I read about this girl in the papers. May. She was young, only 29 I think. I'm not sure whether the autopsy has been completed. But her family & friends believed she died from over-work.

She was thrilled when she landed a job as a admin executive/manager. But what May did not count on was how demanding the job was. It was common for her to wake up at 3.30am and start work at 4.30am in the mornings. She worked long hours even on weekends. In her last blog entry, she complained of stress and failing health. But she decided to hang on because she was a contract staff and she would need to compensate the company should she quit then. All she hoped was to endure for 1 more month.

The irony was that in the same entry she mentioned a contract staff in another company died of a heart attack. She went on to say she didn't want to end up dead for the sake of money. 2 days later she collapsed after working at her laptop for 8 hours non-stop. Doctors suspected that she might have died of Deep Vein Thrombosis due to long hours of inactivity. It is really sad.

Her boss attended her wake and denied he had given the girl too much work.

This particular piece of news caught my attention because I too have been complaining lately of stress and heavy workload. But I have been mindful not to over-stretch myself. I find outlets... I listen to music, chat with friends over the phone, I find time to go to gym plus I am lucky to have my wonderful kids to distract me.

Whatever it is, please listen to your body. No amount of money is worth dying for.

TV not fixed yet. *sigh*

Anyway I finally unboxed the Apple TV last night. First thing I noticed. No cable. I don't think a HDMI cable or component cable is that expensive. Could have just thrown either one in. And I was sure I asked the sales guy at the Apple retail store and he said cables included. Could have saved me a trip. Now I got to go Sim Lim to get a cable. Maybe I should check the internet and see what else I need to get. Not going to keep running to the store.

Episode 18 of Heroes ended with a cliffhanger... Mohinder was pinned to the ceiling.. Peter up against the wall with Sylar slicing his skull open.

I waited 7 weeks and then I got this weird fighting scene that left me scratching me head.

WTF is Peter doing with his back tuned towards Sylar! Back towards the enemy? That seemed too complacent to me. Sylar took his time rising the glass shards with his telekinesis power (which btw is a pretty cool scene). Surely Peter could see that and the very least he could do is DUCK! Come on, Peter! You could absorb the other person's power, at least you could have deflected some of the glass and then perhaps missed 1 "fatal" piece.

If I were the director/script-writer, I would have done the scene differently. First, I would have Peter knocked about a bit more by Sylar (hey! If I going to make people wait for 7 weeks, I better give them more blood! heehee). Then Peter does his invisible thing. Sylar can't see Peter but brings up the shards of glass and shoots them with great force in all directions. Some of the glass pieces got stop in mid-air as Peter too uses the telekinetic power he asborbed from Sylar. Sylar sees it, knows exactly where Peter is standing. He raises a large piece of glass (or knife, whatever) from behind where Peter is "standing" and fires away. Peter is hit and becomes visible again. That way Peter will still be shot from the back and yet FACING Sylar!!!!

And the other issue I have with this episode is ... Why didn't Mohinder kill Sylar when he had the chance to ??!! We all know that was his intention. He tried to shoot Sylar in episode 18 but failed. And then he, even though injured, somehow managed to master enough strength to knock Sylar out with the map (??!!). and then he took his time to check on Peter, and then bring Peter back home to his mom? What happened to "what I'm doing is revenge. Now I can fullfill my duty as a son."? Arrgh!

Ok. Now that I got these two out of my system I can look forward to episode 20.

I never really pay attention to censorship. Especially nowadays when there are ways & means to get the uncensored versions if you really want to. I understand that certain subjects or lyrics may be offensive or taboo to certain groups of people hence why the films or music have to be censored or even banned. But personally I think no one's forcing anyone to listen to their songs or watch their movies. If they offend you then just don't listen. Go ahead, do a self-censorship.

On the local scene, our censorship board is very efficient. Austin Powers 2 had it's title changed from "The Spy Who Shagged Me" to "The Spy Who Shioked Me". I had such a good laugh because "Shiok" means good or nice in Singlish (Singapore's own style of English mixed with Malay and Chinese dialects.) Singapore's board of film censors said the use of the word "shagged" was "crude and offensive".

I thought our censorship board only issues total ban. But recently I found out that a single offensive word could be blanked or masked off leaving the rest of the song intact.

For example, the song Glamorous by Fergie. When I first heard it over the radio I couldn't figure what was the sentence.. "If you ain't got no money get your broke o home." This sentence was repeated quite a number of times. I was wondering what on earh is a broke-O until I saw the MTV online. The line was supposed to be "If you ain't got no money get your broke ass home. " Heh heh.

My kids like James Blunt's "You're Beautiful". Not too long ago we bought the DVD for them They came running to me and told me James Blunt said the naughty word. I couldn't recall there being any profanity in the song. They were so excited and couldn't wait to re-play that part for me. "She could see in my eyes that I was fucking high." Oops. The version I heard on the radio went "flying high". Ok. So there's a clean verion. Now I know.

I bought the AppleTV on Tuesday. I couldn't wait to try it out but my hubby went on a business trip and took my powerbook along. No worries, I still have my old eMac to test on.

I connected my video hard disk to the eMac but somehow the eMac couldn't detect the hard disk. Not sure why. My eMac is still running on ver 10.2 so that might be the problem.

Nevermind I could still run iTunes to see if the appleTV works. But the iTunes in the eMac was ver 6 which didn't have the AppleTV option. I tried to download the newer iTunes but the latest version was for OS 10.3.9 or later so it wouldn't run on my 10.2 OS. Shit! Called Ghost the next day to get a copy of OSX 10.4.

I could test the AppleTv using my notebook. But I didn't have MacDrive so my notebook couldn't read my Mac-formatted hard disk.

But Ghost was busy and couldn't pass me the copy till weekend. *Sigh* No choice but to wait till Saturday when my hubby comes home with my powerbook. Saturday came and I reclaimed my powerbook. But Saturday was a real busy day so I thought I would leave it till Sunday.

Guess what happened on Sunday?

My TV broke down! WTF! The TV is only 10 month old! If this isn't worthy of a Arrgghh moment, I don't know what else is. 6 days after I bought the AppleTV, it's still in the shrink-wrap box. Now gotta hunt for the warranty card to get the TV fix first....

Here's something for you to chase away those income tax blues.

Just e-filed mine this morning. When it comes to tax matters, my motto is "do not do today what you can put forth till tomorrow" . I would probably have pushed it till the very last minute if I had not seen the newspapers. It said about 40% of the tax payers have not filed yet. So I better not risk it. Their server would not be able to handle a few hundred thousands users all logging in at the same time.

Surprisingly it was a breeze logging in this morning. Guess most people were still in bed. Did mine in less than 15 minutes. Unlike last year when I had so much problem. Took a while for me to figure out what was my password. Can't be helped. This is one password that I use only once a year.