Dead faces in the water, etc.

I had a bad dream.  Not one of those "sleep-too-much-and you-dream-too-much" type of bad dream, but a bona fide nightmare.  It wasn't an emotional nightmare where you dreamed that someone you loved has died and you wake up weeping — those are worse — but this was the real thing: haunted hotel, room 71, taking a taxi to the haunted house, your friend swimming in a pool filled with dead faces and telling her in as calm as a tone you can muster to get out of the water, big live gargoyle-like thing that guards the door of the room, getting an SMS from your boss to go to camp to do duty, forgetting about the SMS and not showing up, planning a lesson where the culmination of a subject-verb agreement lesson was a half-marathon and you realising much too late that "Hey!  They CAN'T run a half-marathon! So now what am I supposed to do?", and then missing the lesson anyway because you lost track of time in that haunted house.  

I think it is MONDAY.

What is the best PDA device for the Mac?

I need it to sync seamlessly with iCal, Address Book and the To-do
list. Preferably using iSync.

A miracle begins with a meagre contribution

It is inevitable that I thought about hunger while sitting in church. I had just finished reading Hunger: An Unnatural History and I had skipped breakfast that morning, my stomach a churning, borborygmic dungeon. My stomach influenced my brain, and because I was at church, the rumblings mixed with the sermon, concocting a strange heady mix.

I remembered the big contention I had with God when I was a child. It was about the passage in Matthew 6 where Jesus tells us not to worry.

`"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?'

My question to God was always this: What about the children starving to death in Somalia? Do you not care?

I never got an answer to that one. Not in a direct way, anyway.

Coincidentally (or not), the sermon today was about Jesus feeding the masses with five loaves and two fish. A huge crowd was in the middle of the wilderness and Jesus had been teaching all day. The disciples asked Jesus to dismiss the crowd so that they could go buy food, but Jesus said,

"You feed them."

The ever-practical disciples pointed out to Jesus that eight months' wages wouldn't even be enough to feed a crowd this large. The numbers were too large. The problem too big. When the disciples looked for resources, all they found were five loaves and two fish, only a boy's lunch, half that of an adult's.

But Jesus broke the bread and the fish and distributed it to the crowd, and it was a miracle, because everyone was fed and there were twelve baskets of broken pieces of bread left over.

What a thought, that Jesus would make a miracle from our meagre contributions.

Hunger gives you the sex drive of a sick oyster

A rather facetious quote from page 130 to introduce Sharman Apt Russel's book on hunger. When I saw Hunger: An Unnatural History on the shelves at Bukit Merah Library, I was curious. Is this a book about widespread famine or voluntary fasting? Science or anthropology? Religion or United Nations?

Surprisingly, this book is about all the above. It is about what humans achieve through hunger and what we descend to when deprived of food. It is about the Minnesota Experiment and the fasting maids of Europe. It is both how I feel when my lunch is an hour late and about the child with the bloated stomach in Somalia. This book is both science and art.

I was inspired by the re-telling of Gandhi's "fasts to the death". He says, "I fasted to reform those who loved me... You cannot fast against a tyrant" (81). Then the world must have loved this Great Soul because powerful governments and stubborn religious bodies acceded to his will when he fasted. He changed the face of India when he fasted for Hindu-Moslem friendship, protesting the creation of a separate Hindu, Moslem, and Untouchable electorate. When he fasted, he broke the century-old chains that linked India to her caste system. India, the huge sprawling millions of people groups who are as diverse as possibly all the peoples of the world, changed because of one man and his vision.

But hunger has its dark side. Reading about Colin Turnbull's study of the Ik people and what living on the edge of starvation did to them horrified me. The Ik people live near the northern border of Uganda and Kenya. They are forbidden to hunt and forage at the National Park, leaving them confined to a small patch of infertile land. They are intimate with starvation. At three years old, children are thrown out of the house to fend for themselves. They form gangs to steal from the adults. The weak are tortured and left to die. The young steal from the old. The old, i.e. those over 30, crawl into abandoned huts to die when they can no longer look for food. They have relinquished all familial relations. How to live like this generation after generation?

It makes a person want to do something. There are too many people starving all over the world. 505 million in East and South Asia, 41 million in North Africa and the Near East, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 198 million in Sub-Saharan Africa: the greatest percentage of hungry people in relation to population. Russel proposes three ways to help: first to mobilise political action to end hunger; second, to put in place polices that reduce hunger; and third, to start or enhance regional grassroots programmes. Or you could give money to Concern Worldwide and others.

Russel writes with art. The book ends with this paragraph.

One day, according to legend, Saint Patrick wanted something from God, a favor for himself or his people. For reasons unknown, God was reluctant to grant the saint's request. So Patrick went on a hunger strike, a troscad unto death. Repeatedly, angelic messengers begged him to break his fast. They implored. They sang. They remonstrated. But Patrick was steadfast. Patrick would not eat. Against this hunger, even God gave in.

Moodle

I'm pretty pumped. I got Moodle working on my Mac. Moodle is a free, open source software that helps teachers develop effective online learning communities. Teachers can post assignments, moderate forums, oversee wiki projects, post their notes, etc.

Installation was a breeze on a Mac. There are some instructions on this page on how to allow others access to your moodle page.

First you have to open the firewall for MAMP. It's really easy to do this. Open the System Preferences from the Apple menu and go to Sharing. Here you must open the menu Firewall. For MAMP you have to configurate a new filter rule. Click on New..., choose Other in the first field, enter the tcp port number 8888 into the second field and click OK. Look a the attached picture and you will see everything.

With this easy thing you open the firewall of your Mac so other computer can ask for an internet page on port 8888.

On Second you have to change your Moodle configuration so your Moodle server can answer for the question of another computer. Please open the configuration file /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/moodle/config.php with a text editor and change only the following line

old: $CFG->wwwroot = 'http://localhost:8888/moodle';
new: $CFG->wwwroot = 'http://192.168.0.250:8888/moodle';

In my case my server has the ip address 192.168.0.250. You must use your own ip address. if you don't know the current number you have to look into the network configuration. Open the System Preferences again, go to Network, and see the ip number of your computer.

And I have a book.

I haven't played around with it very much but it looks promising. I'll tell you how it goes.

The gun issue

I realise that the gun issue is sensitive in the United States.  Even among us bloggies who are usually very agreeable on most things, talking about guns can cause some serious disagreements.  Straddled between the people's constitutional right to bear arms and the violence that guns sometimes bring, only one thing is clear: that the United States will never be able to return to a violence-free utopia.

Cut to Singapore.  I am curious to hear what Singaporeans think on the gun issue.  For those unfamiliar with my sunny island state, Singapore is at the opposite end of the spectrum.  We have the most kaisu gun policy in the world.  Robbers use toy guns to rob banks.  (And get shot by the security guard in the process, what irony.)  In fact, even toy guns are illegal.  Once in a long while, an antique pre-war gun shows up when an ah-pek gets drunk and starts showing off to his friends in the coffeeshop, or when a one-eyed man smuggles one in from Thailand and actually kills someone with it, and it makes the headlines for weeks.

I live in a very strange country, but I'll just about bet my bottom dollar that most of us like it the way it is, on this issue anyway.  Any thoughts?

Hot seaweed soup by my window on a rainy day

I'm staring at this view even as I type. This picture looks cheesy. You can't see the lightning across the sky or hear the thunder rumble, or smell my hot seaweed soup. Unlike Tetanus, whose photos are self-evident, I make up for mine with words.

A compendium of books

Because I haven't had time to blog about these individually, here is a list, tinkertailor-style.

Watchmen by Alan Moore is a classic. The anxiety of the '80s pervade this collection, affecting even the superheros. It is a story about superheros, which really isn't so much my kind of thing. Isn't it awful that I have such stereotypical taste?






With Endless Nights, I've finished The Sandman Series, and what a strange, wonderful, fantastic journey it has been. Each of the seven Endless is given a tale to tell in this volume. I love Death's story. Despair's I read quickly, afraid of her hook that snares the heart. The artwork is drool-worthy.






I'm about half-way through The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender. Did you know that there is a DC universe of characters? Did you know that if one character dies in one story, he dies in all? Strange isn't it? This is one of those behind the scenes book. Great for juicy tidbits. Die lah, I think Elle is right, I am a 30 year-old fan!




The Dream Hunters was created by Gaiman as a 10th anniversary volume in celebration of The Sandman series. It isn't a comic but an illustrated story. It is about a monk, a fox, and the Sandman of all-night dreaming. It reads fast.





And that's about it, my narrow scope of books.

Mostly about links

Otterman has posted information on the melamine contamination in pet food. The full list of recalled pet food is on the US FDA site. It is an extensive list, so do check it out if you own a pet. In Singapore, the AVA has released a press statement that none of those affected has been imported to Singapore. Thanks for clarifying Otterman!

[As an aside, stupid people are hard enough to tolerate, but stupid bosses require a saint.]

Firefox has a pretty sweet video downloader add-on. It helps you download videos from sites like youtube and Google video. It downloads it in .flv format which you can play in VLC or a FLV player.

[I'm supposed to be cleaning my room. There isn't enough space on my shelf.]

About my mac

My friends got me a moshi PalmGuard for my birthday. I'm very pleased. Recently I noticed grimy black marks on the trackpad and where my right wrist rests on my Macbook. Since then, I've been anal about using the mouse as much as I can and cleaning it with alcohol.

Though to be precise, I use a facial toner, which is probably not a good idea. While I was lovingly swabbing away the dirt, I realised to my amusement that I've never used that bottle of toner on my face. Some girls' priorities are just all wacked up.

For some reason, when I turned on the MacBook again after sticking on the PalmGuard, my iSight camera turned on automatically. A restart didn't help, so I shut it down again and took out the battery. That was the first time I've taken out the battery and it made me fall in love all over again with my MacBook. It is the way it fits. Taking out the battery and restarting solved my iSight issue.

My love affair with my Macbook has its ups and downs though. My MacBook has had shut itself down on me, that is, the equivalent of the Windows fatal blue screen of death, at least ten times in the last two months or so. People say that Macs hardly ever crash like that. Apparently they weren't using mine. I wonder what is the Mac equivalent of a reformat? I wonder if it is because I push mine too hard?

In any case, I'm fairly happy. Region settings for DVDs still makes my blood boil and I'm this close to buying an external DVD drive.

Okay, going to try out that toner on my face now that my MacBook is erm, protected.

Breaking my promise

It is crazy. I promised myself that I wouldn't let myself be affected
by my emotions. If they misbehaved, I told myself that I would detach
myself from my disappointment, and try again.

But now, I break my promise. I can't mark or get any work done: I'm
that happy. My senior colleague said I did a good job today, and I'm
giddy with excitment.

I really shouldn't be this happy. Because it means the mirror is just
as possible.

Hit the ground running

18 April 2007. 6am. The alarm rings. I hit the ground running.
Wake, wash, coffee, dress, and I am out of the door, ten minutes late.
Where did the ten minutes go? Eaten by the monster that swallows
time, I suspect.

Bus crawls into the bus-stop. Why is the bus travelling so slowly?
Is there an old man waiting to disembark and the us driver is being
gentle? No. No old man. Just a slow bus driver who's probably ahead
of his schedule, while I am behind in mine.

Brain wanders. I remember something and I plead with God, to the
point of insolence. Maybe he has changed his mind.

In school. Student smiles at me; I smile back. I wish I could find a
voice to interact with them that is both kind but not too familiar. I
haven't found it.

Five minutes to the bell. I write this. And my day begins.

Sad news today

Condolences to all at Virginia Tech.

Quicksilver + Firefox Quick Search

[An irrelevant introduction: What a hot day. I've been taking more than my fair share of showers. Three on Sunday, and I'm thinking of taking another one in about five minutes just to cool down. A friend who lived in Sudan told me that she soaked in a bathtub of water every afternoon just to cool down. Temperatures reach the forties over there. Crazy.]

In other news, Quicksilver + Firefox quicksearch bookmarks = magic on your fingertips. In the preferences pane (Cmd + ; ), tick "Web search module" under "All plugins".



Restart Quicksilver. Type in the name of your Quick Search web page in the first tab. In the second tab, choose "Search for", and in the third, type in what you're looking for.



There you have it.

To scale photos with quicksilver, install the "Image Manipulation Actions" plugin. For the dictionary, install the "dictionary module" (duh).

Thoughts on turning thirty

Turn thirty today
Terrific terrible thought
On the thirteenth, too



I'm having a great day, in a quiet and pensive way. It's kinda cool to go to work and not have a single person know that it is your birthday. It is like having a birthday incognito. I know, I'm strange.

I'm happy to leave the twenties behind, especially since Smole and I completed the one thing we wanted to do before we hit the big three-oh, that is, to train for and finish a marathon. It is a great way to end the twenties, hand-in-hand at the finish line after a grueling 42.195km. What else will we accomplish in the next decade? I don't know. I'm glad I have ten years to plan, God willing.

The twenties were tumultuous times for me, both emotionally and spiritually. Ugly break-ups, coupled with horrendous internal struggles about who I am, what I should or should not be doing, and what I ought to be accomplishing. There was a lot of dying to self and painful growing up when I realised that life does not always turn out to be the fairy tale that I want it to be. I'm relieved that phase is over with.

Now I'm thirty. My life is pretty much set in place. I don't think I will ever marry nor have children, and I'm okay with that. Every decision we make affects the rest of our lives – some in a minute way, some in a huge way – and I am finally brave enough to look at the future in the eye and say, "You are mine. Every bit of you. Future joys and heartaches to come, death and living, boredom and thrills, singing and gloom."

It is a great day to be alive.

They are climbing all over my head. :(

Exhausted.

My calendar is v. colourful

By the way, I really like iCal, especially the way it syncs with my Sony Ericsson mobile phone. Having the laptop and phone synchronized means that I can have my appointments and to-do items on the go, and that I can be reminded with an alarm even if my MacBook is sleeping. Sweet.

It is Easter today. I was feeling a bit down this morning (hence that morose post which I have since deleted) but being in church and singing the old songs of faith made it better. Being brought out for a lovely treat of a lunch by Smole also did wonders for my mood.

My church does this Easter response where the pastor says, "He is risen," and the people say. "He is risen indeed!" and we do this three times, each time louder than before. On the third time, I heard the shout echo from the other parts of the sanctuary, the tent outside the building, and the hall... It made me shiver.

The words that really got to me this morning and made me tear was a sentence in the unison prayer:

Praise and glory to You, the God of life who is stronger than all kinds of death!

All kinds of death...

CHRIST IS RISEN!

____Christ is risen indeed.

Just wondering...

Do you think God was lonely on the day between Good Friday and Easter?

Of awards and memes

Gwynne of The Shallow End has given me an award. Can you believe it? She says: *cough cough* "Mis Nomer's pensive, solitary moments are some of her best... She cuts to the very core of what it means to be human."

Whoa.. that's pretty high praise for the distracted ramblings on this page.

Then again, the post is titled "April's Fool", so who's to know what she really means? ;) In any case, her words are way too kind. Thank you...

In other news, here is a long-neglected meme. Got tagged eons ago by smudgi3 but didn't get a chance to do it till now. The wave has come and gone, but here it is anyway.

SIX WEIRD THINGS ABOUT ME (you've always wanted to know that eh?)

ONE: I think I'm perfectly normal
Really, I do.

TWO: I rub my nose the first thing I wake up in the mornings
NOT a good habit. I also do it when I'm stressed.

THREE: I cannot sit down with a pen and not twirl it.
Habit from Secondary school days.

FOUR: I can't spell very well
Not that weird actually, but considering that I have an English degree, it is kinda weird. All I can say: thank God for word processors.

FIVE: I have both the Simian crease and an unusually large gap between my first and second toe, both common features of Down's Syndrome.
Flip flops fall off my feet. 'nuff said.

SIX: I don't respond when you call me by the Christian name on my Identity Card.
Because I don't recognise it. On the other hand, if you were to yell out, "Misnomer!" I just may respond. ;)

My dream

I dreamt of a snowy white owl.

It was spring-time in the US. The air was crisp and I was lost in the city. As I walked down the pavement, I saw a flock of large brown owls flying about, birds of the city. Then I saw him: small, white, with piercing blue eyes. It was a predator with eyes larger than its stomach.

I saw him creep up under a large brown owl, and as quick as lightning, it bit the large owl's talon. But the small white owl was not big enough nor strong enough...

And then I felt him, his warm body and the life ebbing away. I felt his snowy white feathers soft as pillow in my hands. The fierce blue eyes staring into space...

And then I kept on walking.

Snippet

The Exposé function on a Mac is apparently very awe-inspiring.  There was a collective gasp yesterday, followed by, "'cher, 'cher, do it again!"

Heehee.