dens|ee*

I have aban­doned my blog for long enough and I thought it is time to do some­thing. So I cleaned up the design a bit, fixed some JavaScript errors and wrote this post.

Time con­strain is a bitch. Although I wish to blog more often but blog­ging just take too much time off my hands. So instead of tak­ing the time to put up all my thoughts, pic­tures and videos on my blog, I turned to micro-blogging plat­forms like Twit­ter, Face­book and Insta­gram instead.

Until recently, when I received the domain renewal notice from my host­ing com­pany, I decided not to renew my host­ing and shut­down this blog for good.

Ok I was just kid­ding. Hahaha… Did I sur­prise you? Just try­ing to pull a belated April-fool joke :p I will never throw this 5-year-old baby out the win­dow just like that.

The blog is here to stay, but what should I do with it next? Keep it vacant as it is and update 3 times a year and mak­ing promises to update more often which I know I can never keep?

Well, I have no idea either. I was think­ing to turn this blog into some­thing else maybe a Tum­blr blog or some­thing more advanced like an auto­mated tweets and Insta­gram com­pi­la­tion blog. But I guess that will take quite a lot of time to imple­ment too. Oh well.

So until I fig­ure out what to do next, there will be noth­ing much to see here. Or you have bet­ter ideas? Do let me know.

Till next time, ciao.

Oh ya, there’s one more thing. Do fol­low me on Twit­ter or Insta­gram for more updates. Just search for my user­name “denslee”

Frankly, I know noth­ing about Viet­nam before this. I thought it would be less devel­oped and major­ity of the peo­ple still liv­ing in poverty.

But man I was proven so wrong after the 5-day trip to Ho Chi Minh City (the cap­i­tal of Viet­nam) in early Novem­ber 2011 with Peter and Sophea.

This post is about my first impres­sion of Viet­nam in gen­eral, I’ll post my trav­el­ogue soon.

HCMC (short for Ho Chi Minh City) is a big city which I didn’t expect it to be that big with so many skyscrapers.

There are sev­eral things I found it inter­est­ing in HCMC and the first thing that had us jaw-dropped when we arrived at the city was of course, the infa­mous traf­fic situation.

The amount of motor­cy­cles on the road was just incred­i­ble. How they dis­hon­our the traf­fic lights, criss-crossing among each other while honk­ing all the way was really an eye-opening scene.

Another inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non is how Viet­namese love their coffee.

Drink­ing cof­fee is like their cul­ture, their iden­tity and their only rea­son to con­tinue liv­ing. Okay maybe not to that extend.

But their love for cof­fee is def­i­nitely unde­ni­able. You will see peo­ple sell­ing and drink­ing cof­fee at every side­walk all day long. When Viet­namese talk about their cof­fee, their eyes sparkle. If they can put cof­fee beans on their national flag, I bet they would.

So what is so spe­cial about their cof­fee? The cof­fee has some spe­cial roasted taste and it tastes really really kao (thick) it’s almost like the espresso of the espresso.

When added with some con­densed milk and lots and lots of ice (usu­ally how they drink it), the taste is just superb and satisfying!

It took me a few try to get used to the taste of the cof­fee and the sweet­ness they used to drink, but once you get used to it, you will def­i­nitely ask for more.

Another thing that caught me by sur­prise in HCMC is the num­ber of lux­ury brand stores they have there.

Louis Vuit­ton, Chanel, Ver­sace, Jimmy Choo and Burberry just to men­tion a few. And sur­pris­ingly, their prices are so much cheaper than Malaysia, almost by half! Too bad even cheaper by half I still can’t afford a sin­gle item from those places.

So this is it, my ini­tial impres­sion of Viet­nam in gen­eral. The city is devel­op­ing and the peo­ple are progressing.

I’ll post my trav­el­ogue from day 1 to 5 soon where we found out the painful his­tory of the Viet­namese peo­ple and a num­ber of inci­dents that caught us off guard includ­ing how I lost and found my pre­cious belong­ing.

Stay tuned.

First post after 8 months!!!

I know… I know… I’ve been gone for a very long time. And for those who have been chas­ing me for updates, I’m really sorry about that.

I stopped blog­ging 8 months ago because there were some changes in my life.

But due to some per­sonal rea­sons, I can’t write about them. If I can’t write about them, my blog is not “up-to-date”. If my blog is not up-to-date, I bet­ter off not writ­ing anything.

Exe­cuses I know.

But time flies, I didn’t realise that stop­ping for a while would be 8 months long.

Many things have hap­pened and many things have changed.

First and fore­most, I quit­ted my full-time job!!!

Ok maybe this is not a break­ing news any­more for those who know me in per­son since it hap­pened months ago.

In a nut­shell, I resigned from my posi­tion as a Senior Web Designer from a glob­alised local uni­ver­sity and started free­lanc­ing web design and devel­op­ment jobs.

It was a big step for me and it was life changing.

It’s not easy at first espe­cially when money is run­ning low and clients refuse to pay. But that’s the price I need to pay for free­dom and lifestyle. I’ll leave the details for another post (if there is another post :p).

Okay, so what else hap­pened? Actu­ally I can’t really remem­ber after so many months. I have bad memories.

For now, I will leave you with a pic­ture from the trip to Viet­nam early this month. Full story com­ing soon (I hope).

Cityscape view of Ho Chi Minh City from the Bitexco Finan­cial Tower’s obser­va­tion deck at level 47.