We somehow ended up cooking a sit-down dinner for 22 people, we really wanted to move into the new house in time for xmas last year – but we just couldn’t make it and ended up moving in on January 15th. Anyway this year we’ve been in 11 months and we felt ready to rock out a big dinner for maybe 8-12 people….which seemed quite daunting.

When it ended up as 22 people I shit my pants…anyway I think we’ve gotten things under control (including nibbles, 2 appetizers, 4 types of meat for main courses, 3 types of potatoe, a few vegetables, 3 desserts, a cheese board and coffee)…

I’m actually REALLY excited, first time xmas has been special for a long time.

And well seen as though I’m married now, here’s a family picture to fill your hearts with joy

I’d also like to share this video as well as it really amused me.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

Wishing you all a glorious, healthy, prosperous and happy year of the Rabbit!

HUAT AR!

It’s been a hard but fruitful year in many ways. Spend pretty much the whole of it being broke because of the new house. But that’s pretty much sorted now, still a lot of bills to pay and things to buy!

Anyway just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for reading and commenting and I hope you all have an even more fantastic 2011.

I shall finish with my own self indulgent wish list for 2011:

- TV Cabinet
- Awesome massive wardrobe
- Bed side tables
- Shiny microwave
- Denon 3311 AVR
- 5.1 speakers (PSB, Polk etc with velodyne sub)
- Curtains
- New screen protector for my phone
- New rims for the car that can fit a BBK
- K-sport BBK
- Rebuild my engine
- New dual monitor desktop PC
- New HTPC that is small, sexy and can actually play high bitrate 1080p files
- New clothes
- New shoes
- Visit another new country
- Visit UK
- Washing machine
- Weights bench and punch bag or wooden man
- Find a good Wing Chun school
- Update my blog theme/layout
- Finish my photography site
- Get fitter
- Eat healthier (home cooked meals yay)
- Save money and invest more (despite all of the above purchases LOL)

Mostly boring house stuff – sorry!

Here’s a hand-made xmas card my Mom sent me all the way from the UK – thanks Mom!

Anyway that’s all – enjoy the weekend

Yes – 1,209 Posts, 16,723 Comments, 6,081 Tags & 25 Categories later and I’m still here

Blogging has been an interesting journey and one that is not over yet. It’s had ups and downs and sometimes I’ve felt like packing it in, but most the time I don’t.

It’s interesting to read back through your own blog archives and see some of the experiences you’ve journaled in your own little space on the web.

In the early days my entries were a lot less organised, very chaotic, very personal and probably very much more interesting than they are now. I was traveling a lot for work during that time too which meant I had a lot of random stuff to write about.

I used to do some epic yearly summaries, check them out here:

2004

• 2004 — What happened and what we learnt

2005

• My Obligatory 2005 Summary – With Pictures! – Part I
• My Obligatory 2005 Summary – With Pictures! – Part II

2006

• 2006 The Year That Was – A Summary – Part I
• 2006 The Year That Was – A Summary – Part II
• 2006 The Year That Was – A Summary – Part III

2008

• 2008 — The Year That Was..Let Us Welcome 2009

My first anniversary post was here – Happy Birthday to ShaolinTiger.com

The 2nd here – Happy Anniversary to ShaolinTiger.com!

And well there’s been no more anniversary blog posts since then. I feel like it’s time for an update soon, a fresh theme, some new features..I’ve been running this theme (which is the 3rd iteration) since June 2007 – so it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, back when WordPress was at version 2.2.

You can see some of my most popular posts here (by views and comments) and my full archives here – http://www.shaolintiger.com/archives/

If you are driving off anywhere, please do make sure your car/tyres etc are in good condition and drive safely. Take a rest if you are feeling sleepy.

If you are sticking around KL, enjoy the empty roads!

And remember, today is a day for forgiveness – so let go of any grudges, be happy and love thy neighbour.

That’s quite a sum!

Also check this out, especially for fans of Gossip…a scandal in the socialite Metro Manila world – I’ve met some of the characters in the blog before and I’ve been to the place mentioned frequently more than once (Embassy).

It’s an expose by an Australian who allegedgly got conned in the Philippines by one Delfin Justiniano Montano, it features the Gucci Gang, a pretentious bunch of coke snorting rich kids like Celine Lopez, DJ Montano, Tim Yap, and Wendy Puyat.

“DJ” Montano Delfin Justiniano Ocampo Montano II

Look at the insane traffic it’s getting, it’s probably since yesterday one of the most highly trafficked blogs in Asia! IF you want to read, make sure you read from oldest to newest. Lot’s of people are getting exposed in the comments.

Apparently it’s set Manila on fire and is slowly spreading through the Philippines – I wonder if the mainstream media will pick it up. It seems unlikely as Celine Lopez and her family seem to be quite influential and quite a few of them are involved with the media.

Thursday – 547
Friday – 6881
Saturday – 13,768
Sunday – 31,674

These are uniques too, not page views! I wonder how many it’ll get today…and during the rest of the week as it gets spread around.

If you read any of the socialite Filipino blogs you’ll probably recognise some of the people being ‘exposed’. I do hope Brian gets his money back, I’d also be interested to hear the other side of the story as it’s only one sided so far.

*UPDATE*

The story has finally reached the Philippines Inquirer (mainstream media) – no names named of course.

“Naming names: Online ‘telenovela’ indicts RP ‘high’ society”

The traffic is still going insane too with about 68,443 uniques yesterday!

Come on you should know bloggers are comment whores, we thrive on comments…even though I see the page views, the unique visits….you are here, you are reading, watching, stalking..

Stop being silent, say something, say my post sucks, my pictures are bad….anything.

Anyway if you have something to say, anything to say – just comment. Don’t be shy, I’d love to see at least 10 comments on every post.

Give me some feedback, let me know if I’m boring you, if I’m posting stuff that interests you – or otherwise.

Everything should be back up and working now! All posts are restored.

Anyhow things should all be restored now – and it was incredibly boring…so it shows the power of taking regular backups. I’m incredibly thankful I took my own backup on September 10th…I can’t imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t backed up or it was 2-3 months out of date.

I made a few upgrades as well seen as though I was re-installing the whole site..I’ve upgraded to the latest branch of Wordress – 2.3 and I’ve internalized the tags so they no longer point to Technorati. I’ve also upgraded all plugins and mods so we should be stable and secure now.

You can now click the tags on the index or inside posts and they will take you to the tag archive page for that tag.

The sites feels a bit faster and more responsive to me after I’ve upgraded to 2.3, but that might just be me.

Do let me know what the performance is like from your side, especially now I’m using a Malaysian host it should be much more responsive for local browsers.

Now I gotta set-up some proper back-ups!

If you spot anything funky or something going wrong/error/weird behaviour/files missing just drop me a comment or use the contact form and let me know.

There’s just a couple of image files I’ve found which are missing and the CSS file needs a bit of tweak to get the comments looking nice again – but I think that’s about it.

Upgraded, recovered and back on track.

Regular posting will resume in the next 1-2 days after I get some sleep. I’ve still got 6 million other things to do! Argh!

Thanks for the kind words, e-mails and comments – I appreciate it!

The most common of course is “Why ShaolinTiger? – Where did the name come from” and other similar questions of how did I choose it, do I like martial arts and so on.

I chose this name when I first joined the monkeys and tubes that make up the Interwebnets back in 1996 when I went to University in Liverpool.

Before that I didn’t own a computer, didn’t need a nickname and knew virtually nothing about the net. When I first got to uni they were still using Windows 3.11 and Yahoo! was king of search (makes me feel kinda old)..

And I’d heard about this thing called Internet Chat, so I chucked it into Yahoo! and out came mIRC, so I downloaded it and connected to DALnet #chatzone…that’s the start of a whole other story.

Anyway, the point is to chat you need a nick, preferably a cool one…so I knocked my head trying to think up something.

At the time I was studying Kung Fu at the local univeristy club, Hung Gar Kuen to be exact – yes the same style from the family of Wong Fei Hung.

It’s known as a style based on Tiger and Crane forms – Character Taming the Tiger Fist and Tiger Crane Paired Form Fist.

It also has some stuff on 5 elements and iron wire fist, it’s a style very much based on stance. My sifu was second generation Shaolin and spent 2 years just doing horse stance before he even did any basic moves. Sadly in the Western World such slow learning wouldn’t stick so things were rapidly accelerated.

I used to really enjoy sparring hard and the blood rushing to your head as the adrenaline kicks in.

Hung Gar was good, and was my second favourite training experience after Wing Chun.

I’ve always meant to talk more about martial arts..but I never have, is anyone even interested?

So back to my nick….. ShaolinCrane didn’t sound very cool, so I went for ShaolinTiger seen as though I was studying Shaolin Kung-Fu and it was Tiger and Crane style.

And that was that…let’s not talk about the Yahoo! e-mail address I ended up with as shaolintiger was taken even back then in 1996.