Recently in Miscellaneous Category

It’s been a crazy past 2 months. The kinda crazy that has you lying awake on your bed, thoroughly exhausted yet mortally afraid that you can’t continue like this but you must kinda crazy, know what I’m talking about?

Faith’s nausea has her in a constant tug-of-war with the retching gods, and it pains me to see her continually in that state. I’m doing whatever I can around the house - making sure everyone’s fed, the housework’s done, the laundry washed and the kiddo out of mommy’s hands every now and then so that Faith can get some much needed shuteye. Faith sleeps quite a bit these few days. I can only imagine how tiring it is to control the urge to purge every single moment of every day.

But God has been amazingly gracious, and I am so very thankful for even the smallest things. Faith manages a smile every now and then when the nausea subsides, and I fall madly in love with her again. I realise how frail and weak my love for her is - that it is dependent on her being what I know of her. Were she to suffer some personality-changing trauma from a mental or physical illness, I really wouldn’t know what to do.

His faithfulness is greater than ours, and His love hopes forever.

If I were better at math, I’d sit down and calculate how much time I’ve wasted on Microsoft products.

Defragmenting hard-drives, downloading virus signatures, replacing obscure .dll files. I used to take pride in the fact I knew how to solve computer problems back in the day. I’d be the guy people call whenever they faced a printer that wouldn’t cooperate or a drive that wouldn’t start up. Though I still receive those phone calls and emails, I am no longer that guy.

I gave away my last PC to a little mainland Chinese girl who came to Singapore to study a few months ago. The only piece of hardware I own that has Microsoft on it is my XBox 360, and it has given me grief just like the old days. Only this time I do not have a keyboard or any diagnostic tools to troubleshoot it.

If you have a faulty 360, you call a hotline. They attempt to “troubleshoot” it over the phone, basically checking if you have the XBox plugged in. When that fails they schedule an appointment 3 weeks from the day for a one-to-one exchange.

I’ve been there, waited and done that. I brought home the replacement set. I even bought 2 new games. I had a little spare time in between the onslaught of deadlines at work. I ended up spending that spare time trying to fix the faulty replacement Microsoft has given me.

I called the hotline again. It’ll be another 3 week wait, while the warranty continues to elapse from the date of the original purchase. I can’t believe it - the most reliable gaming system in my home is a Mac. I can’t even trust Microsoft to make a console - how on earth do we allow them to power software that drives most enterprises around the world?

I ask the guy manning the hotline if he could bump me up, considering they had given me a faulty set. He laughs a little and apologies, then asks me if there’s anything else he could help me with. I ask him if a refund is possible. He repeats his previous response. I then realise that I was talking to a human representation of Microsoft products - they mean to help, but end up wasting your time.

On the train I saw a young, relatively attractive woman reading Jane’s Defence Weekly, a military magazine, while sitting beside a sleeping monk.

Very surreal.

A thousand paths were carved tonight. Some intended, some unintended. Many thousands still hang in the air, uncertain of where the winds may bring them.

This can’t possibly be rated only 102 PSI. Eyes are smarting, throat is scratchy. Thanks, Indonesia!

5 minutes ago, the flu bug hit me like a ton of bricks falling off the Empire State and unto my sorry excuse of a nose. Attended a 2-day course where 4 lawyers took turns to attend a half-day each, on a single pass. Could’ve sworn all of them had the sniffles, and one of them told me that their entire office was suffering from a bad case of the flu.

Having 4 of them definitely ensured that the passing of the baton was certain.

Ok, so downing down a whole 1.5 litre bottle of green tea in the late afternoon will induce insomnia.

It’s been 3 years since we moved in. It’s about the time when all that was once new isn’t quite so new anymore. Things start to break down - the door could use with a new coat of paint and some parts of our couch look a tad worn from the occasional washing.

Faith and I just spent the last few minutes feet deep in 1-inch water. Ok, I know it isn’t knee-high or anything, but having the pipe under the kitchen sink burst wasn’t part of this evening’s programme. And me, living like I was still in college, have only my trusty swiss army knife as my toolbox. It’s the huge all-in-one swisstool, not the pocket-sized ones. Only problem is I gave it to Jon, who’s leaving for the States on Wednesday.

So I’m off tomorrow to buy a real toolbox. And I’m going to get the pipes fixed. Oh, and the leaky shower too. This comes amidst a ton of work and favours for friends, but we can’t live with the water mains turned off. There’s something oddly testosteroney about getting a toolbox and fixing the house up.

I like.

Wow. This is some flu bug. I feel like someone hit me smack in my face with a bag of bricks. We arranged for Anne to stay at her grandparents’ along with Faith, so I’m home alone, with “Puddle of Grace” playing on iTunes.

In other news, the 17” Macbook Pro is now for sale. The 13 incher rumoured to be slated for launch in a few months will definitely fuel the temptation to upgrade. I’m still currently running on my 12” 867mhz for work. I’m no qualms bringing my own gear to work, but when upgrading is required, I feel the pinch paying for hardware and software I use for someone elses’ benefit. It’s not that my employers have always asked me to come with my own equipment, but having run my own business for a while, I’ve streamlined the way I work, the software I use and even the dual monitor setup for cross-browser testing. So far in all my jobs I’ve been breaking new ground, so there haven’t been any established methods of working to adhere to.

I never thought of myself as a civil servant, but this afternoon in a drug-induced semi-coma I thought to myself, “I like my job”. And it’s true too. I like it that I don’t face management resistance when it comes to implementing web standards. My bosses know that I make user experience my main priority - that I really do want to create tools that’ll help educators in Singapore do their job.

Oh, for those of you who don’t already know - I work for the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Yes I know that the website doesn’t validate and isn’t semantically coded. We’ll be working on the internet revamp sometime later this year. I’ve managed to move a major portion of the intranet to a more standards-compliant state. It’s tough to keep things clean when you have more than a hundred people of varying degrees of tech-savvy putting up content on a content management system that sometimes doesn’t play fair.

Ok, I’ve got a fever and cold to feed / starve.

You know you want it.

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate.This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

Thanks Min, who always gets things done while the rest of us usually end up only thinking of doing things.