Merry Christmas to Christians and Merry X'mas to non-Christians! Spending another christmas back in Kuching. No snow, no Santa Claus, no stockings, no Christmas Tree. But, there were alternatives.

Mommy had her own fun. Mommy came out with this wacky idea of making her version of a snowman. Well, not really a snowman, but a snowman wannabe. There was this trend of buying those mini sized mandarin oranges. Mommy bought a lot of them and she came out with this. I thought mommy's idea was funny, she even made a nose for this Orangeman. Hell yeah, it really looks kinda cute too, and tasty! yum!


Well, what about daddy? Well, daddy went out with his friends in the morning to some ulu place in the outskirts of Kuching. He came back in the afternoon with 2 kilograms of big-ass bamboo clams! Nice~ They were so tasty that I forgot to take a shot of them. Daddy brought back something that I find kinda cute. It's these greenish, furry, little I-dunno-what fruit. Daddy says their edible, but I was suspicious. No one ate it and it's still on the wet kitchen table since daddy left it there. Here's a shot of those furry green balls.


At night, the whole family went out for a Christmas dinner. We ate at non other than Thian Court Restaurant at Crown Towers. Mommy ordered some fantastic dishes. I stole a few shots before everyone dug into the food. Here comes the Kung Pow Chicken. Tender and juicy chicken stir fried in kung pow sauce. Looks kinda oily from the surface, but that's how the chef makes sure the Kung-powness of this dish remains. Scrumptious indeed.


Then we had the delicious Soft Shell Crabs. These crabs make a lazy crab eater the happiest man on earth. Why? It's because that these crabs' shell is so damn soft, that you don't have to peel them off. All you gotta do is eat like usual (gobble for some).


Next, we have the Baked Cod Fish in Japanese Sauce. The fish that we all came for! The size of the fish is so freaking big. This dish was baked with japanese sause (whatever that is). It tasted a little bit salty, but with the tenderness of the fish, it made the other dishes feel cheap.


Last but not least, came the most special dish for the day. The Cold Dish! It was a special order and no one knew what it's going to contain, until it arrived. The trick was to let the chef of the day to choose 4 types of food and mix them together into one. As everyone anticipated for the arrival of this dish, the moment of truth was here. We could see rolls, pears, dumplings and jelly fish! All looked simply pleasant.


The fried rolls, are actually made from yam. Yam covered with fried flour, made it a very tasty snack. The pear looking 'things' are actually curry wrap in glutinous rice. Made to look like a pear for no reason, but who cared. The dumplings, looked like dumplings, but didn't really taste like one. Til now, I still can't figure out what was in the dumplings, but it tasted kinda good. Lastly, the Jelly Fish, I think this needs no description at all.


Well, another satisfying dinner for Christmas. This time, it was eating out. Though it didn't feel like Christmas, but it still made my day. Missing those fried rolls now. hmm... When I'm back to Sunway, I think I'll miss Kuching food even more. Haizz... Gotta head to bed now, *yawn Goodnight!

It's the morning of Christmas Eve in Kuching and it is raining now. A very bright time for a rainy day. I can still feel the heat from the sunlight whilst seeing raindrops rushing and bashing down on the grass and flowers on daddy's garden.


As usual Christmas will be spent back home in Kuching. Plans for tonight? Not yet plan ah! I'm not sure actually. I didn't book for any special places, so I guess I'll be stuck at home for the night.

Today I will announce the retirement of my old camera the Sony Cybershot T33. Well, not really a retirement, but a demotion to him from my only camera, to my secondary helper. Yes, he is still the slimmest in my camera collection, and also one of the most powerful. With it's powerful Carl Zeiss lens to magnify details, he is still good to go. Bringing this baby to the library to 'steal' some nice shots is the easiest. Well, glad that this Cybershot has also been with me for a couple of years since my Canon V3 died, when I was in Foundation Year. Still, it is in good condition and I'm still going to use her for some 'secret' missions.

So, who is it that is going to replace this beautiful and stunning camera? Another Sony? Another Canon? What is it going to be? Well, here's a hint. It's a token from my daddy, for having Graduated from College with flying colours + Won some awards + Found an acceptable job + Christmas. All these add together comes a stunning result, my all time dream wishlist, A Digital SLR camera! OMG! And it's not just an ordinary Digital SLR, it's a midrange DSLR by Nikon D80 kit. Thanks Daddy!

Let's see what came with in the set! It comes with a 18-135mm wide lens, 4GBs of high speed memory SD card, A flimsy tripod, A 90 anniversary Nikon heavy duty bag, a UV lens filter and also an LCD screen protector. Looks quite complete for me to start some shootings.


The Nikon D80 has the power of 10.2 megapixels, 11 areas of focusing, pop up flash, and the most interesting things about this Nikon D80, is that noise only appears when you shoot at ISO 1600 & beyond. Now that is so freakin cool! Meaning, this baby can shoot high quality pictures in lowly lit areas. (I haven't tried it out, but I'm going to test all the features in my coming days.)

The thing I love about Nikon is it's design of the camera. It seems that the designers for Nikon DSLRs did very good research on this area. I found that the grip of the trigger button seems almost too perfect where it is positioned right now compared to Sony's and Canon's. The button is placed in just the right place and feels very comfortable to click on when you are shooting. The shutter speed dial is located behind the trigger, while the aperture dial is positioned in front of the dial. Making it as user friendly as possible. Though this isn't the latest and newest camera in town, but still I love it very much. Not because it is costly, but it is really a very high-end camera and it came from daddy.

Now to install that lens, charge that battery, on that switch and shoot shoot shoot!! I mean test first la! Ooo-la-la! so handsome ni! Muaks Muaks Muaks!!

Sony Cybershot please don't look at Nikon D80 like that. I'm not going to abandon you. As long as you can still take those wonderful closeup shots for me, you will still be in my pocket. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to test it out. BOOM!

My family came to K.L and they had their shopping spree. After my interview for work, I quickly headed downtown to find them. Hehe.. all I had in mind was, My family here means better food to eat. No more Sunway crap food. And so it was. Managed to eat all sorts of stuff downtown, there were really delicious ones and so there were pretty hideous and yucky ones too. Here are some that were kinda nice:

Lot 10's Isetan's Sushi

I got these sushis at half price. At around 8:45pm is when all sushis at Isetan will have 50% discounts and time for cheapskates like me to dig into their delicious sushis. Got myself a set of 6 with Salmons and Tofu Rolls. Yummy~

Then there's Pavillion's Food Republic. One of the stall's delicious braised mutton with rice. Though it looks small, but it was simply scrumptious and the tender meat was so juicy and tasty.

Food Republic's Braised Mutton

In Sunway Pyramid's Dragon-i, famous for their Xiao Long Bao (Steamed Dumplings) The most interesting about these littles Baos were the soup that was wrapped inside the Bao itself. When you use your chopsticks to pick one of them up, you can actually feel the weight of the soup inside. And only the skilled ones are able to quickly pick them up and put it in their mouths with the soup and dumpling together.

Dragon-i's Xiao Long Bao

Here is something interseting, the pork intestine lookalike. It is actually made from toufu and it tasted delicious. With the sweet sauce from the Dong Po Meat, it made this 'intestine' the most mouth watering.

Dragon-i's Toufu Intestines

This is La Zi chicken Szechuan style. The spicy delicacy that didn't really make it to my delicious list, but worth taking a photo of. It was a very hot and spicy dish and we weren't able to finish that whole basket. You can imagine the pain we went through when we tried to finish it. Just look at the chilies in there.

Dragon-i's La Zi Chicken

It's been ages since I talked about food here. I hope to get some nice pictures in Kuching. I'll be staying in Kuching for 2 weeks til 1st of January. So, please jio me out, or I'm gonna die from all those downloaded videos I have in my computer. :P

Yesterday was a tiring day, it was the LongXi Creative Forum/Exhibition 龙玺大家斗“酷”, held in Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre. The forum started at 9a.m. and ended around 6p.m. Everyone from the multimedia department went and so did I.

The forum used ancient Chinese torture methods as a theme. Showing that Chinese creativity existed back in ancient times, apart from the 4 famous Chinese inventions, the various forms of ancient torture methods were seen as creative as well. The website is beautiful, done by TOA's Multimedia Team. Ooo.. nice!!! click here to see the site.

The forum was very unique not only because of the theme behind it, but the speakers, I find they are very extraordinary and very well planned compared to the Kancil Awards I went last time. There were 2 sessions, the first was conducted in English while the second was in Mandarin. The mandarin session gave me the feeling of returning back to High School, where lectures and speakers were all speaking Mandarin. It just felt very different and comfortable, after 3 years of experiencing the absence of Mandarin in my college years.

Hehe.. I got my pass which wrote Professional. Ooo.. sounds cool isn't it. Well, There were many speakers for the day: 3 out of the 4 dinosaurs - Jimmy Lam, Thomaz Mok, Peter Soh and more. The list is here.

Among all of the speakers, the one that captured my most attentio nwas Thomaz Mok's philosophy of Creative "Yi Jing 易经" based on the oldest Chinese classic text formerly known in Wade-Giles as "I-Ching". Literally it means Classic of Changes. But, Thomaz's Yi Jing was very different. Here in the chinese character of "意", he implemented 11 other "yi" s and to form. It was so extraordinary, it caught my eye just when he showed this slide:

It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, apart from the colours used. The 11 characters used here represents his philosophy of creative advertisements. We all know that creative in mandarin is called "Chuang Yi 创意", he explained every aspect of his "yi"s from 创易 simplicity, 创异 difference, 创一 originality, 创宜 appropriate, 创忆 memorable, 创艺 craft, 创依 relevance, 创怡 delightful, 创议 talkabout, 创移 expandable, and lastly to 创益 effective. These are the important aspects and elements of a creative advertisement. Here are some examples he showed:

A FedEx Ad to show heavy duty

A medicine for running nose ad

Miller Beer ad, very nice execution of a basketball

Quote from Thomaz "I believe in creativity than vanity, exploration than definition". It was a meaningful speech from him. Oh oh! See... here is prove that I listened to the talk ok? I took notes here and there. *hehe. Bad handwriting after 3 years of not taking Chinese notes. Hmm... gotta improve on that.

The talk was a also a good place to get fat. We actually had 2 tea breaks and 1 big lunch. Cheesecakes, mini burgers, chocolate cakes, tea and more. After all those food, again we had to sit in our places and listen to the speakers. Lunch was pretty good. Yenny's herbal chicken soup was taken away by the waitress and she was furious. *chuckles There were 2 drumsticks in her soup and she haven't even tasted it. Hahaha... she was like "Aaargh!! Where's My Soup??"

The talk was very educational indeed. The 2nd round of panel judges were very interesting. Their critiques were fabulous, as they touched on every possible angle to talk about the pros and cons of the advertisements shown. From Hongkies, to Taiwanese, to Mainland Chinese and even Malaysian Chinese. Here is a really nice ad I like. It is a traditional Chinese character of "horse 马" spelled into English as HORSE. The product is a translation pen. Very beautiful calligraphy.

Ohh... No more MMPS! La-la-la.. Freed from burdens and stress! It just felt like God has raptured me into freedom (although I don't believe in God). But, still there is work to do. As art director for our graduation batch and Leader for the teaser team, I needed to finish up my things, or else I will not be able to sleep well when I return to the magical and enchanting boring island of Borneo. Well, as a result till today, we have quite settled some of the things. Haha.. I won't tell you cause I feel it's embarrassing, but Hey, we tried our best OK? Now now...

We have bought re:volt 2008 web server and it will be launching soon. Wee~~ Here is a sneak peek of the site's splash page. You may click on the image to link to the site. The url is http://www.revolt2008.com. Please note that the site is still under construction until further notice. :)

We will have a set of things for this campaign. A teaser, a website, posters, invitations, showcase and most important of all, the exhibition. The exhibition will be held at The One Gallery, on the 7th of January 2008. Will update more on re:volt next time, till then... gotta get back to work! Shit! Teaser, trailer references, music, missing shots, RAM shortage, aaargh..how to work peacefully????

We have this Digital Portfolio class this term, taught by the one and only Wai Khong. We are assigned to complete 2 projects for this subject, and the 1st one is to promote yourself creatively. We need to come out with a concept and an idea to implement. Provided that the 1st project can be from any media from digital to traditional print.

As for me, I prefered to do something I hated most, print! My concept in short is to inform my employer that I am multi-talented in design, solve problems creatively and make big money for the company. I used the idea of the "For Dummies" international icon to implement into my concept. Due to its highly recognised reputation, it gives the target audience a better understanding of what I'm trying to portray in my work. Here is a picture of what I came out with in the end.

As you can see, there are 6 books in this complete set. The topics covered here are: Big Profit, Creative Solutions, Original Ideas, Web Solutions, Design Management and Bonus Items. In the 5 books, they contain all the same content. Which are the 5 big steps:

1st step: Pick up your phone
2nd step: Dial this number: 0169*****5
3rd step: Hire this person: Reuben Teo
4th step: Sit back and relax
5th step: Congratulations! You have mastered the secrets to a big business success!

And the other remaining pages, are note paper for the employer to scribble on, while relaxing when they hire me. Now, you noticed about the Bonus Items book, and you must be asking, what the hell is that? Well, it's actually a folder that contains an envelope titled :"Most Wanted Secrets" Dum~ Dum~ Dum~ Dum~ *chuckles.

Aiya.. It's the envelope where I put my resume and cover letter lah! Hahaa.. Cheh!! you guys sure say. Well, hope you guys like it. I sure had fun with this project. It costed me so much money and time. Yes I know the finishing wasn't that good, Hey, I'm a multimedia designer and I do RGB stuff k? This is considered quite good liao! :P