28 Jan 2018

Going Cashless with DBS Paylah at Food Centres

January 28, 2018

I made my way to ABC Brickworks Market and Food Centre while the heavy downpour added on to my depressing travel journey due to its location. My goal that night was to go cashless, meaning that I would only be using paylah from my mobile application to pay for my dinner.

The food centre was more like a ghost centre as more than half has already shut its shutters for the night. This place obviously caters to the lunch office crowd around the district. I wandered around trying to catch hold of the QR code stickers seen pasted on walls of hawker stalls.

Despite the fact that some stalls had their QR code stickers on their walls which allows payment made via paylah, I still got quite a couple of rejections. I finally got a glimmer of hope as I made my way to one last stall, persuading the aunty that I wanted to make my payment through paylah.

Like typical older generation folks, she was really skeptical about accepting cashless payment as I whipped out my mobile instead of cash. I had a bit of resistance from her as she kept questioning me, afraid that I would run away without paying. Throughout the payment process, I showed her the screen of my mobile, making sure that I had keyed in the correct amount to be paid and letting her see the green tick symbol before she finally stopped grumbling.

Cashless payment through paylah definitely was a hassle free solution, provided that these hawkers are willing to accept the new change in their lives towards digitalization. DBS is constantly working on it right now!

14 Jan 2018

Jewellery Design and Fabrication Short Course with Caratell

Arts and Crafts January 14, 2018

My fascination and curiosity in jewellery designing and production led me to sign up for the Jewellery Design and Fabrication short course/workshop with Caratell last year. It was held once a week from 7-10pm for about 4 months at Beacon International College. I did wondered why I was so greedy for skills and knowledge since I was also in the midst of attaining my part-time degree at the same time. Total fees I paid was S$1000.00 which excludes GST. Too bad at that point of time when I registered, the course was not yet made claimable under SkillFuture.

The lessons were taught by Michael Koh, a jewellery designer as well as the boss of Caratell. A friendly and approachable lecturer who is always willing to impart his skills and knowledge to his students. My course mates, including myself would always bombard him with plenty of jewellery related questions from designs to costing to technical and practical stuffs. We even visited his outlet at United Square and also his jewellery production workshop as well.

We all started off with basic sketching of what we would intend to produce. I basically stick to just using copper as my material (provided) since I did not want to risk investing into more expensive materials such as gold and silver which my other course mates did. Overall, I learnt about the processes from cutting shapes, annealing, polishing, craving, connecting joints, using moulds and more. It definitely wasn't easy and it takes plenty of practise and years of experience to reach Michael Lao Shi's (teacher) level of quality.

Although it could be torturous during certain point of time such as filing (a lot) to smoothen sharp edges and fumes from the torch that kept irritating my eyes during the annealing process, I did learnt a lot from Lao Shi. I kept changing my mind on the design and ended up creating the abstract stacked ring that could fit nicely on my finger. Having hands-on sessions are always fun as I get to relish the moments of honing my crafting skills in the process.

3 Jan 2018

Rounding Up my 2017 with a Touch of Photoshop

Digital Imaging January 03, 2018

2017 has been a playful year for me as I started to explore the artistic side of myself, trying to manipulate images with my mediocre photoshop skills which would perhaps be seen as a joke to those experts out there.

I probably found my source of inspiration and editing style leaning towards gamification and escapism. The Japanese anime "One Piece" would be my escapism while unrealistic landscapes and predicaments were influenced by the gamification concept. Somehow my overly wild escapism concept, together my editing got a little off the grid for some to tolerate, as seen in 2 to 3 of the following images below. Still images got a bit lifeless and I played around with gifs during the last few months in order to input some life/motions into them. If only I could handle motion graphics/animations and have more than 24 hours a day, I would definitely create more digital artworks for fun. Each edit took me an hour or more to complete.

Anyway I finally completed my part time studies of 2 years duration, in order to attain a degree while working. Loving the sense of freedom and the thought of not having to flip through notes while camping at Starbucks any longer. I even attended a hobbyist short course in jewellery fabrication as well, that lasted about 3-4 months and I have yet to blog about.

I am thankful to my blogger friend Kenny who brought me along as his +1 for countless fun events such as food tastings and some lifestyle ones this year. All my boat images below were shot by him too and I used them to play with my edits! I attended quite a couple of DBS events as well such as DBS FasTrack, Singapore Coffee Festival 2017, Pangdemonium's Fundraiser Concert - THE JAM and more. I had a chance to watch a magical theatrical performance - The Nutcracker, which I enjoyed so much. Not forgetting the crafts related skills which I picked up such as Finger Knitting, Arm Knitting, and Cross Stitch, which I would probably forget as time goes by.

Spending my Christmas volunteering and performing a small role as a delivery boy / thief in a church related performance was indeed thrilling, fun and satisfying. The play was about imparting good values to the audience and thankfully I need not speak much since the play was in mandarin.

I did not travel overseas this year but had a staycay with mum at Sentosa. I spent my New Year's Eve with the same group of bffs as during pre-Christmas. Although they were always annoyingly late for meet-ups, we had fun and took plenty of wefies with filters. Thank you to my different group of friends whom I still continued to hang out with, be it a meal or catching up throughout 2017.

Bye bye 2017 and hopefully 2018 would be more fulfilling and inspirational!