Heineken: Walk-in Fridge

One of my current fave ads ;)

Enjoy!


Cheers and Good Morning from,

Matrix

Of sweat, heartbreaks , and well spent money

the much loved Whella and Jamis resting after a blasting on Singapore's pavements

The Jamis has been hitting tarmac a lot lately , cause i want to avoid injury this semester and partly cause i fear expensive repairs ever since the last time the Bkt Timah trail laid waste to my Wiemann Zac rims.

And so, i've been all the way to the Marina area and back , and done the NUS-NTU route thrice (twice with roomie) and blasted the 10 clicks of clear open road on Lim Chu Kang.

Hardly the best use of a mountain bike, but oh well.....

Roomie got back yesterday and then we decided to chucks work and just take a ride. Mainly cause Whella's casette was wacked (one sprocket had broken off after 5 years of hardship).

Found a replacement at a shop in Clementi. Twas a SR Suntour , but very decent quality, and so we made the repair.

I must stop and say at this point, people in the west of singapore are generally quitegrumpy and carry this aura of hardship and depression around them. And they infect the mood of others with it.

The shopkeeper was grumpy , his assistant was grumpy, even the damn popiah lady we bought a snack from was grumpy.

Sad to say this was reflected on the popiah which was a pretty sad looking thing indeed.

Damn.

Oh well, at least we got Whella up and running and we made it to NUS, saw Ming Han (an old A lvl pal from KL) and even dropped in on bro to say hi. Nice.

And then we hit Vivo...

At this point we were so pumped up and were like..,

"Yo! Lets do this! Lets push all the way home and ride in like conquerers of Troy to hall"


and then things went wrong.......

ouch

Yeah, that came out near NUS

Whella had a mind of its own. The bike was soo damn good and smart, she had progressed from handling terrain and riding awesomely to slowly bankrupting my roomie. The pedals were apparently loose and slowly ate away at the thread in the crankset, totalling them.

And so we were stranded near NUS and i desperately called Wenyan for taxi numbers.


At this point heartbreak and money loss, having crippled roomie's soul had started to get to me and we decided to save money and wheel the bikes as far as we could until around 8.30 pm to avoid the blasted 30% peak hour taxi charges.

It was far.....

We reached Clementi Avenue West around 8.20pm, then decided to try our luck and made for the bikeshop with the grumpy towkay.



IT WAS FREAKING OPEN!!!! ( generally astonishing cause most bike shops close by 8pm)

Grumpy man allowed us to leave the bikes there overnight and he'd fix it tomorrow.





Allow me to digress a bit. The Jamis came with a stock Shiman Alivio rear derailleur. For non cyclists, its the mechanism which changes the rear gears for you. Expensive ones have are made of better materials and use better springs, and the Alivio is considered a decent, but not quite the top end stuff.


Now, Audrey (uni mate) owns a GT with an Alivio setup and apparently her read d was a bit wonky and I , wanting to upgrade to an LX , offered to sell my Alivio if i could find a decently priced LX.

know what? When we went back to get the bikes today, I stopped by at a nearby cycle shop specialising in Santa Cruz bikes and asked about second hand LX-es.




I FREAKING GOT ONE!!!! For only SGD 45!!!!

The original price for a new one is 70 and mine was from a Santa Cruz bike whose owner upgraded to the top end XTR Shimano parts when he made the purchase. I haggled and brought the price down from SGD55.


Hehe, its soooo damn smooth compared to the old Alivio!




Cheers from a very satisfied,


Matrix

Ramblings

I was musing about what i had and then i realised just how much i miss it.

I had a lot of people around me when i was a kid. Loads of cousins , aunts, uncles and a few surviving grandparents whom i hardly talked to cause i could now hold a sustained conversation with them. Probably my fault for not taking enough effort.

No matter.

I guess i turned out ok after all cause there being so many peopl around, i got caned practically everytime i crossed the line.

I still remember the first time i learnt the famous F*** word and shouted it at my brother when i was 10. My butt ached the entire day from my father's whackings. He sure had a hard hand.

I could not even get off easy when i threw my vegetables in the bin in secret cause i used to hate spinach. The family maid would spot it and duly report to my aunts, who would then catch me and make me eat another plate of it and then make me sit in a corner.

I do miss other aspects of my childhood.

My uncles, dad, cousins and brother used to pack the family MPV on weekends and head for the nearby field to play football for an hour or so. We would place 2 traffic cones my uncle got from somewhere (my guess is he nicked them or something from the roadside....there were so many discarded around my housing estate) at opposing ends of a marked area on the field and we'd split into teams of 5 or 6 depending on whom could come , and we'd just play.

That stopped when uncles and dad hit their late 40s and we got into our mid teens and became too strong in our tackles for them to handle it.

Uncle developed neck aches and dad had his back aches. 

We used to sometimes play cricket too in the house compound. Night cricket, cause we could turn on the floodlights in the compound and used the same traffic cones as wickets. 

Its quite rare for Malaysians to be playing cricket, but my entire family with the exception of brother and me , had spent a few years of education in India, and that's where the influence came from. I sucked at batting which bro was pretty good at, but i could bowl pretty fast balls , which incidentally did not work against my brother and an uncle, cause they were big and hid the cones with their bodies...darn.

I have a few regrets though. I wish i had not studied too much in secondary school , been too competitive , instead could have laid back a bit and done other things. For instance i could have dabbled in a bit of basic circuit design and model building, which i want to do now, but can't find the time :(

I wished i had taken up an offer to join the school's football team which i rejected cause i wanted to maintain my ranking in the school, which counts for nothing actually later in life. What a waste of time.

No matter.

I have come to accept that you will have some form of regret for whatever you have done in the past when you look back from the present. I dare you to NOT find any.

And so, i have to go against my natural instinct to not be cliched , and come to accept that that oh so cliched talk of "Do not look back at the past, but enjoy the present" is in fact so very true.

*shifty eyes*

This sounds a bit emo........

Righto!

Thing is , even though i'm not very much good at it, i like trying to theorise life's question into a set , objective guideline of sorts. (ooh, that sounded very messiah-ish). 

But then a friend told me its not possible. And i pondered more and then i realised that its futile and a stupid thing to do. Its not going to achieve anything. Its time wasted. And its downright boring conversation material , unless you're talking to a person with an emo problem.

*read post again to find out what's been written*

Darn, this is one confusing post. No matter, i shalt name it "Ramblings" , publish it now, and probably look at it later in the year and wonder what sort of boredom i had to be in to write this.

LOL.

Anyway, i suddenly feel the mood to look at circuits again. And so i bid you the reader au revoir!

Cheers from the,

Matrix

I must say, that was awfully fun....

I went to a hotel room with 2 complete strangers i had only met 2 hours before......

I must say, had it not been singapore this would not have happened.

Before i elaborate further, please feast your eyes on the view from a 1000 sing dollar per night room at the Ritz Carlton.

Yeah, that's a floating football pitch, yet to see its first match though, lol.

I woke up at around 8.30am despite being up till 2 am , probably cos the past CA week's hellish aura forced me to be up studying at 5.30am.

CA's are basically quizzes which contribute anywhere from 15% till as high as 40% towards your final grade. I had a grand total of 5 CAs last week , one which i screwed up cause i had taken some lung infection medication and half slept during it.

No matter, i nailed the electronics and thermodynamics quizzes :P

So, i woke up at 8.30am. And then i got bored cause i had no mood to study and did not want to meet or go out with anyone, not that i can find anyone to go out with on such short notice. No matter.

So i decided on the spot to cycle a 60km route from NTU to the Central Business District. And so i did....

Partly also cause i wanted to try out the new chain i had put on my bike after the last one snapped as i tried to max the bike. Twas good by the way.

Now i'm not sure whether this is true in general, but whenever i go on these long rides out to the city , any cyclist i see out for a morning ride normally tags along and we ride as a group, despite being complete strangers. The largest and scariest of these rides being one i took with a group of road bikers on their carbon fibre 60km/h capable bikes along one of singapore's so called most haunted roads at night. Cause they're so fast, ur cycling alone most of the time alongside tombstones and funny noises.



Where was I?


ah....right..


And so i found myself on the tail of a chap on a Raleigh hardtail MTB near NUS today and quite naturally we chatted about our bikes, where we have been on it, and then the conversation steered to the topic of where we were headed. The CBD it was and i tagged along to know the route.

Chap was entering the OCBC cycling thingy and he happened to be a service staff head at the Ritz Carlton where he was going to park his bike before the ride the next day. And so we rode and then met his pal, rode some more and ended up inviting me to take a grand tour of the swanky places of the Ritz.


Now i have never been in a 1000 dollar per night hotel room and yeah, his pal and I went wowing at the oak panelling at the jacuzzi in the toilet and the gold lined bathroom fittings. Was tempted to nick the thick cotton bath robes, but apparently they are tagged with RFID chips which embarassingly set off a silent alarm if taken out of the hotel. Talk about the less glamour side of the hotel business....


Anyway, i had fun. Rode through park connectors, saw the more scenic side of singapore, and i now have a new riding buddy.

Cause Ishak lives near Sheng Siong , only a 5 min bike ride from my hall.



Cheers from the,

Matrix

Terminator Salvation - Official Trailer

ITS FINALLY OUT!!!!!!!

Valentine Idea

Yes, i introduce the very cliched red rose on valentine idea......with a twist for all the romantic wannabes out there wanting to show some love.

Get a cheap pinewood box (i think IKEA should have them) , stain it brown and lacquer it. Line the base with some insulation (cotton or newspaper would do) , pack in dry ice , line the top of the dry ice with more insulation.

Finally, take your cliched red rose and place it on top of the insulation and close the box to let the steam build up.

When you go to meet your love , hand her the smoking wooden box and ask her to open it. IF she trusts you (a smoking box is suspicious) , she will open it and a dry ice steam will pour out in a really cool effect, slowly unveiling the rose hidden by the thick steam.

I think its pretty cool. You can do upgrades to this idea if you have time:

1) Sub the wooden box with a carbon fibre or brushed stainless steel one

2) Sub the insulation with a glass phial

3) fill glass phial with liquid nitrogen

4) design a mechanism which breaks the very brittle glass phial (the nitrogen should have made it even more brittle) when the box is opened.

5) place rose on top of phial

So when she opens it, the glass phial breaks, liquid nitrogen flows out and freezes rose. She takes out rose and it melts in her hand to become fresh again.

Then you go, "I had a cold cold heart, until you came along and melted it"....or whatever cliched line you can come up with.

IF YOU ARE REALLY LAZY.....

just get a rose , find a prof with a 50 litre tank filled with liquid nitrogen (i know one) , stick the rose in it, and run with it to her.

*yawns* , righto, valentine's day uncliche-ing is hardly turning the cogs in my brain. Think i'll go and play with my Rubik's cube.

Cheers from the,

Matrix

Oh when the Brits come marching in.......

I was never a fan of british cars , the sole exception being this little chap:

1977 Mini Cooper S

Brit cars were in my opinion only for those who were mad enough to want one so badly, they didn't mind burning their children to keep it running.

Old Jags are a pain to live with. They fizz and they buzz , they do move a bit yes, but then they spend most of their time just sitting there , being a rather large and expensive lawn ornament (assuming you do have a lawn after being foreclosed after one too many hefty bills).

The brits used to make cars.....that make u go to sleep. Now i have never driven a car , but when fans of brit cars go , "Its an absolute beaut to look at! The work of an artist!"....you do know the car is slow at least to let people take a good look at it in the first place to begin with.

British cars were in essence for the appreciative. People who could appreciate the craftsmanship , for yes, they are very very beautiful cars:

Rolls Royce Phantom V and the Flying Spur

But they weren't what you'd call space age. I'd pick any one of these for a luxury car any day:

Mercedes Benz 600 Pullman

Forgive me, i do like a lot of toys in cars. The reason i have always been a German and japanese car fan.......until quite recently.

You see, the brits kind of went through a de-maturing and de-conservative phase and quite suddenly, they started making very cool cars indeed:

The new technologically advanced Rolls Royce Phantom

The company is owned by the Germans, and yes, it is in fact a german engine under than bonnet, but as far as i'm concerned, the design is as British as......well.......Buckingham Palace....albeit a Buckingham Palace with a james bond villainsque interior, complete with death rays and thing that go boom and slice you in half when you sneeze.

Jag's new XF

.......its even got the ladies drooling over it

Bentley's Continental GT

...and my personal favourite.....

Aston Martin's DBS

When footballers and rappers leave italian exotics and start buying up bucketloads of Rolls Royces and Bentleys.......

When you no longer hire a chaueffeur to drive your Rolls for you......

When James Bond thinks your cars are cool again to leave those chaps in Germany..........


YOU KNOW YOU'RE ON A ROLL.......

The brits are truly back......



Cheers from the

Matrix