Interesting Singapore Factoid #871: Many Singaporeans slow down at traffic accident scenes, not to rubberneck, but to get the numbers off the license plates of the cars involved. It's for the lottery. The belief is that the license plate numbers had bad luck, and must be evened out by good luck in the future.

Booted. No more spiffy downtown office. The guy I work with and the bossman of the office where I was squatting got into a bit of a row. Thought it was going to get ugly, but luckily it fizzled before anybody had to get escorted out of the office. I'm going to be working at my cow orker's house for a while, while we look for a new office. Ups my 40 minute commute to about 45, and mostly by bus now, too, so I'll get all pukey if I try to read. And he has no AC. Ratsafratsa.

We saw Secretary tonight. It was good. If you've seen it, maybe you can answer me a question -- I've been away from the States for a while; are law offices typically like they're depicted in Secretary, or are they more like on Ally McBeal?

Woo hoo 80's! The concert was more fun than we expected. It was a great venue in the middle of town, with lit up skyscrapers in every direction, and it was a nice cool overcast evening. We were cordoned off 50 yards from the stage, since we bought the cheap tickets. There was a local band who opened, who did covers (natch); we were treated to their interpretations of Coldplay, U2, the Beatles, Dave Matthews, and Lynrd Skynrd. Go West was next; they were okay. I only recognized one song. Then ABC. Unfortunately, if you're in ABC, you pretty much have to wear a suit, no matter how hot your concert venue is. The lead singer was resplendent in a purple one this night. They ran through pretty much all their hits; they sounded great, and were well appreciated. Level 42 was last, boring, and enough to send us home.

Why, why, why is this town obsessed with a glam ballad that's more than a decade old? I hated it when it came out; now I loathe it. Extreme's "More Than Words". I hear it nearly every day, in a restaurant, mall, or taxi.

Then again, who am I to judge? We're going to see Level 42, Go West, and ABC tonight, on the pretext that we both kind of like ABC. Shoot that poison arrow, baby.

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.