one of the 1337

My colleague queued up for the release new StarCraft II game on 27th July 2010.

As one of the hardcore 1337, this is what he received (with a tee):

Prata Breakfast in JB

A cheap and nice breakfast near the bus stop where you take the bus to Tebrau City. RM7.80 for 4 kosong (plain without any ingredient filling) pratas, milk and coffee. The prata came shredded for your bite-sized pleasure.

Baidu not a search engine but BBQ?

I was telling my friend that there are a lot of steamboat places near the course centre.

To celebrate our passing the course on our first try (I am in a super sunshine mood), I recommended the interestingly named 百度烤肉 Baidu BBQ. We usually associate Baidu with the No 1 Search Engine in China (I support Sogou when it comes to Chinese search engines, haha).

But BBQ?

The variety is wide (despite the thawed meat), even the condiments, which we had many options to mix our own sauces and marinates. I made a mistake and mixed vinegar (which I mistook for light soya sauce) with garlic and sugar to marinate the thin pork slices. But it was fun to BBQ and steamboat at the same time. We ate for hours and stank up the bus after that.

Updated!!! So sad the place closed down.

Miss Saigon - Eh...not very hygienic nor very nice

Since we were in the area attending the food preparation course, we decided to pop over to Miss Saigon for our lunch break.



We ordered spicy chicken wings and pho.

The chicken wings were nothing special, not sure where the spice was. The accompanying sauce was watered down. As for the pho, we distinctly told the waiter we did not want bean sprouts and the guy went back, and came out bearing basil leaves, lime slices and ... bean sprouts. We reminded him we did not want bean sprouts and he took the dish back, and did not bring back basil leaves (which we like), but limes only. The pho ingredients are sad, compared to my fav place in Holland Ville.

Don't think I will ever go back there again.

4分300块， 6分400快 (4 points S$300, 6 points S$400)

In case you were wondering if I had gone mental, this is my Food Hygiene course instructor's 口头禅 (pet phrase). He is referring to the revised penalties imposed on food preparation staff for bad hygiene practices.

My friend and I had to take a typhoid jab and this course before we could get a food preparation licence (keep reading this space to find out more on what we are planning to do later!!!). It is a 8 hour long course *faint* and we only found out when we arrived there for registration that we had to take a 49 question MCQ, an oral test and a hands-on test where we had to prepare a simple lettuce sandwich for sale. Very fun!

In fact, the entire day passed quickly and entertainingly. I have to say for all my years of education, this was the most fun day I ever had learning. The best part of the entire session? We got our certs at the end of the day after the tests!

Great News - Burger Stacko is in Android Market!!!

I have finally taken the plunge, and published my Burger Stacko game in the Android Market. Yes, I know it is a very dumb game, but it's simple and great for whiling away your commute.

Please Support me!!!

Updated!!!

Well, it's finally in the market, after I allowed users to download it off the device. While I am ok with people doing that (and then laughing at my app for its simplicity * I am a simple programmer *), it's rather like Hobson's choice isn't it? Giving you the option, then when you use it, your app doesn't appear... or is that problem limited to developer phones?

I saw some of the comments which are constructive and kind, and now I am tempted to build onto the game earlier than I thought. I was going to come back and build on it later, and start on my educational game first, but now I am thinking of adding the random stages to Burger Stacko now!

I cheated... by buying the plant this time

I nearly starved my family with my harvest of a puny little radish (smallest than my little finger's digit), yes, and that was after I had nine little plants, which almost all perished after Mutter's well-intentioned transplantation.

So this time, after we had dinner at our favourite pho restaurant in Holland Ville, we did a lap around Cold Storage (once I came across my fav cheap wine *actually not alcoholic enough to be called wine, methinks*, selling at S$5 a bottle). I saw that they were selling lemon basil plants, which leaves were used in the pho.

I was so tempted... I bought it. After my mother transplanted it (well, I was too lazy, and happy to leave it in the pot instead of risking its life) into my sad ice-cream tub plot, it's now growing like crazy, after sulking for a few days after the transplantation and looking like it was going to "up lorry".

Syntax Error on token *something*. Identifier expected after this token

Hey fellow Noobs,

If you encounter this error when coding, this means... that entire line of code is not in any method. Move it into one and your problem is resolved.

Also,

if you are used to doing your stuff in MSSQL and MySQL like me, don't forget to Commit; when you are using Oracle. Otherwise it will only be stored in local cache, and nothing gets ahem commited to the database tables.

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Be Afraid Be Very Afraid - The Mole

[source: DailyMail]

Tante giveth most excellent booty today

Tante popped by this evening to partake in Vater's Chilli Crabs and pass me the most excellent assortment of gifts I ever gotten from anyone. She outdid her previous gift of a lovely small oil painting from her Europe trip.

She brought me the free Cathay movie tickets which I missed out on (for some bizarre reason I forgot to read the English newspapers today), the Elizabeth Arden which is so coincidentally one of my fave scents, a wallet (?) and ... a portable harddisk.

Holy crap. A hard disk!!! Fantastic, just when I was thinking of triplicate-backing up my dev envt, here pops in a free hard disk. I am ecstatic!

Burger Stacko in Beta Testing as of Today!

Hi Everyone, I am so pleased to announce that I have finally summoned the remainder of my brain cells and completed the coding for Burger Stacko (you know the original long sad story of how I lost my hard disk, and backed up the wrong Eclipse workspace, thus losing my entire working copy)?

As of today, Burger Stacko is in Beta Testing mode!!! So far it has been 3 hours, and my team of hardworking friends armed with their Android phones are still helping me break my game. Too bad about the shit graphics, but it cannot be helped. These images, drawn in Microsoft Paint (and a mouse) are from my initial Flash game built in 2005.

I am thinking of setting up a team of app breakers. I have a G1 Developer (upgraded to OS 1.6), and my friends have Samsung Galaxy (1.5) and Milestone (2.1) respectively. Would love to find a Droid X owner using Froyo if possible. Interested parties, please contact nibblezware @ gmail.com. Thanks!



On another note, according to my friend, Google has come up with a Interface Builder, which helps speed up Android App building. Checking on Google Labs has revealed that it is called App Inventor. It is not for general release yet, but you can ask for an invite. Speaking of which, I still haven't gotten my Google TV invite... Sigh. What is App Inventor you may ask? Think Micro$oft Popfly, but significantly higher survival rate because it is owned by Google.

Thank you Everyone for your gifts of $$

Thanks to all your kind financial assistance, here's my new scratchy:

Isn't he gorgeous? I told my teacher I cannot make love with something so physically and musically ugly like my old violin (it sounds like cats scratching their way across a blackboard), so he got me this beautiful violin. Unfortunately the bow is like shit, worse than my old bow (unbelievable but it is true), so I am still playing with my old bow. The bag is very heavy though, so I will have to carry the scores and books in this bag on Wednesday, and not carry my work bag.

Mama is a Farmer - Can you tell what veggie this is?

Mutter brought this back from the farm today. We are not quite sure what kind of vegetable is this. Mutter says it is 芥菜 (mustard), then after we consulted Google... she now says it's 小白菜 (chinese cabbage).

I thought it looked like 菊苣根 (chicory. Yucks!)

Updated!!!
I was right.

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