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I could not believe my eyes as this scene unfold in front of me. I had heard and read about the ugly side of Singaporeans when they took public transport but this was really unbelievable!

I was on the NorthEast line heading towards Chinatown station to switch to the EastWest line when this happened. A father with his 2 children decided to occupy the whole row of seats on the train so that they could lay down and have a quick nap. The father was sitting in the center while his 2 children lay across the seats. How convenient. I got this photo from Stomp. The child was seated this way.

It’s way too ridiculous. Though it was not the peak hours yet but there were other passengers who paid the same fare and was standing in front of them! Even though the children were sleepy, it was wrong for them to do that. The children might not understand this but surely the father knew better.

An elderly passenger board the train after a few stops and stood by the side, waiting for the father to wake the children. This never happened. The father simply ignored his existence and pretend to make an “important” call to his business partner. This was totally unforgivable. What kind of teaching was he passing on to his 2 children?

I decided to give up my seat to this poor man while staring at the goons. I deeply regretted not snapping his photo and send it to stomp. After all, there was a section dedicated to this ugly commuters in Singapore. This might be happening on the train everyday as no one even raised an eyebrow to reprimand the father’s action.

There were many inconsiderate commuters in Singapore. Take the picture on the right for example. Would you approached the lady and request her to remove the bags from the seats?

Most Singaporeans would just mind their own business in this case. And this commuters just got away with their inconsiderate deeds. I didn’t notice this at all while travelling on the MRT in Bangkok.

In fact, the Thais gave up their seats to those that needed it more. Why wasn’t this happening in Singapore? Was it because the teachers never touch on moral education or the values taught by the parents were all wrong?

We even have to run campaigns to educate commuters to stand on the left while using the escalator. To further insult ourselves, yellow lines and boxes were drawn to educated the commuters where to stand while waiting for the trains.

When will we ever behave like a first class citizen?

I was reading The Keropok – Singapore Daily Photo and decided to share this in reference to this entry. That photo of the green chess board was taken in Bishan Park if you needed to find it.

This was taken while on holiday at Hard Rock Hotel, Bali. Yes you guess it. Life Size Chess Pieces! In order to move those pieces, you had to physically shift them as the game progressed. A mental and physical game with this chess pieces.

I knew nothing about chess and how the game was supposed to be played. There was too many can do and must do. Guess I would need to read up Chess for Dummies!

This granny not only can sing, act and blog. Now she even have her own music video! To label her as granny, in my opinion is an insult! I mean how many of the senior citizens are as cool and hip like her? Most of the ones I know are just waiting for God to call them back.

Instead of resting at home to enjoy life, she chose to appear on the Big Screen, blogs and now even have her own music video. How cool can that be? I think by now you know who am I talking about. She is none other than Lao Zha Bor.

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Isn’t it interesting?

Another buddy of mine took the walk down the red carpet last evening. Maybe it was time for me to settle down as well. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my freedom and wasn’t really into the marriage thing. At least not for now.

Marriage is the next big step in a relationship. It does scare me actually. From a boy to a man then someone’s husband follow by fatherhood and finally grandfather. Am I really aging that fast? Oh man, back to the topic.

We had known each others for years and I was really happy for him that he found his love. He was someone that enjoy freedom and live life one day at a time. He always told me that his wedding would be special and different from the others. Imagine the surprise on my face when he told me that his wedding would be held at Aramsa the garden spa!

I being the traditional man started thinking,”That was unusual. Which spa would be big enough to host 20 tables?” Chinese wedding usually would have a eight or ten course dinner in a wedding. Keeping an open mind, I went down on his big day last evening. There was one thing which I hated when attending weddings. I wasn’t sure what to wear. If it was in a hotel, formal clothes would be the choice but this time it’s in a spa. What am I suppose to wear? After tossing all my clothes out of the wardrobe, I finally decided to go causal. BB had a good laugh looking at me paraded my clothes after one another.

Since I was very late, decided to take a cab down to Bishan Park where the spa was. I had a funny feeling that the cabs were playing hide and seek with me. I was waiting at this side of the street but the cab kept coming from the opposite side. BB decided to cross the street and wait but once we crossed the street, empty cabs started to come on the opposite end. I almost pull out my hair in frustration. Finally a cab came along but he didn’t know how to get to the spa. In the end, paid almost $15 bucks to get to the park but the spa was at the other end of it. Crap! Took us another 20 mins to walk down one end of Bishan park to the other. I had to remind myself to cut down on cabs. I didn’t knew that there was peak hour charge on a Saturday evening.

By the time we reached there, the wedding was almost finished! The wedding was held outdoors in the gardens. Nice and cosy setting. Loved the place at once. It’s the usual Christian wedding. My buddy was so excited and nervous that he could not even repeat after the pastor! That broke the ice in the crowd. Everyone was laughing their heads off.

Not many photos taken as I was too busy feasting. The buffet was great! I had forgotten to take a card from the vendor. Who knows it could come in handy next time. It was a rather unusual experience for me to attend a wedding in a spa.

Any other unusual wedding venue that you had attended before? Let’s exchange some ideas.

Seems like the scientist had solved the sticky problem of chewing gum. Read all about it here.

I missed my chewing gum days. Chewing gum were part of the children culture born in my era. I would run around the neighbourhood with my multi racial friends pretending to be “Teenage Mutant” “Ninja Turtles” “Spiderman” “Superman” or even “Smurf”. You weren’t cool if you didn’t chew gums while pretending to be those super heroes.

That was way back in 1983s. The time when Singaporean still rely heavily on it’s own buses as their main transport. The time when the government promised cheap housing to Singaporean. To improved our lives further, the Mass Rapid Transport aka SMRT was introduced. With this new mode of transport, the time taken from one place to the other was greatly reduced.

How does the ban of chewing gum have to do with MRT? That was because some idiots decided to stick the chewing gum on the door sensors of MRT preventing it to function properly and causing disruption to the train services.

Maintenance in high rise public housing was fast becoming a headache with vandals throwing the gum in mailboxes, keyholes and elevator buttons. I used to curse and swear when I stepped on those spent gums. It was really a sticky situation for me. Over the years, this taught me to open my eyes and look before stepping to avoid the mishap from happening again and again.

For the good of all Singaporean, chewing gum was banned in Singapore from 1983 onwards and we became the first country to successfully ban the import of chewing gum. (I wonder if the government going to ban the import of cigarettes as well? You know for the good of all Singaporean.)

In 1999, under the pressure of US, the act was revised to allow the import of medicinal chewing gum provided it must be sold by a dentist or pharmacist. With this invention, will Singaporean finally get their chewing gum fix?

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I was rather busy last week. Had to juggle between work and attending free movie screenings. Couldn’t imagine that I had watched 3 movies last week.

I caught the latest block buster like Rush Hour 3, The Bourne Ultimatum and local production 881. The best thing to happen last week? All the tickets for the movies were FREE.

So how did I do it? I must give all the credits to my wonderful friends and their associates for sharing. Free tickets to Rush Hour 3 and 881. As for The Bourne Ultimatum, I won the tickets by taking part in the contest organized by The New Paper.

The screening was at Vivo City GV Max yesterday. I had been told that GV Max was more comfortable and much better than those normal cinema theatre. More leg space. Wider screen. Moreover there was a draw for those who attended. A brand new Acer Gem Aspire 7720G to be given away. How could I gave up such a hard to come by chance to experience GV Max and walk away with a free notebook?The Bourne Ultimatum wasn’t as interesting as the previous Bourne movies in my opinion. Maybe it was the way parts of the movie was filmed. I couldn’t make out who was being hit by who and who was being chased by who. I got a little dizzy during the show because of the effects and maybe because of my heavy lunch before the movie. Especially, the part where Bourne and Desh was engaged into a cat and mouse chase. In case you were wondering who the hell Desh was. He was one of the assassin being sent after Bourne.

As for GV Max theatre, it was indeed comfortable. Lots of leg space and the screen was real wide! I wasn’t sure if I would pay more just to enjoy the wide screen and more leg space though. Sorry no pictures of the GV Max theatre. I didn’t dare to take any in case GV thought I was trying to record the movie.I didn’t win the notebook to DD dismay. In fact, we watched 30 minutes of advertisements while waiting for the movie to start. Something which rarely happen since I was always the one being late. No matter, I’m already a winner for attending the event. Got to watch The Bourne Ultimatum and got a free goody bag. What more could I asked for?

After much consideration and research, I have decided to move my blog from the present blogger platform to wordpress. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the blogger is not good enough. In fact, I prefer blogger to wordpress. I am not sure why. Maybe I have grown attached to it? Maybe I just like to get my hands all dirty and go straight into the codes to tweak them.

As you can see here, this site is still under heavy construction. Blog entries from blogger will not be imported here. It is just too complicated and time consuming for a busy guy who eat 6 meals a day. (Nah I am just plain lazy to read the help file.) Alot of preparation are needed before you can just abandon the old blog and start anew.

There are emotional issues you have to tackle if you are an emotional guy like me. Throwing away years of blog memories are not easy as learning your abc. (I know someone must be on the ground by now laughing so hard that tears are free flowing.)

After you have over come the emotional issues of starting everything afresh, let us start with a to-do list.

1. Blogging Platform

2. Hosting

3. Installation

4. Customisation

There are quite a few out there in the cyberspace. We, bloggers are spoiled for choice over here. Just to name a few of them.

• Blogger

• WordPress

• Typepad

It’s really up to the individual preference over here. Someone’s meat might be another one’s poison. My advice is to play around with the plateform before you settle down on one or better still, Google a few reviews to help you decide.

So, you have decided on the blog platform. Now, time to decide between free hosting or paid hosting. There are always some restrictions when using free hosting. So decide if you can live with the restrictions. For me, I have decided to try out the paid hosting. As usual, Google a few reviews on the hosting companies and through word of mouth I shortlisted two of them.

• Dreamhost

• Awardspace

In the end we (the hosting is shared between a few of us) chose Dreamhost for it’s wonderful tech support, weekly increasing bandwidth and hard-disk space and the discount if we sign up two years. (not too hard to digest for you at this point of time?) Another plus point for Dreamhost is that they have a function called One Click which automates the installation of wordpress for me. Makes my blog shifting a hell lot easier.

There are still plenty of stuff for me to learn and get used to. I am still coping with my loss. Once in awhile I still go back to my old blog and take a look at it. Afterall, I have spend many years blogging there. All good things must come to an end. Let’s look ahead to the future and the joy this blog is going to bring.