Decay On Net

Been handling the whole issue rather well, ignoring the flaming and stuff. Even when I was being sandwiched between 2 friends and end up losing both of them, I still managed to keep my cool. Was rather surprised myself too. When did I get such high endurance level?

But I blew my top just now over a small misunderstanding. Just simply blew it. Looking back, I think I was rather foolish. Now that I've calmed down, I was quite ashamed that I actually blew up over such small matter. Especially at this sensitive period. Sorry guys.

This is a critical time for everyone in ping.sg. Those who don't like us can't wait to see us fall apart. We can fall apart any moment if things aren't handled properly. Everyone is looking at us.

We have to stand united if we want to get over this crisis. Face the problem as a team. Put down all differences and move on. And move on we will.

Posted by DK at 1:56 AM | Comments (2)

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire



Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye"

Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

CHORUS
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser aand Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy hn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, "Peyton Place", trouble in the Suez

CHORUS

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"

Lebanon, Charlse de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur", space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo

CHORUS

Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

CHORUS

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodsto/ck/, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

CHORUS

We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on...

PS: Check out the wikipedia entry

Posted by DK at 12:35 PM | Comments (5)

Should have posted this entry earlier. Been busy over some other issue. Finally got the time to sit down and blog about this properly.

Thank you for voting for me for the ping.sg anniversary blog award. The results were announced during the ping.sg party at Geek Terminal.



I've won the Most Insightful Post award and Best Citizen Journalism Post award.

I didn't expect to win any award. I was pondering if I should actually prepare my acceptance speech. But the lazy me decided not to because I thought I won't win a single thing. I should really try to touch up on my public speaking skill. Feeling very nervous up there. Argh. Where is the public speaking confidence I used to have?

Peter recorded both acceptance speech that I've made and posted it on youtube. Thanks a lot. It sure feels weird looking and listening to yourself on video. Could never get used to it.





Once again, I would like to thank everyone for their supports all these years. Although I still don't understand why so many people like to come here daily to read my ranting.

----------------

None of the prize presenters took my bribery. I double checked the result slip to ensure that. Perhaps my reward isn't attractive enough.

As for my voters, I still remember that I've promised you lift upgrading, MRT station and ERS. I will slowly roll out these benefits soon. Do keep a lookout in my blog. Those who didn't vote for me will get it first. (So that they will vote for me next year)

----------------

I don't know why, but after getting the 2 award, you are the first person I wanted sms to inform about the good news even though you are thousands of miles away.

Labels: ping.sg

Posted by DK at 2:14 AM | Comments (5)

Not really say, but rather SMS.

"I'm never going to speak with you again."

And you'll never know how hurtful it could get when a friend said this. Especially when I didn't do anything wrong at all. What fault am I at? All I did was tell her that we met for dinner and beer one night and chatted until 4am. That was quite some time ago already.

And she twisted that info to do personal attack on you. But it wasn't my fault. She twisted the truth, not me. Why should I also be at the receiving end? What did I do to deserve this?

Yes, I understand that you are angry with her. I would also be angry if I'm placed in the same position as you. But there is really nothing I can do except ask you to put down the differences and forget it. She has already removed her blog entry and said sorry. What else can we all do except put down the differences and move on?

I'm indeed the best loser last night. I've lost a friend....

Posted by DK at 11:59 PM | Comments (13)

Actually I don't want to blog about this issue. But I'm left with no choice but to step out and tell everyone where I'm standing because my name was mentioned several times in many blogs. I feel that I'm being misinterpreted.

Firstly, I don't want to win any single award. I wasn't expecting to win anything at all. I didn't even prepare for a thank you speech. I don't want to win anything, including the best blog award.

I did ask Uzyn about the best blog award. Initially, I thought the idea was the best blog will be judge by the total number of votes from all the best post and best blog categories. But maybe I misinterpreted Uzyn's idea of best blog award. His idea of best blog is the blog that got the most votes from the blog categories.

Is this considered controversial? I don't think so. I feel that it's debatable and depends on how you view it. I agree that my views and uzyn's views are different. But there is no right or wrong in this argument. Both methods has their pros and cons. Since Uzyn decided to take the other method to judge the winner, then I will go with his decision.

So why did I say I'm the loser?

I spend so much time and effort trying to make this entire event work.

We met up several times to discuss about this event. Went to geek terminal to discuss the event and pricing. Went to TCC boat quay to discuss the nomination. Do you know how many hours are being spend there?

And the countless of emails that we send to discuss and coordinate this event. Everyone is very supportive of this event. We put in alot of effort. And the endless MSN discussion we made. Even until the night before the event, we are still on MSN ensuring everything is in order.

I specially went down to iShop after work on Monday to collect the gift packs together with Uzyn. iShop is very kind to provide us the bags and some goodies. But they are too heavy for me to carry them home alone via MRT. Wanted to grab a cab, but the Taxi queue is very long. I have to call my bro-in-law who is NOT THAT nearby to come fetch me.

I drove down to Fort Road on Tuesday 11pm SPECIALLY to collect the gift from Shuffle-arts. Roger gave us some discount voucher and shuffle-arts for door gift. I also exchanged several emails with Paddy from bak2u on the gift packs too.

And I carried the gift pack from my house to Geek Terminal on that day. I have to take cab down because it is impossible to take MRT. I even call cab because I was late and we still haven't pack the gift pack yet. We spend 1/2 hour at the entrance of Geek Terminal packing the gift pack. Thanks to everyone for helping out.

And I was running around the place during the entire event, looking to see if there is any thing that need my help. I didn't really get to sit down and enjoy the award presentation at all.

Why am I doing all these? Why do I even bother? I've been doing all this because I wanted to do something for this community. I hope this community can grow and bond together. I hope more people will join us at ping.sg, come out have lots of fun.

So did I achieve that? NO!

One day after the award presentation, what I'm seeing is the verge of a full blown flame war. I get people MSN-ing, SMS-ing and calling me and talk about this best blog award issue. Seriously, I don't really care that much about it. I just want the community to come out, gather and have fun.

PLEASE! Do you all want to see ping.sg break up into a flaming war? Do you want this party to be the last party ping.sg dare to organise? Everyone here is my friend. I don't want to see this happening to us. Before you type your next flaming entry on your blog, think about it. Do you want to break up this community which we spend so much time building? What is the point of this flame war? What do you want to achieve from it? Think about it.

So the best loser for this ping.sg award is DK. For putting in so much effort for the party, hoping that the community will grow stronger, YET it ended up as a flame war, dragging him down at the same time. Well done DK! Keep up the good work.

Do I get a best loser award trophy for this?

Posted by DK at 6:12 PM | Comments (31)

OK, the big event is finally over. I guess we can finally sit back and relax a bit. The past few days were hectic. I must agree that the planning wasn't really good for some part.

But allow me to defend ourselves a bit. Ping.sg not an event organizing group like TDM. We are just a blogger community who likes to meet up and have fun. We have no experience in organizing events. This is our first time and we choose to take up such a big event. We make mistakes, we learn from mistakes. Thank you for being with us while we are learning from our mistakes.

And so while everyone is sleeping or busy chatting at the ping.sg shoutbox, I did some debrief myself which I would like to share with everyone. These are just my personal opinions. They are not official replies from ping.sg, its community and/or owner. It is just my thoughts at 4:30am after 3 glasses of beer.

The awards
Why some nominations are rejected.
After the nominations, the committees met up one saturday night and spend hours looking thru all the nominations. We rejected some nominations because either the blog is not in ping.sg or it doesn't fit into the category. Every single nomination was looked thru and voted by the committees. Some of the nominations are just totally out of the category that we have to drop them.

Why are the nominated entries mostly the active members?
The nomination for the blog award was open to all ping.sg members. The reason why most of the nominated entries are from active members is because, well….. they are very active in the community. When you are active, you get fans, supporters and friends. And these people will naturally nominate you for the award.

Why the winners are mostly the active members?
Same for the previous question. If you are more active, you get more fans, supporters and friends.

I do wish to see more blogs being nominated. But we need your help to nominate more blogs from those not so active members. I did tried my best to surf around and nominate a few less active members. But I can only do that much. I hope we will see more nominations next time round.

The event
Why the event started late.
We Singaporeans are known to be late. I wish we could start on time. But the place is only half filled. If we start on time, a lot of people will miss the front segment. And people entering the place late will disturb the audience and MC.

MC wasn’t well prepared.
Yes, we could have done better at the MC part. There wasn’t enough rehearsal. But as I said earlier, this is our first time organizing such events. Please bare with us. Both Rinaz and Brennan have their own job and commitments too. It’s really hard to do a proper rehearsal. Perhaps they could do better with more rehearsal and scripts.

Everyone is too quiet, no interaction.
OK, I admit I’m at fault for creating this “too quiet� environment. I’m not sure how many people attended blogout which was also held in Geek Terminal. What happen at blogout was, there are not many seats around and most people are standing in groups and chatting. The MC and panel are having a hard time presenting their stuff. It is too noisy and everyone is more interested in their own conversations. So for the award presentation, I suggested having seats in straight rows for this event so that people will not make too much noise during the event. And I think I over did it and now everyone is too quiet. But I personally feel that there is a time for everything. During the award, we need the audience to be quiet and pay attention. After the awards, we moved the chairs away so that people can stand around and interact with each other.

Time slot for sponsors are arranged wrongly.
I don’t know leh. Is it wrong? We wanted to give the sponsors some time to talk about their product and also give out an award. So naturally we would put both items side by side. It would create a sense of a “commercial break�. Is the time slot wrongly arranged? I personally feel that its ok. Maybe I’ll have to speak to Josh and Paddy to get their feedback.

There are still many areas for improvements. This is our first time but it will not be the last. It’s a good lesson for everyone of us. We took home something at the end of the day. Ping.sg, like I mentioned, is not an event organizing group. We are a blogger community.

Thank you everyone for coming for today's event. Do join us for the next gathering if you can. We will have more fun this time round. I hope. Cheers :D

Posted by DK at 4:30 AM | Comments (27)

I went to the newly opened Starbucks at Marina Square yesterday. The ambience is good with quite a lot of sofa seats. I only managed to get a seat after 5 minutes.



I went to the counter to order my usual Cafe Mocha and discover something shocking. Starbucks is using those super automatic espresso machine. Those "press one button and you get coffee" espresso machine. It's not those espresso machines with a porta-filter where you press the coffee powder in the basket.

Suddenly I felt so cheated. Now ANYBODY can be a barista. Just press one button and you get instant coffee. No more grinding or pressing. I can be a barista too, just give me 30 minutes training and I'll be brewing perfect coffee for everyone.

And I'm not sure if it is just me or the coffee. But somehow, the coffee doesn't taste as good as before. There are some talks that super automatic espresso machine doesn't make coffee as good as those semi-automatic espresso machine. I'm not sure if it is really the fact or is it my mind playing a trick on my taste buds.

Why did Starbucks scoop to the same level as TCC? I still remember couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was joking about TCC's coffee because they are using super automatic espresso machines instead of the semi automatic espresso machines that all the other coffee places are using. But now we are seeing Starbucks using super automatic espresso machine too. Feel quite disappointed. Is this the new "Starbucks Experience"? I thought an institute like Starbucks would put more stress on training their staff rather than using those super automatic espresso machine.

I think I'll avoid Marina Sq Starbucks from now on.

Posted by DK at 1:15 PM | Comments (4)

This song has been repeating in my head over and over again ever since the Youtube and Beyond talk. Think I'm going crazy soon.

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy



I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions have an echo
In so much space

And when you're out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you're in control

Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I wanna be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come
And I can die when I'm done

But Maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Possibly

Uh, uh

Posted by DK at 2:33 AM | Comments (0)

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would switch off the lights in my room, turn on some nice music and sit on my bed to wonder.... why am I still single? OK, I know I'm not rich or capable or good looking. But I'm still not that bad mah. Why am I still single? Is there anything wrong with me?

Someone even said that I'm a nice boy, tall, pleasant looking but a little fat. Then why am I still single?

Well.... maybe is because got people post blog entries like this, this and this. After reading those post, where got gals want to get near me? All the gals who are interested in me will all back off after reading those blog entries.

Whatever remaining reputation I have are all being destroyed by the folks at ping.sg tonight.

Ladies, don't listen to those rumour mongers. I'm perfectly straight and only interested in gals.

Posted by DK at 12:11 AM | Comments (30)

OK, as you guys know, I'm nominated for 5 categories in the upcoming ping.sg anniversary blog award 2007. Well, I didn't really publicize much about my nomination. I’m not those type that hang my avatar at every lamp post along the road. I’m also won't drive a lorry around the place and broadcast a recorded message of me urging voters to vote for me. This is not my way to run for election.

As you all know, I'm promising all my voters the following:-
1) Lift upgrades at their blog.
2) MRT square line station will stop at their blog.
3) ERS (virtual money) for everyone.

Voting has since closed and I'm sure a lot of people are buying into the perks that I've offered. I promise that I'll give you everything that I promise if I win. Only I can give you these benefits. Look at my competitor, they are not capable to give you anything. OK, I'm sure a lot of you are saying that I’m using bribes to win votes. Mind you, these are not bribery. These are election benefits offered to my voters.

But to further ensure that I win all 5 categories, I'm taking some extra measures. I think I'll need to bribe the prize presenters too.

To all the 10 prize presenters, I'm offering you these benefits if you announce me as the winner of the award instead of the real winner:-
1) Door gift (In case you don't know, I'm incharge of the door gift. *evil laugh*)
2) Free dinner at geek terminal on 7 Jul 2007 (Buffet)
3) Spend a night with me (valid for female prize presenters only)

Think about it. Are you going to present the award for free? Or will you want to receive some special gifts from me? The choice is yours. *smoke cigar*

PS: This is a PPP (Pang Pui Post). Just like the usual PPP from EastCoastLife , this entry should not be taken seriously.

Labels: ping.sg

Posted by DK at 5:19 PM | Comments (8)