It’s time for another of my monologues. So exciting!

My unispins are coming along just fine. I’m learning to ride forward, stop and hop a bit, unispin, then continue riding now. Progress is good and I daresay I’m landing almost 60-70% of those unispins. Rate increases to about 90% when I’m slightly intoxicated (due to a cooking experiment with alcohol gone wrong).

I’m trying out hand positions for 360 unispins. Contrary to what I had suggested earlier on about hand positions, the one that I had been practising all along doesn’t work at all. It’s all fine and perfect if I were to use that for a 360 jump mount (assuming I can pull that off) but once I’m on the uni, the balance point is VERY WRONG and that position will either pull some muscles in my arms or damage a few fingers. What seems to work though is to have my hands in the same position as in a 180 unispin, except to re-position my spinning arm in mid-air such that that hand’s the one that will be pulling the seat up at landing. It’s hard to describe it. If anyone’s interested in a discussion, I’ll be glad to show.

A couple of bruises later (mostly caused by this particular accident where the velcro on my guards came loose and hooked themselves to the other guard), I was worn out and moved on to less intensive tricks - one-foot wheelwalking and stand-up wheelwalking.

I’m starting to get better at one-foot wheelwalking. I started learning while wearing Converse shoes (the soles are flat and great for that) but they wore off at an alarming rate so I’ve switched to wearing my Nikes to uni these days. I’m starting to get the hang of the backstrokes and getting a bit of balance at a standstill just before I continue with the next downstroke. I try to remind myself to switch into a wheelwalk each time I lose my balance but I tend to forget sometimes. Transitions from wheelwalk to one-foot wheelwalk would need a little more practice. Next thing to learn might be unispin-to-wheelwalk.

Today, I’ve also got a little better at stand-up wheelwalking. I think I’ve figured out the technique and it feels very similar to one-foot wheelwalking. I seem to have most success when I lean backwards a little such that the toes on my stationary foot barely touches the wheel. I realise that each forward stroke would cause me to bend forward a little and cause that stationary foot to move away from the wheel. Here’s the important part: At that point in time, I’d try to relax a little such that my wheel moves forward more, causing me to lean backwards once again and have that stationary foot rub against and slowing down the wheel. The whole idea, if I’m not mistaken, is to have the moving foot take over what I’m doing with my stationary foot at the moment to control the speed of the wheel and get my balance back.

I’ll report back again once I manage to get that right.

Tags: unicycling, wheelwalk, unispin

I’ve this last minute assignment in which I’m supposed to write up on funny blogs on the net. I was specifically referred to a few to get an idea of what was wanted with the reminder that I’m writing for a family magazine so tone down the content a little.

Some of the blogs I’m reading (given to me by Boss Dude) are hilarious. This one entry in particular takes the cake. It contains nude pictures of specific male body parts though so don’t be clicking it if you’re at work or don’t like to see naked men.  The post is titled ‘Reader’s Pole ‘07′

I chanced upon this blog post some time back and have been meaning to bake a batch of biscuits since then (this sounds very Martha Stewart I know). So since I had the day to myself yesterday, I did that.

Sad thing is, I think I added too much flour so they became bastard scones instead of nice brown biscuits with moist centers.  And there wasn’t a temperature setting on my oven (there were only 1-10 markings) so I probably have it on to some wrong temperature too. Will try making them again once I get rid of the ones at home. They taste pretty decent though so that’s a good sign.

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There was a food fair a bus ride from my place and I was there today. The place was packed and most of the vendors were selling uncooked food so it was really a food fair and not a food festival as some people might assume. There were some rather interesting sights though. This one booth was selling bread and had someone in a costume prancing around.

Another booth was selling drinks called Anything and Whatever.

The idea is to have the cans contain a mystery beverage (one of six different kinds) and no one would know what he’s got til he opens the can. Just last week, one of my friends was just remarking that someone should set up a food stall called ‘Anything’ because Singaporeans have this habit of replying that to questions on what they’d like to eat.

Well, yeah, whatever.

Tags: food, baking

Since I’ve got some time to spare while waiting for my files to copy, I thought I’d talk a bit about what I’m learning now.

How to Unispin

I’m re-learning the unispin as some of you might know. Progress is slow because
1) I’m still wussy
2) I still can’t hop really well (better now though)
3) I have very little stamina
4) I didn’t really learn to 180 jump mount when I learnt it the first time round.

When I learnt to unispin some months back, I did it by sheer willpower and force, it’s far from being elegant (hey, it’s a freestyle trick so it should be elegant right?). I learnt to jump mount first and after that it was onto ‘hop, hop, SPIN, TRY TO LAND OH NO I MISSED REDO!’

If you’ve been keeping track, yeah I did learn to unispin but I exerted too much force on the seat (one hand was positioned at the back of the seat while the other held the handle), compensating for my lack of skill with stability from vaulting over my uni during the spin. It worked definitely but I wanted to learn to 360 unispin and that will not transit well.

So the past couple of days, I’ve been relearning specifically the hand positions of unispins from scratch. The plan is this
1) Get comfy with jump mounts with 1 hand on seat (I could do this previously too)
2a) Get comfy with 180 jump mounts
2b) Get comfy with 180 jump mounts with minimal weight exerted by hands
2c) Get comfy with 180 jump mounts where one hand is used solely to spin the uni (ie. when I land, I should have only 1 hand on my uni seat, positioned in the middle of the seat)
3) Try to unispin with the same hand placement (one hand in middle, thumb on seat facing me, the other hand on back of seat)
4) Unispin with 1 hand on seat when I land.

Today, I managed to get pretty steady on part 4 but I feel that I’m still using the other hand to counter-weigh myself when I’m in the air. The good thing though, is that my landing rate is pretty decent and I’m not as afraid anymore because the landings feel waaaay more steady than previously. Now all I have to do is to cut down on the many pre-hops and post-hops.

Notes:
a) If you’re learning to unispin, learn on the grass. Less scary and it holds your uni in place. (Cons: It’s almost impossible to ride off initially)
b) Having the hand position in the center really makes it feel more steady than with hands at the each end once you get used to it. The spin’s faster and more consistant too.
c) 180 unispins do not require you to jump up high. You don’t even need to jump enough to clear the wheel if you’re jumping with your legs spread a bit.

Tags: unispin, unicycle, stunts, street, unicycling

Someone requested for a basic juggling tutorial on YouTube so here goes.

2-ball juggling is pretty important if you want to be doing some 3-ball routines like The Factory, Pendulum, Yo-Yo, etc and is necessary for moving on to learning 4-ball juggling. In fact, you can actually learn 4-ball juggling without ever learning to do 3.

Music in the video’s called Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On by Jerry Lewis, the same guy who sang Great Balls of Fire.

I’m wearing a Threadless shirt called My Pet Human.

I’m quite fond of Threadless shirts for juggling because unlike MOST female tees, they’re actually long enough to not have half my torso showing when I raise my hands. It’s also good that they seem to complement my bedroom walls.

Tags: threadless, juggling, humor

To celebrate the new Shrek movie (which really is two movies too many), the local McDonald’s went into overdrive unleashing tie-ins on its unsuspecting customers. There’s green milkshake (honeydew), green lime sundaes, green fries (seaweed powder) and possibly more if you count the unintentionally mouldy food left behind on the floors by kids.  But that’s not the point.

In addition to the nuclear waste-colored food, more importantly, check out the counter staff.

I didn’t want to incur the ogre-wrath of the green-earred ones so I took the picture from a distance (which explains why it’s blur). Apparently, the headbands are sold for $2 with proceeds going to some charity. Take a look for yourself if you’re passing by.

In other news, I was surfing the net a bit and found myself looking at the side views of people. And I realised I haven’t actually seen my side view before since well, my eyes don’t grow that way so I started taking pictures of myself from the side.

It might sound stupid but I don’t really recognize myself from that angle. I also think I don’t look very chinese.

IS IT NORMAL NOT TO RECOGNIZE YOUR OWN FACE???

Tags: shrek, mcdonald’s, mugshot, headshots

That’s my display pic on MSN when this conversation occured…

Person:  Your boyfriend looks like he’s stifling a yawn

Me: he IS yawning.

Me: let me come up with a cool story

Me: I’m such a good kisser, my boyfriend suffered lockjaw.

So quit asking if I bored him. That’s the official story.

In between rounds of We Love Katamari and Ossu Tatakae Ouendan 2 while sort of preparing for an interview tomorrow, I started musing about why I got to be involved with the industry.

I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons. They’re cheesy and the funniest shows on Earth. The most memorable shows as a kid included Disney’s Gummi Bears, The Wuzzles, Captain Planet, The Simpsons (although it’s debatable if this is considered kiddy fare) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I never had a videogame console growing up (my first was a psOne when I was 17) and I kept with a Pentium 1 computer til 4 years back. The only videogames I played as a kid were those at the arcade where my aunt would bring me once in a while. Even then I had my parents screaming at me (and her) for wasting money.

Thinking back, that perhaps had the most influence on the sort of games I enjoy. My computer couldn’t accomodate new games so I discovered old LucasArts adventure titles like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis which had the same sort of cheesy humor as the Saturday cartoons. It helped that old games were sold for much much cheaper (Indy Jones sold for $3 on CD-ROM back in 1996).

Then games became more expensive.

And that was when I got into gaming really.

It occurred to me one day that if I had a job that required the playing of videogames, I’d be getting a steady stream of games to play. So I found me a job that paid me to do just that and promised a regular flow of new games. And that was how it started.

No fancy stories about how I’m inspired to make this a career having played through the Saturn, SNES and Genesis games as a 5 year old tot.

My tale’s kinda disappointing really.

I’m back from a 2 week long vacation. Hong Kong had cheap McDonald’s milkshakes while Phuket just had cheap everything. Returned home to a whole bunch of emails (200 and counting), 70% of them spam from some phoney address pestering me to increase my non-existant penis size. I’ve 2 pieces of snail mail on my desk, one a phone bill and the other a government letter telling me to claim some monetary rebate - the irony.

I’ll be doing up some juggling vids soon enough, probably after a haircut. It’s essential to get the haircut down soon because I’ve managed to have the singularly most unattractive photo of myself taken in Hong Kong that has me look like this:

 And I’m *really* not nearing 50 yet.

More photos and stories when I wake up.

My mom and aunt introduced me to this little cafe place (we had coffee there) where I saw the largest slice of pizza selling for $2.80.

The cafe’s a bakery sort of place so the pizza tasted more like an open-faced bun than a real pizza.  It had corn, bacon, cheese, mayonaise, sun-dried tomatoes (I think), meat floss, some parsley and probably all sorts of fillings leftover from the other breads in the shop. Not entirely nice but still worthy of mention I guess, because of the price (and size).

In other news, the Miyata unicycle I so coverted as a souvenir from Hong Kong is apparently no longer selling at the shop. So I’ll probably wait out some time and decide if I want to ship one over. Probably when I get what we call a job which pays the stuff called money that’s used to trade for goods. Yes, I’ll be off on vacation on Sunday so I’ll be updating only after 19th May. Or maybe on the 12th. I’ll first be off to Hong Kong for a couple of days before returning and then flying to Phuket.

Oh and one last thing. I’ve read (or seen, can’t recall) that Desperate Housewives star, Eva Longoria (Gabrielle on the show) could stuff herself in a suitcase.

So well, for the record,

 I apparently can’t. Either that or I need a bigger suitcase.

Tags: vacation, suitcase

… where you feel so lazy and don’t want to go out because it’s wet and gloomy.

I spent the good part of the afternoon juggling, first playing around with bounce balls and underleg bounces and then moving on to regular (meaning unbounceable) beanbags. I found out this week that my bounce balls are similar to the oddballs that are being sold in juggling shops except there’s probably less quality-control for mine since they’re being sold as kiddie toys. The ones I have have 3 sets of bounce heights so they take a little getting used to.

After an hour or two, I think I’m starting to get the hang of 5-ball cascade. I’ve got a little problem with keeping my throws regular though - my left throws higher than my right - but hopefully that will iron out soon. I’m also getting the hang of backcrosses but I can’t do them continuously (I’m assuming it can be done since I managed 2 iterations a couple of times). Backcrosses ought to look rather impressive when combined with some of the other tricks. The last noteworthy thing I worked on today is a whole new trick inspired by cigar boxes and uh… Romeo’s Revenge.

My next goal now is to get my juggling up to scratch, hopefully learn and be solid in 5 ball juggling and compile a video. That will probably be end May or beginning of June. It’d be fun I hope.

It takes an idle hour and a random surfing of one of those networking sites (the ones where you can look at what your ex-classmates and acquaintances have been up to) to make me like my life a little more. Because for every one interesting person around, there’re probably 10 with a mundane enough life to make Animal Planet look like an action thriller.

There’re all these people, some of whom you went to class with; some look different with a funky new haircut; some don’t look like they’ve changed much from the personality-deficient blob they once were. There’re people who write that their hobbies include eating and sleeping and you tend to agree that they do little apart from that from the way they phrase their sentences (although these days, I’m starting to fall into this category myself… worrying). Some people change, some people don’t. Most are happy to stay the way they were - normal. There’re people who think that the most exciting event that could happen is a night getting stoned on martinis and vodkas in a club/pub and dancing the night away is what the young and reckless do. The social retards would obviously disagree with such habits because a simple evening spent at home - alone - fighting off terrorists in Counterstrike or whichever multiplayer FPS strikes their fancy is much preferred. Oh and don’t get me started on Maple Story.

No, I don’t think I’ll be trading my life for anyone else’s.

Does this trick have a name already? I’m fiddling around with juggling and thought this can look rather cool. It’s rather sketchy in the video so does anyone have suggestions on how to make it look more elegant?

Scrambled eggs are the best sort of eggs there are. I added a bit of parmesan cheese and oregano in here so it looks (and tastes) better.

Then I couldn’t find bread to toast.