Family holiday to bandung

Here is my super-long guide based on my last trip just for you guys. 

Quite useful and comprehensive guide about the city here: http://wikitravel.org/en/Bandung

Famous restaurants:

• Kampung Daun - means Leaf Village. Best time to go is Friday night. Service can be slow, but ask for Pondokan that is. Very taste bbq fish, and local food. The weather is cool and nice.
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• Rumah Strawberry - pick your own straberry, but the highlight is the local nasi liwet package. Very fragrant with friend or bbq chicken, etc.
• The Valley, is a restaurant in a hotel that is the top of the cliff. At lunch, you can see the cliff overseeing the Bandung city. At night should be pretty romantic :) the price is steep though, means like Singapore level pricing. The way there is also very scary and steep, an interesting experience, as you follow narrow road among the villas. #2 The Valley
  
• And then Warung Bu Tris, Braga Permai, Rm Ampera, are a couple of wellknown quality and name.

For Shopping Cihampelas, I feel by staying there at night you’ll be able to find some interesting things. Other than Cihampelas:- there are some unique factory outlets along Jalan Riau with better quality clothing and shirts. Heritage is the most famous one, it's housed within an historical building. And there is a couple others side by side along the walking distance. Conveniently, there are snacks pop-up stores just outside to do some local snack shopping. Check out the “branded bags” section and let me know what you think hoo hoo

Learning Chinese

Based on my (layman) theory, facial expression and language spoken have strong influences on people's face due muscle development. So to my surprise, I am now known as looking like "Filipino" due to my non-Chinese face, and thought to be "Indonesian" due to my non-Chinese surname.

To uncover back my heritage route, I decided to learn Chinese, or rather continue my lessons on the long-lost language (to me). There are a couple of options for learning Chinese for professionals in Singapore. My preference and feedbacks:

NUS Extension, the arm for continuous education organized by NUS (National University of Singapore). The class is generally well attended by foreign professionals, taught by native speaker, and have a good curriculum and class progression from beginners. Generally each module is 4-5 months long, twice a week at weekday nights.
(now this has program has been discontinued).

Some online courses or tuition classes. You can try searching here for language courses.

I also found some interesting courses, organized in China/Beijing.

• Language courses organized by Beijing Cultural and Learning Centre: 2weeks summer class every day 8am-12pm. http://school.cucas.edu.cn/course/detail?sid=17&courseid=41422.
• Website to learn a character everyday http://www.learnchineseeveryday.com/

Work, Work, then Something exciting

I am getting a new PC build, diy from a computer shop at Sim Lim Square (SLS). How it started is I was wanting to retrieve data, quite innocently, from my old harddisk that has been buried in the box. Most of the older harddisk is of IDE type, which means that current standard SATA, could no longer read the harddisk. I went to SLS to get a reader - and Video Pro was the only shop online that stocks the Sabrent. I called the shop at 720pm, to check for opening hour the day after, and was informed that they are open until 8pm everyday.

I visited the shop, and was interested in the build. After 1hr consultation, where the shop is closed, but the lads are very happily obliged and I put $200 deposit for an AMD configuration within, or rather close to my original budget of $1500 SGD.

After a night of research, my system is capable of producing this quality in Final Fantasy XIV ARR - woohoo. I have to compare this High Desktop setting with the miserable specs  of my laptop (note: it is a decent 3-year old laptop) under Extremely Low Laptop setting. The graphic, the texture of cloths, dirts, roads, the weapons, the special effects of spells and fire - are all beautifully rendered.