You know the weather is hot when ... It takes me less time to use up the contents of two ice-cube trays than to make more ice. Only connect It's been one of those weeks where my mind is all over the place. My days alternate between writing about 1950s/1960s Singapore and researching about modern-day Vietnam. My nights feature a lot of dinners out (no cooking this week, unless you count making coffee) and/or generous doses of season 3 Veronica Mars. In between all that, my mind takes its own expatiations, sometimes into territory I'd rather not dwell on (in?) too much.On a more mundane note, I have a funny story about a lovey-dovey couple that frequents a particular corner of the reference library, another funny story about photos of a diseased vagina, and a not-so-amusing tale of being jumped and thumped in our lovely pristine Singapore. Only one of these stories is firsthand; if you see me, you can ask me about them. Hrm, redux And today, it turns out that I've been misspelling "inoculate". Could've sworn it had two "n"s!Related post: Hrm Hrm I just typed "output" as "outpoot". This doesn't bode well for a Monday. Crazy is ... Not the thousands and thousands of people swarming the Night Festival last night, but the fact that somebody decided Sunday would be a good time to run a loud motor all day to slice up the tree that they chopped down on Friday. (They have to slice it up into more manageable chunks so that they can transport the lumber away.)Meanwhile, I'm trying to catch up on writing because I only cranked out twenty words instead of a thousand yesterday, and they were twenty crappy words that I promptly deleted today.Sunday = day of rest? Not likely. They cut down a tree today The one right outside where I live, in fact. I thought they were just trimming the branches that overhang the road for safety reasons, but when I got home, the tree was gone.So now there's nothing to provide a little privacy between my front door and the main road, or to deflect the worst of the afternoon sun. I hope there's a damn good reason for removing that tree.Edited to add (July 31): An email from my friendly neighbourhood town council informs me that the tree had to be removed because its base was rotting. I asked them pretty please to plant a new one asap! Rainy nights are good for ... A cup of hot tea in front of the TV and the internet. Two cups, actually --- first camomile, then peppermint. For a change I'm trying not to snack after dinner, although watching POTUS and Senator Vinick spoon ice cream out of giant tubs in the Presidential kitchen (just to be clear, this is The West Wing universe we're talking about) made the unopened pint of Ben & Jerry's in my freezer look pretty damn tempting.Okay, I really need to write in shorter sentences.I created a new photo set on Flickr tonight, when I realised that I've taken heaps of pictures while looking up at ceilings. I don't know where the impulse came from, other than boredom at shooting whatever was visible at eye level. Talking to Wesley about it via IM tonight, he thinks the pictures show "a sense of freedom" or "seeking freedom". To which my glib response ran along the lines of: "So I keep looking up, but I'm trapped by the ceiling".One wonders, huh. I don't have a spillproof mug but ... After yesterday's misadventure, this is where I place my coffee cup now.It might still get tipped over, but at least it's on a chair, below where the laptop sits.The Kleenex isn't there to mop up spills, by the way. It's usually on the table, but this morning I stuck it there 'cause I needed more immediate access to tend to my sniffly nose (it's reacting to the unseasonably cool weather).At least I'm not resorting to a sippy cup. What kind of a dork am I? The kind of dork that spills coffee on her laptop AGAIN. And this time, neither cat was in the vicinity so I can't pini it on them.One minute I'm saying hi to beeker online, the next minute there's coffee over half the table, and too much of it on the Macbook. And then the Macbook decides to go black as I wiping down the keyboard (while knowing in my heart from the previous experience that I'll need to take it in anyway, because any minute now the keys will start sticking together) and doesn't boot up anymore.I hope it's just a short-circuited motherboard and not any hard drive damage, because I have 4,000 words of a new chapter of the book I'm co-writing in there.4,000 words. Not backed up because I only finished it yesterday.Dammit.All right, instead of dwelling on my ownself-sabo-ownself troubles, let me tally the things I have to be grateful for despite this morning's clumsy little SNAFU:Most of my data is backed up 'cause I did a backup just a few days ago.Most of the un-backed up data is stuff I can either download again or pull off my Gmail, Google Notebook or some other web-based entity (thank you, sangsara, for introducing me to Google Notebook last week).Lucian showed me this video (warning: geeky font humour) to make me laugh and feel better.The person I'm meeting for lunch kindly rescheduled it to an earlier time, so that I can meet her, then take the Macbook in to get fixed, stat.I still have the iBook, which still works well enough for what I need, so I'm not totally computer-less while the Macbook is in the shop.I really hope I can retrieve that 4,000 word document. Pure heaven I really like the "taste" of ice-cold water, but it tastes even better after a cup of rich black coffee. Wordiness: grawlix I didn't know I didn't know this word, till I came across this question:"What does one call the use of random non-alphabet characters to indicate cursing?"You know: *^!*@&#^(^$#@(*(*@$(#^*$The answer: "grawlix", and it dates back to 1964. See the full explanation at Ask H&FJ.(Via Swissmiss.) Miles to go before I ... Jude asked me today how work was going, to which I said:I need to power through certain projects by end-September, so that I can start on that Really Cool Writing Gig (more information akan datang),which involves more intense research and writing,and that takes me all the way into 2009.Then I said: "I feel tired thinking about it."Maybe this is why mornings are getting harder. Mornings are getting harder So far this week, I have:Poured un-boiled water onto coffee grounds.Poured boiling water into an empty coffeemaker.Forgotten to eat breakfast, resulting in a forlorn and overripe banana that had to be cast into the trash yesterday.I'm not overworked at the moment, so I'm not sure where all this un-wakefulness is coming from ... Government websites: the good, the bad and the ugly The goodI needed to start looking at some 2009 dates for work, which entailed knowing when certain public holidays are, so I took myself over to the Ministry of Manpower website. As always, they faithfully list the public holidays for the following year, but now they've gone one better and provided the dates in an iCal format.So all I had to do was download the iCal file and let Google Calendar import it. Easy-peasy. Importing information from the web into real life should always be this easy.The badOkay, first off, let's make things clear: I like the library. I love books, and books live in the library where people can borrow many interesting ones for free, so I love the library. You don't have to make me go there or want to use it or want to like it. I'm sold. Tell me that I can access library materials or services online, and I'm thrilled that it saves me a trip down to the physical location.(See how many times I used italics in that paragraph?)That said, what the hell has happened to the National Library website? Or websites, I should say, because where before http://www.nlb.gov.sg served all library needs in one place, they recently decided to split their web presence into three domains:http://nl.sg --- the National Libraryhttp://pl.sg --- the public libraryhttp://nlb.gov.sg --- the rest?To which I'm like, we're a nation-state, isn't our National Library already a public library? And where do I go to find what information? And why the hell do the sites take so damn long to load if the web assets have been divided up? And why the hell aren't any links, including "Contact info", working? (That last complaint occurred yesterday on pl.sg; within a couple of hours they emailed me to say that the links were working again.)To quote from my email to the helpdesk yesterday:I don't know what else doesn't work, but I'm tired of trying to find anything on this website. I miss the old NLB website. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as frustrating and impossible as the new ones.I can only conclude that they're trying to be deliberately inefficient and, as I said to a web-savvy friend over IM:maybe their secret planis to frustrate peopleso we HAVE to go to the brick and mortar libraryThe uglyUh ... take your pick. Most government websites give me eye pain. Yan Yan teaches you English When I first started eating Yan Yan in the '80s, they came in two flavours --- chocolate or strawberry (feel free to say that in a "Okay Pocky" voice) --- and the biscuit sticks were plain and unadorned.Now the biscuit sticks try to teach you English.More accurately, they try to teach word association in English. This is what the sticks say (the animal name is on the top end of the stick, the rest of the words on the lower half):Bat --- Only in the nightStag beetle --- Love itRhinoceros --- Think bigElephant --- JumboCow --- MuuuuuFrog --- AmphibianRabbit --- Eat more carrotsOwl --- Active at nightPanda --- Go for moreSheep --- Wool sweatersNow what I want to know is: who gets to be the copywriter for the Yan Yan sticks, and where can I sign up? Of ethics and the law Ah, our lovely Singapore government. They won't decriminalise gay sex, but they haven't ruled out legalising organ trading. Ask and ye shall receive panaphobic asked for some cat pictures to alleviate her cat deprivation. Here you go (of Sisu, because Ink's over-exposed):Watching ...Ewoking ...Lolling. I wake up early only on special occasions Like making plans with Wahj to go take pictures at the Botanic Gardens, a plan we hatched after I casually mentioned that I hadn't really been to the Gardens since they were spruced up a few years ago.The only other park where I've spent a fair amount of time recently is East Coast Park, and the main advantage the Botanic Gardens has over that --- or just about any other park in Singapore --- is that it's set back and away from roads and traffic, and prohibits cycling or rollerblading. All of which makes for a very pleasant and peaceful stroll, in that most English sense of the word.I have learned two things about my propensity (or lack thereof) for taking pictures of "nature":Still-life portraits in natural settings don't really excite me.I keep seeing things as desktop backgrounds.(There's more in the Flickr photo set.) These are not the birth rates you're looking for The next time someone tries to convince me that the Baby Bonus and financial incentives are the way to get the population numbers back up to replacement level, I'm going to point them to what happened in Ulyanossk, Russia.Giving parents US$11,000 for having a second child on Russia Day (June 12) worked real well, didn't it? Weird things that happened this week MondayAround lunchtime, I got a call from a private number. The woman who was calling asked me for my name and whether I'd called her. I hadn't --- I hadn't called anyone that morning --- but it emerged that she had received a mysterious phone call from my number about an hour ago, during which a man, er, didn't say anything. (I surmise some heavy breathing might've been involved.)As I told her politely but firmly: I live alone, I'd been alone at home all morning, no one else had touched my phone and I certainly hadn't used it to call her. She read out the mobile number to me and it was my number, which then creeped me out because I was wondering how someone could prank-call her but somehow leave my number behind.Fortunately for me, the woman accepted my explanation and there were no further weird calls (at least, not on my end) for the rest of the day. I'm still wondering how my mobile number wound up on her caller ID, though ...TuesdayA work meeting got cancelled, leaving me with several hours free. I mean, I could've done some other work, but instead I decided to clean house.Me --- choosing to clean house over, well, anything else? Very weird. I'm still not sure what possessed me.WednesdayToday, I was making bacon and eggs for lunch. The bacon was no problem, but the first egg that I cracked into the pan --- well, let's just say that instead of a transparent goo coalescing into the familiar bubbliness of egg white, what I got instead was a very strange smell and a rather black substance in the middle of my pan.Was it the smell of a rotten egg? I honestly don't know. It was odd, but it didn't make me feel ill or anything. Although I hastily scraped the semi-cooked black goo out of the pan, stat, and poured boiling water over the pan to, er, sanitize it (at least in my mind).Fortunately, I had one other good egg left, so I could still have bacon and (an) egg. What would've been irredeemable is if the good egg had gone into the pan and the bad egg had gone in on top of it. I am a kaypoh auntie A minor road accident (turning car vs. oncoming motorcycle) just occurred at the intersection immediately in front of the block where I live, and like a good kaypoh (busybody) auntie, I first cracked open the window louvres, then half-opened the front door to see what was going on.Then when I saw what it was and my curiosity was sufficiently sated, I closed the door and went about my business.Telltale signs of a road accident in my neighbourhood: the unexpected crash sound (today, accompanied by a mild but startled scream), followed by the resumption of traffic noises at a muted level, because I live on a not-so-wide road and if the accident takes up even one lane, everyone has to slow down to pass (and stare, of course). Oops It's entirely possible that I'm white. Of governments and new technologies I know I said I was going to write a proper blog entry soon, not just toss out links, but I couldn't pass up on the comparison which leapt out at me while I was reading this morning's news.The UK government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Make public a wide array of government statistics for the Show Us A Better Way competition, where anyone can suggest new ways of using that data to make people's lives better. It hopes to attract everyone from the tech industry to "hardcore coders to adolescents in their bedroom". BBC News even calls it "data mash-up" in the article headline.The Singapore government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Dr Vivian Balakrishnan is quoted on Channel NewsAsia as saying:I think we will get into the 'YouTube' style of politics, which means it's multimedia. It's no longer enough to just talk, you must have moving images, you must have sound, you must have music. And if it makes an impact, you will get millions of hits. And if it's true but boring, without multimedia, then no one's going to watch it.Also, as quoted in the Straits Times:Because you think you are not revealing yourself, a lot of people on the Internet engage in what I call virtual shouting. They want to gain attention and the best way ... is to say something crazy, outrageous, scandalous, maybe even defamatory. Uh. Yeah. So one is releasing information out there in the hope of getting something good back in return, while the other is still concerned with the Sisyphean task of outshouting the crazies.As a tax-paying citizen, I certainly know which project I'd rather my government be working on. Get your geek on Monday's links were about reading, today's are more tech-inclined:In case you still somehow thought that (internet) spam wasn't evil, take a look at what happens when a stay-at-home mom responds to every single piece of spam email for a month.The 10 Commandments of Web Design, according to several prominent web designers and usability experts. I'm so glad that the first item on their list is "Thou shalt not abuse Flash." Your mileage may vary. (Via swissmiss.)When I was young and foolish in 1997, a friend asked me if I would get a cell phone (Lian, do you remember that conversation? I think it took place in your car). I recoiled in disgust and said, "No, I don't need one." I see I wasn't the only one (via Cowboy Caleb).I promise that my next blog post will be an actual blog post and not just a linkdump. Good reading fun I had a work-filled weekend (except for the ROJAK interlude), so it's only today that I can get around to posting some neat reading-related links:Since so many people got a tickle out of "The challenge of problem with office-speak", here's Slate's "Notes on Catch: Which catchphrases should be 'thrown under the bus'?" (via kitschy potemkin). Excerpt:It is possible to think of catchphrase use in stages. There's Stage 1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level. ...Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred" (time to throw "street cred" under the catchphrase bus?) or convey a sense of being au courant.Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as they say" to the end.Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase walking. Take "at the end of the day." It kind of stuns me whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?Also from Slate (also via kitschy potemkin), ";( Has modern life killed the semicolon?", wonders Portland State University faculty Paul Collins. I have a soft spot for the semicolon, and an even softer one (as I'm sure you can tell from reading my blog) for the dash.I also really like the penultimate sentence of this essay:When grading undergrad final papers recently, I found a near-absence of semicolons, save for one paper with cadenced pauses and carefully cantilevered clauses that gracefully stacked upon one another, Jenga-like, without ever quite toppling.Alison Bechdel, one of my favourite authors, gives her take on "Compulsory Reading" (via Bitch Ph.D.), about all the guilt we bibliophiles feel about the books we oughta read that we haven't read yet. This one's a comic-strip essay, for those of you that don't feel like dealing with any more prose right now. (If you like it, borrow her graphic-novel autobiography Fun Home from me.)My personal list of I-really-oughta-reads includes: War and Peace, London: A Biography, any novels by James Joyce and anything at all by Charles Dickens (I don't think the opening two pages of Hard Times or the adapted-and-illustrated-for-children version of A Tale of Two Cities counts).After proofreading for an entire week, I'll be glad to get back to a little old-fashioned reading for a change. ROJAK #11 I liked:Cherie Tan's illustrationsLim Zi Sin's pierced paper artworkSherman Ong's excerpt from his documentary, Thit, Rau Cu & Che (Meat, Vegetables & Dessert), and his HanoiHaiku photos. I went home thinking about:What makes art artWhether art has the right to shock in order to engageHow many people have the patience to stop and think about art.Just another night at ROJAK. The logic of heritage conservation in Singapore 1. "Respond" to public sentiment (as measured by a Straits Times poll with 1,103 respondents) by declaring that a bus stop dating from the 1970s will be conserved.2. On the same day, announce that there will be construction of a new Bugis MRT station. By the way:Due to engineering constraints which cannot be avoided , the land currently occupied by the New Seventh Storey Hotel (NSSH) and part of the adjacent State land fronting Rochor Road, is required for the construction of the station box and the at-grade station structures, such as the station's entrance and lift facility. The NSSH will have to be demolished to allow for the construction of the station.Never mind that the New Seventh Storery Hotel is a cultural landmark, the only building in Singapore that still has a classic manually operated "caged" elevator, not to mention the only place in that part of the city where you can sit outside and have a great steamboat meal.Also, because the government (in this case, the Land Transport Authority) is clearly a great believer in doing things by the book, it decided that it couldn't in good conscience inform the hotel ahead of time that its time was up.Even though the hotel has to vacate the land by the end of this year. Because six months is a fair lead time for any hotel business, as we all know.3. For those of you who enjoy an extra dose of Singapore-style irony, note that this is all decided on the same day that the Cabinet minister in charge of the civil, Teo Chee Hean, tells an audience at the Global Behavioural Economics Forum that:"policymakers are changing the way they deliver their messages - instead of the usual carrot-and-stick approach, they are favouring a softer method to help shape public attitudes."(I'm quoting the Channel NewsAsia report, not the Minister's words verbatim, because I can't find a copy of the speech online.)Oh, I totally agree, Mr Minister. Very soft sell on this one. That's why everyone I've spoken to who feels the same way I do, can only swear in response. Popular reactions:"SHITTTTTTTTTTTTT""ARGH""Cheebye" (repeated several times)"should enbloc Istana" (this seems to be gaining ground)budak, being more creatively inclined than I am right now, has a more eloquent haiku to offer:singapore storeysoft find themselves caught well-shortby new trains of thoughtI have to stop thinking. It hurts too much.Related posts: Photograph it before it's gone, I love Singapore, In memoriam Busy proofreading, no time to blog. But G-man sent me a gem of an SMS yesterday:Walking through a HDB town centre at lunch ... overheard snippet from a conversation between some mobile phone sales staff ... Indian guy saying "You want to see my ex-Chinese girlfriend?"So if she's not Chinese anymore, what other race would she be? Out of Focus, Night & Day No, the post title is not a description of my current state of mind, despite the last-minute proofreading job that's sapping all the creativity from my system. No, it's referring to the Out of Focus exhibition, part of the annual Month of Photography line-up. This year's show is at Night & Day, a bar slash gallery at Selegie Road. I'd been to the bar space before, but this was my first time climbing up to the top floor exhibition space.Ironically, for this was a photography exhibition, I didn't take any photos while I was there, even though I had my camera with me and there were several people taking pictures throughout the evening. I blame it on being distracted by many conversations with many people whom I haven't seen in a while, not to mention that after being cooped up at home for almost three days with only proofreading and the cats for company, it was nice to be surrounded by the buzz of human conversation again.Oh, but the photographs. My friend Gozde Zehnder curated a series with words and colour that reminded me of the visual sensibility of the short film she made with her husband, Take Me Home a.k.a I Saw Jesus. Everything else was in black and white: Geoff Pakiam's study of camera surveillance, Ng Sze Kiat's empty spaces and Chen Shi Han's whimsical toy soldiers.The problem with writing about photographs is that it's really just much better to go and look at them yourself. Seeing the civic district Who knew that walking around for one hour in the post-rain mid-afternoon tropical heat to take pictures could be so draining? I was ready to pass out when I got home after dinner, and it wasn't even 8 p.m. yet.During my one-hour ramble, I learned that there are weeds growing out of the clock tower at the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, Falun Gong types still practise meditation under Esplanade Bridge and the Cenotaph has metal snaps to keep the skateboarders away. See the Flickr photo set for more commentary.Yes, I finished sorting and uploading these images before I finished sorting through my Shanghai pictures. Maybe because there were fewer of them.