It's That Time of the Year Again!

Taken Oct. 29th, 2005:
Also taken Oct. 29th, 2005:
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Singapore!

Colin the Rockstar Pt. 2

Thursday night marked the second (and final) gig I had with the Sheares Hall band. This time we upped the stakes and travelled down to the very swanky Furama WaterFront Hotel, along with the rest of the performers under the Cultural Management Board umbrella.

We played for SSSS, or the Singapore Structural Steel Society. No joke, that's their real name, look them up!

Anyway it was another night of great fun, even if it was a tough crowd - my guess is they weren't there for the music.

Setlist:
Five for Fighting - Superman
Howie Day - Collide
4 Non Blondes - What's Up?
U2 - With or Without You

IMHO some of those songs wouldn't have been my first choice, but they all worked out well. We did a bit of a softer set in the hopes of appealing to our target audience.

So here are the pics!

Steven and I carrying our gear up to the Green Room (which wasn't actually green, as you can see):

Kenneth, Steven and I warming up.

Right before we are about to play:

This is me playin' the bass with my trademark "Concentration Face".


From left to right: Eley, me, Kenneth, Steven and Wen Lee, during What's Up.

A shot of us with the conference room and our SSSS friends in the background:

Making our exit out of the hotel:Back at Sheares, I finish off the night with another fresh juice - this time it was lime. Mmm fresh juice is delicious!
---> BONUS! ChEcK iT oUt!!! <---

Here is a videoclip of us performing Superman: Right-Click Here and Save to your Hard Drive!

The Shining Trailer

Theatrical trailer for the Stanley Kubrick hit the Shining:
http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

Definitely worth a download.

(Thanks, Ian and ODK :)

Toilet Troublez

Today: A retrospective of the toilets in Singapore.

Before coming here, in the travel books I had read about government officials who posed as washroom patrons, but instead were posted in b-rooms to dish out hefty fines to people who neglected to flush public toilets. Alas, I have yet to come across one of them (but I always flush). However, I do see a lot of these neat posters.

This one is particularly poignant, as the floors are often wet:

This one plays off a universal truth:
And I can't even count the number of times I've accidentally got my foot lodged in the toilet bowl after squatting over it:

Here's a shot of my residence bathroom. They spruced it up nice with some potpourri and a nice potted plant in the far corner:
I also like the inspirational posters on each of the toilet/shower stalls:

There you go! Toilets in Singapore!

The Most Delicious Juice in the World

Last night I went out to a Thai restaurant, and I drank The Most Delicious Juice in the World.

Actually I had two kinds, the first was Orange/Tangerine and the second Grapefruit. Both were very delicious - you could taste that they were made from real fruit, and they were very fresh and refreshing.

Raffles Hotel

On the weekend I went to the Raffles Hotel, which in my opinion is one of Singapore's top natural heritage buildings, mainly because it is so old (150+ years). It's also the only landmark of Singapore's that I had heard of before coming here. S'pore landmarks are kind of a big deal for me, because I'm taking a Singapore geography course (Course tag SSA2202 for those of you who want to browse the course syllabus on the NUS website ;).

Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad both have stayed there, which is a source of pride for the hotel. Booyeah!!

But the asking price for most rooms is $500USD and up. That's USD folks, not S (Sing dollaz)!

Anyway, it was nice visit, and they light it up nice at night:

-C

Bandstravalaganza!

Last night was Starlight Rhapsody, a celebration of culture at Sheares Hall! Bands, drama, dancers, other stuff, it was neat! It was held just outside the lobby of our residence.

My band, the Fresh Tomatoes, did a cover of Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thanks to the wonders of technology, you can actually listen to the song while your browse da blog!

Thanks, technology!

Anyway it was lots of fun. I've never played bass before so that was kind of tricky, but good tricky. And we really r0cked 0ut, so we were well received by the audience, which was also a plus! Hutch!!

Below: gettin' ready to go out on stage!

Below: The Fresh Tomatoes, from left to right: Steven (from UBC!) on guitar, Norman (from NUS) on vocals, me on bass, and Wen Lee (from NUS) on the drums.

Below: Kickin' out the jamz at Starlight Rhapsody

Close Call

So y'all may have noticed some tasty changes to the blog.

That's right, the width has been increased so you can read it
without there
being two
words on
every line
(like this).

Also I changed the background colour! What do y'all think of dark dark blue?

But there was a close call when I was editing the HTML to increase the width. The width increased nicely, but so did the size of the font of all the post titles!!! So all the tiles were HUGE while the rest of the text was tiny. Uh Oh! Ohhh boy! There were a few intense minutes as I frantically scanned my HTML source code, hoping to find the problem. I tried resizing the fonts, but that didn't work! Oh man!

What happened next?

Tune in next time to find out!!


Below: We all wonder what happened next - how did the titles revert back to regular size?!? (P.S. yes, that is Cody on the left!)

New Developments

C00l stUff:

1) I joined the band at Sheares Hall! That was exciting. Tomorrow is our first show, along with all of the groups under the cultural management board (CMB) at the hall, so that includes band, dance, a cappella, and drama. Booyeah!

2) I'm incorporating more of the local slang into my speech! This includes:

a) parts of Singlish, like saying "lah" a lot, which loosely translates into the Canadian "eh". So, par exemple, by answering the question "Can you come out for dim sum on Saturday?" instead of answering "Yeah that sounds good, eh!" I might say "Yeah that sounds good, lah!"

b) other Singlish, like answering a question efficiently by responding w/ "can" or "cannot". So instead of answering "Can you come out for dim sum on Saturday" by saying "Yeah that sounds good" I might just say "Can!"

c) or BOTH can be mixed, for my personal favourite. So one might answer "Can you come out for dim sum on Saturday" with "Can, lah!"

d) also I say y'all a lot more because of the American exchange students in my residence. ;)

Radioactive Kitten