A Letter to MJ

August 23rd, 2009 by aacee No comments »

Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)

Dear Michael,

It is almost two months that you have unexpectedly left us. When you announced your farewell concert in London ‘This Is It’, we are all looking forward to an unforgettable curtain call. Even though I was not able to attend the concert, I was hoping to at least get a DVD of the concert when it is released. However, now we are all left with just THE final performance of yours, to be released in cinema on 30th October 2009.

It all started when I bought my first English album and was introduced to a world of pop music, and met the King of Pop. You potrayed a Bad image for the album, pretended to be the Smooth Criminal, and even boasted about the Dirty Diana. But you did not forget to remind us to make a change starting from the Man In The Mirror. I still remember that I listened to the tape so much that it was eventually spoilt.

I still Remember The Time when your Dangerous album was released, I bought both the tape and the CD, which was a relatively new technology back then. I even bought a CD player just to listen to your songs so that the tape would not get Jammed due to long hours of playback. After your previous album, you have undergone some changes and sometimes it made me wonder if you are Black Or White, but that did not matter as long as your songs are nice. There will be things that you want to keep In The Closet, and we will all Keep The Faith in you. When you asked all of us, Will You Be There, the answer will be ‘YES’!

You followed up with the album HIStory, with so many songs that became my all time favourite. Your version of Charlie Chaplin’s Smile is my favourite song. You fought back at the people who tried so hard to tarnish your image by saying that They Don’t Really Care About Us. You Are Not Alone, Michael. When you feel like Screaming, we will always Come Together and scream with you, along with the Little Susie and The Stranger In Moscow.

In the new millenium, after a very long wait, you finally released your final all new album. I had Butterflies in my stomach when I found out about it. Your album is so nice it has proven that as the King of Pop, you are Invincible. You Rock My World whenever your song is on the radio. Your songs start my day at the Break of Dawn, when I wake up and prepare for school, and it was your songs that I listen before I go to sleep.

When us fans found out that you are dead, we tried our best not to Cry as we thought you were Unbreakable and Heaven Can Wait. A lot of us pleaded to you Don’t Walk Away, because to a lot of us, You Are My Life. However, we have slowly learnt to accept the fact that you are gone. Rest in peace Michael, and we want you to know that Whatever Happens,  you will always live inside our heart.

From your life-long fan,
aacee

Monday Blues Series – A.I.’s analysis of Love

August 17th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

AI_Love

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

FWD: You Know You are Living in 2009 when…

August 15th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

stoneage-computerage

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2 You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7 Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12 You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING at yourself.

Monday Blues Series – Maths – Graphing

August 10th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

IT_Comic_03

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

Monday Blues Series – IT Comic 2

August 3rd, 2009 by aacee No comments »

IT_Comic_02

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

Monday Blues Series – IT Comic

July 27th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

IT_Comic_01

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

Astro Star Quest 2009

July 26th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

It was a Saturday evening, and I have nothing planned. My beloved would be joining her family in the PJ Catholic High School School Band Concert, and that left me being alone for the night, until I got a call from my niece.

“We’ve got tickets for the Astro Star Quest Finals at Bukil Jalil Putra Stadium tonight, do you wanna come?”
“Yes! Where? When? Who? What? How?” I immediately jumped at the offer.
“But you won’t be sitting with us girls, we belong to the fan group of one of the contestant, you have to sit with our tuition teacher,”
“Er…not again, going to a concert with a g-u-y…” (the last time I went to Jacky Cheung’s 2007 World Tour in Bukit Jalil Stadium, it was with a GUY friend).
“So you wan or not?” young girls are getting less and less patient nowadays.
“Okay, count me in.”

And here I am. In the free seating section almost at the top of the stadium, this is the view I get, which is not too bad actually.

asq2009_01

Astro Star Quest 2009

Since this is a live broadcast on Astro Channel 311, the show started promptly. With a set of fast songs followed by a set of slow songs performed by the final five. To be honest, I have not followed any of this year’s ASQ, therefore I have no idea who are the five finalists. My judgement is based on their performance on the Finals night and not the whole series.

Having to endure a very poor sound system with echoes and deafening loudness, I can barely differentiate who is actually singing and who is mumbling there. I cannot even hear a single word the judges have said about the performance. By the way, there were no FEMALE judges on the panel.

After the first round of songs, I have eliminated two of them in no particular order:

1-KahFai1-317_43200963707

Kah Fai

17-Ryan1-317_43200960925

Ryan

Reasons for Kah Fai to enter my elimination list:
#1 He was the first to start singing, and he failed to lift the roof, in short, he failed to “come in with a bang”. I know that is pretty bias but being the first contestant to go out, he has to be THAT good.
#2 His voice is a bit better than average but does not have the range to go high pitch without struggling.

Reasons for Ryan to enter my elimination list:
#1 He does not know how to sing (as compared to the other finalists).
#2 He seems to capitalize only on his good looks and the fan base attracted to (perhaps) his looks.
#3 He has shown nothing to convince me that he deserved to be in the last five.
#4 And he ended up No.4 …

Since I have never followed the Astro Star Quest Finals before, I have no idea what was going on when the first elimination was made, until a long long time after that. I was a bit disappointed to see Alvin eliminated in the first round as I tipped him to be in the last TWO. He has that cute babyface (no I am not GAY) and his voice is sweet and soulful, his performance for the night was good, bar his microphone problem in the first song (which was not really his fault, was it?).

Bye bye cute teddybear Alvin...

Bye bye cute teddybear Alvin...

The performance of the last four has picked up a notch and they are singing songs that I know very well. Therefore I can compare them to the original singers. The song that touched me most was Heartbeat (Xin Dong) orginally by Shino Lin Xiao Pei performed by the eventual winner Min. The other female finalist Jie Yu, which I tipped earlier to be in the FINAL TWO, chose to go with Ambiguous (Ai Mei) originally by Rainie Yang Cheng Lin, and in my opinion was the reason she lost. Later I found out that Jie Yu was a ASQ2007 Top 20, which explains why she could only get third place even when she was much better than the rest.

The next round, the final THREE, was messed up by a messed up appearance from Janice ??, who should be responsible for the eventual downfall of Kah Fai. The clueless kid had no idea what was going on when he was backing-up for Janice. Neither did the audience there. After the short appearance, Janice left during the commercial break, looking wobbly and under the influence of drugs. I was wondering if that was Janice or Jill. Later it was reported that Janice has sufferred from a sore throat but insisted on appearing so not to let down her fans, and the smoke from the earlier stage fireworks have made things worse. She was hospitalized immediately after she left the stage.

During the PK round, Kah Fai, probably hit with a huge confidence loss from the previous round, underperformed when it mattered the most. He was out of key in large parts of the song and that no doubt handed the crown to Min with no questions asked.

Podium Finishers of Astro Star Quest 2009

Podium Finishers of Astro Star Quest 2009

Even though Astro Star Quest has produced a few notable stars over the years, namely Nicholas Teo, the standards should be raised so that the Finals will be an entertaining event instead of a dull and a clueless one. I began to check my watch after an hour or so of the show, hoping that it would finish as soon as possbile. Instead, I was forced to sit there and endure almost 3 full hours of a not so entertaining show.

At least it was better than sitting at home, alone, doing nothing.

The unMysterious Disappearance of Andrew Choo

July 22nd, 2009 by aacee No comments »

Hello again. It has been a while since I last blogged. One month and nineteen days to be exact. So what happened between these forty-nine days of my disappearance? A lot.

First of all, if you happen to follow my blog, and eventually gave up due to me not updating it as frequent as I have promised, please accept my most sincere apology. It was not my fault. Blame it on my web hosting provider, and blame it on wordpress. Ha ha. No, serious. The very last time when I wanted to update my Monday Blues series, I encountered some technical problem. I could not upload anything to my server. Wordpress keeps telling me it failed to upload.

After trying different solutions that was posted on the Internet, except for setting permissions 777 for my uploading folders, I gave up. The very last time I set permission 777 to a folder on my website, my website got hacked and was turned into a phishing/pharming site. I was not aware of that until I received a serious warning letter from a bank in America.

At first I thought it was some kind of joke, but after checking my website folders, I was shocked to find out that I was running a phishing site. The phishing site that was hosted here, in simple words, is a fake online banking login page. I believe the hacker has collected a number of login details, to the extent that the bank’s IT guys noticed that and kindly asked me to remove the illegal site before reporting to the authority.

Soon after, my site’s IP address has been blacklisted by a number of DNS (domain name servers) and I have trouble sometimes to login to my site or to check my emails. It was very frustrating and eventually I wrote to my web hosting provider and asked them to move my site to another IP address, which they kindly did promptly, free of charge.

But that did not solve my wordpress problem. The trick that did it was, to create a new uploads folder, set permissions to 755 and try to upload a file via wordpress. If that works, copy the entire contents of the old uploads folder to the new one and continue blogging!

Well, that did not take me almost one and a half month to solve, it is just that I was occupied by other things. I went for job interviews and finally landed myself a job that I am happy with. In between that, I spent most of my time with my beloved because once I start this new job, I will not have much time for her. Not to mention time to blog.

However, I will try to keep my Monday Blues running as usual, and post short but frequent updates in the future. Until my next post. Take care. See you soon. :)

p.s. While I was AWOL, one of my favourite entertainer, Michael Jackson, has unfortunately passed away. I was looking forward to his last rounds of concerts but seems like Heaven Can’t Wait. Check back soon, I will post a tribute to MJ this weekend.

Monday Blues Series – The Rainbow Week

July 20th, 2009 by aacee No comments »

Ok, ok, I am late for this entry. Reason? I was struck down by a criminal called ‘Monday Blues’. Yeah, I am lame. This entry would be even more lame.

Let’s get back to the topic. I am sure you all know that rainbows have seven colours, which is, from top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. How would it be like to associate the days of the week with rainbow colours?

RainbowFirst of all, the beginning of the working week is Monday, and we all know Monday is associated to the blue colour, because we have Monday Blues. The colour is also associated to our mood, therefore on Mondays we feel blue.

Tuesdays make our mood a little better and we feel greener. Our work rate begins to pick up and slowly gathering pace.

Wednesday, it is already the middle of the working week, and we are all looking forward to Friday. Things began to heat up a bit, and we are performing at the most effective level as we want to complete our tasks and enjoy the Friday without having to work overtime. Therefore, it’s Wednesday Yellow.

Thursday, the day before Friday, is what we all look forward to whole week long. Thursday Orange.

The day is finally here! Hooray! RED HOT Friday!

Usually our Friday mood will be extended over into Saturday, therefore we get a mix of red and blue, resulting in a Violet Saturday. By the way, it is VIOLET, not VIOLEnT.

Sunday, a day when we should take a good rest and prepare ourselves for the new week ahead, we have to keep our mind clear and our body fresh. Water is the most cleansing matter of all matters. Thus, Sunday is Indigo.

And now who says that our week cannot be colourful?

Rainbow

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

Monday Blues Series – Hey I Love this Doctor

June 1st, 2009 by aacee No comments »

I received this forwarded email from my high school ENGLISH tuition teacher. Even though it is a little long, please read until the end and you will love the answers that the doctor gave.

Hey I Love this Doctor

This MAY or MAY NOT be the actual doctor that gave the following advice

Q: Doctor, I’ve heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?
A: Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that’s it…  don’t waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; that’s like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.

Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A: You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat?  Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.

Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake? 
A:  No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made out of grain.  Bottoms up!

Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have a body and you have fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your  ratio is two to one, etc.

Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A: Can’t think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain…Good!

Q:  Aren’t fried foods bad for you? 
A: YOU’RE NOT LISTENING!!! …..  Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they’re permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?

Q:  Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.

Q:  Is chocolate bad for me? 
A:  Are you crazy? HELLO Cocoa beans! Another vegetable!!! It’s the best feel-good food around!

Q:  Is swimming good for your figure? 
A:  If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.

Q:  Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle? 
A:  Hey!  ‘Round’ is a shape! 

Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets.

And  remember:
‘Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways – Chardonnay in one hand – chocolate in the other – body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming ‘WOO HOO, What a Ride’    

 AND…..

For those of you who watch what you eat, here’s the final word on nutrition and health. It’s a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies. 
1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
4. The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans. 
5. The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

CONCLUSION

Eat and drink what you like.
Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

(and this joke came from my ENGLISH tuition teacher…)

Monday Blues Series is aimed at lighting up your Mondays when you reluctantly drag yourself to work. It will be a series of pictures, jokes, or light articles that will, hopefully, bring some life into you. Stay tuned every Monday at 9 a.m. (Malaysian time, +0800 GMT) for my Monday Blues Series.

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