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.