Here's My Story

I finally managed to dine here after planning to do so a few times. I recently went there with Ban and his brother. Previously, I looked through their menu and determined that the prices were reasonable. I chose their Pho Beef Combination (RM18.90) as a test case of their food. When it arrived, I had expected to be able to smell the beef soup but I couldn't and so I was a little apprehensive. Fortunately, the soup was quite delicious and more fragrant than the usual. Another feature that set it apart was that beansprout and mint leaves were already inserted into the soup (rather than on a separate plate). Both looked fresh. The noodle itself was quite normal. Beef ball was tasty but seems small. There was, however, a clump of rather tough beef: quite a glaring aberration. Overall, its soup is better than that of Vietnamese Kitchen  but portion seems smaller. Since it wasn't too bad, I would try again to ascertain its consistency. Incidentally, sadly Du Vi...

In the process of applying for a job in Singapore , Ban discovered that his passport had expired nearly 6 months ago @@. We were worried because it was a hassle then to renew passport due to limited number of passports issued at each immigration office. If I'm not mistaken, this whole debacle came about because the passport vendor printed passports that didn't meet the new features. So that resulted in severe shortage of passports. After enquiring with friends and family, Ban decided to start queuing at the Kelana Jaya office by 6am @@. The poor guy didn't sleep well the night before and ended sleeping only about 4 hours :( There was already a queue when he reached there. As these queue slots were so precious, an attempt by a man to jump queue was quickly rebuffed and reprimanded. Yay! Once office opened, Ban managed to get queue number 41. Despite lack of sleep, he was alert enough to ask the officer at the queue counter whether it would be a problem if the chip on his...

When I first started playing Atlas Reactor , it was still free-to-play but restricted to a handful of freelancers on a rotational basis. I gravitated to the only support character available during that particular rotation: Aurora. Soon I found her quite difficult to play, despite the supposedly "easy" difficulty classification. Later I found out that except for  Quark , all supports do not have any Dash ability. Hence, playing support was difficult without that obvious escape mechanism. Perhaps because of this or not, Quark became my choice for support. But much later, for reasons that I forgot, I tried Aurora again and prioritised trying to survive should she be cornered or chased by enemies. Hmmm I vaguely remember one particular game where I was amazed by how good an Aurora player survived onslaught by enemies. Perhaps that was an impetus to revisit this character. Her main ability (with no cooldown) is Shock Therapy (Blast), which damages enemies and heals allies...

Back in June, I tried to renew my REP online (expiring in Sep this year) but predictably it wasn't successful. "Are you currently living in Singapore?" No. "Are you currently working in Singapore?" No. (N.B: questions aren't verbatim). However, recently I re-read the e-mail response and noted that I will lose my Singapore PR if I remain outside Singapore without a valid REP. In other words, I get to keep my PR if I stay in Singapore, right? I then e-mailed ICA on a Friday night asking this question and stating that I plan to move back to Singapore in a few weeks time. In addition, I would establish (have to do this anyway) a sole proprietorship business to provide freelance actuarial work for qualified actuaries in Singapore. On Saturday morning, I then re-applied online to renew my REP but this time adding some information explaining why I was not working in Singapore and that I plan to move back to Singapore after my dad's surgery in September. T...

My mum bought this recently from Tesco and knowing that I like this snack, she left some for me. The taste is quite good. Not too salty and can taste the lentil. However, what was more interesting was the writing on the package such as "guilt free", "And all this stuff also lah..." and the best part was in its list of ingredient: "plenty of love and care". Kudos to designer!

Similar to Bastion , Torbjorn is also a scourge of newbies. Actually, it is both Torbjorn and his turret and at times, it's only the latter that matters. His turret is unique because it'll automatically turn and shoot, with unerring accuracy, at enemies that come into view. Obviously that means positioning matters but that itself is not easy to determine because ideally it should be positioned such that it can shoot as many enemies as possible and yet protected from range guerrilla attack. Consider corners and rooms. Maybe even on higher ground but you have to watch for enemies walking up the same way you did to place that turret. When Torbjorn first places the turret, it's only level 1 and has 150 hp with slow firing rate. With 6 swings of his hammer (when it's at full health), he can upgrade it to level 2 with 300 hp and faster firing rate. Level 3 (800 hp and even faster firing rate) can only be temporarily obtained by using his ultimate ability Molten Core. To...

Actually, it's not an alarm. Turns out that my lucky break is false :( My agent said that the (potential) new tenant didn't confirm. He had been quite meticulous in his job so far and hence for this to happen (i.e. to tell me he had "secured" a tenant and yet later fell through) is quite puzzling. So now we're back to marketing my condo unit for sale and rent. Upon my request, he sent me links to the advertisements he put out in a popular website. I noticed that unlike the one for rent, the sell advert had old photos that were taken when I was still staying there. They were the same photos used for the rent advert almost a year ago which resulted me in requesting more recent photos to be used. I immediately asked him to use the most recent photos (or at least the same ones as those in the rent advert) for the sell advert. Hopefully I'll get a genuine lucky break soon!

Sometime last month, I received bad news from my agent that tenant that we got since Feb  had invoked the diplomatic clause because his company his sending him back to home country :( As usual, I checked Propertyguru and URA to get some data on current market rental rate but this time I also checked market selling price too. To my surprise, although the former had dropped significantly the last 2 years, the latter hadn't changed by much. Doing some calculation, I determined that the proceed of a sale at current price - less money to be returned to CPF, outstanding home loan, legal fee, agent commission - could earn more than the current rental rate (net of relevant ongoing expenses and taxes) if invested in shares with dividend yield of 5%. So far, the historical dividend yield of my portfolio is 6% and so 5% is a little conservative. Sounds good, right? However, that would mean all my investment will be in shares and that's scary given the fact that I'm not an expert a...

Imagine you own a company that manufactures and sells bread making machines. You're approached by another company that wants to make and sell bread but doesn't have the machines to do so. They want to lease your machines to do so. You then proceed to make the appropriate calculations and quoted them a leasing fee, which they accepted. Years later, your client decided not to renew the leasing agreement. In fact, they are going to make their own machine just to produce and sell bread. They then propose to engage you to perform regular quality assurance checks on both the machine and the bread. You determine that this cost much lesser than leasing out your machine and so quoted a significantly lower fee for such checks. In the course of your review, you notice striking similarities between their and your machine. In fact, they even copied your unique identification number of the machine you leased to them before. How will you feel? Furious, right? You would have earned so much...

"-grateful that he's healthy," Rahim Khan was saying. "I know, I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dreams." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Babab sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Kahn laughed. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors". - "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini.