Well, I finally had some free time to process my photos from Edinburgh (Scotland). There are still a lot more photos but I guess they were rather half arsed shots.
What can I remember about Edinburgh? It is one of the most picturesque places I have been so far. It’s almost as if you’ve stepped into a fairytale. I arrived about 9pm on my way to the train station at Edinburgh to St Andrews when I stopped and looked around. I was surrounded by castles, spires, churches, etc. It was absolutely amazing and it reminded me of how much traveling I need to do! With what I did in Edinburgh, there isn’t a lot to mention 
. Most of the time was spent walking around in tours or climbing Arthur’s Seat. I read about Arthur’s seat as a recommendation from wikitravel which they mentioned that it was a gentle stroll. Oh how wrong were they!!! I started climbing it and realized I was building a bit of a sweat and the climb started to be much steeper than I expected. How was it a gentle stroll?! When I reached the peak, I noticed there were heaps of people then peering on the otherside of the seat there was this slight inclined path that lead to the peak… WTF?! So turned out I took the not so “gentle stroll” and wikitravel had failed to mention that part!
On another note, I did try some haggis and black pudding. Haggis I didn’t quite like so much as it left this oily/slimey after taste on the tongue which I had to eat with baked beans to disguise it. Black pudding on the other hand I quite liked… mmm…. this was quite cinnamony…
Tags: Arthur's Seat, black pudding, Edinburgh, haggis, Scotland
Didn’t I promise myself not to work so late… 3am now and I just finished committing. KILL ME NOW!!!
My housemate (Dave) and I went out to Oxford Street after heading to some crappy Winter/Christmas market on Southbank. While looking for some cheap 99p gloves we had the following conversation:
j: While we’re here, I want to head into House of Frasers as they had Laura Ashley there
d: *pauses for a while*… erm… that’s gay…
j: what? I want to get a reed diffuser there. You know fragrances, scented oils… to make your room smell better
d: that’s not helping you
Ok it does sound queer… but hey! Reed diffusers ftw!
So I just got back from holidays and it’s probably the most relaxed one ever. To most people it probably would be the most boring but hey, what ever rocks their boat. Most of my time was spent sitting on a chair, feet up and listening to the birds chirp. It’s something I don’t normally do as I generally need to do something and not waste time. It’s the “go go go” attitude that I have so sitting around doing nothing is a such huge contrast. It’s something that was severely needed though given the amount of hours (and weekends) I was putting into work.
Surprising enough this trip was quite enjoyable and a lot of time was spent talking to family. I had a lot of one on one sessions talking to my aunts and cousin. In the past, when talking to my aunts (or to that generation) I would be treated as a kid and it usually turns into lectures but this time round it is so much different. I felt that they had opened much more to me, talked more of the past (especially family problems) and advised instead. What was weird though is that the advice was not just one way and I advised my aunts too. With my cousin, given that I was much more older than her, I was able to connect with her much easily as I could see so much of myself in her. To me this trip felt like some family drama movie like Little Women or Eat Drink Man Woman or something… Quite bizarre and different but I am missing now that I am back in London.
With this trip to Brunei, my intention was to celebrate my Grandmother’s birthday as it’s something I don’t recall ever doing and given her recent health problems there’s more of a drive for me to spend as much time with her. Ever since I was young, I’ve always seen my grandmother as a strong but caring individual. She’d be the type that would catch pythons in her backyard with her bare hands and release it a few days later (true story). If one bites her though, she’d grab a cleaver and lops it’s head off. So seeing my grandmother now and comparing her to the days when I was growing up, it really breaks my heart because I know the inevitable. That is actually why I cut the Perth leg of my trip short so I could spend my remaining leave with her. Unfortunately I had to miss my friend’s wedding but I had a obligation to my grandmother. I do hope and pray that there will be many years in her left.
On cold and wet days, I do miss family and friends… but hey, gotta get past that and continue on with life, right? Go go go!!
Site is back up and running on bluehost now!
Changing hosts so this site maybe down for a couple of days as I’m still on holidays
It’s 4:35am and I’m wide awake! What the hell is going on? It’s dark so I should be sleeping! I arrived about 17 hours ago (11am Brunei time) and I made the mistake of sleeping not long after I arrived and this is the result. The night before, I opted not to sleep at home but instead to sleep on the plane to tackle jet lag. Sleeping on the plane did not exactly go to plan since I kept getting woken up by either being uncomfortable or the flight attendent 
Arriving at the airport didn’t exactly go to plan as well. In my head I was thinking when I leave the arrival gates I’d drop my gear, run to my family and give them a hug. Instead… I dropped my gear to greet a family that wasn’t even there!!! I thought I had either given my Mom the wrong arrival time/day or possibly know one knew I was coming. About 15 minutes the family did arrive in shock thinking I was arriving am hour later. Mom, Brunei is not in daylight saving!!!!
Hmm… Now to figure out how to get to sleep. Oh the heat is great btw… It’s something I’ve been missing for a while.
I’m on my to Cambridge University now!! I haven’t even had time to rest and now I’m on my to another milk run. Since coming back from St Andrews, I’ve been working crazy hours and days to make sure the integration is a success so I just lost track of time. Was going to say how times passes by when you’re having fun. Well actually, it is fun
Anyway, last week I did my first interview session and have to say I absolutely loved it. Making those kids squirm… muhahahah… Beauty about it was that it was one on one interviews so I had free rein to do whatever I want.
The interview room was fairly large so I was tempted to sit on the opposite side of the table and spin around as they came in (Dr Evil style.. muhahahahh…) but no that’s not my style . I made them sit on my right side while I asked the normal boring questions.
The questions were like how do you handle pressure, what do you do in situations like xxx and the usual why Sungard? Some kids were amazing that blew me away with how confident and prepared they were while others were nervous as hell but once you probe you know they were smart hard working kids. Others you know they were mommy and daddy’s little pampered kid. The nervous kids at times you had to either stop them to calm them down or I’d tell them to move on cos they were rambling. I think I made it worse by timing my interviews… muhahahaha
One interview was an internal as she was an intern(?) appying for the graduate scheme. I had to let her through so that I wouldn’t be the cause of her rejection. Don’t want angry people working near me
I had another kid who was rather over ambitious. I asked him in 5 years what was his plans to reach his goals and he told me that he was going to be a developer for a year, consultant the next year then the following a project manager. Rather over ambitious to achive though I did something similar at Fujitsu (developer to team leader to project manager) in the last 3 years but that’s cos I was buddies with my delivery manager and I’m a whore . Unfortunately I didn’t let him through as he couldn’t back up his answers.
What I didn’t realize as well was that this kid was a year younger than me. It seems that the graduates in this country leave uni much later than Aussies. It’s a bit weird telling people you’ve been working for 5 years at 25/26 as a software engineer as they’d be expecting a year or two.
Anyway arriving soon. I’ve yet to process my Edinburgh pics…. Arrgghhhh! On a side note it’s rather surreal catching the train and blogging. It’s so beautiful once you get out of London. It’s so green!!!
Tags: interviews, kids, milk run, nervous
A month ago, my boss pulled me aside and asked me whether I wanted to do a “milk run”. At the time I was thinking he must be shitting me cos there was no way in hell I’d do a pleb’s job. He clarified further that a “milk run” was a term used to recruit graduates and would entail talking to students on campus and conducting interviews. It still didn’t sound right to me but at least it gives me the opportunity to see some places in the UK that I wouldn’t have thought of.
I was asked to fill in a preference of universities to attend and the one that sounded the best was the one furthest away - St Andrews in Scotland!!! The event was on a Friday which gave me the opportunity to see more of Scotland on the weekend. Free flight some more so why not????
So I arrived in St Andrews late last Thursday which involved a palava of flights, trains and buses. Grabbed some grub at a local Italian restaurant and went to bed (I only had 2hrs of sleep the night before).
St Andrews is a small town that has only two things - a University and GOLF! Apart from those two, there really isn’t much to do. You can pretty much see the whole town within a couple of hours. For the golfing fans, I got kicked off the course for being on the green of the 18th hole I was only taking pictures!!!
Prior to being kicked off the golf course, I was in awe as this is the course where golfing legends like Greg Norman, Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo etc had played on. The course was kept in well pristine condition so I understood why I had to be kicked off. I walked towards where the caddies were hanging out and it was my first memorable encounter with Scots. Listening to them talk to each other reminded me of a turkey farm. I can’t really describe it very well but if you get 10 or so Scots to say “aye” at random times, it’ll sounds like a group of turkeys
The career fair was rather interesting as couple of years ago I’d be doing the same thing like these kids competing for graduate jobs. Now the tables have turned and I can be the bastard with the Dr Evil laugh… muhhahahhaha… but seriously I was amazed by how some students were enthusiastic and proactive about their career while others just seemed too lazy or arrogant. There were others there who were only after one thing - FREE STUFF! You’d see these kids running around the floor sneaking behind people then all of a sudden you see this hand from out of nowhere reach in and grab your pens. Or there are others who’d just waste your time to ask what your company do then go in and grab the pens. Bastards I tell you, the whole lot of them… But then again that would have been me a couple of years ago too
What was surprising about St Andrews was that I was expecting a lot of Scots or English but instead I was greated by a bijillion Americans. When you walk around town listening to the accents, all you can hear are Americans. Sigh… they’re everywhere and you know that most of them are rich kids who are sent there by their parents for their studies.
St Andrews itself is small and beautiful. I managed to grab some shots when the weather was kind enough. I think it is time to get a new lens though. Throughout this trip I was getting sick and tired of taking shots of building. I think it’s time for a new paparazzi style super long lenses
Stay tuned for my remaining stay in Edinburgh… It’s not that exciting though :\
Tags: Scotland, St Andrews
It’s Sunday @ 3am and I just woke up! It wasn’t that I couldn’t sleep but it’s more like I had just woke up from a “catch up” sleep from the previous day. I still can’t believe I wasted my Saturday from just sleeping.
It all started with a casual drink on a Friday night when a colleague wanted to head home without stopping off at a pub. It’s Friday night and she wanted to head home?! It didn’t fit well with me and I didn’t want any of it. I managed to convince her with my charms… Well it really wasn’t hard to change her mind when you mention the word booze or just repeatedly call her a loser . The night started out in a little bar at Liverpool St but it seemed like the night was going to end early as there weren’t many people there and we were heading off for curry at Bricklane. “Eating is cheating” is a phrase we’d use quite often on each other to symbolize the weakness on the person who mentions food and it usually means that it is home time after that.
Fortunately enough, a sms came through to one of my workmates to go to a party over in Enfields. I’ve never heard of the place before but all I knew was that it was in zone 5. This was the point where I knew the night was going to either end up crashing at someone’s place or a whole night of figuring out how to get home. We eventually made it out to the “party” which seemed rather chavvy which is interesting since I don’t get to meet much of the English. The events that had occurred in the “party” has to remain undocumented on this blog as there may be incriminating information
We eventually headed off to an apartment to finish our night off (which means more boozing) and hopefully get a few hours of sleep before heading back home. I was hoping to get a few hours of shut eye but this wasn’t going to be the case when one of my colleagues couldn’t sleep. We spent the whole night talking about love, life, family and work. Wasn’t exactly how I wanted to end the night but hey I love listening to people’s stories.
I eventually got home around 2pm thinking to remain awake but I could only handle 2 hours before I crashed and burned. Sigh… my sleeping pattern is going to be fucked for a while now.
