This is your brain on drugs. Try this. While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles with your right foot. While doing your foot is circling clockwise, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

What direction is your foot going now?

The forces of darkness are winning.

Worms. The new Blaster worm attacked my home computer yesterday. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm good about running Windows Update to get the security patches but somehow it still got through. If you get a warning saying that your computer will reboot in 60 seconds, that's it.

Viruses. I just got another virus mailed to me, which of course I didn't open, but it's still the fourth time in the last month.

Spam. I'm still getting twenty a day, five of which manage to oil their way into my Inbox. I love the new strategy of giving them an innocuous curiosity-inducing title, and coming from a common-but-not-too-common name, like today's batch of "Wanna know what I heard" from Natalie F. Hughes, "You forgot to respond" from Cameron Kelly, and "I don't think so" from Zoe Green. Respectively, these contained ads for -- chyeah, right, like I'm going to open them.

Pop-ups. More and more have been sneaking past my Pop-up Stopper. You'd expect that sort of thing from the likes of on-line gambling casinos, but I've been getting a bunch from Orbitz lately too.

Why can't a man surf in peace?

Bits of tid. A few morsels from the past few weeks:

Saw this giant moth (perhaps a butterfly?) at Mount Faber park a week ago.

It being full moon, there are a few people burning sacrifices in the street in front of their houses as part of the Hungry Ghost festival. One was an old lady who was feeding a rather sizable fire with fake money she was pulling by the handful out of an Ikea bag.

We took second in team trivia at the Yard the other night, and won five Heineken t-shirts.

InstallAnywhere is a damn fine piece of software. That's not a compliment I throw around lightly. Highly recommended for building installers for your software.

Had my worst soccer game yet the other day, gifting the other team a goal when I tripped over the ball instead of tapping it wide. Gave myself a nice bloody hipper in the process too. This was just when we were fighting our way back into the game, and it totally killed our momentum. I hate having to wait a week for any chance of redemption.

News! The Tasmania deal is now apparently a lock. We're just waiting for the final formality confirmation in the mail. I'll likely be heading down end of September/beginning of October. We've got lots to do before then. Marjorie will join me for a week of it, probably, and then hopefully we'll get a few days to do a side trip to Melbourne. Woop!

I just spent about 30 minutes reading the archives of our blog. It's amazing how "normal" life in Singapore has become for us. So many of the little things that were so exotic when we got here have become normalized or commonplace. I suppose that happens to everyone living abroad.
Another thing that's interesting to me, is tracking my attitude; little glimmers of culture shock denied. Singapore is certainly one of the easiest places in Asia for a westerner to become acclimated to, but it's still Asia. Is it ethnocentric to think spitting and picking your feet in public are gross? Other differences hard for me to accept are the tendencies of some people to drag their feet and/or walk slowly, seemingly oblivious to other people (painful to me when I'm in a hurry and want to get around them).
All in all, living in Singapore isn't bad. It's hot, and sometimes (frequently) I wish there were more entertainment options (I.E. good live music-not cover bands, uncensored movies, uncensored t.v., etc.), but, for the most part, the people here are friendly, it's safe, and there are plenty of great restaurants. Truthfully, I think I'd be mostly content if we just had more friends here. We miss the old posse.

Work. A sneak peak at what I've been working on all week. This will only make sense to you if you can read Thai, and even then, it probably won't make sense because all the text was translated using one of those automatic translators which often produce humorous results. The technology has a long way to go.

In addition to Thai, I can now generate similar versions of our product in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, as well as Malay and all the standard European languages that use standard English-like letters. We're still hoping to be able to do Hindi someday, but their crazy script is only just recently being tackled by computers.

It's been something a revelation to work on this stuff. I'm reminded of Huckleberry Finn:

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said -- not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy -- what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head -- dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man? -- er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"WELL, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me dat!"

I'm a little like Jim, in the way I've always assumed that languages used a discrete set of letters that correspond to sounds, and build words out of them. It just isn't so. Symbols get combined, lines are drawn to connect things in weird ways, and symbols are used to represent whole words, giving no clue as to how they get pronounced.

Having a small set of discrete letters may even be one of the key reasons for Western advancement; first because they made the printing press feasible, and lately because computers can deal with them much easier. (Recently the Chinese have gotten in step with the times through widespread use of a simplified form of their alphabet.)

Thai is pretty cool looking, no? Definitely one of the more interesting-looking languages out there (though I would give the nod for beauty to Arabic and Hieratic).

Apparently my signature no longer matches... my signature. They must have some serious check nazis down at the bank. Ah, it's always good to bounce your first rent check in a new apartment. I'd be willing to bet the signature checker's job title has the word "Anal" in it somewhere. This sort of thing was not a problem back in the US.

Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server to Windows XP on my work computer. A short list of all the software I have to install:

NVidia video card driver

TextPad text editor

Cygwin (all the standard pieces, plus: clear, crypt, cvs, doxygen, emacs, file, fortune, gcc, gdb, make, man, openssh, openssl, vim)

XEmacs

Panicware Popup Stopper

WinCVS revision control system

Apache Tomcat web server

Seti@home screen saver

Winzip

The Gimp (open-source PhotoShop)

Java 2 Software Development Kit

NJStar Communicator for chinese language entry

ElevenProspect License Manager

XP language support for Japanese, Thai?, Korean, Chinese

Google toolbar

Netbeans IDE
What a joy. That should take just about all of tomorrow.

The dream. When I worked at the Space Center, the stress of being responsible -- even in a very small way -- for a shuttle launch seemed to give everyone the same recurring nightmare. The nightmare is that it's launch day, and something goes wrong during the fueling, or worse -- during the launch, and it's your fault. Everyone I worked with had this dream at some point. It's not a good dream.

I still have the dream, every few months or so, including last night. It's changed a bit over the years; the shuttle still goes haywire, but it's no longer my fault when it happens. It's still distressing. This time, I was really close to the launch; only a few hundred yards, and it was really cloudy. Through a hole in the clouds I could see sparks flying out of the shuttle where no sparks should have been, and thought "Oh, no...". I told everyone it was going to crash, and while I didn't see the impact, molten lumps of debris started raining down on us, and we had to dodge them. Then I woke up.

I can't imagine working on some of the probes they are launching now. Each requires more than a decade of work to plan and build, and it all comes down to a single launch. I think the Mars probes they've launched have had less than a 50% success rate in just getting there. I sure those guys have The Dream a lot too.

Okay, this is a cool game. It's like Myst, you just have to figure out the right things to click on.

Our government-issue SARS kit has arrived. Contents:

A pamphlet, "Taking Your Temperature Correctly", translated into English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

Two surgical masks.

Mask instructions, also in English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

A rather nice digital thermometer, with instructions in English only.

Just in the nick of time, too.

A great site for movie reviews is Rotten Tomatoes. What they do is to collect and summarize views from critics around the world. A good review is marked with a red tomato; a bad one with a green splat.

It's a rare movie that some critic, somewhere does not like. But there is one out now. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened to their focus groups.

Update: Oops! Looks like they found one reviewer who liked it.

The latest "Awwwww...." My dad's been on a mission to scan in all our old slides. Here's Another picture from my childhood (me on the right). I love this stuff. I have no idea where this shot was taken though.

We hosted pub trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's. It all went pretty well, excepting the small turnout. We did make the mistake in one question of implying that the Boomtown Rats were British, when in fact they are Irish. This is not a good sort of mistake to make in an Irish bar. Marjorie, who was reading the question, received several indignant shouts. Proving she can "take the piss" with the best of them, she responded, "England, Ireland... Aren't they the same thing?" This cracked me up, and everyone else too.

Weekend highlights:

Friday dinner at Bumbu. Tom kha gai, fried fish royale, and chicken with bamboo shoot. Nummy.

Saturday visit to Singapore's Chinese Garden. Lots of wildlife spotting.

Bought new plants (a bamboo, a ficus, and a few other weird things). Lots of stuff cheap from an amazing row of nurseries, and everything delivered for only S$10.

Not much else new...

Four reasons to be angry.

1. US just lost to Brazil, in heartbreaking fashion. I was so hoping for a US-Mexico final.

2. National Geographic reports that Singapore's biodiversity has been ravaged. Paints an awfully bleak picture for the effects of rising population everywhere.

3. The comments have stopped working again.

4. Ice cream, my newest kick, is really bad for you, according to a new study by the people who previously ruined Chinese and Italian food for everyone.

Up the street from the new pad is a hawker center and a wet market. Marjorie and I walked up there today for dinner.

I was hoping she could see the wet market, but it must just be a weekend thing. I scoped it out last Saturday, and it's a trip. Everywhere is fish -- whole fish to cook up, fish heads, aquarium fish, prawns, crabs... A bucket of dead squid in their own ink. And, a container with about thirty live bullfrogs. Also they have meat, fruits, and vegetables galore.

Tonight we found the grounds of a "bird club", which probably explains all the caged birds we see hanging outside area houses. Apparently, the old men bring their caged birds to this site in the evenings and hang them next to each other so they can sing to each other. They have larger cages in the back containing numerous birds. Interesting.

Dinner was a decent chicken murtabak and a Nasi Lemak that we tried unsuccessfully to order without anchovies...

At last, a photo from Sydney. I'm looking more and more like my dad every day, it seems... We have other photos, but they weren't taken with the digital, so this is all you get right now.

Nature walk. We went back to the Fort MacRitchie reservoir today, in an effort to check out the tree-top canopy walkway we recently learned they've set up. Unfortunately, the tree-top walk was about a 4.5 km walk in, so we only just walked some of the other nature trails. New bird: the terminally drab Olive-Winged Bulbul. Also saw another Greater Racquet-Tailed Drongo, some swifts, a kingfisher, a (water?) monitor lizard, a lot of turtles, and a lot of these guys. They weren't that happy to see us, it seems; they kept dropping sticks on us. Just one would've been a coincidence; after the third, we figured we ought to move on.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest results have been posted. This is the contest where the object is to come up with the worst possible opening line for a novel. I was going to enter this year, but I couldn't firm up my entry in time. Next year maybe. There's some good ones this year; as usual, they aren't the ones that won.

Random observation. If you were dropped here (by the hand of the Astronaut?) in Singapore, at some random place, within your frame of vision there would likely be:

Ten highrise apartment buildings

Twenty people

Thirty trees

Five cars

Five mynah birds

Two ravens

No litter

Birthday dinner. We just got back from our favorite Thai restaurant (Diandin Leluk), and again, we talked about it the whole ride home. This time, though, we talked about how disappointing it was. They must've changed chefs. We are so bummed.

During dinner we were also accosted by a manic, mostly-toothless man who walked up to our table and engaged us in a conversation that went something like this:

Him: You are Americans?
Me: Uh...
Him: From America?
Me: We, uh, live in Singapore.
Him: But you are Americans? They are friends with Cuba now, yes?
Me: I guess...
Marjorie: Not really...
Him: They are friends, and Jimmy Carter went to visit with them?
Us: ...
Him: They also have great music there, huh? [Imitates a trumpet player]
Us: ...

He left, finally. Not sure what that was all about.

Marjorie got me the new White Stripes CD, another CD by the Eels, a Ben Franklin biography (I've been on a biography kick lately), and a new shirt I like very much.

Aw, shucks. Yes, my 28th year was pretty crazy. Let's hope my 29th is even more so! *

I just, at long last, picked up my employment pass, making me an official resident here. That's a nice birthday present. I'm 2 Legit 2 Quit!


* Note: Figures presented may not represent actual age.

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday Dear Mark(ie)
Happy Birthday to you!!
Hip Hip hooray!
Hip Hip hooray!
Hip Hip hooray!

Last three lines courtesy of our trip Down Under (that's how they do it there).

Happy Birthday Baby! It's been quite a year, hasn't it?

Words of wisdom:

BILL MOYERS: Which is funnier? CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL?

JON STEWART: CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL? Which is funnier? Which is more soul-crushing, you mean? Both are equally dispiriting in their -- the whole idea that political discourse has degenerated into shows that have to be entitled Crossfire and Hard Ball. And, you know, I'm Gonna Beat Your Ass or whatever they're calling them these days is-- mind-boggling.

Crossfire, especially, is completely an apropos name. It's what innocent bystanders are caught in when gangs are fighting. And-- it just boggles my mind that that's given a half hour, an hour a day to-- I don't understand how issues can be dissented-- from the left and from the right as though-- even cartoon characters have more than left and right. They have up and down.

Read on. Very funny stuff, and wise. I miss The Daily Show. We do get it once a week, but it's not enough...

Ouchy. More soccer follies. Marjorie came out to the game with me today, and got to witness me block a full-on shot with the worst part of your body that you can block a shot with. The sort of block that leaves you rolling on ground in a fetal position, hands cupped... I was able to keep playing, fortunately, but I'm still a little tender. We again beat a team that totally outplayed us, so bully for us defenders. I played like ass though.

New birds spotted: a pair of brown-capped woodpeckers, and a flock of Asian glossy starlings, who seem to be our new neighbors...

Back from Sydney. Our last full day there was mostly spent doing the 6 km walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee, which was fantastic. In addition to spotting a whale just outside of Bondi Bay, we saw a ton of new birds, the most impressive being the sulphur-crested cockatoos and the Australian King Parrots. Also spotted were honey-eaters, fairy wrens, and Willy Wagtails.

I'm one of those sickos who loves to fly, and the flight back was a very interesting one. We passed directly over the famous Uluru (formerly Ayer's Rock), but it wasn't until we were already well past that I noticed our flight path took us right over it. Bummer. North and west from there is some serious desert. There was nothing -- not a house, not a road, nothing -- for about 400 miles. Drawing on their most imaginative thinkers, the Aussies have named this the Great Sandy Desert. The name is even more embarassing when you learn that the region is almost devoid of sand. We flew off of Australia near Derby, then south under Bali and Lombok (we could see the volcanos again), over Java, and up the Javan Sea, over very many small uninhabited islands and atolls.

Entertainment on international flights just gets better and better. Every chair had its own little video screen, as is now the norm, but now there were over 30 movies to choose from, and you could pause and rewind all you want. In addition there were tv shows, video games, news, and a do-it-yourself playlist for music where you could pick songs from about fifty different albums. I can't wait to read back on this in ten years and laugh at how paltry it is. And I'm still waiting for the free in-flight internet access.

We survived the bridge walk -- it was a lot less strenuous or scary than we expected. It was pretty cool, mostly in the way that for all my life, whenever I've driven over a suspension bridge, I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to climb up the supports. A bit of fantasy fulfillment, there, but I'm not sure it was worth the price. Fantastic view, if nothing else. We have pictures we'll scan in when we get home.

Tomorrow we're going to walk the trail along the cliffs down around the famous Bondi Beach. We talked about seeing a rugby match but apparently they only go on on the weekends.

Weird musical coincidence, along the lines of the Christmas/Ho Chi Minh City/Clash one six months ago -- Elvis Costello has a song with the Brodsky quartet that goes:

Care of St. Ignatus House
Willoughby Drive
Parramatta, New South Wales
This fifth day of July

Parramatta's right up the road, and the fifth was just the other day while we were here. Wonder if there's a St. Ignatius House on Willoughby Drive.

Space! Our new pad has space! We spent our first night there last night, and slept well. Apart from no hot water in the kitchen (it has a separate heater, which doesn't work), all seems fine. There's a convenience store, a butcher shop, a cafe, and a small restaurant as part of the complex, which will be nice.

Transportation will be the continuing headache, though. It took me 45-50 minutes to get into work today -- a longish walk, a long wait for a bus, a short bus ride, and a long subway ride. We're going to have to figure something out.

Funny exchange of emails with people on my soccer team.

Yesterday the coach sent out this game report, from Sunday's game (which I didn't play):

Yesterday's results'
Ventz 3pm beat Shanghai Flowers 2-1. Stephen and Mark scored the goals

3pm played a good game and avoided a repeat of the game 2 weeks back by
having the better play and still ended losing. We scored all 3 goals (one
spectacular own goal!)

Since I didn't play, I had to ask --

Is there a new Mark on the 3pm team, or is "Mark" just what you call people when they score an own goal these days?

And someone responded:

Mark - you wouldn't believe this but from the new 2003 Oxford dictionary -

mark, verb 1a. : to make or leave a mark; b: to follow an opponent closely
(see also "David"), c: to label as to indicate.
defender "pulled a Mark" to put us 3-0 up>

I guess this is my own fault!

Today was for packing. We're moving over the next few days, and it's amazing how much junk we were able to accumulate in six months here. Later in the week we're off to Sydney, as the third leg of Marjorie's whirlwind tour of the continents.

Don't know what the deal with the comments is; hopefully they'll have them fixed soon.

Marjorie's back. Here's what she brought me back from the States:

The Cosmos collector's edition DVD box set. Woop!

Five bottles of wine.

The new Fountains of Wayne CD. Sounds fabbo so far.

My cool fuzzy pants, for our trip to Australia.

The Big Lebowski DVD.

A Cookie Monster t-shirt. Huh.

A Scrabble computer game (thanks, Linda!).

Various housewares for the new apartment.

My CD player.
And most importantly,

Her bad self.

These are dangerous times. I promise to be careful.

I've been playing with Google's programmer interface for some potential work projects. This is a service they provide that allows you to do Google searches from within programs you write, instead of going to their web page.

It occurred to me that I could use it to revamp my old "misspellings" page. So, here it is.

The Google API was amazingly easy to use. Quite a number of the queries I sent failed, for whatever reasons, but I can still see this as a handy thing to know how to use. And kinda fun.

I rule. I played bar trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's, all by my lonesome, and won. I had no hope on the Rugby questions and such, but cleaned up on the movie questions. I hope my wife will forgive me for missing the Beatles question ("What Beatles album features the song 'Ticket To Ride'?"). The prize was a bottle of vodka, which we surely DON'T need, as the bottle we got at Duty Free on our initial trip out here has hardly been touched.

Burgerlicious. Here's the placemat from Mos Burger where I had lunch today.

How long do you figure it'll be before McDonald's comes out with THEIR version of the squid-scallop-prawn burger with carrots and asparagus?

Notice too that the bun is made of rice. Actually, it sounds moderately edible.

Goooooaaaal! A beautiful cross; I extend my leg as far as it will go, and tuck the ball neatly into the side of the net. The keeper never had a chance.

Too bad it was our own goal.

Phooey. To add injury to insult, I stubbed my toe on the play, too.

Time to de-stinkify myself and go get some Injun food.

End of the line. I rode Singapore's new MRT line out to the bitter end, Punggol, today, just for shits and giggles. I wasn't the only explorer on the train. For one old Chinese woman it was her first time in a subway, apparently. When the train started moving she pointed at the concrete walls sliding by the window and grinned hugely, revealing rows of neglected teeth.

On the way out, I happened to read in Bill Bryson's "Made In America" how they used to build amusement parks at the ends of the railway lines to encourage people to use them. Well, when the train reached the end and we all got out, staring around blankly like we just got dropped off the mother ship, I realized that this wasn't so much an amusement park so much as a WHOLE LOTTA NOTHIN'. Just a treeless waste with a whole lot of featureless HDB housing highrises. It looked like Communism with a splash of orange. Why would people live out here? I walked around a bit, then headed back.

Yet another photo of me at Disney, with my mother and sibs this time. Love those glasses on my mom. My brother and sister don't look all that happy to be there.

Name-dropping. I just learned that one of the stars of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, Jorja Fox, went to my high school. While I was there, too. Earlier, she was even in the excellent Memento. Were this a proper name drop, I would right now be hinting that we used to knock boots. As it is, I don't remember her at all.

Writing wrongs. I've been doing some proofreading of a proposal by someone whose writing skills are, shall we say, lacking. Incoherent ideas, run-on sentences, and rampantly misplaced punctuation, you name it. I much enjoy proofreading (probably because I get to point out other people's errors). And I'm generally considered a top-notch technical writer (my college professor on the subject even asked if I was looking for work). Outside of tech writing, though, I feel totally hot and cold. And lately, just cold.

When I'm writing well, the whole idea is there in my head beforehand, and the words just spill out, like I'm taking dictation. At other times, though, I just have some random collection of thoughts, and start writing anyway, hoping a common thread will pop up. Like I'm doing now.

I used to dabble in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, which is essentially a creative writing forum frequented by some extremely bright people (and plenty of dummards, to be sure). Despite the anonymous nature of the internet, participating there was often nerve-wracking (especially since many there could deliver absolutely withering put-downs). But I learned more about writing there than the sum total of my schooling ever provided.

The constant pressure to be "on", while self-imposed, is likely why I stopped visiting there. Now I'm worried that I've plateaued. Exactly in line with my guitar-playing ability, I just don't feel my writing has improved at all in the last ten years.

As a kick in the pants, I was considering entering the National Novel Writing Month this year. But I don't think I'll find the time. I think deep down I don't want to write a novel, I want to have written a novel.

So I guess I'm stuck where I'm at, for now. And you, my suffering readers, will have to endure.

Dish fairies. I've been known to do the dishes, as the photo I posted in the last blog will show you. However, I usually leave it to the dish fairies to put the dishes away after they dry. They seem to have been on strike lately, though, starting at around the time Marjorie went back home. Now dishes are piling up in the drying rack. What did I do to get them angry? How do you lure them back?

Awwww... My blog about Disney prompted my parents to scan in this photo of me doing the dishes when we stayed at Fort Wilderness. All that beautiful hair, *sniff*. Strange how I remember all the little details in the picture; the bowls, the dishrag, the dining canopy -- like I can still smell them.

There are lots of foot reflexology centers in town, usually featuring a wacky sign like this showing the link between places on your feet and your various vital organs. I of course put no stock in it as a science, but I did visit one of these places on Friday night for a foot massage. They do like the rough stuff here. It was pinchy and hurty when they worked my toes, but I got more into it as the session wore on.

Learned a new term: "slurp shop". This is what they call those small food outlets specializing in noodles, where you see lines of customers crammed onto tiny tables and chairs, bent over their bowls of soup. I had a good meal last night at one of them; then, after a failed attempt at (geek alert) finding a geocache, I checked out some live music at the Singapore Street Festival, then went to watch the skateboarders for a while at the nearby public skate park. I miss that stuff. If it didn't hurt so darn much I'd still be riding...

Interesting article on the demise of cursive. Like countless others, I had cursive drilled into me for many years, all for the sake of my signature. That's honestly the only thing I've used it for since I left college twelve years ago. And my signature ain't all that.

Quote from the article:

"The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"

Um, yes?

Why spend years grilling the kids on a practically useless skill? To appease some dewy-eyed English majors? Teach the kids to write, not to write cursive...

We are all booked to go to Australia next month. This is just a fun trip. My work trip to Tasmania is again a possibility (the word from the guys in Australia is that our position "looks good, mate!"), and that might involve a side trip to Melbourne, so we're going to go to Sydney this time. Woo!

Disney. On a mailing list I'm on, we've been chatting a bit about Disney. Here's an excerpt from my last post:

This talk of Disney has me thinking back...

Some of my earliest memories are of our family vacation(s) to Disney World; we went pretty much every year while I was growing up. This involved a three-day car ride each way, down from New Jersey and back. With three kids. I don't know how my parents managed that.

Earliest trip for me had to be about '71 or so. I do remember being there just before Space Mountain opened, and I don't think that was our first trip.

Some other early memories:

Getting all excited to go on "Star Jets", and then being petrified when I discovered I had a fear of heights. My older brother, who was manning the controls, kept us up as high as we could go for the whole ride. Big meanie.

Being given my (E?) ticket to get into the Country Bear Jamboree while in line, and promptly losing it. Several very nice people offered us their tickets when we went back through the line to look for it. I was probably crying.

Losing my shiny New Year's hat over the rail into the water near Cinderella's Castle.

Laughing like crazy when the totem poles started chanting in the Tiki Room.

Chasing armadillos in Fort Wilderness.

My stomach falling out from under me for the first time, when the boat goes over the waterfall on Pirates of the Caribbean.

The mirrors, where it looks like a ghost is in your car with you, in the Haunted Mansion.

Fleeting bits from: Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. It's a Small World. The car racing thing (Autopia?). And The Hall of Presidents. If You Had Wings (had wings, had wings...). Jungle Safari.

Lastly, I remember loving Disney so much that it actually made me sad... It's a hard feeling to describe, really, but I was just so worried that it might someday come to an end. I guess I was a melancholy kid. Disney was a lot for my widdle bwain to take in.

Here's a great site with old pictures of Disney, and people's recollections.

New digs. This evening we went to take another look at the apartment we're going to be moving into in a month. Definitely a nice place, and lots of space for visitors, hint hint. Take a gander at the pool.

The new Radiohead album is, like, good and stuff. I like it a lot, on first listen, and that's saying a lot, cuz I never do that. Thankfully, more accessible than recent efforts, but still out there. These guys remain light years ahead of everyone.

Not in Kansas Anymore. Two out-and-about in Singapore quickies:

As I exited the elevator at work the other day, a Chinese dragon team got off a neighboring elevator. I have no idea what they were doing up in our skyscraper, or how they all fit in an elevator, like clowns in a circus car.

I took a taxi to the doctor's this morning; the driver was an old Chinese man who was listening to a cassette of some very old and strange (and occasionally grating) Chinese music, that sounded like a theater production; it was replete with some twangy string accompaniment and tinny cymbal crashes. Interesting. He obviously knew and loved it and was singing along the whole time. As he dropped me off I asked about it; he was clearly delighted that I took an interest. I asked if it was from a play, which he didn't understand, so I said "You know, like Kabuki." He pointed out a little indignantly that this was Chinese (not Japanese, like Kabuki. Oops). But he was still happy, and said "Is good, yes? Is good?"

The verdict at the doctor's: I've passed the stone that was in the urethra causing all the pain, as I suspected, and still have the bigger one that's in my kidney. Fortunately it's in the bottom of the kidney, whereas the tube flowing out of the kidney is in the middle, so I may not have a repeat episode -- the stone will likely just stay there. I'm to be x-rayed again in six months.

Woo hoo! I can legally say schizzle my nizzle!

Mixed bag.

We just got back from Bruce Almighty. Hey, every now and then, I'll admit it, I suffer from the particularly American need to just shut off my brain. Is there any point in my rating it? You know exactly how it was, if you've ever seen a Jim Carrey movie before. Actually, this seemed less funny than his typical fare, which probably means it's REALLY not funny if you don't like him.

Is there anything better than the smell of curry cooking? You can dance in a cloud of it down at Little India here every evening, but often you get it just walking by people's houses. I'll know I'm dead when I've been lying in a hospital bed and suddenly smell curry.

Wikipedia is a free, volunteer-run online encyclopedia that's made leaps and bounds as far as content recently. It's really quite useful and wonderful now. Check it out, just go and click around on whatever interests you.

I can't wait for my SARS kit, and for the toilet ratings.

The Trivia Kings. Last night was our night to run the trivia contest at a local pub. Actually, the usual hosts had a bunch of questions as well, so we split up the duties, and ended up with a marathon round of 100 questions total. This was just too many, and they really had to fly through them towards the end. But everyone had fun, it seemed. We decided we could run a really kick-ass contest on our own, given the chance.

Here are the questions we asked. See how you do; I'll post the answers in a couple of days.

Back. Just had my "IVU"; a pretty grueling ordeal. After changing into their standard doubly-modest hospital gown (two pieces, plus you leave your underwear on; a far cry from the typical drafty American gown where you have to CYA like a middle-manager), they laid me out on the X-ray table and proceded to inject me with dye and prod me and roll me over for over an hour. At one point they laid me on my back and put two big stone-like things on my kidneys, then strapped a clear plastic band over my torso and tightened, and tightened... I have mammogram empathy now, I guess. Anyway, it'll be a week until my next appointment when I get the results.

Because I had to fast since last night, I treated myself to Diandin Leluk (that Thai place I raved about before) after the procedure. I tried a couple of dishes I hadn't had before -- the chicken coconut soup, and the deep fried chicken in red wine sauce, both of which were merely outstanding, but not at the level where I want to kidnap the chef like on previous visits.

Who's a bad-ass? From the coach's report of yesterday's game:

Ventz 5pm scored an impressive 7-0 win against Summer Ville. Mark S, Graeme , Jeff , Edward (Guest Player) , Ben(2) and Steven A did the trick for us.

5pm walloped Sumer Ville 7-0! We never looked back after Mark's 5min headed goal from a corner. Great result for such a new team. Opponents were missing a few regulars but still 7-0..................! The 5pm team is going well with about 20 players but still needs games to gel them together as its a mix of new and old recruits.

That's right, baybee... The game-winner, coming up from playing defense. And we shut them out to boot.

Obviously, I've been feeling better; no pain at all yesterday or today so far. I'm just now leaving to go get my extensive X-rays, though.

Yes! I'm so glad they caught this guy. Friends of mine were at the Olympic Park hours before the bombing, and easily could have been victims. I hope they catch all the asshats that have been helping him too, and lock 'em up.

Coping. The past few days have been more tolerable, as I've taken ot the strategy of uber-medicating myself at the first hint of pain. Tomorrow I get the super X-ray, where they inject me with dye (I'm hoping it's just a regular needle, and not one of those big ol' amniocentesis needles), which I'm expecting to look something like this.

Interesting possibilities ahead -- I may have to jet the country temporarily after my temporary dependent pass expires in week or two, while Marjorie's back in the US. So, I'm having to pick somewhere nearby that I can get a decent deal to. Marjorie's given me a list of places that I'm not allowed to go without her, for safety, medical, and jealousy concerns, including Cambodia, Burma, and Borneo. I'm leaning towards a place that I had never heard of before yesterday -- Fukuoka, a city on the south island of Japan, which looks to have a lot of interesting historical and cultural sites, as well as having all the mod cons. Japan is awfully far away, though; I never realized before coming out here, but it's as long from Singapore to Tokyo as it is from Atlanta to Anchorage, Alaska.

The Pain-O-Meter. For those of you keeping score at home, it got about up to a 9 last night after I blogged. That lasted only fifteen minutes until the drugs kicked in. It came back a half an hour later, but again only lasted fifteen minutes or so. Got to sleep around 2am, and slept fine until 9am when the pain birds woke me up again. I'd rate it a 6 right now. It's moving down a bit -- now it feels like I've been kicked in the, uh, tackle, but at least it's moving along.

Today was better; I had a few impending attacks that seemed to be held off by the drugs. Actually, it's coming on pretty bad again right now and I'm waiting for the pills to kick in.

Forgot to mention; the four different drugs they gave me yesterday came to a grand total of S$7.15 (like, US$4). Crazy! A country where drugs aren't priced like a luxury item.

Ouchy. C'mon, pills, do your thing.

If you've ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, you remember the scene where they pin Private Pyle to his bed, and the whole platoon takes a whack at him with a bar of soap wrapped in a towel; afterwards he lies there in bed just crying and going "Ow, ow ow"... That's a pretty good summary of my morning. Kidney stones suck worse than the worst thing ever (and you're talking to a guy whose doctor bent his broken arm the wrong way when trying to set it). I had a 10:30 am appointment to see the doctor; I was up at 5 a.m. from the pain; by 8:45 it was so bad that I just went in for my appointment early to see if they could do something. They were all very nice and accommodating. The X-ray seems to show a good size stone in my left kidney; the pain is probably from a smaller piece in my urethra. I got some new meds; a painkiller, an antacid, an antibiotic, and some sort of liquid (potassium citrate) that's supposed to help break up the stone. I have an appointment for some further, more extensive X-rays, then who knows, maybe that ultrasonic thing. I wish there was something they could amputate.

Woke up yesterday and today to some pretty nasty abdominal pain that didn't seem related to any digestive issues. Today it was bad enough that I figured I had to go do something about it, so I hopped a cab down to Singapore General Hospital. After having my temperature taken at the door and being fitted with a mask (for SARS prevention), I was admitted and given a urine test and had X-rays taken. I'm glad I went down when I did, because by the time all the testing was going on, the pain really became excrutiating. They gave me a shot of something in me bum that seemed to fix me up okay; I'm fine now. No conclusive results yet, but they seem to think it's kidney stones -- a prognosis which, though not life-threatening, promises lots of of pain. Fun fun. I go to see a specialist tomorrow.

Has it been a year already? One year ago today we became husband and wife. Our first year together was nothing if not eventful.

We decided not to make a huge deal out of the day. We did go out for champagne brunch at the Ritz, though. We usually don't go in for the chilled fork, lifted pinky, "More scones, love?" sort of scene but we really had quite an excellent time. The free flow of champagne didn't hurt (at least, not until later).

Apartment hunting on Saturday yielded three no-gos and one place that was super nice, tons of room (three bedrooms!), beautiful greenery out the balcony, big beautiful pool, in our price range -- all in the middle of nowhere (Bukit Timah/PIE area). We were all ready to commit to it, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the isolation would be a constant, daily frustration. Bummer. We keep looking.

Wildlife spotting. Most of my wildlife spotting has not been in restaurants, unless you want to count animals that are already cleaned and gutted for cooking. Today, however, while lunching at a local restaurant, I spotted a little nose and whiskers poking out from under a refrigerator in a curtained-off cubbyhole. I first thought mouse, then rat. But then the little critter came out from his cover completely to sniff some section of the floor, and I could tell right away (from all the nature shows I've watched) that it was a shrew. Most probably an Asian musk shrew. For some reason I feel better that it wasn't a rat or a mouse, but apparently these guys are just as qualified to be labelled "vermin". I know every restaurant deals with things like this, but there seemed to be several of them there, and they were infringing on the guest area, so I don't see any need to go back to this place...

The Matrix, Retarded. Saw it with my boss, and we tried to figure it out afterwards, and decided that we might trying to make sense of something that the creator doesn't even have a clear picture of. When the audience is laughing at the movie, not with it, there's something wrong. Obviously, not without its entertaining points, but the fight scenes got boring, the psychobabble was laid on thick, and the plot was almost incomprehensible. I'm surprised as anyone that it sucked for reasons other than Keanu Reeves.

Spam, spam, spam. I've been getting more and more spam these days. One spammer in particular has been offering me a "free trial of HGH" every day -- sometimes two or three times a day -- for the past two months. He keeps varying his mailings to sneak around the filters I have set up. If they ever catch him, I hope it's in Singapore, although maybe a thorough caning is too good for him.

Bossman is reconfiguring our web site and mail server. He says that "dictionary attack" emails (which come from spammers who are trying every stinking word in the dictionary at your hostname -- like aardvark@yourhost.com, abacus@yourhost.com, abalone@yourhost.com -- in an effort to discover addresses they can send spam to) are coming in at a rate of more than one per second.

I can't believe this problem is still ongoing. In fact, it's getting worse. Spam accounts for something like 40% of all email traffic these days. Why can nothing be done? I've seen proposals for a pay system -- where it would cost you something like a nickel per email. I would be in favor.

By the way, it's a bad idea to leave your email address when you post comments; spammers seek them out and add them to their lists.

Return of the Assless Wonder. For a while there, I was actually developing a butt. I even had to buy a pair of fat pants. But, now that I've been getting into some kind of shape, it seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic concerns aside, my job pretty much requires sitting on it all day -- and even with a fairly plush chair, it's been increasingly sore. I even had to use a pillow this past weekend when we rented the car.

In other local news, just when it looked like we were about to be declared SARS-free, somebody goes and mucks it up. And, they've declared martial law across the water in Sumatra. Nothing to worry about here, though; the only time Sumatra seems to affect Singapore at all is when it catches fire.

Some random driving today landed us way out on the west coast of S'pore, where there are acres and acres of cemetaries. Apparently this is where everyone who dies here ends up. Interesting, in that the cemetaries are segregated; we drove through the Hindu and Chinese sections, and also past a number of [something]-atoriums, where they had hundreds of little lockers, presumably for burial urns containing the cremated remains. On a small, densely populated island, what else would you expect?

Marjorie drove for a little bit, out in the middle of nowhere; her first left-side-of-the-road driving experience. She did well. But after I took the wheel back, somehow we suddenly found ourselves on the north part of the island, and almost drove into the Malaysia checkpoint by mistake.

We figured we had to go out to dinner, since we had a car. We did Mexican twice already this week, but it was at the places in Holland Village, which are passable at best. So this time we hit Margaritas, which, near as we can tell, is the only place in town that "gets" Mexican food. Num.

Singapore is a different city when you're behind the wheel. We rented a car today, to drive around and look at neighborhoods where we might want to live. It was really strange, having not driven for almost six months, to suddenly have to do it from the wrong side of the road. It wasn't too horrible, but I did get to remember a lot of things I hated about owning a car. Had to blunder our way around a bit. It's quite easy to get lost, even on familiar roads, if you've never actually DRIVEN on them before. I had to come back home and zonk out for a few hours after a while; the concentration and tension involved in driving in this unfamiliar environment can be pretty exhausting. Anyway, we found some pretty nice areas, and didn't run over anyone or anything, so that's good.

Goooooooaaaaal! Today is a national holiday (Vesak Day) in Singapore, so we had a soccer game scheduled for 9 this morning. I was supposed to be playing defense, but at one point I snuck up... and scored! Collected the ball on the 18 yard line, beat a man inside and launched a beautiful curling shot into the far side of the net. I've been playing better and better with each passing week, and having more and more fun. I could do without these 9 a.m. games though. That nasty equatorial sun made the second half brutal...

We're thinking of renting a car this weekend, to drive around and look at apartments. I haven't driven in nearly six months; should be interesting.

We're also considering a trip to Japan in August, to coincide with the Summer Sonic 2003 music festival. Looks like a fantastic line-up. I don't know if I'll be able to swing this, work-wise, though.

Your quote of the day:

"You know the world is off-tilt when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." --Charles Barkley

Joke of the day.

Jason has a conversation with his new neighbour Pete:

J: So what do you do?
P: I teach deducive logic.
J: Huh?
P: Let me demonstrate. Do you have a dog?
J: Yes.
P: From this I deduce that you have a family?
J: Yeah.
P: And a wife?
J: Yeah.
P: And if you have a wife, I deduce that you are heterosexual.
J: That's amazing!

After this Jason visits his friend Chris:
J: I just found out this awesome field called deducive logic.
C: Say what?
J: Let me demonstrate. Do you have a dog?
C: No.
J: Fag!

Blast from the past. Dug this up recently -- something I posted on the internet on 22 December 1992, when I was going to school in Orlando, and working at Kennedy Space Center. Was this really more than ten years ago? I refuse to believe it.

WHY MY DRIVE TO WORK IS MORE INTERESTING THAN YOURS

Mile 7: Leave civilization, enter Bithlo. Home of more junkyards per capita than any other city. I don't mean to imply that the place is "redneck", but I live in morbid fear that my foreign car will break down here some day. If you're black, forget it.

Mile 12: Pass a local baptist church bent on ridding the nation of the evil scourge of evolutionary theory. They have a road sign with replacable letters -- past signs have read "FOSSILS -- WHAT DO THEY MEAN?", "DINOSAUR MYSTERY EXPLAINED", and "MYTHS OF EVOLUTION".

Mile 15: Enter the city of Christmas, famous only for it's post office (you can guess why, and you can guess when).

Mile 17: The chicken mailbox. Papier mache monstrosity of a chicken, that lasted about 3 days before a drunken redneck took a Louisville Slugger to it and knocked off its head.

Mile 20: Pass Gator Jungle, a tourist attraction. Basically an alligator zoo, remarkable in that the entire building facing the road is shaped like a huge gator. Tourists enter through the mouth, which is open to reveal sparkling white fiberglass teeth.

Just last week there was an accident immediately opposite Gator Jungle where a guy in a Cordoba plowed dead-on into a cow that had wandered into the road. They guy's car was totalled, and the cow was reduced to a steaming heap of beef.

Miles 22-27: Swampland -- airboat rides, poor people fishing, and a boiled peanut stand.

Mile 29: A gas station called "Space Shuttle Fuels". I resist the urge daily to pull in and ask the guy to fill it up with liquid hydrogen.

Mile 32: Space Camp, featuring a life-size mockup of the space shuttle overlooking the road. One day there was smoke coming out of the engines, but it turned out it was just a fire.

Mile 33: Cross the Indian River, replete with manatees (sea cows), dolphins and guys in clamming boats (who are out there at sunup, regardless of the weather).

Miles 35-40: During mating season, alligators can be regularly be seen haunting the canals on the side of the road. Once saw a tourist (or "touron" as they are known) who had pulled over and was taunting a gator, with his young son behind him. He was apparently oblivious to the fact that gators can move much faster than humans. Natural selection will swiftly weed out this sort of stupidity, I hope.

Mile 41: Spaceport USA. Features the multi-million dollar Astronaut Memorial, a black monolith with the names of dead astronauts engraved in it, which is supposed to continually rotate to face the sun, so that the astronauts names are continually emblazoned. It has never worked right.

Mile 43: Work: sit down, telnet back 43 miles to UCF, and bring up Usenet.

It's not a toomuh. The blotch on my gammy leg is nothing more than pigmented purpuric dermatitis (please note that the picture of the guy with the hairy ass on that page is NOT ME).

Rare, but harmless. Amputation will not be necessary.

Dig this crazy diagnosis:

Skin shows orthokeratosis, acanthosis and spaced out elongated rete ridges. Dermal papillae and upper dermis has perivascular lymphocytic infiltrate. Red cell extravasate is present. Numerous siderophages are seen.

The steroid ointment I'm to put on it cost S$1.70, or about a buck U.S. What sort of crazy health care system are they running here?

I've been meaning to do something like this; the May Day Project, where you document a day in your life with pictures. Soon, I promise. In the meanwhile, it's a fun site to poke around. A surprising number of Singaporeans participated.

Happy Mother's Day to me mum!

Tomorrow should be interesting. We're going over to my boss's new apartment; he's having it blessed by a Sri Lankan priest (referred to him by his maid). There's some things we have to watch out for, like not to sit higher than him, and not to pass him anything. The maid is cooking lunch; a bunch of Sri Lankan food, whatever that is (supposedly a lot like South Indian).

During a jog the other night, I realized that we are spitting (sneezing?) distance from Tan Tock Seng, Singapore's SARS hospital. Maybe we'll go out to dinner on nights when we're downwind.

Trivial pursuits. We were regulars at bar trivia in Atlanta, so we had been trying to track down somewhere here to play it. Finally we found a British pub up the road -- The Yard -- that plays the first Tuesday of every month. Strange format, almost like a test; they read out the questions, and you just wrote all the answers down on a sheet of paper which they then graded. We did really good, thanks to American mass media, which seemed to be the source of most of their questions (there was a section on Singapore too, which we totally bombed on). Just the two of us nearly beat everyone. Marjorie had fun obnoxiously correcting them on one question, which led to this exchange:

Her: "Excuse me, but Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend in New York, not London!"
Other team: "Sheesh, you got it right, didn't you?"
Her: "Yeah, but people deserve to know the TRUTH!"
Me: "Yeah, you can't HANDLE the truth!"

The best part is, the rules are kind of lax, and we were offered the job of RUNNING the contest the next month. So we're trying to come up with some good (read: not America-centric) questions.

Geeks, yeah, we know.

Ick. Back on line again, from home. After several failed attempts to get an XP boot disk locally (I didn't want to have to wait for one through the mail), and a failed attempt to load FreeBSD instead, I ended up going with the most hateful option. I bought XP again. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go take a shower.

Rrrrr. I have my new hard disk installed on my laptop, but have run into the wall trying to reinstall Windows XP. I have a product key for it, but not the original installation disks, and any other installation disks will not work because you can't reuse license keys that way. My options are: 1. Buy it all over again, for US$200. 2. Get a pirated version. 3. Give Microsoft the finger and go install Linux.

I know everyone thinks Microsoft is scrupulous and honest and non-manipulative, but I'm starting to wonder.

Bother, bother, bother. The hard disk on our home computer has been screeching at us of late, and is about to take a dirt nap. I am endeavoring to swap it out and save all the info off of it, but it may be a day or two before we're back to being able to post regular blogs. Is our apartment building built on top of an ancient Asian burial ground or something?

Walking along yesterday when a flying lizard skimmed just over our heads, alighting on a thin tree just in front of us. How cool is that? We got a good look at him on the tree; about six inches long, brown with a blue-green head, and had a neck wattle that he could thrust out.

Mixed bag.

We (my cow orker and I) were supposed to have heard back already about the contract that would've had me going down to Tasmania for a month. The delay is having us think that it might not happen. We had a strong proposal, so I haven't lost hope.

We have AC again ("aircon" is the term that just rolls off people's tongues here). It is blessed relief.

Take a gander at my favorite movies as well as my least favorite.

SARS notes: Been seeing fewer masks this week, but have noticed many people kick doors open rather than touch the handle.

At the hawker center near my work they have "Sheep Scourge Soup". It's listed next to the "Sheep Tongue Soup", and has a very unappetizing picture of a bowl of grayish looking broth with some sort of organ floating in it. By the gods, they'd have no problem filming Fear Factor here.

I had no idea that Isaac Asimov died of AIDS.

Currently reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, which, had I known it was published in 1956, I probably wouldn't have bought. But it's fantastic and I'm glad I did. Someone should really make a movie of it.

Singapore medicine. I have a lesion on my ankle that's been there for many years. Today I got it checked out, at Singapore's National Skin Center. Even without all the right paperwork, I was in and out in about forty-five minutes. That included an examination and a tissue sample taken after a numbing shot (which actually hurt like heck). Health care is cheap here, too, it seems, from the stories I've heard, although mine wasn't all THAT cheap -- S$210, or about $120 U.S. That's still probably a lot cheaper than it would have cost me back in the States. The big bummer will be missing soccer for a couple of weeks while the stitch heals.

A great game today. Played my best game of soccer in ten years. Even scored a goal -- against our own team. That was the only slip-up, and it wasn't really my fault (ball bouncing on near goal line, one of our guys tried to clear it right through me) . Very fun, beating a team that's better than you.

We went to the Night Safari again last night. The otters were the most amusing; about thirty of them were all screeching at each other, and us, at the same time. The malay tigers were pretty cool, too; they used to be native here, so they're perfectly adapted to the forest here. Last year when we visited the bat cage, one of the humongous flying foxes let us walk right up to him while he was eating, but this time they stayed on the roof (although we got buzzed a couple of times).

We took pictures, but the only good one was this shot out over the big lake in the center of Singapore.

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?

Easter. At our hotel in Bali, they had a little Easter display set up for the Western tourists (Easter for Westerners?). They had a little pen with white rabbits and yellow and pink baby chicks (the pink ones having been dyed that way). Also, by the front entrance, they had -- a nativity scene. Makes me wonder how often we try to do things here for "when in Rome" reasons, only to be given away by some tiny detail we fail to understand.

Anyway, Happy Easter, yo.

Back from Bali. It seemed like a teaser Bali experience at best; we could easily do a month there.

For our second of only two complete days there, we decided we were too sunburned to go surfing. So, we opted to hire a car and driver to just take us around to where we wanted to go. While we were waiting for the driver to arrive, Marjorie went back to our hotel room to get something and found that our suitcase that we had just piled a bunch of things on suddenly had nothing on it, as if someone had been going through it, and the patio door was left open. We're guessing the culprit bolted out when he heard Marjorie coming in. Anyway, after some harsh words with the hotel staff (we suspect an inside job), we moved on, as nothing seemed to be missing...

We had our driver take us to Ubud, where we visited the Monkey Temple and Forest, then had lunch. Afterwards Marjorie went off shopping while I went to explore the rice paddies. On the drive out we encountered this procession of people on the way to one of the many temples in the area.

We finished the day at Ulu Watu, which was fab.

Buying knickknacks in the airport while waiting to leave yesterday, Marjorie and I both were intended victims of rip-off shenanigans by store clerks, in separate instances. If Bali doesn't want tourists to leave their island with bad tastes in their mouth, they really need to crack down on this.

I forgot to mention the other day: on the way over, from the plane, we saw a volcano somewhere on the north coast of Java that was actively spewing smoke. Way cool.

And I was going to say that besides having to sign a health declaration, we weren't tested for SARS coming back into Singapore. But, maybe we were.

Cheers from the Southern hemisphere. We arrived in Bali yesterday and went out to see traditional dancing last night. We had a fantastic day today; took a water sports tour out Nusa Lembongan, and snorkeled, sea-kayaked (even in the nearby reef break!), swam, rode a banana boat, hopped in a glass-bottom boat... Lots of fun and sun. We took the fast catamaran out, and I guess due to the sagging tourist industry out here, had the boat to ourselves, with our own three-person crew. (Some people who missed the boat in the morning joined us for the trip back, though.) Tomorrow we're thinking of trying some surfing in the morning, then going to see Ulu Watu, a temple on a cliff.

Since we'll be south of the equator tomorrow, I was going to do a test to see if toilets really do flush clockwise on one side of the equator and counter on the other (the official word on why they do that is that they don't). Unfortunately, the water in our toilet here just kind of goes down. I'll file a breathless report from Bali because I know you are all curious.

Today's SARS looniness:

Hong Kong is taking the temperature of all departing visitors.

Amazingly, scientists have already sequenced the genome. This should hopefully lead to a SARS test, very soon, which will help to quarantine people before they start coughing on everyone. Go, Western medicine!

And in a gross overreaction, our apartment complex has closed our swimming pool, conference room, and weight room until further notice.

You know what's really insidious about this SARS thing? The symptoms play on your imagination. Let me explain.

One of the main symptoms is a dry cough.

Think, dry cough. Drrryyyyy cooouuughhhh.

If you're not already coughing, you're probably at least feeling a tickle in the back of your throat. With just a soupçon of mental effort, it's not hard to imagine shortness of breath, neck pain, or a fever...

Last minute scare. It turns out that as of this week, Indonesia wants a visa. Even our travel agent didn't know. They issue it at the airport, but I don't know WHAT would've happened if we had shown up without the required passport photos. I thought we were going to have to scramble out this evening to take some sweaty photos taken, but we managed to scrape some up. It's still going to cost us an extra US$100, which is a stinker. Good plan, Indonesia, for reviving your lagging tourist industry.

Pouty. Boo hoo, no Borneo. We decided that there's too much there to see in four days. Even just the Malaysian part of Borneo is bigger than all of the other part of Malaysia that we're attached to. And the Mulu cave area that I wanted to see is a long haul from the city where you can initially fly into. So we're having to "settle" for Bali. This will be Marjorie's first time south of the equator. We're staying right near where the discotheque bombing was a little while back, but other than that, we're not the kind to hang out in the heavily touristed areas.

I've been playing around with The Gimp (the open source answer to Photoshop), which is why the blog title is now all dj jazzy jeff. Woop. I saved it in a graphics format (PNG) that's not compatible with all browsers, yet, so let me know if the title doesn't appear for you.

As far as work permits go, Marjorie is now officially 2 Legit 2 Quit. I'm still waiting on mine. I'm not even a slacker dependent yet; I'm just a wannabe slacker dependent.

Malaysia is our target destination next week for Marjorie's spring break. We were thinking of going back to Tioman, but figured, we can always go there on a weekend; why not do something a little further away while we have the time? So now we're thinking Borneo. It looks, just, incredible. If for some reason it doesn't happen, I'm going to be awfully pouty.

For convoluted reasons my employment pass here is delayed, and officially I'm working for a Hong Kong company. Marjorie's pass is going to come through now, so I'm signing on as a dependent.

Filling out the form to become a dependent, I notice it has the following options:

Wife
Child

Which am I, again?

Marjorie doesn't have SARS. I thought I'd mention that point, before mentioning that she has a slight fever. SARS starts with a high fever and several other symptoms she doesn't have. She went to the doctor today, who prescribed some antibiotics; in fact, to take off work in this town, you pretty much have to have a doctor's note. What stinks is that I can't buy a thermometer for her anywhere, because spooked Singaporeans have bought up the whole stock. I've been seeing more and more people wearing surgical face masks, which are pretty much useless, except for keeping you from spreading it if you already have it.

So I'm trying to decide whether there's anything to this SARS thing to be afraid of, or is it just hype? I think the answer is, it's something to watch out for. It probably wouldn't kill us if we caught it, but it does have a mortality rate much higher than your typical influenza. SARS doesn't have as high a mortality rate as the West Nile virus we had back in Atlanta; it just spreads a lot faster. It's far more dangerous to the young and old, but it has killed some people who were in their prime. So we're being careful. I thought they had it under control, but some new cases sprung up today, both here and in Hong Kong.

There's an text message making the rounds on people's cell phones:

Nobody cares if I live or die, but everyone cares if I cough.