Links for friends

I had some time to catch up some RSS feeds before dinner, because I'd finished what I needed to do in the day and needed to rest my well-blistered feet.

So in no particular order:

• For my geek friends: "Google Wave drips with ambition" (via garry's posterous).
• For my teacher friends: "when teachers and students connect outside school".

En route to Seoul

There would be a picture of my two backpacks here, taken this morning before I left for the airport to prove that I'm really travelling that light --- but the USB cable for my camera is in my check-in luggage.

I'm at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, where contrary to what the internet would tell you, there is free wi-fi. So I caught up on email, Facebook and RSS feeds instead of swotting up on hangeul. That can wait till I board the 1.5-hour flight to Seoul.

My flight from Singapore to Shanghai was packed with a couple of tour groups from China. This was the first time I've ever heard cabin crew sternly, shrilly yell, teacher-style, in Mandarin, "Please stay in your seats!" This was prompted by passengers who were unfastening their seatbelts and getting up from their seats the moment the plane lifted off from or hit the ground.

My ineptness with Mandarin is so embarrassing. I wasn't sure of the term for bottled water when the flight attendant was coming around with the beverage trolley (she simply used the generic word for "water"), and I could not, for the life of me, remember how to say "credit card" when I was ordering drinks at a cafe in the airport. I remember how to say "Korea", but I can't remember how "Seoul" is translated in Mandarin.

However, I did manage to work my way through a six-page inflight magazine story on "the spirit of art" in Melbourne. Just don't make me take a test on that.

I forgot how much I hate Windows

... till I started using a HP Mini today.

The machine itself is great. I had it in my bag for most of this afternoon and evening, and didn't feel the weight at all. It runs pretty fast, and while the keyboard takes a little getting used to, that's mostly to do with the placement of my hands with respect to the touchpad; the size itself is fine.

Now if only these machines could run OSX. I also miss Adium. Miranda looks positively like ICQ circa the late 1990s.

But all in all, I ain't complainin'. The nice folks at Edelman Singapore were nice enough to rustle me up a loan unit for the next few months, so I can bring it to Korea and not have to lug the Macbook everywhere. The latter held up very well against the rigours of on-the-road travel in Vietnam, including being bumped in a backpack against some rocks during an unexpectedly steep descent at Cuc Phuong National Park and enduring the rough vibralto of many motorbike rides throughout the entire trip. But my back and shoulders will be grateful for not having its weight bear down on them every. Single. Day. of the next trip.

So now I have one sparkling white Macbook and one snazzy black HP Mini. And a white cat and a black cat. Can we say photo op?

Just call me an old-fashioned girl

I spent some of today working and watching Mad Men (my newest addiction), then after dinner I did something I hadn't done in a very, very long time: I curled up on the couch and read --- a book.

Sure, the TV was on for white noise, the laptop was on and my cell phone occasionally beeped with a text message that I answered. But for over three hours I sat and read that book, getting up only to refill my mug of tea (I'm trying to fight off an incipient sore throat) or go to the bathroom. I'd already read about one-third of the book and I finished the rest of it tonight.

This is not to say that I haven't been reading all year. I read online everyday, heaps and heaps of stuff. But when it comes to books, I usually read them to kill dead time while I'm on public transport, waiting for public transport, waiting in line at the post office or waiting for a friend at a cafe. In other words: as much as I love reading and books and words and ideas, I very rarely choose to read a book, when I could be doing something else.

Tonight I actually caught myself thinking something along the lines of, "Okay, so I've finished that episode of Mad Men and I don't have the next one. But I have the latest episode of Dollhouse. But after that I don't have anything else, so how will I fill up the evening ..."

And I think it was when "how will I fill up the evening" traipsed across my mind, that I knew there was something terribly, terribly amiss.

The book I finished was Jen Lin-Liu's Serve the People, which I stumbled across at the library last week while I was looking for books on Korean food. It's an account of Lin-Liu's journey to learn to cook Chinese food in China, from a cooking school for kitchen workers who need government-approved culinary qualifications to a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop to one of Shanghai's most chi-chi restaurants.

I have to admit that I picked up the book mostly because the friend who recently landed a book deal is going to write a memoir linked to Singapore food (see her spanking new blog, A Tiger in the Kitchen, which shares the title of the book), and there are other food-related ideas that are burbling at the back of my brain. At any rate, it was nice to take a walk through modern-day China through someone else's eyes, and the ease with which most of the Chinese terms and names made sense to me, made me wonder if I shouldn't indeed spend some time wandering around that vast and crazy land. If nothing else, as I told everyone when I got back from Shanghai last year, my spoken Mandarin would improve really quickly.

This book aside, everything else I've been reading has been related to the upcoming Korea trip. I'm still trying to find a good book on Korean food --- not a recipe book, not a glossary of definitions, but a proper look at the culture and the people. Recommendations welcome!

It's frakkin' over

I stayed up to watch the Battlestar Galactica series finale tonight --- even though I really should be catching up on sleep instead --- because in the three days since it aired, it's been getting ridiculously difficult to avoid spoilerish material online.

Hot damn.

Now it's almost 2 a.m. and I wish there was someone awake who's seen the finale whom I could talk about it with. *growl*

PS: If you're gonna leave a comment on this post, don't leave any spoilers unless you leave plenty of spoiler warnings and spoiler space (this is for the benefit of my BSG-loving friends who haven't gotten around to the finale yet). Thank you!

Link dump

Because I have too many tabs open.

In no particular order:

• "Thomas Merton on Social Media?" --- a 20th-century Trappist monk wonders about "they who have nothing to express [yet] are continually expressing themselves".
• "It's Not About Networking, It's About Community" --- Mridu Khullar thinks "writers are the most generous people on the planet. Well, most of them anyway."
• Granta offers advice on "How to Write About Africa" (via an old college friend on Facebook) --- read it with your tongue firmly in cheek.
  
• Salon.com's Cary Tennis answers the question "Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying?" --- "Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important."

Yes, these links are all about writing. Some weeks, it is all I read about.

Too darn wet

It's been unseasonally rainy, the kind of rain we're supposed to get in January (but this year we had just a lot of wind instead). It's odd having to deal with monsoon-style rain at this time of the year --- it just doesn't feel like March. But I don't really mind the wet. Gadding about in flip-flops brings me right back to last year's Vietnam trip, especially when I'm wearing the pair of black slippers I had to buy in Hue because my Tevas were giving me blisters. And I'm grateful for any cool weather that Singapore gets.

Nonetheless, I hope it's not going to be so wet in South Korea, which is where I'm headed next. It'll be spring and there's supposed to be "light rain"; I'm going to hit Beach Road market to pick up another $3 army poncho before I leave, but I hope I won't have to use it much.

What have been too wet lately are my pasta sauces. I failed to drain the diced tomatoes before chucking them in last week's bolognaise, resulting in a soupy sauce, and I messed up the proportion of chicken stock to sour cream on tonight's stroganoff, making for another liquidy concoction. Taste-wise both were fine, but these little screw-ups are the reason I never trust myself to cook a full meal for family or friends.

Cool things I found on the web today:

• Jon Stewart kicks CNBC's ass for years of bad financial journalism masquerading as market expertise (via my friend Dave's Facebook update).
  
• The Big Picture has some incredible images of people at work around the world (industrialisation never looked so good).
• Go Media has given us the perfect accompaniment to FAIL Blog: FAIL stickers (is there an Epic FAIL version?).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (abridged)

Seven seasons, four minutes, one gambolling piece of music.

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (Abridged)

Thanks, Wahj (who found it via io9).

Okay, it's officially passé

When the "25 Random Things About Me" Facebook meme is all over the mainstream media, viz.:

• "Ah, Yes, More About Me? Here Are '25 Random Things'" (The New York Times) via Serene-via-Facebook
• "25 things about ... Facebook fads" (The Washington Post) via beeker-via-Facebook
• "25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You" (TIME) via mr brown-via-Facebook
• "The random beauty of '25 Random Things'" (Salon)
  

... then the window has officially closed on me responding to any of the friends who tagged me for the meme on Facebook.

If you must have some random "facts", go read some of the old memes from my blog archive.

Why Nciku is awesome

Because when Ondine describes a Chinese character to me via IM thus:

The top is a "ru" as in "ru guo" as in "what if" ... the bottom is a "xing" as in "heart" ...

I may not have a clue what the word is, but I can go to Nciku, handwrite the word in the box provided and it will match the word for me.

The internet is amazing.

Also, I should really brush up on my Mandarin.

Why I like A Small Orange

(Besides their cool name, that is.)

Because within 3 hours of me emailing them on Saturday morning Singapore time/Boxing Day night American time, they had upgraded my hosting package status exactly as I requested (pro-rating the bigger package for the remaining month till I renew the annual subscription for this site), so that I can publish my blog without errors again.

I had to upgrade my package because this domain has somehow hit its disk quota of 75 MB, even though I barely store any large image files on it. The next size up is 400 MB; I think that'll hold me for a while.

Yay for A Small Orange (and Lucian, who introduced me to it)!

Working up to Christmas

Between the moving and the deadline, I've been too busy to do anything Christmasy except order food for the family Christmas lunch and marvel at other people's idea of a Christmas greeting.

So in lieu of any traditionally festive posts, I offer you this rather nifty travelogue instead: "The road to Bethlehem", wherein BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool follows in the footsteps (and donkey-steps) of Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

Personally, I love the opening to the December 17 entry:

"Why are you standing there with a donkey?" said an old Palestinian man.

"This is a nice modern city, and you're standing there with a donkey! What are you trying to say? What's wrong with you?"

Clearly, not everyone was as happy as I was to meet my new travelling companion in the centre of the city of Jenin.

The old man thought I was trying to show Jenin as a backward place. He refused to accept the nativity explanation, and went on his way muttering about how deceptive the foreign media is.

I can't wait to hear more about the donkeys.

Also, I want to write a travel/news story like this some day.

(The only irritating thing --- and this is a technical issue --- is that the posts are ordered in reverse chronological order, like a blog, which would be fine if they were all individually hyperlinked, like blog entries would be, and one could navigate through them from an archive page. But you can't, so it all feels very manual and pre-Web 2.0. The correspondent should just set up a free Blogger or Wordpress account instead.)

Getting things sorted

When friends at home saw me online this afternoon, all they wanted to know was a) how was everything in Hanoi, and b) what was I doing online instead of checking out the place I'm supposed to be writing about?

To the latter, the answer is: I'm not writing about Hanoi, I was chillaxing for the day and I was online only to finish up some prep work for tomorrow, which is the first real "working" day of my trip.

Today we wandered around Hanoi some to run errands --- buy train tickets and Vietnam SIM cards --- and I got to eat a lot more street food than I did the last time. No pho yet, but plenty of time for that (seven weeks, to be precise). Today we had bun cha, baby pineapples, some dumplings with, er, mystery meat, a salad-y thing with something that resembled beef jerky, and cha ca la vong. I was too busy eating to take pictures of anything.

Hanoi is still a fun place to get lost in, just don't let the motorbikes run you over, but I think the air quality has declined distinctly. The quality of light at night is just off, somehow.

Tomorrow we're off to Ninh Binh, and I don't know if the hotel we're checking into has wifi. So don't mind if there's silence around here for a few days ...

Google, I am not a bot!

Every time I use the "define:" operator in a Google search, it thinks I'm sending automated queries and makes me type in a CAPTCHA to prove that I'm human.

Maybe I use "define:" too often.

Random observations about food from the last few weeks

Having a flimsy memory is not remembering to drink the milk in the fridge unless I set a daily email reminder for it.

Sometimes I buy food from unlicensed street vendors, just because.

I have 40 39 pieces of vadai in my kitchen, fresh from Gordon's Katong Vadai, for tonight's party. Woot!

Do not make me uglify my blog

The National Heritage Board (full disclosure: I work for them from time to time) is having a "heritage star blogging competition", which asks people to write about a heritage-related topic or a museum visit. Aside from the cringe-worthy name of the competition, or the fact that it is a blogging competition at all, I'll allow that it's well and good to get people interested in writing meaningfully about their history or sense of identity. I even thought of taking part for the hell of it, seeing as I regularly write about museums or being Singaporean anyway.

Until I got to the part where I read that to qualify for the competition, one has to insert the "Brag Badge" on one's blog.

The term "Brag Badge" instantly set off alarm bells in my head (it sounds like something out of a Bratz product line), but even it hadn't, I took one look at the badges and decided that this was a deal-breaker.


Forget it. No way was I sticking anything that ugly on my blog, just to enter a competition. (Yes, I did it here to illustrate its ugliness, but the above is a screencap from the competition website and doesn't link back to the competition.)

I understand that they need a way to track competition entries. I understand that they're trying to stamp some kind of "branding" on this activity. But the "brand" of my blog is going to last a whole lot longer than any government campaign, and I don't need to clutter it up with other people's short-lived campaign artwork (particularly when that artwork conflates "star" and "blogger" as one word, ugh). Wouldn't a simple text link do the job as well?

Corporate attempts in Singapore to target (or should I say co-opt?) bloggers have been going awry lately (see what Vanessa Tan and my brother have to say). When are PR types going to figure out that not meaningful new media publicity does not come from, in the words of Cowboy Caleb, those who "[v]alue attending blog meetups, blog events, blog outings, blog sex orgies even MORE than actual blogging anything unique and interesting that you came up with yourself"?

I got my shots

Like a good germ-fearing person, I betook myself on Monday to Tan Tock Seng Hospital's Travellers' Health and Vaccination Clinic, where the nurse informed me that for Vietnam, the following shots were recommended:

• Tetanus
• Typhoid
• Influenza
• Hepatitis A & B
• Japanese encephalitis
• Rabies
  

At which point I wondered if there wasn't some kind of cap on the number of shots one could get at one go, because seriously? Owwwww.

As it turned out, before you get the Hepatitis A & B jabs, they test your blood to see if you're a carrier (or something like that lah, I'm honestly not too clear on the medical details). So no shots for that yesterday. I also declined the rabies and Japanese encephalitis shots, on the grounds that I plan to flee from any animals that might attack me and that Japanese encephalitis seems kind of rare, compared to dengue, malaria and the like.

(If I'm being egregiously ignorant, feel free to point it out in the comments. It just seemed like getting that many shots were overkill. Yes, this is how my brain works when it comes to medical decisions.)

So at the end of the session, I got tetatnus, typhoid and flu jabs, one in my right arm and two in my left, after which I went for a Pilates class that involved putting some amount of weight and strain on my shoulders, so for the rest of the evening, my upper arms were a little sore.

Fortunately, I had a Very Nice Dinner waiting for me.


It's amazing what one lovely host can put together with five guests who chip in with wine and bounty from Cold Storage. I had cheese and dip and wine till I was ready to fall asleep in my chair, but not before we talked of Facebook and Indonesia and more Facebook (seriously, six adults, mostly in their thirties, sitting around with red wine, talking about Facebook).

There is a story yet to come about the anti-malarial pills, but that will wait till tomorrow.

Related post: Like a lost backpacker

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed edition)

I always means to read more McSweeney's and then I don't, until Cowboy Caleb provides this awesome link to "Hamlet (Facebook News Feed edition)". An excerpt:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

...

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Read the full piece by Sarah Schmelling.

Government websites: the good, the bad and the ugly

The good

I needed to start looking at some 2009 dates for work, which entailed knowing when certain public holidays are, so I took myself over to the Ministry of Manpower website. As always, they faithfully list the public holidays for the following year, but now they've gone one better and provided the dates in an iCal format.

So all I had to do was download the iCal file and let Google Calendar import it. Easy-peasy. Importing information from the web into real life should always be this easy.

The bad

Okay, first off, let's make things clear: I like the library. I love books, and books live in the library where people can borrow many interesting ones for free, so I love the library. You don't have to make me go there or want to use it or want to like it. I'm sold. Tell me that I can access library materials or services online, and I'm thrilled that it saves me a trip down to the physical location.

(See how many times I used italics in that paragraph?)

That said, what the hell has happened to the National Library website? Or websites, I should say, because where before http://www.nlb.gov.sg served all library needs in one place, they recently decided to split their web presence into three domains:

• http://nl.sg --- the National Library
  
• http://pl.sg --- the public library
  
• http://nlb.gov.sg --- the rest?

To which I'm like, we're a nation-state, isn't our National Library already a public library? And where do I go to find what information? And why the hell do the sites take so damn long to load if the web assets have been divided up? And why the hell aren't any links, including "Contact info", working? (That last complaint occurred yesterday on pl.sg; within a couple of hours they emailed me to say that the links were working again.)

To quote from my email to the helpdesk yesterday:

I don't know what else doesn't work, but I'm tired of trying to find anything on this website. I miss the old NLB website. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as frustrating and impossible as the new ones.

I can only conclude that they're trying to be deliberately inefficient and, as I said to a web-savvy friend over IM:

maybe their secret plan
is to frustrate people
so we HAVE to go to the brick and mortar library

The ugly

Uh ... take your pick. Most government websites give me eye pain.

Of governments and new technologies

I know I said I was going to write a proper blog entry soon, not just toss out links, but I couldn't pass up on the comparison which leapt out at me while I was reading this morning's news.

The UK government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Make public a wide array of government statistics for the Show Us A Better Way competition, where anyone can suggest new ways of using that data to make people's lives better. It hopes to attract everyone from the tech industry to "hardcore coders to adolescents in their bedroom". BBC News even calls it "data mash-up" in the article headline.

The Singapore government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Dr Vivian Balakrishnan is quoted on Channel NewsAsia as saying:

I think we will get into the 'YouTube' style of politics, which means it's multimedia. It's no longer enough to just talk, you must have moving images, you must have sound, you must have music. And if it makes an impact, you will get millions of hits. And if it's true but boring, without multimedia, then no one's going to watch it.

Also, as quoted in the Straits Times:

Because you think you are not revealing yourself, a lot of people on the Internet engage in what I call virtual shouting. They want to gain attention and the best way ... is to say something crazy, outrageous, scandalous, maybe even defamatory.

Uh. Yeah. So one is releasing information out there in the hope of getting something good back in return, while the other is still concerned with the Sisyphean task of outshouting the crazies.

As a tax-paying citizen, I certainly know which project I'd rather my government be working on.

Get your geek on

Monday's links were about reading, today's are more tech-inclined:

• In case you still somehow thought that (internet) spam wasn't evil, take a look at what happens when a stay-at-home mom responds to every single piece of spam email for a month.
  
  
• The 10 Commandments of Web Design, according to several prominent web designers and usability experts. I'm so glad that the first item on their list is "Thou shalt not abuse Flash." Your mileage may vary. (Via swissmiss.)
  
  
• When I was young and foolish in 1997, a friend asked me if I would get a cell phone (Lian, do you remember that conversation? I think it took place in your car). I recoiled in disgust and said, "No, I don't need one." I see I wasn't the only one (via Cowboy Caleb).

I promise that my next blog post will be an actual blog post and not just a linkdump.

Good reading fun

I had a work-filled weekend (except for the ROJAK interlude), so it's only today that I can get around to posting some neat reading-related links:

• Since so many people got a tickle out of "The challenge of problem with office-speak", here's Slate's "Notes on Catch: Which catchphrases should be 'thrown under the bus'?" (via kitschy potemkin). Excerpt:

  It is possible to think of catchphrase use in stages. There's Stage 1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level. ...
  
  Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred" (time to throw "street cred" under the catchphrase bus?) or convey a sense of being au courant.
  
  Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as they say" to the end.
  
  Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase walking. Take "at the end of the day." It kind of stuns me whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?

• Also from Slate (also via kitschy potemkin), ";( Has modern life killed the semicolon?", wonders Portland State University faculty Paul Collins. I have a soft spot for the semicolon, and an even softer one (as I'm sure you can tell from reading my blog) for the dash.
  
  I also really like the penultimate sentence of this essay:

  When grading undergrad final papers recently, I found a near-absence of semicolons, save for one paper with cadenced pauses and carefully cantilevered clauses that gracefully stacked upon one another, Jenga-like, without ever quite toppling.

• Alison Bechdel, one of my favourite authors, gives her take on "Compulsory Reading" (via Bitch Ph.D.), about all the guilt we bibliophiles feel about the books we oughta read that we haven't read yet. This one's a comic-strip essay, for those of you that don't feel like dealing with any more prose right now. (If you like it, borrow her graphic-novel autobiography Fun Home from me.)
  
  My personal list of I-really-oughta-reads includes: War and Peace, London: A Biography, any novels by James Joyce and anything at all by Charles Dickens (I don't think the opening two pages of Hard Times or the adapted-and-illustrated-for-children version of A Tale of Two Cities counts).

After proofreading for an entire week, I'll be glad to get back to a little old-fashioned reading for a change.

Get your own Swedish furniture name

I have a love-hate relationship with Ikea, so the Blogadilla Swedish Furniture Name Generator made me giggle.

My Swedish furniture name is YYMEI --- what's yours?

(Via NOTCOT.)

Feeling my age, redux

Is it scary that I clearly remember three out of Wired's selection of five obsolete storage formats? And for the other two (the 8-track and punched tape), the ex-boyfriend in the US used to make enough 8-track jokes that I feel like I know what they were, and who hasn't seen punched tape in some old spy thriller movie, eh?

As for feeling one's age in internet terms, there's always news about Yahoo issuing new Rocketmail accounts to trigger ye olde memories of an ex-student and an ex-colleague who had accounts there way back at the beginning of this century. The funny thing is that "Rocketmail" makes me think of, you know, something blasting off at high speeds, and the two people I remember having Rocketmail accounts were not what you would call explosive personalities.

Related posts: Spotted in a crowd, Not done growing yet, That time of life, Someone said ..., Feeling my age

The challenge of problem with office-speak

I'm glad I'm back at my email and reading BBC News today, or I would've missed the BBC News Magazine's "50 office-speak phrases you love to hate". I think most of my pet peeve corporate-speak phrases are on the list, including the vomit-worthy:

• "going forward" (#1)
  
• "incentivise" (#4)
• "challenge" (#10)
  
• "paradigm shifts" (#35)
• "stakeholder" (#36)
  
• "cascading" (#39)
• "leverage" (#42)

On a related note, Slate has the sparkling "Lazy Bastards: How We Read Online" (via kitschy potemkin).

Related post: On being plain-spoken

No bad puns on Shanghai in this post title

I'm going away on vacation to Shanghai tonight. I spent the entire day cleaning the house and running errands, and finally sat down to pack at 6 p.m.

At which point my brain gave out and I could not compute if daily temperatures of 20-25 degrees C mean that I should pack a jacket, or not. So I called Ondine, who confirmed that I would need one --- no, not leather, too heavy, something lighter.

Bear in mind that I used to field Chicago winters, no problems. One glance at the weather forecast, and I used to know which jacket I'd need, how many layers to wear under it (in the event of the weather changing midway through the day) and which shoes to wear. Now I find myself staring blankly at a website that tells me it's 71 degrees F in Shanghai "right now!" and my only response is to exult that it'll be cooler than it is in Singapore.

For the first time, I'll be bringing my laptop on vacation with me. I'm not going to do any work or read any work-related emails, but I thought it'd be useful for downloading pictures from the new camera and finding out what's going in Shanghai (I've barely worked out an itinerary yet). Plus I'm staying with a friend, so there won't be any security issues.

If anyone is still interested in my shoe count (see previous tallies for five days in Bali and four days in Ho Chi Minh City; I forgot to tally it for the two-week Paris/London jaunt, but I'm pretty sure it was three pairs then), this time it's three pairs for a seven-day trip.

Oh, and unlike the last time, I have a valid passport.

Edited to add (9:51 p.m.): xkcd goes to the airport too! At least I don't have lockpicks and the blood of a churchmouse ...

Edited to add (11.09 p.m.): Okay, I may only have three pairs of shoes (okay, four if you count slippers), but in my one hand-carry luggage and one check-in bag are squished three other bags, giving me five bags in total: one small wheelie, one backpack, one small messenger bag for daily use, one small handbag for going out at night and one fold-up bag that can be used to tote back shopping acquisitions. I think I'm going a little mad --- or taking that old Girl Guide motto "Be Prepared" far too seriously.

For your reading pleasure

The Top 50 Blogger-powered Blogs, ranked based on some fancypants mathematics involving Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking, Bloglines subscribers, backlinks and Alexa Rank. Most the big guns are there, including PostSecret (#1), Blogger Buzz (#9) and Xiaxue (#24).

Yes, Singapore's very own Xiaxue, who, if you believe the math, outranks Eschaton (albeit narrowly, it's at #26) and Ikea Hacker (#33).

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Then again: "Lies, damn lies and statistics".

Not aliens, just an uncontacted tribe

BBC News has images from the Brazil National Indian Foundation of an uncontacted tribe that lives along the Brazil-Peru border. First of all: cool. Second of all: there are still uncontacted tribes? Third of all: Is it just me, or do the images make it seem as if they're a species on an alien world being visited by us?

It's the aerial perspective, I guess, not to mention the fact that their bodies are covered in red and black paint. Every time I see one of the men wielding an arrow or spear at the photographer-interlopers, I wonder what they're thinking. Do they think the helicopter (I assume the photographer(s) travelled in a helicopter) comes from the gods? Another planet? Other civilisations?

It boggles my mind to think that I'm sitting here, blogging about this, a blog post which could potentially reach any wired person in the world, while talking about it on IM and Facebook --- and I'm looking at an uncontacted tribe.

Okay, I'm going to go look at the images some more ...

Click on it --- you know you want to

Is it any surprise that the most popular BBC News story right now is, "Great tits cope well with warming"?

Oh, human beings --- so predictable. If an alien race wanted to come down and trap us all so it could take over the planet, it would just have to label its trap with the words "great tits" and its work would be done.

I clicked on it too. But that was in the email of daily BBC news, which had it listed as the top story under Science/Nature rather than Health, so I figured it was about some odd creature rather than, well, you know.

Strike three, but we got lucky

Because I am a freelancer who is --- for all intents and purposes --- surgically attached to her internet connection, Cowboy Caleb calls me on occasion for last-minute restaurant advice and I spend about five minutes helping him pick a place where he can fête a client or boss on his company's tab. The other typical condition is that it has to be a place that he knows how to get to in Singapore, which can be harder than it sounds.

Today he calls at about noon from Hong Kong and needs a place for dinner tonight. He can't expense the meal, but still needs it to be nice enough. Oh, and no Asian food.

We settle on Valentino's, because we've been there before and it's pretty damn good food. He asks me to get a reservation (yes, I am officially his entertainment secretary, didn't you know?) and SMS him when the table's booked. I call. Valentino's, it turns out, is fully booked for the night.

A little SMSing, another phone call. "How about Marmalade Pantry at Palais Renaissance?," I suggest, "because the air-conditioning at the Holland Village one isn't working [as I found out to my dismay on Monday night]."

"Where's Palais Renaissance?"

"Next to Orchard Towers, between Orchard Towers and the Thai embassy."

For reasons that cannot be reported here, Cowboy Caleb declines to go anywhere near Orchard Towers. We settle on Ember at Hotel 1929, another reliable choice that he knows how to get to.

I call and: "We regret to inform you that we will be closed for renovations from 30 April to ..." Cheebye. I hang up without bothering with the rest of the automated message.

"Strike two," I SMS Cowboy.

He calls back. By this point, I'm trawling through The Travelling Hungryboy for ideas. We confer. "Okay, Wild Rocket," he decides.

I call and I cannot believe my ears: "I'm sorry, but we're closed tonight for a private function."

Clearly, the moral of the story at this point is that it is not possible to get a dinner reservation at a decent place on the eve of a public holiday (it's May Day tomorrow), unless you planned your evening a week before and had time to work your way through an entire restaurant directory.

Cowboy cannot believe it; neither can I. James comes to the rescue on MSN: "Cork", he says, "63279169." Does Cowboy know where Capital Towers is? Why yes, he does. After which he SMSes: "I boarding the plane. You decide."

Meanwhile, I'm calling --- and miracle of miracles, they are open, they have tables available and they are pleased as punch to take Cowboy's reservation. I manage to sneak in a last confirmation SMS to Cowboy and the URL for Chubby Hubby's review of the place before he switches off his phone on the plane.

As far as I know, dinner went all right.

It seems Secretaries' Day has just passed us by, so Cowboy owes me a huge bonus next year. He should buy me dinner at a nice place.

Radio silence

I haven't had a call or SMS on my phone since 4:15 pm, which in itself isn't unusual. What's unusual is that I didn't notice the dearth of contact until right now, as I'm packing up to hit the sack.

I've barely chatted online with anyone all night too. Maybe I'm not as much of a communications junkie as I thought I was.

Holy crap, that was fast

So migrating to a new server didn't take as long as I thought it would, and I didn't even have to activate my brother (whom I'd put on standby, in case I flubbed something up and needed a rescuer). Even propagating the DNS change took next to no time.

Compare this to a colossal more-than-one-hour struggle this morning with Priceline Singapore to book an air ticket. I kept getting error messages from their server at various points of the search or purchase processes, which exacerbated the usual nervousness I get when I'm about to place an online order for anything that costs more than a DVD box set.

Anyway, I got my air ticket and my website seems to be intact at the new server. Now I still have the rest of the afternoon before me. Whee!

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Technorati Tags: Priceline

Server migration imminent

This website is all grown up and ready to move on to its own server space (as opposed to mooching off my friend's server, which is what it's been doing for something like seven years), so I'm going to be doing a little content migration this afternoon.

No action is needed on your part, except to not panic if toomanythoughts.org is unreachable for a few hours. Just be patient till the new DNS changes are propagated internet-wide.

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Of neo-nomadism and neighbourhoods

It was a year ago that I decided I liked the term "neo-nomad", and now the Economist has a whole special report on it.

The thing I find about living the neo-nomadic/digital-nomadic lifestyle, is that when I read a "special report" like that, I tend to go, "Ho-hum. Tell me something I don't already know."

Or else I tend to assume that these reports are confirming what I hope will happen, like this scenario from the article "The new oases":

... urban nomadism makes districts, like buildings, multifunctional. Parts of town that were monocultures, [William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT] says, gradually become “fine-grained mixed-use neighbourhoods” more akin in human terms to pre-industrial villages than to modern suburbs.

I count myself lucky to live in a village-like neighbourhood now. The free wifi is dreadfully spotty (why, oh why, can't Wireless@SG get it right?), but all the other elements --- brick-and-mortar stores delivering basic services, a mixture of chain stores and "local" enterprises, low-rise living and neighbourhood folk who kind of recognise each other after a while --- are well in place, and have been for decades.

Being neo-nomadic Working freelance means I can spend more time here and still get enough work done to pay the rent. I'd like to think, along the lines of Mitchell above, that the broader neo-nomadic trend also means that it will keep this neighbourhood village-like, with the kind of vibe that made me want to live here in the first place.

(I'm still hoping the coming MRT line doesn't muck up the neighbourhood either.)

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Technorati Tags: neo-nomad, nomad, The Economist, Siglap, Wireless@SG

Readers' poll #3: Which pic does the trick?

I've decided I would like to make a little photo wall, consisting of pictures taken by me. This lovely layout would be great, but I'm going to go with something a little less ambitious: four portrait-format photos, 5" x 7" each, to be hung in a 2 x 2 arrangement, in black frames on a white wall.

So far, the shortlist consists of exactly one photo:


Hence my reader's poll: Which picture (if any) from my Flickr account do you really, really, really like? Bearing in mind that it'll be displayed in a portrait format.

Edited to add (11:47 pm), because beeker complained that I was doling out homework on my blog: I certainly don't mean for anyone to go through every one of the 903 images on my Flickr account. I just imagined that if any particular image stood out in a reader's memory, now would be the time to say so.

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Related posts: Would you watch this?, My very first readers' poll

Technorati Tags: poll, readers' poll

A little off my game

So last week was a bust.

Monday was frightfully productive. Tuesday was a day of meetings and errands, but fortunately was topped off with good news. Thereafter the entire week kinda went outta whack: between meetings and mood swings and my usual procrastinatory impulses, I just didn't get enough work done. Add in the lassitude induced by the stifling hot weather, and you have a recipe for a major deadline disaster.

Which hasn't happened, um, yet.

Yesterday I was at the old flat for what is probably the last time. It looked very, well, empty. Not forlorn, necessarily, but most definitely vacant, vacated. The whole experience, including travelling there and back, was quite surreal. I don't think I've completely processed it yet.

Today has been absolutely productive --- except that given the amount of backlog from last week, it's still not enough.

PS: Key to being productive? Like all the lifehacking sites tell you: stay off instant messaging.

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Tired as hell

It's a strange sort of day when I typo "mind-boggling" as "mind-blogging".

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Technorati Tags: blogging

Links of the day

I surf, I read, I share. In no particular order:

• For Wahj: The charms of Wikipedia (via Salon).
• For stellou: I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.
• For Daniel: 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design (via How About Orange).
• For a documentary-making friend: Taxi to the Dark Side.

Goodnight!
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Missed the window

I spent all of yesterday thinking, "Oh, it's February 29, that only happens once every four years --- I'd better post a blog entry today."

Then I overslept, which made me late for lunch. Then I had to clear out some rubbish at the old flat and the friends who helped came over afterwards to the new place for a bit (with their dog, hence the encounter pictured above). Then I had to do the weekly flat-cleaning. Then (and oiseauxbleu will be particularly glad to hear this) I cooked. Then I had to get more groceries. Then I ran into a friend, who came over for the evening.


So I didn't blog yesterday and I went to bed feeling a little rueful at missing the opportunity to have a February 29 entry.

But it was only today, when I looked more closely at the dates of the pictures I took yesterday, then cross-checked the dates on my email inbox, and finally checked everything against the computer's date setting --- that I realised that February 29 was two days ago. So I'd missed it anyway.

Which just goes to show you where my mind's been.

For the record, I spent February 29 powering through some work in order to meet a deadline, then kicked off the weekend with steamboat at my favourite old-school steamboat place.

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Technorati Tags: 29 February, February 29, leap year

Saturday, at last

A(nother) sign that I am getting old: today I caved in and increased the default font size on Firefox and Adium by 1 point.

Ten years ago, the first thing I used to do on a computer was to superciliously adjust the Internet Explorer font size down to a more aesthetically pleasing proportion. Today, functionality trumps form. Who've thunk it?

It's been a particularly long week, hence the lack of blog updates. Tired eyes, tired body, tired mind. I updated my Facebook status yesterday to say I was "declar[ing] a one-week moratorium on 'business development'" --- because while more business (and money) is good, the distraction of following up of every single potential business lead was taking a toll on both the quality of my writing and my overall equilibrium.

Of course, not three hours after I set that Facebook status, I received emails from two more potential clients about some new projects.

This weekend will be dedicated to unpacking the last few boxes and getting things in order. This place needs to stop looking like a forgotten warehouse.

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I did not know that yesterday

Blog post title taken from the eponymous blog, which I read from time to time.

Last night, I left the Discovery Travel & Living channel on for white noise, which threw up a World Café: Asia episode on Singapore. Presenter Bobby Chinn went through the usual hawker favourites, then ended up on Pulau Ubin where an Indian woman cooked him nasi kerabu --- described on the show as a dish once common in Singapore that's all but forgotten now.

To which I say: nasi what? Turns out it's a synonym for nasi ulam, which I think I've seen listed at Malay food stalls before, though I've not tried it. Google actually turns up more entries related to the Kelantan variety, where the rice is apparently tinted a bright blue colour. Don't think I've seen that in Singapore.

Then today, while IMing with Suzie, she expressed a craving for kuih rose. To which I pretty much responded again with: kuih what? Once more Google threw up images of food I didn't recognise, though Suzie's well-acquainted with the snack. How did I miss this while growing up here?

All of which points to the fact that while we rave about how much great food we have in Singapore, there is always something else lurking in the next stall or shop that we haven't tasted yet.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore food, nasi kerabu, kuih rose

A boy after my own heart

Boy likes reading. Boy reads quite a bit. Boy wants to set up a website to tell other kids about the books he reads because "there might be lots of kids out there who are wondering what are some good books to read. I can help with that."

Boy gets interactive-designer dad to build him his own book-review website.

Boy, for the record, is ten years old.

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Technorati Tags: reading, book review, Evan's Book Site

Prepping to move (or not)

Things I have done in preparation for moving to the new apartment:

• Getting off the elevator at an earlier floor and walking six floors up to get home.
  I only need to walk up four floors at the new place, but the elevator doesn't stop at every floor in the current building and I figure climbing the extra two floors is useful training.
• Washing dishes in only one sink, instead of exploiting both.
• Stopped buying books and asking friends who have loaned my books to return them only after I move.
• Become a daily reader of Apartment Therapy, Design*Sponge and Ikea Hacker.
  

Stay tuned for the list of things I haven't done to prepare (including *gasp* packing).

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Technorati Tags: moving house

Just call me Little Miss Crankypants

I wish it wasn't such an uneven week.

I wish "emily" would stop "inviting" me to MySpace.

I wish I'd remembered to blog the line "If the kempeitai asked me to make a corporate video ..." earlier, because it's too much trouble to explain now.

I wish I didn't have a sludgy headache after spending a perfectly decent day with the best friend and the smallboy, looking for stuff for the new place.

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Technorati Tags: crankypants

Missing the news

For some reason, Gmail has been diligently filing the BBC News' daily email alert in my Spam folder since January 1. And here I thought they were just enjoying an extended New Year's in the UK ...

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Technorati Tags: Gmail, BBC News, spam filter

Firefox is being weird

Or rather, it has been since last night. It's ignoring the domain name on some URLs and treating the subdirectory information as the full URL --- which leads to a lot of ridiculous "Server not found" error messages.

For example, I'm trying to look at my friends' status updates on Facebook, which are at this URL: http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status

Firefox tries to load http://friends/?status instead --- and spits it back as an error to me.

Alternatively, if I try to load the main Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com), I get the following error message: "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded."

Even though several minutes later, so long as the full URL is provided, the very same browser window will happily load the page without any grumbling or misfiring of URLs.

Why is this happening to some pages (so far, Facebook, The New York Times and Wired Blogs) only? Am I right in blaming Firefox? Did I break my browser without realising it?

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Technorati Tags: Firefox

When political leaders get hip to the internet

As I was wishing dolcelatte merry Xmas online last night, I was also watching the BBC, which triggered the following exchange (pardon the lack of proper punctuation):

ME: i am watching the queen's youtube channel on bbc
ME: it is surreal
dolcelatte: oh i heard about that
dolcelatte: havent checked it out yet
dolcelatte: i'll watch her christmas day speech on christmas day
dolcelatte: and it'll be like i never left blighty
ME: pretty cool, the queen :)
ME: way hipper than lee hsien loong
ME: hehe
dolcelatte: lee hsien loong is so not hip
ME: ya
dolcelatte: sigh
dolcelatte: and the queen is like 80plus
ME: i can imagine this will be a topic of conversation at the next young pap meeting
ME: "queen got youtube leh! We only had hip-hop and blog - how? how?"
dolcelatte: hahaahha
dolcelatte: but if they had youtube channel
dolcelatte: it would be political video
dolcelatte: and then, they'll have to ban themselves!

Actually, if such a channel were launched, it would no doubt debut with such nuggets as the MDA rap.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, YouTube, Singapore politics

How the web works out

6 minutes ago, I updated my Facebook status to: [Tym] wants to celebrate Pikkojoulu next year.

Which prompted Abigael to Google "Pikkojoulu".

Which threw up as the top English-language search result, my friend Jude's Flickr post.

Which is where I'd picked up the concept of Pikkojoulu in the first place, and left a comment to that effect.

As I said to Abigael, I'm just everywhere.

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Technorati Tags: Pikkojoulu, Google, Flickr

The elaborate Venn diagram of our lives

A friend told me today about this new girl he's seeing. It being 2007, of course he had to have me check her out on Facebook. Which led to the revelation that she knows some people I know --- not surprising when two degrees of separation is par for the course in Singapore.

What was surprising is that she knows an old classmate of mine from primary school, whom I haven't spoken to since the late 1980s when we bumped into each other at Centrepoint. And that, upon peeking at his list of Facebook friends, it turns out that he knows a number of people in my existing circle: a former colleague, an old neighbour and a friend's ex, among others. Which leaves me further surprised that we haven't crossed paths more recently.

I like Facebook, but sometimes it just reminds me that Singapore is just Too. Damn. Small.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Facebook

How to have a little birdsong with your morning coffee

I was wondering where the sound of birds chirping was coming from --- none are taunting the cat outside the open windows, and he doesn't even seem to notice the occasional twittering or whistling. And then I realised ...

It's coming from this website.

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Now why didn't I think of that?

So there are these two female architects in New York who make it a point of a) having lunch out of the office, b) documenting it religiously. Hence: LUNCH with Front Studio, which even has a handy-dandy map of all the places in their neighbourhood where they eat. They also keep track of their daily 4 pm espresso break snacks.

Saith the ladies:

We believe leaving the office everyday for lunch is an invaluable ritual. In a time and city where people are constantly rushing around, trying to accomplish three tasks at once, taking a moment to have a civilized meal becomes even more vital. Eating at your desk while reading emails, surfing the world wide web, snarfing down a bland turkey sandwich from the deli down the street is NOT lunch.

Amen, sisters. If I had a dollar for every time I've said that to myself, or tried to entice an overworked associate out to lunch with that logic ...

As karma would have it, today might be a day when I skip lunch because I have meetings that run 11:30 am - 1:30 pm, followed by many urgent errands thereafter. Poo.

(Via Popgadget.)

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Technorati Tags: lunch, LUNCH with front studio, lunch who lunch

The week in pictures

On Monday, I went out to sea. But only for a little while and it was choppy enough that I had to stop taking notes and concentrate on the horizon to quell the potential seasickness. Now I know exactly where some of the Southern Islands are, like Kusu and St John's. They always seemed such a long boat ride away when I was a kid.

PS: Our port is truly, irredeemably ugly.


On Wednesday, I popped in on Culturepush's Next Stop: Wonderland tour of Majestic Bar. Groovy art. Besides Yuki Chong's stained-glass ceiling installation (above), I'm also in love with Sandra Lee's third-floor blue-room set-up, staircase and all.


Yesterday, there was ROJAK. I hadn't been to one in some time, and since my Singapore Writers Festival panel put me right across the street from the old City Hall where it was happening, I had no excuse not to drop by for a bit (until my stomach demanded to be fed anyway). It was very, very cool to be sitting in the same room that I've seen in so many black and white photographs of historic events.

Things that I forgot to take pictures of this week:

• The also very cool Dual City Sessions party on Friday night, where I ran into all and sundry, and managed to finally meet a couple of people that I'd been hearing about for the longest time. Other people have pictures on Flickr; all I've got to show for myself is a pair of well-worn wedges (lots of traipsing up and down the stairs), a resolution to bring my mom to see what her Old School has become, and the vicarious thrill of reporting that I loaned Daniel the camera to make his art.
• The Reel Blogging panel I did yesterday evening, which I completed failed to even, er, publicise. Good thing Stefan was, as usual, quick with the blog post and the camera to record what went down.
  

Pardon the lack of more eloquent descriptive phrases. My brain's all used up from crunching text for that Very Important deadline.

No pictures of the new Macbook yet. Let me post this, then I can go play with it.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore port, Culturepush, Majestic Bar, ROJAK, City Hall, Dual City Sessions, Singapore Writers Festival

Better than the SAT

Via Mr Miyagi, I've found FreeRice, which pledges to donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program for every vocabulary word that you define correctly (don't worry, it's multiple-choice). In 10 minutes, I've clicked through 500 grains of rice and my vocabulary level is hovering around 45. I'm particularly stoked that they had "grok" and "reave".

I'm not sayin' that this is the best way to do something for charity. But if you're going to fritter your time away on the internet anyway, and you like word games, this is as good a place as, say, Scrabulous to spend your time on (you know who I'm talking about).

Plus I got to learn what "nictitate" means.

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Technorati Tags: vocabulary, Free Rice

Rhymin' games

I typed this in an email today: "online moniker Ondine".

Now say it five times fast.

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Technorati Tags: tongue-twister

Confusing the cat

I was watching Evan flip over on YouTube and Ink trotted over excitedly to investigate, very much wearing an expression that said, "I can hear the human noise, but where's the human?" He has the same reaction if my cell phone ringtone with the screeching "Ohaaaaaayyyyyo!" voice goes off.

It was only after two minutes of replaying the video that he lost interest and moseyed off.

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Technorati Tags: cat, Ink the cat, baby video

Disturbed sleep

It's really not a good sign when one starts dreaming about Facebooking ...

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Technorati Tags: Facebook

Behold the marvel that is Google

1. Go to the Google search page for images.

2. Enter the following search terms: swan lake on ice singapore

3. Click on the third page of results and scroll down to near the bottom ...

4. Where my blog picture appears --- I would assume, because the contents of that page mention "Swan Lake Avenue", "ice cream" and, of course, "Singapore".

Who'd've ever thunk it?

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Technorati Tags: Google

I have a bad earworm

Blame it on the iCommons party I attended last night, but I woke up with an insipid mash-up of Garbage's "When I Grow Up" with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "Enola Gay".

And it won't go away.

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Technorati Tags: iCommons

Not the coolest thing to do, I'm aware ...

But is anyone going to be watching the National Day Rally at 8 pm so that we can heckle it together online?

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, National Day Rally, heckle

Because anything can be a song

Everyone needs to go listen right now to the Barenaked Ladies' "Testing 1, 2, 3" (recorded at a concert in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004).

It's nice when Last.fm makes me laugh in the middle of clearing work email.

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Technorati Tags: Last.fm, Barenaked Ladies

Playing with Jajah

(Note: Not Jar Jar Binks, whom I still loathe with the vengeful fury of a thousand suns.)

Is anyone else out there successfully using Jajah to bypass their cell phone service provider's rates and has never looked back? There are all these promises of free calls if both phone users are Jajah members; even for calls to non-Jajah numbers, the rates for Singapore-to-Singapore numbers are lower than what my provider (M1) can offer.

If you're one of the people I regularly chat with and you're on Jajah, let me know. Let's see if I can't save more money so I can take more frequent vacations.

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Technorati Tags: Jajah

So long and thanks for all the tea

I'm not sure what the deal is with tea and me lately, but the last work-related meeting I had this week was on Monday at Zen Bone Tea Mind. It was budak's suggestion and a very fine one, because the place is a) pretty, b) quiet on weekday afternoons, and c) operates on the assumption that people will order one tea and then sit there for as long as they like while the waitstaff keeps efficiently topping up the hot water. Now if only it had wifi ...

Tonight, I'm sitting here with a mug of most excellent Stash peppermint tea (thank you, sarah and Little Miss Drinkalot!) and trying to remember if I've forgotten anything work-wise before I go on vacation. It's oddly quiet because Ink isn't here (Terz is cat-sitting him while I'm going to be away) and the flatmates aren't home yet.

Okay, let's see: Yahoogroups switched off, vacation email autoresponse set, perishable food consumed or otherwise cleared from the fridge. Now I just need to pack my vacation wallet, phone and camera chargers and a few remaining toiletries, and we're good to go.

PS: I am bringing 3 pairs of footwear for a 4-day trip, which edges out the previous record.

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I'm a weak-minded fool and you're all sly, crafty old rats, encore

Previous posts here and here.

So I spent the morning Facebooking instead of rushing all the work I need to finish before I go on vacation. I blame this firmly on all the invitations I've been getting, as well as the alleged promise of finding old primary school classmates (as kk has done). Not that I can remember the name of very many primary school classmates to begin with ...

In other news, I desperately want to say "vacay" instead of "vacation", but I think it would make me sound totally Valley Girl.

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Technorati Tags: Facebook, vacay

Friday night tea time

It's not a good sign when I'm standing in a 7-Eleven store complaining about their paltry yet baffling selection of Lipton teas, and the friend I'm with says, "You're going to blog about this later, right?"

Which I wasn't going to --- honest! --- but since it's apparently expected of me, here it is.

I wanted some good ol'-fashioned Lipton Yellow Label tea --- you know, what used to be the default tea option when I was growing up, before I knew what Earl Grey was, and well before Celestial Seasonings and its ilk of infusion confusions came along to clutter up our shelves.

7-Eleven was the only place still open that might have tea for sale. Except that the first 7-Eleven store I walked into had exactly three varieties of Lipton: Red Tea, White Tea and Gold Tea. No humble Yellow Label options in sight, and the descriptions of the Red/White/Gold Tea consisted of sufficiently purple prose that I immediately replaced the boxes on the shelves.

The next 7-Eleven store, mercifully, had many boxes of Yellow Label tea, but also the Red and White varieties. (Neither store had any non-Lipton teas for sale.) Now that the Yellow Label was safely within reach, I took a few moments to peruse the Red and White Tea descriptions a little more closely. Red Tea promised a spicy flavour (I almost fell for it), White Tea hailed from Kenya, which made me think of a rich coffee-like flavour because of the Rift Valley blend coffee I'd had at Starbucks this morning.

Then the friend helpfully pointed out that the Red and White Teas were $4.60 a pack, while the Yellow Label was $2.45.

Half an hour later, I had my Yellow Label tea in a Starbucks mug. It tasted just like it used to.

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Technorati Tags: Lipton, tea, 7-Eleven

Let's call this a want ad

I'm looking for:

• An invite to Pownce.
• A small office space in town without being in the heart of town (where it would be both annoying and unaffordable).
• A morning where I can sleep in without having to set my alarm clock.

If you have any of the above available, please leave a comment, email me (toomanythoughts [at] Gmail) or otherwise send some love my way.

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Technorati Tags: want ad, Pownce

Pictures from the past

Yahoo! Photos is closing, which doesn't surprise me that much since Flickr's been in the Yahoo! stable of companies for a while now. What did surprise me was that I got an email alert about it through my Yahoo! account, because I didn't think I had any photos there.

Oh wait, I did --- but they weren't photos that I'd taken myself or even, particularly, want to admit to possessing now. In fact, this admission makes me sound like I'm still in Facebook's target demographic: who knew that downloaded pictures of Goran Visnjic and Milo Ventimiglia from the late 1990s still resided on my Yahoo! Photos account?

Ah, those halcyon ER days ... and this is pre-Heroes (i.e. Gilmore Girls-era) Ventimiglia to boot.

Clearly I have (had?) a thing for dark-haired men of European ancestry and with difficult-to-spell-without-Googling-to-check surnames.

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Technorati Tags: Yahoo! Photos

Wordiness: An introduction

I like words. I like learning new words. But I don't learn words so well when I learn them out of context, which is why trying to read through the dictionary never did help me very much.

Fortunately, since words are the tools of my trade, learning new ones is very much part of the job. The only problem is my Swiss-cheese memory's inability to retain more than a few of the good ones. Since I rely on the internet to keep track of so much of my life anyway (including my recent albeit late-to-the-party delight with Google Calendar), I figured I might as well use my blog to keep track of cool new words that I come across.

Ideally, there will be a Wordiness entry everyday. On the other hand, this is very much an experiment plus no one pays me to write this blog, so --- we'll see.

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Technorati Tags: word, wordiness

I forgot to pay my bill

First, it was due, but I thought I'd paid it, so I ignored it.

Then I got another bill informing me that payment was now overdue, but I really thought I'd paid it, so I ignored it.

Then I thought I'd better check, so I got in touch with the government agency concerned (after the due date of the second bill). They told me that I hadn't paid it, no sirree. Whoops.

Then I procrastinated.

This morning I tried to pay the bill online, but apparently online payments are not permitted for overdue bills (why the hell not?). The not-so-small print on the bill informs me that "legal proceedings may be initiated to recover the outstanding amount if payment is still not received". Oops.

I've emailed the government agency concerned to ask how I can make payment. Hopefully they won't take that as an invitation to sue the pants off me.

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Related Posts: Procrastination, Chinese New Year-style, Why I should not procrastinate, The afternoon: a chronology, *poof*, They won't throw me in jail for my birthday, I procrastinate, therefore I am

Technorati Tags: procrastinate, procrastination

An afternoon at Geek Terminal

When Adri first told me she wanted to check out Geek Terminal (first seen --- by us, anyway --- at theory.is.the.reason), my initial reaction was: Great concept, but couldn't they have come up a name that was more Wired and less Hackers? Then I said, "Oh, I'm not usually in the Market Street area."

And then at 3 pm today, I found myself at Chulia Street with several hours to kill before meeting Little Miss Drinkalot for dinner. So I ended up at Geek Terminal after all.


The verdict:

• The decor --- Futuristic-ish. A bit too much silver and a few too many plasma screens for my personal liking, which is why I ended up sitting in one of the red chairs and stared at my own laptop screen instead.
• The coffee --- Illy! I approve.
• The wireless - Free and fast on my laptop. However, my Nokia N95 didn't get along well enough with the cafe's wireless network to be able to upload an image directly to Flickr. Oddly enough, the usually more patchy Wireless@SG did the trick instead.
• The Eubiq power plug system --- Very cute! And idiot-proof.

The only downside is that the table height is a little awkward for short Asian people like me. If I lean back into the (comfy-but-stout) armchairs, I have to raise my arms a little to work at my laptop. I imagine that could get tiring for anyone who needs to do some major typing.

I wasn't at all hungry, so I didn't try the menu. But if the cafe's raison d'etre is to serve neo-nomads like me, it seems to be on the right track. There's even a Nokia Nseries/Eseries display where customers can wander over and fondle new phones.

We'll see what Adri thinks when she gets here.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Geek Terminal

My very first Hindu wedding

In which I did not understand a whit of what was going on, because I failed to do a little educational Googling before showing up this morning.

At any rate, it was as colourful as I'd expected, despite the drizzly weather, and the videographer, just like his fictional counterpart in Bend It Like Beckham, firmly instructed the bride as she got out of the car, "Don't smile ah, don't smile." I wanted to chime in with the rest of the line from the movie: "Indian bride never smile! You ruin the bloody video!"


No video was harmed in the making of this married couple.

The rites were pretty, the legal solemnisation ceremony that followed banal and flat in comparison. And because I was sitting in the midst of a number of guests who were government employees, I started wondering who were the poor government employees who had to draft and finesse those civil marriage vows in the first place.

In future, I'll remember not to heap my plate so high at the lunch buffet because the stuff I like (potato curry, prawn vadai, papadums) are mostly carbohydrates after all. Good thing I went shopping after that to work it off.

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I'm a weak-minded fool and you're all sly, crafty old rats, redux

Previous post here.

No time to blog.

So I Twitter. Do you?

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Technorati Tags: Twitter

I took the weekend off

I wanted to blog about the weekend, but then the week of work overwhelmed me, and here we are on Thursday, and I'm feeling like I desperately need a weekend off again.

Yes, a weekend off --- that is what I gave myself for the first time in months (years?) last weekend and it was very surreal.

For one thing, a weekend off meant no touching the laptop between Friday night and Monday morning. No email. No Googling. No catching up on friends' blogs or writing a post for mine. No immediately checking out a cool website when Wahj told me about it over lunch. No using the cell phone to surf the web, either.

It was very weird.

Did I get a little antsy about how much email might be stacking up over the 60 hours that I didn't check my inbox? Yes, but it didn't take me that horribly long to clear it all on Monday morning, plus I was in a much better frame of mind to do it.

It's not clear yet if I'll be able to take this entire weekend off in the same way, but I heartily recommend it for everyone. The Internet? Who needs it!

All I need is my cell phone.

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Oops

I forgot to blog.

More accurately, I have been trying to spend a little less time on my laptop, so when I'm not having to do work, I try not to be at the computer, which kinda makes it hard to blog.

As for how I am doing generally, leave it to the inimitable Suzie to put her very finger on it, even over MSN:

ME: i think i am more "two steps fwd, one step back"?
Suzie: it's more of, two steps forward, maybe one step back, oh maybe not, wait, wait, er, how about another one back, oh whoops, back and forth, aiya, just sit down lah.

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How to get quoted by Reuters

1. Write a quirky! blog! post! about the haze.

2. Make your email address available on your blog(s).

3. Answer email promptly when interested journalist wants to chat about living under haze conditions.

4. In fact, spend half an hour (or so) on the phone with very nice and interested journalist, chatting airily (pun fully intended) about living under haze conditions last year.

The result: I get to inspire the opening anecdote in the news story, "Asia struggles to stop relentless 'pollution calendar'" (thanks, Dad!), even though in terms of being quoted, there's only a brief and none-too-sparkly quote.

Ah well, you can't have everything.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, haze, Singapore news

I, the neo-nomad

I recently came across the BBC's "In search of the neo-nomad", which picks up a San Francisco Chronicle definition of neo-nomads as:

... people who turn a laptop, a wireless connection and a cafe into an office and work wherever they happen to be ... distinguishe[d] from traditional freelancers because of their close engagement with technology and use of the latest generation of web-based tools in their working lives.

Laptop --- check.
Wireless connection --- check (thank you, Wireless@SG).
Cafe --- check. Coffee tastes best at Starbucks or tcc (German blend). Less satisfying is The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf's, and overpriced is Coffee Club's. Epicurious and Toast also have yummy coffees (and unbeatable iced teas). Not that there's anything wrong with indigenous kopitiam coffee, but sometimes in the afternoon it's too hot to sit in a non-airconditioned environment.

Close engagement with technology --- I think so. Did I mention what's in my bag? Nowadays, the list includes a laptop (usually with charger), although I only have one cell phone now and no more security pass.
Latest generation of web-based tools --- check. Gmail to manage 5 work-related email accounts, Flickr, Adium for MSN/Yahoo/GTalk/AIM, blogging software (Blogger/Movable Type/Wordpress) all. Plus I recently got sucked into LinkedIn.

I'm going to put down "neo-nomad" the next time I fill out a job that asks me for my "occupation".

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Technorati Tags: neo-nomad

Budget airline, budget website?

After months of whinging about it, I have finally booked that damn vacation.

Of course, it's in August, but still.

On Adri's sound advice ("Terminal 1!", "assigned seating!", "20 kg baggage allowance!", "no aunties with plastic bags!"), I went with Jetstar instead of Tiger Airways --- also because a Jetstar ticket wound up being about $30 cheaper overall. Despite being a seasoned internet veteran, this also marks the first time I've ever booked an air ticket online. Which leads me to two interesting observations (read: gripes) about the Jetstar website.

When you make a ticket booking, you have to indicate a contact person and assorted details. Strangely, while there are no character limits on the fields where you key in the travellers' names, there is a 14-character limit on the last name of the contact person. I have a 15-character double-barrelled last name, which I whittled down to 14 characters by dropping the hyphen in the middle. But what about all the lovely people who have less truncatable last names (particularly Asian ones)?

So I thought I would do what everyone does in the internet age: click on the link for "contact us", which would no doubt lead me to some kind of online form that I could fill up with the above observation and click on its merry way to the Jetstar feedback department.

Jetstar's "Contact Us" page states:

If you have any feedback relating to our customer services or web site please forward them in writing to the applicable address. [emphasis mine]

Snailmail? They want feedback on their website to be conveyed through snailmail? My mind, it's still boggling.

Jetstar gets an A for having cheap tickets and all the other perks that Adri mentioned. But I'm not sure how many points I'll dock for the level of customer-unfriendliness at the end of the day.

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Technorati Tags: vacation, Jetstar, budget airlines

Only connect

It is a sad, sad day when a 3G connection on my cell phone loads webpages more quickly than the free wireless connection at the National Library. I'm guessing the latter is having a bad day, but even so. What's the point of boasting about an island-wide free wireless network if it doesn't actually let me access the net the way I need to?

I suppose I should be grateful that the creakingly slow connection's still sufficient to let me blog...

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Wireless@SG

Let this not be my destiny

Where would I be without Urban Dictionary? Today's unbeatable word of the day:

technosexual n. A person, male or female, who is so deeply enthralled with technology they discuss it with a level of passion that most people reserve for sex. Not always a geek or a nerd, but generally someone who has the latest and greatest everything.

I don't have the latest and greatest everything, but I often wish I did. I don't discuss technology with a level of passion that most people reserve for sex, but I do write for Popgadget. I cannot deny that I'm somewhat enthralled with technology.

Oh dear.

Edited to add (8:55 pm): Entirely by coincidence, mrbrown blogs about a completely different definition of technosexual that Calvin Klein's trying to exploit.

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Technorati Tags: technosexual, technology, geek, Urban Dictionary

Kill me now

I almost just typed "greatful" over MSN. The only thing I can blame it on is the fact that I was looking at the Great Eastern website (for work, not for personal edification or entertainment).

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Hamlet Prince of YouTube

In lieu of actual blogging, here's the first YouTube video I've ever clicked on that wasn't recommended by a friend.

To post; to blog:
No more; and in that blogging, to say we counteract
The thousand stupendously stupid comments
The Net has heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.

Yes, I really enjoyed this one.

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Technorati Tags: Hamlet Prince of YouTube, Hamlet, YouTube

Matcha madness

The thing about ordering pretty Japanese desserts with a group of friends who happen to blog (save one), is that when the pretty Japanese desserts arrive, everyone whips out their digital cameras to take pretty portraits while the precious ice cream is melting all over the dessert.

Meanwhile, the one who doesn't blog also takes out his digital camera (incidentally, the largest and most sophisticated one at the table) and starts taking pictures of us taking pictures of our desserts.

Well, now.

Eventually, we did eat the desserts and they were about as tasty as they had looked --- which is to say, very artfully put together, occasionally with mysterious ingredients (the dango tasted damn good but what the hell went into it, besides flour?), and satisfyingly sweet but not overly so, taking the cue from American-style sundaes without merely replicating them entirely.


Now if we'd added the "raw honey" provided in the little juglet, that would've been overkill.

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Technorati Tags: dessert, ice cream, Japanese dessert

A sign of the times, or something

Today's Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: gong xi fa cai (though they spell the last word incorrectly as "chai").

Never thought I'd see the day when a commonplace Mandarin greeting for the Lunar New Year would become an entry in a glossary of contemporary slang.

Happy Year of the Pig, everyone! May you enjoy much bacon and (since this is a Chinese New Year after all) fat piggy banks to carry you through to the next year.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year, Urban Dictionary

To resume

Friends who've known me since my pre-blogging days and who perhaps don't spend quite as much time immersed in the world of blogging as I do --- they've asked me before, how is it that I can put up my life on such public display on my blog, to have its minute details read by people I've never met and whom I may never meet.

My answer is simple: it's not my entire life that's on display here, it's just the bits and pieces that I choose to put on record, things that I can live with people knowing, that don't infringe on my own privacy or security in any way. The blog version of me is hardly the whole me there is to know.

Of the many things I don't write about, one of them is my relationship with Terz. It's an unwritten rule that I came up with on my own, to maintain my sense of equilibrium between public and private, between real and virtual.

And then sometimes things spill over into the public domain.

All of which is a long preamble to my saying that if you didn't know already from reading Terz's blog (also the most beautiful blog entry ever --- I'm not insensitive to that), here's the Cliffs Notes' version:

Terz and I are splitting up I am splitting up with Terz because from my point of view, we'd drifted so far apart I didn't know why I was with him any longer. Yes, this is what I really want. Yes, this is the right decision for me.

That's all I'm prepared to say here --- at least, at this juncture. Maybe someday I'll say more, maybe this is all there'll ever be on this blog about this.

Meanwhile, life, as they say, goes on.

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A whimper or a bang

Perhaps someday this will make a good story, but at the moment it's impossible to see how.

Taking some personal time. Thank you for all the SMSes/IMs/emails and a few old-fashioned phone calls. So this is how one weathers an emotional crisis in the age of the internet.

I will be back. I just don't know when.

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Not bored, just ...

Last Tuesday, I found out that someone we'd worked quite closely with for a recent project had unexpectedly --- it seemed, inexplicably --- passed away. Add the fact that I got the information through SMS and that adds a whole other layer of surrealism to the occasion.

Last Thursday, I slipped in the rain, fell down and scraped my knees open. My mother would despair of me. The knees are healing slowly --- yes, I must be getting older because the same wounds used to clot and scab within days when I was a kid --- but still look ugly, unsexy and highly tak glam. Well, at least I'm not limping anymore.

Last Sunday, my stomach decided that it would tease me with all the discomfort of diarrhoea, without any of the actual diarrhoea. Ditto today. I don't know whether to be grateful or disgruntled.

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Gobsmacked

So it turns out that in this era when the word "Google" has evolved from a search engine to a brand name to a bona fide verb in the dictionary, there are people my age who still use Yahoo to search.
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I've forgotten how to blog

So now I have a little bit of breathing space between work, but I've forgotten how to blog. I sit here, I stare at the blank Blogger screen, and I wonder what it is that one writes about when one blogs. I think about the day that's passed, or is passing, and I can't think of anything that's worth committing to words, as such.

I mean, of course, there's stuff. There was Terz's birthday last Friday, which involved a considerably amount of alcohol, semi-public humiliation and silliness for him, and not very much of any of that for me (because I had to put him to bed eventually, see).

There was the Museum's soft launch on Sunday, which involved showing people around the place so that they'd know exactly where the help they'd given us had gone. If anyone wants a personal walk-through, I'm available for one-on-one tours till December 13, all for the low, low price of a good meal and a glass of wine.

And then there was the usual whining about how much I need a vacation. At last recitation (last night), I have the following places on my to-visit list (in no particular order): central Vietnam (currently in the path of the most creatively named Typhoon Durian), Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bali and Beijing (which I've been talking about visiting since June). I have booked not a single air ticket. I have no travelling companion (Terz is otherwise occupied). My window of travel is in January only. At the rate this is going, I will still be talking about the proverbial well-earned vacation come next December.

I do believe I now remember what blogging is all about after all.

For the record, I am still in the office, drinking cold Tiger beer out of a white Ikea coffee mug, while we try to complete everything in time for a certain midnight deadline.

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Technorati Tags: blogging

Names that matter

I had a slew of spam email this week with the subject line, "hi it's [name]", which I guess is meant to trick me into clicking on the email because I might know someone by that name. The names in question were:

• Errol
• Leah
• Tommy
• Concetta
• Mel
• Hal
• Tameka
• Lindsay
  

Let's face it: most of these names aren't exactly common in Singapore. I know exactly one Leah and two Mels. I don't even know of a Tommy among my social circle. And Tameka?

These spammers need to do more homework.

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Technorati Tags: names

How I know the Singapore government is not "in touch" with young people

Edited to add (21 Nov): The Ministry of Finance (MOF) informed me today via email that "it was not part of the Organising Committee's publicity plan to post such publicity messages on blogs."

Or with any people at all, for that matter.

So at approximately 10:22 pm tonight, the following comment was anonymously posted on the previous entry on this blog, "Pay and pay, eh?":

Join us at "Building Our Singapore-The Public Service in Action", an exciting and interactive
exhibition jointly brought to you by the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and Public Service Division (PSD), to celebrate the constant dedication of the Public Service to serve the people of Singapore and its spirit of innovation

Date: Wed-Sun, 15 to 19 Nov 2006
Venue:Toa Payoh HDB Hub Mall
Time:10:30 am to 9:30 pm daily.

Come see how the Public Service aims to e-delight you through electronic services and strive to serve our citizens and residents better with a heart of service!
http://www.mof.gov.sg/buildingoursingapore/index.html

While most comments promising to "e-delight" me would automatically prompt me to delete them comments forever, this one gets to sit there as an object lesson in how the current Singapore government is completely out of touch with the young people of the internet generation it's trying desperately to court ("post-'65" Members of Parliament attempting to get wit da blogging and hip-hop dancing, anyone?).

Assuming that the comment was left by a bona fide civil servant (perhaps a poor soul working desperately after hours in order to comply with a boss's instruction that they "reach out" to "post-'65ers" using "the latest web platforms?), there are so many things wrong with this attempted "outreach" that I don't even know where to begin.

Do I begin with the fact that it's an anonymous comment, thus not necessarily inspiring the greatest sense of trust or reliability, even assuming it was posted by the government? Particularly since that same government told mr brown he should "come out from behind his pseudonym to defend his views openly." So the government gets to leave anonymous comments on the internet, but ordinary citizens can't even use pseudonyms?

Or do I begin with the fact that leaving comment spam is so gauche and verboten that entire systems have been set up by Blogger, Wordpress and other blogging software companies to combat the problem?

Or, as a copywriter myself, do I point out that even if one were to forgive the above two cardinal sins of internet etiquette, the comment itself is so thoroughly packed with the corporatese spoken by our government --- I mean, hello, "e-delight"? --- that it's not remotely likely to achieve its desired objective of attracting people to the event in question?

And never mind the fact that the comment was posted on a blog entry that is fairly critical of the government's latest policy announcement ...

For the record, the web link provided in the comment spam above is genuine. Now whether the comment was actually posted by a civil servant is another question, but the fact that it seems to be taken wholesale from some kind of government-composed press release has me pretty much convinced of the fact. Which irritates me because I can studiously ignore the "post-'65" Members of Parliament blog and the imminent hip-hop dancing *shudder* --- but now they want to bring their lame suxXx0rs attempts at "getting in touch with the people" to my blog, my space on the internet?

Dude. Dude.

Last year, in his National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said:

The Government has to adapt to the digital age. First of all, we need to find leaders who are of that age group, and that’s what we have been doing. That’s why in this election, we fielded a lot of people who are below 40 years old and we call them the P65 generation and they are reaching out to the young generation, understanding the young, being in tune with them, same wavelength, knowing how they react, how to move and motivate this group. [emphasis mine]

Dear government,

Get over it. You're not cool. You're about as hip (which is different from hip-hop, by the way) as Air Supply, pocket protectors and plaid pants combined. The harder you try to swagger around in the hopes of winning a seat at the cool kids' table, the more the cool kids are going to lean back and laugh at your swaggering, and then not still invite you to their parties, even for comic relief.

Spend a little less time on the song and dance routines (quite literally, in the case of certain "post-'65" Members of Parliament) and a little more time working on the actual problems that ordinary Singaporeans --- not just young people! --- grapple with every single day. Thank you.

Oh, and PS: stop leaving comment spam. The internet's messy enough as it is, without the government adding to the heap.

Luff,
Tym

Of course, this post is predicated on the assumption that the government was responsible for leaving the comment spam in question. If MOF lets me know that it definitely, most certainly, 100% wasn't a civil servant who did it, I'll be happy to retract this entire blog post.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore politics

My very first cameraphone video

Busy week, hence the "dearth of blog posts", as Little Miss Drinkalot pointed out last night.

In lieu of blathering, enjoy my very first cameraphone video/YouTube upload. There's no fancy music soundtrack or anything, but you get to hear my voice briefly.

Behold: The Ink Attack.



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Technorati Tags: YouTube, cat, Inkthecat

A good night's drink

Taken by Stryke
You know the mr brown show's acquired a certain cultural cachet when you're sitting in Ice Cold Beer and suddenly your non-blogging friends launch into spot-on imitations of mr brown and Mr Miyagi on episodes like dead birds, csi malaysia, finding nemo and, well, dead birds again, because who doesn't love a good mr brownMiyagi-imitating-Jackie Chan imitation?


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Technorati Tags: Singapore, mr brown show, mrbrownshow

Me and my MOO cards

Last month, MOO gave away free Flickr MiniCards to Flickr Pro users. Since this included free shipping worldwide (I can't remember the last time any web-based promotion did that), I immediately grabbed a lot of them and alerted other Flickr Pro users I knew in Singapore.

Silly me --- I thought I was getting 10 x 10 cards, but the deal was for just 10 after all.


As Darren Barefoot's already observed, the colours turned out darker than I expected. I would've picked more daytime or brighter pictures if I'd known.

Also, the cards are tiny --- it doesn't sound that small when the website tells you "roughly half the size of a standard business card", but it feels a lot smaller in your hand.

Still, they were free so I'm not complainin'. And I have a pretty good idea of what I'd be paying for if I ever decide to order up a full batch.

Now to see who I'll be handing them out to ...


Technorati Tags: MOO minicards, MOO mini cards, MOOminicards

No memory

How sad is it that even after looking up both Terz's and my blogs, and reviewing my credit card records from last December, both of us have absolutely no recollection of how we celebrated his birthday last year.

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In case you didn't know

This is the best blog to follow what's going on in Thailand right now.

Well, until Cowboy Caleb goes home, anyway.

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Technorati Tags: Thailand, coup, military coup

It's official

Unless you are Al Gore or Howard Dean, no other politician can speak about "the latest" popular internet sites without sounding like he's totally out of touch.

Just listen to our Prime Minister's fine example, during the "digital age" segment of his National Day rally tonight. Talking Cock? MySpace? "Narrowcasting"? Microsoft blogs? So last quarter, if not last year or more.

He did, however, mention some handy advice:

First of all, be sceptical. Don't believe everything you see. Not everything which is published is true. Know what is right or wrong.

Indeed, and it's equally applicable to the mainstream media (local and foreign), government press releases and anything else that tries to pass itself off as an authoritative source.

Like, oh, the National Day Rally, for example.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, National Day, National Day Rally

Argh: the antidote

Taken by kk.
Wine: sitting in my wineglass (and some in my stomach) (and the remainder in the fridge, to be drunk once this glass is done).

Cigarette: oh please, I was just expressing the sentiment. No need for the two of you to ask me, all stricken and panicked, if I've taken up smoking. After dating a 2-pack-a-day smoker and now being married to a regular-but-not-excessive one, I'm doing just fine without being up the habit myself.

Additionally, I have six IM conversations going. Procrastination, full steam ahead!

(Yes, I have work I ought to be doing. Hence the continued argh-ness. Poo.)

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The most inane meme ever

This is what comes of chatting online with Cowboy:

Let's all play a new meme I've invented that tells people what kind of preferences you have in various topics. It's also a way to show how clever you are by inventing little snippets of useless information that convey little information.

And then he tags me to do it. My first thought was: Cheebye. Then I thought I would humour him, since I hardly ever see him anymore these days.

1. I'd rather be Wonder Woman than Supergirl (classic comic book heroines).
2. I'd rather be black coffee than Coke Light (beverages).
3. I'd rather be Canada than the United States (countries and their dominant cultures).
4. I'd rather be a hummingbird than an eagle (birds).
5. I'd rather be Anthony Bourdain than Kylie Kwong (celebrity cook types).

Tag! You guys go figure out your own categories:

1. Terz
2. Yuhui
3. Nardac
4. cour marly
5. trisha

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Technorati Tags: meme

Into the light

It is always surreal to learn of a friend's passing, but that takes on a whole new dimension when the news comes via a blog and the friend in question is someone I've never met in person (and never will, now).

Whenever I encounter the death of someone I know, I always end up thinking, "I really don't know what to say." And I really don't here. I just sort of sit and think about the life that emanated through his words and the quiet encouragement he gave to others who were setting out on various journeys of their own. I think about Snoopy. I'll miss Snoopy.

In the last email we exchanged, he wrote:

I reckon I will make hay while the sun shines at least for this summer. God knows work will be hard enough to come by in winter, and there should be plenty of time to sit around the heater or in a heater car and drink hot chocolate and watch DVDs or the sunsets over the ocean.

Wherever you are, Knight of Pentacles, I hope you're having that hot chocolate and enjoying those endless sunsets.

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Flogging (or not)

While this blog has not metamorphosed entirely into a food blog, I've noticed that people are starting to come up to me and say, "So what's a good place for _____ food/for _____ occasion?"

I don't even know why I blog about food so much these days. Am I just giving in to my inner Singaporean? Is it because Singapore culture has, over the years, become somewhat inimical to the discussion of anything real or thoughtful, so the only thing we can talk about is food? Or is it that now I have the income and autonomy and free time to hunt down more interesting places to eat (and then blog about it)?

It's true that there are more Nice Places to eat in Singapore. The funny thing is that the more you go to these Nice Places, the more they all start to look and feel like each other --- even while some nevertheless serve Extremely Nice Food.

And then I came across this Anthony Bourdain quote in The Tyee's report on the launch of Bourdain's new book:

Food is the new porn. People go to restaurants the way they used to go to movies. And they go to one restaurant and talk about the last one they were at. Restaurants are also about a nesting instinct. People associate food with home and want that feeling. Then there's the fact that watching people cook on TV is satisfying. And through all of that, people are getting more sophisticated about food.

Let's see how my experience checks out against that quote:

Food is the new porn.
Uhhh ... I guess for some people ...

People go to restaurants the way they used to go to movies. And they go to one restaurant and talk about the last one they were at.
I definitely go to fewer movies than restaurants and I'd have to say, choosing between having a Nice Meal in a Nice Place with friends and/or family, versus going to a Nice Cinema to watch a Nice Movie with them, I'd probably choose the meal.

And yes, the more restaurants one goes to, the more likely it is that one will be forking into one's pretty appetizer while saying, "Oh, but have you tried the absolutely delectable _____ over at ____?" Though I generally try not to do this because it's potentially bad form plus I'd rather enjoy the meal that I'm having rather than to reminisce (or complain) about meals long digested and expurgated from my alimentary system.

There is a really good reason to talk restaurants in Singapore, though: The turnover rate in the food & beverage business is, as I imagine it is in any other major city, extremely high, so it's helpful to trade tips about which places aren't open anymore or maybe have lost their sparkle, or which new restaurant really is worth trying out. This also applies to hawker food stalls, which may fall victim to not only the whims of its clientele (or lack thereof) but also arbitrary decisions from on high to move out because the space (rather than the food) has outlived its usefulness.

Restaurants are also about a nesting instinct. People associate food with home and want that feeling.
Certainly. As a bad cook whose mother is a good one, I'd be the first to admit that sometimes at the economy rice stall, all I'm trying to do is assemble a meal that reminds me, however faintly, of Mom's cooking.

The kind of TLC that goes into the preparation of Nice Meals in Nice Places, however, is a completely different flavour's than Mom's. It's more clinical, somehow, and certainly more deliberate.


Crab starter at Majestic Restaurant
Taken and uploaded by Ms. Marly
I ain't complaining about it. It's just not quite what I'd associate with "the nesting instinct" or the feeling of being at home.

Then there's the fact that watching people cook on TV is satisfying.
Well, up to the point when I feel really inept. For instance, I enjoyed Jamie Oliver more when he was trying to reform school lunches in the UK than when he's pottering around his kitchen at home.

And through all of that, people are getting more sophisticated about food.
Perhaps. I know that it makes me more fussy about food. I know that I refuse to eat conveyor belt sushi anymore (unless it's 100 yen a plate, like the neat place where Terz and I had a late-night meal in Kyoto) and I'm extremely particular about which Japanese restaurant I eat in Singapore. Ditto Middle Eastern food (just 'cause good Middle Eastern is so hard to find here). And Italian. And good salads. And ... er, it's a wonder I find anything worth paying more than $5 for anymore.

Anyway, all this is by way of working off my angst from thinking that I might have to attend a restaurant opening tonight all by myself. Restaurant openings can be fun --- hello, free food and wine --- but nosso much when one is flying solo. Fortunately, I remembered at the last minute that a colleague is friends with the restaurant owner, so I cajoled her into going with me, which meant that I got introduced to the owner, soaked up some mellifluous Italian being spoken all around me in between introductions (the colleague is Italian) and enjoyed some all too delectable food and wine.

So now the angst is well gone, and I am way looking forward to trying the restaurant's menu proper (tonight was an official launch, which means they served largely canapes and finger foods) --- not to mention that I had the opportunity to properly chat with the Italian colleague for the first time in the four months I've been on this job and she gave me the dirt on all the real Italian places to eat in town.

This blog is not becoming a food blog. Really.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore food

I am Singaporean

Blame this one on brown. I wrote it last week, mulled it over some more, got tagged by a gecko's tale, let it sit for a bit longer and finally decided tonight that I'd better publish it before the bandwagon passed. If you didn't know already, this is inspired by Molson beer's "I am Canadian" commercial (see the video on Youtube). Or something.

I look Chinese, like 77% of the population, but I'm actually a quarter Ceylonese and three-quarters Chinese ---which is not a category recognised by the Immigration and Customs Authority.

In school, they told me my Mother Tongue was Mandarin, even though none of my parents or grandparents spoke it. By the way, I think in English.

I speak good Singlish and I'm understood by my fellow Singaporeans. But I don't understand enough Hokkien to appreciate the film Money No Enough.

I speak extremely good English and I'm understood by people from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand --- and Singapore.

I studied hard in school because everyone said I should, but I should've gone out to play more often.

I read.

I have a sense of irony.

I love shopping but it should not be our national pastime.

I love food, but I think it's more important to talk about politics and ideas.

I went to university on a government scholarship. Thank you for paying for my education. But I quit when my scholarship bond ended because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life upholding a hierarchy of self-styled mandarins and demigods.

I proposed marriage to my husband so that we could get an HDB flat, because my parents wouldn't have been crazy about us living together otherwise.

I still live in a HDB flat today because it's more than enough space for the two of us and our cat.

I don't have any children because, well, I just don't. Last time I checked, my womb was my business.

I am not apolitical or apathetic. I’m just confused when the government says that either I am a constructive critic or else I am "a partisan player in politics".

I have never voted, but I would have in the last election if the boundaries of my constituency had not been changed.

I am a blogger. I exercise free speech responsibly and I have the conviction to stand behind any statement I make.

I am not seditious.

I am not a Communist.

I am Singaporean.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, iamsingaporean