i was sceptical when i first heard about friendster.com. nevertheless, i decide to give it a try, since i've got nothing to lose. you see, i'm paranoid about disclosing my personal informations on the web. i hardly submit my real detail whenever i register for anything on the web, unless i really really trust the website. maybe i've been reading too much on identity fraud and how people get caught for forwarding racist email or trading mp3s on the net.

back to friendster, my initial thought was that it's just another site which groups certain people together to exchange messages or maybe share files, a la yahoo! groups or circles99.com. boy i was wrong. as more and more people registered, it turned out to be a very useful site.

now this is a site, where i get to find people which i have lost contact for a long time. besides, you might never know who might find you! it happened to me recently, when a kindergarten friend who i almost forgot, added me into her list. initially, i have totally no idea who she was. we were exchanging messages in friendster until i decide to add her in my instant messenger list. after a few rounds of chat, i finally recalled who she was. what surprises me though, is her ability to remember in details so many things about me when i was a kindergarten kid, whereas i almost lost all my kindergarten memories, save for a few very unforgetable moments. now that i've had her contacts, i wish that i could spend more time talking to her, just to regain all those past memories. so far, we haven't got to meet up yet, because of our busy schedules. futhermore she's currently studying in kl and seldom comes back to melaka.

and then there's another girl, paik ge, and her cousin, pelf yeen, who used to sit the same school bus as me during my primary school years. we kinda lost contact with each other after i stopped travelling on that school bus, though we stay in the same neighbourhood. paik ge happened to see my brothers in kl a few weeks back and got their contacts. i didn't know any of this until she added me in friendster, and told me all about it. i told her i never seem to bump into her in malacca anymore (malacca is so small that you are likely to bump into someone you know almost anywhere, seriously!). only then i found out the her whole family moved to penang. still, she is studying in kl now and i might go meet up with her someday.

so what else does friendster.com does for me? hmm i guess the most significant feature would be pictures! tons of them! well, it interesting to see how your friends changed and all. i remember a few times when i actually dropped my jaw seeing the latest pictures of my friends. there was one particular fri...ermm...acquaintance (wiyang should know this) who changed so much i thought she had a plastic surgery. and there was a photo which confirmed rumours about a friend getting married. so it's true that a picture tells a thousand words huh? there's even pictures to show that a particular person is currently attached to another person. hmm..saves the trouble of telling each and everyone, i guess.

i really salute the person who thought of friendster concept...

more than 3 months since i last blogged. nah, it's not like my blog is interesting anyway.

chinese new year, the best opportunity to meet most of my old friends, came and went. i didn't actually get to meet everyone i wanted to meet, because the holidays were short and most of them are already working and they just can't stay in malacca longer. futhermore i had to go back to my grandma's place in bukit tinggi and that has taken 2 days off my holidays. as much as i wanted to meet them, there was just not enough time. i guess in years to come, it will be much much more harder to meet up. not to mention certain people who preferred to meet a person that he sees almost everyday in campus rather than someone who he hasn't seen for a year or two.

anyway, there was a small gathering of sort 2 days before chinese new year, because ganesh had to work on the first day of CNY and he will be travelling back on the eve. it's good to see edmund, sin yi, affryll, joon liang, and the jet-lagged wiyang who had just reached malacca for a few hours. the look of his sleepy face was just...funny?

anyhow, i couldn't say that the conversation that night was lively, most probably because we haven't seen each other for so long, and 2 of them are already working. our conversation was mostly about working life, industrial training, and even marriage! yeah, marriage, because recently one of our ex-classmate had just tied the knot. no, it's not a shotgun marriage (everyone of us who heard the news thought so initially). and so we were speculating who would be the next ex- 5Sc1 Class of 1999 student to get hitched.

i wonder how next year's celebration will be...