A Little Re-Direction

It’s pretty amazing that I’m still getting a steady trickle of traffic from this blog, and it means a lot to me that the content I created earlier this year is still searchable and in demand. However, my blog has moved to http://daryltay.net and hopefully you’ve moved along with it so that you can keep up with the new content!

Recent stuff that might be of interest to you:

• A movie review of Clerks 2 by Kevin Smith

• A graphic novel review of Bone vol.1 – Out From Boneville

• A brand new Music Mondays segment

• A review of the Heroes novel: Saving Charlie

• And videos of stuff that happens in Canada

So please change your bookmarks and/or update your RSS subscriptions! If you don’t know what RSS is, I have simple steps (with screenshots!) to guide you.

I’ve Moved Too!

So my “professional” site moved to http://uniquefrequency.com last week, and now my personal site has moved to daryltay.net as well.

The rss feed of the new site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/daryltay so it would be great if I could trouble you to exercise 2 clicks and update that on your feed reader. If you don’t know how, here’s a friendly little guide.

My first post on the new blog? I’m A Guitar Sidekick! Check it out =)

Racial Preference At The Mandarin Oriental Hotel?

This post was going to be all praise for the Mandarin Oriental hotel, until they blew it literally at the last two minutes of my visit there.

I was at an informal discussion at the hotel. I hadn’t been there prior to their renovation and I must say the place is really swanky. On entering the hotel we were greeted nicely, when I asked for the restroom the lady literally walked me to it to make sure I didn’t take a wrong turn. In general, they were courteous, polite, hospitable and everything that hotel staff should be to make you feel welcome and at home.

That is, until I was going home.

Queuing up for a taxi, Howie was in front of me, I was next, and two Caucasian men were behind me. When a cab drove up, the attendant asked Howie where he was going, skipped me (although I had indicated I was not going together with Howie), asked the two Caucasian men, and then proceeded to give the taxi to them.

Now before you say hotels have “hotel guests have priority” policies, let me show you the sign at the stand, taken with my handphone.

The text may not be clear, but it reads: Priority is given to hotel residents going to the airport.

Incidentally, the two Caucasian men were headed to South Bridge Road, not the airport.

So the question to Mandarin Oriental Hotel is: What gives? Are you polite to all guests, as long as they’re not “competing” for resources? Next time when I ask for the restroom and the lady is walking me there, if a Caucasian guest asks for new directions, will she walk off midway? I don’t think this is acceptable practice for a hotel at all.

One thing I know: it only took this incident to completely ruin any positive impression that the rest of the hotel gave, because of inconsistent service, and I’m pretty sure that I will never recommend this hotel to anyone I know visiting Singapore.

Let’s be clear that I’m not accusing the hotel policy as being racist. That clearly can be read into the situation, but I pose it as a question in the title of this post, and invite Mandarin Oriental Hotel to respond to this and clarify the situation.

My Uncensored SMU Review

I’ve noticed a jump in blog traffic to my blog posts regarding SMU “Are You Sure You Want To Come To SMU? Think Carefully” and “At Least One Professor Thinks SMU Has Lost The Plot Too“. I suppose it’s because now’s the time when people are getting their acceptance to one or more universities and want to make an informed decision. In fact one person actually got into contact with me to get some information about the school, so I tried my best to help.

I stand by the earlier post that mugging-wise, the school has gone to the dogs. However, I think in terms of opportunities, training, education method and personal development, the school still shines. I mean come on, did you learn anything while sitting at the back of a 200-300 people lecture hall? I assure you I wasn’t paying attention half the time back in JC. Having all classes less than 50 people definitely helps facilitate discussion and learning much better.

The other key learning experience is teamwork and collaboration. When 50% of your grade or more is on your projects, you damn well learn how to work together regardless of whatever may crop up. And I don’t think that’s any different in the real world. Best to learn it now rather than spend your life thinking it’s all about that solo push for the 70% exam.

Ultimately, I think what you want to do should guide where you want to go. I know I had no bloody idea when I was 18, but if you do, it can really help. If you wanna do journalism like Audrey (the person who contacted me to find out more about SMU), then SMU isn’t going to help you much, even in corporate communications. So use that as an indication.

And…. well. We do have student life. Or we did. Here are some pictures back in year one:

Waikiki in 2006. Waikiki in 2008: nobody.

Late nights studying with booze. This was taken at 1:50 in the morning during study week.

Celebrating Mooncake festival

Impromptu Busking

Those were the good days. But now? You’ll probably see

Speed Racer Rocked!

Finally managed to catch Speed Racer with Reuben and Marcus tonight after scouts and boy was it a blast! I’ve never had any interaction with Speed Racer before, so this was the first time.

First I have to say, the Wachowski brothers know how to take a property and make it theirs. The vibrant colours are astounding, and while some people may find them too much, I thought it really added to the show. But be careful, as Mark says, if you’re not Guitar Hero or video game trained, you just might get seizures and/or a fit from all those colours whizzing around. I heard there’s an IMAX version. Man that would drive people crazy!

The other thing that the Wachowskis did to introduce an element of “theirs” to the movie was the flashback exposition. The seeing of talking heads floating around the screen with images of the past appearing was really something, though confusing at the beginning.

My favourite part of the show was the second race. The dangerous one which transited to some hand to hand combat afterwards. The casts’ fighting sequence was awesome, made better by the Wachoskis vision of how it should look with the snow falling. Fantastic.

Acting-wise, I feel Susan Sarandon (Mom Racer) and Matthew Fox (Racer X) stole the show. Maybe I’m biased cos I’m a Lost fan, but I thought Matthew Fox got a chance to really play a different role from Jack in Lost, and deliver a literally kick-ass action sequence that I’ve never seen from him before. The final revelation regarding Racer X was also pretty well done, with Fox showing just the right amount of emotion.

The parts that didn’t really do it for me was the kid brother and the chimp which I very quickly found annoying, and the whole “business” evil guy plot as Speed’s enemy. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but I just thought it was plain boring and would’ve preferred an enemy driver instead.

All in all, it’s a good show which isn’t short for once (135 minutes), definitely worth your time and money!

The Marriage E-mail

You might remember me mentioning Reuben a couple of times on this blog. We’ve been friends via scouts since sec 1, and are both voluntary leaders in scouts today. (Not to mention Team Fortress 2 players virtually every other night).

So the big news is: Reuben is getting married!

It’s quite overwhelming and crazy at the same time. It’s like how do you transform from a “Go to school, go for scouts, watch a movie, go home and play Team Fortress” to a “married” lifestyle! The jump is almost incomprehensible for me. (For now).

I guess the news never really sank in until this:

Big congrats to Reuben and Gillian, can’t wait for it next year!

Kinda makes you think “omg we’re all going to be adults”, doesn’t it?

The Truth About The SMU Graduate Survey

A lot of hoo-hah going around about people not believing this and all that sort of stuff. So I just want to say two things.

1) The numbers and figures are probably pretty accurate. All the speculation about SMU talking about higher pay is stupid. Even if they want to lie, how much can they lie? From $8k to $10k? Can’t be right? I know people who have graduated and are drawing in that kind of money.

2) The sample is probably not representative. Don’t be surprised. Obviously the school wants to portray the best image to everyone. But you think every survey is representative? How about the one about NUS students having sex once a week? Get over it please. It’s already very obvious that it’s skewed to those in the finance/investment banking sector from the article, so take it with a pinch of salt. Again, I know people in the marketing/IT/communications field who have graduated and don’t even receive the survey from the school ok?

Addicted To Team Fortress 2!

I’m not that much of an obsessive gamer the way some guys are, but when great games come my way (Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Final Fantasy, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Evil Genius), I sit up, take notice and become a little more obsessive than normal.

Case in point, Team Fortress 2. Rubin, Reuben and I actually plonked down $45 to buy it from Steam and play it online. For the first week or two, we sucked bad. Consistently at the bottom of the score list. As with all things, the more you play the better you get. Reuben is now pretty excellent, I get by but Rubin still sucks. (see screenshot for proof. He’s that weird scribble thing that’s dominated by me)

I really like the game because unlike Counter-Strike (which we reached last 16 in Singapore for WCG last year), it doesn’t just emphasise on the offense. And indeed I’m not a great player going forward, so the defensive engineer, backup medic or slinking around corners as a pyro play to my strengths, as my player statistics would suggest.

If you’re playing TF2 on steam look for me (UniqueFrequency) or drop me a comment so we can have a couple of games together!

Wolverine And The X-Men Trailer!

As far as I know it’s not embeddable, but you can catch it over at Comic Book Resources.

Couple of things I noticed:

• No Jean Grey (that’s a first)
• Crazy amount of mutant guest stars (Wolfsbane, Domino, Dust, Gambit, Multiple Man, Pyro, Maverick, Mojo)
• Iceman’s costume is sleeveless (?!), but I’m just glad he’s in the show

What I liked:

• Original X-Men in the team! (Minus Jean Grey). Huge fan of the original X-Men (Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Iceman), great to see they all have parts in it.
• The voice acting is pretty too. It reminds me of the old X-Men cartoons. Beast and Wolverine in particular sound the way they should.
• Many many mutants

What I didn’t like:

• The animation – granted there weren’t a LOT of action scenes, but somehow I’d imagined that if we’ve waited years for a new X-Men animated series, it’s be a lot cooler. Look at the Legion of Super Heroes cartoon, or Ben 10 or Avatar. They look much slicker in terms of animation efforts.
• The “plot” – can we see a new story please? Going back to Magneto and Sentinels really isn’t going to be interesting for very long. I honestly felt at some points of the trailer that I was watch the cartoon from the ’90s, with different art and voices
• The title – Wolverine and the X-Men? Really? I bet they just want to cash in on the Wolverine movie next year.

You can find the entry of Wolverine and the X-men on Wikipedia, but don’t get too hyped, it’s only slated to start early next year. Bummer.

Free Comic Book Day 2008 – Today!

If my Dark Tower graphic novel post hasn’t indicated already, I’m a huge comic book/graphic novel fan and have been collecting them for the last 11 years.

I know the perception is that comics are expensive (they are), so here’s a solution: Today is Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) and that means certain comics are….. free! So no investment from you at all, pick up a couple and see if you like them.

Here’s what I picked up today:

Superman, Hellboy, Cable, X-Men, Transformers and an independent comic.

Where can you get all this? I got them from G&B Comics at Bras Basah. It’s on the third floor, can’t miss it. You can check out their details (and a special FCBD sale) from their blog or check out a blog report from the Fortress of Testicular Fortitude, complete with great pics!

Also picked up today, the long-awaited X-Men: Messiah Complex hardcover. The online community generally said this has been the best crossover since the 90’s, so I’m really looking forward to it. A 13 part story for $40. Kinda expensive, but awesome.

Finally, full disclosure: I recommend G&B because it’s the comic store I go to. I don’t get anything from recommending their store here! This is just me sharing my passion (obsession?) with comic books and hoping to get a couple of people interested.