Ohai. By the time this is published, I would have just got aboard one of these and will be cruising from Singapore to Macau with stops along the way for the next 14 days. Blogging may be sporadic. Not because there will be no internet (hello satellite broadband) but probably because I will be too busy stuffing my face or drinking myself silly with the family – all 22 of us!

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Two Sundays ago, due to my careless mistake of not checking before opening the garage door, Snoop ran across the street and bit my neighbour’s dog. Not only was I traumatised by my neighbour and his kids screaming and shouting, and the thought of their dog suffering a serious injury, I was also worried about the incident being reported to the local council.

This was not the first time that Snoop had bit a dog – the first time was the one and only time that my mom took him for a walk in the park, when he pulled my mom onto the ground as he rushed towards the other dog. If my neighbour had reported this incident, I was afraid that the rangers might make me surrender him to be put down. I was an emotional wreck and I was feeling nauseous and couldn’t eat and sleep for the next day. At one stage, I was curled up on the floor into a foetal position.

Luckily for me and thanks to my mom smoothing things over with the neighbour, the incident was not reported after we’ve had agreed to build a fence in our garage and to pay for their dog’s medical bills. The dog underwent treatment just this weekend and we are still waiting to hear back about how much it will cost, but initial estimates are that it’s going to be about $2500 at least.

Thinking back, this has not been the first expensive incident. Due to another careless episode, Snoop chewed open a box of snail pellets and my other dog Dillon ended up eating it. That cost us around $1200 to have his stomach pumped. There was the time he got hit by a car which cost about $4000. And then there was the time he had to have his leg amputated because of a tumour which cost about $1000 all up (it wasn’t so expensive anymore because I had pet insurance by then).

A conservative estimate would bring that figure up to about $10000. I’ve had him for 10 years so a rough approximation would be that he has cost me $3 a day to keep, on top of his food and regular medicine. If I look at it as cheap therapy it was worth it but then it was not all therapy – the stress that I went through during each unpleasant episode was terrible.

Would I have prefer to have had another dog? Perhaps. One that doesn’t hate other dogs so much would have been nice but at least Snoop is really nice with people and kids. I know that there has been a lot of times that my mood is instantly lifted when I’m around my dogs, and they motivated me to exercise by running and playing with them. Having them is therapeutic but it sure wasn’t cheap.

And one last thing, pet insurance is really worth it and I should have gotten it from the beginning. At around $300-400 a year and say your dog lives for 10-12 years, you just need to have one medical emergency or accident and you would have gotten your money’s worth. But it doesn’t cover your dog biting someone or someone’s dog so learn from my mistakes – be vigilant and know your dog’s character so that you know when and how to avoid potentially nasty situations.

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On the weekend, a group of us (Me, Kayo, Tham, Sel and Howe Chern) went down to Margaret River for a little getaway. I would have blogged about it by now have I not lost my camera on the way back here. I didn’t realise it on the 3 hour drive back when I was the designated driver, and I didn’t realise it when I got home and dropped my stuff on the floor and slumped down on the couch for the next few hours. I only realised it as I was falling asleep and the thoughts of how I was gonna blog the trip popped into my head.

I jumped out of bed and began to look around frantically: the front door, the kitchen and the laundry; my bags and my dirty clothes and I couldn’t find it. I then texted the group asking if they had seen it amongst their stuff or in the car. Everyone said no. I then messaged our friend CC who works at Avis where we got the rental car to see if she can look for it when she gets to work the next morning.

What bothered me most was the thought of losing the photos of the trip and not so much the camera itself. Worried but exhausted I managed to fall asleep. The next morning CC said that she looked everywhere in the car and couldn’t find it. This was when I more or less accepted and came to terms with the fact that I have probably lost it for good and I tried to not think about it anymore, even as I was looking around the house and my bags repeatedly expecting it to miraculously appear.

Then this morning as I retraced my steps one more time, I decided to call the place that I knew we last stopped at before the drive home, Simmo’s Ice Cream in Dunsborough. To my great relief, they did find a lost camera and it fits the description of my camera.

So I’m gonna be driving down south this Saturday again to pick it up – a 510km round trip. A few people asked me why I didn’t arrange it for it to be mailed back to me. One, I wanted it back as soon as possible. And two, I wanted to do the drive down (those who know me well would understand how this is a big task for me ‘cos I hate long car trips!) so that this life lesson to be less careless is strongly reaffirmed in me. Heheh.

The other lesson that I learnt: when one has a laptop whilst on holiday like I did, one should upload the photos to the laptop at the end of every day so that if the camera was truly lost, then at least one would still have the photos from the days before.

Anyway, photos and write-up of the trip will follow after I get the camera back.

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1. Money can’t buy you happiness but it can buy you the company of your friends who may be too cash-strapped to hang out. I believe that money is nothing if it doesn’t bring people together in a good way. But there’s a fine line between being generous and being used.
2. My mom have told me this before: you can’t take your money with you when you die so there’s no point hoarding it. There’s a difference between saving for a rainy day and being a scrooge.

   Plus I think that making your descendants expect a big inheritance is only going to make them lazy and complacent and they would not know the true value and hard work involved in earning money.

3. Bill Gates was asked about being super-rich and he said this:
   

   “I can understand about having millions of dollars. There’s meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger. Dick’s (a burger joint in his neighbourhood) has not raised their prices enough,” Gates said.

   I agree with his sentiment. Once you have financially taken care of the basic things many times over, chasing for more money is just ugly and obscene if that extra money was not used to help people and advance society in meaningful ways.

   After all, the simple and important things in life cost little if anything, and those are the things that give the most long-lasting happiness.

   Bill Gates: Being very rich is ‘the same hamburger’ | Technically Incorrect – CNET News.

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For the rest of the day I analysed my words over and over again to try and understand what I could have said differently. In the end I couldn’t so I thought, “ah fuck it, some things are not meant to be understood.”

My opinion on happiness is the same – it’s not necessary to understand why you are happy. You just are. And as long as your pursuit of happiness is not immoral or illegal and it doesn’t harm yourself or other people then you are doing fine. Even better if it is not based on arbitrary milestones or timetable, whether yours or other people’s. All of which is a long way of saying:

You are happy because you are happy.

It doesn’t have to be logical and it doesn’t need a reason. Some need a lot to be happy and some don’t. There’s no right way or wrong way about it. What works for you may not work for me and I’m not going to try your way just because you feel that there’s no possible reason that I should be happy with what I have.

And if you say that I don’t know what I’m missing out on, I’m gonna say that if I don’t know what I’m missing out on, I can’t be missing it now can I?

Ignorance is bliss. Look at how happy they are.

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I got thinking about how much more time and effort it is for those who are parents. Even more impressive are the single parents, those who can’t afford hired help or day care, or those who don’t have in-laws or parents near by to help out with the kids. And it must be especially hard for those who work long hours or do manual labour.

And then this is assuming that the kids that you have are healthy both physically and mentally. I can’t yet imagine myself sacrificing so much of my free time and energy, and my social life to looking after someone other than myself. So to all the parents out there, my parents and your parents, I salute thee.

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When I saw last her in Sydney, Jan 2007

This afternoon I had bumped into BJ, one of my best friends from way back. She’s been living in Sydney and country New South Wales. I hadn’t seen her in 4 years and since then she’s had a baby. We’ve kept in touch with the occasional SMS and calls but as our lives got busier (hers more than mine of course) those had lessen. If only she was a more avid Facebook user. Heh.

I was walking out of the office towards the post office nearby and there she was on the same side of the street pushing her baby in a pram. It felt kinda surreal and I actually squinted and focused for a while to make sure that she was who I was seeing.

We walked and talked and it felt like we have never lost touch at all. Of course it helps that my life hasn’t really changed much since the last time that I’ve seen her (forever lonely – sob. Heh), and she’s still as I remembered her. The conversation was effortless. I’m kinda blessed that I have a lot of friends like that.

It got me thinking about the timing of this chance meeting. If I didn’t had to go to the post office today, if I had ate my lunch a little slower before leaving the office, then I probably wouldn’t have met her today. Although, she would have called me sooner or later and I would have met her eventually soon enough. But I don’t fret over such trivialities. The important thing is that I met her today and that made my day great instantly .

And yeah I got thinking about “Sliding Doors” again.

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You would think that after my years of working in IT support that these two things would be instinctively done every time. But in the heat of the moment, I’d forget my lessons learnt. So here are the top two things that I can impart to anyone looking to work in this field. Are you ready?

1. When speaking to a customer who may not understand the nuances of modern technology, ask to speak with someone else who is more technical. For example: their internal IT support or the youngest child in the house. You don’t need the additional stress of passing technical info through a non-technical conduit which will surely double the time needed to resolve a problem.

   Be careful with this one though. One time I did this with a female caller and she immediately thought that I was a sexist pig.

2. The placebo effect cannot be underestimated. This week whilst dealing with a difficult customer, I was reminded how effective it is by two of my colleagues. Instead of thinking how a change might not solve the problem at hand, know that a change done by you is better than inaction or suggesting that the customer look into possible problems at their end.

   This is particularly useful when the customer is stubbornly insisting that you do something, anything to fix a problem that cannot be or is difficult to attribute to your company. So even if it’s moving a problematic website from one server to another server that is identical in specs, which you know will change nothing, it will be enough to placate the customer. And they might even sense an improvement when there isn’t one.

   Ultimately all of us customer service types are in it to make the customer happy. So whatever works, right?

But no matter how obsequious we are required to be at our job, remember this: not every customer is right.

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Bacardi 151 is evil in a bottle. At 75% alcohol or 151-proof it’s highly flammable and is meant to be mixed into strong cocktails. But if you wanna get hammered very quickly at half the price, this is the shot for you. However …

If you like to enjoy your night slowly progressing from sober to buzzed to drunk, this is NOT your drink. If you want to help get the chick sitting on the couch into your bedroom, this is NOT the drink to use. If you want to showoff and think you’re a total badass, this is NOT your drink.

Urban Dictionary: bacardi 151.

Alcohol blackouts are nasty and nothing gets you there faster than a couple of shots of this swill. If you have a high tolerance of alcohol you can still function and appear normal but your brain is not capable of forming memories anymore. This was the crux of the rape case that I was a juror for.

Contrary to popular belief, alcohol does not kill brain cells but it does “interfere with brain receptors that produce steroids, which cause neurons essential to memory and learning to misfire”. And it gets you into dangerous and undesirable situations.

“If you drink enough alcohol, you will do things you won’t even realize you did the next day,” he says. “You will have conversations with people you won’t remember and put yourself in dangerous situations. You will get yourself in trouble, not remember and it may be the police explaining it to you.”

The Body Odd – About last night: Biology of the booze blackout.

Anyway, my point is … stay away from Bacardi 151.

Half a bottle of 151 off in a jug
1 cup of Malibu rum baby thats whassup then you
Fill the rest of the jug with pineapple juice and its crackin
The only defect is waking up like, “What happened?”

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I was at the supermarket picking up some Mother when I saw this preposterously named variant of one of its competitors on the market. The full name is: Monster Energy Extra Strength Nitrous Technology Super Dry. I was like lol wtf?!

The gimmick is that besides carbon dioxide, there’s also nitrous oxide used to fizzy up the drink. Otherwise the ingredients are the usual energy drink culprits: caffeine, taurine, guarana and vitamins B1 and B12. Flavour wise it has a generic citrus taste, a bit like Mountain Dew. I don’t know how nitrous oxide is meant to taste like when it’s infused into water, perhaps it doesn’t even have a taste. Due to the nitrous oxide probably taking up the volume that would have been normally carbon dioxide, it is less fizzy than the other energy drinks which meant I could gulp it down faster.

The blurb on the can says the nitrous oxide gives the drink “a unique texture, smooth drinkable flavour and buzz that’s bigger than ever”. It did feel slightly thicker in my mouth than the usual fizzy drinks but I didn’t notice anything new with the flavour. It’s citrusy and that was it. But because I could slam it down faster, I did feel a stronger buzz that lasted for about 2-3 hours.

I would buy it again even though it costs the same as Mother but in a smaller can. And I would also buy it again because I want to encourage energy drink companies to come up with the next crazy idea.

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