End of Break

My break is coming to an end it’s the last day !!! aaarrrrggghhhhh !!! back to work tomorrow, so what has been going on you ask. Finally took some time to do some of the things I wanted to do like cleaning the house.

In the end I managed to clear up, catalogue, sort and pack most of my comics and that came to 33 comic boxes and that still was not enough looks like I need a few more to group everything together. I did my stamp collection which has been neglected for years finally found all those unwashed stamps and did some washing but not all of it. Still trying to sort and clear up my trading card collection from the Star Wars days to the recent World of Warcraft TCG games. Guess it’s time to throw some of it out. Did part of my Lego collection I still have 2 big Lego models to built I started on my AT-AT and no time to finish it yet. Can’t wait to complete them and take some photos of them. With all that packing there was no time for me to even relax at home and watch a DVD (although I did go out to catch 3 movies) and my poor XBox games will have to wait for the time being. One other thing I did was to get some unwanted electronic stuff and headed off down to the Cash Converters and let them have it all since I am not using them and they are just taking up loads of space in the house. So there that’s how I spent 10 days at home, basically moving things around ha ha ..

Dental Checkup

Made an appointment with a Dental clinic on Thursday. It’s a new Dental Clinic that I am going to since it is just more conveniently located near the house. Had to wait for half an hour as the dentist had another patient and that made me all the more nervous since I’m not a great fan of Dental visits. Finally got to my turn after the initial check found there is a hole that needs to be patched and the usual clean and polishing needs to be done as well. All in $140 was the damage, seems to be getting more and more expensive these days. Ah well guess will be seeing the dentist in 6 mths time again for the checkup. But maybe I’ll see him in a year from now :)

Trans 2

Caught the new Transformers 2 yesterday, not a bad movie, I still love the sound effect when they transform, that’s still real cool. Wonder if they will top the ‘transforming’ DVD when it gets released later. Might just buy it then. I just say the Fanboys DVD out in the shops today, likely will be getting that as well as a few other movies which I missed. Although I think I’ve seem quite a number of movies this year already but still missed out on some.

New Fridge

Me and the missus went Fridge hunting yesterday, finally got us a new fridge from Fisher and Pykel, it had a 4 tick energy rating. It was a little bit more expensive but the energy consumption should help in the longer term. It’s bigger than our current fridge and should fit the families needs better anyways that fridge we had was over 9 or 10 years old and it was time for a change.

EOS 450D

This is my latest ‘toy’ I got about a month a go the Cannon 450D DSLR camera.

It’s a great little light weight camera, well it serves my purpose anyways. It has a 12.2 megapixel CMOS sensor, 3” LCD monitor, live view, auto-cleaning and a few other capabilities which I’ll not go into as it’s probably going to take up too much time then.

Anyways I’ve tried it out on a few occasions now and it works great so far, will be looking to upgrade to get a zoom lens. I went for the basic training which cannon gives to all users of their products, an interesting session, the guy who explain things made it sound pretty interesting that you just want to go out and get all the other accessories.

 

I got my dad’s old dry box for the time being since he uses an electrical dry box now. maybe after I get a few other lens then I will think of getting a electrical dry box.

The Last Day

It was the last day at my current job, the week passed pretty fast, had all the farewell lunches and coffee breaks, gifts and well wishes from everyone. A little sad but have to move on. Well it’s also a break for me before I start my new job. Time to rest and clear up the house I guess.

Modem Down

What a start to the weekend. Friday night and I could not get a connection to the internet. What was happening I wondered. It worked the day before. I checked the modem and found that the power was showing a ‘red’ light and nothing else was activated. I was on the Mio Group which basically means my home phone line was not active as well. That’s a bummer, no internet and no fixed phone line.

Called the helpdesk, and they do have a 24hr helpdesk I think as it was almost nearing midnight, was informed by the operator to call the Mio Tech Support and I was given a number which somehow did not work as every time I enter my home phone number and the # key it tells me I over exceeded the number of keys and cuts me off. Getting a little frustrated here so I called back the helpdesk this time I got an operator who tried to help and said that it was likely a hardware fault and will need a change. I was put on hold while she checked the time for the appointment. When she came back on, I was told the earliest was Tuesday !! Now that seemed ridiculous so after stated my point that it was ridiculous to wait so long with no internet and worst still no fixed phone line. She said finally that as the technical support vendors are closed for the day they will call me back tomorrow around 8 to 9am to confirm.

Well 9am the next day came and no calls, so I called the helpline again and at least they were aware of my case, well at least the lady the night before did her part to input the urgency of the situation. The gentleman I got said that his supervisor will get in touch with me and check on the next available vendor to help me out by 9.30am.

10am came and no call so I called back again and this time the gentleman on the line told me to wait a while longer while they sort out who to get in touch with me, seems they have not pinpoint which vendor yet. So I go on and rant to the guy about the service level and the need for the line to be fixed ASAP. Just as I got off the line with him the supervisor called me back. Managed to get someone to attend to my case and 2pm was the time given. I was ok with that as long as it was today. Went out for early lunch at 1pm and lo and behold the Technical Support calls and ask if he could come over now. Told him I was having lunch and to come back at 2pm.

He came at the appointed time and swap out my Mio box for a new set. A nice guy found out he was not one of the outsourced vendors but the company staff itself since the vendors were overwhelmed it seems.

Anyways to end it all everything was back to normal after 24hrs of unavailability. Just hope this new set will last longer than 2 yrs.

GSS 09

The Great Singapore Sale is on us again. The one thing different this year is that since you leave your email at various malls during the other promotions that they now sent you email messages on what’s on. It gets a little overwhleming when every mall starts sending you stuff .

Room at the Regis

We stayed at St. Regis recently, it was a 6 star hotel, and we really got good treatment there. It was just a nights stay which came with breakfast and a butler service for you. Well of course we got the butler to get us some coffee a latte and cuppacino no less.

The room was really nice and the bed was really comfortable.

I have to say the bathroom is bigger than most living rooms !! a huge bathroom with separate wash basin, a shower area (with jets that blow horizontally) and even a bathtub in the centre, which if you look at the picture below, that black thingy glassy bit on the wall in front of the tub is a TV. Had a great time in the tub watching TV woo hooo …..

Breakfast was not too bad standard fair, but they had healthy meals if you wanted. We made use of the spa, which I think was really interesting as it had many things which you cold do there all complimentary, there was the heated outdoor Jacuzzi, a few different sauna’s a rain forest type pool, heated stone beds and ice massage of some kind, all sorts of fancy names which I can’t remember of hand. The spa is gender specific, so males and split from the females and basically you just walk in there in your birthday suit.

All in a great days stay. The one thing I got a kick out of was the toilet paper where they had their own logo printed on them :)