The Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure - Super Fun!

a few days ago i participated in a race that took 5 HOURS.

and it was mad fun :D

the Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure is a race where eight teams of 1 media member + 1 member of the public will compete to discover Malaysia’s ‘Soul of the Night’ in 5 hours, using only your smarts and the spankingly fabulous Nokia N82. all teams will be given a list of types of nighttime places to go (eg: a place to go drinking at night), and immediately you will have 5 hours to find these places and take pictures of each location and upload ‘em all onto the N82 site.

catch? these places have to be unique and obscure while still attractive; extra points for you if the judges have never heard of these places. the theme if after all, discovering the soul of the night :)

the 4 bloggers invited to participate: me, pop, kim, suanie. all pictures stolen off Facebook and other people :P

Suanie, Kimberlycun, Smashpop and myself were the 4 bloggers invited to form the media halves of our respective teams, and we were to be randomly paired up with one of the 8 finalists who signed up and auditioned for the race.

the 8 teams for the Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure

the night before the race, we were all called in for a briefing at the One World Hotel in 1 Utama, where we were introduced to the Nokia N82 and our fellow contestants. the Nokia N82 is DAMN NICE okay - it’s that phone from the ads where these people who have lost their way use Nokia Maps to find their way to wherever they need to go, and the directions are given out through a voice function? we were to use this Nokia Maps application to aid us in our race (key in any location and the phone gives you a direct route to that location from wherever you are, using A-GPS), and really, this maps application is but a teeny tiny fraction of just how awesome the phone is. i don’t think i’ve ever touched anything as techie as the N82.

best part? we all got to keep the phones :P teehee.

David and i - Team Pink! best team colour everrrrrr!

we were also introduced to our teammates at the briefing. my teammate was David Liow, who blogs at Narrowband.org, and is Shawn Yue’s twin :P sigh yalar i got the most lengchai partner, why am i so lucky. and we make the most awesome team, because while i’m familiar with nighttime places in KL and i can write, David is a total techie who’s a great photographer AND he’s familiar with the NSeries phones cos he uses the N95. hahahahaha! best team ever or what?

i am totally loving Nokia right now because they spoiled us silly during the race. we got to stay the night in these really nice deluxe rooms at the gorgeous One World Hotel, dinner was at 1U’s Delicious, lunch the next day was a flipping 4-course one at Bakerzin :D and did i mention that WE GOT TO KEEP THE N82???

*happy*

flag-off: ready set go!

so after that yummy lunch, we mingled around for a bit, took pictures, were interviewed by the media, did some last minute strategizing, and at 4.30 PM it was flag-off. we got our list of places on the screen, quickly downloaded it onto our phones, and off we went :D this was our list:

1. Discover a good place for live entertainment in the Klang Valley

2. Discover a good spot with a night-view of Kuala Lumpur

3. For games in the evening, where do people go?

4. Discover an eatery that serves great food

BONUS: 5. Discover a place for great evening shopping

i was feeling quite confident because David and i knew exactly which places to go after a quick 10-minute brainstorming in our designated car, which was a sleek Cefiro driven by the world’s nicest driver :P you see, the drivers for the race are not supposed to assist you in the directions. you cant just tell him, ‘we want to go to KLCC’, and expect him to take you there. all teams must give directions to their driver with the aid of Nokia Maps, and even if we give him wrong directions, he’s not supposed to correct us :P but our driver, Ibrahim, was sooooo nice because he said we didnt have to give him directions. hahaha. so all we had to do was sit in the backseat and bicker while our marshal and cameraman tried not to laugh at us :P

the race cars : 2 participants, 1 marshal, 1 cameraman and 1 driver

we made quite good time and covered all our 4 places AND our bonus location within 4 hours, but our problem was uploading the pictures and writing captions quickly. me being the perfectionist i am spent a lot of time agonizing over each and every caption of our 25 photos.. and then we spent even more time resizing the photos and bluetoothing it back and forth between our phones (only one phone gets the SIM card), and then uploading it onto the race’s website.

PANIC!!!!

we arrived back at 1 Utama about 20 minutes short of end-time. i thought with so much time, we would be the first to arrive back (and hence get to use the laptop to upload), but NO. we were like the SEVENTH team to arrive back, and all the laptops were already taken up. at this point, we’d only uploaded and captioned one out of our five albums. sei mou. as we were sitting on the floor frantically uploading all our remaining photos, my infamous stress/angsty mode was out full force oredi. one marshal tried to give me a plate of food and i smacked him away. another one asked me some question about something and i screeched back at him, ‘DONNO DONNO DONNO!!!’. hahahaha cracks me up just thinking about it. sorry ah, kind marshals who only wanted to help me :( sorry David Lian for being so angsty while you helped me connect my phone to the Wifi :( sorry David my partner for being so stressed and panicky in the car and at 1U :( you all still love me wan right?

my stressed face :P

by some stroke of miraculity (is this a word) and because one laptop was finally available, we managed to upload all our pictures in time. after deliberation by the panel of judges who are all experts in their respective fields, Suanie’s team was announced champion. congrats Suanie and Frankie!!! :D AND NO, SMASHPOP, YOUR TEAM WAS NOT RUNNER-UP *angsty*

so Suanie and Frankie won an all-expenses-paid trip to Hong Kong along with RM 1,500 cash each! the rest of us got Robinsons’ vouchers worth RM 500. i’m happy :D SHOES-TIME!!! does Robinsons not stock the best shoes.

it really was such a fun race :) it combined a lot of my favourite things - the city, food, arts, photography, writing, storytelling, friends, discussion and competition ;) i’m so glad i got to be a part of this. thank you David, Eevon, Text100 and Nokia for this amazingly fun experience!!

will put up all the pictures of our team’s 5 locations in the next post :) can guess where we went anot! give you one buck if you can!!

Comments April 8th, 2008

The Maxis Venus Affair

this week is a week of many nice events :) i just came home from a great event that left me drop dead tired (but happy!! will talk about this one soon), and yesterday another one where i got a free flower, makeover, photos, hand massage and the chance to play around with a new toy… AND in a couple of days i will be on a panel of three bloggers speaking in a forum about blogs and media. sweet! :)

okay but first i’ll talk about the free flower / free makeover / free photos / free hand massage / new toy event :P

because i am a loyal Maxis user, a blogger and a laydeeee (Little Britain reference! will all watchers of Little Britain please raise your hand!), the kind green folks at Maxis recently invited me to their event called The Maxis Venus Affair. it was a 5-day female-focused event held at a few Maxis centers around KL - pampering women and telling them why they should purchase the Maxis Broadband plan ;)

i have always been very curious about the Maxis Broadband thingie, because it’s supposed to be internet wherever you go, yes? okay, i would like that very much for all the times i cannot locate a Wifi location and i’m feeling too stingy to pay for YET ANOTHER mug of Starbucks whatever. so, yes, enthusiastically accept the invite i did!!! and i brought Eeyang with me because he’s an expert on the Maxis Broadband and could educate me throughout the event.

we walked into the KLCC Maxis Centre to see the whole place all decked out in pink. men and women alike were milling around the various booths checking out stuff. it was like a mini-fair of sorts where Dell was showcasing their new laptops, AsterSpring were giving out free makeovers and hand massages, and then the Canon one where we could take pictures of ourselves with the new Canon Ixus, and have them print them out pronto with those portable photo-printers.

photos of us being printed! i so covet one of these printers. spot the happy gerbera next to my face

then they had a promotion going on with Dell, where if you purchased the Maxis Broadband plan, you’d get a nice fat discount on a Dell Inspiron laptop. c’est moi with the PINK laptop that comes with a pink mouse! Martian has this laptop in black, and so i believe it is only natural that i get the pink one too. eh baby what you think!! spot the happy gerbera next to my face again

this is the focal point of the day on display - the Maxis Broadband USB modem. plug it into your laptop, instant internet access :) no cables, no installation, no phone lines. oohers.

i purposely brought my laptop there just to test out the mini modem. hahaha. and it’s awesome, i love the fact that it gives me instant internet connection anywhere at all. speed is good, but i’m not very sure how smooth the connection is. eeyang tells me it drops depending on location, more so since i live in a condo. but tempting product nevertheless; i’m strongly considering getting one for those crucial internet-less times, and especially during the times when Martian comes back to visit and we have to pay through our noses for hotel broadband if we want to go online :\ RM 70 for 1 day’s internet, you kidding me ah!

Maxis Broadband is RM 118 per month for Maxis users! i was quite surprised because i thought it was going to be more expensive. it’s almost the same price as my broadband at home. hmm obviously this wireless broadband is not as stable or fast as a local access point broadband connection lah, but the key here is that i’d be paying not for stability, but for coverage and portability. definitely something i’d consider :)

i didn’t go home with a Maxis Broadband modem that day. but i did go home with many free things, hahaha, like a free hand massage! and all those flowers.

okay i’m very, very sleepy now. i just want to say that i’m really happy that all these blogger-related events are popping up :) much fun. can’t wait to blog about today’s (secret!) event and this wednesday’s forum! the Ringha pictures have to wait, it seems.

Comments April 6th, 2008

Kunming and Holey Pants

last week, Martian and i made a really unexpected trip to Yunnan, China for easter weekend. one day he just asked me, ‘do you want to go somewhere really really cold?’ and i said yesyesyes with mucho excitement, and that was that. a few days later, we were freezing our butts off in the mountains of Ringha :\ ‘really really cold’ is a description of much deception.

on our way to Ringha, we transited for a night through Kunming, which is about an hour away from Ringha by flight. Kunming is the capital of Yunnan, situated on an elevated plateau, with a pleasant temperate climate all year round and like most of China, very rich in history.

it’s a lovely city with clear blue skies, crisp air and friendly rosy-cheeked locals. good smoky smells of street meat on skewers fill the air and one has to constantly avoid being run over by bicycles or gutsy ladies who try to cut your queue ;) kiasuness notwithstanding, the locals are very friendly even if a little bit shy at first.

we only got to explore Kunming for a day before we had to head to the airport at 5 in the morning the next day. so even though Kunming is home to the Stone Forest - what looks like a really magnificent cluster of sharp stone formations, about 90 kilometers away from the city and a UNESCO heritage site - we didn’t get to travel to the outskirts to marvel at ‘em rocks. we mostly stuck around the city drinking lots of this Chinese tea that Martian really likes - it’s called pu er - and poking around nooks and corners, all while trying to get by with our embarrassing grasp of the Chinese language. Martian is a lot better at it than me though. he conveyed to this one cabbie in marvelous Chinese, with perfect intonation and twist of the tongue, that we needed him to go a little faster because i, the girlfriend who needed the bathroom quite urgently, was very ‘beh tahan’. yah. i really love my boyfriend sometimes.

here are pictures from Kunming, and there are many, but regretfully they have to be kept to a minimum because my host is stingy with bandwidth and i am SWITCHING HOSTS SOON, so until then, it’s going to be less than 30 pictures per post :\ the cruelty.

#1 lots of people cycle in Kunming - university students, working men who wear their briefcases on their backs, mothers who carry their kids in a basket at the front of their bike.

#2 us stopping for lunch at a little noodle shop in Kunming. delicious stuff :) more on Kunming food in a new post.

#3 at the Flower and Bird Market, where there are lots of birds, fishes and other random pets being sold. give you 1 buck if you can guess what that red mess is in front of the lady :\ they were quite the bestseller, with lots of stalls proudly displaying them

#4 this woman just took the pot from the noodle shop we were at, scooped some water out of their tank, and washed her kids’ hands. then she nodded at the shop-owner, the shop-owner nodded back, and that was that. such neighbourliness! and such cute kids!

#5 Martian disturbing a kid who was having a lot of fun playing by himself on this statuary. it was quite an emotional one. in there is a statue of a man holding a gun and also a little girl close to his chest, and the little girl had bronze tears coming out of her bronze eyes

#6 birds at the Bird and Flower Market

#7 cross-stitching is like the fad with the girls manning the stalls at the market. everyone was doing it and totally ignoring customers like us who were interested in purchasing beetles and dwarf hamsters :\

#8 smartly-dressed man selling tempting-looking strawberries

#9 one of those old sewing machines, used by a tailor who operates her business right off the street. it was so cool. my grandmother used to have one of those; i grew up amongst the sounds of that foot-pedal being pushed back and forth and the rapid mechanical tak-tak-tak-tak of the machine pushing thread into cloth

#10 at crossroads

#11 walking to Cui Hu Park

#12 this is Cui Hu Park, a huge park in the middle of the city where locals retreat to for a quiet evening feeding birds or a round of tai chi in the mornings. lots of lovebirds on benches like that one. Martian and i felt so at home!

#13 before this day, i had NEVER seen one of those bags on sticks, except in cartoons and storybooks when i was little. yknow, the bag of stuff that characters take with them when they’re running away from a wicked stepmother or when the hunter needs to go out to the forest to chop firewood?? the Enid Blyton books used to call them knapsacks… are they really called knapsacks?

#14 cherry blossoms at the park

#15 me being bored while Martian pored over the history behind why Cui Hu Park attracts so many gulls and birds :P conversation: “wow baby this is so interesting!!!!!”; “yes baby can we go play with the ducks now”

#16 DUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *HAPPY

#17 me being very impressed by the baby watermelons and baby mangoes. they were SO SMALL! but tasted SO GOOD! we bought some back even though the fruit peddler ripped us off, as is always the case when it’s Martian on the buy-side. hehehehe *runs away

#18 this is Chinese Lee Meng… hahahahahaha

#19 men playing cards or a checkers-like game on the streets is a common sight. i suppose in a country where half of the Internet is blocked, one must turn to the cards for some honest entertainment :\

#20 us shopping at a little grocery store near the hotel. Martian bought these instant noodles that were really really good in the unrelenting cold of Ringha. it irritates me how he always successfully picks all the really nice food, and then he doesn’t let me forget it when i say i wanna have some. “oh, nowwwwwww you want some” -___-

after our Ringha trip, we came back to Kunming for a few hours to catch our flight back to KL. we mostly hung out at this flower market and some nearby streets:

#21 lots and lots and lots of baby’s breath at the flower market

#22 lilies. the flowers here are SO CHEAP. we once did this flower project for Valentines’ Day, and i remember how happy i was to find a supplier who sold us 24 stalks of roses for RM 18. yeah well here in Kunming it’s 24 stalks of roses for RM 5. *depressed*

#23 really big cacti

#24 a dragon flower arrangement on a hearse. it was interestingly morbid. morbidly interesting?

#25 streetside stall selling fishballs. i wanted to eat but Martian don’t let :(

#26 lots of snooker tables in the alleys of Kunming, where men gather around for a game and some smokes

#27 me posing in front of a place that looked so funnily gangster! all the people milling around it looked very gangsterly too. but they ungangsterly allowed lil ol me to mock them with a ladypose. actually i wasnt ladyposing… i was trying to look ruffian. see the imaginary cigarette? :\

#28 i leave you with a final picture of several kids playing by the road. note the little hoodied boy sandwiched on the kiddie-sized automobile - he had a big hole cut out in the seat of his pants. this seems to be a popular local fashion trend among the kids!!! and with such practicality too; instead of wasting the precious seconds it takes for the tyke to search for a bathroom and pull down his pants, all he has to do is squat by the side of the road, and voila! bowel movement at its most convenient! :D

i really liked Kunming. there’s not much to do there, really, but i’m beginning to realize that i have strange affinity towards cities that are covered with graffiti. it must be the vandal in me :D

pictures of Ringha soon :)

Comments April 4th, 2008

College Admissions Decisions

the Ivy League universities decision letters were just out about an hour ago.

so i’ve got all my results now.

remember how i said i would be so relieved already if just ONE of my eight schools accepted me? i really only ask for ONE. because i know how difficult it is to get into those schools i applied. and i was kicking myself for not taking the time to just expand my list to a few safeties. i was SO FREAKING scared that my lack of Pre-U was the first step into a path of rejection, especially compared with all the other applicants who are so much more academically qualified.

i applied to 8 schools. 4 of which were Ivies.

and my results?

Comments April 1st, 2008