Animal Instincts

Never mind the fact that the salesperson didn't warn me that it could change colour. Turn a blind eye to the truth that it had a silvery tail. The fact is I love my new mouse so much so that I wanted to give it a name.




No ordinary mouse

Yes. It is an optical mouse. The red light is due to the LED which provides light under the mouse, helping the camera mounted to sense slight changes in movement. I had been rather bent on changing my old mouse. Besides the rather unsensitive and laggy trackball system ( which I had to clean every week) , the mouse "squeaked" everytime I moved it a little too fast.

If you think it looks nice now, you should see it when it's dark.


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Blogging and MOE doesn't seem to belong to one sentence. But from today onwards, schools will "outblog" one another in an Inter-school Blogging Championship, co-organised by Singtel and MOE. Scrolling down, I tried to look for my secondary school. Nothing. It seemed I had no luck searching for my Junior College either. This will be my entry if I were still a student now.

My Teenage Years: Pet Peeves and Inspirations

Sometimes I wonder what Singapore will be like without the MRT. Popular tabloid Today's newspaper stands will be relocated to bus interchanges , volunteers asking for donations will crowd the shopping centres and instead of TV mobile, buses might have already installed PC mobile with WAP access for every passenger due to a deficit in government spending.

But what annoys me most is not the irritating yapping noise that comes after every "door closing phrase". It is the commuters. Yes. Like all Singaporeans I like to complain and this topic gives me all the freedom I need. I like to see commuters classified basically as three different kinds of people.

First and more irksome of the lot are the gliders. These are the people who mysteriously appear in front of you while you were still admiring the War of the Worlds trailer on the plasma screen. They do it so silently that sometimes you wonder if David Cooperfield himself had taught them the elusive art. When they get in front of you, they pretend to be messaging their friend, powdering their nose or listening to the newest heavy metal rock set to the maximum voulme, which gives you no chance at all to catch their attention, except maybe through gliding infront of them again.

Then there are the Hard Core Ruby players. Once the doors open, it is their cue to push,shove and heave their way to the intended goal- a seat for themselves. I suspect that some had their coats shoulder pads replaced with shoulder protectors.


My seat!!!

So how does one go about dealing with such rogue behaviour. The rule is simple. If you can't beat them, join them.

The third are the trained sleepers. Whenever they see an elderly man stand infront of them, the entire cabin closes their eyes with such syncronised precision you'ld think some terrorist network had slipped some sleeping gas into the air conditioning duct. But then you realise that the poor old man is still very much awake.

Of course my experience onboard the MRT haven't been entirely bad.

I boarded the train at Simei one particular sunny afternoon and was greeted by Jay Chou's Qi Li Xiang on top of a pungent mix of perfume. Immediately I thought SMRT had installed some speakers on their new trains since they were already experimenting with video screen mounted near the route boards. What made it more convincing was that no one on the train gave a hoot. Not the Indians near the windows chatting nor the Caucasian Hikers carrying bags almost as big as me. But as the journey progressed, it became evident that that wasn't the case as annoucements clashed with the Chinese rapper's songs. As the train drew to a stop at Tanah Merah, a ITE student, wearing a lime-green shirt tucked out disembarked with his black slingbag swinging along happily to the tune of Ge Qian.

OK. So that wasn't a particularly good experience but still.

MRTs and Taxis are not the only culprits in infuriating the docile me. Buses too, seem to have gotten on my bad side, I fear. I had a Sikh friend who was complaining to me one day about how unreasonable one particular Bus Driver was.

" I couldn't believe he wanted me to pay for the damage!" he gasped.

"for what ? Don't tell me you go and test the red handle meant for emergency accidents and smashed the glass ah," I asked, bemused.

The story, apparently was that he was happily walking down a pavement,whistling to himself when suddenly, the side mirror of the bus smashed with the back of his head. The mirror, obviously was shattered. His head,though bruised, was still in tact.And so it was that the driver asked for a compensation. He refused. His father subsequently wrote a letter to the LTA and the matter was more or less resolved.

Poor him.

But just before we start shifting the blame to drivers, we examine a common phenomenom in Singapore buses known as OMG-there-are-ghosts-at-the- back-of-the bus syndrome . For some reason, these commuters refuse to move to the back. And there seems to an entire community dedicated to nurturing such inconsiderate behaviour.


but... I'm no ghost...


One can only wonder what goes through their minds.

I stand here closer to the door, easier to go down.

That uncle there like smiling at me le.

I just love looking at the door closing sign.

I help everyone le. If not later very cramped.

My home one stop away only, go all the way back for what?

I can tap my ezlink card earlier so can save money.

I think I stand here, my luck for the manjong game later...

I just love complaining. Yes , I know I have written virtually nothing on inspiration. So inspire me.