When the apartment's running down, you make the best of what's still around. Guy came today to fix the AC which had been broken for four days. They seemed to fix it, but it quit on us again after two hours. Two words to describe the repair people in this town: for shit. Remember, we are already dealing with a washer/dryer that has already had FIVE visits from a repairman and now works worse than when we started. And I forgot to mention, the other day, just after we commiserating each other over how our apartment is falling apart, the faucet in the sink just fell off while we were cooking, spraying water everywhere.

We may just have to figure out how the British colonialists did it, back in the day, without air conditioning. I'll start by drinking more Singapore slings, and maybe get one of those guys to sit out on the porch, pulling a rope to work a ceiling fan inside.

Languages. What I've been working on this week is the ability for the software we're creating to be used by people who speak different languages. It's really interesting. I've developed a French interface, based on the piddly bits I remember from high school, and a little help from an on-line translator.

Two of the languages we were hoping to support, Hindi and Thai, are just not expressable by the underlying software (Java, or more specifically, Swing) because they are so strange in written form. They're promising to support them someday, but as for now, we're just stuck. My officemate, who's Indian, says that nobody uses Swing in India because of this.

Hindi is an interesting written language!

All the "letters" hang off of an imaginary line.

Consonants have vowels automatically associated with them (but which can get overridden by vowels).

No spaces between words (until recently, I think).

They have their own symbols for numbers (until recently, again; they've started to use Arabic numbers).

The order of consonants and vowels may not necessarily correspond to the phonetic order!

Although it goes left to right, sometimes symbols are stacked vertically.

There are some symbols (called conjuncts) that stand for collections of other consonants.

No wonder it's not supported in Swing. Are we just lucky that English is so much easier to render? There are apparently some theories that state we've been able to advance faster due to the fact that our language is boiled down to a small number of easily represented symbols. Imagine trying to print Hindi on an eighteenth century printing press.

I do think Hindi is more aesthetically pleasing than English, though, but not as much as Arabic or Hieratic (as we once saw in the British Museum). I've been thinking of taking a caligraphy course; around here, it would probably have to be Chinese though. My Japanese lessons are on hold until they find some more people who are willing to attend.

Blast from the past. I've just downloaded an Apple ][ emulator just so I could play Aztec, a game I played in high school back in -- 1983? Wow, twenty years ago, and it's amazing how much of the game I remember. This is so cool. There's emulators out there for everything; chances are, if you name the game, I can tell you what you need to download to play it on your computer, for nearly any old computer or home video game system or arcade game maker. If you love games and don't already have Mame on your computer, you are seriously missing out. (I also highly recommend this accessory to go with; I have one, but unfortunately, it was too bulky to bring with.)

Yum! Just back from the greatest Thai food on the planet. Made a point of remembering the name this time: Diandin Leluk, in the Golden Mile complex. Every time we eat there, we leave wondering why we ever eat anywhere else, ever. Tonight we had the Thai beef salad (in a sweet, very spicy sauce) and the spiced chicken wrapped in Pandan (sp?) leaves. Everything's so good we've started getting extra take away food every time we eat there (this time, we absconded with green curry chicken soup and pat thai) for our next day's meal. We have yet to have anything even mediocre, even going in with high expectations each time. It's still an experience going there, too, for the ambience; it's in a shopping center that's a like a little bit of Thailand transplanted into Singapore. A little bit seedy. There are beer girls walking around, hawking Tiger and Singha beers, but they are usually women in their forties wearing short dresses designed for teenagers. And tonight we went shopping in the Thai grocery store, and came away with all sorts of sauces and prawn crackers and stuff.

Pop ups. I've been getting a rash of popups that look like this that neither Ad-Aware nor Pop-up Stopper seem to do anything about. Seen these? By the gods, how do I prevent these cursed things?

Tomb raiding. Today I was browsing around a Malaysian newspaper, based in Borneo. It seems that tomb raiding is still common there, for two reasons, according to one government official. See if you can guess what they are. (Hint: they have nothing to do with Lara Croft.) Give up? Read on. There's something funny about primitive thinking being expressed over a modern medium. That's the internet in a nutshell, though, innit?