New Years 2012!

My nightshift has ended and today is my first day back to the day mode.

It made me see my 'daily' life at the other end, seeing how my family bustles/ or nua at home at different hours, reaching home in time to see my little brother at 6am for school and trying to stay up just a little bit more to watch him eat breakfast.

Or my mum would one night call me at 3am because she was awoken by the heavy rain outside, telling me not the come home yet because of the downpour and she didn't want me to get wet and fall sick.

Meeting little friends at night, aka. bugs, who would crawl around the floor near the light switches.

What a lonesome affair. I had become completely oblivious to the happenings during the day. Thank God that somehow inside me, I felt peace throughout the past week. Perhaps I was too busy to notice, but I'm glad it's over.

I don't like the fact that I have subconsciously let work take over my life. To allow it to have my social life, my family life, my activity, hobbies, church, etc, be taken over by a version of activity that is deemed more important than school in the real world. I like my work and I enjoy what I do. VERY. At the same time, I like alot of other things too. So I really admire those who have the ability to take time off and do what they love. Be it regular classes in yoga or dancing, or the simple act of attending cell. It's the joy of life.

OK, I don't want to sound like I have no life. But I am spurred up enough to want to make some changes this year. I know I will have pockets of time and will venture to learn this great skill of balancing or rather, last minute spontaneous act of quickly deciding what I want to do and slotting a session into my available times AND planning ahead.

I actually told someone in my office that life isn't only about work. Well, unfortunately, the reply was: "My work IS my life." and that was that.

I will choose to give my 100% to work, at work.

Because I only have 2 out of 7 days in the week for everything else. It may be done sparingly, but it will be done. :)

All the best to a much more fulfilling life in 2012!

I-con-cur!

Icon crazy!

I just spent some time changing some of my icons into really, REALLY cute ones! Managed to find superheroes icons, wall-e icons, beautiful folder icons, and all sorts of cute cartoon animal ones and textured ones.

Icons made me so happy today. ^-^

This strange reaction was triggered when I had to reformat my 2 precious 3.5TB HDD and my boss told me I could use his icons collections to make them look cute and all. oh boy. I picked sheep icons for my newly repaired HDD and now I've got a Mr. and Ms. Meh Meh~

Here are some screen grabs of the icons from www.iconarchive.com:

and it made me so happy~

Needs to re-look at life.

"A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of

our daily routine" - Unknown

That's not my name, Ting Ting.

I didn't blog for almost a year!

Oh how I'm bursting with things to say after a whole year of 'silence' and many memories that went unrecorded. (What got into me?!?!) 2010 became a year of the unspoken coolness because so many things happened!!! More updates on that some time appropriate.

After changing the layout of my blog and re-reading my precious archives yesterday (because I wanted to recall a date of event(s)in 2008), I realised how much I miss my blog! All my nonsense in electronic pages stored almost forever on the internet, if I let it!

I randomly decided to google my name this week and guess what I found:

1. Ok, not surprising, but my Facebook page was the top search result. But I'm also thinking, I am not the only person with my name with fb around... so why am I the first?

2. My old Friendster site. I have not touched that in YEARS since junior college. (sorry friendster, I have to downsize my electronic relations because I just don't have time to do everything.)

3. My Twitter account (That I don't use and should probably delete it.)

4. My LinkedIn account. (... *shrugs...)
3. A website that searches people by names and that generated 2 photos of me from fb and my picassa album repeated in different sizes, resolutions and cropping (Along with other people by the same name, of course.)
*By now, I was starting to get a little freaked out...

4. I FOUND 2 of my university final year reports in an archive in the school library (thankfully under lock and password key but it is still accessible to students).

5. I found 2 Trinitarian magazines with my name in almost fine print around the content pages because I had contributed (my very brilliant) photos for the soccer and netball inter-church tournaments. :)

6. I didn't see it this time round but my colleague found me on IMDb some time back... omg.


OK, maybe it's not that big a deal. It's not like i have some biography, or videos, or articles, or books, or news....

STILL. The above mentioned is yikes enough.
I was seriously astounded by how the internet can find all these occasional nitty online details of what I have done. (Not very much though. ha.)
It makes me think if I should start to be afraid of the internet for intruding into my life. (duh... I am ironically declaring this on an online blog.)

Given how long the internet and social websites has been around, it is truly late to 'worry' about all this now.
[HELLO.. Stone Age was that way back in time. Please come again.]
BUT shouldn't some of us be concerned if crooks and thieves steal our identity? Or, gasp! Murderers? (I blame crime movies for this paranoia.)

A colleague of mine had her IC stolen 2 weeks ago and that darn person has gone and caused havoc with that ill-gotten identity card. I don't dare imagine if we, the citizens of the safest and, DARE I say it, self-proclaimed honest country in the world, should be on edge constantly fearing the misuse and duplication of our own identity by others?
[That's already happening now, by the way... That Sony PS3 hack case earlier this year in the US headquarters has affected countries all over the world.]

There is a youtube documentary feature movie that can be downloaded for free called "Google Me". It's about a man who decided to meet up with people he could find with the same full name as himself by using the Google search engine. At the end of the show, he found 6 people in different continents and were willing to meet up with them after some form of contact, with details gotten either through Google, or some other way. They all had an awesome time together. Awesome.

I would love to start talking about this documentary but since the topic is about identity and being found, i shall return to point.
The point is, it is way easier to do things with all this electronic human exposure, for both good and bad.
You CAN find and be found by someone at the other end of the greenwich scale online!! They just need a full name, vague location/country and a phonebook. =S

So what should we do?
Unfortunately I have no solutions.

Some people want to be found because it is their shot to fame and fortune. Look at all those youtube star wonders. They wouldn't have gotten their big break if they didn't expose their talent to the world. Or people who wrote fantastic and highly educational websites and blogs that made the world smarter than yesterday.

Some people like being low profile. By that, it literally means less things to worry about. There would be nothing online that can 'harm' you because risk is near 0%. Partly also because less people know you. Normal people don't hurt those they don't know... unless it's an accident. :(

So it all boils down to what you're willing to face in your life. That's all.

I hope I do not inspire conspiracy of any kind after reading this post. May God be with you.

A nice invitation

I'm sure God has heard my prayers.

Just when I was complaining that my life isn't exciting, guess what. God sends the excitement.

Had a chance to go for my first company invitation from a local director to watch a play-cum-film/installation. I found it rather refreshing to see a silent video voiced by a person live... none other by an up and coming actress who has been appearing in almost all of ADM's short films. We even had free food! :) It was really nice to see familiar faces and I had a chance to invite a friend over too. Feels nice to be in the company of people. I think I love my people. I love talking to people whom I can.

Happy that I have my weekends off too, even if it means spending a little more time coming back to the office after the play at 10.30pm to finish it, i'd do it gladly. I can finally clear some much needed things, set much needed/delayed appointments and have a proper date night. I'm happy I am going to have some time for such things.

Am beginning to value all the little things I can do each week, even things like letting my tortoise out of the hamster cage to take a walk around the house. :) Somehow and strangely so, I find a growing connection to my cute little tortoise, whom/which I have ignored for the longest time. Maybe it feels lonely and needs company and exploration. I need to find a way to cut its nails though... anyone has a pet nail clipper??

I may not get free Tshirts now but hopefully what I do get is something that won't need to take up too much space and can be enjoyed. :)

TeeeeShirts!

Found some time to go through my wardrobe just now. Whoa, it was like going back in time.

Unfortunately, I've become quite a hoarder. There's a period of time when I have such a strong reluctance to throw things away. Maybe that's why you still see me wearing the same old clothes from yesteryears.. haha. Well, after a while, I'm beginning to feel like I've left an exciting and fun filled life behind in exchange for adulthood, obligations and less exciting daily events in life, less clubs, social groups, outings and games... and having Tshirts for free for being a part of an 'era'. I'm sounding ridiculous, I know.

Just going through my stash, I've got Tshirts from (excluding PE Tshirts) Secondary-JC-Uni CCA Tshirts, my volleyball jerseys, my house colour Tshirts for sports days, School and Church camp Tees, Orientation Tshirts of Various colours, Hall Tees, Beach volleyball Competition Singlets and School competition Tees... Heavens, even our Cell group made Tshirts!! And oh how precious they are to me! All those memories just comes flooding back on the commitments, aspirations and hopes we had for the cell printed in cute Tshirts. It even has my name drawn on it (and a printed pig with wings... hehe)

Just looking at my wardrobe, I suddenly think that my life must have been quite exciting and it was over.

Makes me want to mark the rest of my life with little 'tidbits' of memorabilia... maybe just photographs will do... (See how simple my expectations are nowadays?)

What am I going to do with all these Tshirts?? Donate them?

Maybe I will line them up according to the year I got them (as it is written on the Tshirt itself) and take photos of them and paste them into a book of Tshirts or something. (See again? I can't bear to let go...)

Now I have no club or sports or activities group that I'm a part of. That means no more Tshirts to mark my life. So sad. It means I've got nothing to do!

But silly me, life is not marked by how many Tshirts we have. It's now how satisfied and happy we are, where we are, in what we do, in who we have around us... and maybe more.

Still, it's nice to have an event-filled life.

My latest free Tshirt is a crew Tshirt from a movie my company is working on (it's almost finished!) in which I was involved in very minimally, and my name is not even on it. (It has the names of my colleagues who handled the project though). But I'll keep it anyway, even if just for a while. :)

iPhone test

I'm blogging from my iPhone! Just testing o see if it works. My computer kinda crashed the other time I finally tried blogging so the entire post was wasted. Too bad. Ok if this works out well I'll be able to blog a little more frequently. :)