Tuesday June 29, 2004 
MCWong
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MCWong
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Tuesday June 29, 2004 Something's really rare in modern Singapore. I've probably seen less than 3 blackouts in the last 10 years (at where I stay). Authority was quick to announce that it was a gas supply disruption that tripped the generators. These days, people are quick to jump to suspicion of another terrorist act. The blackout hit my place at 10:15pm SGT right when Smallville was on and was soon restored at 10:30pm, just long enough for me to miss the part on how Clark got himself strapped down and dunked into a pool of Kryptonite liquid which jolted his first memory of being put into the craft that brought him to earth.... ... Oh the blackout ... yeah, there was a blackout. At first I thought my main breaker tripped again as it did a few times. The amount of juice my appliances and gadgets draw must have been way too much, openning the envelope of my electricity bill every month is like watching a horror movie, less the entertaining value. First thought was to open the main door to let the lights from the corridor in, but it's dark outside too. Then when I look across Bishan Park seeing it's pitch dark, it struck me this one's the real deal. Having lived in a place like Manila for many years, "brownout" as it's called in Philippines, is a way of life. I rate myself much more prepared than average Singaporean, and it was quite true. Being the last person to go to sleep in the house every night, it wasn't a problem finding my way in the dark to get to a flashlight, and I know exactly where it was just for situations like this. Then it's the candles... which is not at all an essential item in a Singapore home as people don't expect blackouts, whether man or natural causes since there is no typhoon neither. Soon enough, my next door neighbor was calling out for help as she stand in pitch dark inside her unit, no flashlight, no candles, no clue! It took a while for me to dig up the bag of tea-light (the kind that's used for aroma therapy), and an old disposable lighter, lid up a few and handed a whole bunch to my next door neighbor. She was thanking us profusely and couldn't be more grateful. (2004-06-29 21:21:21.0) Permalink
Monday June 28, 2004 Source: Yahoo! Features June 28, 1838, Britain's Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey. June 28, 1914, Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, Sofia, were assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist - the event which triggered World War I. June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in France, ending World War I. Birthdays: Actor Alessandro Nivola is 32. Jazz musician Jimmy Sommers is 35. Actress-singer Danielle Brisebois is 35. Actor Gil Bellows is 37. Actor John Cusack is 38. Actress Mary Stuart Masterson is 38. Rock musician Saul Davies (James) is 39. Actress Jessica Hecht is 39. Record company chief executive Tony Mercedes is 42. Football Hall of Fame electee John Elway is 44. Actress Alice Krige is 50. Actress Kathy Bates is 56. Actor Bruce Davison is 58. Rock musician Dave Knights (Procul Harum) is 59. Former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta is 66. Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., is 70. Actor Pat Morita is 72. Comedian-movie director Mel Brooks is 78. Blah! ... is one year wiser and forever 21. (2004-06-28 12:00:00.0) Permalink My baby just turned 1 year old and my gosh it was a big deal. Not fond of the idea of DIY parties, I opted to pay. It was so much more fun to have a party and not having to clean up afterwards. We picked a nice "town club" (as oppose to a "country club") The Legends Fort Canning Park and catered a spread of chinese dim sum for afternoon tea. Fort Canning Park is just next to Sun Singapore's office at Central Mall which was one of reason I know about the place. We sent all (except 1) invitation cards through e-mail, talking about digital age. After putting together a guest list, we soon realize everyone has email addresses. We received so many gifts we almost felt guilty ... nah... at least my daugther won't. Well I do need to thank everyone for a wonderful party. Here's the cheeky thank you card we sent out (less the photo) ... supposedly written by my daughter :-)
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Wednesday June 23, 2004 After working 8 straight days (Monday to Monday), at the brink of crashing, decided to do an orderly shutdown and reboot another day. Had to take a day off, to catch some sleep and much needed exercise (which normally means golf but now, driving range is a priviledge that I cherish). ... Then of course, there was the CPF housing insurance thing I need to take care of, got that done in the morning. ... Then send the wife to office at noon because it's Tuesday and she work late on Tuesdays. The husbandly thing to do, since I'm just "resting", I might as well drop her to office, right? ... ... Then need to exercise my warranty rights on my new T630, which took all "just" 2 hours, but that's another blog. ... Then went to the mall to pick out a DVD player to be used on my baby's upcoming birthday. (You bet, another blog.) ... since I'm in the mall, might as well pick up a few other things ... it's late afternoon so coffee and fried dough (not doughnut, chinese style, mmm ... something for a new category = food); rushed through the food bec. finally, ... driving range! Whacked the usual 2 buckets, and as usual glad that I have a day job; ... Wife SMS'd (aka Text), "don't forget the milk and diapers". ... Off to supermarket ... ... got home already 7:40pm, 2 hands full of shopping bags that weighs a ton. (At least I got my arms worked out). ... Then of course the "quality time" with my baby, which at this stage of her age means chasing her around in the house while she "explores". By the time I'm done and sat down to "rest", I realized I'd probably be less tired if I had been in office. :( So much for "Rest Day". (2004-06-23 11:11:11.0) Permalink
Saturday June 19, 2004 A panoramic lost of direction ... What was I thinking... that was the EASTERN end of Bishan Park. Panic: brain not responding (2004-06-19 09:59:59.0) Permalink
... from my home! One of the successes of Singapore, clean and green. This is Bishan Park, stretches about 2 kilometres long, this is the western end [eastern end actually] of the park. A second success, this is the view from a public housing apartment! Generally refered to as "HDB flat", or Housing Development Board .. flat (?a very British apartment unit?). Whooopi! My shift is over and going back to my comfy flat... Boohoo... I'll be baaaaack ... again tomorrow. (2004-06-19 00:10:20.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Friday June 18, 2004 Things we do to keep customer happy. Finally weekend after a long week? No sir, mine continues. Can't help to feel dreadful having to wake up at 6am on a Saturday, not for golf, but heading for office ... yawn! Beside having been doing that for the whole week; and will again, on Sunday, Father's Day: my first ever Father's day being a father. Since the web is 24x7, so do computers that runs them, so do vendors like Sun who support them. Having 3 geographies means we cover 8 of the 24hours in a day. So when USA is on summer time (DST), work hour here starts at ungodly 7am. Those on "duty" watch the sky for flares and do rapid response, and call for reinforcement if need be. On weekends, we are it! Singaporean says, "die die must do", doesn't make much gramatical sense but, you get the meaning. We're paid alright, but how do I value the smile when my daughter saw me awoke as early as she, and then her bewildered look right before I rush out the door while waving goodbye? (2004-06-18 19:19:19.0) Permalink
Thursday June 17, 2004 While having my daily fix of Sun blog (kind of becoming yet another addiction), I came across hoffie's happy endorsement of downloading gaim from blastwave and interestingly traced to maintainer torrey. Hey, that's Torrey! Can't miss Torrey if you read email support aliases. >-) Since I had procrastinated too long to compile gaim 0.77 myself (got the source but not the time) and to think that 0.78 is already out, I figured, hey, why not, let's be lazy. I remember doing pkg-get some time ago when it was still BOLTpget.pkg, but can't recall what for; which means it probably failed for some reason. Anyway, this time, it was painless and by far the best user experience I've had installing free stuff! Installing anything for that matter! pkg-get -i gaim A couple of y's later for 'yes' to run script with su priv, Gaim 0.78 was up and running! That's all there is! Considering that I had an empty /opt/csw, so pkg-get were downloading obscene amount of packages that at some point I was actually worried. (Should I?) With such easy success, it didn't take long for me to continue with: pkg-get -i gqview And again, no problem whatsoever. This time was a lot faster considering most of the big dependent packages are already done. blastwave ROCKS! Here's yet another satisfied customer. :-) (2004-06-17 02:02:02.0) Permalink Comments [4]
Tuesday June 15, 2004
(2004-06-15 20:20:20.0) Permalink Comments [2] esc Esc ESC ... No I'm not trying to get out of 'vi' insert mode. Esc in support services world I'm in reads: Escalation. Bad news for most people, good news for me, I've got a job! It's actually gratifying, no kidding. Unlike engineering projects that get axed all the time, all customer cases must come to a close, eventually, hook or crook, and therefore escalation too. Closure is a good thing. You sleep better, or you try to sleep it off and forget about it... either way, I slept. ;-) It does, unfortunately, get to you sometimes. Especially when you get to explain "fixed, unverified". What kind of a fix is that? "I think I can solve world hunger! But I can't prove it ..." More so when it grabs all your time trying to explain why it's unverifiable, to the point that you couldn't blog! Now that's a sin. The reason for my "unverified" absence at Blah! "What do you mean you can't fix 'freeing free xxx panic'?" That take quite an effort to explain, simply bec. you can't be too convincing when each time you repeat (and repeat and repeat), it always ends with the sentence, "however, we can't reproduce it so we cannot be sure if it will not happen again." Although probability says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, Murphy's says otherwise. Since we can't prevent for sure a ufs quietly messing up meta structures, at the least, try not to panic. [See SRDB70770] It's not going to do much good if you run only 1 app on 1 file system, but the system stays up! You can still use it as an egg boiler. Good 'ol ufs is too fragile to begin with. I remember studying about file system strucutre; inodes, direct blocks, indirect blocks, and that's college, wholly 2 decades ago! [Disclaimer: I'm 21!] Desire to buffer i/o opens up whole new opportunities to mess up in ways that's untraceable. By the time you see it (panic or otherwise), it's too late, since it probably happened some time ago. What gives? Let ufs R.I.P. We have zfs, if you have to go Sol 10 just for it, it's probably worth it. I have yet to take a test drive, but I will, and probably give me something else to blog about too. (2004-06-15 00:01:02.0) Permalink
Thursday June 10, 2004 Slingy Singapore? I prefer Kopi-C. It should be obvious enough that I'm in Singapore... duh! I have a Singapore category up there! Do you know here's Sun Asia Pacific's headquarters? Ok, big deal. Geography 101... Pull out a world map, let's start with some landmarks... Australia should be easy to find, just go "down under". Move up, the bunch of big and small islands is Indonesia. Go left and up, you find Malaysia and then Thailand. Great, you just missed Singapore... :( It's that dot somewhere there. So what's up with Singapore Sling? It's not the national drink for sure, but pubs and hotels make tons of money out of tourists who are generally told, it's a "must try". [sneaky] Singaporean drinks Tiger Beer and Kopi-O, or Coffee-black. That brought up an interesting topic, "Kopi". A mutant of transliteration of transliteration (yes twice) and somehow it is generally the only way to order the strong, dark and sometimes lethal wake-me-up from your local "Kopi-tiam" (coffee shop). "Kopi" obviously sounds like "coffee", and it is, but Singapore actually writes "Kopi" on menus. There is no word in Chinese for "coffee". So when coffee was introduced to China, the words are simply transliteration of "coffee". When a Chinese "hookien" pronounce "coffee", it became "kopi", due to dialectic accent. Good proportion of Singapore Chinese are hookien, and of course Chinese is not written in latin characters, but Singapore is English speaking, so born "Kopi". [???] Logical? So Kopi-Tiams serves Kopi, but Delifrance, StarBucks and Spinellis serves "coffee". "O" as you have guess by now, is hookien for "black". Here's a run down on the variations in case you happen to drop by one of these days: Kopi, the default configuration is coffee with condensed milk (or sweeteners), no sugar added, or needed. Kopi-O, is Kopi with sugar, no milk, no creamer. Kopi-Gau, is Kopi thick, although less water, but same volume at no extra cost. You wonder what's the catch? No catch, as long as you can drink that stuff! Kopi-C, is Kopi "silky" (I think), which means Kopi with evaporated milk and sugar. Kopi-Bing, is Kopi-on-ice, no skates or costumes. :)
Now the advanced version:
Kopi-O-Gau, you can translate this by now.
And as always, there's the exception to the rule: Kopi-Gosong, as in Kopi "plain", no sugar, no milk. The real Coffee - Blank! Ok, black; and "gosong" is Malay word for plain. How's that for a mutant menu. (2004-06-10 08:07:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Wednesday June 09, 2004 One could never miss or resist clicking on the link to our premier blogger MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Afterall, being fixated at the top of the "Most Popular Weblogs" roster, and with 3 times plenty hits as the 2nd in line, the self-mutiplying effect is just fascinating. To new bloggers or just surfing-bys, "What's this really popular blog?" Mmm... *click*. Ka-ching! Hits += 1. Classic lesson on marketing. Build a brand name, get to the top, keep your customers, the new ones just follows. It helps too where there's bells and whistles, i.e. lots of pictures, stories, and my gosh, a contest with real prizes! And ships! How do you beat that? After all, it's Duke the stuffed one.
Mary knows her market well, being a marketing person. (Shhhh, being new here, I looked her up in NameFinder. ;-))
Now how does one dislodge a market leader? Not that I have the urge (or believe I could) but you can't deny the thought. It's like, how do you out-sell M$? Clearly a great product alone doesn't do it. Unix is clearly more rebust, scalable and not to mention, secure. Usability-wise, Mr. Jobs had it covered. But the Windows empire is still there. Take a page from IBM PC clones war in the 80's. Long long ago in a galaxy far far away... clones sold at fifth of the price still make good profit, the clones fester, killed the IBM PC. The fact that you got here is probably bec. of the cloned blog title "MaryMary...". 8-) I must admit, it's a conspiracy, but I prefer the term "Experiment". [tongue-in-cheeks] (2004-06-09 09:09:09.0) Permalink Comments [3]
How could you not like children? Ask me that question a year ago and I would say, "how many ways would you like the answers?" But now, how could I not like children? Look at this cutie cute cute baby baby... ahem... btw, that's my daughter, she's turning 1 year old this month. Even my mother submitted that I was not the children-kind-of-person; even when I, was a child myself. I was may be 7 or 8, a tidy, I should say "pristine", toy crate was an obsession. Every toy was in it's box, and every box has it's place in the crate and all was in harmony. Btw, I am the youngest of four so absolutely no one touches my toy box. Except of course, the "guest". When mother says, go "play" with your little friend! Gasp, my worse nightmare! I wished she meant hide-and-seek. They're just like "guest" accounts, password is always "welcome", they log right in and head straight for the confidential and proprietary. The worse was the phrase "Go play with", which was always taken as an implied "take ownership" permission to what they want and trash as they see fit! I wonder what happened to that toy crate? You should see my cubicle today. Everything got it's place alright, which is just about anywhere that fits, or not. Ok, mostly not. It's not gonna get me any cleanliness award from Workplace Resources but I can find my stuff. Afterall, I need to keep up with the image of an engineer. Parenthood does strange things to people. I couldn't imagine how I would take care of my own children which is may be why we waited so long before having our first. But now, just can't ever seems to spend enough time on my new obsession! (2004-06-09 03:03:03.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday June 08, 2004 Blah blah blah... Blah, blah blah blah? Blah blah. Blah! The all encompassing, ubiquitous, blah. Google search blah returns, "... about 2,670,000"; soon 2,670,001? The choiced mocking where no word could, it's blah. I have no idea where the word originated but then who cares. Dictionary.com defines blah: "Worthless nonsense". But isn't "worth" subjective? The title choice for my first blogging experience may be cliche. Hey, I need a username to get my blogs.sun.com account; pressed with anxiety of what am I gonna write about, the first thought, "blah blah blah"! [lightbulb] There you go, no framework, no boundaries, no agenda. So welcome dear readers; here's my blog, and you be the judge of worth and sense. (2004-06-08 08:08:08.0) Permalink |
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This picture was taken with an old digital camera that I had for 4 years now; and what a pleasant surprise! It actually looked really good! I was on my way back from lunch and figure that it would be nice to post a picture of Sun Chai Chee office. It was a hot day (as always in Singapore), but it turned out to be a perfect day for photography.
This building used to be the Central Post Office! Yep, all mails came here! Being previously factories, the inside had unusually high ceilings for a cubicle laden office. That turn out to be REALLY nice, because the whole place look bright despite the cubicle dividers. No claustrophobia.
You are warned!
Ah! Home sweet home.
