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.

My prediction:

Josh Holloway will eventually star in a Marvel movie as Thor.

At the airport using the free internet. It’s 2 hours before boarding.

The keyboard’s really oily. See you guys on the other side.

Ok, so three cups of mountain dew at 1130pm wasn’t such a great idea.

A few days ago my phone flipped out of its case attached to my belt and narrowly missed falling down the toilet. I remember distinctly thanking God that it was a close shave. That was before I discovered three huge crack lines running across the screen. “Might as well have fallen into the toilet”, I mutter. But in retrospect a broken phone is better than a broken phone and a clogged-up toilet.

Maybe you experts out there can tell me what phone to get.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m home with the flu. It’s funny how I seek time alone, but feel lonely whenever my alone time coincides with someplace I ought to be, and some people I ought to be with.

In this case, I’m usually at church Sunday mornings. I can’t help thinking of what people there are doing now, the looks on their faces, whether they’re smiling. When I take time off work, it’s the same deal - I always wonder how people are doing in routine-land.

It is not to say that I’m one who doesn’t take well to being alone. I just don’t like taking time off unless I’m absolutely sure no one needs me. Back in Tucson, I spent many sunsets by the mountainside because I knew Min was catching the lastest episode of Friends. I’d rush back in time for dinner.

Maybe it’s because I don’t like relying on people. I don’t like others doing what should be my responsibility. I don’t like the idea of not contributing.

I don’t like the flu.

Faith and I finally caught our first movie since Anne was born. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, of course. Rowling fans would have to admit that this is probably the poorest installment on print, meandering back and forth before finally heading into the story proper.

The movie was totally different. While Faith liked it (she didn’t have the patience to finish the book), I found it a little too fast and hard; it was like watching a DVD on fast-forward. There’s definitely too much material to fit into a single movie, but in my own opinion I thought the character development portion of the book should have made it to the big screen. Given its limitations, HPATGOF did a satisfactory job of telling the story in two and a half hours.

My one big gripe is this: What’s with Dumbledore?

I know the original actor is in a better place, but why is this new guy so … spritely? He’s always jumping up and down, speaking too fast. In essence, he lacks the gravity I have come to expect from Dumbledore. Dumbledore, to me at least, comes across as very deliberate and thoughtful (thinking through everything, I don’t mean considerate, although he is).

Next stop, some movie about a wardrobe.

It’s been a while, but I’ve come to realise some things, many of which come to me in the dead of night, sitting on a gym ball with an 8kg baby in my arms.

I realised that how a person breathes reveals a lot about the way a person lives.

We breathe way too fast a lot of the time. As if we were laying claim to a finite amount of air, and we could hoard more of it by breathing faster than the next person. Or some of us breath in deep and slow, but exhale fast, almost like a sigh. It is like one who’d much rather receive than give.

Take a deep breath. Go on. Fill those lungs slowly to their maximum capacity, then breath out slowly. I was struggling to breathe with abovesaid baby lying on my diaphragm when I decided to breath deliberately and slowly. It felt oddly liberating, like there was a whole world out there, an immense ether too much for me to ever fully absorb or comprehend.

You know what? There’s enough air for all of us. God made it so.

It’s funny how tired I get with the new “regular” job. When I was running the old business, there were many times I had to pull all-nighters, but I would always have the energy to keep going. Here, with regular hours like the rest of the world, I find myself sleepy at 11pm.

The scary part is I feel too tired to be scared of what I’m becoming.

In and of itself, the job isn’t tiring. Sure, the demands of a government job are somewhat more fastidious than most, but I’m not one to feel the urge to sleep earlier than one in the morning.

A few days ago, Anne learned how to slither a few centimeters forward on her tummy. She seems to have chosen walking as her main form of transportation. Instead of tucking her knees under her to crawl like most babies, she has learned to pull herself up to a standing position. She has done so grabbing on to the edge of the sofa and most recently she hoisted herself up with a firm grip on my nose. It hurt.

I’m off to bed. I feel like an old fart. I’m enjoying myself on the job, but something feels odd. Like I’m losing colour and turning black-and-white. Like I’m becoming like everyone else.

I’m designing a flier for a concert. A friend needed help urgently so I take on the job. Her client agrees to my fee. I discover that the photos given to me yesterday night are 0.4 megapixels in size. There is no possible way I can stretch the photos without them looking like a pixelated mess. Deadline’s later today. Anne’s ill.

Much as I like working under pressure, 0.4 megapixel pictures feel pretty much like a dead end.

Calling it a night.

For the next week, I’ll be serving my nation in an army facility on the extreme other side of the island. It’s so far away it’ll take me 2 hours to get there by public transport. And I have to be there so early it is probable that public transport won’t get me there in time.

I’ll most probably be late.

So you see, I’m a good soldier, but the facilities the country affords me makes me otherwise.

There is so much I’ve wanted to write about. A satirical analogy to the NKF debacle, a reflection on being married for 2 years now, Movabletype’s 3.2 beta release.

But pro-bono work and the evolution of Anne into baby Samsonelle (superhuman strength and a temper to match) have prevented this. Best-laid plans I guess.

All this content and no outlet.

The sun sets into the past. The further it moves away from the present, the emptier the present feels.

I miss you Arizona. A lot, a lot, a lot.