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I’m the sort of person who really can’t care less about a wedding ceremony. I always joked with one of my colleagues that the easiest thing would be to elope, and then used the money for the downpayment of a house, or to go on holiday, or something more usefull than a wedding ceremony.

I told T awhile back that I’d like a really small wedding, just immediate family, and to have it at a beach. My one requirement was that I’d have Josh Groban and Andrea Bocelli performing LIVE as I walked down the aisle. Of course, his comment was, “Good luck with that!”. I’ve always been fans of their singing, in fact, more often than not, their CDs will be the ones playing in my car as I drive to work.

So, I was reading someone’s blog a few days ago, and they mentioned that Josh Groban performed at the Emmy awards, and he sang a medley of TV songs. That really intrigued me, and this morning, I went to YouTube and searched for his performance. It was really cool, he sang theme songs from shows like Friends, The Brady Bunch, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and even Baywatch (?!?). The theme songs were from older songs, around the time that I started watching TV. It’d probably not be familiar to a lot of the younger kids, but it was right up my alley. There were a couple of songs that even I wasn’t so familiar with. Overall, it was a very fun performance, especially the Muppets and X-Files bit! Have I caught your attention yet? Well, here’s the link, so you can watch it for yourself!

These past few weeks have seemed quite heavy on the game-playing for me. I’ve started playing with my PS2 again, after a break of a couple of months. The game I’m playing now is Persona FES, which is a Japanese-y kind of RPG.

In the game, you play a boy attending school during the day. At night, there is a period of time called the “Dark Hour”. Only certain people are aware of this time, others become unconscious. Of course, you are one of those that can detect this special time, and your task is to check out this huge tower called Tartarus. During the day, you go to school, and are able to create Social Links with other people, as well as increase your Academic / Charm / Courage stats. And by night, you battle in Tartarus.

It’s fairly interesting thus far, I’ve reached level 20+ in Tartarus. The annoying thing about the game is the tiredness factor, after battling in Tartarus, either myself or my party members will get tired. If you continue battling in this condition, your characters will fall sick, and take even longer to recover. I seem to be getting tired all the time! Oh, and another thing that causes you to get tired is by studying late at night.

Other than my PS2, I’ve also been playing with my DS. I started playing Spore Creatures about two weeks ago, it’s quite a cute game! You are a creature that has the ability to evolve, and you can get new body parts by completing quests / fighting other monsters. You get new arms, legs, tails, mouths, and more! Each body part has a different functionality, for example, new arms will give you higher attack power. There are many creatures on the different continents that you explore, some are enemies, and some can become your friends. You can befriend them by “cuddling” them, which involves moving your stylus back and forth across their bodies, or by dancing with them, which is a mini rhythm game. Once you’ve made friends with them, they may give you a new body part. You can also ask them to join you in battle!

It’s a mission based game, and is fairly straightforward. In fact, I finished the game over one weekend! The one thing I found annoying was one mini-game which had to be completed in order to proceed with the storyline. You had to throw stones at these creatures who were coming to steal your food. I found it really difficult, it felt like a lot of random tapping on the screen to try and guess where the creatures were going to go. I almost quit the game because of that part, but after some perseverance, I finally managed to complete it.

After Spore Creatures, I moved on to Puzzle Quest - Challenge of the Warlords. It’s basically a Bejewelled game, but with a twist! There are elements of RPG-ness in the game, you play the part of a Warlord, trying to complete various interlinked quests. As you play Bejewelled, each coloured tokens collect Mana / Experience Points / Money. With enough Mana, you can cast spells on your opponent. It’s not as simple as it sounds, because your opponent takes turns with you, and also can attack you! It was really attention holding, and one of my colleagues and his wife are now hooked on it as well.

Puzzle Quest didn’t hold my attention for too long, I moved on again shortly after that to Rune Factory - A Fantasy Harvest Moon. I loved Harvest Moon on the PS1, no other Harvest Moon game entertained me as well. I tried a few on the PS2, but it didn’t seem that good. With Rune Factory, all that has changed. It combines Harvest Moon, and RPG! You play a farmer (of course), and you get to do the standard Harvest Moon things, like plant crops, fishing, mining, but you also get to fight! There are monsters that appear in the caves, and you have to defeat them, and the boss, in order to proceed to the next cave.

A few comments, I find the RP a bit annoying. In order to do anything (eg. chop wood, break stones), you need RP. And RP runs out really quickly! In the previous Harvest Moon game, you could regenerate your health really easily, by sitting in the hot springs at any time of day. For this one, you can only do it once the hot springs opens, which is at 3pm. So, I run out of RP in the morning, and need to wait till afternoon before I can do anything else! Also, collecting wood seems to take ages. In order to upgrade your house, you need wood, which can be obtained by chopping the logs / stumps. In the previous game, you could also buy the wood, but here, you can’t. Which means waiting ages for wood to grow, and chop it! I’m still playing it at the moment, but I’m not sure how much longer I will last, unless I find another way to replenish my RP quickly.

What a bloodthirsty title, but I AM feeling rather bloodthirsty at the moment! A few days ago, my computer got infected with a Win32 Trojan. I kept getting fake popups, saying that Windows Firewall has detected a problem. The name keeps on changing (the most recent ones I got were Trojan-Spy.Win32.KeyLogger.aa and Trojan-Spy.Win32.GreenScreen). Not only that, it seems to have quite a few other side effects as well.

The first thing I noticed was that my Ctrl+Alt+Delete wasn’t working. It kept saying that the Task Manager had been disabled by an administrator. Hm, well, I’m the administrator, aren’t I? I definitely don’t remember I ran all AVG, Spybot, and Lavasoft Ad-Aware, and they removed some of the problems, but there seem to be more lurking around. All the scans kept saying that my machine was clean, but I know better than that! To fix the Task Manager problem, I downloaded a nifty program from here, and that got it working again.

That was a much needed fix, because another thing I noticed was that my Firefox browser kept hanging. And to close it, I can only Ctrl+Alt+Delete to end the process. ^&*(^%$^&5!! I thought that maybe if I upgraded to Firefox 3, it might solve the problem, so I did that, and…no such luck. It still kept hanging. Also, when I added a post to my blog, it just took the title, and left out all the content, so I had to re-type it all over again. *sigh* There were a few other problems, like dropdowns not working, and my Yahoo Mail content not showing up. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, but that doesn’t work either.

So now, I’m running all the anti-virus & adware programs, for what seems like the umpteenth time. I’ve tried Googling it, but I haven’t found a proper solution yet. I’m in the middle of downloading Kapersky’s trial anti-virus program, and if that doesn’t work, I have no idea what else to do! Well, if I find something that works, I’ll be sure to post an update, just in case anyone else is experiencing the same problems.

*Edit: Well, I’ve finally managed to get rid of most of the issues plaguing my computer. It was solved by two things. One was downloading Malwarebytes’ Anti Malware and scanning my machine with it. Secondly, was a comment that I found on one of the many forums that I was reading. These were the steps that I used:

   1. Wait for trojan to appear then run task manager by pressing ctrl +alt + delete.
   2. Go to Applictions - right click on problem task and left lick on - go to process, record image name of file and end process.
   3. Go to Start, select Search and type in file name for search.
   4. Left click on result name go to file and open Containing folder.
   5. Move folder/file to desktop.
   6. Run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware click on More Tools tab and then run File Assassin tool.
   7. Locate problem file on desk top and run tool.
   8. A notification will come up advising that the file will be removed on start up - reboot computer and hey presto the troublesome trojan has gone.

I hope if anyone else is having the same problem, this will help you as it helped me!

Would it come as a surprise if I told people that I have high cholestrol at the advanced age of 25? Actually, I’ve had high cholestrol since my first cholestrol check two years ago, so I suppose I can say that I had high cholestrol since 23. My mum always blames it on the food I eat, but hey, she eats really healthy food, and she has almost as high cholestrol as I do! I tell people that for the extra 0.1 that my cholestrol is higher than hers, I enjoy my food so much more than she does.

It’s so hard to eat “healthily”, healthy food always tastes so blah. Oatmeal lowers cholestrol, oh yes, I would love to eat oatmeal compared to a nice cheesy pizza. Yeah, right! When my dinner finishes at 8pm, it’s so tempting to dip into the pint of ice cream sitting in my freezer at 11pm. Or the piles of chocolates in the office whenever someone comes back from a holiday.

On my dad’s friend’s advice, I’m now on medication for one month to lower my cholestrol. After that, it’ll be up to me to maintain it. It doesn’t come cheap either, at a price of RM144 for 30 tablets. That’s almost RM5 per tablet! If only my company’s benefits were better… I suppose if we were talking about “if onlys” there would be so much more to say. If only I exercised more. If only both my parents didn’t have high cholestrol, perhaps I wouldn’t have high cholestrol either. If only our insurance benefits were better…

Speaking of insurance, I met up with my insurance agent yesterday. She was refreshing my memory on my existing plan, and of course, trying to upsell me some new plans. I wonder though, why should I increase my coverage? Yes, if I were to die, my beneficiaries would get extra money, but I’m dead! I don’t have any children, nor am I married, so the person to benefit would be my brother. Hmm, maybe I should think again about it some more.

When you speak to an insurance agent, getting a critical injury / dying never seems so good before. “Oh, if you have a critical illness, you get X amount of money, and your premiums for the rest of your life will be FOC!” Sounds appealing, doesn’t it? Even losing a toe / finger would earn you some money. Anyone want to chop of one of my toes? That seems to be one of the least important limbs!

I’ve been back for almost a week now, and I figured that it was about time I posted about my recent holiday (prompted by seeing Tsin’s Tioman pictures. Since I’m somewhat motivated, I should do it now or else it’ll never get done! *Warning*: Picture intensive post!

We got the MAS RM0 flight to Manila, so the flight tickets came up to RM400+ for the taxes, whereas normally it would cost 2k? For that price, I figured it didn’t matter what the airplane food was like. :p Mine was plum sauce chicken, if you look really closely, you can see the rice at the top was all hardened.

Terence’s asam fish

When we landed at Manila, my friend’s driver came to pick us up. On the ride back to the apartment, I was looking out of the window. The traffic wasn’t much of a culture shock, I guess once you’ve experienced Hanoi, most places aren’t too bad! Once we dumped our luggage, our first destination was shopping We went to a nearby complex called Market Market. I was on the lookout for balut, I’m not sure whether I would have actually eaten one, but at least I wanted to see what it looked like before deciding. Unfortunately, the only balut I saw was already the cooked version, and looked a bit boring.

Our loot after two hours of shopping. Only the purple dress and the black one are mine, btw!

Shopping was really cheap there, of course, you need to go for the non-branded stuff! We were walking around the ‘fashion bazaar’, and a lot of the stuff there looks like clothes you can get from branded places here. Like my purple dress, I saw something really similar that was being sold at Zara. The difference? Probably a hundred dollars or so. Mine cost a grand total of RM20! We didn’t stay out long, as our flight the next day was at 6.30am.

The plane from Manila to Caticlan

Ferry from Caticlan to Boracay Island

The main transportation mode in Boracay

The hotel that we stayed at - WestCove

The view from our hotel room. Gorgeous, isn’t it? This is one of my fav pics, one person who saw it even said that it was so nice, it looked fake!

Our hotel

Main shopping / eating area of Boracay

At night, the restaurants will set up tables and chairs on the beach, so this is the view you get whilst having dinner

Went island hopping for one day + snorkeling. One of the boats was the one that we took. Look at how clear the water is!

One of the works of art. They build sand masterpieces like that, and charge people to take a picture with it! This was taken by me, sneakily, from the dinner table.

Back in Manila, and off to Krispy Kreme! That guy was taking two free donuts for us.

OK, that’s enough pictures for now. I didn’t put in that many of the beach, did I? Hmm..just one more then, so you get the idea of how nice it was!

Fun in the sun!

Last night, I went for the opening performance of Beauty & the Beast at Plenary Hall. Normally, I wouldn’t go for opening night, I always have this idea in my head that opening night is never as good as it could be, because there would be minor glitches here and there, which they need to iron out. However, this time, my dad was buying the tickets to celebrate his 70th birthday, and he wanted to go for the opening performance. His reasoning was that since it was the opening performance, there should be something “special”. Who was I to argue, after all, it was a free ticket!

We got there in plenty of time for the beginning. My dad was astonished that for a RM250 ticket, we were seated so far at the back! Such is the pricing of musicals over here… Anyway, they started late, about 8.20pm. At one stage, people started clapping to try and get them to start. I’ve never really experienced a musical like this starting late, I’m not sure whether it was of problems, or they were trying to start a bit later because the hall was quite empty, and people were still coming in.

When it started, I felt a sense of nostalgia. Beauty & the Beast was the first movie I watched in the cinemas with my mum ages ago. I’ve always loved the soundtrack, you can’t go wrong most of the time with Alan Menken and Tim Rice! The singers / actors that were particularly good were Belle, Gaston, and Lumiere (the candlestick). Belle’s acting wasn’t great, but I think her singing was really good. And Gaston was excellent, both acting and singing! Lumiere’s acting was really funny, he had a snooty French accent and he played his part to perfection.

One of the things that really spoilt the play was their sound system. There were static sounds most of the time, and at times, the mikes went off, so we were unable to hear them. Most noticeable was when Mrs Potts sang the theme song, and her mike went off, and we missed the first line and a half of it.

Towards the end, the tension was building up when the villagers + Gaston came beast-hunting. It was at the fight scene with Gaston and the Beast, and Gaston had just thrown the Beast off the railing, when the lights went dim. Then this voice came out…”Ladies & Gentleman, we are experiencing technical difficulties. Please bear with us, and we will try and resume as soon as possible.” ?!?!? What a mood breaker! I was already drafting out a letter to Yvents in my mind, saying things like “Pay for expensive tickets, get bad performance and disruptions”. Luckily, it resumed after about 5 - 10 minutes.

I feel for the performers, they did nothing wrong and they were really good, but people will have a bad impression of the musical because of the sound + disruption. My conclusion is that I will try never to go for opening night again!