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...