plaxoed!

I hit my Flickr upload limit for the month so it looks like I’ll have to wait a few days before I can upload the latest pictures I took today at Macao… which makes me wonder, why do they bother to have a 2GB/month limit for pro accounts? I figure most pro members don’t use their full 2GB bandwidth each month anyways (I know I usually don’t) and for the rare occasion that pro members do hit the 2GB limit, it’s quite annoying.

I mean, if my trip had started in early August and I had run out of my 2GB bandwidth allocation in mid-August and was unable to upload pictures for a few weeks, that would really tick me off. Is it really that cost-prohibitive for Flickr to offer unlimited uploads to their pro users?

Well, I didn’t get to finish blogging about Singapore last night, so on to Day 2 in Singapore!

We woke up and went to Chinatown to walk around and pick up some food. We followed another great walking tour and saw a ton of sights including a street market, a temple, a mosque, and of course, a food court!

If you’re ever in Singapore Chinatown, I definitely recommend you check out the Maxwell food centre, and in particular, try the $2 Laksa and $4 sliced fish bee hoon (a fish noodle soup).

After filling up our stomaches, we went to Bugis street, which is another large shopping area. There’s a nice air conditioned mall called Bugis junction and there’s also a flea market style area with lots of little shops and a ton of local flair.

Also in the Bugis area is the Singapore National Library, which as it turns out is much cooler than it sounds. It’s got some pretty cool architecture, great views from the top floors, and even an outdoor courtyard area for people taking a study break.

After the library, we headed to Esplanade, a crazy double durian shaped structure that houses Singapore’s concert hall and theatre.

Inside Esplanade they’ve got some art pieces on display, a few restaurants, and a rooftop deck! If you’re in the area in the afternoon, the Japanese restaurant has a great happy hour deal (a bowl of udon noodles, a hand roll, and tea for $5 SGD… very tasty ).

Lastly, we saw the Merlion on the waterfront downtown… which is where I had my accident. But once again, it’s getting late so I’ll save that story for tomorrow

We spent 5 days in Thailand, which was just about enough to relax a little at the resort and get a good feel for Bangkok. Our next stop would be Singapore, where we would have 2 days and 2 nights; we could probably have used another day here in Singapore - we had an action packed time running around in taxis, the MRT, and buses.

Right after we got to Singapore and checked into our hotel, we rode the MRT to Little India. It was our first stop in Singapore and so we quickly introduced ourselves to the s’porean food court system

Next, we went on a walking tour through Little India - the guide brochure was provided for free by the Singaporean government

To finish the night, we walked around Orchard Rd - where our hotel was at. A pretty lively shopping area, even at night. There were street side vendors and the malls were open pretty late. Our first stop was to eat at Food Republic, a food court inside the Wisma Atria mall.

Then we did a little window shopping…

Finally, we got back to our hotel and saw this hilarious sign:

Like I said, action packed Check out the rest of the pictures from our first day in Singapore on my Flickr. I’ll be back tomorrow to blog on the rest of our Singapore stay; in the meantime, it’s bedtime over here in Hong Kong

For those who have been watching my Flickr stream, you’ve probably noticed that there’s been a huge influx of pictures in the past few days and that it’s been of very international locations. That’s becuase I’ve been on vacation for the past week and a half in Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. I rarely go on vacation, but Rose’s cousin was getting married in Thailand so we decided to take an extended Southeast Asia trip and spend a little time away from the daily grind.

I haven’t had very good internet access until I got to Hong Kong, so I wasn’t able to upload any pictures or do any blogging - I was barely able to catch up on e-mail But now that I’ve got a good broadband connection again, I should be able to do some catch up posts on the trip so far.

Our first stop was Thailand for the wedding. It was held at a nice all-inclusive resort called Evason Resort and Spa in Hua Hin. If don’t mind all the traveling (flight to Thailand and then a 3 hour bus ride), it’s quite a nice place to relax. It’s right by the beach, has good food, great weather, a nice swimming pool (can’t swim in the ocean because of jellyfish) and you can get a 90 minute Thai massage right next door for $300 Baht (approximately $9 USD).

After the wedding, we rode a van back to Bangkok and spent a few days there seeing the sights and doing a lot of shopping. The best part is the super cheap food from roadside vendors. You can get a fresh fruit drink for $10 Baht (about $0.25) and tasty meat on a stick for $5 Baht (maybe $0.15) An hour Taxi ride is about $100 Baht (less than $3 USD) and a super tasty bowl of local noodles cost $15 Baht (less than $0.50)!

Going to Thailand first definitely spoiled us a little bit price-wise. For the next two stops we were continuously comparing against Thailand prices and complaining about how expensive everything was.

That’ll be all for tonight. Enjoy the pictures and I’ll be posting again tomorrow about Singapore!

Saw Scoble’s post on the IDEO display at the Palo Alto Art Center last month and so one day last week Joseph and I went to check it out during Lunch. Overall, there was some cool stuff, but we were kind of underwhelmed :S We thought we’d be blown away by awesome designs and concepts, but save a few cool trinkets here and there, most things were… well… strange and impractical. Kinda like manifestations of all those random ideas you have when you’re just sitting around - except this time someone is actually getting paid to build those ideas. I still admire IDEO, but not so much for the work they do; I now admire them for the fact that they’re able to get paid ridiculous amounts of money to make random ideas a reality

Don’t believe me? Judge for yourself! Here’s a future work station for Herman Miller:

And here’s a new DJ mixing table:

A nice shelter made out of recyclable materials (not sure who’ll live there or where )

Random trinkets

A CD player that looks like a tablesaw… sweet! (who uses CDs anymore )

Cool sunglasses

I’ll have to assume this is old…

Maybe a best-seller in Japan (I wouldn’t mind having one though):

And of course the required pictures of the next generation shopping cart!

I did like the design of the exhibit and the explanation of the IDEO brainstorming process though.

Sounds like a great place to work (if you don’t mind that most of the stuff you create never makes it to production) - I’m definitely jealous

Check out my Flickr set for more pictures of the exhibit

My last post was actually post #300 on this blog; while that’s way behind many active bloggers, it seems like a lot to me

So much has happened this past year and a half that it seems like an eternity ago when I first typed out those fateful first words at http://99zeros.blogspot.com. My blog has been really slow going these past few months since I’ve been really busy… how long will it take me to make it to another 300?

A few months ago I was chatting with Seth and we were discussing this idea of embedding a Meebo chat widget into blogs and other sites and today they’ve launched the feature called MeeboMe!

Of course, I’ve added the widget here on my blog. Let’s see if I can embed it into my blog post too…

Does that work in your blog reader? Let me know