Sherm's Birthday: Guitar Hero 5 & Cafe Le Chateau

Sherm's birthday just passed, and she had a really good week celebrating it! I got her Guitar Hero 5, mainly cos she's a total Muse fan now, and wanted to play more of the Muse guitar hero releases. We ate at a few nice places, Cafe Le Chateau being the one to highlight here.

Guitar Hero 5:
We've been playing Rock Band 2 for a few months now. We've created at least 3 bands and multiple characters, and we liked the song list much more than Guitar Hero: World Tour. Then came GH5, with its more friendly track list and bonus avatars (Shirley Manson, Kurt Cobain, and most importantly - Matthew Bellamy!). However, on purchasing the game, we realized that Muse's already released tracks for the Guitar Hero franchise only works on GH: Legends of Rock edition (which is only for guitar, not even singing or anything), and we were sorely disappointed.

However, we gave GH5 a chance, and learned that the difficulty level in GH5 really was more challenging than RB2. Sherm's been getting really good at the drums, and she feels that the GH5 drums is more realistic with their out of rhythm bass pedal kicks, and multiple rolls on single pads, even the trigger for Drums Star Power is harder - you have to hit both yellow and blue together. The various challenges for each song unlock more stuff to enhance customization which leads me to the character creator. GH5's creator is even more customizable than RB2's, you can choose face shape, nose angle, distance between eyes, etc, and that's just for the face! So all in all, it wasn't a wasted game, we just hope that there'll be more Muse tracks available for download soon, and hopefully, we'll have Matt Bellamy avatar by then!


Shermaine's birthday dinner at Cafe Le Chateau:
This was a place I read off Hungrygowhere.com recently, and wanted to bring Sherm to, so we eventually got around to hitting the place and found it to be quite a sensory-enlightening visit. There was an article in The Newpaper on this restaurant a few days prior too!

Oxtail Stew - This dish, their house special, is said to be stewed for 2 days before serving. We went on a Monday, and they were closed the day before, so I suspect the meat itself hadn't been stewed 2 days yet, but the demiglace sauce was absolutely fragrant, with a strong hint of quality wine! Seriously good!! @ $20.50, it was well worth it.

(Sherm): Had a bite of this slathered in sauce and was actually bracing myself against a sodium overload. Was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the sauce was only barely salted, with the main bouquet being a very flavourful beef stock, smooth and floral/fruity red wine, rounded off with the sweetness of well-stewed meat.

The oxtail pieces could have been a bit more melt-in-the-mouth tender, as some pieces still had little bits of chewy connective tissue, but a very competent dish as a whole. Props for the perfectly boiled potato, it was put to good use sopping up all the delicious gravy! Yum!

Creamy Pork Cutlet - 3 medallions of tasty pork cutlets in a heavenly mushroom sauce. Comes with skinny fries n a healthy portion of boiled veggies - the fries, crisp and not oily, dunked in the oxtail stew tasted even better! ~$18. Do note the arrangement of the fries in the picture, it doesn't look like it was simply scooped and plonked on, does it? Such attention to detail!

(Sherm): This was my dish, and I sure didn't regret ordering it. The cutlets, while firm and ever so slightly dry, were beautifully crisp on the outside, perfectly pan seared and delicious with all the caramalised crust to nibble on! still thinking about it... mmMMmmm... shoestring fries in red wine oxtail gravy... slurrp...

Apple Pie - this $9 dessert serves 2 nicely. Apparently it's another house special that they prepare 15 mins before serving. We tried eating it several ways: 1) the apple pie in small portion without ice cream, 2) the apple pie with some ice cream in a bite-sized portion, 3) a wedge of the pie the size of a tablespoon with a generous skim of ice cream. And we realized method 3 yielded the most awesome taste of all! It's worth it too!

(Sherm): buttery, flaky pastry topped with thinly sliced apples and a robust, sticky vanilla ice cream... having eaten some stodgy apple pies in the past, this open-faced style one (similar to a tarte tatin?) REALLY hit the spot. four thumbs up! =9


Despite the place having a chi-chi French name, the price of food at Cafe Le Chateau isn't expensive considering the quality of the food and the exquisite tastes that French cuisine is known for, and bearing in mind that you probably can't get a dish this size for that price in any chi-chi French restaurant in Singapore anyway. They do have cheap lunch sets @ $11, and executive lunch sets @ $28+. Also of note is the excellent service we received there, perhaps cos we were the only other table there besides a large party of 8. That said, we'll definitely visit this place again!

Cafe Le Chateau
491 River Valley Road
#01-16 Valley Point
Tel: +65 6737 7897

Opening hours:
Daily 11.30am–2.45pm, 6pm–10pm
(Closed on Sun)

I did Geeky Things today

So I took the day off to reformat my PC the way I wanted. I've been wanting to reallocate more space to my Linux Mint partition in order to Virtualbox it with Windows XP, but my old WinXP partition had so many games and junk in it that I just couldn't get round to doing it.

8 February being National Clean Out Your PC Day, and being a few days to the Lunar New Year, I finally found the resolve to get down in the dirt and start eliminating the games, allowing me to go for a full reformat after the "spring-cleaning".

TIP: Don't place your PC on the floor or where it has direct access to dirt. Elevation makes for a cleaner PC interior.

Taking inspiration from a friend's toy display, I placed my PC casing onto a rack, elevating the base about 3-4" off the floor. After 1 year, I opened my casing expecting a dust carpet (like from my old units), but found it immaculately clean, just like when I set it up! The only dirt accumulation could be found on the exterior grills where the intake fan was placed. Just had to vacuum that and voila! dirt begone.

What I did was, I re-sized the partitions with GParted (an open-source version of Partition Magic), then re-installed Windows for that fresh (read: fast) Windows feeling. But Windows killed my GRUB Boot Loader (cos I hadn't assigned a partition for it previously - have done it this time), and I couldn't repair my GRUB (cos of my newbness, I couldn't even locate it - I think I unpartitioned it away) so I had to re-install the whole partition again, but that was fast and easy. I kept to Linux Mint 7 "Gloria", preferring the look and feel of the older build than the latest version "Helena", and Grub 1.5 of course.

Current setup:
1) 125GB of Windows XP partition purely for gaming.
2) 165+ GB of Linux Mint running Virtualbox with Windows XP on workspace 2 for all my Windows needs (except gaming).
3) 2GB of Swap Files for Linux
4) 2GB of Boot partition

Pritpal later suggested that I might want to consider installing them on separate hard disks to save me the hassle of re-partitioning. I also considered that HDD failure might cause me some future problems.. Maybe I'll do it for my next clean-up next year..

Turns out when I unwittingly re-installed my Linux partition, I also lost some data that I had not backed-up, thinking I hadn't needed to when I hadn't planned to re-install that portion. So there went my years of MP3 collections, which I had only just recently been re-united with. Those were probably the most valuable in that they accompanied me through the years 2000 till 2007. 7 years of my life's soundtrack.

But that's fine, after talking to Shermaine, metaphorically, I realised my taste in music had evolved/ changed and I like other things better now. I guess my life had taken a turn and other music now played in the background. What I lost was simply the feeling of nostalgia I suppose.

I also lost a handful of composite images I made in the last 2 weeks of our recent Taiwan trip. The only surviving copies have, luckily, already been uploaded into Facebook.

It was about 11pm, and I was just about to wrap up everything by backing up my iPhone.. I then went and screwed up the new update and lost some very important data!

TIP: 'Syncing' and 'Backing-Up' do not mean the same things for iPhone/iTunes. Always Sync before Backing-Up.

The travel-logs that Shermaine had been dutifully compiling during our recent Taiwan trip - over long journeys, staying up late at night just to input our tastes and experiences there - were gone with the factory restore. That was the biggest loss. All the other Apps could be replaced, but the data in them were the most valuable. I learned then that "Cloud-computing" really has its uses. My stuff in Evernote remain safe, cos they're safe in the 'cloud'. Other Apps that didn't use any means of backing up other than the iTunes sync would probably suffer a loss of memory. Thank goodness the calendar was backed up in iTunes.

TIP: Always back-up your data in the "cloud", don't rely on your gadget alone.

Anyway, those problems have since been resolved. Turns out I did extract the travel logs and saved them via email already, phew!! Very lucky, as Sherm says.. I did send a technical support query to Apple regarding my lost Apps and was surprised by their quick response. And it wasn't generic either, she actually lamented my loss of personal data! The tech also took the liberty to restore my lost Apps so I only needed to re-sync with the App Store to get them all back. Only the Apps that had changed since would be missing, and she actually stated what I wouldn't be getting. How is that for awesome service? Colour me very impressed.

TIP: Running videos while doing brain-numbing/ time-consuming activities makes time pass quite enjoyably.

I must say, having a Netbook to watch 7 episodes of Smallville while doing all that geeky stuff made it really less of a hair-pulling experience than usual, since I'd just watch the vids while the installations/ formatting took its time. Turns out Season 4 of Smallville has 2 famous licensed characters pop out from the DC-verse - Bart Allen (aka Impulse, aka The Flash), and Mikhail Mxyzptlk (aka Mister Mxyzptlk). Bart also mentions wanting to start a league of people just like him and Clark - reference to Justice League! Whee!

Other things that contributed to the productivity of my day - fixing Sherm's torn plastic brolly from Taiwan, fixing the broken hook in my mom's PC motherboard. All with resin + hardener btw..

All in all, taking a day off work to do this really made me quite relaxed, Sherm calls it "me-time" - I agree it was wonderfully beneficial, were it not for the unnecessary stress at the end.. Well, after consolidating (or trying to) my photos and music and digital junk, I should think the next time I need to do this overhaul, I'll be even more prepared. I really hope so. =) I'm glad I got to do my geeky stuff today!

Big Night Out: Muse in Singapore

This was one awesome awesome concert!

After entering the Singapore Indoor Stadium, I spent some time marvelling at the last 2 times I was there. One was some years ago when I sang with the combined church choirs for a Shine Jese Shine rally. Can't remember much apart from the fact that there were a lot of people, we had a free meal and that was about it. The first memory of the Indoor Stadium however was when I attended Debbie Gibson's show here. I recall sitting at the extreme left of the stage in the stands..

So there we were at the MTV Big Night Out event, featuring Muse, Saosin and Rise Against. Of course we were all there for Muse..

Sherm and I spent the last year or so bathed in their Starlight, thinking we were Knights of Cydonia, joined up with the Resistance against the Exo-politics of the Supermassive Blackhole hailing from the United States of Eurasia. Our Undisclosed Desires were to follow our Guiding Light and lead the Uprising in the City of Delusion to cull the Hysteria born of the Megalomania there. We would be Invincible and our victory Glorious, and only then would we Take a Bow and Sing for Absolution.

But I digress. We gave the warm-up bands a chance, Saosin (like Saosin Jiu - wine), was kinda emo, in that they had layered vocals and were a little wail-ly, and a little hard-core, Rise Against was more energetic and their sound suited Shermaine more. Overall I didn't really enjoy their performances for the simple reason that they just sounded bad. They didn't seem to have a proper sound system, with a sound guy to moderate their volumes, so both bands just sounded really raw and in your ears, and we couldn't make out a thing they were singing/saying. *rolls eyes*

Then Rise Against left the stage and a whole bunch of roadies came on to move their equipment off stage. Prior to this I was already getting a little worried that Muse would sound as bad as these guys, but when ALL the speakers and what not was carried off stage, I got excited. My rationale was that the previous bands had amps behind them, so they had hearing probs, which was why they just cranked the volumes and hoped for the best. Then the Muse stuff came onstage. A white piano, a new set of drums and what appeared to be a magic box on a stand..

We noticed they started testing smoke machines and the sound pit in the middle of the stadium suddenly had 3 angmohs inside tweaking sound settings. This was definitely hopeful since the pit had been devoid of people in the previous performances! Suddenly 3 displays lit up - what looked like a perspective image of 3 buildings appeared on the backdrop of the stage. Everyone went wow.. They had an electronic backdrop!! Just like at Wembley!! Yes yes yes!! This was gonna be good!!

And it was good. Muse came on stage, the stadium came alive and we were treated to a great 1hr 40 mins of an awesome performance..

Just to compare what we went through, this is Hysteria from their Wembley gig:


This was Shermaine's first ever concert attendance. She's never been for one before, and when she heard Muse was coming to Singapore, she just jumped at the chance to go see it! I must say, she really enjoyed the performance. When the other 2 bands played, she just bopped along, and raved a little (about Rise Against) - "they're really good!". When Muse filed in and commenced with Uprising, Shermaine (who was seated for the first 2 bands) immediately jumped to her feet and raised her hands! For the entire performance, we sat down only once, somewhere around United States of Eurasia, when Matt Bellamy took to the piano and started a slow tune alone. For the other 1hr 30+ mins, we were on our feet, jumping, dancing, shouting, singing, pumping our fists, clapping.. it was just marvelous!

And the inevitable end came, the crowd, including me kept chanting, kept standing and clapping.. and Muse obliged with another 4 songs, complete with video and lights as well (this was a planned encore!)!

Muse is a great live performance band, their albums have been spectacular - of note is their latest one, The Resistance. Do check them out, and book standing area tickets if they ever come around to your town.