Tales of Stupid - South Korea enforces game ratings?

I was sent an email recently by a company offering to help me rate the ever yucky Burger Stacko (I laugh whenever people give me a bad rating, because if they think it is boring, what about me who tested it over and over again? At least say something constructive that I can fix, instead of calling it shit in different languages.) for South Korea. All I had to do is to let them distribute the game.

I was like, wtf? My game is free.

Now I read old news that South Korea is making every game, even Indie games, go through an official rating and.... the developers must pay for it. Double WTF?

It is ok for Starcraft since they have so many loyal Korean fans and can earn it back, but what about sad apples like me? Weird. Talk about burning the creativity and enthusiasm of developers.

Picross 3D Solutions - Time Challenge (Between Easy Levels 8 and 9)

Picross 3D Solutions - Easy Level 8

Picross 3D Solutions - Easy Level 7

Picross 3D Solutions - One Chance Challenge (Btw Easy Levels 6 and 7)

Picross 3D Solutions - Easy Level 6

Yeo Keng Nam Traditional Chicken Rice

Three words. Salty, oily and dry (the fried Hainanese pork chop).

Mr B1's Pet Crab - Mr Bartholomew

Well, actually he is one of six hermit crabs that B1 was 'peer pressured' into liking recently.

I just call him Mr Bartholomew for fun because you know, our nicks all start with B.

Beer Guzzling at Colbar

Remember last year I visited the hidden gem, Colbar, for stupidly, a working lunch where I had to stare hungrily, in the humid heat, at the extensive smorgasbord of beers and ciders that it has chilling in the fridge?


This year, a wiser but still overheated me (will it rain already?!) dragged B1 there where we had a very cute but oddly romantic meal inside the little house, surrounded by photoshopped pictures of the Colbar Tigers over the years, while all the ang mos were happily thawing in the veranda.

I had the Chicken Maryland, which came with a sweet but mushy fried battered banana (the particular species that I don't like and had to trick the B1 into playing games with me in the hopes of making him eat it instead). It was Chicken Schnitzel at its 'chaota' best, singed at the side, but moist inside. B1 had steak, mushrooms and chips, his fave. I still found the sauce salty, but went perfectly with the cider and beer that we could now finally ourselves with. S**t, but the uncle has a really excellent collection of imported beer *thumbs up*. I was happily wasted =D



Fantastic place for chilling.

The Haves versus the Have Nots

Yesterday I watched two of the newest sitcoms to hit the screen this Fall season. Raising Hope and Running Wilde. One revolves around very poor people raising a baby from a ONS with a death-row murderess, working deadbeat jobs while squatting at senile MawMaw's house with a crazy cousin who sleeps in a tent in the laundry room. The other is about a rich, superficial, apparently stupid guy, his crazier neighbour and his insane tree-hugging, superior, but more stupid ex who happened to one of his many housekeepers' daughter.

Running Wilde has a lot of money, but humor it does not. It was so terrible I wanted to take a bullet to the brain less than half an hour into the mind-numbing comedy (what a joke to call it comedy). It is probably a weapon of mass destruction, a plot to destroy us in the comfort of our homes. Keri Russell sucks as a comedic actress, though the male lead stinks more.

By contrast, Raising Hope was unbelieveable but cute. Cute was the little baby whose Mommy was electrocuted for killing her many boyfriends and somehow rescued by Jimmy after a miscalculated murder plot before rewarding him with an ONS and a motherless baby. Cute was MawMaw who wanders around in her bra and snogs Jimmy thinking he was his great-grandfather. Most cute was Jimmy's cynical, old-before-her-time Mother who dangles a cigarette precariously from her lips with a scowl but smiles when she is told that she looks like Jimmy's sister. “I told you getting pregnant at 15 would pay off eventually,” says her demented husband.

I am excited by Raising Home, especially when I googled the show after the epsiode ended, to discover that the show was made by the same guy who made my favourite My Name is Earl. On the other hand, I'd rather suck on a grenade and die before I will watch another episode of Running Wilde.

Earning $$ in US of A

I was reading the Mashable article on "Life after Microsoft: 15 startups founded by ex-employees" when I came across Glassdoor.com.

It's very useful for whenever you ever wanted to know how to get into your fav company, or know how well they treat their employees and pay them.

So IT does pay, just not in Singapore. I practically nosebled to death.

Struggling with Android App Inventor????

Crap, I don't believe I am going to say this but.... Eclipse is easier to use than the App Inventor. Haha. Yes it has just been released for a day, but wow. I am having major problems understanding, but it could also be due to the fact that I just inhaled Brothers' Pear Cider at Colbar just now.

Google, if you are reading this, please fix the ImageSprite or provide clearer details on how to use it. Also, how do I

I have gotten my App Inventor account

Have you registered for yours yet?

Here's the interface:


Try here.

I am not quite sure I like the terms. Think it doesn't allow me to charge for the app I use to develop there (expected) but huh, Google has the right to reproduce it? Hopefully using App Inventor, this will significantly increase the quantity and conceptual quality (can't go for total quality, since the developer is limited to whatever logic the platform provides) just like Game Salad for Apple. More for non-techies and lazy people like me :)

Updates!!!
I have been struggling for an hour and so have my Firefox and IE browser. Bloody App Inventor crashed my browsers and hung my pc. Not sure what I am supposed to do, but too lazy to try the tutorials. Tutorials are for losers (haha), I always maintain, I like to learn things by challenging myself. I guess the Brothers Cider that I gulped down at dinner is zapping my brain cells (but doesn't seem to impair my gameplay).

Mata Thai - Talk is cheap

I walked past this new(? I haven't passed by that corner for a very long time) restaurant on my way to the carpark last Sunday. We returned there for dinner after visiting my cousin at the hospital where she just had a baby. Congratulations to her, the child was a long awaited bundle of joy.

Anyway, we had to queue for a long time even though there was empty but dirty tables. The lady boss did not want to give us one of the dirty tables as they were put together as a table for six. When she finally gave us a clean but sticky table outside without cutlery, she offered us free lemon tea while we were ordering food and drinks. So we said ok, and proceeded to wait like 20-30 minutes while tables next to us were being served drinks and provided cutlery. *Annoyed* Btw the place was understaffed with only three wait staff. I saw that the lady boss takes the orders, a guy serves the food from the kitchen and another girl handles payment, serves drinks and supports the guy.

Probably incensed due to hunger, we managed to beckon the lady boss over (after the other girl studiously and resolutely ignored us many times) after much gesturing and asked to order drinks. We were not dying for the free lemon tea, but we were certainly dying from thirst, thanks to the heat. She expressed shock that we had not been served, and pulled the biggest bullcrap statement loudly in Mandarin"(the girl's name), drop everything you are doing and make sure this table is served drinks". Haha.

Anyway after some minutes later, we got our drinks which disappeared quickly. Then the lady boss came back and said the $15 fish we ordered has finished but there is one for $20. We said ok. So the joke is this, there was a lady and her son sitting at a nearby table. They had finished their meal but they were still sitting there chatting (I had been rather annoyed thinking that they were hogging the table while we were queuing). Little did I know, that the male waiter went serve them our fish! The lady customer was visibly delighted and welcomed him to put the fish down but the lady boss was screaming at him that it was not for them. Guess what... the man walked back into the kitchen, probably did a u-turn, and brought it to our table, complete with the delighted lady's exhausts.

B1 whispered darkly that it must be a popular practice by local Thai restaurants to have other customers fawn over the food before it is served (he was referring to our Nakhon experience). WTF. The lady was served her fish shortly after, and I noticed that her fish was obviously smaller. Oh...

Anyway, the food is affordable ($41 in total) but not exciting. We ordered Green Curry, Roasted Pork with Kailan, Fried fish and Pineapple Rice. The Pineapple rice was disgusting cold, despite being served on the spot. I suspected that it could be due to the cold Pineapple that they served it in, and that it was probably only lukewarm in the first place then blasted cold by the encasing Pineapple. Not a very intelligent decision.

The fish was probably the best part of the meal, I said probably, because it was served from the other customer's table. If I had gotten it first, I would say it was very good. As it is, I am rather leery and disgusted. The rest of the dishes tasted like they should.


In a nutshell:
Mata Thai
Blk 508 Bishan St 11 (corner unit)
Food Quality: Hit and miss
Price: Great
Service: Always waiting, always wanting. Understaffed (3 wait staff for dinner rush hour), blur and irritating

Updated!!!

I was trying to find the address for this place(to post), when I came across someone's blog. Guess what? Everyone gets a free drink when they order. More bullcrap from the lady boss.

Scenes from Breakfast 1 - A (Wo)Man, A Plan, A Can

Mushrooms fried with garlic, butter, olive oil and lemon basil, tomato, cheesy sausages and an egg.

SADC 2010

Apparently there is a local Android Developer Challenge hosted by NTU for tietiary students. Why the hell didn't they have it two years ago when I was still an overaged student in school? When I saw the $$ and the prizes, I am even more sour now.

Haha.

If you are still in uni or poly now, pleae remember to register and take part.

Tried and Tested - The Realism of a Man's Love

If you ask a woman in love, "if you are not with your lover today, would you be alone?"

The likelihood of her saying yes, she will be alone.

Honorable Emasculation - A Man who Hangs out with Women

A man who hangs out with a group of beautiful (or not) women is a sad creature. He is not the master of a harem, but the coolie for their shopping, the shoulder they lean on when their boyfriends dump them and the counsellor whose advice is always ignored.

His romantic chances with any of his girlfriends? Zilch, Nada.

It would take a very stupid woman to compromise what she has right now (see above) for a chance at a romantic opportunity with the guy, no matter that he is a sensitive, tactful and high emotional intelligent man (to be able to hang out with women). What if the relationship fails? All the other girls will be forced to take sides, and they will all lose in the end. So, it will be better to remain good friends.

Since the man is more likely than not, forced to search for a girlfriend outside of this circle, his girlfriend would need to be an extremely confident and understanding girlfriend. After all, which woman can accept a boyfriend who hangs out with a group of women, beautiful or otherwise? Once they have become friends for so long, the girls will "honorably emasculate" the guy, as in no longer see him as a sexual male, and treat him like one of the sisters. The girlfriend, if she survives the once-over by the coven (not harem, haha), will be forced to watch her boyfriend get touched or talked to intimately by them, i.e. the relationship will not last.

That's why most women aim for a gay intellectual whore. The best of two worlds. A man who can give you decent fashion advice, to boot.

Screen sizes in Android

After playing with B1's iPad, I marvel at the quality of the images in the (paid) games and also how they can scale according to your preference.

Seeing that Dell Streak is out and more Android-OS based tablets are coming soon, I am wondering if I should learn to scale up my android apps. I am reading up on Google's directions on screen size, before I start drawing my images. I previously toyed with the idea of making different xml files for different screens for Burger Stacko, but figured the images were horrible anyway, so didn't bother.

So far, I figure out that if you need to manipulate screen size in your game, use WindowManager and DisplayMetrics.

DisplayMetrics metrics = new DisplayMetrics();
getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay().getMetrics(metrics);

Games wise, I like PopCap's Plants vs Zombies. I wonder how many developers and game designers do they employ? It was rather funny that PopCap claimed Microsoft wanted to acquire them some years ago, and then they only estimated the company was worth US$5M when the executives said they had US$4M in the bank at that point. Dude, bad luck. Anyway they earned US$1M from 9 days of sales of PvZ in Apple AppStore.

As for my misalignment struggles in displaying the scoreboard in Burger Stacko, a Development Lead advised me to use Courier or some other monospaced font. I learnt something new~! This is why I love hanging out with geeks and developers. :D

B1 joins the dark side again

Brainwashed by the iPad he received for his birthday, B1 became besotted by the Apple AppStore and is getting iPhone. He said the games in Apple AppStore has a bigger market than the limited Android market.

I am so annoyed now I can pass out bricks. Though my love for Google is going unappreciated, I am still trying very hard to code some decent stuff for Android. I sourly commented that his iPhone will probably join his Android phone in the glove compartment since neither of us can carry camera phones to work.

I am supposed to be working on the expansion for Burger Stacko and a new game. But the heat is getting to me so much, I fell asleep when watching Babies in air-conditioned comfort. Zzzz. I can't even play Company of Heroes, I am so tired. I am toying with the idea of buying a Bamboo drawing tablet. The previous pad I bought was terrible, and I reverted to using a computer mouse to sketch. The little girl you see as my avatar is drawn by mouse, as are the images in Burger Stacko though it is obvious I spent lesser effort when drawing those images. Haha.

Sunday Munchies - My Ramly Burger

Vater heated up some mystery patties for burgers on Sunday. Since I had a late breakfast, I made myself a Ramly burger after I played some COH. If you frequent Singapore's night markets (or Pasar Malams, as we call them), you will notice these popular stalls selling one item, the sinful Ramly Burger.

It is a chicken or beef patty, doused with Worcestershire sauce, mayo and tomato ketchup, before lovingly wrapped within fried egg and cheese, and then clapped between two rounds of greasy grilled bread. It is Sin in a Bun.