Pooters the Happy Scooter.

Sun, 17 Jan 2010
2 min read
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Had to go for a Digital Storytelling Workshop organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore over the last few days. This is the product of the workshop.

The YouTube link here in case you can’t see the embedded video.

The script we had to write:

Pooters the Happy Scooter
By Laremy Lee

The first thing I do before first-time pillion riders get on my bike is to introduce my scooter to them. “My scooter’s name is Pooters,” I will say. “Pooters?” they will ask. “But why?” My response: “Because it poots.”

Pooters is a Vespa ET8 that I’ve owned since receiving my motorcycle license back in 2004. When I bought Pooters, it was black in colour. After Pooters and I met with our first accident in 2005, however, my father nagged me into painting Pooters white. Since then, Pooters and I have been in two more accidents, so maybe it’s not really about its colour.

Pooters has a knack of endearing itself to everyone it meets. While Pooters’s fan base is innumerable, let me settle this matter once and for all: I am Pooters’s biggest fan. After me, comes my girlfriend, and after her, the cats in my neighbourhood. I just wish they’d stop leaving their paw prints on Pooters’s seat.

I like to think that the reason why Pooters is so popular is because Pooters is A Happy Scooter that smiles at everyone and everything it sees. I know it sounds like mere whimsy on my part, but rest assured that you’re not gonna get a chance to ride on Pooters if you don’t agree with us.

Though it isn’t always rainbows and unicorns with Pooters, you know. One of my biggest bugbears is Pooters’s temperament: it often breaks down at the most inconvenient of times. Compound that with Singapore’s penchant for rain, and it’s a surefire recipe for an unpleasant commute.

Does this mean I’ll be trading Pooters in for another vehicle anytime soon? Well, for all its quirks, Pooters occupies a special place in my heart. Until the day comes for us to ride under the giant ERP gantry in the sky, you’ll still find us pooting merrily down the roads of Singapore together, Pooters and I.

Playing with words.

Tue, 29 Dec 2009
2 min read
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Finally – a slightly more personal post after so long! (Aaron Ho would be pleased.)

While I was in Bali, I worked on a short story when there wasn’t any sightseeing to be done. After finishing a draft of the story, however, I realised it read more like the Chapter One of a novella. That’s fine too, I guess, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to finish writing that.

In any case, I’ve just finished tweaking the draft a bit and I thought I’d check if I’d used any words too many times. Apart from being a fun tool to play around with, Wordle helps quite a bit here.

The picture you see above is a word cloud of the story – the greater the number of times a word is used, the bigger the font size of the word in the cloud.

It seemed I used ‘around’ a bit too much as a preposition, so I modified some occurrences. ‘Toward’ has the next highest hit, but it’s harder to replace the word.

I’ll post the story/Chapter One up when I’m done getting feedback on it and editing it. Merry Christmas, everyone and have a Happy New Year!

Potential concert set lists that The Killers might use.

Sat, 14 Nov 2009
1 min read
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You can find them here. Just click on the link on the right-hand side of each row.

P.S. I know you might think this ultra-nerdy, and I make no bones about the bookishness of this exercise.

From past experience, however, ‘mugging’ for concerts does have its payoffs. If you can remember the lyrics to all the songs, you can sing along/mosh while the band plays. It’s a heightened experience, and it gives you more bang for your buck. And with ticket prices in the three-digit range for this particular gig, I’m sure you’ll want as much bang for your buck as you can get.