1985

Went out with my friends today in what was an informal reunion of sorts for a quarter of 5Sc1 's class of 2002. Things didn't change much. After four years, we were still talking about the same things, supporting the same sports teams and personalities and sharing the same 'stuff'. And that really got me wondering: what have some other people our age accomplished?

Cristiano Ronaldo
Footballer, Portugal International
DOB: 5/2/1985

Wayne Rooney
Footballer, England International
DOB: 24/10/1985

Nico Rosberg
F1 Driver
DOB: 27/6/1985

Keira Knightley
Academy Award Nominated Actress
DOB: 26/3/1985

My friends and me? Well two of them are in MMU, another guy and me are at Unimas, two stayed back to retake their STPMs and there's one guy each at APIIT, UM, USM, UTM and UMS. Wanna compare? The thought of it makes me grin broadly!

The New World

Before watching this movie, there were two things that I knew for a fact:

1. I'm not a fan of Colin Farrell.
2. I didn't like 'The Thin Red Line', the only other Terrence Malick movie I've ever watched.

But I decided to be optimistic and watch it anyway because reviews say its an 'artsy' sorta movie and I'm a sucker for historical epics. Even more so if it involves some element of romance in it (think: The English Patient).

The movie starts off well enough. It's 1607, the English arrive, and the natives (called 'naturals' here) crowd around to see the huge ships sailing up to what would later be known as Jamestown. Enter Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell with shaggy hair), who was to be executed for mutiny but later saved by a sealed order from the Virginia Company which stated he was to hold some position within the new colony. On a mission to save the colony from starvation, Capt Smith was captured by the natives but his life was saved by a native princess (whose name was never mentioned in the movie but is later seen in the credits as 'Pocahontas') . I actually enjoyed this part of the movie. It was cool to see Capt Smith clad in knight-like armor fending off attacks from the natives before finally being captured. An added bonus is seeing Colin Farrell getting his @$$ kicked even with all that heavy armor. But the execution/saving part was even better. In fact, it almost has a certain romanticism to it. To quote from the movie, "At the moment I was to die, she threw herself upon me,"

Ahh, a princess saving a knight (stripped of his shining armor) from execution. How romantic could that get?

But IMHO everything went downhill after that. The slow, panning shots of nature and the princess and Capt Smith slowly getting intimate got pretty tiring by the end of the first hour or so (keeping in mind this movie lasts 2+ hours) and I was starting to wish for more action. What I got instead was more slowness...the movie seems to drag on after that. Until Captain Smith left and the princess was told he was dead. Enter Christian Bale as John Rolfe, who immediately fell in love with the princess and married her. The last part of the movie dealt with the Rolfes as they journeyed back to England and it was there that the princess (named Rebecca by now) learnt that Capt Smith wasn't dead and met him. The movie ended satisfyingly for me at least, as we discovered that although Rebecca probably still loved Capt Smith, she decided not to abandon her husband.

Overall though I'd give this movie a 6.5/10, thanks to Christian Bale (who was also great in Batman Begins and the earlier 1980s Spielberg flick Empire of the Sun) and Q'orianka Kilcher, who isn't really what I would call a stunning beauty, but the movie nevertheless managed to make her appear beautiful.

Best line:
John Rolfe (Christian Bale): "I think you still love the man. In my vanity, I thought I could make you love me and one can not do that or should not,"

Certainly food for thought, eh?

I admit, I didn't really like the movie but to put this really bluntly, the underdog still gets the girl, and that was enough for me. My thoughts at the end:

1. I still don't like Colin Farrell
2. The New World suffers from the exact same thing that made me dislike The Thin Red Line.

Well whaddya know? I believe I just wrote my first movie critic!

Waht der hech??

First day back in Taiping and already I'm missing Singapore's fast and reliable broadband internet connection. Can't they do anything right here in Malaysia? My email (especially my email!) and soccernet.com are important to me and right now, I can't even access them. Darn. No wonder folks are all in awe of our neighbours down south. Buck up TMNet. As it stands, people are calling you TMNut.

Spotting, Changi International, 19 May 2006 - Part 2

Lion Air 734 on pushback

CX flying pencil. If only I had a better zoom range

SQ's A345. My fave in their entire fleet

EK's 773(?). This was the only shot I have of an EK plane that day. There was another chance at the beach, but I fumbled with my camera and missed it...

Vietnam Airlines A321 nose shot

FedEx A310

China Airlines 734 after pushback

Views from Changi beach. The variety here is amazing! AirAsia Thai's 734

SQ's 772

Yangtze River's 737. Dunno wat model though

Air India's A310

KLM's 744

A change of view later on. JetStar Asia's A320

China Airlines' A333

Thai Airways' A300

Spotting, Changi International, 19 May 2006 - Part 1

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Changi, do as the spotters do! After completing the interview, I wanted to spot at Changi International and decided to walk there. Big mistake. Took me an hour and fifteen minutes, all because I wanted to save on some taxi fare (which would have cost me a mere S$5 anyway). And you thought Singaporeans were kiasu, huh? All was not lost however. On my long trek to Changi's Terminal 1, I chanced upon this:


Unclear on the big picture? Try this then:


Better? Thought so. That's an aircraft crossing, right over a busy freeway. Shame about the trees though.

And to make things even better, there was a pedestrian crossing not too far away from the aircraft crossing where you can get clear views of this:







This time though it was shame about the lightposts. But anyway, after finally getting to Terminal 1 and downing a bottle of isotonic drink, here are the views from the obervation lounge:

FedEx MD-11 in the distance

The tailplane of JetStar Asia's A320

The midsection of the same plane

The whole plane after pushback. Took this after heading to and back from Terminal 2 on the skytrain. The observation mall there is horrible, ala Kuching International's.

Nose shot, specially for Tharan who requested it. But this isn't the only one!

JetStar A320 rear shot

China Airlines' 738 arrives

The money shot: VN's A321. Could've sworn I saw a B757 at first!

Do you prefer the old livery?

Or the new one?


Loads of pics coming soon...

Godspeed, Weiyang

Have you ever had those "What the hell am I doing here?" moments? I've just had one. It's 10.05pm now and my SIA interview is slightly over 12 hours away. I'm done reading up everything from interview tips to the specs of every type of aircraft in SIA's fleet but my performance during tomorrow's interview isn't what I'm really worried about. What's nagging me is this feeling that I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing. I mean, it would be easy to just dismiss it since it's just a first interview and there's no guarantee of anything, given SIA's high standards of selection. But somehow I keep questioning myself: if you know there's such a slim chance of you even getting in, why apply? Why not complete your degree and apply in four years? Why the impatience?

When I arrived here on Tuesday, my relatives gave me that skeptical look when I told them I was here for an interview to become a pilot. That same skeptical look when I told them I wanted to join the military academy almost four years ago. The skeptical look that seemed to say, "Not again! Why are you always trying to escape what you're destined to be??". And my cousin asked me a really good question yesterday: what are you going to do if you get through the selection process? Honestly, I have no idea. I'm going into this expecting nothing but failure so if I succeed and any requests for a deferment of training is rejected, what do I do then? Damn...maybe I'm worrying about it too early.

I just don't know what to think now. I'm hoping this won't end up as yet another of my failed attempts to escape reality. Then again, its an inescapable conclusion considering the fact that I'm expecting to fail, isn't it? Paradoxes, paradoxes...I'm gonna wish myself good luck and go to bed.

Additions to the Current Favorites list

A couple of great songs I discovered recently:

James Blunt - Tears and Rain. Classic James Blunt. Highly recommended.

Bethany Joy Lenz & Tyler Hilton - When the Stars Go Blue. First heard this song on One Tree Hill. Didn't like it then, maybe because I'm not really a fan of Bethany Joy Lenz and I feel like hitting Tyler Hilton on the head with a baseball bat everytime he appears on screen. But thanks to Tharan who asked me to download this song for him, it's now stuck in my head after listening to it a few times.

Going to Singapore

The title says it all! Bus leaves in 2 hours.

Farewell to an Old Friend

For the umpteenth time this week I had been browsing airliners.net when I read something really shocking. Well it was shocking to me anyway, and it concerned the retirement of an old buddy from my childhood days - The F-14 Tomcat. Back then, she and her navy fighter pilots were my heroes, appearing on numerous TV shows (Supercarrier comes to mind) and magazines. I really thought I could fly her one day when I grew up and became a fighter pilot myself. There were days when as a kid of just 7 or 8, I would lull myself to sleep imagining how much fun it would be catapulting off a carrier over the sea and into the blue sky, safe in the cockpit of my beloved Tomcat. Alas, how differently things had turned out to be...

But if there was one thing that remained the same throughout, it was the F-14. She was and still remained to me everything a fighter jet should be: huge, powerful and armed with the best weapons there were. So here's to the Tomcat, the plane I 'flew' as a kid.

Drink Black Coffee and You Can See UFOs

If you've ever wondered why my blog is so named, the following news report from NST might give you a clue:

Was Penang visited by aliens on Tuesday?

Could the object in the picture be an Unidentified Flying Object? These are among the questions raised after the object was captured on film by a guest at the Paradise Sandy Beach Resort in Tanjung Bungah on Tuesday.

The Australian tourist was photographing the sunrise around 8am from the balcony of his hotel room when he caught the object on film.

The tourist, who wished to remain anonymous, only realised the presence of the object a day later, when he was checking out.

Hotel public relations officer Virginia Scully said the tourist left a copy of the photograph with the hotel before leaving for Australia.

"He asked if we had seen such sightings from the hotel," Scully said at the hotel yesterday.

Oh, and this pic accompanied the report too:

That's right folks. Drink more black coffee! :)

Trip Pictorial

As promised earlier, here's the rest of the pictures:

Government Jet. VIP in town, perhaps?

Some choppers and light aircraft. Isn't the chopper in the middle the one that sliced through someone's head a while back?

Shot of the tail

An almost complete shot of the entire aircraft. Shame about the reflection though.

The beautiful wing of the A332

You can even see the F/O! Shame about the reflection again.

The following five pics have been resized to 1200x900 pixels so you can see the details on the various parts of the plane.

Full load meant I didn't get a window seat :(

Empty cabin view after the flight

Night scene of KLIA from the viewing gallery

Taxiing to the runway. Note the landing light on the flap fairing is turned on. Not sure if this is standard procedure or due to bad weather.

A shaky takeoff with plenty of turbulence (yay!) meant shaky pictures. You can clearly see the lights from the wings bouncing off the water and clouds.
After clearing the stormclouds

Empty 737 cabin after the flight

And finally, the remaining shots that Delwin took of my departure