Think : Imitation is the best form of flattery.

Photo credit to Mr.Snots. Summer night in Sweden.

When I first heard of this phrase,"Your eyes are the windows to your soul", I seriously think that who ever came up with that was totally delusional. I can never tell whether people are being sincere or lying to my face just by looking at their eyes. The only thing that I would probably notice about their eyes is how captivating it can be.

You also can't obviously think of me as a very nice, warm loving person just by looking at my eyes, or that I do charity, and feed the homeless or carry grocery bags for old aunties. Right? But of course none of these are true. I am quite selfish and a bit self-centred at times. Then again, if you have been living your life alone for so long, why would you want to care or bother of what's going on with other people.

Talking about other people, there are countless type of people out there with different needs and views on life. You might have encountered some few annoying ones, good ones, or sometimes the ones you would love to emulate or imitate in life.

On that note, I once dressed up with a cap pull backwards, baggy jeans with an awesome soldier belt (because they had this camouflage print) and also my oversized t-shirt because I thought it was cool to be like TLC, especially T-Boz and Left-Eye. LOL. I also had multicoloured handyplast plastered on my face and on my hand because it was deemed up-to-date.

There's this time when I basically had NKOTB posters on my bedroom wall and was dancing to Linear's saving all my love.. saving all my love to you...., I cut my hair short and put on so much of hair gel and hair spray, I had caused the thinning of the ozone, above the path I had walked on. It was even cool to be a boy for a girl like me. Lucky I didn't end up being a lesbian. (not that I have anything against them, I'm just saying you know). I even put on a choreographed performance (each of us was in character, I think I was Jordan Knight haha) with my "gang" in school during the Teacher's day and boy, they were so lame, they really loved it. We were freaking lame as well, because we wore torn jeans and a black leather jacket. LOL.

Then I came to know a bunch of skateboarders and listened to RHCP, Ugly Kid Joe and etc. Now I remember that we were divided into 2 groups of skaters back then; those who listened to rap/hip hop music. This group was further classified into 2 subgroups - east side and west side. How freaking ghetto is that? We had Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G wannabes. The other group, the rest of the brat pack, those (like me) who listened to rock/alternative rock songs that were on the rise back then. We donned the skinny jeans, t-shirts and the hi-tops shoes.LOL. This fashion has made a comeback, and now we have a bunch of teenagers with this fashion sense who associates themselves with all things Indie.

Growing up, one transformation after another took centre stage in my life, every time I discovered something new that I can totally relate to, or something I think I would want to become, or ought to be.

Luckily for me, at the end of my journey in search for so-called self identity (somewhere when I was 15), I reverted to my all time favourite; jeans, t-shirt and anything that I feel like wearing without putting any constraints on me - my comfortable self.

Since that point of time, I never had any urge to follow any trend, be it music, fashion, accessories and others.

These external changes influenced my image, my song choices, friends I mingled with, but deep inside I always feel the same. All I ever cared about was finishing up school so that I don't have to wake up way too early in the morning, my sports activities and try not to get on the parents' nerves because, this you guys have to agree with me, when they were much younger they were really mean and roarrr arrgghh *shows claws*, merciless towards us.

But life was so much awesome nonetheless.

Tweak : Fixing the Firefox.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Firefox internet browser. I know it is one of the safest if not THE SAFEST, most convenient, well organised and all the features that would make a geeky worm goes gaga over it. Well, I am one of those unimpressed geek.

The only issue I'm having an emotional flip-flop with Firefox is the Add-On/Plug-ins feature. Why? Because it is always being automatically downloaded and once it is installed, it always search for updates. I don't need all those extra features because I prefer the native add-on free browser. Disabling it won't exactly put my mind at ease.

Although I always refuse any sort of additional downloads, sometimes I do overlook certain updates. Especially when it comes with a DEFAULT configuration.

The CULPRIT is Ask.com Toolbar. I hate it with passion! And for the past few days, it has been giving me hell.

One thing I need to remind the fans of Firefox is, when you remove your Ask.Com Toolbar, just make sure that you perform this step.

--> Go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components and remove the AskSearch.js file in that folder.

Because although you think by performing uninstall task and everything will magically goes away, in reality, sometimes it doesn't really completely remove all the components of the add-on/plug-ins, and these "containers" that were left behind will cause your browser to go haywire.

Example:
You will get this every time you enter any URL on the address bar. The browser freezes for few seconds and will later produce this error message. What triggers this? It is the damn AskToolbar (I would rather refer to it as Ass TooBAD). It leaves behind the file I mentioned above, and still the browser will try to call it. Stupid or what?


All you need to do is just to remove the AskSearh.js and things will go back to normal. Trust me. It is still a pain in the ass, but it is a curable pain.

One more issue.

If you are a fanatic internet user; say, you use internet 24 hours a day and browse almost all the available pages in the virtual world; you might want to, once in a while clear your cache and browser history. That what we were told to do right? and by doing that we would think that it will be gone, deleted, vanished, cleared, thrash-binned, and whatnot.

Wrong.

You need to perform this instead.

1. Go to your Start Menu, navigate to Run and enter this %appdata%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/.

2. You will then be diverted to your mozilla profile folder (oddly titled with an extension .default) that housed all your configurations; like bookmark, historical data and so on and so forth.

3. Open that folder, search for this file, places.sqlite . This file contains all your browsing history for as long as you have been using your Firefox browser. The size won't become smaller just because you constantly clear your history.

4. Rename this file place.sqlite.bak or you can delete it if you want (but I would recommend you to rename it, it is always a good practice to do backup). Because this step will force the Firefox to create a new file and will give you less headache every time you want to type in a URL and the browser would "SLOWLY" trying to search for the recommended site for you, based on your browsing history.

There you go. Hopefully it is all clear now. Even the greatest and the awesome-st browser is flawed.

Think : Somber and Suicidal.

Photo: Standing still.

I received an email this morning from Mr.Snots asking me why the tone of my writings is somber and suicidal lately.

I said that I didn't realise it at all. Then I came back to this blog, browsed through the archive and I finally see that I do sound a bit suicidal. I noticed that my choice of songs have changed dramatically as well. Keith Urban, Eagles, Joshua Radin and Paolo Nutini is on top of the playlist now compared to Stone Sour, Kiss, Kinks, Papa Roach, Three Days Grace and Nine Inch Nails a couple of weeks ago.

So here I am, updating this blog with a hope that as I compose this entry, I might discover what had influenced this transformation in me.

Before this post is published, I have taken a couple of breaks in between, to analyse what's going on. Few things that I understand now, and most important one is the fact that what I write is a reflection of my emotion in that frame of time.

Emotionally, I have been a bit under the weather lately. I don't know how to elaborate on it, but I know that I do feel empty. It felt like - I could have done more with my life and maybe the outcome will be different. You know? I don't feel happy or maybe because am PMSing. But not to forget the fact that PMSing actually emphasize the state that you are in. Things that you think is petty, no longer seems to be small and irrelevant. Things always get blown out of proportion, just like all these stupid chaotic hormones.

Well, let see if after I've done with this rollercoster ride of hormonal chaos, I will be able to atleast not sound so suicidal. For the mean time, bear with me.

Sew Myself Shut.

Photo: Enjoying the sun.

Photo: A nice lady feeding the lil birds on a bright sunny autumn day.

I have a tendency to keep everything to myself. Something that should be out in the open, sometimes is left unspoken until it is forgotten. I have an attention span of a 5 year old, and a memory of a flushed-down-the-toilet goldfish. Things that have been forgotten will not be recalled or remembered until it is triggered by some tragic incident. Most of the time, none of it will ever be remembered at all.

I don't blame it on the ageing factor, or for having too much of interesting things to remember. My incapacity of remembering anything started since I was very small and my life ain't that interesting. I think it is somewhat due to the fact that, I am able to block any undesirable experience at the blink of an eye and can easily pretend like nothing ever happened. So, for having to process so many "hide" function for the past 31 years of my life, my brain can't differentiate between manual intervention and auto clean-up anymore. It basically disconnect everything that seems insignificant.

I have a lot of things that I have been meaning to say to a couple of people about a couple of stuff, but somehow I feel like there's an invisible hand holding me back from pouring my heart out. One shitty fact about me is, I can never find the best or suitable word to describe any of my resentments, sentiments and predicaments. I'm easily misunderstood. *sigh*. So I rather keep my mouth shut than to say something totally out of context or or could bring any sort of confusion towards other people.

Bitter truth.

I have always been in a relationship. I've started my journey very young and every time I fell out of it, I picked myself up, and believe that my Mr.Right is somewhere out there. Although sometimes Mr.Right ended up being Mr.Right Now, but as they cleverly put it, it isn't so much about the destination, but the journey towards reaching it.

I had my first boyfriend when I was just 10. We were in the same circle of friends and both of us played hockey for our school. Funny to think about it now, because having a boyfriend back then was just a school girl's way of making a statement and something to brag about. He didn't serves much function/purpose in my life and vice versa. Nevertheless, I had one at the mere age of 10.

I moved on to another boy a year after, to another one not long after, and the other one right after, until I met (who I thought back then) the ONE. Since both of us were in a different situation and under some circumstances (being a bit older and whatnot) it lasted for 12 years. The breakup shattered my heart in gazillion pieces and at that point, I never thought that I would be able to make it whole again.

Then I met Mr.Snots. It has been two years, and we are still together.

The recap of my journey in search of unconditional love is not because I want to portray or make anyone think of myself as someone who can easily get a man. What I want to uncover is the side of me that I think hasn't changed since I started this journey, 21 years ago.

I have always wanted the same thing. A partner who wants to be with me as much as I want to be with him.

Some people had it easy - fall in love, get married, build family and fall prefectly (or unperfectly but still) into the sequence of events that usually follow suit. Unfortunately, am not one of those people. I don't know how to take my relationship to the next level. Most of the relationship resolutions will dissolves itself without any further action from me.

I'm actually scared to bring up anything about "marriage". Although it had been conveyed every once in a while, but I was more scared than excited when talking about it. I think I was afraid that I have to face the possibility and the probability of it not happening, and I think I still am.

You see, it is not that I want to get married tomorrow but this thing will always be at the back of my head. It will be nice if I could talk comfortably about it.

The only thing that I can tell my mom is that I'm not thinking about it, every time she asks me about my future/relationship. The truth is, I lied.

Work from Home(town).

I love this picture. It was taken by a friend of mine, candidly. Didn't notice the love symbol carved on the wooden door before the photo was captured. It turned out great though. I was sitting because was too tired from too much of walking LOL.

I'm planning to go back to my hometown this weekend. Since it has been a long time since I last went back, I applied for another 3 days of leave next week so that I can extend my stay a bit longer. I will be packing my work stuff with me because although the idea of spending time with my parents and aunties, doing nothing ;except for endless talking and eating; is my top priority, but *sigh* work is work and deadline is just a bitch. I'm still struggling to finish reading all the SIRIM standards to come up with a report. That book is like a sleeping pill, every time I open it, I fell asleep.

So my mom asked me yesterday, is Mr.Snots tagging along this time around? Much to her dismay, I said no. I know that she's probably wondering why on earth that, I've been with this dude for 2 years but everyone in the family (except for my brother who is living with me) only met him once. I don't know how to explain this to everyone. The situation is a bit different with this one because every time we make an arrangement to go back home to meet the parents, that usually means that we meet our OWN parents at our OWN hometown, separately.LOL.

I always believe in this perception about doing things (certain things pertaining family) separately. If you are involved in a committed relatioship; married or unmarried; you can and should be able to still spend time with your family without your other half. There's no such thing as - if I go back to my parents' you must come as well or else - kinda arrangement. You don't have to follow me every where I go.

Also, the problem about being single for too long is, you have somewhat developed these routine "activities" that you do together with your family every time you (in this case, it is totally me) go back home. Like I would want to take my mom and auntie out shopping, and take her anywhere she wants to go. I also think that they would be more comfortable talking to me about "family" issues alone, without my bf nearby. But of course, there's always time allocated for family, time for relationship and most importantly for both, probably at the same time , next time.LOL. Just need to make a bit of arrangement every now and then, so that everything is well balanced and everyone is happy.

Krabi Trip 2010 : Pictorial Edition.

We promise each other that we would spend time away every year together. I'm talking about my girlfriends here. Last year we made it to Bali, and for this year's trip - Krabi, Thailand. Did nothing much but lazing around, talked, shopped, read books, and whatnots. Good times!

I'm still pretty much obsessed with white fluffy clouds I guess.

What is it about these girls that I love so much anyway? We don't actually have anything in common except for enjoying each other's company. Each of us came from different background yet when we sit and talk, we can REALLY talk. I don't know, everytime I spend time with them, it feels as if am free of my worries. I can always count on them to be around everytime I give out a distress sms/email/call.

Sunset in Ao Nang beach.

We share stories about love, life, expectations and the lack of it, ambitions and everything under the sky. I have no idea why is it that everytime we meet each other, there's some kind of a magnet that attracted/extracted stories out of my chest/brain or something. I.must.tell.them.what.has.been.going.on.lately. or else I would curled up and die. Seriously.

The girls.

But that's the thing, I have other girlfriends but I don't have that urge to tell them anything. These four (it's five actually but one of them would only available whenever she wants to meet us; hehe - but we love her nonetheless) silly girls (or otherwise known as The Cacklers) would always have a special place in my heart.

The beach.

Thanks for the friendship and am looking forward to our next outing. Probably tomorrow, yes?

The books.

I lost a bet to them. Now I must muster enough courage to eat the most disgustingly foul -smelling (in my own book of course, I don't speak for others) Durian because the two seemingly cowards "I-am-afraid-of-riding-a-boat" had managed to spend two hours travelling from Krabi to Phi Phi. Blearrghhhh!!

I.must.not.give.in!!! BRING IT ON!