, we don't cherish the idea of waking up to face the day by popping in a contact and suffering blinding pain for a couple of minutes, and probably only to have the contact pop out 10 minutes later. Second, we run a high risk of a contact popping out sometime in the middle of the day - this has happened a few times already. They never happened while we were in Glasgow, though.

It's because of this our compliance for contact lenses went down the drain. A pair could be made to last 2 months due to very infrequent usage, so much so that we don't even mind trashing a contact that popped out of our eye that we only wore five times in 6 weeks. Right now we still have one more Freshlook Colorblends (Amethyst) to finish - not one PAIR, just one LENS. For our right eye. Yep, left eye goes blind. While this works for outdoors reading turns out to be a bit of a chore, so we don't.

Anyways.

It's not that we dislike contacts - it's just that it turns out to be rather wasteful for us when we can't make full use of it. We prefer contacts to wearing glasses, really. And so we've been contemplating daily disposables for a while - it may be a bit more expensive but given our erratic usage it might turn out to be more cost effective for us. But price still was a bit of a hurdle. So instead of shopping for it at our second home, we decided to give our third home a try - and we're learning to like A-Look a bit more now.

Our ears pricked up when we heard them quote RM70 for a box of daily disposables. And RM50 for a box of monthly disposables. Picked up a couple of boxes of dailies and popped a pair in at the shop itself. And enjoyed the same experience as our first time wearing contacts again :D Now we can just use the spare specs in the car to get to work, pop in the dailies later when eyes are comfy, and dump them at the end of the day! And this Focus Dailies turns out to be rather small and comfy too!

Now, what are we going to do with the B&L Multipurpose Solution pack-of-2 that we just bought?!

Car Wash

...Hey, get your car washed today
Fill up and you don't have to pay
Hey, get your car washed today
Fill it up, right away...

Mum has rather high standards towards cleanliness and neatness, which, while good in terms of hygiene and aesthetics, tends to creep past the tolerance level of everyone else at times. Even when it comes to our car. So it happens that every weekend or so mum will go, "Boy-ar, go take your car to wash-la, so dirty already."

Problem is, mum not being able to tahan the slightest sight of dustiness, would have already hosed down the car with water somewhere during the week itself, thus while the car isn't all sparkly and waxed, there isn't much visible to justify forking out RM12-RM15.

When we do tell her that the car isn't dirty enough for a wash, her next line of argument goes, "Your car still needs vacuuming what." Since patting the car seats doesn't cause dust clouds, we take it she's referring to the car mats. Which, given if we don't do anything about that too within the day, by the next morning the mats would be devoid of sand and such, courtesy of her intolerance.

It's not that we don't want to have the car washed, it's just that she's not making it worth our money, nor allow us to work on our own timetable and not hers. And yes, we're too lazy to consider the DIY alternative.

To go on a tangent...

When it comes to driving around, we actually go into autodrive mode should our destination be somewhere we know - home, a mall, office. When there's a deviation from the flightpath route ie. gotta drop someone else home first while we're in autodrive, somebody better remind us about it or else enjoy a scenic drive about at our expense.

Anyways.

So happens that on our way to the office today we'd let our mind wander on something or other and went into autodrive mode. And being completely distracted we didn't realise we were actually tailing a garbage truck for over 5 minutes while heading out of the housing area. In close proximity.

X(

There wasn't even the warning pong that warns of the garbage truck - that was our only comforting thought while we did some serious backpedalling and giving the truck some respectable space. Even that small comfort was dashed when we paid the toll (by Touch'n'Go, saving some poor toll collector from distress). A whiff, and we went, "Oh, shit." Well, it didn't smell of that but it's the unmistakable pong that identifies garbage trucks everywhere.

The drive on was done with one hand frantically waving our apple-scented Shaldan Pot air freshener gel in front of the air-conditioning vents for the rest of the journey. It didn't help that we had to wind down the window twice more to tap our season pass to get into parking. And we practically fled from our car, secured in the thought that no one would touch it either to break in or clamp it.

Now we really need to send it to the car wash.

Platinum Page

We dunno. We think Citibank is just being plain evil by sending us this last week.

Opens letter, expecting junk leaflets. Junk leaflet claiming to upgrade to Platinum, first year annual fee waived falls out. Reads, throws into wastepaper basket.

Looks at surprise at envelope within envelope. Opens envelope. Jaw drops.

A Citibank Platinum, with our details covered by our lovely Philosophy namecard holder.

Now this really got us wondering, because our current Citibank gold card isn't even a year old and is only our secondary card (read: expenses not meant to be seen by parents should they snoop our mail) and it doesn't really see much use. So how is it that Citibank sees it fit to 'upgrade our status'?

Our mind was already made up within 5 minutes of holding it (or maybe it was the RM600 annual fee): it's our new platinum bookmark courtesy of Citibank. How nice of them, they know we loves books and gives us a bookmark.

Now how do we bloody make sure this card will never be activated nor fall ever be usable in the wrong hands?!

Ray from Mage Cafe suggested we punch a whole through the smart chip. We were thinking more on the lines of laminating it.

Now we have a hole through our nice platinum bookmark. And it's not even centered on the hole.

:'(

It's a big, uneven, uncentered hole. Should have just laminated it.

Probably will tie a small ribbon to make it look better. Or probably tie some trinket from Philosophy instead.

Oh, must remember to scratch out the CCV number before putting into book.

True, it isn't as nice as being able to wave your hand and show off a ring but that's a luxury not opened to bachelors-for-life.

Movies At Our Second Home

We'd took the day off to get a few things done today, and since we were going to have dinner at 1U we thought to ourselves, it's been a while since we spent quality time at our second home (we've been spending loads of time at our third home, Curve). So yeah, we parked the car at Eneos for servicing and prowled the corridors as we once used to.

MPH proved to be evil - now that our MPH Card has expired, they'd gone and put up the lot of Agatha Christie books for sale at 15% off for MRC members while non-members have to make other purchases of a minimum of RM10 to be eligible for the discount. Gah. Don't need it. Don't need it. Don't need it...

...

We're now 1 book closer to completing the Jane Marple set - gotten us A Caribbean Mystery. Got 2 more greenback Penguin Classics to get the bloody 15% - The Importance of Being Ernest and Frankenstein. Just our luck they didn't have Wuthering Heights (we've been recommended that as a follow-up to Pride and Prejudice). Gah MPH be evil.

Oh yes, been breaking out the popcorn (Twisties, actually) as the summer brings in the slew of movies. Shrek 3 was good although not as satisfying as Shrek 2, but we guess that's because there wasn't much to parody about this time. Minor things we caught: the mural behind Shrek and Fiona when they were dressed in full royal togs featured an ogre as well; and Prince Charming used Danse Macabre as a song for his musical :s It was still funny, but not as funny as it used to be - we couldn't really pinpoint any particular 'highlight' joke (like Puss' cat-eye act from 2). And we thought Artie looked more like Doogie Houser than Justin Timberlake. Although you can never go wrong with Shrek :D

We broke our code of 'not watching anything with Nicolas Cage' for the fact that the movie was based on a Philip K. Dick novel (The Golden Man) and the premise of the story looked good. Next showed off Chris Johnson's ability to see 2 minutes into the future to good effect, but the ending felt...well, somewhat to the same effect as how Sunshine made us feel. Good buildup and then a twist to leave us hanging. Not memorable...except that during our first screening, there was a power failure throughout 1U, sometime 3ish to near 4ish.

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End. Now this is, so far, the movie of the summer. Has Johnny Depp ever failed us? Spider-Man 3, move over. It even had more laughs than Shrek 3. The only thing about the whole Pirates series is that in order to fully understand what's going on is to rewatch the earlier movies or be left wondering "Who's Captain Barbossa?" or "Who's that soldier in love with Elizabeth?" kinda thing. Also, the other pirate lords were really quite calefair characters, but it allowed for the focus to be where it is - on Cap'n Jack, Will, Elizabeth, Barbossa and Davey Jones. The final battle - very nice - although interestingly enough when Liz and Jack was rescued from the ocean they were very dry looking :s didn't they just fell into the ocean?

Pirates really put us in mind of Pride and Prejudice though - everytime we look at Tom Hollander all we can see is Mr Collins :s and Keira Knightley as Elizabeth. Prolly need to get that out of our system.

Oh. Take note. Shrek 3 we sat for quite a bit during the credits - even after the bit where the subs go 'Sarikata drpd...' and Puss waving goodbye. Then we gave up. STAY BACK FOR PIRATES. DON'T LEAVE.

Wild Hogs isn't gonna be memorable and so we shan't comment (although trying to remember what Dudley said that his Mac misinterpreted to 'Alternative Sex' tho'), and while Blades of Glory might look good we were told it isn't as funny as Wild Hogs. Waiting on Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Transformers and Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix (oh, hopefully the movie's better than the book) now.

Trailers that got us excited? Neil Gaiman's Stardust. And to think we just picked up the book at the just-recent Times Warehouse Sale. Fracture also looks intriguing - Anthony Hopkins at it again.

Now we've got the Sony Ericsson W880i jingle in our head, 'Want You To Know' by Freelance Hellraiser.

Want you to know, you make me happy
Want you to know, you make me sad
Want you to know, you make me happy
You are the best thing that I ever had

Want you to know, you make me happy
Want you to know, you make me happy

Counting Men

One little, two little, three little...arg. Counting Puerto Rico colonists was never a fun job - depending on our games, we had to set out 55, 75 or 95 of these little brown pieces. Initial games set up saw us counting stacks of 5 or 10, hoping not to lose count or drop the pieces off the table etc.

Then one day RoB shows us how it's done - by taking to cards and making a trianglular stack out of the pieces. And when he did that we mentally slapped outselves on the forehead for not seeing it any sooner: a bloody tablet counter!

We've already made 3 so far: the first prototype is residing in Mage Cafe for use with their Puerto Rico set, the second is still with us and the third one is for RoB for giving us the idea (and because he asked).

So far we've only been able to find the ideal A4 hard board (not too sure the specific name for this) in many many colours in CzipLee, at RM1 per piece. Naturally the prototype and MkI is in green while RoB's MkII is in bright red. There's only one problem we have with the counters - the cellophane tape that we use. We wholeheartedly support 3M's Scotch Magic Tape because the adhesive isn't too strong (it's perfect for our book wrapping), but unfortunately it couldn't hold up the sides long enough before giving way.

Here's RoB's MkII. Our only gripe is that while we'd obliged him an ambigram as well, we ended up doing it while being rather distracted, thus the ambigram turned out...sucky. Worse than sucky. If ever we get a better inspiration we'll print out a better copy for RoB to stick over the current one. Another lesson learned - stick to 4H for sketching, forget about ever drawing with a 2B. Totally not for us.

RoB owes us RM1 for the counter :) we haven't started charging for service yet. Sucky ambigram is free.

Prototype model hard at work counting PR colonists. Can you count the men? It's 6 rows = 21 men! We have this habit where we count (rows) + (balance) and it throws people off course...
Janvier: "9 plus 5..."
Whoever's overhearing: "14."
Janvier: "No, 50." *doesn't bother explaining*
Once finished with the counting just pour the men out from the gap on the top.

Edit: We realised as we were writing this post that we haven't any photo to demostrate what and how a tablet counter works nor how Puerto Rico colonists look like for those not in the know. We were hoping to hop over to Mage to get a quick photo using the Prototype model and post up within the day but whatwith events that followed all we wanted to do was sleep. Anyway photo's up.

"On Hiatus?"

So FeR asks. We just haven't been behaving well so we thought it best to lay low, although we did learn that isolation has to be done in moderation - we almost overdid it a fair bit of times. Being a bit of a conservative and watching over your own shoulder means that we just don't say much about it if we can (although body language and attitude said a lot more), or, if we do, have to say it elsewhere (some Cardinal Truth had to be talked about).

Anyways, FeR's done up the wedding post and is asking for pics. We had shaky hands, so didn't take much (if it was even us taking the shots). Today managed to identify the uncle and aunty sitting behind our table that was bugging our memory throughout the entire night - they weren't our parents' friends, but friend's parents ('Ward's, to be exact).

:s

Good thing didn't say hi and intro ourselves as so-and-so's son, the utter confusion and embarrassment would have killed us.

What few photos we have are up in Flickr, non-embossed at the moment.

Edit: the embossed versions are now on Flickr, tell us if you haven't snagged them yet and we'll email them to you if you want them.