I’m seriously ashamed of myself for not blogging for long. Life is never the same as before and I have to neglect some hobbies sometimes.
Ever since I have started working on my tuition agency website, things have changed a lot. I’m a one-man-show for most of the back-end work. After more than a year, it does look like a professional website, but there are many features I have yet to implement or improve on. I have to worry about SEO and spend lots of time on them every week and eventually the daily boring administration work almost turns me berserk.
I’m also working on quite a number of blogs as well, which are either non-profitable or can earn me money in future. There is also a blog for the tuition agency. This makes my personal blog insignificant compared to them. My contents are also diverted to the blogs.
After all, my time management is really bad. It is not that I’m working 24 hours everyday but I’m always drained and thus operating at a lower speed.
It is definitely good to keep my blog running because it is one of the best ways to relieve my stuffed brain. I rarely get in touch with people and it is bad to keep things within myself, especially my frustration.
However, apart from having lack of time, people around me do give me problems as well. I’m not able to type whatever is in my mind sometimes because I have readers who are stalking my friends. Some people with lower EQ can also quote me out of texts to create problems for me. After all, many things have hit my motivation hard.
Another demoralizing thing is that my plan to move my blog from BlogSpot into my personal domain has stalled for very long. Somehow, I’m quite greedy that I want to keep my existing layout and structure, such that I would need to spend time learning how to edit WordPress template. Recently, updating WordPress for some of my blogs have also given me problems.
I have been tweeting a lot, which auto forwards the statuses to my Facebook, but the limited characters are pathetic. I have tried to forward the tweets over to my blog automatically through Hellotxt but it has shamefully failed me.
I’m a person full of thoughts but I do not have the chance to express myself freely. Blogging is almost the only way for me to become myself. Although it allows people with not-so-good intention to find out more about what is happening around me, it also allows people who are truly concern about me to show their support.
I’m always curious who will still bother to read my blog after so long of idling.
Friday was a long day for me. I spent the morning working on the “Our Services” page for Smart Tuition Singapore to include extra services. I wanted to go to bed early since I had to meet up with Mike to collect the keys to the new office. However, my mum wanted to go to the ATM at around 3am and we brought Lucky down. Her main motive was probably to take Lucky for a walk, which was certainly at the wrong time. Lucky refused to do his business downstairs and eventually gave me more work to wipe his poo on the floor later on. I went to bed at 6am and Lucky disturbed me for quite long, moving down and up of the bed.
Mike’s SMS at 9.30am woke me up. I met him up Amara hotel and we took a cab over to Raeburn Park. We had breakfast at the canteen and Linda came down. David was busy with another client and he did not come down as what he had told us days ago, however, the co-broke agent did not join us as well.
After collecting the keys, we walked around the place while waiting for the air-conditioner man, Ah Tan, to come over. The assistant manager, Xiao Hui, joined us to give us instructions on the installation, such as piping. It was problematic and I finally realised why the rental fee was low. Ah Tan advised us to look for the contractor from the management who had done the work there before and was thus familiar with the procedure.
We strolled over to Chinatown Point’s MacDonald’s. Mike exhausted himself by sharing his stories and strategies with me. After that, we took a bus back to Kampong Bahru Road. After resting for a while while waiting for Xiao Hui to get back to us regarding the contractor’s contact information, we walked to Tanjong Pagar.
Due to the lack of sleep, I had a low efficient afternoon trying to do my SEO for the tuition agency website. I spent hours typing a new article – Home Tuition in Singapore.
The Johor Bahru trip for the next day to celebration my younger brother’s birthday was confirmed.
As I took my lunch and dinner together in the late afternoon, I started starving soon. I went to the prata shop with my mum and elder brother for supper. After that, I continued to work on Bianhong’s photo for printing a puzzle for his girlfriend’s birthday present with distraction from the internet. I went to sleep after 7am.
I woke up at around 2pm. the nasi lemak my mum bought was cold. She added extra ingredients to my packet as she probably could not finish hers. The chicken wings were awful as the meat was difficult to chew on.
The backache I had since days ago was bothering me a lot. I did not have the mood to work but still, I managed to complete Bianhong’s picture and pending his acknowledgement. Since his girlfriend was besides him, he could not give me a reply to see if any amendment was needed.
Since Tengy finally replied me after she filtered my message in MSN the day before, and she was easily agreeable to let me use her photo for my new Facebook group, I went ahead to work on it. I also peeked into the latest article I wrote for SmokeForWhat, but my brain was not working well enough for a conclusion yet.
In the late evening, I was totally out of mood to do anything. I spent the time lying on the bed and playing Condition Zero. It was a noisy night for my family started cooking prawns and had beer. Then, they decided to go to the beach the next day.
I slept at 6am and my mum woke me up at around 10.30am before she left for the hospital. I was brushing my teeth and she changed her mind that she left together with my elder brother without even telling me. I went back to sleep until around 1pm.
The four of us had lunch at the Tanjong Pagar food centre. After that, I accompanied my younger brother to the MRT station to buy his student concession pass.
I spent the afternoon doing up an article for SmokeForWhat but it was much easier since someone else had typed the article out and I was merely formatting it and researching the keywords.
At night, the four of us went the Chinatown Complex to have dinner at the level two food centre. This time, we had chicken rice but my younger brother did not take much since he had the same food not long ago in school.
After the dinner, we shopped at Swanston and followed by the CK departmental store where I saw a very cute and sweet girl. Next, we moved to the Tanjong Pagar NTUC.
The usual deep pondering caused my head spinning. I tried to break the record by going to bed before 1am since I knew it was going to be a boring morning in the internet but my mind refused to stop working. It took two hours for me to give up and start booting up my laptop.
A moment of frustration hit me hard to wake me up. For the past month, I had been strangling myself with greed that had slowed me down too much. I was never in mood for anything. I hated the fact that history always repeated itself.
I started warming up my engine and slowly sped off with blogging, website editing, clearing up my desktop and even uploading of old pending photos. Updating my portfolio with the Chinese poems was a pain in my ass. I realised I had not been adding the new ones for years and it seemed that I did not keep the new ones properly inside my poem files. I exhausted myself but I refused to stop until 7am. I did not feel like going to bed just like having a strike.
Zaki rang me up at around 11am and he guessed well that I was still in the mid of my sleep. He verbally answered to the email I sent him in the morning that our gang was not going overseas anymore for the upcoming long weekend, and he also asked if I knew how to fix router. I went back to sleep and woke up after 1pm.
It was a big struggle to keep my mind focused. I tried hard not to think of catching a movie. The concentration into web design did me well though my mind did wander off some times. The work lasted till late night before I emailed shifu guiltily after the long delay of work with the temporary location in my webhost.
The confession from Vanessa stating she used to be scared of me haunted me throughout the day. The claim was that I was too sharp. I began to reflect on myself for how many tales I had exposed in the past that had drawn people away. I was probably being too harsh to myself. Nevertheless, it was good to be different from hypocrites and only unique people would appreciate.
Blogging was a chore. I finally uploaded my latest article regarding smoking in corridor to SmokeForWhat, together with photos. I also created an addition item in the main menu to organise them better. However, it required more than just scripting. In additional, I also included a sitemap near the bottom to showcase the menus at one go so that users could glance at them at one go if they did not want to use the dropdown menu. I went to bed at 6am.
My brother woke me up at 1.30pm. After washing up, we set off towards Queensway and my mum hopped onto the bus near Kim Tian Road. We were eyeing for the hawker centre opposite Queensway shopping centre but it was closed. We proceeded to IKEA straight away and dined at the foodcourt. The sore throat forbid me from eating properly, besides, I could not eat a lot right after waking up.
We shopped around and this time we did not leave empty-handed. My brother bought a clothes hanger trolley for his girlfriend since she was going to stay in my house more often as she was going to begin working at Orchard. We also had an extendable tray holder for the bathroom but it was too big.
When Kevin started messaging me in MSN, I began to realise my life was really stagnant. At least, he complimented me on the development of SmokeForWhat. I went to sleep after 4am, setting my alarm clock to sound at 10am.
It was a great battle after 10am and I managed to stay awake after half an hour. I started blogging insanely. Since it was raining throughout the afternoon, I was lazy to step out of the house.
There was nothing special about the evening except that I got to webcam with Jade for a while when she was studying with her male classmates.
My brother downloaded a new 2 on 6 Command and Conquer map and we had a second game together after struggling in the first game. It was 3.30am when I finished clearing up spams in Facebook groups. I made severe tosses on the bed before dozing off.
I woke up in the morning but forced myself to sleep, and eventually woke up at around 2pm. Dreams seemed to come back into me so often and this day, a monk appeared and my family seemed to be close with him.
After touching up a bit on the new freelance website, I could not control myself but to put my new ideas into SmokeForWhat, updating several pages and adding a new page – Quit Smoking Checklist. My perseverance had led to more hits from search engine, displaying my SEO skill; but the cute little Google Bot for PageRank had not visited the site for months that I was so anxiously waiting for the new PageRank result.
At night, there was a very nasty spam in Facebook by someone creating lots of accounts, flooding groups with “add me for farmville and if you love your iphone, but be nice xx”. The asshole could have succeeded in hooking up guys to add the fake accounts before starting to spam them individually, but so many accounts posing the exact same message was too obvious for most people, except for some horny guys who probably could not use their brains. I did my part by removing and banning them in one of my affected groups, which was terribly time-killing for the enormous count of them.
I slept earlier than usual at around 4am after blogging. Finally, I woke up before noon and my aunt came over with my breakfast – mee hoon with chicken wing and sausage.
I spent the morning updating SmokeForWhat crazily. It took too much time and effort to type new article. I had a few more in mind and phobia was taking over me. I went to bed after sunrise, after replying Huiting’s SMS.
Since the initial dinner venue was at SP, I had no plan to take off early. After some hesitation, I made my way to the gym.
I had no time to waste like usual to take lots of breaks in between the workout. While others always used “resting is useless” to push themselves, my mind was full of “resting will make me late”. I almost killed myself by exhausting myself thoroughly. During the previous “day 2” training, I could do four sets of wide shoulder pull-up, but this time, my third and fourth sets could not even reach ten pulls to complete them. My injury on the left shoulder hurt more than ever.
I managed to finish the entire workout within an hour. While I was trying hard to stable my wobbling legs, I checked my phone and realised Eunice had changed the meeting venue to Bukit Timah. I rushed home to shower and get changed. When I missed the bus 75 right in front of me, I knew I was bound to be late. The next bus took ages to arrive while the road was full of other vehicles. There was no other way to get to my destination earlier other than this direct bus.
While I was still stuck in the jam of Holland Road, I thought Huiting was near Ngee Ann Polytechnic already and thus I would be the last to reach. I dropped off a bus-stop earlier and paced towards the Old Town White Coffee, reaching the junction earlier than the bus at the nearer stop. I was glad that I was not the last one to arrive.
It was a good dinner but since Eunice had declared to pay for the meal, I was quite stingy with the selection of my food. I was the only guy but it was not the main reason to be rejoiced, for the companion of nice people was more attractive. We moved to the food centre for dessert after that before Eunice called for a curfew at 10pm.
I had lots of fun crapping with Jade while waiting for her bus. After that, I went to KAP’s MacDonald’s to test their toilet before going home. The place reminded me of the past, after my A division volleyball games, the entire team went down together for dinner.
My plan to spend the peaceful night trip on bus 75 doing my work failed as I was troubled over Firman’s project, which had no budget.
I spent quite some time chatting with Huiting and giving her suggestions for her final year project after she approached me for helps in the website. Afterward, I spent quite some time chatting with Vanessa while doing my work.
In the afternoon, I had a tough time working on SmokeForWhat.com to incorporate more harmful effects of smoking into the site. It was a draining process.
In the evening, I went online to search for the movie “Confucius”. The quality was poor but at least I got to know the story finally.
It was a “movie morning” for me as I managed to catch three movies in a shot – “The Imperial Guard”, “Big Soldier, Small General“ and the “Lightning Thief”. I also got lots of entertainment from Eileen in the midst of the earlier movies. I managed to give tomato a wake-up call for the second continuous day. I went to bed slightly before 7am.
As expected, I woke up in the afternoon again. I set off for my photography trip around the neighbourhood since it was late and I could not go far. It was not a good day for shooting though since I was too sleepy. Perhaps, the old places were not so attractive to me. I still could not get a good hand of my old camera.
After the boring trip, I went to the gym and did my first session of workout for the week. Bobby was around to guide me and I was very impressed with his knowledge. It was a short stay in the gym this time for I left home once I was done with it.
Blogging killed lots of my time with the distraction from the television.
Monday morning, I was busy with my usual blogging and editing of the SmokeForWhat.com website with my new photos in the supporter page, and eventually I went to sleep after 6am, after giving Tomato a wake-up call.
I woke up in the afternoon and after clearing my email, taking my lunch and lazing around, I started my photography trip to Ann Siang Hill Park. I was horrified at the beginning of the trip at the entrance when my rechargeable batteries died on me. The charger was too old and rusty that it happened often that the batteries were not charged properly.
I was quite surprised to see people walking through the park as I expected it to be more remote. My photoshooting trip ended when the spare Energizer batteries died on me. I dropped by Tze Khit’s gym when I was on my way home but I stayed for only a few minutes.
I started uploading the photos and some of them were indeed failures as seen on the tiny LCD screen of my old camera.
It was my third time staying over at Zaki’s wonderful house. He kept the place so neat and tidy, and the furnishing was too great for a person with an absolutely disgusting house like mine. My family were going to Malaysia for durian trip over at my brother’s girlfriend’s relative place and that was why I felt a bit uncomfortable not accompanying my mum the night before they left.
I did not bring my laptop along as I was not prepared to stay overnight there; in fact, it seemed to be an impromptu decision to go over to Zaki’s house. He left his netbook at the living room and thus I was able to go online this time. The netbook was in fact a killer for the keyboard’s alignment was slightly different from a “regular sized” laptop’s, which meant a lot. I was struggling very hard to type in the darkness, by the side of the glass door next to the balcony. One of the most common key used was “backspace”.
I spent the morning replying to Huiting’s MSN messages while typing my diary in Gmail. Afterwards, I used Gmail to store a story written for SmokeForWhat.com – My ex girlfriend is a smoker.
I went to the toilet at around 3am when I was ready to sleep but I was horrified by the fur all over my jeans. I was raped by the mat that Zaki’s cat, Pika, always rested on. I spent more than ten minutes inside the toilet to pluck the fur off from my jeans.
Hirman had wrapped himself up with the blanket and thus I used a big cushion to protect me from the cold air sent down by the fan on the ceiling and right in front of the air-conditioner. I could not doze off. After some time, Hirman woke up to witness my unglamorous hideout and I was glad to be able to sleep properly under the blanket. I dozed off soon.
We woke up at around 7+am. Hirman and I left after 8am since Zaki was going to accompany his parents. We had our breakfast at the nearest TCC. I was actually eyeing for half boiled eggs and it almost caused me to drool in my sleep. Nevertheless, the TCC in the building of NAPFA was quite stylishly furnished and it was not a bad idea. We sat there and chatted. We shared our views and we both agreed strongly to the fact that our group of angels were people without hidden agenda and thus it made us so comfortable to hang out with.
He dropped me at Bugis Village and I rushed to the nearest toilet after crossing the road. It was drizzling and it was probably not the best idea to change my mind and take bus instead. I reached home at around 11am and the house was empty. I called my mum but she did not pick up the call and I knew they had left for Malaysia. After bathing, I dozed off.
Magdalene woke me up at around 2pm in the afternoon. It was the second time she woke me up within two days but I was glad that she did that before I woke up totally strengthlessly due to famine. She had nice appraisal for me after she saw me in the drama “Your hand in mine”, which she had recorded and was viewing with her daughter.
I went downstairs to get myself a packet of carrot cake before going up to continue with updating of SmokeForWhat.com.
At night, I called for delivery for a packet of Malay fried rice.
I was crazily working on SmokeForWhat again and slept at 7 plus in the morning. Magdalene woke me up at 9+am to inform me that we were going to have early dinner with Zaki at 5.30pm. I could not doze off after that and thus I went online. There was a spam mail from Weitat and I quickly informed him. After some time, I finally managed to doze off.
I was woke up in the afternoon by my neighbour’s shouting. She had difficulties in walking and her dog ran out of the house when she was going out for treatment. I went out but she was actually blocking the corridor that wasted quite some time for me to go over to find the dog. Luckily, the dog was shivering at the stairs nearby. It was raining heavily and the dog was afraid of thunder. It was my first time carrying a dog with great fear because she had just done her operation and her stomach was still in stitches.
I went to 313 Somerset to meet up with my ITE buddies. It was Zaki’s advanced birthday and we gathered at Marche. The entire shopping centre, including the restaurant, was a babe-sighting heaven. I was so distracted by sweet faces walking around. Hirman’s hyperactiveness made the night with lots of laughers.
After the dinner, Hirman left in Magdalene’s car to pick up his from Orchard Tower. The rest of us went up to try to adjust Zaki’s new watch but it was too bad that his wrist was far too small. I was quite stunned by one of the shop assistants who looked nice. Next, we went to Centre Point and Joei got herself an item for makeup. Then, we waited outside for the drivers who were caught by the traffic jam.
I took Magdalene’s car together with Zaki whose house was too near for him to drive over. The birthday boy started making tea for us and it smelled awesome but the taste was not as superb as expected. We started playing Monopoly Deal when the rest arrived and it was an interesting game. Jenne arrived soon and we stopped the game once Zaki pawned us.
We began the cake-cutting session and it was fun. I was shocked by Zaki when he proudly stated that he had nothing more to wish for. He had houses, car and money, girlfriend and a stable job; though he did not own all the best things in Singapore, he was being so appreciated and contented with his life. I supposed having a bunch of true and no hidden agenda friends was another great achievement of his life.
After that, we played the DVD – Ugly Truth. Hirman dozed off halfway as expected as he claimed that his contact lens were too dry. I missed a part of it because Chua called me after he saw my scene in the latest episode (170) of “Your hand in mine” on channel 8.
It was at 11 plus, everyone started to leave and I hesitated for a while before deciding to stay behind to accompany Hirman, who continued with his sleep.
I continued to work in the morning and went to bed during sunrise. It was a slow progressing day for I seemed to be exhausted by the past few days' hard work on the website.
During late afternoon, I started Facebook marketing again. I was not as enthusiastic as the past days anymore.
A rather depressing result for getting support for SmokeForWhat filled the night. It was not easy to make people do good deed.
I could not stop updating SmokeForWhat.com. There were too many things I wanted to add in but I was never at my full efficiency to hit them with the frequent random thoughts of ideas for other projects. A jobless person with his mind full of only non money making stuffs was probably insane. I hated myself but I could not control myself. I slept after 7am.
In the afternoon, I saw disappointments after logging into the internet. Facebook disabled administrators of the pages from creating new status post after twenty thousand fans were hit. It was crap and would only lead to people deserting the page without the frequent updates.
A call from the polyclinic for my mum quite worried me for they wanted her to go down to talk about her blood test results. It had happened quite a few times before but luckily there was no major problem.
I went down to the third level with my mum to pick the design for the interior of HDB upgrades. After which, I went straight to the gym to help them to take care of it for a while as they needed to leave for some stuffs.
I concluded that the gym was never a good place to do my work at. It was not the noise or people walking around, but the viewing at my work and borrowing of the laptop. Internet access was limited at times since they insisted that the router made connection speed slow.
I joined Shaohui and Junzhe in their workout. The continuous second day of gym made me weaker. By the end of it, I was exhausted.
The copyrighting of the FAQ page for SmokeForWhat.com was done and it took longer than anyone could expect to put them nicely in place with all the keywords highlighted or hyperlinked.
I got so excited with the basic layout of SmokeForWhat.com up and I pushed the files to live immediately without testing it using other browsers, especially Internet Explorer.
Vanessa was the first person to test the live site after the changes and it looked totally disastrous in her Mac’s Safari. It reminded me of my mistake of not testing it in other browsers before uploading the files. I got her to do a refresh of the browser and it helped, and everything appeared as designed in Safari.
However, when I tested the site using Internet Explorer, the new implemented dropdown menu’s alignment went berserk. At 3am, it was the most horrifying thing to happen to a live site. Internet Explorer was a problematic internet browser for it did not strictly follow the W3C rules and thus, some pages might appear differently; and it came free with all Windows installation.
Luckily, I managed to fix, or rather, recode the dropdown menu within the next hour, such that it looked perfect for all browsers.
It was another day which I bathed really late.
I was woke up by shifu’s SMS but I went back to sleep at around noon. It was supposed to be an eventful day for Meihoe had organised badminton game in the new ITE CCK campus, which I was very excited in for I did not get to see the sports hall previously. However, she did not reply my SMS to confirm the game and Weitat told me that he did not see her for the entire day. I decided not to risk making a wasted trip down.
It was also Wanling’s off day and we were supposed to go out in the morning but she told me on Sunday that she had to accompany her mum for medical checkup in the early afternoon. After dropping her a message in the late afternoon, she replied that she could not make it anymore.
I spent quite some time on blogging and also playing with the yellow bird that my mum released from the cage.
It was a very slacking day for me after putting up the new design for SmokeForWhat.com. My effort in getting original pictures for the site to spice the boring words up went in vain.
