Yay and Nay.
written: 4:57 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 26, 2008
Major thanks to Mag for telling me about his new song and new album slated for release next week. I went to check out the song out of curiosity and was honestly expecting another disaster like last year's insipid and ridiculous cowboy song, but...Oh My God I Love It. It's Vintage Jay Chou which is also Jay Chou at his best and it's the reason why I was obsessed for four years. I love it. I can't play it enough, and he wrote the lyrics which are actually pretty inspiring. Even though the 珍惜一切 就算没有拥有 line sounds a bit awkward to me (do you use 拥有 in such a manner? Sounds odd), I am so in love with the 童年的纸飞机 现在终於飞回我手里 line. I LOVE IT. He's always had this thing for childhood imagery and references, and this thing about the paper plane from his childhood flying back into his hands...I think it's pretty genius. And my opinion is completely unbiased because I wrote him off for one entire year.
I'm so glad he's back. Hopefully the rest of the album is like that too, because I'd really, really like to erase the atrocity of his stupid Cowboy album. I think I've played that CD a grand total of two times, like a grand total of three songs, when I'd always played his CDs repeatedly until it was absolutely impossible to count, and I'd always genuinely loved every single song on all his CDs. So I'm going to buy the new CD, and I am absolutely surprised by the fact that I think he looks damn good in that potentially-ridiculous Joker concept he's adopted for the album. It helps that half his face is covered, of course, but when Mag was describing it, I expected Utter Disaster. But oh my god, it's actually pretty good! Maybe he was inspired by The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger's amazing Joker; I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
Still, I have one nitpick: The dude cannot enunciate to save his life. I cringed when I heard him sing/say/rap/whatever "dao cao len" instead of "dao cao ren", and dropping all the "sh" sounds on words that need it like "shang" (without saying the "sh", it becomes "sang" and it sounds awful) and "sheng". And the "len" in lieu of "ren" thing alarms me - it's soooooo Taiwanese Mandarin. And I'm talking about the Chen Shui-bian kind of Taiwanese Mandarin, the benshengren kind. I can't believe he actually recorded that...but then again, Jielun's bensheng so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
(In all honesty, I don't think the bensheng/waisheng distinction really exists anymore, but it's a convenient label so yay.)
2. Tennis!
So I totally signed up for tennis lessons after like ten million years, and it's damn cheap! $72.10 for six two-hour sessions. They're on Monday nights at Choa Chu Kang which works for me since class on Tuesday is at 3 and I don't do anything on Monday nights anyway. But I just realised that Monday is my fucking shit long day...oh well! I shall be inspired by Roger's major awesomeness and push through the tiredness I feel every Monday.
I realised my racquet is damn heavy. And yesterday I was playing with my brother's basketball which is genuine leather and one of those pro basketball used in pro games type. I was attempting to spin the ball on my index finger, which I could pull off decently, oh, a couple of years ago; but yesterday, the damn ball kept slipping. And after a few minutes, my arm started to ache.
Like that how? I think after 15 minutes of attempting to play tennis, my arm might break off. But if it's going to give me nice toned arms in the long run...it's worth it.
3. I Hate Government Websites
A few gripes:
One - I just don't understand how it's possible that the SSC website has shit English. How can a government website have shit English? Can I offer my services and help them clean up their embarrassingly bad English? "Please wait while we transfer you, if not click here." "Directing to [some other website], one moment pls..."
"Pls"? Are you kidding? There's nothing sloppier than using these lazy contractions and it gives off the impression that whoever wrote the content and/or maintains it is a lazy bugger who doesn't know proper English. It annoys me to no ends. Maybe I shouldn't expect so much from a government website...but it's a government website. I don't care if it's just the Sports Council website; it's still a government website. And by virtue of it being a government website, it should have proper, concise, standardised English. If the Government of Singapore can't even run websites that have good English, how the hell can it, or anyone, expect the citizens to have good English?
Two: I honestly do not understand this country's aversion to PayPal. I tried paying for the class using some enet.sg shit, and the first two times I used Firefox. Like, duh, who still uses Internet Explorer anyway? Not only did the site take ten million years to load, I had to close all my other tabs in order for it stabilise, and I honestly thought the SSC site wasn't serious when it said that I had to close all over windows before I could make my payment. Who does that? How absolutely inconvenient and inefficient. Hasn't anyone here heard of PayPal? It's fuss-free, nonsense-free, and I can open as many tabs as I freaking want to and make my payment without crashing my Internet browser. Besides, if the whole world uses PayPal, I don't see why Singapore needs to be different and use some stupid and shit enet.sg crap. And with PayPal, I don't even need to enter my credit card info; all I need to do is press a button and I'm done. Convenient, right? Exactly.
Three: I CAN'T BELIEVE THE STUPID SITE IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH FIREFOX. I can't believe there exists websites out there that are not compatible with Firefox. Okay, so my blog layouts in the past used to be incompatible with Firefox, but I have long since seen the light. Who still uses Internet Explorer? It's the shittiest browser ever. It takes up so much memory, so much space, and it makes my laptop fan go batshit insane. WHO STILL USES IE ANYMORE? And how can a website that's meant to facilitate payment between a consumer and a seller not be compatible with Firefox?
I tried making my payment twice using Firefox, but I couldn't click on the 'name' and 'credit card number' fields at all. First I thought it was all the other tabs I had opened, so I closed everything. It didn't work. So I closed the whole window and went in again - still didn't work. I was about to try again a third time, because I was naive enough to give the site the benefit of the doubt as the very idea that such websites aren't compatible with Firefox is just inconceivable to me, when I decided, Screw it, I'll use Internet Explorer.
And it worked. And so here I am, ranting about it, about my incredulous disbelief. I can totally help them design Firefox-compatible websites. Seriously. Surely they have actual professionals running the shit; if I can do it, I don't see why they can't.
Utterly, utterly tragic.
4. I Love Roger, But Boy, His Website's Layout Sucks
The link to the site is on the left; I'm too lazy to type it out.
I'm okay with the constantly-changing colours (the purple is way better than the previous puke green); what I'm not okay with is the layout. The content portion is too narrow, and whenever people post large pictures in the forum, the page gets screwed up and I have to scroll horizontally to see the content. And I hate scrolling horizontally. The header font is also terrible. I like pixelated fonts - but only when they're set to font size 6 pt and are not meant to be the focus of the design. It's just not attention-grabbing and professional-looking at all.
As for the clear lack of an overwhelming picture of Roger as the header (an example? Mine!), it's nice in the sense that it's different from other sites dedicated to famous people. But you don't really get the sense that it's a Roger Federer site.
You know, I bet I can do a much better job designing the layout of the website. The actual technical details I can't do, but if it were up to me, I'd make it a lot louder, attention-grabbing, and in-your-face than it currently is. And the content width would definitely be a lot wider. I mean, look at Novak's website. That is how an official site should look like.
Unrelated but funny: "The Official Internet Site of Novak Djokovic." HAHAHA.
5. I Don't Really Have Anything Else to Say
I went swimming and now I'm damn tired, I still can't get into really studying and set a nice pace for myself, I wanna pull out every single strand of my hair and admit defeat.
Bleah. I'm hungry.
before sunrise // before sunset
Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010