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When I was in secondary three (that’s nine years ago), I remember we had a new teacher in our school. He was Mr Gunasegaran, who taught us English. He was probably in his early 30’s, and had a very charming, youthful character. We all loved him because he was close to us and always made us laugh. After several weeks of teaching us English, he also became our PE teacher.

I remember one day, during one of our PE sessions, my friends and I were talking about something funny when Mr Guna, upon hearing our jokes, said to us “Hey… *points to his feet*… even my toes are laughing… hahaha”. We always enjoyed his lessons. To many of us, he was more than just a teacher. He was a friend, in and out of the classroom. A few days ago, I learned that our beloved Mr Guna had passed away.

A friend told me that he had fallen from a roof a week earlier, and had been in coma since. My body went numb upon learning this. A group of (current) students attended his funeral wake, which I’m sure I’d have gone if I’d known. Many of my former classmates didn’t know about it either. But as my friends Sanjay and Anton put it, at least Mr Guna left us all with good memories. I’m sure he will be fondly missed.

God bless his soul.

This has got to be the most random entry ever. Haha. I saw the pictures I’ve watermarked and uploaded for my Bali trip in my flickr, which reminded me that I still have unfinished business! LOL.

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Before my blog turns into some kind of a photoblog, allow me to slot in an entry that’s actually focused more on thoughts than photos. It’s been a while since I did this. I’m sure you’d agree. Some people asked me how long have I been a photographer. Well you know, for me, I think I am more of a blogger than a photographer. I love to take photos, and when I’m at it, 70% of the time I have my blog in mind. As far as photography is concerned, I’d say I’m still very much learning. I bought my first SLR camera after some months of saving, and when I showed it to my parents, Mom wasn’t very happy with the way I spent my hard earned money.

Obviously I do not make a living out of taking photos. I don’t get paid for taking nice photos. Yet, I splurged more than RM3K for an entry-level SLR camera which I love dearly even til today. For those of you who may not know, I had been eyeing an SLR camera since my early days of blogging. It was because I didn’t have the means to get one, I had to wait til I joined the workforce. The burning desire (to get an SLR) peaked during my first working trip to Singapore. I bought my EOS 400D in less than a week after I got home, and I never looked back.
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I shared with you stories of living in Japan in my previous post, let me now take you back on the ‘tourist’ course.

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A couple of days ago I was informed of a possible delay in the project I’m working on. Yesterday it was confirmed and therefore I will be allowed to return KL. I have never been out overseas this long before, so it will be nice to go back, chill with friends and family, and recharge. Sure, I can chill in Japan too while waiting for all systems to be up again, but they wouldn’t like to pay me everyday just to ‘chill’, right? If the delay is substantial then it’s actually economically-wiser to fly me home, and send me here again when everything’s resolved. Unless of course during this period I’m assigned to another project.

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I want to thank you all for the kind birthday wishes last month. I got most of them one day late, even though they were sent between 0000hrs and 0100hrs on my birthday. That’s because I didn’t have telco coverage at that time. We were somewhere outside Tokyo Bay. I received a birthday cake from the company too, which was pretty cool. I and another American engineer both celebrated birthdays on board the vessel together.

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I noticed that many people usually take photos of the view from their office windows, especially if they’re overseas for work or business meeting or something like that. I, too, have decided to post up some of mine…view from my ‘office’, pretty similar throughout the day. Heck, even throughout the month (for those of you who know, yeah… it’s been that long).

Yes. That was taken during good weather. Usually it’s only the sea, and sky. 65% of the time (since we’re not too far off shore), you get to see land. 0% of the time though, you get to see whales and dolphins.
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For many of you who’ve stepped foot on Japanese soil before, I bet there was one thing that you didn’t do while you were here. It’s something that most of us are not accustomed to. It even borders on absurdity. And I know that if I tell this to some of my friends back home, they’ll say it sounds a little wrong as well. While I’m sure you can find similar practices in other parts of the world, in my case I experienced it right here in Japan. It was a culture shock of sorts. I don’t know what we usually call it back home (because it’s so uncommon nobody actually bothered to come up with a term), but here they simply call it ‘public shower’.

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To a certain extent I think I’m lucky to have taken up Japanese 5 months ago. Although I’m still far from fluent, I imagine it would be much more difficult to communicate with the locals here, who speak little English (and a lot of Japanese, despite knowing that you can’t understand much of what they’re telling you anyway).

Yes la I censored my bookmark-cum-namecard!
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I feel like running head-on into a punching bag now. I was composing an entry when I got an MSN message - which was, by the way, nothing but a virus-infected URL - and like always, I wanted to close the window. I didn’t realize the window wasn’t maximized, and I accidentally closed my Firefox instead. I have decided to block the contact. Serve me right for not blocking her earlier, because everytime she came online, the same message would appear. Whatever happened just now has got to be the last straw. If it affects my blogging - which I haven’t been doing much lately - it affects me badly!

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