Oh Noes…

Why isn’t my Chinese characters showing up?

Argh, this is frustrating… I’ve checked the support forums, and it seems like currently the only way is to either reinstall WordPress via FTP (which is quite a complicated process) or to tweak the config.php (which might do some irreversible damage to the database).  Even though I have made my own backup, I still lack the courage to make that change…

Aaaaahhh… guess I’ll have to stick with English posts for now…

Life’s Good… Kinda.

I’m on leave tomorrow, as I have to bring Dad to the hospital for a neurology appointment.  Since I don’t need to wake up early, I can afford to stay up a wee bit later than usual tonight.

Work has been better lately, with Jane coming back from her maternity leave.  I’ve passed her work back to her, with profuse apologies of course, for messing up all her stuff.  XD  Ey, at least I tried to keep it nice and tidy!  It’s just not easy to juggle 2 persons’ work for three months, you know… hmph.  Well anyway, it’s back to normal for me!  Yay, no more whining on Sundays about having to go work the next day.  :D

Just met Ka Wai and Yeh Yun for dinner last Thursday.  Pei Fong was supposed to join us as well, but she was totally overworked and couldn’t make it the last minute.  We headed to Sushi Tei at Raffles City (again – I kinda realised our meet ups were there most of the time o_O), and caught up with each other over dinner.  Yun will be coming back for good at the end of this year, and Ka Wai is still happily married with some *cough*goodnews*cough*. (That’s an obvious hint already, right?  XD)

As usual, gossips and rumours went around the table, and some giggles here and there.  It’s hard not to laugh or smile when I’m with them.  They knew what the right things are to say to crack me up, and my 冷笑话 never fails to crack them up either.  I have to say, I really treasure my friendship with these three ladies.  They are the only people from AHS whom I’ve regularly kept in touch with (with the exception of Chang Yuan).  Even with Facebook, I didn’t have a lot of AHS friends in my Friends list, because they only knew me by my Chinese name, not my Christian name which I used in my Facebook profile.

Of course, I could always have taken the initiative to add them and say “Ooooh, I’m Yanming!  Remember?!?”  But uh… I’ve only friended a few of them that way.  All the others… well, never mind.  I’m quite sure they won’t remember who I am anyway.  :D

On the same note, I wonder if how many of those people who are going for the OldSkool Gamer gathering that Sue organised over Facebook will remember or even know who “Scottie” is?  Haha…  I’m quite apprehensive about attending the gathering, to be honest.  I was part of the gaming community for such a short period… and I was so low profile that I’m sure I’m just “one of the faces” in the crowd all the time, despite being part of the Khabal committee.  Oh well, we’ll see how it goes, if I’m able to make it for the gathering.  :P

Oh yeah, for those who are concerned, baby Dylan will be due… in a few weeks’ time.  I’ll be a 小姨 soon!  I’ve already bought a “gift” for Dylan… hope he’ll appreciate it!  I think I’ll dote on him a lot, but don’t expect me to carry or hug him… I don’t like kids.  Or babies, in this case.  I don’t like to be near them, especially if they are unattended.  If one comes crawling towards me, I’ll run.  Doesn’t matter whether he’s my nephew or not.  No unattended babies near me.  (Sis, you hear that?  :x)

I need a new computer, dang it.  This one is lagging a lot on me, thanks to all the too-many-to-count files under the Documents and Settings folder.  I’m just too lazy to move them to other folders, so… they’ll be sitting there till I manage to haul my lazy ass to SLS and grab a new CPU (Shinji, remember to get me all the latest parts!  I want Quad-Core!! *waves fist*  :D ) and a spanking new huge LCD monitor.

Gah, it’s also because of this super-slow machine that I’ve lost interest in playing my rogue and priestess in WoW.  At least I don’t feel like playing at home.  My PC at Reko’s place is like a space rocket compared to this big clunky ’60s Beetle.  Maybe I should try moving my iTunes libary over to that PC some day and see if it will lag like this… This PC, after all, is not that bad if it could Doom 3 with no lag… (Okay, I know that game is super old, but still.)

Bleh.  Nevertheless, life’s still pretty good for me.  Though, a new PC will make my life better.  =D

Just For Fun – A First Attempt At Nature Photography

Because my dearie needed some nice photos for his school assignment, we had woken up today at 4.30am, took a cab (which we booked in advance) at 5.30am, and reached Changi Boardwalk at 6.00am.

Yes, there goes my precious beauty sleep.

Anyway, he lugged his precious Nikon DSLR there (don’t ask me what model – I don’t know), while I decided to bring my Lumix along just in case there’s some nice scenaries to take. I’ve never been there before, so I don’t know what to expect, really.

His camera, being a DSLR, is way better than mine, so he was able to take some really nice photos even though it was still totally dark, since he could set the shutter speed and take long exposure shots. My camera, on the other hand, failed in such an epic way that I’ve decided to spare you the pain of looking at all those horribly “black” photos.

See? The beauty of DSLR.

Hur hur. My camera. Epic fail.


So, yeah. We spent like, almost 2 hours there, trying to capture most of the photos while the sun just came up, as that was the nicest lighting possible. After that, Reko decided that the photos he had taken were enough, and we strolled to Changi Village Hotel for a nice, sumptious buffet breakfast at their Saltwater Cafe.

Here are the rest of the photos on my Flickr account. Please don’t laugh or cringe at them as this is kinda like my first impromptu attempt at “Nature” photography, with just a point-and-shoot digital compact camera. Enjoy. :D

A Little Update

I haven’t really been updating since the last few weeks, because I was kinda busy with the switching of webhosts to actually want to sit down and blog. But well, guess that’s out of the way now, so here’s a little update about what’s happening (or had happened) a couple of days ago.

First of all, happy Lunar new year to all! Sorry this is a few days late, heh. I didn’t visit relatives this year because both my parents are working, and to be honest, I can’t really be bothered. It’s not that I don’t like my relatives and cousins, but I just didn’t like the idea of going to their homes and sit there without anything to talk about. So when my parents said there won’t be any visiting this year, I felt so relieved. XD

Then… Reko and I celebrated our 4th anniversary this year on 23rd Jan. We didn’t really plan for anything, except to have a really nice dinner at Melt~The World Cafe. It was horribly expensive, but the ambience, the service attitude of the staff, quality of food are all exceptionally good. We were greeted with genuine smiles and hearty “Good Evening Sir, M’am!” all the way from our first step through the hotel front doors to the restaurant (which is at the fourth floor, if I didn’t remember wrongly). It made us feel as if we were one of the VIP guests or something.

The food selection was great, much better than some other hotel restaurant buffet that we’d been to. They have Thai, Western, North Indian, Chinese and Japanese food all lined up neatly in different counters. The seafood counter, which stood solitary right in the middle of the buffet area, looked delicious, with huge, red lobsters, crayfish, large tiger prawns sitting prettily on the ice, waiting for you to grab them. It’s a pity that neither of us eat seafood. :p My favourite food would be the mashed potatoes (mmmm, sinful but heavenly!), and my favourite desserts has to be that waffles with icecream. =D~~ I’m drooling again now as I write this.

No photos for you guys, unfortunately, coz I was so busy eating that I only remembered that I should take some pictures when we were attacking the fruits. XD

Hmmm okay what else… Oh yeah, I’m gonna become an Aunt soon! My sis is due in Mid-Feb, so I can expect a wailing nephew in a few weeks time. I’ve already bought something for him! (Or rather, for his cot, actually.) I’ll take a picture of it once I visit their home again.

Finally!

All done and set to go!

A couple of minor changes here and there:-

– no more fanlistings, as I don’t have the time to maintain them all for now.
– no more wishlist at the moment (until I feel like making one).
– no Tag Board, since there’s comments enabled.
– instead of having links on the right navigation bar, I kept them in a separate Links page. The previous Sanity Asylum blog that’s not powered by WordPress will be available there as well, if you have a burning desire to read my previous blog.

Right now I’m pretty happy blogging with WordPress as I don’t have to manually put in all the html tags and codes. The only disadvantage is obviously difficulty of designing personalised themes/layouts.

Currently my new webhost, Oryon Networks, is still ironing out some kinks involving the transfer of domain (not their fault, really), but otherwise I’m quite happy with them at the moment. The connection to my site and FTP is really fast, and according to a lot of their clients, their servers hardly have any downtime at all. We’ll see how it goes. =D

New… stuff.

Like, wow.

New webhost.  New layout.

Haha!  Yeah, as you can see, I’ve switched to WordPress (as it is a lot easier to manage) in order to facilitate blogging-on-the-go in the future.  There’s still a lot of stuff to tweak, and I’ll blog more after I’m done with all the little adjustments here and there.

Laters.  ;)