Just to inform you, Mr. Dew has migrated his blog to beconfused.com/blog See you at the new location. Do update your links too.

Isn’t it annoying to search in a search engine and only to find your most trusted one return results of a whole list of blogs populating page 1?
It sure is. I hate it. Especially when I am trying to search for some serious stuff and all I get is blogs after blogs.
I am sure many people enter my blog by accident too. According to my referral tracker, I receive around 70% of my visitors from search engines. Not that I mind of course, however, I believe those people who enter my blog through search engines beg to differ. [If you’re one of them, do give a comment.]
Blogs are probably the single most evil object floating around cyberspace. It’s junk. It’s redundant information. It simply chunk up the number of irrelevant search results.
People keep online diaries. I dislike them too. These are attention seekers. Their mindsets are open. They are looking for this spot light to be cast on them. Why let the world know about your personal life and views? For all you know, it may be used against you.
Ironically, I started a blog on June 20, 2003. I posted my first message back then using Blogger. I can’t explain why I started a blog, I don’t have friends around me who own blogs back then. Starting a blog is a rather sudden thing for me. One day, I just accessed Blogger.com and just signed up.
That time Blogger is famous as its parent company, Pyra Labs, just got acquired by Google. That’s when I start noticing Blogger, it’s all around the news. I signed up for fun on June 20, 2003 and I continued the fun till this day.
Today, June 20 too, just of another year, it’s been a year already. It feel strange look back at my first post actually.
Lots of things has changed. My blog has grown too, from 0 visitors a month to a 1000 visitors a month. It’s quite a joy ride for me. Changing layouts after layout, adding affiliates after affiliates, doing site promotion. It has been fun.
And the fun shall continue, at least for me. So on this very day, my blog officially migrates from beconfused.blogspot.com to blog.beconfused.com. Do update your links soon. All the posts have been imported there. There’s still some problem with the HTML template. The theme “Fable” needs to be updated too. Theme “RAINBOW” is 90% complete now and “SaiKano” is 60% complete.
Thank you all for patronizing. Once again, sorry to all those to drop by this page by accident, lol.
You can comment here or email me at dew(at)beconfused_dot_com to tell me how terrible your Google search experience is when you landed on my blog.

With all the hype of 1 GB email from Google and SpyMac, the 100 MB email storage from Yahoo!, I often wonder what the hell is the Redmond giant doing. Maybe they didn’t read the news that I read and are not aware of the competitor’s storage space offerings.
Well, it turns out that they do after all.

In response to rival e-mail services enticing customers with high capacity storage, Microsoft’s MSN unit will soon announce its intentions to follow suit, BetaNews has learned.

Redmond executives have been mulling over how to respond to the storage frenzy, and are set to unveil a plan that will go into effect in July.

Although still in beta testing, the launch of Google’s free Gmail service heated up the competition by offering customers a whopping 1GB of e-mail storage. Yahoo! fired back this week by boosting customer inboxes to 100MB and unveiling an updated user interface, which Microsoft called “quite good.”

“We have been intentionally quiet over this period, as we formulated our plans, and waited to see the Yahoo response, feeling it would be best to see how strong Yahoo’s counter would be before going public with our own,” Blake Irving, corporate vice president of MSN’s Communication Services group, told employees.

Microsoft hopes that by giving customers enough space, it can move the media focus away from storage as a key selling point and reduce the emerging threat posed by media darling Google.

“We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users,” said Irving.

E-mail is not the only area in which MSN is feeling pressure from competitors. Microsoft has been developing and refining its own algorithmic search engine, and plans to launch MSN Newsbot – a service similar to Google News – by the end of the year.

Source: BetaNews

So let me guess how much Microsoft will offer. Er, 20 MB perhaps? MSN Hotmail has the most email accounts I think, millions and millions, to offer 1 GB would be quite unrealistic. I’ll wait and see. Meanwhile, there’s Google’s Gmail for me. In case, you’re wondering what the hell is my email address, you can reach me at dew(at)beconfused_dot_com
Love to hear from you.

Also, I am wondering if anyone has a suggestion for a new layout. Provide me with the picture with good resolution and I’ll build it up. I’m trying to build other types of layout.

I need to get my pay back. My neighbor says that he'll wait for a call from the guy who always contact them. But the person never called up. The person's name is Ah Tai or Ah Zai or Ah Cai.
Let's just called him Ah Fai.
I asked my neighbor - let's call my neighbor Ah Wai - Ah Wai to give me Ah Fai's number. Ah Wai says he doesn't have, so he rang up Ah Bai [New Character, Ah Bai is Ah Wai's friend who introduce him to work at Ah Fai's place].
Ah Bai didn't have Ah Fai's number too. Ah Bai instead gave Ah Wai another person's number. That person shall be known as Ah Mai. I was told by Ah Fai that Ah Bai suggest me to call up Ah Mai to get Ah Fai's number. I did so and Ah Mai answered with an angry tone. Ah Mai gave me Ah Fai's number. Let's delete Ah Bai from the picture since he's no longer needed.
Ah Mai told me that Ah Fai didn't give her the piece of paper where my working process is recorded. I called Ah Fai and found how he is no longer working there. Then I return back to Ah Mai and Ah Mai say she'll clarify with Ah Fai.
Ah Fai says he'll clarify with Ah Mai too. Ah Fai and Ah Mai probably had a quarrel the other evening because they apparently fail to contact each other as promised.
Thankfully, Ah Mai found my working sheet and suggest me to go down to that work place to get the pay. But I don't know how to get there.
So Ah Mai kindly offered to bring it to me in Bukit Batok (I live in this area). But she never did call me. So the next day, I called Ah Mai again. She says she works till 1 a.m. and wouldn't pass by Bukit Batok as I slept already.
I'm getting quite mad, especially when I have been trying to get the pay from Ah Mai since Monday!

This afternoon, I called up Ah Mai again. She says she'll pass by Bukit Batok today and she can bring my pay over to me. She's late by 15 minutes, but I gotten my pay. She gave me $60 expecting me to return her $3. Sadly for me, luckily for me, since I have only $2 in my pocket, I returned her $2. I earned a total of SG$58. For all the trouble, all the sweat, all the bumpy bus rides in Tuas, I think I seriously deserve the extra dollar.

In the past, I dislike travelling. I thought it'd be great if I can just travel from one place to another in a split second. It'd be great for everyone, probably except airlines and FedEx as their purpose would have been pretty much expired. Well, it turns out that Nature reports the first step of my dream coming true. Although I no longer fancy the idea of travelling around in split seconds, the idea of faster computers still excites me. Well, I'll wait for another 20 years to see if these qubit thingy comes true.

Migration isn't as smooth as I planned. The importer that's supplied by WordPress didn't do a good enough job. That leave all the <br> or <br /> in my SQL database.
I exported the entire database into a text file that is around 800 kilobytes and start editing them with FrontPage. Why FrontPage? Because it's the only thing I have that has an extremely powerful Find and Replace tool. I got it to remove all my quotes, did-you-knows and stuff. I got it to remove all the commenters whom I plugged previously. I got it to strip all the colors tags too.
And I replace <br> or <br /> with (backslash)-n which means new line to make it more SQL-friendly. It's a lot more work to do than I expected. Everything turned out alright in the end. FrontPage helped a lot. I even used Excel to do some sort before I import it back to the database.
It seems that I did something wrong though. Some of my posts lost a space between 2 words. I don't know what's wrong. It's probably something to do with the "Find and Replace" tool in FrontPage. I probably replace the wrong strings resulting in these problems.
Now, all my 218 posts have been successfully imported into WordPress, minus the missing space problem of course. All unnecessary tags have been stripped. I replaced <i> and <b> with <em> and <strong> respectively with FrontPage.
In WordPress, I can assign categories. I love categorizing things you see. So I attempt to categorize it into some else other than "General". I did so to about 50 posts and I got really tired soon after.
This time I did a lot of planning for the future. All posts only contain tags that are strictly XHTML-compatible. No <font>, <b> and <i>. They have all been updated to XHTML standards. I use <blockquote> now too. It's lots of changes. It's been fun though.
I added excerpts, change the layout and stuff. I did some customizations to the script too. It took hours and hours. I don't know if it's worth it anyway. But at least I am doing something I like.I spend the later half of my day hunting for PHP scripts since I suck at coding them anyway. I found a really really simple Guestbook script that I really really like. Any idiot can understand the coding. It's so simple, it has only one PHP page! But it lacks features. The features it has is to write and read a guestbook. That's all, that's what a guestbook is about anyway.
It took me an hour to finally find such a simple script, the others have all the really cool features that aren't need in a guestbook. I don't need smilies, I don't need text filtering. I don't care scold the "f" word. [Oh, what's it again? Puffer fish?]
After the hard work. I say my new site is quite ready.

From June 14 to June 16, this blog may experience technical difficulties; inconvenience is regretted.
You know, I retype the first sentence several times to make it sound cooler. It does sound quite cool, doesn't it? About some technical difficulties shit I going to have. It's all my way of trying to sound cool.
Well, there will be such a problem, but it's a really minor one. I need to migrate my blog from one service to another, that's all. And it'll just take 5 minutes of downtime. Really.
So what the hell is with my "June 14 to June 16"? Well, I take my laziness into consideration. I plan to do a conversion fast, but if you know me well enough, you would have guessed that my exporting process is going to take quite a bit of time. -opens a can of green tea-
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Blogger. Blogger is a fine publishing tool. Very fine one, I love it. The thing is that it doesn't have web space. I bought some web space and start hosting myself. There's lots of things to be done.
Not long ago, pketh migrated from Typepad to er, pketh.com. I am doing a migration too. It's going to take quite some time. More time than I expect in fact. I need to strip a lot of codes from my posts too, just to make it compatible with the Blogger importer for Wordpress. -starts drinking green tea-
Ahhh. I love green tea.
Perhaps, at this point of this very post, you're wondering what the hell have I been typing about in the above 200 or so words. But trust me, I wouldn't understand them if I were myself of 3 months ago.
Basically, in short.. -drinks green tea again-
Where was I? Well, as I was saying, in short, I am moving. No longer using Blogger/Blogspot's services. I'll be hosting my own. A new address. It'll be the same old content. The same old me typing these post.
Coming up, there'll be image galleries. I just bought a digital camera and have taken some photographs. Forgive me if they're bad looking, it's my first time with the camera. I never owned one before, the last time our family had one is when I'm 10 probably. -drinks green tea again-
There'll be quite a lot of work to do after I finish this green tea. :)

What a day for me. Jonathan (my cousin) came to my place. And he was using the computer with my brother playing Counterstrike: Condition Zero. I hate that game, it caused me to have lesser chance to use the computer, hahaa.
They were doing commentaries like those in television where two guys sits opposite each other trying to "brother" each other in a none gay way in other to entertain a stadium of people who are apparently are giving the hot dogs more attention than these guys.
"I am great, I am great," chanted Jonathan (translated from Mandarin)
"Look! There's one there," announced my brother (translated from Mandarin)
"Easy, easy. He's dead already," Jonathan replied nonchalantly. (translated from Mandarin. Hey, you know what? Those people only speak Mandarin, everything is translated, I shan't do a second mention.)
"Another one is.." announced my brother.
"Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click," Jonathan clicks furiously while upsetting my mouse and I.
I thought for a while, my computer is being used by them and I can't use it. I can't read too since their voices are awfully loud. That leaves me with one choice - sleep.
I laid on my bed for a while and I realized that their sound level is forbidding me to sleep too. It must be my low energy level or something, but after a while I did visited dreamland. It's for a while only though. I woke up soon after.
"Quiet.." my voice trembled sleepily.
"Quiet," my cousin echoed somewhat displeased too.
I got really angry for some reason, if I had a shotgun in my hands, I'll shoot them down the way the shoot their enemies down. They're in my room playing the computer (which I can't say is mine since I didn't pay for it) and they're not obeying the rules I set for them to not communicate loudly.
At 10, they left. My brother went to my cousin's house to stay overnight so as to play more Counterstrike with my cousin's computer. He's stupid, my aunt (Jonathan's mother) is going to limit their play time to 2 hours only. They played for 8 hours in my computer.

Junice sent me an email last year on September 25, 2003. Yes, it's another email joke. You see, I don't get tired of them. Yesterday I posted those dumb girl joke. So today, I got to be fair and post something about guys. Here goes my fellow species' story: It's about the breasts after all, at least in this joke. I just posted a joke about my own species. Before you yell traitor, you got to admit that it's got a nice twist at the end, lol.
I can imagine my girlfriend agreeing with the joke and trying to get me convinced that men are the worst living creatures asides her much-detested worms.

I receive this from Dimas, about dumb girls. Her email is like one of those dumb blonde jokes but the word "blonde" is no where to be found. I often wonder why is it called "dumb blonde jokes", blondes are that dumb?
I don't think they are, probably Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde only. Enough said, here's what Dimas sent. [Actually it's been shortened by me.] You're probably wondering why the hell am I posting something that useless. Well, you see, I spend the past hour in front of my word processor thinking about what to blog. I couldn't think of anything in the end. My Muse's gone for a break to South Africa to check out the giraffes.

There was a time when everybody in Singapore wants to own a handset and chances are high that their dream handset is one of the sleekest models from Nokia.
Today, all has change. Some people are eyeing on Nokia handsets still, but many are keeping their options open to look at devices offered by competing companies like Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics.
Reuters reports through MSNBC.com that the Finnish giant see their global cell phone market fell sharply in the first quarter of 2004 as illustrated by a survey conducted Gartner. I guess it's time for Nokia to wake up. They lost ground to all of its top six rivals this time. I sense Nokia's end in the cell phone reign as they continue to put their time into the absolutely lame N-gage.

If you have been visiting my blog, you probably notice the disappearance of text colors. I'm thinking of moving from Blogger/Blog*Spot and is coding some automatic "color applier" in PHP to ease my life a little. This PHP is simpler than I thought, lol.

There's something about movies. That should explain why I keep watching them. I just watch another movie - The Best Bet. Made by local film director cum actor cum singer cum writer cum comedian cum producer cum transvestite - Jack Neo. And yes, I think he enjoys sporting women wear in his evening primetime show "Comedy Night", that makes him a transvestite in my opinion.
Whilst I enjoy Jack Neo's style of comedy and local flavor, I find the local flavor is too exaggerated. The Best Bet is the worst movie I watched this year. The comedy is no doubt present but it isn't as good as the previous Jack Neo films. It lacks a good cinematic soundtrack, is poorly produced and plagued by advertisements within the movie.
This film is featuring their sponsor's products on purpose and they did it too obviously. I don't mind Britney drinking Pepsi in front of me as long as she isn't over-doing it. But in Jack Neo's film, the product name and function is even stated. Companies like Osim, Mitsubishi Electronics and Novena are mentioned. And it's so obvious that I guess the sponsors instantly. [These advertisements are in the film itself and not a pre-show feature.]
Advertisements not only plague the web sites I visit, it's even plaguing the films I watch! It's all around. On the telly, on the papers, the web sites, the banners and even on the freaking bus I boarded yesterday.
Before you're going to point out that I sounded annoyed right now, let me reveal a somewhat un-shocking piece of news - I like advertisements generally. But they have to be creatively done.
Advertisements offered through many mediums, seen practically everywhere. I see it as a form of knowledge increment sometimes. Some advertisements are indeed informative; those make you go, "Wow, I didn't know you can do such and such." Some advertorials are very interesting if you have lots of time that the news of the adjacent side of the paper is featuring war in Iraq.
Sadly, there aren't enough such advertisements, at least not enough in Singapore so I rather see less of it sometimes. And as for Jack Neo's film, I prefer seeing none of it. Jack Neo made me feel like I've just wasted SG$7.50 watching an anti-climax comedy and even more useless advertisements.
I rate the film 1.5 upon 5. It is really funny in the beginning but the whole story develops downwards. And the movie is rather anti-climax; choose to watch this film only when you have extra 15 bucks to spare. The rest of the money ought to be spend on pop-corn, because you seriously need it.

[I rate it low as it is compared with international titles, for a local title, I'll rate it 2.5 upon 5. I prefer the earlier Jack Neo films. As a compensation, I recommend you to watch Twin Effect 2 probably this holiday. It has got MediaCorp RainTree Pictures involved in it.]

My girlfriend went overseas and she managed to get into an internet cafe. So she sent a message to my phone demanding my immediate online presence. As much as I would like to meet her demands, I can't. I wasn't home, I was out at the library when she messaged me.
That's some luck I, or rather we, have. I'm out occasionally and it's really occasionally. I returned home and checked my Hotmail account to find an email from her.
While I won't show you the details of her email, I'll show a part of what I have written. Written in my blog style. That's 46.48% of the original email I sent to her. It's written in blog style so I thought I'll post it up so as to add one extra post to my post count. I'm in such bad luck to be out. She'll be back on Saturday I believe. I'm staying home tomorrow and The Day After Tomorrow (great effects from the movie).

My brother got a new game. His birthday is coming and I feel the need to get my very much loved younger brother something. He was eyeing on this game called Counterstrike: Condition Zero.
It's a first person shooter where you shoot the first person you see in the surrounding. Well, my brother followed that rule too well and ended up shooting down his teammates and the guys he needs to save. Blunder.
Perhaps buying the game itself is a blunder for him and for me. I transacted 5 bucks more my emergency financial unit for his birthday present. The game cost about 50 bucks and I'm being nice to offer 5 bucks to discount him a little. Am I being nice or being very nice? [Both of course.]
There's no string attached you know. Really. I even offered to treat him with a pie in Burger King and, unlike my much-desired wish, it'd be served into his mouth and not his face. Much of my brother's dismay (and my dismay too), it didn't happen, Burger King sold out their pies. Shucks, I was in the pie mood today.
But why a blunder for him and for me? Well, firstly it's a blunder for him. He went to a computer shop and bought Counterstrike thinking it's the cheapest. He explored West Mall (local mall) on the weekends and somehow confirmed it.
So today, being a wonderful elder brother, I went right down to West Mall just to bring him 50 bucks as he doesn't have enough money at the moment. He made that purchase excitedly and very promptly too. I went into that shop and was out within seconds!
It's so stupid to go to West Mall for less than 5 minutes and returned home, so I told my brother to follow me to Harvery Norman (Australian electric appliance store I believe) to check out the selling price for the digital camera I bought. And I saw some games at Harvey Norman, one of which never seemed more familiar - Counterstrike: Condition Zero.
Well, the thing that saddened my brother is the fact that Harvey Norman sells at SG$47.90 and includes a free game called "Die Hard" while the one at the computer store gave a free useless sling bag that probably just cost a dollar to manufacture. I wouldn't bring that sling bag out, it looks so stupid with counterstrike characters imprinted on them. Neither him I believe.
My brother proposed the strangest plan ever. He wanted to returned to that computer shop hoping that they'll return him the 50 bucks and later buy it from Harvey Norman. I told him it's impossible and stop being childish and his stupidity has overruled him.
Turns out that the stupid one's me. My brother is actually able to exchange the game (intact)! He told the shopkeeper he doesn't want the game anymore and the shopkeeper actually returned the 50 bucks. "Huh?" I thought, "Whatever the hell just happened?"
We then head back to Harvey Norman to make that purchase. He is very happy he saved 2 bucks and got an extra game.
As for why is it a blunder for me.. Well, now my brother is hogging the computer, playing that game and I can't use it. Damn. Big blunder for me, should have discourage him getting the game.

I've been watching quite a few movies recently. First, there was Van Helsing with my cousin, Jonathan. Then there was Troy with Benedict and Cui Xia. And there was The Day After Tomorrow with my girlfriend two days before yesterday. Today, I went to Suntec City (local mall) to catch Harry Potter riding on his broomstick with my younger brother, my aunt and my uncle.
I can't say I am fully blown by the effects of the movie. It does showcase some interesting effects, I especially enjoyed the bus ride that Harry Potter rid on. It's much more enjoyable than the one I ride to Suntec City on.
After the movie, we split and I proceeded to meet my mother at City Hall train station. Our destination? Nope, it's not Hogwarts. I can't possibly be going Hogwarts all the times. -yawn- I went to Singapore Expo. Unlike Hogwarts, where the wizards and likes gather, Singapore Expo has a PC Show where the geeks and likes gather.
It's a long ride, it never felt more boring, even with my mother in the train. I wished I had a train conductor like Harry's bus conductor, my ride would be much exciting (and dangerous). But screw Potter. The highlight of my day is the PC Show 2004.
The PC Show is filled with people both young and old. In Singapore, PC Show is very much a family affair somehow because you can see a few father walking enthusiastically from one end to the other while his wife tagged along carrying a kid.
However, seeing these family outing aren't the strangest sight of them all. The strangest is seeing a Mac in the PC Show! Maybe Apple made a mistake and joined the wrong show. They should have been in The Heeren (another local mall with HMV) promoting iPod and iTunes. But today they're at the PC Show promoting the same thing plus some other software. So much for PC Show.
Since Apple is there marketing Macs, you can't blame Microsoft marketing Xbox-es and local telecommunication giant - SingTel - trying to get people to sign up 1,500 Kbps ASDL connection services. Xbox is going at a super low price there, SingTel is offering that 1,500 service at the cost of their 512-equivalent service too! You people might want to head down and join the squeeze next morning.
What I am really interested is none of the above I mentioned, not even Harry Potter. I am interested in a digital camera. I walked around watching one after another digital camera from Sony badly overcharged and finally settled on a Konica Minolta one.
Why Konica Minolta? Well, my mother thinks the salesperson is the friendliest of them all and she's paying for half of the camera. Indeed he is the friendliest and my father ought not to know about this. Actually only reason that my mother found him friendliest is because none of the other spoke Mandarin, the language that my mother loved (and only understand).
We took an-hour train ride home. Felt tired, so much that I never intended to switch on the computer if not for typing this post and spending 2 hours exploring the digital camera. And because I spend 2 hours playing around with my new friend, I have to make a post on 1:10 a.m.. What the hell, I will have to post with a date that's one day after. If only I had Hermione's Time-turner (just a less fancy name for a time-traveling device).. Hey, I do have. [The time of post has been changed to 11:10 p.m. from 1:10 a.m., i.e. 2 hours back.]

There are many ways to earn an extra buck for companies. They can go around suing rivals. These lawsuits are often caused by patents. eWeek reports Apple recently filed a patent (U.S. Patent Application 20040098406) which covers "information-bearing windows whose contents remain unchanged for a predetermined period of time become translucent."
If you're wondering what the hell is Apple talking about. Well, I am not very sure either. But I suppose what they meant is that the window will fade away when the user didn't use that particular windows. I made a program to illustrate what I think that patent covers. Click here to download an application I made (with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET). This program requires Microsoft .NET Framework to function.
This is how to check if you have the .NET Framework. Firstly, you download the application I made form here. Then determine if there's an error message. If there's one, download your free copy of the .NET Framework here, it's for Windows machines. [Well, the right and non-lame way to check for .NET Framework being installed is go to your Control Panel and then to Add or Remove Programs. Scroll down and check you have "Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1" in the list. If you do, you have Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installed and need not install anymore unless you're super free.]
I thought it's a really common thing that shouldn't be patented at all. I heard that AIM is using that feature too. It's believed that the patent filing movement is aimed at Microsoft. Windows XP successor - Windows codenamed Longhorn - demonstrated a similar feature as part of Avalon, which is the graphical presentation system of Windows codenamed Longhorn.
But just as critics cry foul, The Sydney Morning Herald reported Microsoft has been granted a patent for double-clicking (U.S. Patent 6,727,830). [What the hell, you can even patent that.] The inventors have been cited as Charlton E. Lui and Jeffrey R. Blum and the assignee is Microsoft Corporation.
Patents are a good idea, but they can easily be abused. Apple's move is clearly to safe guard that feature from the hands of Microsoft. And Microsoft's move is clearly to, I don't know what they're thinking, double-clicking is a really scary thing to be patented.
Double-clicking has become so popular. I don't think Windows is the only operating system that uses it too. It's no doubt good money to earn though. Imagine having to license such a "technology" to others for a fee.
Patents aren't the best things on Earth. They did well in protecting rights, but it does, to a some extend, limits creativity. How are you going to work on something and only to discover that what you're working on clashes with some other companies' patents?
With this, creativity is likely to be restricted. IBM and Canon seemed to be very proud of the fact that they file many patents every year. With more and more patents are granted each year, if I were to be an inventor, the chances of me "inventing" something that clashes with someone else's patents also increase.

Yesterday, we celebrate our 2nd month "anniversary". Yeah, I know "anniversary" is the wrong word to use, but I can't think of another word.
She's the most reserved girl in class. She speaks little. Or shall I say, she speaks least. Words are rare from her. In class, she's doesn't talk much, she sits up attentively. At least, she seems to, she says she's day dreaming actually.
Her lower secondary math teacher looked at her after one semester has passed and insist that she is not from the class. She's quite invisible to me. I didn't notice her much. The first few days of my second year, I noticed there are 5 girls in my class. Out of the 5 girls, I can only recall 4 girls' name. I can't remember the fifth girl's name. Her name. I often have to think really hard to dig out her name.
Last October, she brought her digital camera to school. Took a class photo [some people missing though]. She send the images through email or instant messengers. I got it through MSN Messenger. I chatted with her.
For 3 hours. I can't say it's rare for me to chat for 3 hours, it did happen before. But my chatting with her is quite different. It's continuous, something it's drifting from topic to topic. We chatted in length. Strangely, time past really fast. Through chatting, I start to know a person I never noticed much.
The new semester comes and we meet each other in school. But we didn't talk much in school. I wanted to talk to her in school, but I thought if we just start talking like we're pals from secondary school all of a sudden, it's going to appear strange. So I came up with this less than brilliant idea to talk to her gradually. Unfortunately, it backfired. She thought I was pretending not to know her purposefully and she follow suit.
We met up a couple of times, somewhat secretly. Two of us only and I didn't announce to anyone in school. She's really punctual. I recall always have to contact my friend to query on his or her current location when they're five minutes late. Her records quite clean in that.
After a while, some of our classmates from my clique started noticing that I spoke to her sometimes. I can't say I speak to her much in school, but the thing that really stood out is that fact that she doesn't speak much to guys. So my a couple of my friend falsely assume that we're together to tease me. That's when a rumor starts.
She doesn't know of the rumors existence. I hope she doesn't too, with the fear that if she knew, she might avoid me in school or something. I don't like this rumor, I ignore them all the time. But words still reach her ears in the end.
It wasn't until March that we discussed about this rumor. It feels strange discussing. It turns out that she is used to having rumors concerning her and doesn't seem to mind another. For me, I can ignore that rumor too, but I still prefer not to have that rumor growing.
On April 1, we stopped this rumor. Not by presenting a press conference to clear things up, but by realizing the very rumor they're spreading.