Charting web search trends

Google Labs recently released a new tool called Google Trends, which lists the number of search requests of any keyword divided by cities, world regions and languages... it's nothing really substantial, just fun to play around with. It naturally assumes the search is done in English (hence you don't see South Korea and Japan topping the charts as much as one would expect these vastly connected countries to be ;)

As expected, Singaporeans top the charts when it comes to searching for FOOD!

A surprising statistic is that Singaporeans hunt down more information on their "idols" than even our closest neighbors! :P

Originated from Tomorrow.sg "Trends in loneliness" post.

Cutest. Baby. Photo. Evar.

I just HAD to post this - hands down, THE cutest baby photo right now of 9-month old Eleanor! Courtesy of Karen and Cynthia!

A trip down to Gymboree (a children's clothing and educational toys store, i believe) garnered a good number of photos... but this... this simply deserves extra attention for both the timing and the expression Ellie has on her cherub face! :)

Absolutely Bloody Lovely!

Graduation: Part Deux!

Wah, so fast, time for my sis-in-law, Karen's graduation liao! Oh yes, Karen now holds a undergraduate Bachelor's degree in Art, specializing in Graphic Design. And of course, to celebrate, we have more photos of the graduate and her prrrecious! Eleanor is growing up so fast, and always a happy baby!

Happy Graduation + Happy Birthday (to my bro) + Happy Mother's Day (to my Mom, my Godma and Grandmas and the newest mommy, Karen!) - all on one weekend!!! Click on the mother-daughter photo to see more of the Lim Family's cutie-pie!

Lovely Singapore Skyline Panorama

I believe I saw this link to "15 Best Skylines in the World" from Tomorrow.sg or mrbrown's sometime back... but anyway, it's a nice list of beautiful cityscape panoramas. And oooo lookie! Singapore's listed as 6th best!

Ahhh... yes, the familiar sight of the Benjamin Sheares bridge stretching across the waterfront from East Coast Parkway to Marina South, the Padang offering a nice patch of greenery in the concrete jungle, with the tall super-structures adorning CBD on the right, the futuristic-looking Suntec City with its neighbours Marina Square & Pan Pacific hotel on the left, and right smack in the center... the ever-unique twin Durians.

FIFA World Cup 2006 - Destination : Germany!

I've been in the US for close to 4 years, and I nearly forgot about the very sport that is revered like a religion back home in S'pore... SOCCER (aka Football in S.E.Asia)!!! Oh yes, it's that time again, folks - World Cup fever is about to rock the house and... what's that? Am I already seeing some Soccer Widows/Gals getting their high-heels and clubbing outfits all set for ladies nite out? Mwahahahah...

For the guys, here's a World Cup Soccer babe to tide y'all over - Argentinean model Pamela David:

Yum!

Video mania!!!

Okay, now everyone knows about Google Video and YouTube, but where else do y'all grab your interesting videos from?

Once in a while I'll sneak over to Apple's Quicktime site to catch my monthly dose of trailers (and to re-watch the X-3 trailer - 18 more days to go!!! WOO HOO!!!), and for my PC/video-gaming fix, I simply lurve the hi-res videos featured in the previews and reviews from Kikizo. Kudos to them for the quality stuff!

Loose Change 9/11: 2nd Edition

Conspiracy Theories abound... once again, after watching a 9-11 special on Discovery at a friend's place, this video kept popping back in my mind... I thought everyone deserves a second viewing of it... be warned tho, it's a 1 hr 22 min video. It's narrative-heavy and needs a set of ear/headphones to listen to every detail. I had to watch this twice to catch all the information that was being displayed.

Have fun folks... now, where's my tin-foil hat?

Alternatively, you can check out the direct link for full-screen viewing. And here's the official site.

Hic. Hic. Hic...

<<< Drunk's best friend.

Man, I was so pi$$ed drunk on Sat night, all I remembered was losing a round of cards, downing a glass of Malibu (21%, "tastes like cough mixture", as one of my friends would attest to), answering a phone call from a friend, and... waking up the next morning nursing a train-wreck of a hangover. Felt like someone tossed a couple hundred cluster bombs in my head.

Must've puked my guts out coz I got a bit of bruising on my chest... probably hit myself crawling to the toilet... not exactly the way I wanted to clear my stomach and give my liver a workout. Hee... oh well.

Lemmmmmmmmings!

Awww... this really brings me fond memories of my good old 386/486 machines... Hopefully you guys also have a similar experience as I did with this cute little buggers. Okay, now, admit it... you wanted to see what kinda death sequences there are for them!

Try the online version now: DHTML Lemmings

Engrish Encounters of the Third Kind...

Followed this link (Rahoi) from mr brown's site and almost fell off my chair laughing while reading the article... coming from a menu from a "Chaineeese" restaurant in San Fran (i think), here are some examples of its hilarity... see fur yer self!

CASHEW NOT - So what are we ordering...?

F*CK THE SALT (BEAUTIFUL POLE) DUCK CHIN - I like duck, but this is pushing the envelope of taste...

Wonderful read to perk up a slow mid-week!

Graduation, Class of 2006

March 19th, Circa 2006.

B.S., Mathematics and Physical Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences (the weird thing is that there is no mention of me being a Computer Science student on my degree... haha).

At long last... I have completed another step of my life journey and am now accredited with a Degree from Ohio State Uni... w00t! So now I can start fulfilling my dreams of driving to Las Vegas, sky diving for kicks and try to score a lady's number on my first try! Ahhh yes... big dreams. ^_^

End of the road, bud... so what's next?

Adorable waste of time

An interesting find this week... Japanese game maker "Eyezmaze" has a series of interesting and yet, seemingly pointless, Flash games... it's really cute and I believe that there is a lot more strategy to the games than it appears at first. I'll keep going at it until I figure it out... try all of them now!

U Gotta Believe!!! De La Soul ft. Double

Majorly sweet video... featuring animation from PaRappa da Rapper! 2D fun in a hip-hop video... Check it out!

Birth of an Nuclear Explosion

In a scary/crazy/cool way, these photographs show the amazing shots of an atomic bomb explosion at 1/100,000,000ths of a second from initial ignition.

Edit: The news article has been removed/archived, so I will post the link if i find it again

Plus: Here's a video of the beautiful, billowing death clouds during atomic explosions. Thanks to Google Video for the link.

Digital spring-cleaning

Ever felt that your hard disks are just simply bloated with all kinds of files that you probably don't use, don't read, and really don't bother with after some time? At the same time, you also think your friends deserve a look at them before you toss them into the digital dumpster in the sky... buuuut... the damn file is over 10MB in size - which is, incidentally, the max limit of e-mail sizes in some ISPs, many have lower thresholds!

Ok, so whaddaya gonna do about it? Well, hang on to your horses, deputy, coz a new sheriff's in town! ^_^

Check out this wonderful list of sites you can upload your files to be shared out (either permanently or temporarily) ... the free web space given range from 10MB to 2GB!!! Give it a look and mark your calendars to start do some housekeeping on your PCs soon!

Getting Linux to play nice with wireless USB network cards

As a reminder to self, and to pass along helpful information for any other fellow 'nux n00b who are trying to get their Linux boxes to run nicely with USB Wireless-G adapters, here are some great resources for setting up the WLAN NICs:

• Linux Wireless LAN support database
  
• ndiswrapper, and its installation WIki
  
• Linuxant DriverLoader for NDIS Linux drivers
  

Have fun! Right now, ma Penguin Playpen is running SimplyMEPIS 3.4.2-RC1 on an old generic box: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ w/ CoolerMaster Aero HSF, ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, 2 x 512MB DDR PC3200 SDRAM, IBM ATA66 20GB HDD, Yamaha CDRW, and a SMC EZ Connect 2862W-G 802.11g USB2.0 NIC (connected using ndiswrapper, used iwconfig to setup WEP... will try WPA another day).

P.S. I've tried a Hawking Tech HWU54G v2, Gigafast WF748-CUI (both are running Zydas ZD1211 chipsets, and I'll probably have to try find some time to get the ZD1211 'nux driver compiled and working first) and a Netgear WG111v2 (uses some Conexant chipset... worked with ndiswrapper, but connection was not stable with WEP/WPA security turned on... so I returned it).

Art of Sound

Everyone, it's tiiimmmmme to hit the beat! For anyone who ever aspired to bang on the drums all night, here's one reason why you should not give up on your dreams! There's always Flash! ^o^

This is my first published blog entry using the Performancing FireFox extension! Waaaayyy coool!

Meow Meowwww Hsssss... Woof! Woof!

Ready for some primal violence? SGAnime forum member NCH and his com'padres mold together a nice piece of animation - featuring the never-ending feud between Dog Dog and Meow Meow... Now online! Check it out!

Gong Xi Fa Cai 2006

Chinese New Year has passed by swiftly here in Ohio, but that doesn't mean we Singaporeans are gonna just go down without a fight! Kicking the bad luck from 2005 and welcoming the new wave of prosperity in 2006, the SSA and Friends' CNY dinner celebration was a great success! Not only that, we were fortunate to have a Lion Dance performance on the very night of our dinner! w00t!!!

Anyway click on the image link below to check out our CNY '06 celebration pics!

Osaka Revolution

As any fan of Azumanga Daioh would know, Kasuga Ayumu aka "Osaka-san" is our regular ditsy/day-dreaming character of the anime/manga series. And she happens to be one of my favorite characters in anime (you can easily draw parallels between her and Pheobe from 'Friends' ^_^ ) ... Here is a wonderful psychedelic AMV (Anime Music Video) featuring the song "Waka Laka" from the DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) series by Konami!

Remember kids: Don't stare too hard and ENJOY-JOY-JOY!!! ^o^