Life Snippets #5: Back From The Basics

Well, three days ago it was back to the basics, now it is back from the basics. On Saturday I left for my maternal grandmother's house in Port Dickson, which lies on a 15 mile stretch of coastal road. The town is on the 3rd mile, if I am not mistaken. The cemetery is on the 5th mile, at the road bend where it bends because of the bay point. My grandmother's house is at the 11 1/2th mile. It's just a single-storey house. My grandmother's house has a weird outlook on it. You park your car on the road above, go down a flight of stairs, and you reach the house. The house is basically below road level. The stairs go down on a steep slope where my grandma has planted all sorts of flowers.

The moment we arrived at the doorstep, we were greeted by a strong, stinky smell. We immediately cleaned up, but the smell was still there. We traced the smell the the sofa, where a rat made home at the bottom, and eventually died there. My grandmother was very annoyed at my brother who was making alot of noise, so she picked up the dead rat and chased him at it. Since my brother is a scaredy cat, he quickly ran around the house avoiding my grandma and after she stopped chasing, my brother stopped running and cried at the top of his lungs.

My brother forgot to charge his PSP at home, and I forgot the charger. To make up for it, I lent him my PSP, which turns out to be a bad move. He was the last to sleep and within the first night, he drained the batteries. So for the next two days I played Gravity Defied - Trial Racing on my handphone and listened to the same song on my iPod repeatedly. For the record, it was Holidae In by Chingy ft. Ludacris and Snoop Dogg.

Livin' High Up In The Sky

Apartment Life. That's it. An all-new way to look at your homes made its way to the market, being realeased just before Q4 starts. No more boring old normal-type homes, we can all live in the top floor and stomp on the neighbors below. In this game you can become a witch! And there is also the all-famous San Francisco Painted Ladies townhouses in the game, although I doubt very much that it resembles anything like the Burj Dubai. And oh - a trailer park too! Whoopee, rednecks ahoy.

Talking about apartments - which happened to be my favorite type of house, I'd like to share with you guys a few other cool stuff that you can put in an apartment. A real-life apartment. C'mon guys, sometimes a geek just got to revisualize his own natural habitat.



Have you heard of the Bloomframe? It's a retractable balcony which looks like a window when closed and a balcony when open. How very cool is that?


Whoever said you can't have a BBQ on the 10th floor? With this Bruce BBQ set, you can have a BBQ anywhere you want as long as it has a railing. Wonder if it'll work on stair railings?


Lately a lot of high-end upmarket apartments have included car elevators that take your car directly to your doorstep at the 17th floor. Very thoughtful, and dumb. I have a fascination for automatic parkings and car elevators, but wouldn't that annoying Hummer living above leaving for work be annoying especially when it revs its V8 engine every morning?

Bruce BBQ found on Neatorama
Sims 2: Apartment Life found on GameSpot
Car Elevator Apartment found on CarLoft
BloomFrame found on BloomFrame

Security First - Protect Your Gadgets

If you are a geek like me and have alot of tiny little gadgets you don't want anyone to touch or steal - for example: thumbdrives, iPhone, expensive watch, and other whatnots - then you better know that the safe is the worst place to hide items because where would a thief go when he enters your house? The safe, of course! Now I know since most of you don't have a safe (not even me) because you don't want to invest in one, then let me show a few items that can protect your item better and in far more cheaper ways.

This is one of the effective ways to hide your items. In a wall socket - I mean, the thief would only want your power cable so he can watch your plasma TV in his shack, why would he need a wall socket? As in the picture above, a key unlocks the wall socket and it swings on its pivot to reveal whatever you hide inside there. Sweet.


Ah - the classic book vault. This company glued together two random boring books and drilled a rectangle crevice hundreds of pages deep so you could hide stuff inside - in the picture, they hid an iPhone so you can roughly guess the size of the real book.

If you have smaller items such as jewellery to hide, then maybe a small place like this 7-Up can is all you need. You can unscrew the top to stash away. However I don't think so this one is effective as alot of thieves are poor and hungry, and they always grab a quick snack in their victim's house. 7-Up, unopened before their eyes, mm. Once they realize the can contains more than $1 worth of carbonated drink, you're in for some sobbing time.
However, this one would certainly work well. I'd like to know what kind of thief eats dog food. And nobody ever opens a can of dog food unless you have a dog. So, this one is the least expensive way to hide your hideables.

Ah, this one is different. No, you can't hide anything in it - but with battery-powered blinking red LED, this dummy camera would fool any crook. They'd think the camera is videotaping their every move because not many homes have a CCTV installed in - it's a breach of privacy. But this one would be more than welcome, I'm sure of it. For a tiny more cash you get a swivelling version, one that tilts left and right on it's own. For a bit more cash you get a waterproof outdoor version so you can always put it by that new Ferrari of yours - or so you've been telling me.

All products can be bought from X-Tremegeek