• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
• The Eighth Habit
• The World is Flat
• The Twilight Series (four books!)
• The Children Of Hurin

And books I WANT to read:

• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• A Thousand Splendid Sun
• Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang
• The Stand
• … and probably more

I think I should start with finishing the books I have first.

On another note, my family spent quite a lot of money on the PC Show yesterday. Let’s see how much I spent:

• $49.90 – Sonic Gear Earpump Pro
  Since my creative in-ear has decided to stop working on one side of my ear, I had to get a new pair. I am rather impressed with the package. It comes with a pouch and some audio jacks including one that allows you to plug in two earphones into one audio output jack. Buying it at the PC show included a free gift of a HTC mini-USB to 3.5mm audio jack adapter. Pretty cool!
• $60 – On the Twilight 4 books boxset
• $59.90 – Two pairs of Berms

And my dad bought a 42″ HDTV at $1699 =D It comes with a free Blu-Ray player. Now I just need to get a media adapter (looking to be $500 =/) to stream videos from my PC to the TV to maximise the use of said TV in a HD-content devoid Singapore.

My brother bought a $1299 HP Notebook to replace his ailing notebook.

Total damage: $3167.80

With this, I have ended my shopping for summer 2008, albeit with some stuff I would have wished to buy. But alas, money is a scarce resource.

$75 (pair of jeans after 15% discount) + $49 (shirt) + $149 (shoes) + $9 (belt) = $282

With this I have spent $282 and this is pretty much more than enough.

Need to catch The Dark Knight next week. I heard it was pretty good. Too bad all the tickets are sold out for the cinemas I went to this week. I couldn’t believe it when we couldn’t even get seats in the first row.

And I can’t believe Wall E only premiers in Singapore on 28 Aug, TWO MONTHS after its premier in the US.

But this means going back to 1 SIR. Not something I look forward to.

I went shopping yesterday, something I have not done for a long time. I managed to spend close to $150 on a pair of jeans and a shirt. (The money comes from the IPPT gold award in BSLC. I thought they were kidding when they said there was a monetary reward.) And thanks to my friends who gave me a watch and a shirt for my birthday. I really appreciate them.

The most annoying thing that happened to me was when I wanted to buy a pair of shoes and it turns out they no longer have my size. This happened to all the pairs I wanted.

I didn’t buy any in the end.

I sooo want this phone. The specifications are great! It runs on Symbian, has a touch screen and a great camera to go with it.

But the sad reality is that I am in NS, and it costs $400+ with a two year plan.

– Linksys WRT54GL: Oh yes, I need to get this soon. The lousy 2Wire is driving me crazy.

As for the rest, they are not “urgent” in a sense but they could be part of a new PC to be built in the coming one or two years. (With my monthly-accumulated [i.e. saved up month by month] NS salary perhaps; it’s still too early to say.)

– Some Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
– 200 GB SATA Drive – IDE drives are a thing of the past!
– hmm… nothing else for now.

Anyway, I’m thinking of building a 64 Bit PC next. 32 Bit is gradually being phased out anyway. If you were wondering about this bits thing, read this.

We need more of this, this, this and this kind of high-end PC manufacturers here.Goodness they allow you to customise your system to your heart’s content and one of my customisation ended up being USD 3878.

I went to watch the movie The Holiday yesterday. Not my type of movie but I kind of enjoyed it, at least the humour within, much unlike the terrible You, me and Dupree. The crowd at Orchard was just terrible. I wonder how it’s like right at this moment, 10+ minutes to Christmas.

Today, on Christmas eve, I went on a shopping spree, including stuff that weren’t for me. I had a haircut, followed by a trip to Sim Lim to buy 200 CD-R and 50 DVD-R for CCA usage. Gosh, that was SO heavy and expensive (SGD 87). I almost died along the way carrying that home. I bought myself a Bluetooth adapter and for my cousin a network card and a thumbdrive (a pretty good looking one if you ask me).

Walked around for a long time before settling on a pair of Niké shoes. Believe it or not, this is my first piece of Niké merchandise I ever bought. The rest belonged to Adidas and New Balance etc.

And later on, I bought another jacket and a new shoe bag.

Phew, remind me not to shop at this time of the year again. The crowd is kinda huge. I still need some shorts and pants. That should be all that’s left to get.

Anyway, while I was walking from the MRT station to her house, I passed by some places that gave me some kind of a feeling of nostalgia. I used to live with my aunt when I about 4 I think. Walking through those places really made me feel how quickly 10+ years have passed.

My cousin had an operation on her knees (because of reasons I can’t remember) and can’t walk around. So she had to stay at home everyday for a few weeks until she can walk fully again. She just returned from working in New York.

She lent me the box set of Lord of the Rings Extended DVD which she bought at only USD 40+! I was simply amazed! Damn, I want to get my hands on this box set for myself! It’s sold at (I think) nearly SGD 200 at shops locally!

On a side note, my recent attempts at combating SPAM bots seemed to have worked. I now use two plugins for this purpose: Bad Behaviour to block any spam bots from sucking my bandwidth try (i.e. blocking their access) and Akismet to filter any comments that bots which has passed through the first layer of defence post.

Somehow, this seemed to have worked to a pretty large extent – only 6 spam posts in two days compared to the 30+ per day from before!

Anyway I’ve added some form of advertisement on the site, powered by Adsense. I would call it a subtle way of placing it because you only see it if you view the posts on its own page. (i.e. when you click on the post title link.) I wonder how much I can earn by placing it like this. We shall see.

More later perhaps.

• Computer RAM – gosh, all the other parts are getting cheaper EXCEPT for this. Need 1GB more.
• Hard Drive – Hm…
• A new PHONE! Mine is two years old now.

… if I could afford it, I won’t mind getting a better graphic card. But that’s way out of the budget anyway.

And now… I still need…

• A new pair of shoes
• Some clothes
• Pants. Long and short ones

Class chalet tomorrow. Hope it doesn’t end up like the previous ones.