forgot to mention this, i met radio69 at jalan kayu while having prata with kannan and ocean. jolly old chap is kind of taking a break from cycling...

shot the morning wedding today at the sri mariammam temple. got there early, shot like machine gunner. that's bad. i must learn to set a limit on the number of shots taken - shutter life's not free. eileen (debster's longtime chum) was there as well - i forgot that she was teaching in the same school as the bride... oops!

went to do ojt with the blue water volunteers over at sentosa, met jingling, danwei, bernard, kim yong and wai. not as much stuff as kusu, but then again, we can only expect to see the most stuff during... diving!

jeanette must have "miss lucky" as her middle name! she got herself a spankin' new polar axn500 heartrate monitor by just attending the polar axn series launch at fort canning tonight. of course, how did i know? because i was there watching from a hundred meters from the stage where she received it!

was introduced to kenneth by handbag, an obs instructor (ok, so i didn't ask what his appointment was...), who also did the action asia race. asmah, harry, ee pin... the same old group was there in force. must admit, adrian's english was a little... stagefrightened? sounded a little shaky...

earlier in the day, i met up with doorbell to resell off the avid rollermajig that i have now no use for, since i'm changing soon to sram esp shifting (tata shimano!)... later at sim lim square with handbag, i bumped into old platoonmate peter, and tada! i'm 65 bucks closer to my new bike... ok, ok, so i didn't win that heartrate monitor that jeanette got, but still 65 bucks closer to my new bike is such an uplifting experience!

but should the wheels be uh... "m.i.a.", that may mean that i'll get back $249.95 from colin... which means i'm that same amount closer (+ $65 from today) to my new bike! *overjoyed*

almost got run into by a bmw in seletar camp's west camp road on wednesday evening on my way back home... what a close shave. so yesterday i went to the traffic police headquarters to hand in my complaint personally.

last night was also the mike mangini drum clinic. for the first time, i saw single-handed rolls... just plainly incredible! believe it or not, he holds the record of the most drum strokes per minute, at a rate of over 1000 per minute - you saw it correct, one thousand! imagine hearing a drum roll on a single hand - it was so incredible reading about it, but to see it, it's just a mouth-dropper!

and what i thought was a "simple" but "fast" song on steve vai's fire garden, bangkok and the fire garden suite, were amazing pieces when mangini played along to the click tracks. never have i seen this technical drumming before... now i'm really open to such technicality... and know that portnoy isn't the only odd-time guru...


the man himself, mike mangini and me, after the autograph session

shot for a unit their "big shot" visit on friday; that night i cycled to terry's place to pass him the loaned 17-40. got caught in the light rain for probably two hours...

saturday night was spent at the uwcs first birthday bash... but oddly enough, i was totally flat out of energy - spent probably more than 15 hours' worth sleeping...

monday was a boring flat energy day - and today i went back to mandai to get my mini-dv tape encoded into digital format. imagine my horror when i learnt that 3 minutes of video at 720 x 576 @ 15 fps, 4:1 ima audio compression @ 44.1 khz, mono would take almost 300 megabytes!

met chin siong, one of my ex-vs schoolmates as i was crammed up on service 169 going home yesterday evening. had dinner together at s-11 amk, before we took a common bus and parted ways.

today morning i did a 3+k run, then changed and headed for a swim workout - my balance in the water has improved somewhat - keeping in mind what jeanette told me during that class she conducted for me.

had a fallout with my op spec lim in the afternoon, when i curiously lost my cool. i wonder why too, that i was on a short fuse today. thankfully it's settled now, phew...

cycled to seng aik's place to loan a lens in the evening, and met up with terry as well. total today - approximately 48k cycling and 1k swim. good workout!

went to kusu island yesterday with the blue water volunteers - surprisingly i met angie and adeline from nie. angie is not the wife of gorilla, but from the pgde program. turns out adeline also knows mr black rose aka siva.

saw a fair bit more diverse stuff than at pasir ris (duh!) - including - carpet anemones, plenty of ascidians, sponges, corals (yeah, pasir ris doesn't have 'em), hard corals, soft corals, a peacock sole, an octupus, sea stars, some fishing crab, and probably a flatworm infested coral colony. i said, probably.


at low tide, interesting flora and fauana can be found on
local shores. a carpet anemone bunches itself up to prevent
drying out as the water ebbs. clownfish, or more correctly,
anemonefish, call such anemones home. the centre spot is the
mouth and anus of the animal
©ngoh seh suan, 2004


surprisingly, one of the bwv guides, jolyn, made a guess and got it correct - we were indeed from the same primary school - just different classes! i also met hanrong, one of the ex-vs guys who was a volunteer too. with the laid-back culture, it seems enticing for me to join them too...

went with lim to stansfield college on friday evening to check out the course outline for the degree in banking and finance. at least we left knowing the structure of the course, which is a boon for me too, should i intend to do something similar in the future.


in a flashback about one month ago, there was a playground that
caught fire. could it have been attributed to sparklers being
burnt at the synthetic-based grounds that the fires started?
©ngoh seh suan, 2004

what's worse than being surrounded by fools?

facing one fool who is as capable as a bunch of fools.

i can't believe it. i'm facing one person who gives me the description of the latter at camp almost daily (heck, remember it's a 5-day week?)

imagine these:

standing half-f***ed, right hand tucked in the rear pocket. left hand probably grabbing on to a pen, half-holding it and biting the pen's pocket clip with the teeth.

can't stand straight at all. never have i seen him not standing with a heavy slouch.

no sense of pride that can be picked up by others visually.

lack of common sense - to look around aimlessly, going "HUH?" and giving a puzzled face, instead of moving a just-unplugged shredder to the closest wall socket.

complaining the next day he came back to work, that the office i cleaned up together with another colleague, was messy. he doesn't even bother to pick up the handful of markers when our rsm kicked it away in disgust.

in my years of doing work and national service, this is the utmost disgrace. how am i supposed to treat this person, as a person instead of that fool that i mentioned in the "riddle" earlier? and i thought, when i first came to the brigade, that the others were picking on him. and the "best" thing he did to me? we were at a dinner at sembawang park, i turned to talk to the colleague sitting on my left - this fool was on my right - so when i finished talking to the colleague of mine, and faced the table, i had two large pieces of used tissue paper right in front of me. guess who put them there? our fool.

a couple of days after the cleaned-up office issue... i found this broken-off pocket clip from a pen that he uses. guess who bit the clip off with the teeth and left it on the table for me to clear it for him?

he thinks too highly of himself. so what if you were from debating in njc? so what if you were from acs (i)? you don't give anyone the sense that you can survive in the real world. you don't have proper respect to superiors and seniors in camp. and you think you are the most senior one around? you're only a non-combat fit, totally unfit person who's still showing that green-and-black checkered boxers under your issued pt shorts on our runs and warmups. are you aware you are giving yourself a really bad rap? did you know that the reason why people talk to you condescendingly is because we don't want to get worked up over how you talk? can you cut your "uhhhs" and incessant loud humming to yourself? the people around you are not deaf. being from debate doesn't make you more special. what i do know is, you are severely lacking in communication skills - if you don't do anything about it, debator or not, "official or non-official", you will suffer. not me, not any other person, but you. i have never come across an aural stumbling block of a debator, how he did debate in jc, i really wonder.

i believe i said it before - even my primary schoolkids can do waaay better. i sure hope he reads it, and digests it and changes for the better.

got myself some great deals yesterday - one pair of oury grips for 5 bucks, one pair of hutchinson cameleon tires for 24, two pairs of defeet socks each for 10 bucks to make another 20...

the minister for defence paid us a visit over at the exercise venue. we gave his aide a set of our the bat times as a parting gift...

while one the bus from over from seng aik's to orchard, gary the cyclist spotted me on the bus. when i arrived at plaza singapura to draw some cash out, i spotted ivan lim from 95s44 too.

i got my ticket for the mike mangini drum clinic at music plaza - then when i left, i happened to meet vincent ng. no wonder i didn't see him at the action asia race - he said he had an injury to his meniscus.

then while leaving plaza singapura - i saw andy and his girlfriend. almost meeting the whole world in one night?...

last night i hitched another ride to potong pasir, courtesy of my bde rsm. along the way, i've learnt to look at him differently. he's more human than his typical carriage tells of him; and he gave some advice to me that i feel are indeed genuine - topics such as general planning for the long term, a dash of finances, a sense of ownership of being a singaporean, and some other stuff i can't really recall off-hand now.

on the topic of ownership as a singaporean, he said that if i've had that feeling of wanting to pick that piece of litter that is strewn around our place, then i would not be the typical indifferent "singaporean", because i've taken a sense of ownership of where i stay. this i gladly agree - i was amazed in my earlier years, because lee phui mun would actually go on her rounds of the vjc campus, and actually pick up litter to throw away. you don't normally see that of your principal, do you? i must attribute my keen sense of ownership to her, because had i not see it, i wouldn't have seen her humble side, despite comments about her being high-handed, and unfeeling.

reminds me of which, i better get a sense of ownership of what i call "my room", because it's in a damned mess still!

but realistically, most of the small little things that we foul up on, can be traced back to a lack of ownership. late for school? lack of ownership over the fact that one should be punctual, or even early for school. losing one's 11b, or handphone? lack of ownership. loss of girlfriend? loss of ownership... of each other.

one of the things that i forgot to mention about the last post i wrote, was that i'm seeing the longer term truth about being attached/hitched. i'm not uncommittal, but when the word "finances" pop up in a relation, the actual headache of having one breadwinner while the other looks after the newborn etc, makes me ponder, if i should live my life by myself, and do the stuff i enjoy anyway. i wrote some time back too, that i enjoy the feeling of "being away from it all" when i was in tioman - heck, i still miss that feeling to date - and i still want to do marathons, biathlons, triathlons, and perhaps one day, adventure racing too - but how will i be able to come across a girl who has the same interests too? i mean, i still can do those sports being hitched to a sedentary girl, but there would be quality time lost. why quality time? it's only through hardship of these sports, that i learn more about myself. like last saturday when i was contemplating quitting because i did the dead slowest swim i did in a long long time, and i thought of cutting my losses because my left knee was agonizing me with each step i took; but i carried on anyway, and after some analysis, i still held on to the 20th rank for the fastest run leg for the men's open category, though the time of 23++ minutes for the 5k is nothing to crow about.

it wouldn't be fair to say that i have a dream girl, because it's one-sided, but names like jeanette and vicky pop will come up if i'm hard-pressed for it. like it says on jeanette's site,

"i have fought the good fight... i have finished the race... i have kept the faith - 2 timothy 4:7

racing in a triathlon, puts three forms of exercise fatigue on an individual, regardless of being amateur, or professional. even professional triathletes will have at a time or other, a feeling of wanting to cut their losses and pull out from a race. i'm reminded of a time when i read of a one-liner about running a marathon - "the half-marathon mark is the toughest - it's where you have to decide between wanting to quit and wanting to carry on." i've said it before that sport is how i found myself, and learnt more about myself, never will i quit it. no sport, no me.

sport forver.

i gave a little thought to that idea again, after talking to s3 on the ride over to redhill. he said, that it would be hard to change a career, or a major life decision once a person has started a family. indeed.

there's an interesting sight to behold at the current temporary food centre just beside the train station - there's a couple of folks there, running a makeshift getai, singing songs... might be a rare sight for most of us not living in the area.