Happy New Year of the Ox...

...welcomed with style and sickness.

Meh I've been wheezing and snivelling for the past week and a half. Am terribly not happy.

Chinese new year passed like any other day with the exception of a couple of angpows and two massive pig eat outs. That was good. I'm really really thankful that while the mucus leaks on without relent, I've not lost my appetite and my sleeping patterns are still normal (read: mild imsomniac).

Work's been rather quiet of late with lots of repetitive activities that bore me down very badly. While it can understandably get like this quite often, this time round seems to be an all time low, what with the general feeling of unwellness and related anger. Rawr.

Recently, I've gotten back to building models...

Tre-sama gave me a kit over Christmas and I've already ordered the majority of the paints needed for it's completion. Shall slowly take my time over 2009 to build it up. In the meantime, work is also being done on a previous kit. A '99 spec RX7 by Fujimi, which I've primered last weekend. Shall clean up the burrs and dags this weekend with Mr. White Putty! Nyaha.

Am going to die...

*gets Chee-kun to help me get more drugs*

Currently listening to: Do You Remember by Jack Johnson

Question of the day

Does the head of the body (in a coffin, obviously) face the front or the back of the hearse when it's being transported?

Hot tip of the day

Remember to google yourself every once in a while, lest you find that you offer sexual favours for a price on the Internet unknowingly.

Today's hot tip has been brought to you by Chrissehs-kun.

Value added disappointment

Sad that the 2nd post of 2009 had to be a rant.

Work resumed on Monday and after an eventful night's sleep, I made my way to St Pancras without as much as a hitch. 'It was going to be a nice day after all', or so I was lead to think.

At the ticket office:

81 pounds please

Oh it's gone up in price... from 75.50. Rather steep eh.

*Shrugs*

I thought 'okay maybe they need money for making the trains run on time or maybe the extra heating for winter'...


Btw, the First Capital Connect don't heat their trains. Or if they did, it's probably optimum temperature for penguins. Bastards.

2008 Giant SCR Saru-kun's Special

About a month or three ago, I was in the market for a road bicycle. You know, them things with the weird looking bent down handlebars? Yahah so anyways, I gave up looking for one when there was none with the specs I wanted at a price ceiling of £450.

A few weeks later, this turned up on Ebay, at a price too good to resist:

£129.99 lighter in the wallet, the frame duly arrived 3 days later. A piece of paper was whipped out of thin air and a list of the parts needed to build a bike was made up. Back then, I was torn between either mixing and matching bits and pieces or going for a complete groupset. In the end I decided to bite the bullet and go for the all singing and dancing Shimano 105 10-speed group, which was released about 2 - 3 years ago.

Initially, the plan was to buy the bits one by one over a few months to lighten the financial load. I also enlisted the help of the BFF who was back in Malaysia then to help me purchase the groupset as it was cheaper. That, sadly, fell through the roof and crashed many many floors down, much to my dismay.

Hence a new budget was set at £600 with the aim of building it to be under 8kg. Parts were then purchased from CRC, Wiggle and numerous other online vendors as well as the good people at rock&road , addiktioncycles and Birmingham City Cycles.

Much to my dismay once more, it shot the budget roof by £189.77. I haven’t weighed it yet, but it feels to be under 10 kilos. Which is abit of a good news. It was supposed to have had its maiden ride last Saturday but yours truly decided to lie in and die on the bed because it was cold outside. Sniffle.

The spec list is as follows:

• 2008 Giant SCR4 frame – 46cm
• Brand X aero carbon wrap front fork
• Shimano 105 BR5600 front brake and Shimano R650 rear brake
• Shimano 105 10-speed gear levers 5600
• Shimano 105 10-speed front and rear derailleurs
• Shimano 105 10-speed 12-25 cassette
• Shimano R700 crankset 34-50 (170mm)
• Shimano 105 Hollowtech II bottom bracket
• KMC 10-speed chain
• Shimano Dura-Ace shifter and brake cables
• PRO PLT stem, 80mm 10º, silver
• PRO PLT drop bar, 42cm width, silver
• PRO PLT seatpost, 27.2 x 280mm, silver
• PRO bartape – Floral Baby Blue
• Charge Ladle Ladies saddle, black with baby blue trims
• Shimano RS10 wheelset, black
• Shimano A515 SPD pedals, metallic baby blue
• Vittoria Rubino Tech Pro 120 TPI tyres and inner tubes

Meow.

Rather overdue autumn London

Spongebob says hello from the window of a Nickelodeon office.

Merry Christmas, albeit belated and a good 2009 to everyone.

Monday morning

I dreamt that I was waking up when I was meant to be waking up for real this morning.

All in a day's walk

You know its not a good start to the day when you see your bus speeding past while you're still about 70 odd metres away from the bus stop...

... ending up having to stand in the Arctic cold for about 10 minutes before another came... but didn't stop. Because bus No. 29 to Wood Green blocked its way in the stop. So came another freezing 5 minutes...

... at least the bus I got on was warm. I arrived at St Pancras at 0716 hrs. My train was due at 0716 but was delayed by a minute. It pulled out of the station as I was halfway towards the platform. The next one was at 0732 hrs, but that was delayed at first to 0736, then to 0743. Typical.

I picked up a London Metro from the floor of the train and flipped it open, straight to an article entitled "Network Rail to reduce delays".

Yup, when cows fly they will...

The biting wind and bitter cold embraced me as soon as the train doors open. You'd never find a more clingy lover. Its sunny and the blue skies are cloudless.

Its also 0 degrees C.

Winter's here.

Akan datang!

Happenings of the months

To start off with, I managed to wobble my way to a UK motorcycle driving license. A full 'A' license at that, which means that I'm not limited by engine capacity. Which means I'm road legal on a 1.3 litre Suzuki Hayabusa with immediate effect. Which also means that the UK roads are not safe anymore. Bless them.

Lucky for the UK'ians then that the DVLA hasn't sent me the license yet...

The girlfriend's birthday was two weeks ago. That was awesome. A dinner date at ASK, where the risotto and al fondo was rather nice and where it was a shit place to have a romantic conversation. What was nice though (and still is), is just spending time together. Lying in bed with her head on my shoulder, her wet hair making my t-shirt damp. Happy 21st babe =)

A few days later, the Design Office manager, my colleague and yours truly were invited to PTC World 2008, held at the Heritage Motor Centre, in Gaydon. It was a gathering of sorts for PTC's customers, showcasing the latest and greatest that PTC had to offer. Great opportunities to network. I met the editor of Racecar Engineering, Graham Jones and Philip Darlington, who was involved with a reverse-engineering job with Carlin Motorsports. A former engineer at Ferrari F1, he designed their cylinder heads as well, if I'm not mistaken. That was pretty cool...

There were also lots and lots and lots of Jaguars about... typical of a place close to Coventry.

Oh and before I forget, we got a couple of friends round and had a steamboat dinner / party of sorts at Tre-sama's place. Nom. Almost 500 odd meatballs and fishballs were consumed, in addition to three packets of enoki mushrooms, almost 2 kilos of prime beef meat, a couple of eggs, one whole chinese leaf, fried beancurd, beancurd, fishcakes and a few blocks of noodles. Oh wait, lets not forget approximately 6 litres of pork soup that was boiled the previous night and left to steep. Muahaha...~

The chocolate cake from Costco. 'Tis the only time I gave up halfway through a slice of cake. It is that big a deal.

Currently listening to: Sleep Now In The Fire - Rage Against The Machine

The Butterfly Effect

A mindfuck.

Good film. Watch it.

The long awaited aftermath...

... and the third day...

The weather here is fickle...

It be snowing

Real novel...

I chanced upon this gem of a site while doing the usual trawl online and the author has a put forth an interesting application of the double wishbone suspension design; on the front of a motorcycle!

Bott 1000 Morlaco

A litre class bike with racecar style double wishbone front suspension and drop dead gorgeous styling. I can't quite see how the dampers are actuated but assuming that he wants to display his dampers on top of the fuel tank it's probably remotely pushed or pull by a rod or rocker of some form. Refreshing from the blingy Ohlins black and gold inverted beauties we're used to seeing.

He must have had quite abit of fun playing with instantenous swing arm length during his geometry optimisation phase. Lovely design and packaging as well. Good craftsmanship too.

Picture taken directly from the website. Rendered by a Mr. Jose Garcia. Please drop me a mail if anyone would like this taken down for intellectual property reasons.

I'll definitely be keeping tabs on this...

Honestly, don't they have more important things to attend to?

I types this as Hamilton stands on the top of the podium at Shanghai during the replay of the race. Typical textbook race with nothing untoward and fairly uneventful.

The light-hearted mood wasn't to last for me as Chee-kun forwarded me the following:
I'm like what the feck?

How pissing off is this to the genteel and kind residents of KL and PJ and probably the majority of Malaysians?

The renaming of Jalan Alor in Bukit Bintang to Jalan Kejora has to be one of the most pointless and baseless moves ever by DBKL, among many others.

And the government asks us why are we so unhappy. Diu...