Passport is finally here!...

Random: Cute... Amazing DDR Kid :)

I can finally go to sleep without worrying whether my passport is going to arrive before the day I was set to depart! I'm seriously wondering why it took so long for it to be delivered (?) it's not like it's a complicated process, and I'm pretty sure they weren't backed up at the time. My parents put in for theirs and received them well within the 3 week period that's stated. Mine, on the other hand, was stuck at the printers for god-knows how many days waiting to be printed... wtf. How do I know this? Well, I called the line to check the status of my passport... the service was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. As expected, I was in the phone queue for a good 25 minutes before I was picked up by an agent. The nice thing about their queue was that it let you know exactly where in the queue you were. In between the hold music a voice would come on the line... "yadda yadda, there are xx people ahead of you". That was a nice change which encouraged me to stay on the line as I could approximate the amount of time I had before my call would be picked up. I had lost my receipt and along with it my tracking number :p so she looked me up by name and verified some information, then she let me know that my passport had been at the printers for sometime and she didn't know why they hadn't printed it out yet. WTH. Anyway, she sent them an email and assured me that I would receive it by Monday.

I remember that sometime the previous week (Wednesday, I believe) I had put in an online request for a status check on my Passport. I didn't get the email from them until Feb27^th(the day that on which I was assured my passport would reach me), nice eh?

And What's up with this?:

Important note: We highly recommend that you use this service only when the normal processing time has been exceeded. Requesting information about the status of your passport or travel document application during the normal processing time could result in a delay.

How the frack does that work? Ask about the status of your passport and they will delay the time it takes for it to arrive? psh... run by a bunch of chimps I tell you.

Here's the timeline:

Feb 03^th, 2006 - go to Passport office and put in application for passport. The clerk advises that I should get the passport by Feb 17.

Feb 17^th, 2006 - Wondering where the frack my passport is... figure I'll wait a week before I say anything.

Feb 20^th, 2006 - Start to get anxious, will I have to postpone my departure?

Feb 22^th, 2006 - Check Passport Canada site and put in an electronic request for a status check.

Feb 23^th, 2006 - Called the 800 number to speak with a representative regarding Passport status. Was assured that I would receive it on Monday (Feb 27^th).

Feb 27^th, 2006 - Received status email (it's been 5 days). I use the tracking number that they gave me and it tells me this: 2006/02/25 15:12 OTTAWA, ON Item accepted at the Post office.

Feb 28^th, 2006 - Passport finally arrives! Now I can rest in peace, right? NO... I'm to excited about the trip!!! :p

Final Tally...

Well It's official over the last 24 hours I had over 1050 Page visits and over 1600 Page Views :p

Here is the final tally for the week:

And here is the final tally for the day:


I have an itching feeling that's telling me that... my 15 minutes of fame is over ;) Keke. To tell you the truth, it was kinda wierd. It felt like there were a whole bunch of strangers walking through my house O.o haha... and the even stranger thing... they all came in and didn't say hi =p 'cept the 3 that left comments... Anyway, it was fun while it lasted! :D

*** UPDATE ***

Here's the official report from Site Meter:

Blardy hell...

Nice, now it looks like my site is down, and I'm hosting my images there... argh :@ First I have a shitty day @ work, now this.

Since I have nothing else better to do I think I'll upload the images to blogger just to guarantee image uptime with blogger uptime... *rawr*

What... The... Fek... ?!...

Ya... so I go online after midnight last night and noticed that my hit count was waaaaay out of whack. My meager 22 hits a day average was already shadowed by the 80+ in the hour following midnight. I wasn't sure what the hell was going on until I decided to go onto KennySia's blog to see if he had updated... lo and behold there was a link to my blog from his... wow..

Really, I didn't make that picture to get traffic. I was bored and decided to PhotoShop for a bit... anyone who uses PhotoShop will vouch that it's a poor quality piece of work =p

Anyway, here's the aftermath (midnight-8:00pm)

And here's the pattern throughout the day:

I guess this is testemony for the next time Kenny opens up advertising space on his blog. I'll probably be worth your money :) Just think... if a someone like me can accidentally get 1000 hits in one day just from 1 link from his blog, just think of how much publicity your add will get ;)

I'm still waiting to post the day's final tally later tonight.

Cheers

UnKenny Resemblance...

Was reading up on KennySia's Blog and came across this post: "Like Mike"

I then got bored and made this, don't ask me why :p

BTW, I didn't have my mouse on me, so I had to use a trackpoint mouse, also too lazy to find a bigger picture of Kenny's head so the resulting enlarged features are of poorer quality.

Original photo from KennySia.com

*** update ***

Wow... it's 12:55am here, and I've already had +85 pageviews.. scary!
Didn't expect that pic to show up on KennySia's blog :p Anyways, I'm glad the effort wasn't for naught ;) Enjoy!

Vancouver NightScape...

Vancouver's NightScape (taken from Stanley Park)
I went on a drive with ASoo the other night and managed to get an OK shot of our CityLine. This picture was taken on the strip with the Marathon Runner statue before the 9 O'Clock Cannon. Unfortunately I didn't think of bringing the tripod along... so the picture is a little blurry. Enjoy!

VOIPStunt... Fair Use :p...

Yet another update on VOIPStunt and their services. Haha :D I appears that I have managed to violate the VOIPStunt Fair Use Policy and as a result some of my calls to Singapore are now being charged :p

I'm pretty sure I fall under the "Fair Use: Excessive Use" category as defined by the VOIPStunt Terms of Service. Here's an excerpt from the terms:

Excessive Use

1. In the case of VoipStunt free calls, there are restrictions on the maximum number of calls and the duration of the calls.

2. In the case of VoipIn numbers, applying for more than one number is excessive use

3. In the case of Fair Use Promotions, what is excessive use will either be advertised by VoipStunt at the time of the relevant promotion or included in this Fair Use Policy prior to the commencement of the relevant promotion.

I'm pretty sure I fall under the category that I've highlighted in yellow. That's still not going to stop me from using this application. The VOIPStunt service contains some of the best rates that are currently available. In my case (after excessively using my fair share) I get charged €0.005 ($0.00680852 CAD) so after talking for an hour the total comes to €0.30 ($0.408562 CAD). No complaints there :) But I'm thinking I should slow down on the usage or they'll just terminate my service (?) O.o

VOIPStunt... Bringing Us Closer Together...

I've always been skeptical when it comes to new technologies and accepting them... you're never sure what you can trust and how well they're going to work or for how long the service is going to be available for.

I guess this time was different for me because my father received an email from one of our family friends who is overseas in Malaysia. Towards the end of the email he mentioned that he's been using VOIPStunt to communicate with someone in Vancouver. hey, look at that... that's the city I live in. He also goes on to mention that the calls that he makes using VOIPStunt are FREE OF CHARGE! wooo haaa!

Click picture for a complete listing of call rates & locations
The list of landlines that you can call for free contains 37 countries. The only 3 that I was interested in were Malaysia/Australia/Singapore (for obvious reasons) Lo-and-behold... this list contains them all!!!

So I go ahead and install it expecting there to be some crappy restriction despite the fact that it says, "100% Free, no call setup!" I then proceed to place a call to Singapore (mobile phone) curious as to whether it would work because it says it's free to all landlines. But then again, all mobile networks have to be land based somewhere... right? To my surprise it worked... and (or I could have just done more research and read the rates :p) it worked well! Jacq said that the line was clearer than when I call from my home landline... wow!

HOWEVER... this service is not without a catch. I placed a few more calls that night and eventually it told me that my trial period was over, I had to go update my account. WTH... I really need to read more before I sign up for things like this :p

To counter misuse of our network we have limited these free calls to a maximum of 1 minute for our trial users. If you want to enjoy UNLIMITED FREE CALLS to these destinations, you have to become a fully registered user by topping up your account. This credit deposit will stay untouched as long as you are calling the free destinations and remains valid for 120 days after your last purchase.

Psh, no biggie :p I'd rather pay the €10 (approx $14 CDN) for 120 days of free Long Distance calling than the 10c per minute from our LD provider! Not to mention the $38 phone call that was billed to my mobile :p

Anyway, ya, it's working great and I get to talk overseas to my heart's content ;) Give it a shot. The only restriction I have now is that when it hits 59m 59s it drops the call. All you have to do then is call them back :D

* * * UPDATE * * *

Re: X's comment: There are VOIP services available in Canada but... funny story... the day after I signed up for VOIPStunt I was in the car on the way to work and I heard a story on the local news station. They were warning about one of the perils of VOIP service. When you're signing up for VOIP services (to replace your landline) you have to make sure that it offers a direct connection to your local Emergency Line. Apparently there was someone in the Lower Mainland who dialed 911 to report a fire... the call was routed/picked-up in Toronto and subsequently (eventually) routed to an Emergency Line in Vancouver. Unfortunately, this particular line was not a monitored line (???) yea, that part didn't make sense to me either, but I guess that was the only number that the TO office had on hand (?). Needless to say, there was substantial fire damage even though the call was eventually routed to the proper authorities. That's my story X... one final thought... why didn't the caller have a mobile phone? or just go to a neighbor's house?

* * * UPDATE * * *

Hmm.. interesting...


I was doing a little research on VOIP services.. and for some reason if you look at VOIPStunt, VOIPBuster and Internetcalls they're all owned by the same person (?) hmmm... In fact VOIPStunt and VOIPBuster are pretty much the same site templates... just different color. The client looks the same but the title... and the difference between those and the Internetcalls client are... the titles in the titlebar, and the icons... oh, and the fact that Internetcall allows call forwarding. What does the future have in store for me?... I wonder O_O

WTH... Speechless... :|

ya... wow... wish I had friends :p then I could try something like that too, heh.


You HAVE to read this... In-N-Out 100x100!

Happy Valentine's Day... Surprise!!!...

Wow... this year I actually decided to order something... ONLINE... for the first time. It also happened to be a Valentine's gift for my Overseas friend :D. So I go online to Google and do a search on 'Singapore flowers'. Me being a typical guy ended up sticking with one of the first 2 hits that I got :p so much for shopping around...

First hit: Prince's

I browsed through the site and was put off at the fact that almost everything was in the 3 digit range. Now, yes I think that if you're going to give a gift then give the best, and spare no expense. But I'm also a minimalist of sorts, simple+beautiful=perfect ;) the fact that I'm going to be flying to M'sia and S'pore and broke when I come back was another good deterrent. They had interesting assortments, some of them nicer than others... but I found most of them to be just average, considering the prices.

Second hit: Flora2000

Flora2000 offered (in my opinion) a nicer, simpler selection. Looking back, it may have just been the pictures that they used for their site that sold me :p The colors are more vibrant and they're all set on a nice white background. The arrangements were more appealing as well. Yeah yeah, I know, I'm not supposed to be thinking about what I would like personally... I'm supposed to be thinking about HER and what I think she would like, right? It's hard :p The other thing that attracted me to this site was the fact that most of the prices that were listed were in the 2 digit mark... which was nice for my pockets :D

I ended up purchasing the assortment that's pictured in my previous post. Simple... Classic Dozen.

A nice feature available on the site is a 24x7 Live Chat feature incase you need assistance in placing your order. I actually had a chance to try it out as I needed assistance was curious to see if it would work ;). The time it took for an operator to pick up the request was no too long taking into consideration it was Valentine's day (in Singapore) already. By the time the chat was initiated less than 10 minutes had passed. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that the person on the other side, a) Couldn't type to save his life or b) Didn't have ANY information on-hand which resulted in longer waits than should be expected for reasonably simple questions. To tell you the truth, I'm certain there's only one person taking requests for the site...

One thing I will mention though is for you people to be observant and find out what currency prices are listed as. Seeing as Prince's prices were listed in SGD I just assumed that the other site was also in SGD. Soooo, needless to say, when I did the conversion I chose SGD to CDN when it should have been USD to CDN. You can imagine my shock when I saw the little blurb in the Q&A section: "All prices are in United States Dollars (USD)" Yeah, great... thanks for making it obvious. For those of you who might not know, the big difference is that one conversion goes _DOWN and one goes ^UP. I guess it's my fault for not realizing that /Singapore was a sub-section of the site. there you have it, you have been warned :p

After all was said and doneI went home excited at the fact that (hopefully) someone would be pleasantly surprised. I even stayed up waaaaaaay past my bedtime chatting on MSN in hopes of being awake when the flowers got delivered. Nope, no such luck :( As it turns out they couldn't make the delivery on time and Jacq didn't have the chance of getting embarassed in the presence of her co-workers :p I was happy when I received her sms at 6:32am :D The flowers were indeed delivered, and in a timely fashion I might add. (There was a disclaimer in red stating that Valentine's Day orders would be delivered between Feb 14th and Feb 16th... too bad they didn't make one as prominent for the pricing as well :p)

Now I'm just waiting for her to send a photo of the Roses in all their true glory (with her in the picture, of course!)

And here it is!!!

It's V-Day Again...

It's that time of the year again, and if you're anything like me... you don't 'like' to do things last minute, but that is always the way things turn out. Restaurants are fully booked, and even if they aren't... it's going to be expensive as hell :p It's all worth it in the end, right?

I heard a good spot on the radio, for those of us who do not have a 'significant' other, have just broken up, divorced or lost their spouse it can be hard on V-day. Hard to watch couples walking past holding hands, cuddling and spending time with each other.

Some of the things that were suggested were to spend time with friends or family, go for a walk with someone. For those who have lost a love one, whether a spouse or someone else, sometimes writing a letter to them will ease the pain. In fact, many people do this annually... makes sense, no?

Fortunately for me, I have not lost any loved ones during this time and if there was ever someone who dumped me during V-day... they've long been forgotten :p

Well, I'm hoping that you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day... Stay healthy, remember, whether you know it or not, there's always someone out there watching you.

Where Was I All Week?...

For my whopping 3 readers who are wondering where I was all week (sorry for the lack of updates)... this is what I was occupied with =p. Yes, that's right, I was dorking out on PaperCraft :p Earlier in the week x sent me a link to this guy and I HAD to make it :D the game was fun, and it was a relatively simple PaperCraft to do.

Unfortunately I ended up with an appetite for something more challenging... so I downloaded and printed the Notre-Dame de Paris, France. *sigh* I'm too easily distracted.

Jacq mentioned that one of her collegues was wondering what kind of paper I'm using. Personally, I'm using your standard 8.5x11 sheets that you can find in your office printer. I'm sure they recommend something a little more rigid, but this seems to do the trick. One thing I will mention though... when I first started doing PaperCraft with AS we used gluestick, in the long run I'd say white glue is better. The Yamaha Motorcycle that I made with the gluestick had bits fall off over time... if you do it right the white glue will give your PaperCraft more support.

Welcome To My City...

Finally! The sun decided to come out and stay awhile! I was so ecstatic that I had to call AK up and see if he wanted to go in-line skating. I'm pretty sure I woke him up even though it was mid-day :p lazy bugger. I found my in-line skates and (literally) brushed the dust off of them. Then we were off. I took over 40 photos during our outing, but I'll post my favorites and a few others :)... hmm, maybe I should start a photoblog...

Here's a picture of Science World close to where we usually start. For those of you who are reading this and are not from Vancouver this was the center point for EXPO 86, when EXPO Came to Vancouver. It looks like it's undergoing a facelift or something.



Here's a picture of the Plaza of Nations (not a very good one)... some of you may recognize this place because there have been multiple films / TV shows shot here. One of my favorites was one of the death scenes from Final Destination (can't remember if it was 1 or 2... the kid that gets crushed by the pane of glass).


This is one of my favorite pictures... I wasn't expecting it to turn out that nice. Actually, I wasn't sure what to expect from the camera at all, the sun was blocked by all the clouds, so I thought maybe all the photos would be under-exposed. I'm thinking about making a large print of this one. If anybody's interested, just leave me a comment and I'll send the original, the dimensions are huge. ;)


Approaching the Round House area... and just past the Round House area...


This is another picture that I want to make a large print of. I've bladed past this spot countless times and have never noticed that the buildings there are symmetrical. This shot turned out nicer than I expected as well :) Again, if you'd like me to send you a copy of the full sized one, just leave me a comment ;)



Above are pictures from English Bay the beach where the famous Polar Bear swim takes place as well as the Symphony of Fire. I was surprised at the amount of people that were out despite the clouds. I supposed they were all tricked by the sun that peeked out earlier... like how AK and I got suckered :( That's a picture of the hotdog stand that we COULDN'T buy a hotdog at because we didn't bring our wallets along!



A few more snaps of English Bay.

I noticed something while we were blading that day... there are a while whackload of random statues/sculptures/monuments strewn about the DownTown area. Monuments that were not there last year... I'm guessing that it has got to be part of some effort to make Vancouver all pretty for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympic games... I suppose this might also be a part of that effort as well... :/ Don't really know what to make of it though. It's interesting, that's for sure.

Here's another of the pictures I took. Another favorite. I'm thinking of getting this one blown up as well...

Hmm... I think I should make a photoblog for my posts like this... too many pictures, wow. Too much time :p Well hope you enjoyed the pictures =)

Signs Of Life...

I woke up this morning with the sun shining into my bedroom window... WOW! With over 45 days of rain under our belts I'm sure most of us have forgotten what the sun looks like... I went out for a hack and decided to take some snaps of my backyard... There's no real rhyme or reason. I guess it's just because the sun was out :p