What's up in June

Started off a gloomy Sunday with a hot bath and a healthy breakfast which consists of: two petit pains au chocolat, a cup of mocha and half a tub of a 200g muller light strawberry yogurt. Plans for the rest of the day: update blog (on it now), do some 'Work' work ( presumably it would occupy my whole Sunday ), watch F1, go to the gym, do laundry and then clean my room. Productive? Or boring? Haha...

Actually wanted to go down central london yesterday to check out the Summer Sales. Unfortunately with the 'bomb' incident in Haymarket, I thought better avoid getting close to anywhere central london for the time being. I would imagine the transport links going havoc...mind you, it's England...And so, went to Brent Cross Shopping Centre in Hendon instead. First time to the mall. And it was packed! Yea I know it's Saturday...Sales everywhere but I ended up buying all full-priced items. I think I need someone to teach me how to buy On Sales stuff!!! For some reasons I just find those items on sale not captivating...What I bought: a pair of Firetrap shoe (love it), two tops from Republic and a dress from Kookai (love it as well ).

Another incident happened last week, my vaio laptop got infected by a worm. I was downloading some games from Limewire, and thinking it's just a game, ran the executable and the stupid worm copied itself to my windows system folder and stopped some other windows executables from running. Having not being able to run cmd or taskmgr, I can't stop the freaking worm from running. Formatting is the ever last thing I would wanna do!!! And so, searched for some solutions on the net and came across Cyber Tech Help, which provides free online techie help. And...problem solved after fixing some p2p files.

Oh yea, after coming back from NY, got infected by the "must-have-been-a-US-virus" and started coughing . And so wasn't that productive for the first two weeks after my holidays. Went to Boots and ask them to recommend some medic for reducing phlegm. Catarrh pastilles...and I'd say it worked. Cough died down after two days, and having consumed two and a half pastilles, LOL. By the way, would welcome advice from doctors and medic experts for other cough solutions.

New York, Niagara Falls, Boston Breakaway

Ferried to Liberty Island and Ellis Island for Statue of Liberty and the Immigration Hall on Ellis Island; Ground Zero where the Twin Towers once stood, now fenced around construction of the memorial park and Freedom Tower; Strolled around Financial District and Battery Park City


Got tickets for Avenue Q from TKTS, Times Square; Went up Empire State Observatory; Visited American Museum of Natural History and Rose Ctr; BTW, Avenue Q is really good! Very funny...a must watch Broadway! And you should really check him out - Howie Michael Smith haha 0:)


Flown to Buffalo Niagara for Niagara Falls American Tour; Went on Maid of the Mist (white boat with ppl in blue raincoats) Boat Trip which brought us really close up to the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls; Cave of the Winds trip - walked up some stairs really close to the falls; And of course, Buffalo Wings at Hard Rock Cafe


Walked along Boston Freedom Trail, Harvard and MIT campus; Lovely seafood with lobster meal @ Legal Seafoods and Quincy Market


More of NY, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Ctr...had Mexican at Rosa Mexicano, Korean at Seoul Garden, really yummy xiao long bao at Old Shanghai and cheesecake at Europa Cafe (with our unsuccessful search of Cheesecake Factory which might have really good NY cheesecakes!)


Shopping, shopping, shopping at Macy's (good stuff!), Soho & Broadway, Fifth Avenue(although it's more like admiring the shops and window shopping on this street); Cool shops with DJs in Guess and A/X; Sony Wonder Technology lab - fun place to experience things like TV broadcasting, Electronices stuff, video editing etc etc...it's free and you get a cert by the end of the so called self guided tour :). Other interesting shops: FAO Schwarz, MAC, NBA, Prada (haha). Oh yea we also took the bus from Port Authority to Woodbury Common, a factory outlet, has really good bargains!


Along Museum Mile, Guggenheim Museum which is depressingly under Exterior Construction :(, Metropolitan Museum of Art (has quite interesting combination of arts and artefacts exhibits); Central Park

Quote of the day

There is once that I thought you've changed...
But I suddenly realised you've not...
I think I did...

How to get to Paris from New York - Ref: Google Maps

Got this from Hui Leng's blog...

Follow the instructions below for your dose of laughter for the day:
Go to Google Maps
Click on "Get directions" tab
Enter in the first text field: New York, New York
Enter in second text field: Paris, France
Click "Get Directions" button
Read line 24

ID Inspiration - Stairs - The Holiday

From the bottom...


And up...


and up again.


Bird eye view

Capturing WMP Images

And so...

I watched The Holiday the other day and Cameron Diaz's house in LA gave me a tinge of ID inspiration. The stair case caught my attention. Thus, I was trying to capture the image of the stairs from Windows Media Player playing the movie. After a few failed attempts using Pause and Print Screens, Full Screen and Print Screen etc etc, I thought why not search for some solution. And viola, straight to the answer.

There are actually a few methods to do it:
a. Simply do a CTRL-I and WMP will prompt you to save the captured image to the disk.
b. In WMP, go to Tools -> Options -> Performance Tab and reduce the "Video acceleration" from the default full to none. Restart with the file you want to play and do a ALT-PrtSc to copy the image to the clipboard

There you go...I prefer the first method ;)

May Day May Day

May Updates...

It's a boring and gloomy Sunday today. The weather turned crap this week. Where is all the sunshine?!?!?!?! Ugghh disgusted, totally disgusted with the weather and for the fact that I suddenly realised I've completed most of the stuff on my list of things to do, I felt bored ONCE again

And so was surfing the web for evening gowns for mum, setting up iGoogle...oh wow didn't notice it was quite useful cos I've always used My Yahoo! Not that Yahoo! is not good, but I would say Google made an effort to keep up? Not sure which one has the service first, but I'd used My Yahoo! for quite a while now... So far, wuts' in my google home page is: Weather forecast (still haven't take the time to figure out how to display more than one place...I have a big list in my yahoo!), daily horoscope, BBC News, A ToDo List and Calorie Counter by LabPixies hehe , Jamie Oliver's recipes, dictionary.com, word and quotes of the day and World Cup Scores (?uh?...not sure why it is there? but it just happens to be)

Been to two gigs so far...Lost Prophets in Wembley Arena and 30 Seconds to Mars, London Astoria. Comments? Lost Prophets performance and stage set up etc are quite cool. Although I would say the sound system ain't that great. Prolly cos it's quite a big venue. 30 Secs to Mars...awww Jared Leto was so cool!...Really good ;)...although we waited for almost two hours before they came out! It's all worth it!

Work stuff, things died down a bit these days...mostly working on minor projects stuff, enhancements and bug fixes etc. Was making bookings and planning for NY trip next month! Can't wait! Gee how I wish I had more holidays and money to spend on those holidays LoL...On top of that, am totally broke this month for buying two Karen Millen dresses which I can't resist not buying! Hit me! Hit me hard! I need to wake up!

Besides feeling bored on a slack Sunday, I've actually have some other stuff to follow up...Call STA to send me my youth card, book boston's bus tickets, buy air ticket back home for Sept, etc, etc.

Sent out a parcel back home yesterday. And guess what it contains...A gift for Mum...for whatever occassion she wanted it for...Mother's Day or her Birthday (her bd's early next month), a belated birthday card for bro, a mother's day card, a birthday card for mum and a father's day card...LOL...cheapskate me tot why not send everything at once! Well my another excuse would be that I don't have to sneak out to the post office during office hours ;)!