Suaku-speak

Wah! I have like 32 friends online at the same time.

Never before a 'feat'. That's a little more than 30% of my entire list.

And I remember the days when the man used to laugh at me: "Wah, you got 10 friends online ah. So many ah, not bad what..."

Farking 'ell.


I just missed out on the Internet-generation.

I am an oldie. I should be glad I even have an MSN list now.

Back in varsity days, if you had a computer, you'd find yourself suddenly swarmed with lots of 'friends' in hall.

"Hello, can I use your computer tonight? I have FYP report to do."

Never mind if it was a 486 or a Pentium I.

Infrastructure? What infrastructure?

Oh, you mean the telephone port to which you hooked up your 56k dial-up modem?

Oh yah, we had that.

In our days, we spent lazy hours watching TV together, going for runs, drinking mindlessly, talking cock - anything but playing LAN games.

If we wanted to relay a message, we would call each other on the land line, or text each other like crazy on the cell (at least SMS-es were free in those days).

"Eh."

"What?"

"Come to my room leh."

"Why?"

"Just come lah."

Few seconds later, my next-door neighbor turned up at my door to see me lying comfortably under my covers in bed.

"Can help me switch off lights and close the door?"

Friendster? ICQ? Simi lai eh?


That was what welcomed the man in his first year of school.

Couple of years later, by the time he was in his final year, you would be pathetic if you didn't have your own personal computer.

On a quiet weekday night in the hall, if you stood by the window and listened hard enough, you'd hear echoes of 'uh-ohs' throughout the compound.

Nobody spoke to each other much anymore; everyone just 'uh-ohed' one another.

Heck, no one even subscribed to a land line anymore. Instead, all they knew was the LAN line.

Just plug and go.

If you had more than 300 friends in your Friendster account, you probably wouldn't know more than half of them, other than the fact that they were your "hi-bye" hallmates from some other block, or that they were the friends of the friends of your friends.


I have barely 70 friends on Friendster.

I have only 100 friends on MSN, and worse, only 7 on Yahoo! - or something like that.

Only a handful of us keeps a blog, and I don't think anyone else is on multiple online-community sites as I am.

I must say, we've advanced and aged pretty gracefully, haven't we?