Rubénerd!

If I were into paranormal stuff, I'd claim it was a syncronicity.

Today, in Sydney:

Trains across most of the CityRail network are delayed up to 40 minutes after a fire safety alarm activated because of smoke in the Strathfield Signalling Complex earlier.

Today, in Singapore:

[a fire in an MRT tunnel] involving electrical wiring disrupted train services on the North-South line at about 9.05am. [..] Train services between Marina Bay and Toa Payoh stations resumed at 11.30am

So a fire alarm goes off, and the entire CityRail network goes down in Sydney for the rest of the day. A fire hits the Singapore MRT, and the affected line is fixed in less than 3 hours. Good to know.

Photo of the Newton MRT station by Terence Ong. Newton was the station I lived closest to for most of my time in SG, funnily enough ^_^

Chinatown, in Singapore. Also got this photo of Orchard Road, but not as good.

Will be uploading the rest of the photos from our trip soon, promise!

On the second day of my sister's and my Singapore trip, I corrected a grave packing mistake! Fortunately without too much fuss, and without getting rained on!

Camera DERP

I have a Nikon D60. It's a camera. It takes pictures. It's not the fanciest SLR, but I have a few lenses I love, and it does the trick. Only catch is, like many digital cameras (except those fancy ones with perpetual motion machines in the grip) it requires an energy cell to operate. Or battery, in typically flawed English.

Not only did I realise I left this vital part of my camera back in Singapore, I left the charger behind too. Such n00b travelers mistakes caused me such anguish I was able to mutter an entire sentence of gibberish. Normally my sentences lack cohesion, but this lack any semblance of English whatsoever. Not even Singlish. Aiyo.

Fortunately, this numbskull was able to use this dumb oversight to check out camera shops! After seeing Elke off, I hit Peninsula Plaza and The Adelphi near City Hall. As a fan of retro architecture these places hold a certain charm compared to the brand new or just renovated super-buildings now along Orchard Road and Raffles Place. As I commented on Twitter, they kind of look like the sets of old Star Trek movies; I'm sure their architects thought they looked super futuristic at the time!

These shopping centres have tons of little family run camera shops with all sorts of amazing wares. My favourite is The Camera Workshop at #01-31 in the Peninsula Shopping Centre; my dad and I have been going there since I was in primary school. The owner even recognised me, and gave me an amazing price on a new charger. Across from there I was able to get a replacement OEM battery for much less than an official Nikon one, which means I didn't waste too much of my Chinese food or cargo pants budget!

In the morning Elke and I hit the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Somerset 313, then for no reason later in the afternoon the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Ion. Both these shopping centres along Orchard Road were finished in 2010, only shortly before my sister and I left for Sydney. Still, all Coffee Beans have the same kind of feel, and we reveled in having the same free flow cawfees in their distinctive wide coffee cups and Ice Blendeds!

We headed back to the hotel (dubbed "home" for now!) in the evening to freshen up and charge all our phones, iPads and cameras, then headed to Suntec City to look at glasses for Elke. I love Suntec City, for the same way I love those other centres. People in the 1990s thought they were building something futuristic, now it has that sort of retro modern feel, which I really like. Ever since I was a kid, my dream was to start my own IT consulting firm out of Suntec, the buildings and the world's largest fountain in the middle are just too cool. That and I used to hang out in the shopping centre downstairs growing up :')

We also went to Carl's Jr, one of the few fast food places I can stand because the food is actually... really good! It's probably a good thing Sydney doesn't have them, I'd probably put on far too much weight eating their Sante Fe chicken burgers, or Elke with her Double Bacon Guacamole Cheeseburger. What a monstrosity XD;

In lieu of my actual camera, I took a bunch of fairly crappy phone pictures. Most centred around travelling on the MRT, Singapore's metro system that's so refreshing after dealing with CityRail in Sydney. It's not fair to compare the two per se, given the former is a metro and the latter a suburban system, but the difference in service, cleanliness and affordability was striking! They'd also finished the Circle Line since last time we were here, and some of the new stations are just GORGEOUS!

We also paid homage to the now-closed Borders in Wheelock Place that both Elke and I used to hang out at. Got my first O'Reilly programming book there :(. At least it's replacement was something awesome, the Marks and Sparks Food Hall had TONS of English sweets, crisps and biscuits! :D

Finally, I was able to get a micro SIM for my iTelephone 4! My dad still needed my post-paid SingTel card (with the number I've had since I was in primary school!) for convoluted reasons, but having been to four separate StarHub stores that told me they were out of stock of the tourist Micro SIMS, I went to their branch at 1 Raffles Place and got one for $18, $7 of which was used as credit towards 1GiB of data. Suddenly I was wandering around again with 5 bars everywhere, including rail tunnels, lifts, shopping centre basements! Curiously enough, I got 4 bars while wandering around Raffles Place.

Productive day! Here's hoping tomorrow I'll be able to actually *take* proper pictures again!

I'm back in Singapore for the first time since my sister, dad and I moved back to Sydney. Have a raging headache, so today's entry will probably be as cohesive as... something that isn't. Aiyo!

Scoot

We arrived at the Sydney Airport late in the morning and checked into our Scoot flight without any trouble at all. Scoot is Singapore Airlines' new budget long haul carrier mostly serving Australia and Asia.

The tickets were so cheap and the initial checkin so simple, my sister and I kept waiting for the catch to come up! When we boarded and the staff were super friendly and the chairs comfortable enough, we still kept waiting for the catch! Given it was a budget airline we had to pay for food, but even that was easy enough and the chicken biryani I had was surprisingly tasty.

The catch came in the time it took them to get the food. I ordered around 13:30, and by 15:00 I'd been served! This despite the fact I'd ordered it already, and pushed the staff call button and asked two more times.

Lesson learned: Scoot is a surprisingly hassle free budget airline, but eat a huge meal before you get on board because you could be waiting a while!

We have a scary person here!

I've often joked that Singapore immigration treat me better than Australia's, despite being a citizen of the latter.

This time around was quite the adventure; having gone through the horrid claustrophobia-inducing immigration hall in Sydney Airport, we were naturally called over for "random" secondary screening.

My sister maintains that because our dad has been to Iran dozens of times, we're on some sort of black list! Given what I've heard other former expats have gone through, I reckon the Australian government must just have a record of deserters who naturally can't be trusted! Whatever the case, either Elke or I ALWAYS (and I really do mean that!) get called for secondary screening. ALWAYS.

I won't go into the details of the secondary screening here, but suffice to say my sister triggered alarms. They cleaned the machine with alcohol then scanned again which turned up clean, but for a few brief moments we had people staring at us as though we'd tried to carry TNT with us.

As for the Singapore side? We were off the plane, didn't queue at all in the gigantic, breezy Changi Airport immigration hall covered in indoor plants and flowers, got our bags from baggage claim, and were in the public area of the terminal in less than 15 minutes ^^.

7-11 F&N Seasons Soya Milk Drink!

We went down to the Airport MRT station, waited 2 minutes, boarded, transferred at another station, waited less than a minute, got off at that station, then were at the hotel :).

For reasons I won't get into here, my father has my Singapore SingTel SIM, with the number I've had since I was 12 :D I gave the one I bought myself to Elke for this evening, and will look into getting another tomorrow.

In the meantime, off to sleep so I can be up early to go to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf or ToastBox for breakfast! Ironically enough, most of the things I want to do involve either taking pictures of things, exploring nostalgic places, and eating good breakfasts XD;

Going through my backups this afternoon, I stumbled upon all the photos I took with my Sony Vaio PCG-C1VM laptop. It was one of the first laptops to include a built in webcam, and took horribly bad 320x240 images! Still, at the time it was my only digital camera, so I spent ages taking shots with it like the silly nerd I was.

According to the time stamp, this photo was taken on the 11th of July 2001. I think it was on our balcony at Highpoint in Singapore. Nostalgia!

Remember all those DBS ATM skimmer problems I talked about earlier this year? Seems that it hasn't affected their bottom line:

SINGAPORE - DBS Group, Southeast Asia's largest bank, posted a record quarterly profit that beat analysts' expectations due to higher loan margins and trading income, and was bullish in its outlook.

The money is all in Asia now folks!

Ironically, I'm thinking of moving to OCBC. During some recent family adventures with a handful of banks, they've been by far the most tolerable. As far as banks go, that's high praise!

A statement from the new centre-right government in Queensland:

The Queensland Government has decided not to proceed with the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in 2012 which will save Queensland taxpayers $244,475, not including the cost of resourcing the Awards.

And only a few days later from Singapore:

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will donate $350,000 towards three new awards. The awards support community bonding, social service, and the arts.

Clearly there are more issues at play here, but fascinating timing nonetheless!

The 29th of February! Such a monuments (though chronologically predictable and necessary) occasion warrants a post I have precious time to write, so instead of a well thought out, logical post I've decided just to ramble for a bit. That's so unlike me.

When did this happen last time

To get into the spirit of writing, I thought it best to check out what I was blogging about the last time it was the 29th of February. Given this happens every four years, I was able to ascertain I needed to look up the 29th of February 2008. No, I'm not a mathematical genius, I just used a calculator to deduct 4 from 2012.

What happened last time

Turns out, the post I wrote for the 29th of February 2008 was a rather unsalubrious rant regarding sites taking my blog posts and wrapping them in ads. No, I'm not talking about Google (haiyo!), I mean spam sites. Ironically, those that Google used to be infested with and are starting to slowly creep back.

Let's take a look! Step into the four year time machine!

At first spam bots harvested email addresses from search engine indexes of web pages, then when the concept of posting comment on blogs started reaching critical mass spam bots started pumping spam through those [..]

It seems to me though that blog spam in itself is evolving though. I used the word "though" twice in that sentence. When previously they mostly consisted of masses of links to get more Google juice, now they seem to be latching on web feeds that blog software exports and creating more and more junk blogs with this plagiarised information. Some of them try to pass themselves off as legitimate by creating faux introductions that go along the lines of "Hey I found this blog entry and it's really interesting, here's a summary!".

I even took a screenshot of Camino showing one of the spam sites in question.

29th of February 2012

So now we return to the future, or the present, or whatever this period of time is. Einstein's Law of Relativity would imply that in this current time we would see it as the present, but had we stayed in 2008 we would have seen the present as the future. Right?

This reminds me of that episode of Star Trek Voyager with the USS Relativity where the first officer is trying to explain to 7 the idea that time travel is plausible if one understands effects often precede causes, and that temporal paradoxes can cause headaches. Wait, that was Captain Janeway, never mind.

So-called "True Trekkies" aren't supposed to like Star Trek Voyager, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching it growing up. That could be read as me watching it while I was growing up, or that I was watching the show itself grow up. English is such a clumsy language, one need only be a programmer or know other languages to be aware of this. Hey, at least we don't have seven different tenses! Right?

What was the photo?

So we finally come to the photo from the very beginning of this post. As I did while looking for previous blog entries written on the 29th of February 2008, I ran my master Swiss Army Chainsaw Perl script to spit out photos on my SLR backup drive taken on that day. I didn't take many, but one was that view above from my bedroom balcony at the time. You can view the full photo here, if you really want to.

Suffice to say, set homesickness mode to full! It was such a shock to have a quiet, dark bedroom when I came back to Sydney, I can tell you that much!

Another photo I had for some reason was this "screenshot" of installing Nvidia binary blob drivers for my FreeBSD tower.

The End

The irony hasn't escaped me that I spent my 29th of February 2012 post taking about the 29th of February 2008. That's fine, on the 29th of February 2016 I'll talk about the 29th of February 2012. Better make notes about Raspberry Pi for that day. The system works!

From Channel NewsAsia, regarding Singapore's Foreign Affairs and Law Minister's current trip to the US:

SINGAPORE: Singapore and the US have reaffirmed their desire to enhance the existing strong legal cooperation between both countries.

Ah crap.

I didn't intend for this to be a series, but here we are again! We heard of the skimmer problems with DBS ATMs, and the response the bank garnered from customers. Now we're finding out what DBS is going to do about it.

Photo from the DBS 2010 Annual Report. I'll bet their 2011 report will mention losses incurred from this incident. Maybe!

Prevention is good, but...

Channel NewsAsia reported on the basics, but for the real story we turn to the DBS Newsroom which inexplicably needs JavaScript enabled to work. How terribly frustrating!

If you're a cardholder you'll want to read the full report, but this seems to be the primary action they're taking:

All customers who have made overseas withdrawals using their ATM/ Debit cards at any point in time on or after 1 July 2011 will be able to continue to use their cards outside Singapore. However, they can also choose to block the overseas ATM cash withdrawal function at any DBS/POSB ATM, branch or by calling the DBS contact centre. For added protection, they can also choose to lower their daily cash withdrawal limit at any branch

If I'm parsing this correct, DBS are implementing an opt-in approach for overseas ATM banking. This would seem to be the opposite of what HSBC does; I handle some finances for my father, and in the case of his HSBC cards he's informed by SMS when overseas transactions occur. I think both serve their purpose, but the opt-in approach would be the most foolproof.

Maybe! Hey, I've said that once before here. No wait, twice. Maybe. Ah, crap.

Yes, but what about the hardware?

While these preventitive measures are valuable, they don't address the underlying hardware issue: that ATMs in Singapore can have skimmers installed which record customer information. To that end, DBS offered some advice:

Be Observant - If something about the ATM does not seem or 'feel' right, then stop your transaction and use another ATM. Do not remove any suspicious devices from the ATM, as it may be under surveillance by fraudsters.

I'll be looking out for another followup press release. In the meantime, I'd better check that I've used my POSB ATM card in Sydney since July last year; I'm pretty sure I haven't!