dens|ee*

I went to Tech­duol­ogy LIVE 2013 last Sat­ur­day and walked away with noth­ing Well, at least I walked away with some nice pictures

If you never heard of Tech­duol­ogy before, it is a show on YouTube hosted by Jason Goh aka smash­pOp and also Ben from Fly FM where they talk about the lat­est and trendi­est tech­nol­ogy out there every week. Every year end when it’s close to Christ­mas, they will take the show to the audi­ence and give away gazil­lion good­ies where it will make you feel like Santa Clause actu­ally does exists.

And every year, they will invite dif­fer­ent guests to go on the show and this year, they have invited the well known stand-up come­dian Kuah Jenhan.

I’ve been to Tech­duol­ogy LIVE con­tin­u­ously for 3 years now and year after year they are giv­ing away big­ger and bet­ter prizes includ­ing the lat­est Nokia smart phones, head­phones, phone cases, gad­gets and other count­less goodies.

And when I say count­less good­ies, I really mean it. Lumia phones, Case­ta­grams, Sony head­phones, Jabra wire­less speak­ers, Muku Labs Shuttr, Puma good­ies, free stay at G Hotel Penang, AWSM t-shirts and many more. Does it make you sali­vat­ing yet? Well they cer­tainly made me.

Okay, so this is the part where I’m sup­pose to write some­thing and hope­fully I will stand a chance to win the biggest prize of the show.

So what is there for me to win? Huge 6-inch 367ppi screen, 20-megapixel Pure­View cam­era with a Carl Zeiss lens, oh boy the new Nokia Lumia 1520 is def­i­nitely a catch. I would die for the cam­era fea­ture alone.

Pic­ture taken from The Verge.

The Lumia 1520 is not only a beauty on the out­side, but also a beast on the inside. Packed with quad-core Snap­dragon 800 proces­sor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of built-in mem­ory, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Blue­tooth 4.0, NFC, 4G LTE and pow­ered by Win­dows Phone, Nokia has really stepped up to their game in recent years.

Well, even if I didn’t get any­thing, I def­i­nitely had fun at the live show. Free food and cof­fee from Cof­fee Bean & Tea Leaf, tech talks, games and gad­gets give­away, what is there not to be liked?

Tech­duol­ogy LIVE 2013 has def­i­nitely put a per­fect end­ing to the sea­son of the show and what­ever they are brew­ing for the next sea­son, it cer­tainly going to be awesome.

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.