May 2012 - Alvin Ng

Archives For May 2012

Week Of App Purchases And Congrats Jase!

27 May 2012

There was a frenzy of apps sales across various platforms this weekend and my credit card’s getting a pounding paying for them. It seems like developers are discounting their apps across the Memorial Day weekend and I thought I’d share with everyone what apps I’ve indulged myself with.

App Name	Platform	Sale Price
Kingdom Rush HD	iPad iOS	$0.99
Tweetbot	iPad iOS	$2.99
Diet Coda	iPad iOS	$10.49
Coda 2	Mac OS	$51.99
Forklift	Mac OS	$0.99
Infinity Blade 2	Universal iOS	$2.99
Grand Theft Auto 3	Universal iOS	$0.99
Sword of Sorcery	Universal iOS	$2.99
DeathSpank	Mac OS	$2.99
DeathSpank: The Baconing	Mac OS	$2.99
DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue	Mac OS	$2.99

The big purchases were definitely the Coda apps by developer Panic but they were definitely worth the coin for the features. And oh, Tweetbot for the iPad wasn’t actually on sale but I was on such a money spending adrenaline rush that I decided to buy it anyways.

A couple of game developers are also discounting their games on various platforms at www.becausewemay.com till the 1st of June so get them now!

It’s also been a pretty terrible weekend too with my car breaking down and I’ve got to take the trains to work on Monday. Would be interesting because the last time I took the trains were before I moved to Box Hill with my ex in 2010.

Well at least two good piece of news happened in the week.

First was Sonti, Joey and I managed to catch up on Friday night for some FIFA 12 and it seems like Sonti has taken over the FIFA chump status with Joey losing to both of us multiple times. He goes on to complain that there was some sort of “lag” when he presses the buttons on the controller.

The guy is full of excuses really. And he’s pretty shit with directions too. Sonti and I had to guide him on our mobiles and he still had problems finding our office.

The other piece of good news was that Jason finally got married!

Sonti, Joey and I were chomping down our Maccas while playing FIFA 12, Jason was getting married to his beautiful (albeit familiar looking HAHA!) partner Olivia in Bali. I’m really sorry I couldn’t be there but I wish the couple all the best and will we be seeing Little Jase in 9 months?

I’ve got it down on my Google calendar to see if my prediction comes true.

Big Weekend At Facebook

21 May 2012

What a big weekend at Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg. First Facebook was listed on the Nasdaq and the company went public and news broke today that the co-founder of Facebook married his long time girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

Kudos to the guy who becomes one of the youngest billionaire at age 28. All I can say to the guy is…. pre-nuptials mate. Better to be safe than sorry. Haha.

I also finally watched The Social Network on Friday (on the day Facebook went public) and was totally blown away by the performance of Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin. No wonder the movie’s gotten nominated left right and centre at last year’s Academy awards.

With The Social Network’s writer Aaron Sorkin set to pen the scripts for the new Sony Steve Jobs bio-pic and Ashton Kutcher starring in indie movie of Steve Jobs early years (I loved Ashton Kutcher in Spread), it certainly seems like people in the tech and startup worlds are getting more prominent on our big screens.

And I’ve also included what must have been the most epic scene in The Social Network below.

Chelsea Finally Wins The Champions League

20 May 2012

What a season it’s been for football. First the dramas at Manchester for the English title decider and now Chelsea displays a masterclass performance full of grit and never say die attitude to finally hand Roman Abramovich his first Champions League title since taking over the club in 2002.

Bayern Munich was definitely the better team throughout and I was Whatsapping Jeremy and Sonti feverishly discussing about what’s going on in the match and I told Jeremy that for some weird reason, I think Chelsea was going to win. He was gunning for Munich to beat Chelsea so his beloved Spurs could play Champions League football next season.

And when Thomas Muller scored in the 86 minute, it seemed like all was going well for Jeremy’s Spurs and Bayern Munich. Muller was substituted off for defender Van Buyten soon after and it was clear Munich wanted to protected their lead for the last couple of minutes for the match.

By this time, Torres was brought on for Kalou by Chelsea and the 50 million pound striker did well to win a corner for the Blues.

Mata swings the corner in and Drogba powered a header past the flapping Neuer in the 88th minute. Game on!

Torres had been getting much flack since moving from Liverpool last year but his form has been improving in the last couple of months and his most telling contribution to this match was winning Chelsea’s FIRST corner in contrast to Munich’s 15 corners.

All Chelsea needed was for Torres to win their 1st corner in the 88th minute for Drogba to score. 50 mil well spent. #ChampionsLeague

— Alvin Ng(@alvinng) May 19, 2012

It must now seem silly of Bayern coach Jupp Heynckes to take Muller off and when the camera was on Muller looking bewildered at the turn of events, it certainly brought back memories of the 1999 final when Lothar Matthaus was substituted off and having the same look after Manchester United staged one of the greatest comebacks to snatch the title from within Munich’s grasp.

Chelsea didn’t manage quite a similar comeback but with Drogba’s goal, brought the game into extra time and boy was more drama to come.

Early in the first half of extra time, Drogba, hero for Chelsea so far, brought Ribery down in the Chelsea box and Munich was award a penalty. It seem like that was the end of the road for Chelsea but when Cech stepped up to save Robben’s penalty, a sense of self belief swept through the entire Chelsea team.

They held on through the second half of extra time and the match went into penalties.

Ivan Olic and Sebastian Schweinsteiger missed their penalties and Drogba took Chelsea’s last penalty to win the cup for the Blues and send the stadium into raptures.

I’m absolutely delight for Chelsea and even though Bayern Munich played the better football, their inefficiency with their finish definitely cost them the match.

X Factor Auditions Fail

17 May 2012

I accompanied Joey to his X Factor auditions 2 weeks ago and it’s my time spent there that I realised that reality TV is a whole lot of bullshit.

There is so much acting involved it simply blew my mind. Crowds were ordered to gather around to make it look like there were heaps of people auditioning and family and friends back stage were told to “encourage” the contestants before they go on stage for the camera.

Everything was so FAKE.

What pissed me off more was that I arrived at 8.30am at Hisense Arena with Joey and he didn’t get to sing till 4pm. We had to wait close to 8 hours before he went on stage and by then, he was so tired that he didn’t really do justice of his rendition of Train’s Drive By.

Mel B loved him, Nat Bass almost wanted to let him through but Ronan Keating and Guy Sebastian just didn’t look impressed. In the end, it came down to the fact that Joey just wasn’t good enough.

He wasn’t bad though, just not at his best to impress the judges and starting the song on the wrong beat didn’t help either.

Hopefully at the end of it all, he will get some screen time on TV for all our efforts and if not, at least I got to catch up with Joey and I finally got to meet his lovely sister Julie.

Manchester City 1, Manchester United 19

14 May 2012

What a dramatic finish to the 2011/12 English Premier League season. Manchester City score 2 late goals in stoppage time in a dramatic 3-2 win over QPR to win the championship by goal difference over my beloved Manchester United.

Kudos to City for giving us a good fight this season. It continues to amuse me that the rest of the league still struggles to catch up with us even when we haven’t really been doing well this season.

At the very least, I have the consolation of saying that United did as well as Barcelona this season.

Now that this season is done and dusted, we’ll need to look forward at strengthening the squad with a few gangbuster signings and try to wrestle the title back into the red half of Manchester.

No doubt City will be doing the same but we’ve got at least a leg up on them by distracting them with our horrendous new top for next season.

Let the mind games of 2012/13 begin!

Pingie Brotherhood: One Is Getting Hitched

10 May 2012

I worked at Accenture Australia for a year before moving on to become the Chief Timetable Systems Analyst Product Architect (totally not a made up position by the way. #sarcasm) at Monash Uni and it’s fair to say I’ve met some of my best mates during my time at Accenture.

Our friendship was cemented on the 17th floor office space at Melbourne Central Tower close to 6 years ago and even though now that everyone has moved on from our initial dwellings, there seemed to be an unexplainable sense of brotherhood between the four of us.

There’s Joey, the talented Italian and token white guy in a group of Asians. He has won one too many dancing trophies and got shot down by Guy Sebastian at his recent X Factor audition (another post coming up about this).

Jason, the smart Malaysian guy who still calls himself an Aussie PR after living in Melbourne and now Sydney all his life. His favourite past times include sending the group random photos of topless women he found on the internet at the crack of dawn every other morning.

Sonti, the Laotian guy with an Italian girlfriend. I roped Sonti from Accenture a year ago to work at Monash and see him on a daily basis. Our office has became a battleground for our FIFA 12 skills.

And then there’s me. The fobbish sounding Singaporean guy with a knack for coming into work late all the time and acting as if nothing happened.

It’s amazing that even though we only catch up once probably every 1-2 years(except for Sonti and I), we made sure that we stayed in contact literally everyday via Whatsapp, Google chat, Twitter, Facebook and emails discussing about the most frivolous topics ever. In fact, I was trying to find a group picture of four of us and I realized we don’t have one…. #horror.

The best thing we’ve ever done together as a group in my mind was to create a bunch of fictional words to replace body parts so that we could openly discuss about the dirtiest, most perverted things our minds could conjure up and the hot chick sitting next to us would have no idea we were talking about her bingies.

That’s right. Her bingies. That’s the word we use to replace the word “breasts”. In fact these are the most commonly used ones in our conversations:

We Say	It Means	Origin
Mingie	Vagina, chick, hot girl	It came about when there was an episode of South Park featuring Oprah's talking vagina. Her vagina was referred to as Minge in the episode and we indadvertedly changed it to mingie.
Gary	Butt, asshole	Gary was the name of Oprah's asshole in the same South Park episode and was the best and closest (LOL) friend of Minge.
Bingie	Breasts, boobs	We simply replaced the first letter of mingie to change it to bingie using the letter B because it's the first letter for boobs and breasts.
Pingie	Penis, cock, dick	Pretty similar to how bingie derived replacing the first letter of mingie with P because it's the first letter for penis.
Blueberry	Masturbate, fap, spank the monkey	Joey has a strawberry farm at home and there was wild speculation that he masturbates in the strawberry fields because he still lives at home with his parents. We replaced straw with blue to protect his identity and the origin of how this word came about.

We’re so comfortable with these words that we don’t even bat an eyelid when using them in our daily conversations and it amuses me to no end that we’re all men in their late twenties having our own secret language.

Jase is getting married in 2 weeks time and it’s kind of sad that we couldn’t be at his wedding in Bali but I definitely wish Big O and him all the best and hopefully we all get to meet her soon. I love these boys and hopefully we’ll all move into the four Victorian town houses on #TheBlock in South Melbourne and have more shenanigans to come.

Pingie bros!

Magical 3D iPhone With Pop Up Animation?

5 May 2012

In my eyes, Apple’s iPhone 4S is the best mobile phone I have used in my adult life and with Apple refreshing the product every year, it’s hard to imagine what new features Apple will be adding to their flagship mobile device in October this year.

This video was made by an LA-base 3D artist Mike Ko, showing what would happen if Pixar like three dimensional objects were to be projected onto the iPhone screen. The whimsical car zipping around on the streets of a candy coloured city landscape has me drooling thinking about what we can do with the iPhone if technology like this really existed.

Imagine playing Angry Birds on it….

Samsung Unsurprisingly Unveils Galaxy S III With iOS Features

4 May 2012

I wanted to stay up last night for the Samsung Galaxy S III live stream but was too tired and the fact that I had to get into work today meant that I can’t be fucked staying up till 4am for a phone that I was never going to purchase.

What struck me looking at the “new” features of Samsung’s latest flagship mobile phone was how similar (read carbon copy) some of the features to those that present in Apple’s iPhone 4S.

It’s almost like some Samsung executive shoved an iPhone 4S into a designer’s hands and went “Build and design me a phone like this! And replace all the ‘i’ with ‘S’!”

I’m sure they got plenty of practice when they did it the last time.

Last I heard, the South Korean phrase for copycat was “mobang beom” and not “Samsung”.

Early reviews from major tech blogs seem to be luke warm, describing this as an incremental update to the Galaxy S II and didn’t seem to have the wow factor.

Some of it’s features include a voice recognition assistant dubbed S-Voice (Apple: Siri), a new Scan and Match for music on it’s new S-Cloud cloud service (Apple: iTunes Match and iCloud) and AllShare Cast for streaming content to Samsung HDTVs (Apple: AirPlay).

They also unveiled the AllShare Cast dongle, which I’m just going to describe as Samsung’s AppleTV (it even looks like the AppleTV for crying out loud) which you can stream content from your Galaxy S III to any manufacturer’s HDTV.

I’ve always admired Samsung’s products but not in they way they copied Apple in the mobile space and it seems like even after previous accusations of blatant copying, they’re still happy to do it for their new flagship phone.

I’ve got some official press shots from Samsung’s Facebook page and to tell the truth, I’m not impressed but we’ll see when I get to hand one of them in the shops.

Cissé Scores Wonder Goal, City Up Next

4 May 2012

There were lots of action in the footballing world overnight with Real Madrid sealing up it’s title with a 3-0 win over Athletic Bilbao but all headlines seem to point towards the match between Chelsea and Newcastle.

Chelsea had their season revived under Di Matteo, reaching both the FA and Champions League finals, and it seems like their form in the league has started to pick up as well until Newcastle brought them crashing back down to earth again condemning them to a 2-0 defeat.

Newcastle was beaten by relegation fighting Wigan 4-0 last week will aim to regain their recent impressive form to secure a Champions League spot next season. It’s fair to say that have done pretty well against this season’s finalist.

Papa Cissé, a January signing for Newcastle, amazingly scored his 12th and 13th premier league goals against Chelsea to condemn them to a 2-0 defeat. Cissé accomplished this astonishing feat after only arriving at Tyneside 4 months ago and he is starting to be a cult hero among Toon fans with his scoring prowess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW-ckrXBszU

You have no idea how hard is it to find YouTube videos of the first goal because YouTube is FLOODED with uploads of his second goal.

His first goal was definitely reminisce of a Thiery Henry goal scored against Manchester United with Barthez in goal a couple of years back but the quality of Cissé’s strike was definitely worth the 10 million pounds Newcastle paid SC Freiburg for.

Can’t say Liverpool got the same value when they paid Newcastle 35 million pounds for Andy Carroll and his pony tail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne1IKt-N47Q

No words can describe the confidence he had went he sent the ball swerving and dipping past the bewildered Cech for his second goal in the game. Definitely the goal of the season (Suarez who?) for me thus far.

Now all we need is for Newcastle to repeat this performance against Manchester City and we’re gold.