Before 2009

The Shimano Wheel Incident
I was desperate enough to send my experience to STOMP, but alas, nothing. No news, but a cryptic email pushing the buck to the local middleman of the distribution chain. I replied to that email, but alas, no reply again.

This is getting nowhere, and I think I might have no choice but to cut my losses and send a snail-mail to the American office, detailing the bad experience I had had with the Shimano wheel and worse of all, their customer service.

And no, I still have not gotten the wheel back after 2 weeks.

Bicycle ride to Seletar Airport
A lazy afternoon, watching the birds and the planes.







Youth Flying Club students landing the planes, some doing very decently, others looking like they had almost crashed the plane. That was because of the stiff crosswind that was blowing almost directly perpendicular to the runway, with a component of tailwind (bad also).

What they do in the landing seems to be pointing the nose at an angle to counter the wind, then using the rudder to straighten the plane near the runway, a process called sideslipping.



Weather was crazy hot. The YFC guys finished their training and all was silent - for a long while.

Except for mynahs, eagles, sparrows, egrets, butterflies and dragonflies, there were nothing flying in the area. Zilch. I was looking forward to looking at passenger turboprops land and take off.

It was only after a long long while before i saw landing lights from the other direction. The wind direction changed and they reversed the active runway! I cycled to the other end, via a very muddy and pothole-ridden road. Ouch.







USA registered jet in the background. Also saw a Hansung Airlines ATR72. Then saw a couple of planes take off, including a 737!



Military C130 from Oman on tow.



Lockheed L-100-30 Hercules from South Africa leased to East Asia Response Limited, a company that handles oil spills in this region.




Meeting up with Fadz and Kun
made me realise that the people I hang around with in school have made me all but oblivious to humanity and entertainment. People in my faculty are so bitchy, so self-centred and so achievement-driven that I really don't know what the fuck I'm doing in it.Every day I'm around them, a part of me dies.

Thank goodness for friends outside school.

The EDMW Super Lonely Hearts Supper Club New Year Eve Outing



A bunch of us online forumers went to Changi Airport for dinner (to avoid the crowds).











Lots of food for 7 people. The chicken tastes better than when I had eaten it in the middle of 2008, though the chicken pieces were still very variable in size.



We headed on to City Hall area for the fireworks.





Human traffic jams abound, mainly due to the pushy (literally) foreigner population in Singapore. The police had almost lost control of the situation when the crowd had repeatedly refused to move. They opened up a barricade just as we were in that area, so we had managed to get a good spot for the fireworks.

We were so close we could feel the blasts of hot air from the fireworks. Without further ado, the pictures:









































We hung around for a while, waiting for the crowd to disperse before we took the late night Nightrider bus home.

The sweet thing about online outings is that everything's so relaxed. There's no expectations, no jostling for attention, no haughty arrogant braggarts that I was previously so used to.













Whew. That was a lot of pictures.