Okay this is related to guitars. I've got a Taylor acoustic and a Duesenberg electric guitar, but I'm having problems because both guitars have different neck scale lengths and I don't quite know which one I'm supposed to be practicing with! Alright this may be quite facetious to you if you don't care so much about guitars, but it matters to me! I will try to simplify this as best as I can.

The Taylor acoustic that I have is smaller most normal-sized guitars. Hence, the guitar neck is correspondingly narrower because its scale length is 23 1/2", well shorter than the average guitar of about 25" thereabouts. And it's superbly great because this is what makes it such a nice guitar to play with, cos I seldom have to do crazy finger stretching on the strings, and it is generally easier on my hands. The Duesenberg, however, has got a much longer and wider neck of scale length 25 3/5", and the frets are jumbo frets. Which just means that the frets are more spaced apart from each other, so the Duesenberg is more of a stretch than the Taylor. Which also meant that the Taylor spends more playing time with me haha.

Now that won't be a problem if I'm just practicing for an acoustic guitar set-up, but the problem arises when I have to play electric guitar! Because I'm so used to the Taylor 23 1/2" scale length, I am completely out of sorts with the Duesenberg 25 3/5" and I cannot adapt fast enough to the sudden jump in longer fret distances and finger stretching! And if you know guitars and their characteristics, the frets are never evenly spaced on any guitar; instead it bunches up more and more closer the higher up the neck you go. That's where the scale length comes in and wrecks havoc on my playing, especially on the Duesenberg! What was previously 3 frets spacing on the Taylor can be as little as 2 frets spacing on the Duesenberg especially on the higher registers, which means more stretching and a need to get used to my fingers allocation for all the frets.

And the problem works both ways. Once I start getting used to the longer scale length, it takes quite a while to get used to the shorter one. They say that most guitarists who play a lot of electric tend to get very heavy-handed and somehow become a lot slower when they play on the acoustic guitar instead, but for me I started out playing acoustic for years, so the hard-handed treatment got me flying on the electric! It is much easier to play on the electric cos the strings are "softer", so I can happily slide and bend and move faster generally. But the differences in scale length will have me at my throat, really.

(I should have included pictures, but nah lazy to put my guitars to the pose and snap)

I think my annual Good Friday and Easter celebrations seem to be trying to top each other every year. A few years back Youth Dept dedicated one SAY (youth) service especially for Good Fri, and every year ever since we have been having annual Good Fri services with small-scale dance or drama productions, and all the super high energy worship sessions and phenomenal preaching. I count it my privilege to be involved in some of them, either leading worship or playing or sharing short messages. And then last year Maj Paul brought his grand concept of decorations and displays inside out auditorium itself. The centerpiece was a 2 or 3m tall cross, with displays including the open tomb and Holy Communion etc.

This year was just as grand, with a new addition of a Garden of Gethsemane and about 70 drawings from us youths. I loved the peace and quietness of the hall which allowed me to just wander through each exhibit and reflecting on the stations of the cross. It's an open exhibit throughout the week, and since I'm in church so often, I steal ten minute breaks from studies and work to go into the hall.

And perhaps a constant challenge would be trying to keep the SAY services fresh. This year they had a dance and several characters narration. I was playing electric guitar for worship and it was a blast. Again, I'm most relaxed with the acoustic, but I'm trying hard to convert into a better electric guitarist haha. My left wrist and arm are hurting from excessive guitar playing.

One refrain that has beenn resonating a lot in my mind was"death, where is thy sting". The idea that sin and death has been conquered, because of grace I don't deserve and because of overwhelming love, it kinda messed my mind on how it all comes together. Freedom in Christ!

Shall continue my melodramatic posts on Mamee about two or three weeks back? So in that previous post I mentioned that I was very upset with Mamee not including sufficient seasoning packets for their 10-pack jumbo. Since that time, my sister has decided to buy the 10-pack to try her luck at the seasoning packets too, and it turned out that there are only 5 seasoning packets to last the entire 10! Which meant that the swindlers at Mamee fully intends for you to share one seasoning packet to TWO packs! This is a huge injustice and a breach of all ethical food packaging, because in the past it was one to one!!!!! Such gall. I'm probably never going to buy another Mamee pack ever again. 

Okay rant over. On a much much happier note, and still related to food, I finally found the one-litre Milo which they pack it in a UHT pack! I used to purchase these one-litre packs and guzzle myself silly whenever I have to teach marathon tuition sessions, or when I have to stay up all night to do assignments. But in the whole of last year and this year, I haven't seen these one-litre packs on sale at all. Not even once. All I see of Milo were those tin cans of powder, or they sell it in 6-packs of 200ml. But a 200ml pack isn't the same as one full litre! So I ended up switching to Vitasoy one-litres instead for most of last year. But guess what, I finally found it stocked again on the NTUC shelves today! 

I risk sounding very very bimbotic and frivolous in all these blog posts. Sorry. I will try to act my quarter-of-a-century age. 

This blog post is prompted by a mini discussion on Twitter with a friend haha. It is with a certain sadness that I recently read that they are retiring MSN Messenger, or Windows Live Messenger. Never quite knew what to call it, because we always just call it MSN for short, but I think they undergone some name change before, hence Windows Live. For whatever reasons that come into play, they have decided to migrate this instant messaging platform to Skype, and that's it, no more MSN.

In a way it does not really affect my life now, because I think it must be at least two or three years since I last logged in to MSN, and as far as I know, very very few of my friends are still found there either! If I log in now it is probably a ghost town, and the E-buddy app thing to log on to MSN which I have on my phone is as good as useless. But contrast this to my secondary school and JC days (and possibly most of my army days too), MSN was practically where 75% of my social interactions took place. This was an era before Facebook and Twitter and Whatsapp and iPhone (first iPhone was 2007 I think) and what have you now that you can instantaneously send short messages to each other. Nowadays all the social and business chats are completed on my phone on Whatsapp, and sometimes email is dispensable too.

I guess in those "dark ages" of Internet's infancy years, the only way to sustain a decent conversation with someone was to get a computer, get online, and get on MSN to chat. Texting on the phone don't quite make the instantaneous grade, and calling may get too awkward or costly. MSN had cool smileys for just about any purpose, and if that wasn't enough you can add in more of your own too! I had one "stick out tongue" one which I really really liked, but I can't ever seem to find it now. And progressively they came up with group chats and 'nudge' functions and video conferencing and all these cool stuff.

I won't be ashamed to say that MSN was the place where I dated a lot! Okay, dated virtually haha. But it brought a lot of friendships and relationships closer. It is also possibly the cause of my late night owl habits too, because to go to sleep early meant missing out on conversations. Group chats with cell groups and project groups and JC orientation groups, haha that's where all the scandals are formed and solidarities forged. I could rant and rave without being too self-conscious because it isn't face-to-face, which meant closer sharing of stories and experiences! All those thrashy talk about how instant messaging and Facebook depersonalizes friendships are NOT true for me. I think I made a great counselor on MSN hahaha. 

It's a nostalgia virtual land of past happiness and sadness. Of course, when I first started Sec 1 and 2 cell leading six years back, the kiddies refused to get on MSN because they'd much rather flood me with calls and text messages. The young ones don't know any better hahaha. And when I did eventually move on to iPhone, I can't imaging life now without the phone-based instant messaging apps. I can't quite keep up with time and technology, but MSN's still a great platform for what it was for me. This blog post can't claim to give it the tribute it has in my formative years hahaha. In fact, very soon, blogging may just retire too. This world now demands instantaneous and short messages (hence, Twitter). You should treasure this trove I have here [sticks tongue out emoticon].

I usually try to maintain this blog with happy posts, but of late I am getting increasingly disappointed with certain things, and among the chief culprit this time is Mamee Monster noodle snack! I'm pretty sure that snack is not entirely ancient old-school because I still see it around commonly. It's a crunchy instant noodle snack with a small packet of seasoning, which you have to pour right into the noodle packet and you can eat it without cooking. I give in to the occasional snack once in a while, and I love Mamee because the seasoning is literally an MSG bomb! It's so salty that it wakes me up like a jolt, and eating one packet probably maxes out my sodium allowance for the day, but I still like it! My primary school days were spent guzzling the salty MSG in the truckloads I think, and it didn't help that it was selling at 10 cents a packet. These days I think I may not even be able to find it in schools anymore, because it is undoubtedly a health hazard.

In the past they used to package the seasoning packet into each individual noodle packet itself, but nowadays if you buy the jumbo pack of ten, they pack the seasoning separately from the noodle packets. Now that to me is fine, but I got one such jumbo pack last week and I'm tremendously upset because I discovered that instead of ten altogether, there were only nine!!! And worst of all, they only packed four seasoning packets!!! It is absolutely unforgivable! I don't mind if it was some machine logistic error that accounted for nine packets instead of ten, but the very least they could do is to ensure that there are nine corresponding seasoning packets! Now I feel like they are cutting corners at everything and terribly short-changing everyone. How do you expect me to eat Mamee without sufficient seasoning packets! Takes the whole joy out of it.

Friend told me that he got his jumbo pack in Indonesia or Malaysia, and the same thing happened: not enough seasoning packets. I want to keep faith and think that I just got the isolated jumbo pack error, but I'm upset and disgruntled and don't wish to try anymore.  

Something rather trivial and random. A couple of days back I met up with a group of new friends that I got to know through Twitter! It's one of those weird things where we know each other from Twitter and we follow each other's lives through Twitter, and just based on that relationship we count each other as friends even though we've never met. The story began when I took up a rotation curation job for an NUS Twitter account. The idea goes that you will hold administrative rights to that account for one week, and you can tweet about anything you want, but after the one week you gotta pass it on to the next person, and so on. The really cool thing was I got to meet a group of Twitter friends while on that curator job, and we eventually kept in touch on our personal accounts after that. A couple of them are also curators too, so it makes it all the more easier. 

And it is an incredibly strange "tweet-up" (meet-up), because here are a bunch of people that I converse a lot to on Twitter, but have never spoken to them in real life. I know they kinda exist in person, as can be seen from their display pictures or their occasional selfie photos. It's fascinating to know that they have an actual name, compared to knowing them by their Twitter handle. For the most part, the tweet-up was quite great, they are really nice people and I'm thankful for this convoluted way of meeting new people. Funny how us apparent strangers can gather out of nowhere and have decent conversations like this. Now who says you cannot meet nice people online???