The Hamster Factor @ flickr

I am in no hurry.
Fast or slow,
As long as I’m with you,
It’s all good.

On the weekend, I was talking to a very attractive girl, a girl that I thought was more attractive than her boyfriend. My reactions were incredulity, curiousity, and envy. In that order. As I talked to her more, I discovered that she is the epitome of every nerdy geek’s dream girl. She reads manga, watches anime and is a hardcore World of Warcraft player. All the while looking like honey-coated candy cotton fluff. She’s delicious is what I’m saying, in case it wasn’t obvious enough. Heheh.

She told me they had met at the supermarket that they were working in at the time. He was persistent. She thought that he was creepy. But eventually, he won her over and they got together anyway. Can the story get any more rom-com or what?!

After hearing her side of the story, I thought I should now talk to the guy and learn his magic tricks. And there were none. There were no tricks. He was just being himself, being sincere with her. The fact that he liked the same things that she did was a big factor of course. But there’s always this hesitation to find out more about a person whom one doesn’t find physically attractive at first, isn’t there? Plus he had a big barrier to cross because she had already thought that he was creepy. So I can imagine the day that they started talking about their interests and it hits them that they really have a lot in common.

Like I said, it’s such a rom-com.

I has always had the belief that there must be at least a slight level of mutual physical attraction to hold a relationship together. But, personality counts for more in the long run. And it is also the thing that can compensate for that initial lack of physical attraction. Love happens, one way or another.

“Pretty is as pretty does”. Proverb to mean: It is more important to treat people well than to be good-looking; just because you are good-looking does not mean you are a good person. (Said only of girls and women.)

source

And sometimes you just have to take that plunge and talk to her
(xkcd.com)

Last night I went to the Challenge Stadium to catch HK pop/movie star Eason Chan in concert, along with Stephanie, her uncle and Lily. Eason was very entertaining and I especially loved his jokes and banter with the crowd. Never laughed this hard at a music concert ever.

I also got to try out the camera on the HTC Incredible S. Zooming and focusing don’t work so well in the dark, but other than that, the photos have very little noise which was quite impressive.

Overall, it was an awesome night. I had joked to Steph that half the Chinese population must have been there, and the other half was at the casino. Heh. Thanks for the ticket again Steph!

I love my KFC. I get mildly euphoric from eating it. So when I first read about this being available in America, my first thought was, “WTF, that’s insane” and my second thought was “When are they gonna do it here too?” Heh.

For those of you who don’t know of it, it’s a double-deck burger without the buns – two pieces of whole chicken breast meat would be the buns. And in between are two slices of cheese and bacon. If you order the original recipe chicken, you get BBQ sauce slathered on the cheese and bacon. And if you order the hot and spicy chicken (the Zinger version) you get hot sauce instead.

So how was it? It’s exactly what you’d expect if you bite through two pieces of KFC chicken. The first bite was like a party in my mouth but subsequent bites became a little too much to handle. If this was a normal burger, the sweetened buns would have balanced out well against the saltiness. The bacon and cheese did not add to the flavour at all because the combined taste of the two pieces of KFC chicken was overpowering. The hot sauce did provide an extra kick to it though.

The price was $7.95 for the Double by itself, or $9.95 in a combo with regular fries and drink. I had the combo and I was stuffed after. I think the whole thing sat in my stomach for at least the next 2 hours. I don’t think I will have it again. I had thought that I would like it more than I did, but I’d much prefer having two pieces of chicken meat on the bone, one piece at a time. If I’m gonna have a massive intake of fat, salt and calories, I might as well enjoy it right? Hahah!

p.s. I could have sworn that the girl at the counter smirked when I told her my order. Her expression was like, orly?

I still remember how happy I was when I first got the iPhone 3G. However, in the 3 years since then, it has crashed and been restored 3 times – once whilst just doing an iOS update, and the last time because I had turned it off (!) – and 2 SIM cards mysteriously died even though they’ve never been taken out of that pain in the ass SIM cradle that you need a pin to get to.

Even then, that’s ok. I only use the phone to make calls and send texts, to listen to music and for web-browsing. I’m not big into apps or games. However the last crash and restore forced me to put iOS 4 on it which made the phone lag and sputter, even when I’m just doing two things – using Safari and listening to music. Considering these are the two things that I use the phone mostly for, it got pretty annoying pretty fast.

So I started looking around for alternatives today. I settled on the HTC Incredible S because it had good reviews. I had thought of moving over from Optus to Telstra as well because their 3G coverage is supposed to be better but they didn’t offer the phone, and their prices were generally more expensive. Better 3G coverage is good but not something that I’m willing to pay more for at this stage. Optus’ coverage is ok along my daily commute and that’s good enough for me.

I also considered the iPhone 4 but if I wanted to pay $0 upfront, I have to go from the $49-cap plan that I’m on now to the $59-cap plan. With the HTC Incredible S I can stay on the same plan. Plus, with my slightly-soured impression of the iPhone and how Apple does things in general, I swayed quite readily towards the HTC phone.

So, off to the phone shop this weekend! And you know what I’m most looking forward to besides having a usable phone again? Not having to use iTunes to transfer songs onto the phone.

I have this fantasy that I get to go back to uni and relive my life back then except that this time, I would have the self-confidence and security that I have now. Yeah as hard as it is to believe, I wasn’t always this cool with myself. Heheh. It had taken me a few years to get used to high school and then I had to start from scratch again when I got to uni. And by the time I hit my stride in my fourth year, uni was almost over. Argh.

The main reason that I want to go back to uni is because I think that the social life was awesome back then. If I could re-do it without having to do lectures, assignments and exams, and earn the money that I earn now, I’d go back in a heartbeat. The social life was awesome because one would socialise in between lectures, after lectures, sometimes during lectures; whilst “studying” in the library, doing group assignments and labs; and when having meals together in the cafeteria and everywhere else. And this was during uni time. On the weekends there would be the clubbing, partying and drinking. Ah heck, sometimes even during the week.

My point is: uni was one big party scene even though we were there to earn our degrees. It would have been even better with the aforementioned self-confidence and security. Oh and also the cynicism and the understanding of men-women dynamics. That would have helped me out with a lot of the social awkwardness and relationships that I found myself in at the time because I thought I needed a girlfriend to fit in. I would have also met and talked with some of the more hotter chicks that I was too chicken-shit or tongue-tied to talk to, even when they said hi to me. Yup, I was but a shy fool.

But I think there was a reason that I went through that social minefield – all of it was a tremendous life lesson. I like how I got shaped into the person that I am now.

That you would arrange for your new wife to be killed right after you marry her?

A businessman arranged his wife’s murder on their honeymoon six months after telling a friend he had been forced into marriage and “needed to find a way out of it”, a British court has heard.

Shrien Dewani, 31, allegedly said that his family would disown him unless he agreed to settle down with Anni Hindocha, 28.

Sydney Morning Herald – Honeymoon murder suspect was ‘desperate to escape marriage’.

I don’t see the logic in any of it. Would making her die make it unlikely that his family would make him re-marry, and thus allowing him to go back to his presumably freewheeling playboy ways? Why can’t he marry her and then still fool around anyway? If he was afraid of being found out and having his family disown him for that, I’m sure he could do it discreetly right?

If the reason that he’s afraid of being disowned is because of losing out on the money, he could have gotten married, start siphoning money from his family and stash it somewhere, fool around until he gets found out and still be laughing.

All of the above is better than killing a person and then getting caught for it right? All of that would have been better for the poor wife anyway. She didn’t even see it coming – snuffed out ultimately because the man she married thought that being disowned was worst than killing someone over it.

Shrien Dewani detained in secure mental health hospital | World news | guardian.co.uk.

So yeah there’s no logic in this. And although the possibility of his lawyer using mental illness as a defense seems like a ploy to get him acquitted or to reduce the severity of his punishment, he might just be that little bit mentally unhinged because he clearly wasn’t thinking straight.