Category: My Hobbies

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I See I Write Photography

2010 SingTel F1 Grid Girls Crowning Party – A Media Event

What a great media event!  I mean, fast cars and pretty women should go side by side with one another.  I am an avid fan of Formula One and have been watching every single match on TV.  Singapore circuit is special.  Not only because it is a night race, an anti-clockwise circuit, but also because the race takes place in the city, along the beautiful marina.

So what do F1 grid girls do?  Good question.  I met one of my fellow bloggers at the party.  To me, grid girls are there to hold the flags before the race.  And they are there to clap and welcome the winners at the end of the race.  Beyond that, I have no idea what they do.  My buddy is the hilarious one.  He said there have been rumors that …

Anyway, the venue of the event was at Shanghai Dolly, Clarke Quay.  I seldom write about the event venue (because most are just standard).  I think Shanghai Dolly is a lovely venue.  Great decoration and the house band is simply mesmerizing.  I will be back, for sure.

12 SingTel F1 grid girls, 3 group performances followed by questions for the individual.  I am surprised that no one answered world peace.  I think one girl has a rather noble answer and she went on winning the top grid girl award.  At 10 pm, the winner of SingTel Grid Girls 2010 was announced.  Mabel Lau has won the title, got herself a S$10,000 cheque from SingTel, and will be holding our Singapore flag on the race day.  OK.  I can understand why she wins.  Probably the most photogenic of all.  Personally, I like the 2nd runner up too.  In any case, we will see them on TV during the weekend of 24th to 26th September.

Back to F1, I am being asked a lot of time on which team I support or who is my favorite F1 driver.  The thing about motor racing is that viewers have very short term memory.  The last race’s winner is always the hero – in this case, Alonso.  Webber in this season has pulled off some of the most amazing stuns (and is marginally leading the championship).  Button has won the championship last year, looks like he is still in the game.  And Hamilton, what a committed driver – when he has a competitive car.  I wish he can win this season.  Having said that, I would be delighted if any of four could win.

Where are the photos?  You must be asking.  Well, I have worked double hard and pushed out the contents within a few hours after the event.  Hot from the oven.  Just for you!

Notes:

  • I haven’t got time to narrate the photos.  But they are very much self-explanatory – I hope.
  • Those who carried flowers are the top 3 girls.
  • I wish I could devote the same amount of attention to all 12 grid girls.  But I am a man.  My attention takes direction from my …
  • The girl who doesn’t look like a grid girl won herself a gift from SingTel after some intense competition on the stage that involved … dancing.
  • The girl who was holding the mic is from the house band.  She has one amazing voice.
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Photography Travel Blog

Day 5 To Versailles And The French Were On Strike

I can understand the philosophy behind the action of the unions calling upon the workers to go on strike as a form of protest against certain unfavorable policies.  This time, it was something to do with the pension fund policy in France.  On one hand, I am pleased to see workers coming together to achieve a common goal.  It is a rare scene from where I come from.  On the other hand, it sucks when we as tourists have to bear with the inconvenience and uncertainty in a place that does not communicate in English.  Every moment, there may be a surprise on where the train is heading, where the train is not heading, which station it does or does not stop.  Through chitchatting with the locals, we learned that a strike or better known as industrial action or social movement is well planned in advance.  And it is usually set in stages.  Every morning during the strike period, the unions get together and vote to decide if the strike should be intensified to the next stage.  Or if their objectives have been achieved, the unions may call off the strike – for now.  The beauty of it all is, no one knows what tomorrow would bring.

Although the train service was shutdown to the minimal, we stuck to our plan and visited Versailles that is about 25 km away from Paris.  To read more, there are:

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Photography Travel Blog

Sacre-Coeur And Montmartre, Pompidou Centre And Eiffel Tower

I am not a big fan of Eiffel Tower.  But when we visited France, I had one mission in mind: To take a photograph of Eiffel Tower that is seldom seen before.  I think I have somewhat achieved that.  There is some deeper connotation with regards to how this photo is composed.  But I shall leave it to open interpretation.

Day 4 and the weather got warmer and warmer, more like a summer holiday.  It did take some time for Cynthia and I to recuperate from the jet lag, change in weather, and slip into a more productive mode of being a tourist.  In the morning, we have visited the Sacre-Coeur or Sacred Heart Basilica.  It is hard to miss this basilica when you look at the landscape of Paris.  It is white in color and is located on top of a hilly area called Montmartre.  We had spent a good number of hours under the sun admiring the monuments.  And we had spent a good number of hours inside the museums.  By the time evening arrived, we had a delicious dinner at a Corsica restaurant.  Likely to be one of the best meal we had in Paris.

To read more about our 4th day in Paris, here are the options.

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Photography Travel Blog

Day 3 And We Went Up The Towers Of Notre-Dame

Finally, the blue sky appeared on the third day of our holiday.  We switched from museum crawling to monument crawling.  If I am to pick one place in Paris I love to hang out the most, that has to be the two islands – Ile de la Cité and Ile St-Louis – in the center of the city.  These two islands are so tiny but yet, to me, they are the focal point of the numerous momuments in Paris.  That is why when you climb the 387 steps and stand on the top of the south tower of Notre-Dame, you can see Sainte-Chapelle, Hôtel-Dieu, Palais de Justic, Arc de Triomphe, echoed by Grande Arche de La Défense to the west.  Saint-Jacques Tower and Sacré-Cœur rise up over Montmartre to the north.  To the east, the Bibliothèque Nationale and to the south, the Latin district and turning westwards, Les Invalides.

To read more about the third day of our trip, here are the options.

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Linguistic

The Story Of A Boatman (La Historia Del Barquero)

This is my latest doodle titled “Boatman And A Girl Together With Other Parties“.  I have not been drawing for quite some time.  Drawing can be therapeutic.  Especially if you have a rough day at work (like mine today).  Each stroke scraps away a little bit of the trouble in your mind.  By the time you are done with your drawing, you would be so detached from the earthy frustration and glad that the time spent not thinking of it has turned into something tangible.  Something that brings a smile to your face.

Some of you may be bored of me going through in detail how I compose my drawings.  If you have been reading on my doodle series, it is the same old symbols and linkages and a picture within a picture.

What inspired this drawing is our recent Spanish class.  We were given a story in Spanish and were tasked to first form our individual opinion and then discussed and debated within the group in order to arrive at a common conclusion.  All in Spanish of course.  What intrigued me, out of this entire exercise, is how differently we think as an individual.  It comes down to our bearings.

The story goes something like this.  A young married girl was neglected by her husband who spent most of his time working.  And she was seduced by another man while her husband was away.  How far did she go?  She had spent a night at her lover’s place on the other side of the river.  In the next morning, she woke up early and planned to reach home before her husband returned from his business trip.  At the bridge, she was hassled by a dangerously looking mad man who refused to let her pass.  Panic, she had decided to take a boat in order to cross the river.  But she had no money with her.  And the boatman refused to take her across if she did not pay in advance.

She then returned to her lover’s home asking for money.  But he refused with no explanation.  As she left her lover’s home, she remembered a bachelor friend of hers living nearby and is in platonic love with her.  When she explained her situation to her friend asking for money and he refused.  Feeling utterly disappointed, the young girl had decided to reason with the mad man.  When she tried to cross the bridge, she was killed by the mad man.

So, in your opinion, of the six characters – the girl, her husband, her lover, the mad man, the boatman, and her friend – who is the most guilty one?  And how would you rank them from the most to the least guilty?

Our class spent much time debating, attempting to arrive at a common ranking order.  It was a fun exercise.  It reminds of one of the law books my sister read.  So full of bizarre scenarios that challenge the readers to decide who the guilty ones are.

For those who are learning Spanish, here is the story in the original text.

Una joven casada, poco atendida por su marido demasiado ocupado en sus negocios, se deja seducir y va a pasar la noche con su amante en una casa situada al otro lado del río.

Para volver a casa al día siguiente, muy temprano, antes de volver su marido que está de viaje, tiene que cruzar un puente, pero un loco haciendo gestos amenazadores le impide el paso.  Corre entonces hacía un hombre que se dedica a pasar gente con su barca.  Se monta, pero el barquero le pide dinero por el viaje.  Ella no tiene dinero y aunque le suplica desesperada, el barquero se niega a pasarla si no le paga por adelantado.

La joven vuelve a casa de su amante y le pide dinero.  Él se niega sin darle explicaciones.

Se acuerda de un amigo soltero que vive en la misma orilla del río y que siempre ha sentido por ella un amor platónico, aunque ella nuca lo ha querido.  La joven le explica su situación y le pide dinero.  Pero su amigo también se niega: se siente totalmente decepcionado.

La chica vuelve a hablar con el loco, pero él no cede y la amenaza otra vez.  Al final la joven decide cruzar el puente.  El loco la mata.

¿Quién es, en tu opinión, más culpable de la muerte de la chica?

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Photography Travel Blog

First Two Days In Paris Was Colder Than We’d Anticipated

Time flies.  If I don’t get started documenting our travel journal, year 2011 may hit me before I know it.  June this year, we have visited France.  Like our trip to Spain last year, I am going to publish an article every weekend, until I run out of materials.

I am familiar with Paris.  When I was studying in UK, I spent my summer holidays staying with my relatives in Paris, helping them with their work and in my free time, I wandered the streets of Paris.  I have worked in Paris too.  And I have always wanted to bring Cynthia to Paris and show her the city inside out.  10 years we have been married, it seems like a destination long overdued.

Late June, we would have thought the weather was going to be sunny and warm.  We landed in Paris on a cold, cold morning of 9 degree Celsius.  Time to jiggle our plan a little bit and improvise.  Below are the options to read more about our first two days of the trip.

Here is a quick peep at a highlight of our photos.

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Linguistic My Hobbies

Objects In The World Of Spanish, And The Distractions That Entail

Learning a new language makes me feel like a kid once again.  It is long, hard, made of wood, and we use it to write, to sketch, and to paint, what is it?  And my study partner would answer, “Pencil!”, in Spanish.  And it would be my turn to ask, “What is it?”.  “A handkerchief”.  “What is it for?”.  “To wipe nose!”.  So on, and so on.  For the obsessive compulsive me, this exercise is ideal to practice for our upcoming Spanish examination.  Unfortunately Cynthia is far from being an OCD.  And she prefers to watch television instead.

Learning should be fun.  The beauty of a language is not what the words mean but what one can do with them.  To that extend, I love learning expressions.  Every culture has its unique way to express a certain idea.  In English, there is a saying: Every cloud has a silver lining.  I think it is beautiful, though at time of a heavy downpour, I can hardly find any silver lining.  Dark patches all over the sky, that is all I see.  But expressions like this stick to our minds.  In Spanish, the same idea is expressed in a more practical term.  No hay mal que por bien no venga, which roughly translate to good things won’t come when nothing is bad.  Don’t think too hard on the logic involved.  My mind goes into an infinite loop whenever I ponder too hard on the Spanish version of every cloud has a silver lining.

Learning new words, I must say, is hardly possible without dictionaries.  Kids nowadays are so blessed.  The online free ones are even better than some of the paid ones.  By right, I would imagine that with an explosion of readily available online knowledge, kids nowadays should be super kids in no time.  Yes?  One may be awed by the movie Matrix when Neo learns Kung Fu via an instant download from an optical disk.  The 20 years younger version of me back in the nineties would too be awed by the fact that one can learn the overview of Spanish history – or any topic of my choice – with a click of a button at Wikipedia today.  Or to learn how to bake a cake at YouTube.  Perhaps with the explosion of online knowledge comes an explosion of distractions in an equal magnitude.  That may be why our kids are still not the super kids we would have expected.  Or because knowledge is so readily available, we seldom make an effort to memorize.  That would explain why I keep searching the same Spanish word online again and again.  The penalty of not memorizing a word is another click of a button.  Hardly a penalty at all.

Learning objects is more fun that I thought.  Cloth hanger in Spanish is called percha.  Informally speaking, ser una buena percha is an expression that means to have a good figure (for girls).  I suppose if one’s body is good enough to hang clothes, one’s figure must be good?  My favorite one is pañuelo that means handkerchief.  Instead of saying it is a small world, there is a Spanish expression that says the world is a handkerchief (¡el mundo es un pañuelo!).

Learning online could be distracting.  What does a comb use for?  Peinarse.  I looked up the word and was attracted by the poetic usage of the verb comb (peinar).  Las aves peinan las olas depicts the beautiful graphical scene of the birds gently combing through the waves.  And by looking up the meaning of secarse (to dry), I stumbled upon the sentence me sequé las lágrimas (I dried my tears), and was intrigued by the conjugation of the first person past tense of ‘to dry’.  Soon, I am staring at how to express crying one’s heart out in Spanish (llorar a lágrima viva).  I am pretty sure none of these matters for my Spanish examination.  But I think I am too old to study solely for an examination.  Don’t you think?

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Linguistic My Hobbies Reflection

“When I Was 18” – A Spanish Homework

“When I Was 18” – that was the topic of our Spanish homework.  In fact, our teacher Natalia left the age to be open.  It could well be when I was 16, when I was 24, when I was 30, when I was … OK, let’s stop here.  I mean, when I was 16, my life was not that exciting.  Maybe observing the gorgeous girls going in and out of the nightclub at the ground floor of my apartment in Hong Kong was one of the highlights of my being 16.  What about that romantic relationship with a girl a couple of years younger than me?  OK, that – was complicated.  Really complicated.

18 was – looking back – the turning point of my life.  One of those moments that was tantamount to a multi-facet metamorphosis – physically, mentally, and spiritually.  5,995 miles away from home, I was studying in UK.  The age of experimentation, the age of inquisition, and the age of doing just the opposite for the sake of because-I-can.  Sometimes in a good way, sometimes not.  To experience at all cost.  When you are that young, I guess empathy may not be high in your list.  Neither is self-preservation.  It is a time of having to face the consequences and to bear the scars, a time of learning and moving on.

When I was 18, I was used to walk afar, alone or with my friends.  We would walk miles to another town, to visit the pubs, get chased by the dogs.  A few years later, in another city of the same country, I would walk miles to visit Toy “R” Us, to check out the latest console game titles.  I would spend hours walking, in the cold or in the rain, day or night.  We would climb a crane and stand high up above the ground in order to embrace the chilly wind, feel the thrill down our spines.  One evening, my friends and I ventured into a privately owned woodland.  Occasionally we found shotgun shells on the ground, under a bright moonlight.  Flying creatures would suddenly pop out of nowhere and got us scared.  Or did we scare them with our trespass?  When you are that young, you do not think.  You act with your heart.  At the end of our night trekking, we would see a peaceful lake with swans.  Flying ducks would make a gentle landing onto the surface creating beautiful lines on the otherwise serene pliable gigantic mirror.  In the middle of the lake, there was a castle decorated with modern interior.  How nice if I could live in such a surreal surrounding.  Looking back, I sincerely cannot recall how many times I have visited that lake.  I think about those moments from time to time; I dream about those moments from time to time.  When hallucination mixes with memory and dream, what is real, what is created by my mind consciously and subconsciously?

When I was 18, I seldom slept at night.  My friends would drop by my room to chat, to listen to music, to do homework together, or to play guitar.  My English friends would teach me the culture of tea drinking, the English way.  I would teach them my culture of having toasted bread with butter and sugar.  They were surprised when I sprinkled sugar on top of my buttered toast.  I was surprised when some preferred to drink English tea with only milk and no sugar.  I suppose when you are young, you are eager to try almost anything.  And we would chat the entire night.  Do you remember the days when you and your friends suddenly have this revelation that the world is so screwed up by the grown-ups?  That we have millions and one ways to make this world a better place?  Do you remember the days when you and your friends started to question the core of our existence?  The future of our existence if there is one; the doom of our existence if there are none?  Questions, questions, and questions.  And we debated.  The entire night.

That spirit of being 18, that spirit of endless adventure and no topic is a taboo.  That carelessness, that care free attitude of life.  Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back – so said Milan Kundera.

Now, I wish I could write that in Spanish.  The result of my homework is a lot simplified.  I am going to post it here because first it takes great effort to compose anything in Spanish and I may as well post it here for my personal future reference.  And second, it is rare that I could get someone to correct my Spanish writing (thanks Natalia!) so here we go.

Cuando tenía 18 años, era un joven estudiaba que en Inglaterra.  Me gustaba caminar largas distancias, gran altura.  Mis amigos y yo caminábamos por el bosque bajo la luz de la luna.  O entrábamos a otra ciudad a pie.  Cuando veíamos una grúa, la subíamos.  Era peligroso.  Pero era joven, sin pensar mucho.

Cuando tenía 18 años, era un hombre tranquilo.  Me gustaba escuchar música clásica o melodía de ayer todo el tiempo.  Visitaba a menudo la habitación de mi amigo y escuchábamos la música pop.  Otra amigo me introdujo la música rock.  Y tocábamos las guitarras en la noche.

Cuando tenía 18 años, mis amigos y yo hablábamos durante toda la noche.  Hablábamos sobre chicas, sobre extraterrestres y ballenas, sobre política y los problemas de mundo.  Los problemas que pensábamos que podíamos resolver.  ¡Qué ingenuos éramos!

Cuando tenía 18 años, veía la vida como una aventura.  Ahora la veo como la rutina diaria.  Prefiero quedarme en donde estoy.

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Linguistic My Hobbies

New Maps Added To “Human Spanish Conjugator”

OK.  If you recall earlier on, I have released a beta version of a board game to help learners like Cynthia and I to practice conjugating Spanish verbs.  This evening, we have given it a test drive.  Surprisingly, it is indeed pretty fun to play!  We have made some tweaks to the game and I have added 4 new maps to the board collection.  The official web page can be found in here.  Try it.  If you like it, share the link with your friends.  If you have suggestions, feel free to drop your comments here.  I will try to incorporate.

For those who are new to this simple board game or Spanish verb conjugation, the game has random tiles of a combination of “person” and “tense”.  E.g. one tile reads “we – past tense”.  Player #1 picks a card that has a verb such as “eat” and conjugates this verb as per the tile’s instruction.  Player #2 holds the answer that is hidden away from Player #1.  Following this example, the answer is “we ate”.  Believe it or not, it is not as simple in Spanish.  Far from it.

We have fixed a “bug” found in one of the special tiles.  The new rule now says that if you have landed on that special tile, you can pick another “person” to conjugate with the “tense” after you are given the verb (e.g. instead of “I”, you can switch to “we” if you want to).  This way, you can use it to your advantage to potentially gain a power up (x3) on an irregular form or to avoid a potential score loss.  Also, if all the players are new to Spanish verb conjugation, the one who holds the answer may announce if the answer is an irregular form or not once the verb is revealed.

45 minutes and we have managed to cover one third of the game board (about 34 verbs out of 99).  I reckon we can get it down to one hour for one complete game.  The rules are still evolving.  Stay tuned!

Related Link: Official Web Page to Human Spanish Conjugator™

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Linguistic My Hobbies

A Board Game I Am Working On

For the past few weeks, I have been working on a board game.  It has been an exciting journey.  Got my creative juice running.  The link to the game can be found in here.  I call the game “Human Spanish Conjugator™” for now as I need something fun to help me practice verb conjugation.  Below is a short journal on how I go about creating this little game of mine.

I started by designing the score sheet.  That basically set out the fundamental of the game.  I wanted something that looks sleek and functional.  I think I have more or less got it.

Designing the board was a lot harder.  At first I wanted to use dice to randomize the combination of person versus tense during the game play.  But it lacks the spacial dimension of maneuvering across the board – an opportunity to strategize beyond conjugating Spanish verbs.  So I eliminate the use of dice and preset the questions (as tiles on the board).  I wrote a generator (using OpenOffice) to randomize a set of combination (98 in total) with the possibility of placing emphasis on certain tenses or persons (such as practice more on ‘you’ and ‘I’ forms).  To create the first prototype, it took me a while to manually copy and paste each tile onto the image.  98 times.  Later on, I found a way to copy the pre-randomized tiles across to the game board, in one go.  Imagine, how many randomized game boards I can create in the future!

As for the cards, initially I (or rather Cynthia) wrote the verbs on paper.  While it functions as intended, it does not look sexy.  I thought long and hard and have decided to print them out and stick them onto blank name cards.  And why stop at the verb?  Why not print out the answers as well?  Save us time to verify our answers.  Tons of frantic copy and paste but I think both Cynthia and I love the end result (of that deck of 63 cards).  Cynthia did the actual cutting of the papers and pasting onto the blank cards by the way.

OK, now that this new prototype is out, time for a test drive some time this week.  I am hoping that this game is as fun as I think it is.

Related Article: Human Spanish Conjugator – A Board Game (Beta)