It’s been a while since I last posted 7ven music; I know some of you miss it. You see, the amazing ME has been busy and lacking inspiration to sing; age is catching up. Truth be told, the main reason for lack of music post on mayvelous is cos’ our dear O’ Icy went back to Yangon for a few month. She just came back last week and must have brought back quite a few Karaoke CDs. She was telling me about the latest hits from home the other day and sent me these three songs that she tried out. As her most faithful fan, I have the honour of listening her songs first and am given the freedom of praise or criticize about them ruthlessly. ha`ha`

The three songs she sent are: (more…)

My brother, Aung a.k.a Zatlite, has started blogging yesterday after a few years of persuasion from me. He started off with twittering ,which was also the result of my persistent persuasion, and has been a good regular twitterer to date. Yesterday, he suddenly made himself a blog and now he’s crazy about it.

His very first blog, “The private life of a badminton maniac“, talks about all his passion on racquet sports, especially badminton and racquet breaking hobbies. I’ve posted some of his actions on the past Badminton games in this post and; photos and videos of his squash tournament here. (more…)

Just spreading this wonderful opportunity to all those travel bloggers who like to visit Indonesia and participate in this event. Early this year, I went to Bali for similar event; I had a great time there, met lots of people and learn new things. I wish I could go again, but I doubt it since I’m not really a travel blogger. Anyhow…the following is an abstract from the GV email I got, read on for detail info as well:

Indonesian Bloggers are having the 2nd national gathering next month on the November 22nd, last year we managed to get 500 bloggers from all over Indonesia to come.

This year hopefully we can get up to 1000 bloggers to attend the whole day event. The theme for this year is blogging for society.

Leading to that, as a part of the program to promote Indonesia tourism, supported by Indonesian Ministry of Cultural and Tourism, we would like to invite several international bloggers from any country to come and have a trip to three cities (Bali, Jogjakarta, Jakarta) in Indonesia leading to the event.

We are looking for bloggers (travel bloggers) that can post their experience, photos, people they meet, basically blogging about Indonesia and Indonesian people, and join the event.

The period for this trip is between Nov 17 – Nov 22 2009 and this is the itinerary:

1. Denpasar, Bali (Mon, Nov 17 – Tue, Nov 18)
2. Jogjakarta (Wed, Nov 19 – Thu, Nov 20)
3. Jakarta (Fri, Nov 21 – Sat, Nov 22)

All expense will be covered, including flight ticket from your country to Indonesia and back.

And read more about the event in detail below. Their site is fully in Indonesian language but this is from email attachment and it’s in English, so dumping it directly here.

(more…)

Yesterday, I went to see my brother’s squash game at Defence Club. There is this Fiji Bitter Squash Tournament going on here at Suva for this whole week – every evening after 5pm. My bro’s game was supposed to be on Monday but his opponent didn’t turn up so they postponed the game to Tuesday (yesterday). He played against one Indian man around 40+ (hmm I forgot his name) and was thrashed badly.

It was the very first squash tournament for my brother since he started playing squash a few months back. We use to play Badminton only and this year my bro started playing squash with some of his friends so he still has a lot to learn before he can compete in the tournament. Nevertheless, he signed himself up in B Grade thinking C Grade is for kids and he would do fine in B. Well the result was he got knocked down pretty badly; he wasn’t really in his best form also and the opponent was quite experienced player who knows how to make him run around in court. So he lost his game and went into Plate pool and will be playing again today at Victoria Park. I guess I’ll go watch again this evening.

Aung’s very first squash game

One of the Ministers, Mr. Kenneth Zinck (and a few other big faces I sometimes see on TV), came to play as well, I’m not sure he came just to play for fun or was in the competitions as I couldn’t stay long to watch his game. He was cheering his buddy’s game quite loudly/actively. I was taking a few videos of the game and itching to take him as well but that would be awkward to directly shoot at him so I was waiting for his game but I left early and missed the game. I think he wanted his picture taken as well cos’ he kept smiling at my way while cheering for his buddy (Ok may be just my thought) .

I know him as one of the most active sport lovers among Fiji Government Ministers especially on Rugby games. We are sure to see him cheering from the front row in almost every Rugby games, yelling and waving his things (the flag/the banners I mean) at the camera. LOL. So we normally search for him everytime there is a Rugby 7 game on TV. Quite a celebrity he is. I also remember him very well after seeing him wear Tweety Bird necktie on one of the interview sessions on TV. Quite a fashion for him. It was so funny to see a Minister wearing some childish necktie with big Tweety bird at the bottom. I guess it must have been a gift from his kids or something. But that was one of the unforgettable sights about him.

There were some players from Nadi and other towns participating in the tournament as well. I met 4 young guys from Nadi; their coach was pretty nice man who encouraging us to join their club and telling us about his 4 players. His son plays in A Grade and other 3 guys play in Bs. He was also coaching a Korean girl who lost in ladies game against a Fijian girl. He said he also will be playing in the competition but I missed his game.

Coaching a Korean Girl

The Game with a guy from Nadi

Well you see, I had some ulterior motives, it’s not just watching my brother’s game but I went there to check out some good looking players but turn out only the old men were there. The Nadi guys are quite cute but they’re just too young, under 19. hehe Oh but there is this handsome organizer, I heard he’s very good player and former Fiji representative or something. Aww but it’s a pity he got ring on his finger haha. Nah I’m kidding, I just went there to cheer for my brother’s first game and also getting some material for my blog (Ok there’s still a motive behind but good motive).

Here are some more short videos I took: Two Games Mix + Score Sheet | Another Mix Game | Practice Games | Game Sheets

I’m going to watch the games today also at Victoria Park. One of our colleagues is playing in C grade and I’m sure more games to see today. They are having this tournament in 3 different places, Victoria Park, Merchant Club and Defence Club due to limited availability of courts in each club. Anyways, I hope I can watch some nice games this evening and hope that my brother and our colleague play well in their game also.

I’m not sure it’s a spam mail or a proper mail. I did not write anything about salt on my site but posted a short link on GV the other day. Is that why this person email me or am I thinking too much out of spam mail? Well who cares, if it is a spam mail then it’s pretty good one. If it’s a proper mail then I’m sure whoever see this post and interested might contact him?

Feed Back Message from Mayvelous.com
Shahidul Haq Sikder wrote:

(more…)

These few months I’ve been busy running around arranging things for various visa applications. Here are my experiences, as a Myanmar passport holder, with different consular services in Fiji. Depending on the type of visa application, type of passport and your situation, the services might be different. This is entirely based on my personal application experiences.

Most visa application takes 3 days to 2 weeks of processing period and 0 to 210+ FJD visa fee. Most visa application requires you to show the followings:

(more…)

This little apps, “Open Street Map” is getting popular among my colleagues and quite becoming the topic of discussion this morning. It’s all started from strangepants who pass on the word to my bro zatlite and now everyone at the office started adding street names for their residential areas. As for me, I just observed the site but haven’t done any actual work on it since almost every streets in our area has already been added by my bro. Anyways, here is how this cool little thing works.

It’s a wiki sort of world street map where anyone can login to add/edit the streets in your region.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.

OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.

To edit, you need to sign in first. Anyone can open an account there easily. You can also export the chosen map area into a few formats, (png, jpeg, svg, pdf, postscript) and can play around with the size, scale etc under “Export” tab.
You can also write some diaries on it or do some GPS tracing.

Ofcos’ if you are confused with how to do the tracing, you can always check out their wiki help page. In the Beginners’ Guide, there is an very well explained introductory video for you to get started with. I’m also checking out the video and briefly reading through the steps.

I did ask my bro, who actually done editing on the map, to write a post about it since it’s quite interesting to play around but as usual the lazy slime just passed me the video and ignored my request. So here I am dropping a note to whoever out there love playing with maps to check this site out.

Ciao!