Archives For alvin

Jess and I headed off to Brickvention 2013 at the Royal Exhibition Centre on Saturday. It was a two day event that brings together LEGO fans of all ages from all over Australia to view original and unusual creations built by Australian modelers and collectors so I thought it could be a fun day out.

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Cosplay Australia was out in full force collecting donations for Autism Victoria. I’m guessing these are characters from the Star Wars series? I have no idea but they do look freaky with their glowing eyes.

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After we finished up with Brickvention, Jess and I went on a little adventure to purchase her new Macbook Pro. We were suppose to get it from the Elizabeth Street store in the city but it turned out they didn’t have any stock even though the website indicated that they did.

Wasted trip into the city. Sigh.

We had to make a detour and drove to the JB Hi-Fi on Rosamond Road in Maribyrnong and I have to say, Ush, employee that attended to us, was the friendliest JB Hi-Fi employee that Jess and I had ever met. He wasn’t one of those bearded, dark rim glasses wearing, sleeve tattoo sporting hipster dude or emo chick.

Just a down to earth guy who made sure that we where happy with our purchase and answered any questions we had with enthusiasm unlike anyone we have encountered before at JB Hi-Fi. He even showed a photo of his 14 month old daughter to us and encourage Jess and I to quickly have kids because it was the best thing ever.

The family advice thing was a tad weird but it just made Jess and I laughed more than anything really.

I have to say Ush really made my trip to the Rosamond Road JB Hi-Fi a really pleasant one and I would probably go back to the same store if I need anything else next time.

We then headed off to Craigieburn and invited ourselves to Cheryl’s home for a nasi lemak dinner. They just bought new outdoor dining tables and chairs and the weather was good so we were fortunate enough to have dinner outdoors.

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Cheryl is a great cook and everyone was just wanting to get stuck in as soon as possible. Seemed like Clayton couldn’t hold back anymore. Haha!

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Jess took this shot of Clayton and it was my favourite one for the day. Definitely shows why she’s the pro and I’m the amateur. Cheryl hated Clayton’s new hair cut but I thought he still looked cute doesn’t he!?

20130119 Dinner at Cheryl's Outdoor Area 19 Jan 2013-12 20130119 Dinner at Cheryl's Outdoor Area 19 Jan 2013-14Obligatory group shot for Instagram and it seemed like Ashley was too shy to reveal her face! I have to thank Cheryl and Shiping again for having us over for dinner and the coffee from your new coffee machine is AWESOME. I’m going to be around a whole lot more. HAHA!

Happy Birthday Jess!

24 December 2012

As you all can tell before, I’m not really a HUGE birthday person. Two weeks ago, it was Jess’ turn to celebrate her birthday. I wasn’t going to throw her a huge super hero themed party (what she had last year) but I wanted to do something special for her before she flew off to New Zealand for the Christmas holidays.

We had dinner at Fiorelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Camberwell. Nothing fancy, just good food in a good restaurant (Thanks Yelp!).

I’ve been telling Jess the whole night that I hadn’t bought her a birthday present just to see if she gets upset and I think she really did and was telling me to stop being mean! I did get a her an Elsa Peretti open heart pendant and necklace and she really loved it! That’s good news because I’m terrible with presents! I’m safe for another year. Haha.

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The necklace and dinner wasn’t the only surprises I had up my sleeve though. I had Cupcake Central made some custom cupcakes with the letters placed on them to read “Happy Bday Jess” and had the waitress bring them out after dinner.

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The sparkler was a really nice touch and I think Jess was happier to see the sparkler than the cupcakes.

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The lovely message that the cupcakes read out. The way pretty awesome tasting cupcakes by the way. If anyone is reading this, you should really check out Cupcake Central in Melbourne.

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photo7The night ended with us stuffed full of Italian food and cupcakes with huge grins on our faces. I thought Jess wasn’t going to enjoy dinner because she was so stressed out about getting things organzied before she flies off to New Zealand but it turns out, it was a good idea to get away from the house for a bit and not worry about anything for 2 hours.

I’m just glad I could spend some time with her before I lose her for a month.

Happy Birthday babe!

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 SayIt MeansOrigin
MingieVagina, chick, hot girlIt 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.
GaryButt, assholeGary was the name of Oprah's asshole in the same South Park episode and was the best and closest (LOL) friend of Minge.
BingieBreasts, boobsWe 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.
PingiePenis, cock, dickPretty similar to how bingie derived replacing the first letter of mingie with P because it's the first letter for penis.
BlueberryMasturbate, fap, spank the monkeyJoey 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!

 

Yes I know, we’ve all heard this one before – I’m starting another blog. After the train wreck that were my previous attempts at blogging, I’m starting this one, afresh, a clean slate and hoping would last more than a couple of weeks.

I’ve been sorting my digital photos over the past weekend and looking at my old photos made me realized that photos I took (or of myself) are the only medium that would prove that I ever existed. It brought back so many memories, both good and bad.

This prompted me to ask myself, if photos could invoke those emotions in me, why am I not recording my life in words? I’ve always fancied myself as a writer. I’ll leave Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for bite size tidbits of my life and this blog would be a would be an avenue for thoughts and musings about the internet, technology, photography, football, family and whatever pops into my head.

It doesn’t matter if no one reads this because I’m doing it more for myself than anyone else.

Trust me Alvin, this time I will not disappoint.