Friday 13th August 2010
Friday 02nd July 2010
My old man told us the packers would be here today. They arrived yesterday. D’oh! This is our seventh massive family move thing. I love travelling and living in many different places, but packing sucks. Fortunately we’ve got rid of so much stuff, this is the first time we have less stuff than what we had before. It’s also our first family move since mummy passed on, which has been really fricken hard. I found it harder going through her stuff now than I did when we were choosing clothes for her funeral, which makes no fricken sense.
That has to be the most fractured paragraph I’ve ever written here. My writing sucks, but that was even worse than usual. Fricken is such a fricken awesome word. Fricken heck.
Wednesday 25th November 2009
Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it’s not there. I’m far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I’m going to give it a try.
Monday 02nd November 2009
My home is back in Singapore and I’m studying in Adelaide, and in both places over the years I’ve collected huge collections of computer books, like these ones! Computer books are bulky and heavy just by themselves, so carrying a few dozen of them between cities in luggage is completely out of the question. What I need are ebook versions.
Friday 30th October 2009
I read a report somewhere that people of my generation tend to stay in contact with our parents far more than previous generations did. I’m not sure how much of that is societal or whether it’s because it’s just cheaper and easier to do now wherever we are, but I’d say it definitely holds true for us here.
I try to contact my dad at least twice a week on Skype because especially since my mum died we’ve become really close friends. He’s still obviously an authority figure when it comes to certain whatnot, but for the most part I talk to him now the same way I talk to friends. We didn’t break our longest running record yesterday afternoon on Skype, but 1 hour 54 minutes is still pretty damn impressive!
Tuesday 27th October 2009
Monnie over at Vanilla Silence recently wrote a detailed blog post about her holidays that were otherwise fabulous save for a nasty bout of hayfever, so I decided I should talk about my flu thingy too.
COUGH! SNEEZE! SO HOT! SPLUTTER! COUGH! SO COLD! SNEEZE! BIRD! SNEEZE! WORD!
I was going somewhere with this!
After postponing going to the doctor for several days because doctors scare the heck out of me, I finally went this morning. Turns out what I thought was just hayfever or a common cold was the flu and a respiratory infection. I’ve got stuff to take for it now and I’m breathing easier already, though I still have to take it easier over the next few days. When I have assignments due and a family crisis, of course!
My mum put up with these symptoms when she was having cancer treatment for over 12 years. 12 F*CKING YEARS. Even now I still don’t know how she did it.
Saturday 24th October 2009
So I’ve come down with such a severe case of hayfever now that Spring has finally Sprung that I think I was making more noise this morning than the constructon workers across the street. Every time I sneezed in the loungeroom I think I broke a window, quite an achievement when you consider our small house here only has glass doors and no windows.
Thursday 10th September 2009
Had a ridiculously busy day today with a ton of things that went wrong. Two conference calls; five classes with hour long tests in two of them; I had to see my sister off at the airport by taking public transport which took an age in an of itself; I had to work on an assignment because I’m a schedule freak and don’t like getting behind on university work I’ve planned; three lots of homework which I had to sprint to the computer pools at the campus to print because our printer stopped working; I had to deal with another internet banking glitch and subsequent explanation to the landlord; our internet was throttled; and while having one of my usual headrushes I blacked out for a second and hit my head on a light switch, something which doesn’t sound like it would hurt much but it really did!
Then after breakfast… I kid. I tell you what though, while days like today aren’t exactly the most fun, I think it helps at times to remind ourselves that’s it better than the alternative. I’m comfortable saying this now because today is over of course, if someone had come up to me and relayed that sentiment to me earlier today I might have relayed a frozen grilled cheese sandwich at their head. That’s my new weapon of choice by the way.
On behalf of the entire writing team here which consists of me, I apologise for the lack of posts today. I’ve been on a roll publishing posts these last few months, so I can understand it’s difficult to miss out, especially if you use Google Reader for example and are used to seeing all my nonsense scattered through your unread posts every day.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to put another ice pack on my bruised forehead and call it a day. Which would be disingenuous to say the least given it’s 00:26 and therefore it’s very early morning and still dark.
Sunday 15th March 2009
UPDATE: This post was originally written yesterday on Sunday, but I hit the "Save Draft" button instead of "Publish". Looking back at it now, I wish it were still Sunday.
I’m sitting here at the Boatdeck Cafe this Sunday afternoon with just my iPhone and a stable wireless network. Sometimes I need to lug the glorified monitor and keyboard stuck together, but today just typing on this feels fine.
It is definitely starting to show that it’s Autumn here in Adelaide; after almost every day being as hot as Singapore when we came back here, this weekend has been in the low 20s and drizzling. To the astonishment of many a person in the real world and online I’ve readily admitted I prefer overcast days; there’s something about them that allows me to relax more. Perhaps it was the positive cool change overcast days have on tropical climates that made me think of them positively.
Mugachinos are good!
As for today, despite university now being back for a fortnight now I’ve still been having a nagging enrollment issue that I thought would have been fixed but clearly not, so I had intended this afternoon to work on that, but unwittingly I forgot the online enrollment system isn’t functional on Sundays! Or at least the part I’m trying to access. I still haven’t even got a new student card yet!
So to be productive I’ve been watching some more Code Geass and going to the Boardeck Cafe! I figure my life is so dreadfully confusing and filled with anxiousness and dread that a Sunday where I only have a few responsibilities is, for an Atheist wanting a better word, a godsend! Plus it’s overcast, good times!
I’ve also finally recorded a Rubenerd Show again, the first since coming back to Adelaide. I had forgotten that I was supposed to be keeping shows under 10MiB so people on iPhones and iPod Touches (the phrase "iPod Touches" just doesn’t sound right, if you know what I mean) can download them on mobile phone networks, so I rambled on just as I’m doing here without any thought to the time until it was just time. The result was I had four things I wanted to discuss and I ended up discussing one thing, then getting sidetracked and talked about something else! Good times.
Well that’s my Sunday! Now if you’d excuse me, I’m going to turn to the Stanza iPhone app and continue reading The Counte of Monte Cristo [Wikipedia] while I finish my Mugaccino. Sundays are fun.
Sunday 21st December 2008
Tanglin Mall in Singapore, sans Christmas decorations by User:Sengkang Will be uploading my dad’s and my Christmas photos soon!
I’m sitting in a coffee shop again, only this time not at my beloved Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes in Adelaide in South Australia in Australia in Asia Pacific in Earth in the Solar System in the Milky Way galaxy, but rather the Starbucks at Tanglin Mall. Sitting here on a Sunday morning you could be forgiven for thinking you’re in Australia, or the US, or Canada, or the UK here there are so many ang mohs here!
Little tip, you can always tell the ang moh (literally means "red head" in Hokkien, used in the past as a somewhat derogatory term) tourists from the people who’ve lived here by what they’re wearing and how much they’re sweating!
Anyway back to better things, having been back in Singapore for just over a week now I’ve been dealing with this web hosting disaster. Wait, that’s not a better thing at all, it’s quite awful! As a result of my web host being blocked on my own internet connection at home it’s been painfully hard to create and upload new posts which has been a real shame. I think the problem is I thought I may as well clean out the databases that have accumulated large amounts of junk since I started using them five years ago, as well as moving over some of my media files to Ourmedia and changing the URL to something more logical. Perhaps I’m biting off far more than I can chew.
ASIDE: Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had problems with my jaw bone and chewing, that’s why I eat so slowly… and find it even harder to chew that which I have bitten to much off of. When I was a kid I thought it was normal to feel pain whenever you closed your mouth! Ah those were the days, right?
I’ve really missed writing these rambling nonsensical posts, they were so enjoyable to do in the past. Here at the Starbucks using their free Wireless@SG internet connection I’m having no trouble accessing my site; very refreshing after dealing with proxy servers at home just so I can upload a file or browse my comments pages! SingTel seems to think that my web host is still reputable. Or perhaps they just don’t know.
Back to business though, it continually stuns me how rapidly Singapore is developing and changing. Every time I leave here and come back after only a few months things have changed. For example, there’s now a 50+ floor new apartment building nearing completion outside my bedroom window that wasn’t there before. Really! The post office opposite Tanglin Mall which I can see through the floor to ceiling glass here as I type this is now a Friven and Co which also houses a fantastic gourmet Swiss deli which my German father wholeheartedly approves of! Half the computer shops in Sim Lim Square have changed and rearranged themselves.
My aforementioned father for his birthday on the 2nd bought himself a Nikon D90 DSLR of which I am insanely jealous of.
ASIDE: I’m sorry I have to rudely interrupt myself here. Does that above sentence make grammatical sense? I would be jealous of my dad for having a fantastic new camera not jealous of the camera itself… would I? Four years since high school english classes and I can already tell my standards are slipping. I blame it on C++, Perl, Ruby, Objective C and Chuck Peddle.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the camera. Yes he has a new Nikon D90 and a slew of new lenses including an ultra wide angle which can see so far in either direction the camera may as well have eyes in the back of it’s head! Or lenses in the back of the camera as it were. As a result of having this new optical device we’ve been on several photographic expeditions around Singapore taking photos of the Christmas decorations at night and during the day, as well as some nature shots. I’ve been using my venerable FinePix S9600 bridge camera and the super macro capabilities of the attached lens to show up my dad’s D90 up as he currently doesn’t have a lens that matches it, but let’s just say his night photography shots are somewhat better!
I purposely chose photo sizes that make my S9600 appear bigger and more impressive than my dad’s D90. I’m not biased, I’m just… selective!
My FinePix S9600 can take stunning night photos even when set on a low ISO setting, but I tend to tremble a lot so I need to use a a tripod. The Nikon D90 can take stunning night photos even if you swing the camera and intentionally move it around! Just for fun he took several photos at night of the Christmas lights and sneezed as he pressed the shutter button. Photo came out perfectly. What a show off.
Did I mention I’m jealous?
My dad, sis and I have been to restaurants I want to review here and post photos of, we’ve seen Segways zipping around the street… eventually when all this web hosting nonsense has sorted itself out I’d love to post all this stuff. It’s amazing, I’ve only been posting every other day now instead of several times a day, and the material is piling up faster than snow. Which given Singapore is in the tropics it isn’t much of an accomplishment, but notice I didn’t specify where the snow was. Ha, I’m too clever for you!
Until next time, have a good one :). Did I mention things keep changing here?
