After missing last year’s Singapore Night Festival, I made it a point to drop by National Museum of Singapore last night to see what the night festival is all about.

The main event started at 10.30pm, but there are fringe shows nearby which started at 7.30pm. After I had my dinner in Asian Kitchen, City Link (which has better noodle than Din Tai Fung), I went straight to the park nearby the museum with Evie and Rafi. The other folks later joined us there. One thing you know when you go there is you gotta bring your camera, and so I went with full gear, Canon EOS 450D with 17-55mm IS f/2.8 lens borrowed from Jowena.

The fringe shows started at 7.30pm, and these are the performances which I bothered to take picture of.

They call themselves "Deng"

Some dance

At around 9pm, we started walking towards the museum so we could get a better spot to take picture from. Unsurprisingly, there are already LOTS of people setting up their tripod around the museum, so we tried to find the best available spot from whatever empty spaces available.

The Loop of Fortune

The show started with some lady walking around, dancing, but I couldn’t see much as she was too far away, then it was these two men who continued playing drums in rotations, upside down.

Men playing drums

Then, the real loop of fortune show started in front of really cool backdrops of various decorations to the museum’s face.

Loop of Fortune in action

Finally, it was fireworks galore. Not as great as those National Day fireworks, but these are stage fireworks, so it was so close to you, you can feel it.

Fireworks

They ended the fireworks show with this great fireworks coming down from the museum’s building, really good stuff.

I love these fireworks the most !!

The crowds who were there soon left after the whole show ended. We waited for a while to wait for the crowd to clear up a bit before we head our way back home.

The crowds

On our way back to the MRT, I saw this poster.

The Cross of Christ

In the midst of Great Singapore Sale, it reminded us one most precious thing, human salvation through Christ, though free, is not for sale coz it ain’t cheap.

It has been a LONGGGGGGGGG while since I wrote here, and for good reason. I have been busy on and off work. Many of my off work time was spent going through photos that we took in Europe and of course going out (it’s GSS after all).

There were five cameras that went with us on the trip, and as expected, we came back with roughly 16,000 photos. That’s enormous amount of photos. So far I’ve only run through half of them, and still waiting to go through the rest.

Truth be told, I was planning to finish going through the photos before I started jotting down our travel experiences, but a month since I came back, and I probably have not remembered as much as I had last month.

We shall see if I’ll ever find enough time and more importantly self-will to start writing about our Europe trip. The last complete blog on my US trip took me a couple of weeks to complete. Maybe I should just write one summary blog post?

For updates for the next two weeks, look on the right. ——->>>>

Or, follow me at http://twitter.com/hendrikch.

This will be my first backpacking trip to Europe with six of my friends, and this trip was planned to be more educational rather than the usual i come, i see, i take picture, i go type from tour agencies.
There will be more museums to visit, to enter, and to explore in. There’ll also be palaces, opera houses, and sleeping on the train and 4-bed and 8-bed room in hostels.

We’ll be covering five countries this time: Germany, Austria, Italy, Swiss, and France.

The full itinerary are:
May 01: Munich – Salzburg – Vienna
May 02: Vienna – Venice
May 03: Venice – Rome
May 04: Rome
May 05: Rome – Florence
May 06: Florence – Interlaken
May 07: Interlaken
May 08: Interlaken – Geneva – Paris
May 09: Paris
May 10: Paris
May 11: Paris – Rothenburg
May 12: Rothenburg – Munich
May 13: Munich – Newschwanstein – Munich
May 14: Munich
May 15: On flight back to Singapore

All the stuff I need have been bought, and the latest packings I have weigh at slightly over 8kg, not that heavy I would say. Girls in my group seems to pack only 6kg in theirs. I always thought girls have more stuff to bring on travels haha… :p

Seven of us will be bringing a grand total of FIVE cameras, no pocket cameras. Out of those five, two are prosumer cameras, and the other three are dSLR (two 450Ds and one D90) with a total of five lenses (18-200mm, 18-55mm, 55-250mm, 18-105mm, and 80-200mm). I will be bringing a total 40GB of SDHC cards, so when we’re back and have consolidated all of our photos together, expect LOTS of photos in my blog.

For now, I’ll be away for holiday for two weeks, so won’t be updating blog. I will still try to tweet whenever I have free Wi-Fi around, so you can check my Twitter (http://twitter.com/hendrikch) to get the latest updates from my travel.

Bahagia, walau mungkin tak sebebas merpati.

It was crazily packed Plaza Singapura last night when Jackie Chan and Daniel Wu made their cast appearance around 7.30pm to promote their latest movie, Shinjuku Incident. It was already SUPER DUPER crowded from 6pm, and by the time they arrived, the crowd went wild, and camera and flash are the very obvious things around.

The moment Jackie Chan arrived, the first thing he did was to take pictures of everyone around.

He probably got photos similar to this one I took.

Daniel Wu himself was just a cool guy, letting Jackie Chan took all the spotlight.

Too bad, all the talk were in Mandarin, so I understood nuts about it.

After letting people waited for 1.5 hrs, the whole “show” only lasted less than 30 minutes. At the end, they were given caricatures of themselves.

Before they left, each of them signed on the advertisement board behind them, then left the crazy crowd behind.

Taking photo under the most difficult circumstances, with LOTS of hands going up with camera, phone, and people’s head everywhere, I think I did quite a good job in getting these shots. All in all, I took 185 shots in that hour, and after heavy selection process, only left 25 of them in my album.

CPF currently has an IM$avvy financial-literacy quiz in their website, complete with a lucky draw.

I'm a financial-guru, CPF says :p

Do try it out, and let me know what’s your score? I’m sure some of you would be able to get 100% full mark.

For the first time in a month, the icon in my taskbar gets SO full that it overflows to the second row. I actually don’t feel that I have installed A LOT of stuffs to my machine, let’s see from left-to-right: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari (just to try out, to be removed soon), Windows Explorer, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer, Windows Media Player, Windows Live Messenger, Word, Excel, Skype, Calculator, Notepad, Mozy, TweetDeck, Windows Mobile Device Center, Services.

With the exception of Word and Excel, all of the software I have in my machines are freeware. And they’re pretty common too. I wonder how many icons can a 12” or 15” laptop fit when my 17” monitor can only fit so few (17 to be precise)? To Microsoft credit, they’re changing the space between icons in a more recent build to fit 20 icons in my 1280×1024 screen resolution.

Yesterday, I went to Starhub service centre to get more details about my data usage that amount to that HUGE charges in my bill. I talked to a nice guy who showed me a detailed log file containing every single site that I accessed, complete with its file size, time stamp, and all minute details you can think of.

The person showed me a column that he said containing the page size that I accessed (in Excel). We summed up that column, came out 226000, which according to him was in KB. 226,000 KB is close to 237 MB shown in my bill. Fair enough.

I asked the person to sort based on that column. The largest page I accessed was in http://m.google.com/ domain. The size column showed around 14000. I’m sure that column was in bytes, therefore the page size was about 14KB. The person insisted it was in KB, making that page size 14MB!! We’re talking about 1000 times difference here.

Singapore Rain Locations

Scroll up a few lines, we could see this line: http://www.nea.gov.sg/cms/mss/gif/rainloc0.gif (shown above) amounted to 8579 in size. It makes perfect sense that it’s 8579 bytes, therefore 8.5KB. The person, again, still insists it’s 8.5MB!! Now, try loading that image in your browser, right click, look at its properties, and tell me how on earth that image can be 8.5MB? Even the photos from my digital camera were only half of that size. Moreover I said, if I could load that image in my phone in 2 seconds, does that mean Starhub network speed can go 4.25MB/sec? Heck, even my broadband at home can’t do that.

The person continued to give lame answers that would be passable to other non-IT-savvy users, but I eat bytes, KB, and MB for lunch, I know the differences. The person probably gave up trying to convince me with those lame answers, he promised to call me back later. I went back to my office, and about 6.30pm, he called me again, saying that he has checked and confirmed with the IT department, it was in KB, to which I replied “Check again, and call me back after you get more reasonable answer.”

About 8pm, he called me again, he told me, he has tried to load NEA website, clocking up 100KB from loading the page, and would need to get a few pages before he can hit the page where I could get that image. Well, I replied: “First, I bookmarked that image, so I don’t need to go through few pages to see if it’s raining in Singapore or not. Second, if the home page was 100KB, in order to hit 8.5MB, I would have need to visit 85 pages just to know if it’s raining or not??!!”

He gave up and offered to waive all the extra data charges this month, and will monitor again for my next bill. Good. Unless you can prove how I clocked up 237MB in a month when I have used less than 10MB each month for the past year, you should not try to charge enormous phone bill. Yeah, I know there’s a cap at $36, but still, that extra $30 is enough for my 6 months subscriptions. I’m not letting go easily, especially knowing that Starhub log file didn’t show that I did anything extra (like Youtube) in that month.

To be fair to that guy who helped me, besides the lame excuses, he actually did a good job, trying to cover up what I think was an accounting mistake on Starhub part.

Tonight, I came home, surprised to see a tweet from Starhub, offering help to check for me. I’m surprised to know that Starhub actually checks Twitter and address issues of its customers who complains in Twitter. Excellent job I would say. That Starhub Twitter account was created in 15 Feb 2009, so I think they’re only starting to use this popular online medium to reach out to customers.

Tweet from Starhub

My phone bill charges record so far was around $130, and that’s when I went overseas and uses did some roaming. With that in mind, I was shocked when I received this bill from Starhub today. $729.63 total data usage? What the heck did I do in two weeks so use up so much? I was in Indonesia for the other two weeks.

So, last week I called Starhub to ask for the details, and this afternoon, a lady from Starhub called me to tell me that she has checked with their IT department and confirmed I really have used that much. Puzzling. Especially if the counter on my phone shows only 8MB of usage.

I’m going to drop by Starhub tomorrow to get the details, see if I can spot something “strange” with my data usage.