Ever get annoyed with the carriages being full in the morning? Well, have no fear, George is here!

Today I have discovered (and yet to perfect) this new technique for getting onto a crowded train. And here I am, sharing my secrets with you! Fully illustrated with easy to follow instructions that even a toddler will have no problems understanding it!

Got a tip to contribute? Want to thank me for this ingenious guide? Leave a comment!

As most of you know, I’ve given up on driving.. to work that is. I am now an official commuter of the LRT trains. Which means no more traffic jams for me, which means I get to save on money on petrol.. and a whole load of things. Anyway, the following email pretty much summarizes my transport situation:

From: George [mailto:george@inspidea.com]
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 3:51 PM
To: ‘Jason’
Subject: RE:

LRT - 135/month = ~5 a day
petrol would probably be there's parking fees at the lrt station i think, rm 4/day
rm14/day

now i'm paying:

parking: rm100/month or rm5/day
toll: rm2.50 (to work) 1.50 (home) = 4.00/day to and from
petrol : at least rm100/week, so that's about rm14/day
rm23/day

i save about 40%
wow
haha

LRT
pros:
cheaper
don't have too drive far
can sleep on the train (if i get seats)
girls to look at (if there are any lol)

cons:
have to wake up VERY early
have to remember to charge my mp3 player or i'll die from boredom
can't stay late at work (wait, is that a con? lol)
long ride in the train
might get mugged (ever since i got mugged, i have a phobia about walking around at night now :/)

Car
pros:
can leave the house later (sleep more :p)
can leave work later (pro? lol)
good music in the car
going out after work is not a problem
i drive a nice car

cons:
very expensive
car accidents
traffic jams
people might plant car bombs

This will serve as an introduction to the LRT stories I will be posting in the future.

So I was chatting with Jason and he mentioned that his free DVD that was supposed to come with his magazine subscription was missing. So he started going on about he would kick the postman’s ass if he ever came back to return the disc. haha

Then I started thinking to myself- if i was a postman, my residents won’t be getting their mails!
I mean seriously, what does it take to be a postman? Do you have to sign some sort of trust/honesty agreement?

I mean, think of all the cool shit you can get as a postman! Everything gets sent by mail! Love letters, blackmail, money, magazines, bills, bank statements, CDs..everything!

Of course you would have to deal with the random mail bombs, anthrax packages and whatnot.. but I’m pretty sure all the good stuff you get outweighs the bad!

Alright, I’m adding working as a postman to my ‘things to do before I die’ list.

I guess I somehow knew that being a post man would be a cool job when I wanted to be one when I was a kid :p

Groove Junction, Sri Hartamas
Monday, 12th May
8-10pm
RM 15 cover charge including one drink
There will be another band performing as well

This will be the first time I’ll be playing a full set at a gig!
Bring yourself, bring your friends! Spread the word!

For more info you can contact me at: msn/facebook: geowongyt@hotmail.com or hp: 0123616973

See you guys there

So it’s that time of the year again. Well not really. It happens more often than not.
Clearing out the saved messages on my phone!

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this and my phone is clogging up. So here we go:

“Kinky prostitutes come over for great sex”

The other day when I wrote this, I guess I must have been thinking about high school. When Ian came up with this mnemonic for remembering how to sort out living things in bio. In case you don’t know/remember, it goes:

Kingdom | Kinky
Phylum | Prostitutes
Class | Come
Order | Over
Family | For
Genus | Great
Species | Sex

Good to know that I haven’t forgotten it yet!

“People who piss me off- waiters who are too damn cocky or lazy to write orders down. Or serve you the wrong food despite confirming your order with you.”

So I’m sure everyone’s experienced this before. I mean seriously, if you’re having trouble remembering things, write them down! It takes 2 seconds and saves all the trouble you go through later! I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. It’s not illegal to carry pen and paper in a restaurant! And it’s better to admit you have bad memory by jotting stuff down instead of pretending you got everything when actually you don’t.

“Man spits into helmet face guard”

Its just something funny I thought of. Imagine a motorcyclist spits out phlegm onto his face guard instead, cos its so clean he doesn’t realize it’s there. haha

“Why don’t bad guys fight among side their hench men?”

Ever watch a movie where a bad guy sends his whole army after the hero, only to see them almost killing the good guy, but not quite, then get decimated? Then the bad guy is left all alone with the hero. Again, the bad guy almost, just almost kills the hero. But he fails, and gets his ass kicked. Now imagine this- instead of just sending his goons, why doesn’t the bad guy join the fight in the first place? He’s gonna end up fighting the hero eventually, so he might as well join in when he has advantage and a higher chance of winning! (Hollywood) movies are flawed!

“I was so afraid to wake up cos I dreamt there was a roach in my room and didn’t want it to be true. Car spoiler stolen!”

That was one bizarre dream I had with 2 separate incidents. No explanation needed I guess. Unless you didn’t know I have a fear of roaches. Well, you do now!

“What drives you mad- keep on pissing someone off till they kill someone”

Haha. I think it’s an idea for a story of some sort. Kinda twisted if you ask me. Too much for my taste :p

“This evening when I was sitting by the stairs near the klcc fountain I overheard 2 men on my left talking about malaysia- ‘they can’t even manage a bus company and they want to send a man off to space’ haha!”

One of the best lines I’ve heard whilst eaves dropping.

* * * * *

Oh and my performance on Sunday was alright. I was the first open mic on stage and nervous as hell! Did alright with ‘Car Crash Hearts..’ but screwed up the ‘myspace’ song. It was a fun night nevertheless Thanks to my roadie Jason for being the only one showing up. LOL

Looking forward to the next gig!

And so, tomorrow will be the first time I’ll be performing this year :p I can’t wait!

Marketplace KL (visit their site for a map)
9pm-1am
featuring SingleTrackMind, Jerome Kugan, Oh Chentaku! and other open mic acts
its rm20 cover charge which gets you 1 drink
for more info you can call the number on the flyer, or me at 0123616973. I’ll be doing only one song due to time constraints, but do stay for the other acts!

If you can’t make it to this one (or don’t feel like coming cos i’m only playing one song :p) I have an upcoming gig after next week, where i’ll be the ‘main act’ with a 15 minute set.

See you guys there!

As I was having dinner with my colleagues yesterday, my mind wandered off for a moment. I got lost in all the multiple threads going on at once. Everyone was speaking in either Cantonese or English.

My friend asked me, “do you understand what they are saying?”
“A little here and there..” I replied.

Over the past year working in Inspidea, my skills in non-English language have tremendously improved. I am now able to pick out the main words and key phrases from Cantonese and Malay sentences and decipher the meaning of the whole line. Communicating with my colleagues isn’t much of a problem now.

Language has never been my strongest point. People shit on me for having a bad command of Malay and Chinese/Cantonese. So how come people think its wrong for me to shit on other people who have a bad command of English? What kind of one way street is that? Not that I do it anyways. The only time I ever rag on people with bad English is when they bring it up first. I’m pretty tolerant towards non-English speakers, I know just how they feel whenever I try to speak in Malay/Cantonese to them.

But I hate the fact how the alot of people think that locals who speak English as their main language, and by English I don’t mean Manglish, (as opposed to speaking in Malay/Canto) are snobbish, disrespectful, and uncultured people. Those people aren’t snobbish- they just happen to communicate better in English! If you’re gonna criticize anybody for speaking a ‘foreign’ language well, I think you should start pointing fingers at yourself for being so narrow-minded in the first place. Who knows why they don’t speak with their mother tongue.

It wasn’t a choice to choose what school you attend or the people you mixed with. You couldn’t choose what language your family used to communicate with each other. Its not like you purposely chose not to speak the local language. These things can’t be decided by you. Why don’t people look at it the other way instead- “I was unfortunate I did not get the chance to learn our local tongue” instead of “I’m too good to speak other languages besides English”.

I was born and raised by an English speaking family. I didn’t grow up on Hong Kong movies or TVB serials. Neither did I watch the locally dubbed cartoons. Does that make me any worse or better off? No it doesn’t.

And despite speaking only English, I was never really good at it. I was in the top English class for year 7, then going down to group 2 in year 8, group 4 in year 9 (i think there were 6-7 groups then), and the group 4/4 in year 10 and 11 (the lowest non-ESL group). I was in the last Malay class as well. For my IGCSEs, I didn’t get any As for English Language, Literature or Malay.

So I know my place, and I don’t act like I’m some bigshot just because I speak English. I am who I am because of everything that’s happened to me, and the result of my actions.

I’m grateful that I went to a prestigious school and met the people whom I know as my friends today. If not for this life, things might have turned out differently.

The very same night I had that conversation, I bumped into an Ah Beng in a petrol station. From the way he looked to the way he talked and walked, this dude was the real deal. And when he got into his car and sped off (you know how ridiculous cars move in real life when they’re driven by people who think they’re the stunt driver for the next Jason Bourne movie)- it was how I expected it to be. Now it was probably wrong of me to judge someone by their cover. But from what I observed, it was like skimming through his book, I had him figured out. I wonder if everyone else looks at me and stereotypes me the same way as I did to them? Of course they do.

“thick framed glasses..black hair..t-shirt and jeans..this kid must listen to Taking Back Sunday..”

The encounter with the Ah Beng made me think about my past. Imagine if I was brought up in another school (no I’m not saying that kids in non-international schools turn out to be delinquents, this is just an example), and I mixed with Ah Bengs and ‘gangsters’. I could be a pedlar parading the mamaks of kl selling dvds and vcds or even pushing drugs. I might be ‘pimping’ out my Wira with unnecessary spoilers, headlights and chrome rims. Life would’ve turned out very differently for me.

So if I got the chance to do everything again, like most people would say, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s the very same reason why I am where I am right now. It might not be where I want to be or what I hoped or wished for. But who I am is who I am now, and the only way is forward. Sure we can regret things that we did in our past, but don’t dwell on them. Just because you did something wrong in the past doesn’t mean that if you did it right back then, things would be better now. Life is unpredictable. And change is the only constant.

So I haven’t been on for the past few days cos my modem/router died. And suddenly they decide to start working again today. So I’m back in the online world :p

Well, its been awhile since I’ve posted a whole bunch of pictures, and I’ve been clearing my phone’s memory (annoying process of infra-red phone to blue-tooth phone to pc), and so here are some interesting pictures I’ve collected over the past few months.

Road sign on the way to the Selangor National State Park.. not very encouraging

Since Win Yew didn’t play his guitar anymore, I decided to trade my magic cards for his guitar

Did you know that Ramly made condoms too? Hahaha

HORSE the band performing

I encounter 11.34 in with my touch and go card.. evil

Who would’ve thought you needed to learn how to be sad?

Alvin’s face in the video game he and Seng Yip almost beat the shit out of

Great news! It’s that time of the year again, where I get to share my (crappy) music with the rest of the world! Well not really the world, but KL :p

A few weeks ago, I came across the doppelganger open mic website and emailed Jaz asking if I could perform for the open mic at the next gig. And so I got the reply (yes), and to cut the short story short, I’ll performing (hopefully my hair will be out of mid-length crisis by then :P) at:

DOPPELGANGER presents…
SINGLETRACKMIND
JEROME KUGAN
OH CHENTAKU
+ RASHDAN HARITH
+ OPEN MIC GIGGERS
at a new funky place near the fabulous twin towers!

Date: Sunday, 4 May 2008
Time: 9pm - 1am
Cover: RM20 incl 1 drink
Venue: Marketplace Restaurant & Lounge
4A Lorong Yap Kwan Seng, Kuala Lumpur.
Visit www.marketplacekl.com for map.
For reservations, call (03) 2166 0750.

To play, or find out more about DOPPELGANGER, sms Jaz +6017 623 0288.
Click here for flyer

So yeah, even if you guys aren’t coming to watch me perform, come for Jerome Kugan. That dude is awesome. I’ll be having another gig coming up the following week, I’ll keep this blog posted.

You know the period of time after a haircut, when your hair reaches the length that is impossible to manage? It’s too long to spike up, yet too short to be left alone to fall down. And no matter which way you style it, you still end up looking like you got hit in the face with an ugly stick?

Yeah, I’m going through that right now.

So you say, how do you solve that problem? Well, from the following chart which I made up:

we can see that I have two options- cut my hair again, thus resetting the graph, or just wait it out till my hair grows longer. Since I’m not in the mood for a haircut, I’ll be keeping it long again. How long will it take? Well it depends on whether the hair growing tips on Wikihow work or not. Just kidding.

Anyways, you can see that you can’t keep your hair too long or you’ll end up looking like an unkempt beggar in petaling street.

Hope this post saves some lives out there! (note: this chart doesn’t apply to girls- they can usually carry off all sorts of different hair-lengths)

(EDIT : i just realized that this chart is for me, and not everybody- some people look really good with short, next to bald hair i.e. Scofield (right Vanessa?!) and some people look good with really long hair as well haha, so this chart can’t apply to everybody, but it can be used as a rough guideline- the first low will be the ‘mid-life’ of your hair where it’s too long/short, and the second low will be there only if you don’t look good with long hair. Wow, long edit :p)