the reads in my bag

Can you read my life from the books in my bag?

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Playing squash on a budget

If you get bitten by a squash-playing bug, but don't have any equipment, this is what you do:

1. Find some way to get out of work a few hours early.
2. Call your friend who is on leave to bring you tshirt and shorts.
   
3. Spurn the $89.90 squash racquet you find at SportsLink.
4. Go to a second-hand cash-converter shop and buy two racquets, one for $15 and the other for $6.00.
5. Go back to SportsLink and ask the salesperson for a squash ball for beginners. Buy squash ball for $4.40.
   
6. Go to Yio Chu Kang Sports Centre and book a court at a non-peak rate of $3 an hour.
7. Play squash for a total cost of $28.40, and try not to look too much like a uncoordinated ballet dancer doing it.
   

Squash is my new favourite game. :) And I'm so bad at it that an embarrassing percentage of the fun I have playing the game is laughing at how bad I am.

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Happy birthday Smole! :)

I wanted to draw the setting sun at MacRitchie, the orange and pink bursting into brillant gold, and the turtles and the monkeys watching us do that funky kickboxing move on the boardwalk in the cool evening breeze. But after three tries, I gave up and drew this cheena postcard instead, to say happy birthday to the coolest, smartest, snazziest dudette in town today.

Happy birthday Smole! :)

(Because the more I look at it, the uglier it looks to me, so I've enlisted the ever-cute Jessie to help me out instead:)

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Is this what growing old is like?

I met J down her block today. She was reading a book and I was cycling home, and so we sat on a bench for a while to chill out before dinner. Then she told me that she has a lump on her throat and that they tested it and it was found to be cancerous and that the surgery is on thursday.

God.

Is this what growing old is like?

I've prayed for J for as long as I remember. Long, angst-filled prayers where I struggled and bargained with God, fuelled by my rigid, evangelical notions. How does a person live with such notions of heaven, hell and eternity without becoming completely insane? I don't know.

This thursday. The doctors say optimistic things. I believe them. I will still pray.

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It's a hobbit's life

Because you had a bad day
You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know
You tell me don't lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride...
http://www.myspace.com/danielpowter

I think I need some food therapy after work today. Will take my bike and have me some chicken rice at Novena today, and then have me a second dinner when I get home. I hope there is soup.

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Books

This is long overdue. The day Jim posted this list, I looked up the books in the online catalogue, trooped down to the library, and got the book that made him laugh and the book that made him cry. From the sentence above, I wouldn't blame you if you thought that I was interested in him in that sensitive, new-age "who are you really, inside?" kinda way, but really, even if you were interested in him in that funky way, I don't think reading these two books will help much. You'll probably have to read though a little library, read the bible cover-to-cover at least five times, AND watch an entire series of Veggie Tales to get close to the answer. Anyway, back to the books.

Shopgirl by Steve Martin is entertaining. It is an old-fashioned story about love that doesn't say anything new, yet manages to take you by surprise with its comedy. The characters remain with you. I found myself trying to determine the most efficient way to juggle my errands when I suddenly realised that I was exactly like Ray Porter.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf came with the recommendation of Eric as well. I was afraid of crying so I read it very slowly and hesitantly, pausing frequently in the lilting story because I did not want to get too caught up.

I didn't cry after all. But I was won over by the two crusty bachelors in the novel. They were described in such an endearing and sweet way that it made me chuckle, and then melt.

Plainsong celebrates the role of community in a stark, harsh world. It manages to be both realistic yet idealistic, depressing yet optimistic. The story-telling is simple, and the flow seamless.

This is a good book. It is worth the read. :)

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Sheares Bridge Run and Army Half Marathon 2006

Loved the interesting and varied route for the Army Half Marathon (21.1km) this year.

The theme for this year's run was "Experience Singapore", and so runners ran past the Merlion, Sheares Bridge, East Coast Park, Nicoll Highway, the National Library, Orchard Road, Chinatown, the Parliament House, and the Padang. Even though we lugged a camera the entire way, we have nothing to show for it because I didn't realise the battery was flat. :( I felt very sorry that Smole had to carry it the whole way.

There must have been 15 guys to every girl. I suppose that is what you get when it is organised by the army. One of the best things about this arrangement was that the queue for the ladies' portable toilet was only one-third the length of the gents, which never happens in regular life! The bad thing about this arrangement was that with a total of some 60,000 runners, the pong of these men was quite something. I don't even want to think about it long enough to describe it.

One of the most interesting things about this run was that the water-stops were taken care by different divisions in the army. Some divisions like the 9th division infantry and the 6th division really went all out to motivate the runners. One of them gave out ice-cold sponges! The other had army men dressed up as big-headed dolls and dragons to welcome the runners. A lot of divisions had drums, loud music, and fertilser sprays to water down the crowd. What a carnival! :)

The weather was excellent too. Because flag-off was at 5:30am, most of the run was in the dark. It was also a cloudy day -- in fact, it rained at 9am on the carnival after the race. I pitied the 6km runners who were coming in at that point.

Our timing wasn't as good as Standard Chartered, but I am glad that we finished the race strong. I thought that we may have to walk long stretches of the way because we aren't as prepared this year, but that didn't happen and I actually really enjoyed this run. From now on, everytime we do a long run, it will be longer that anything we've ever done before, until our first marathon at the end of the year. :) The plans of mice and men...

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Reformatting for dummies

As a novice who has gone through three cycles of reformatting before getting it right (for now, anyway), this is my step-by-step instructions for the next time I have to do this.

1. Backup all documents. (External hard drive will be handy. If you have a laptop hard drive (smaller) like this, you need to plug both the short wires into the USB ports, and the long one to the computer.)
2. Ensure that you have all your drivers, start-up discs, and license codes.
3. Stick the Windows XP disc into your CD-ROM.
4. Restart computer.
5. Before the operating system kicks in, hit the key that allows you to choose which device to boot from (mine is F8). Choose to boot from CD-ROM.
6. Follow instructions.
7. When you get to screen that asks you which drive you would like to install it in, delete all partitions. This means that all your data will be wiped out.
8. Follow more instructions, and eventually you will get into Windows again.
9. Turn on your firewall to your internet immediately.
10. Run Windows update, or ensure that you have the latest critical patch. (Please note that installing Windows XP SP2 may cause your external drive not to be recognised. Possibly not true because my comp is still not recognising my external hard drive even though I don't have Windows XP SP2 installed anymore.)
11. Re-install your programmes.
12. If you have more than one hard drive, you need to format and assign a drive to it. Right-Click `My Computer', `Manage', `Storage', `Disk Management'. Select the second hard drive and create a partition.
    

Theoretically, this is a simple process. Theoretically.

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News: Malaysia bans all religious dialogue

To curb growing tensions among various religious groups, Malaysia has banned all religious dialogue.

One of the reasons why tensions have been growing is the increasing prominence of off-limit topics in the news and public dialogue. Stories of conversions, apostasy, the demolition of Hindu temples and special Malay rights were once strictly off-limits in the public square. Yet, in the media and through special Inter-Faith Conferences, these prickly issues are increasingly given prominence, adding to the threat certain Muslim groups feel. To cool off, the government has imposed a ban.

The Prime Minister is for the status quo. In fact, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi commented that every state should have laws to restrict the spreading of other faiths among Muslims, specifically mentioning Federal Territories, Penang, Sabah and Sarawak as states that have not done so. He told reporters, "Why are they still not doing it? To those states that have not (legislated such laws), they should consider. Take whatever actions needed." (news article)

Related news articles:
`No' to discussing religion Daily Express News, 22Aug 06
PM wants states to enforce laws on spreading faiths Bernama.com, 21Aug 06
Ban neccessary, but still room to talk New Straits Times, 22Aug 06
Muslim tensions high in KL over `threat' to religion MalaysiaToday, 1 Aug 06
Discussion ban on all, says Radzi theStar, 11 Aug 06

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Why my next computer will probably be a Mac

Because 5 minutes after reformatting and reinstalling Windows XP on my computer, I catch a nasty worm just by using Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Tip: Download critical patches from Microsoft before you reformat so that you can install them right away. It is a nasty world out there, at least for us Windows users.

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Update:
After reformatting it for the second time, my computer is now infected with adware. I may have to download the latest patch from Microsoft (rather than just the specific fix for the worm I had the first time) before reformatting it for the third time tonight. But, but, but, the latest patch is two hundred and seventy two freakin' megabytes big and my CD ROM doesn't read data CDs.

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Does absolute power corrupt absolutely?

In Indonesia, it is almost impossible to get anything done if you are not willing to help things along with a bribe or two. The Chinese there have a saying: "If you want big fish, you mustn't be too hung up about small fish."

If you know the right people, you can get your driver's license made on-the-spot for about $20 or so, without so much as stepping foot in a car. If you get a $50 fine for speeding (regardless of whether you were actually speeding), it will be forgotten with an appropriate tip to the policeman. Well-to-do Indonesians actually hire people to check in for them at airports to avoid the hassle!

Singapore is usually commended for being corruption-free. Perhaps some of us are tempted to think that it is in our nature to be as clean and straight as a starched white PAP shirt, but I don't think so. We are only clean because we don't want to get caught!

A case in point: my buddy's Treo 650 got stolen last week. While attending to a patient in an emergency, she placed the $600 palm-phone on the table right beside the bed. By the time she was done, it was gone. This was within closed curtains, outside of visiting hours. Who took it? It could only have been staff.

I think, as a people, we do what we can get away with, and that we only appear incorruptible only because we can get away with so little in this over-watched nation state. When I was ten years old, I used to throw in eight one-cent coins in the bus and pass it off as ten cents. (Yes I was a little cheat.) Not to mention hitting $0.60 on the transitlink no matter the distance I was travelling. Then they installed EZ Link to cut off the cheaters like me.

Does the country with the biggest muscle inevitably bully? Does absolute power corrupt? In a way, if countries are driven by their own self-interests, how can they not bully? Israel and Palestine, trade laws that favour the developed nations... What about the unintended offence US gave Osama bin Ladin in the wars in Afghanistan? Even Switzerland, in the spirit of neutrality, may not do what she ought to do.

Which begs the question: does God have self-interests?

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I'm down to 38

But is it really worth all that sweating and showering and changing of underwear?

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My sick comp

I've been wrestling with my computer at home all weekend long but its still persists in hanging like a pertulent petulant child. I've done everything I can. I've uninstalled practically all my RAM-guzzling programmes, defragmented, scanned for viruses, vaulted, deleted, restarted, tried to do a `system restore'; but because of a series of unfortunate events (such as the comp not being able read data CDs, or recognise an external drive so that I can backup my stuff for a reformat, or stay alive long enough for me to do anything), I now have:

1. One incomplete setup of a Taiwanese Windows Pro Installation that means that everytime I turn on the computer, I need to hit escape repeatedly otherwise I will see a screen in traditional Chinese asking me something I do not know. At that point I only know that I should hit F3, F3, ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC, and choose Windows Professional instead.

Help.

Last night I dreamt that my English Literature teacher in Junior College, who is British mind you, marked my work in Chinese and at the end of the paper, I had to do practical criticism on a Chinese passage that started with a thrice-repeated refrain of "yi ge, yi ge, yi ge". And I thought in my dream, "That really ought to be significant," but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

2. Infinite re-boots. Infinite patience. I'm taking disciples if you are interested. My training is simple: swap your computer with mine.

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Are army men desperate?

You tell me. Spotted in a brochure for the SAFRA Running Club in the Army Half Marathon Goodie Bag:

"Team membership available to HomeTeam (NS), single ladies and students above 12 yrs old."

Or is the Running Club a masquerade for something else altogether?

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42

• the number of classmates i had in Pri 1
• the number of times i have left to cycle to work before i recoup my tyres
• the number of links on my linkpage
  
• the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

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The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener is described on the cover as a "suspense thriller" with an "unforgettable ending".

When my buddy recited that to me from memory, I burst out laughing because it sounded so strange. An `unforgettable ending' is the kind of phrase that doesn't say very much. Why was it unforgettable? Was it poignant? Was it hilarious? Was there a twist? Was it impacting? The phrase is also not effective because it negates a negative term, making it only neutral at best, apologetic at worst. So it was not forgettable, is that really something worth mentioning?

Anyway, The Constant Gardener was a suspense thriller in the British-kinda way, i.e. without the Hollywood adrenaline-pumping car chases and spectacular explosions we've all become used to. The suspense in this movie is pulled forward only by its plot, slowly and persistently towards its "unforgettable ending".

It is an alright show. A lot of it is set in Africa, so the backdrop is colourful and the music full of drums. In any case, it rescued me from the tedium of a weekday night.

Category: Reading

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A plethora of inconclusive observations on a bicycle

If you saw a Christmas tree on a bicycle on your way to work this morning, it was me. I had a backpack, a heavy-duty bicycle chain, a helmet AND a badminton racket hanging off my person as I manoeuvred my way through the morning traffic.

Never again.

The thing is, I replaced my tyres over the weekend for $58 ($23 per tyre, $6 per inner tube). The bicycle shop owner managed to convince me that although the tread on my old pair was still perfect, it was old, hard and dry, and so could not grip the ground effectively. Dunno true or not.

In any case, my new tyres are sweet and smooth, and I have come up with a plan to recoup my losses. I will have to cycle to and from work 23 days, or 46 trips altogether, to make up the cost of my new tyres. With this most recent Christmas tree balancing act, I am down to 43.

Yeeyaiyipppeeyo. Why am I not looking forward to this at all?

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Cryptic Chinese Gospel Tract

This is a contextualised Chinese gospel tract taken from Create International. Can somebody please explain to me how in the world it tells the gospel? (large picture here)

As far as I'm concerned, it is a story of a poor country damsel who gets lured and taken dancing by a city man and is then unceremoniously dumped. The depressed girl then meets the man of her dreams, a man who smells of horses and fields. Maybe I'm reading it in the wrong direction.

Better insights, anyone?

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Which other country, I ask you?

We are so well-run it blows my mind.

16,000 delegates from the IMF and World Bank will be converging in Singapore next month and the country is getting ready. Which other country will:

• Brief all the taxi drivers in the entire country in a three-hour training course to be polite to delegates, not to have body odour, not to talk about sensitive political and race issues, and not to have too many accessories in their taxi? Haha!
  
• Launch a "Four Million Smile" campaign which plasters Singaporean smiles on billboards, bus ads, and prominent buildings? (even though a survey found us to the unhappiest lot in Asia. Of course this survey calculates happiness by multiplying life expectancy by life satisfaction and dividing that by something called the ecological footprint. I mean, by this calculation, although Singapore comes in 131st, USA comes in 150th!)
• Re-tar the roads and re-paint lane markings in August? (erm, this is just own subjective observation) Update: I really think they are re-tarring most of the roads here!
  
• Plan it so that high-level events such as the Singapore Biennial 2006, Raffles Forum 2006, and others coincide with the IMF and World Bank gathering? And co-ordinate it all via a well-organised website of activities, links and useful information for delegates?
• Close the entire Nicholl Highway for 11 days straight.
  

Just gotta be impressed.

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7:00am

Waiting for my buddy to wake up enough so we can go for a morning run. I think my Sunday will be awesome. Hope yours is too! :)

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Did you know?

That every time you walk into a field, you could be wading though hundreds of spiderwebs? This was what we saw on an early morning run in a Chinese cemetery in Malacca.



How cool is that? Smole calls them spider web blossoms. If you look at it close-up, you'll see a spider in every single web.



Running makes me smarter, I swear.

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Always moving on

I have a confession to make: I am a bloody finicky woman.

I get a thrill saying that. Saying that seems so mean and wrong. But I can say what I want about myself.

I am not finicky because I can't make up my mind -- I did make up my mind a long time ago -- but rather, having made up my mind, I find that my heart (that twat romantic construct) is in pieces all over the place, and the pieces cannot be found. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king's soliders and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. I am scattered like that pollen grass that blows in the wind.

Things will settle down. Memory is a double-edged sword. One day, I suppose, the memories will be sweet.

"Dear Fox, old friend, thus have we come to the end of the road that we were to go together... and so farewell.
But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you.
Something has spoken in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die. I know now where. Saying:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth –
– Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending – a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.” Thomas Wolfe

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Why is bird poop white?

For Smole, the ever curious one.

Unlike mammals, birds don't urinate. Their kidneys extract nitrogenous wastes from the bloodstream, but instead of excreting it as urea dissolved in urine as we do, they excrete it in the form of uric acid. Uric acid has a very low solubility in water, so it emerges as a white paste. This material, as well as the output of the intestines, emerges from the bird's cloaca. The cloaca is a multi-purpose hole for birds: their wastes come out of it, they have sex by putting their cloacas together, and females lay eggs out of it.

Scoop on Poop

I think that multi-purpose hole sounds a bit dodgey if you ask me.

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Some things I will not do

I was walking from the bus stop to work in my half comatose state -- waking up the day after a public holiday is awful, every molecule in me screams that it ought to be a Sunday; yes, I confess I am a five-day-week softie -- when my colleague told me that she bought a new portable TV.

You know I like gadgets, even gadgets that I have no conceivable use for in my lifetime, yet at that moment, while checking out the box, I realised this: I will never ever buy a portable TV.

In fact, I am not even neutral about it, I am positively repelled by the idea of needing to have a portable TV. What do you do with one? I was surprised at my strong reaction, so I thought of a bunch of other things that I will probably never do while I still have breath:

1. I will not drink to get drunk.
2. I will not buy a lottery ticket.
3. I will not visit a fortune teller.
4. I will not bow my head at any temple; AND
5. I will not buy a portable TV.

What about you?

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On the tip of my tongue

There are so many things I wish I could say aloud but I can't, so I repeat what I can over and over again, until my friends both real and virtual get tired of me regurgitating my shallow theoretical thoughts, as if that is all to me.

So I spew my nonsense -- I tell you about Gizmo Project, about the book I just read, about my latest gadget fetish -- while I watch you tear and struggle with loneliness, desire and disappointment, or watch you smile with the joy of having someone, as if I don't feel it too.

I wish I could tell you.

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Graveyard dining

My mind deceives me. It feels like I have been gone at least a week. But perhaps it is because I misplaced my stomach while walking the streets without a map and it decided to remain behind at one of the many roadside stores we found an excuse to stop at every chance we could.


Mee Rebus with crispy muruku. The plastic sheet over the plate is brilliant. It keeps the plate clean as there is no running water at the roadside store. This Indian seller's gravy has a tinge of fish curry in it. Different from what I'm used to in Singapore, but just as good.


Graveyard dining. Two roadside stores sold RM2 Mee Rebus and RM1 Chendol in the middle of what looked like freshly dug graves.


BBQ pork and rice balls, this time at a proper "restaurant".

We ate a lot more - mee goreng, curry chicken bao, fried chicken, roti prata, penang prawn mee, etc., but sad to say, we didn't pause long enough to take pictures. :)

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My one claim to fame

Thanks Elle E and Mingz.

How many mistakes can you spot? :)

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Update: Wah... I got a mention in the Vietnamese online news as well. I quote:

Ho?c ??n gi?n ch? c?n bi?t h?t các lo?i th?c u?ng c?a Singapore c?ng ?ã ?? làm nên m?t ng??i Singapore, nh? tâm s? trên http://mis_nomer.blogspot.com: "Tôi là ng??i Singapore vì tôi có th? phân bi?t ???c teh, teh-O, teh-C, teh-peng, teh-O-peng, kopi-gao, kopi-slew-tai, kopi-chino, milo-dinosaur, milo-godzilla, ta-chiu (các lo?i th?c u?ng ???c gi?i tr? Singapore ?a chu?ng), món nào tôi c?ng t?ng n?m qua và ??u ghi?n h?t!".

Heh.

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Weekend Get-away

What you need to create the above map: Garmin Forerunner 201, Logbook Splitter, GPS visualizer, Google Earth, one daredevil coach driver.

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Flickr made me a pro for three months!!! :D

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Early morning weekday run

sunrise behind the trees


life


do you see the flag?


i was surprised at how quickly the sun rose


sunrise over shenton way


stopping and watching


running back
More pics

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Don't miss a hoop

I am sad today. Just came back from an interview with an institution that does not seem to recognise my degree, which makes me sad. But not yet devastated, because I still believe in myself and in what I am capable of doing.

There are fast tracks towards success in Singapore. If you get on the right track, you are alright and things will be smooth sailing. We say we are a meritocratic society, which is absolutely true, but there is so much more than that. It is necessary to jump through a series of hoops, in order too, to even get onto the playing field to begin with. After all, there must be some way to judge merit, and God help you if you missed a hoop.

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as it is with peas and carrots...

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A sandwich

I want a sandwich. With grilled chicken, avocado and alfafa; and cheese, the big-eye kind that has holes large enough to stick all your fingers through and wiggle them about. I would like it on fresh bread, any kind, just as long as it is not so dry that its tastes like crackers, and not so empty that it floats on water.

Tomatoes, not those generic plastic tasting ones you get from NTUC at $0.20 a hundred grams, but the succulent sweet fresh variety that is bursting with the taste of, well, tomato. Oh gosh, what would I do for a tomato! And possibly olives and green peppers, a light dressing, a dash of pepper and maybe salt, and I'll be a very happy camper.

Now who wants to buy my a subway lunch? :)

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this is not forever

The human psyche is a funny thing. I work at this job as if i am going to be here forever: being bored with my work, taking my time with projects, drinking coffee and wasting time, thinking I have to bear with certain colleagues forever. This is in spite of the fact that I have taken small steps towards finding a new job. It is as if there is a disconnect between both bits of my life, and when I am at work, I don't realise that this is not forever.

Same way with life. Some of us have made plans for when we are gone: we write wills, book niches and think about our children. But we live as if that day will never come! We think life is a bore; we are full of regrets, wondering what life would be like if we hadn't done this or chosen this or had done well in school or were making more money... We want money as if we will always need it. We are frustrated with the idiosyncracies of our family and friends, and say stuff like, "You are always like that," as if always will stretch into eternity.

It is in Ecclesiastes that Solomon writes that God has placed "eternity in the hearts of men". I wonder if that is the origin of the disillusion that even though there is irrefutable evidence gathered over many centuries that someday we will die, we think that when it comes to us, death will pass us by and we will ride like Elijah in a chariot of fire. I don't think so.

I really have to make more effort at smiling and being cheerful at work and at home, and put my darnest best into what I do, because this is my one shot at life, because this is not forever.

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