Today was for packing. We're moving over the next few days, and it's amazing how much junk we were able to accumulate in six months here. Later in the week we're off to Sydney, as the third leg of Marjorie's whirlwind tour of the continents.

Don't know what the deal with the comments is; hopefully they'll have them fixed soon.

Marjorie's back. Here's what she brought me back from the States:

The Cosmos collector's edition DVD box set. Woop!

Five bottles of wine.

The new Fountains of Wayne CD. Sounds fabbo so far.

My cool fuzzy pants, for our trip to Australia.

The Big Lebowski DVD.

A Cookie Monster t-shirt. Huh.

A Scrabble computer game (thanks, Linda!).

Various housewares for the new apartment.

My CD player.
And most importantly,

Her bad self.

These are dangerous times. I promise to be careful.

I've been playing with Google's programmer interface for some potential work projects. This is a service they provide that allows you to do Google searches from within programs you write, instead of going to their web page.

It occurred to me that I could use it to revamp my old "misspellings" page. So, here 'tis.

The Google API was amazingly easy to use. Quite a number of the queries I sent failed, for whatever reasons, but I can still see this as a handy thing to know how to use. And kinda fun.

I rule. I played bar trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's, all by my lonesome, and won. I had no hope on the Rugby questions and such, but cleaned up on the movie questions. I hope my wife will forgive me for missing the Beatles question ("What Beatles album features the song 'Ticket To Ride'?"). The prize was a bottle of vodka, which we surely DON'T need, as the bottle we got at Duty Free on our initial trip out here has hardly been touched.

Burgerlicious. Here's the placemat from Mos Burger where I had lunch today.

How long do you figure it'll be before McDonald's comes out with THEIR version of the squid-scallop-prawn burger with carrots and asparagus?

Notice too that the bun is made of rice. Actually, it sounds moderately edible.

Goooooaaaal! A beautiful cross; I extend my leg as far as it will go, and tuck the ball neatly into the side of the net. The keeper never had a chance.

Too bad it was our own goal.

Phooey. To add injury to insult, I stubbed my toe on the play, too.

Time to de-stinkify myself and go get some Injun food.

End of the line. I rode Singapore's new MRT line out to the bitter end, Punggol, today, just for grins. I wasn't the only explorer on the train. For one old Chinese woman it was her first time in a subway, apparently. When the train started moving she pointed at the concrete walls sliding by the window and grinned hugely, revealing rows of neglected teeth. It was really sweet, actually.

On the way out, I happened to read in Bill Bryson's "Made In America" how they used to build amusement parks at the ends of the railway lines to encourage people to use them. Well, when the train reached the end and we all got out, staring around blankly like we just got dropped off the mother ship, I realized that this wasn't so much an amusement park so much as a WHOLE LOTTA NOTHIN'. Just a treeless waste with a whole lot of featureless HDB housing highrises. It looked like Communism with a splash of orange. Why would people live out here? I walked around a bit, then headed back.

Yet another photo of me at Disney, with my mother and sibs this time. Love those glasses on my mom. My brother and sister don't look all that happy to be there.

Name-dropping. I just learned that one of the stars of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, Jorja Fox, went to my high school. While I was there, too. Earlier, she was even in the excellent Memento. Were this a proper name drop, I would right now be hinting that we used to date. As it is, I don't remember her at all.

Writing wrongs. I've been doing some proofreading of a proposal by someone whose writing skills are, shall we say, lacking. Incoherent ideas, run-on sentences, and rampantly misplaced punctuation feature prominently. I much enjoy proofreading, probably because I get to point out other people's errors. I'm generally considered a top-notch technical writer (my college professor on the subject even asked if I was looking for work). Outside of tech writing, though, I feel totally hot and cold. And lately, just cold.

When I'm writing well, the whole idea is there in my head beforehand, and the words just spill out, like I'm taking dictation. At other times, though, I just have some random collection of thoughts, and start writing anyway, hoping a common thread will pop up. Like I'm doing now.

I used to dabble in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, which is essentially a creative writing forum frequented by some extremely bright people (and plenty of dummards, to be sure). Despite the anonymous nature of the internet, participating there was often nerve-wracking (especially since many there could deliver absolutely withering put-downs). But I learned more about writing there than the sum total of my schooling ever provided.

The constant pressure to be "on", while self-imposed, is likely why I stopped visiting there. Now I'm worried that I've plateaued. Exactly in line with my guitar-playing ability, I just don't feel my writing has improved at all in the last ten years.

As a kick in the pants, I was considering entering the National Novel Writing Month this year (like this Dean character did last year). But I don't think I'll find the time. I think deep down I don't want to write a novel, I want to have written a novel.

So I guess I'm stuck where I'm at, for now. And you, my suffering readers, will have to endure.

Dish fairies. I've been known to do the dishes, as the photo I posted in the last blog will show you. However, I usually leave it to the dish fairies to put the dishes away after they dry. They seem to have been on strike lately, though, starting at around the time Marjorie went back home. Now dishes are piling up in the drying rack. What did I do to get them angry? How do you lure them back?

Awwww... My blog about Disney prompted my parents to scan in this photo of me doing the dishes when we stayed at Fort Wilderness. All that beautiful hair, *sniff*. Strange how I remember all the little details in the picture; the bowls, the dishrag, the dining canopy -- like I can still smell them.

Things that I've learned, decided, or figured out lately. The historical facts are from Bill Bryson's Made In America:

Sam Adams, of beer fame, was actually responsible for propagandizing the Boston Massacre, inciting a popular uprising, blowing the facts of the case totally out of proportion.

Starlings, those pesky little speckled black birds, were introduced to the US by a well-meaning but utterly misguided professor who was trying to populate the new world with all the birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.

If I ever write a newspaper column, it'll be called Mark My Words.

When I put out my best-of album, it'll be called A Fat Lot of Good.

Listening to old Built To Spill albums makes me happy.

Curry is actually not a plant. Not per se -- there is a curry plant used for its leaves, but curry like you find in most dishes is actually a mix of spices, including but not limited to pepper, ginger, garlic, coriander seed, tumeric, and cumin.

My dad is the best. Happy Father's Day, Dad...

LA Story: There's some story/legend about one's experience with L.A. based on one's first celebrity sighting here. My first LA celebrity sighting happened at dinner this evening, Jerry Springer, don't know what that means about my future with this town. He (Jerry) was in da house at Border Grill in Santa Monica (which I highly recommend by the way).
LA's a fun town. I've seen as much of the town as my hosts could pack into two and a half days. And, so far, I'm dealing with my jet lag pretty well.
Gossip for the kids: J-Lo and Ben may be married now. You heard it here first, from a potentially reliable source (could be crap though).
Also, I was privy to a phone conversation between my very good friend and Elayne Boozler (the Elayne that Julia Louis-Dreyfus' character was based on) at the Getty Center today. Pretty cool yo.
Being back in the States these past couple of days just makes me want to be here (semi-permanently) again so much more.

There are lots of foot reflexology centers in town, usually featuring a wacky sign like this showing the link between places on your feet and your various vital organs. I of course put no stock in it as a science, but I did visit one of these places on Friday night for a foot massage. They do like the rough stuff here. It was pinchy and hurty when they worked my toes, but I got more into it as the session wore on.

Learned a new term: "slurp shop". This is what they call those small food outlets specializing in noodles, where you see lines of customers crammed onto tiny tables and chairs, bent over their bowls of soup. I had a good meal last night at one of them; then, after a failed attempt at (geek alert) finding a geocache, I checked out some live music at the Singapore Street Festival, then went to watch the skateboarders for a while at the nearby public skate park. I miss that stuff. If it didn't hurt so darn much I'd still be riding...

Interesting article on the demise of cursive. Like countless others, I had cursive drilled into me for many years, all for the sake of my signature. That's honestly the only thing I've used it for since I left college twelve years ago. And my signature ain't all that.

Quote from the article:

"The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"

Um, yes?

Why spend years grilling the kids on a practically useless skill? To appease some dewy-eyed English majors? Teach the kids to write, not to write cursive...

Left alone. Marjorie done runn oft home without me. Saw her off this morning. I'm a little sad. She has something like eighteen hours of flying ahead of her, just to get partway home. Her plane stops in Hong Kong to pick up a few SARS patients before going on to Los Angeles.

I'm leaving tomorrow for the States. First stop Los Angeles to spend a few days with friends in Hollywood. Next stop Atlanta to see family, friends, and two very missed black Labs. Then back to LA for a day before returning to Singapore.
When I get home we'll have four days to move and settle in to our new apartment before going to Sydney. Three continents in one week. Woo hoo.

We are all booked to go to Australia next month. This is just a fun trip. My work trip to Tasmania is again a possibility (the word from the guys in Australia is that our position "looks good, mate!"), and that might involve a side trip to Melbourne, so we're going to go to Sydney this time. Woo!

Disney. On a mailing list I'm on, we've been chatting a bit about Disney. Here's an excerpt from my last post:

This talk of Disney has me thinking back...

Some of my earliest memories are of our family vacation(s) to Disney World; we went pretty much every year while I was growing up. This involved a three-day car ride each way, down from New Jersey and back. With three kids. I don't know how my parents managed that.

Earliest trip for me had to be about '71 or so. I do remember being there just before Space Mountain opened, and I don't think that was our first trip.

Some other early memories:

Getting all excited to go on "Star Jets", and then being petrified when I discovered I had a fear of heights. My older brother, who was manning the controls, kept us up as high as we could go for the whole ride. Big meanie.

Being given my (E?) ticket to get into the Country Bear Jamboree while in line, and promptly losing it. Several very nice people offered us their tickets when we went back through the line to look for it. I was probably crying.

Losing my shiny New Year's hat over the rail into the water near Cinderella's Castle.

Laughing like crazy when the totem poles started chanting in the Tiki Room.

Chasing armadillos in Fort Wilderness.

My stomach falling out from under me for the first time, when the boat goes over the waterfall on Pirates of the Caribbean.

The mirrors, where it looks like a ghost is in your car with you, in the Haunted Mansion.

Fleeting bits from: Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. It's a Small World. The car racing thing (Autopia?). And The Hall of Presidents. If You Had Wings (had wings, had wings...). Jungle Safari.

Lastly, I remember loving Disney so much that it actually made me sad... It's a hard feeling to describe, really, but I was just so worried that it might someday come to an end. I guess I was a melancholy kid.

Here's a great site with old pictures of Disney, and people's recollections.

New digs. This evening we went to take another look at the apartment we're going to be moving into in a month. Definitely a nice place, and lots of space for visitors, hint hint. Take a gander at the pool.

The new Radiohead album is, like, good and stuff. I like it a lot, on first listen, and that's saying a lot, cuz I never do that. Thankfully, more accessible than recent efforts, but still out there. These guys remain light years ahead of everyone.

Not in Kansas Anymore. Two out-and-about in Singapore quickies:

As I exited the elevator at work the other day, a Chinese dragon team got off a neighboring elevator. I have no idea what they were doing up in our skyscraper, or how they all fit in an elevator, like clowns in a circus car.

I took a taxi to the doctor's this morning; the driver was an old Chinese man who was listening to a cassette of some very old and strange (and occasionally grating) Chinese music, that sounded like a theater production; it was replete with some twangy string accompaniment and tinny cymbal crashes. Interesting. He obviously knew and loved it and was singing along the whole time. As he dropped me off I asked about it; he was clearly delighted that I took an interest. I asked if it was from a play, which he didn't understand, so I said "You know, like Kabuki." He pointed out a little indignantly that this was Chinese (not Japanese, like Kabuki. Oops). But he was still happy, and said "Is good, yes? Is good?"

The verdict at the doctor's: I've passed the stone that was in the urethra causing all the pain, as I suspected, and still have the bigger one that's in my kidney. Fortunately it's in the bottom of the kidney, whereas the tube flowing out of the kidney is in the middle, so I may not have a repeat episode -- the stone will likely just stay there. I'm to be x-rayed again in six months.

Language In the short time we've been here we've adopted several Britishisms and a few Aussie phrases. Our favorite of late is "Daggy" which basically means bad taste or a person who doesn't give a s**t. The word is derived from "dag" which is the term for the poo stuck in the fur on a sheep's backside.
Other words we've been overheard using lately: "knackered" for tired or exhausted, "savouries" for salty snacks, "plaster" instead of band-aid, "capsicum" for bell pepper, "coriander" for cilantro....there are many others but it's hard to remember them all now.
On the flip side I will never be able to say "tomato" or "vase" the British (and conversely Singaporean) way. I recently went shopping for a vase and was corrected ("oh you mean....) by every shop person approached.

Inventory: Yesterday was the last day of school for the kid. Now I just have to have my supplies inventoried, my work permit cancelled, my taxes paid...and I'll be finished with this chapter of my career. A few people have asked why I'm leaving the school and the honest reason is that I just don't find teaching very stimulating. The past three months I've had great kids, a good assistant, a supportive principal and team, and I still haven't enjoyed the job. I wish I did, it would make life easier, but.......
Hopefully I'll be able to find an early intervention/assessment job similar to what I was doing in Georgia before we left, if not I may look into consulting or classroom facilitation for students with special needs.
On a completely different note, I'm really looking forward to being back in the States for a few days. I'm not going to be there near long enough (again), but anytime is good. I'm slightly jealous of the Aussies I know who are going home to winter as it's been oppressively hot here lately. There will be no weather relief found in Hotlanta.

Mixed bag.

We just got back from Bruce Almighty. Hey, every now and then, I'll admit it, I suffer from the particularly American need to just shut off my brain. Is there any point in my rating it? You know exactly how it was, if you've ever seen a Jim Carrey movie before. Actually, this seemed less funny than his typical fare, which probably means it's REALLY not funny if you don't like him.

Is there anything better than the smell of curry cooking? You can dance in a cloud of it down at Little India here every evening, but often you get it just walking by people's houses. I'll know I'm dead when I've been lying in a hospital bed and suddenly smell curry.

Wikipedia is a free, volunteer-run online encyclopedia that's made leaps and bounds as far as content recently. It's really quite useful and wonderful now. Check it out, just go and click around on whatever interests you.

I can't wait for my SARS kit, and for the toilet ratings.

The Trivia Kings. Last night was our night to run the trivia contest at a local pub. Actually, the usual hosts had a bunch of questions as well, so we split up the duties, and ended up with a marathon round of 100 questions total. This was just too many, and they really had to fly through them towards the end. But everyone had fun, it seemed. We decided we could run a really kick-ass contest on our own, given the chance.

Here are the questions we asked. See how you do; I'll post the answers in a couple of days.

Back. Just had my "IVU"; a pretty grueling ordeal. After changing into their standard doubly-modest hospital gown (two pieces, plus you leave your underwear on; a far cry from the typical drafty American gown where you have to CYA like a middle-manager), they laid me out on the X-ray table and proceded to inject me with dye and prod me and roll me over for over an hour. At one point they laid me on my back and put two big stone-like things on my kidneys, then strapped a clear plastic band over my torso and tightened, and tightened... I have mammogram empathy now, I guess. Anyway, it'll be a week until my next appointment when I get the results.

Because I had to fast since last night, I treated myself to Diandin Leluk (that Thai place I raved about before) after the procedure. I tried a couple of dishes I hadn't had before -- the chicken coconut soup, and the deep fried chicken in red wine sauce, both of which were merely outstanding, but not at the level where I want to kidnap the chef like on previous visits.

Who's bad? From the coach's report of yesterday's game:

Ventz 5pm scored an impressive 7-0 win against Summer Ville. Mark S, Graeme , Jeff , Edward (Guest Player) , Ben(2) and Steven A did the trick for us.

5pm walloped Sumer Ville 7-0! We never looked back after Mark's 5min headed goal from a corner. Great result for such a new team. Opponents were missing a few regulars but still 7-0..................! The 5pm team is going well with about 20 players but still needs games to gel them together as its a mix of new and old recruits.

That's right, baybee... The game-winner, coming up from playing defense. And we shut them out to boot.

Obviously, I've been feeling better; no pain at all yesterday or today so far. I'm just now leaving to go get my extensive X-rays, though.

Yes! I'm so glad they caught this guy. Friends of mine were at the Olympic Park hours before the bombing, and easily could have been victims. I hope they catch all the people that have been helping him too, and lock 'em up.

Coping. The past few days have been more tolerable, as I've taken ot the strategy of uber-medicating myself at the first hint of pain. Tomorrow I get the super X-ray, where they inject me with dye (I'm hoping it's just a regular needle, and not one of those big ol' amniocentesis needles), which I'm expecting to look something like this.

Interesting possibilities ahead -- I may have to jet the country temporarily after my temporary dependent pass expires in week or two, while Marjorie's back in the US. So, I'm having to pick somewhere nearby that I can get a decent deal to. Marjorie's given me a list of places that I'm not allowed to go without her, for safety, medical, and jealousy concerns, including Cambodia, Burma, and Borneo. I'm leaning towards a place that I had never heard of before yesterday -- Fukuoka, a city on the south island of Japan, which looks to have a lot of interesting historical and cultural sites, as well as having all the mod cons. Japan is awfully far away, though; I never realized before coming out here, but it's as long from Singapore to Tokyo as it is from Atlanta to Anchorage, Alaska.

Today was K2 graduation. As the kindergarten at my school is gigantic, this lasted WAY too long! The kids did really well though. The parents (in general, not our class parents) were obnoxious though: They were all armed with camcorders to film every moment and had them stuck in our faces for every second of the two hours and pushed their ways into the area taped off to be seating for the kids so the kids had to sit in the tiniest little space with the knees of parents practically in their backs.
One more week and we're free for the summer.
Mark's still hurty. Poor thing. Selfishly, I just hope he passes the stones before I go home to the States so I don't have to worry about him being hospitalized when I'm away.

The Pain-O-Meter. For those of you keeping score at home, it got about up to a 9 last night after I blogged. That lasted only fifteen minutes until the drugs kicked in. It came back a half an hour later, but again only lasted fifteen minutes or so. Got to sleep around 2am, and slept fine until 9am when the pain birds woke me up again. I'd rate it a 6 right now. It's moving down a bit -- now it feels like I've been kicked in the, uh, tackle, but at least it's moving along.

Today was better; I had a few impending attacks that seemed to be held off by the drugs. Actually, it's coming on pretty bad again right now and I'm waiting for the pills to kick in.

Forgot to mention; the four different drugs they gave me yesterday came to a grand total of S$7.15 (like, US$4). Crazy! A country where drugs aren't priced like a luxury item.

Ouchy. C'mon, pills, do your thing.

I left school yesterday when Mark called me from the hospital. I told my kids I had to go because of an "emergency" so today they had questions. First question: "Why did you leave yesterday?" My response:"I had a friend in the hospital and I needed to go and make sure he was okay". Their next question: "Was your friend your husband?". My response: "Yes, it was my husband". Next question: "Did you kiss?" followed by many giggles. Me: "Okay now, let's get started on our calendar."

If you've ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, you remember the scene where they pin Private Pyle to his bed, and the whole platoon takes a whack at him with a bar of soap wrapped in a towel; afterwards he lies there in bed just crying and going "Ow, ow ow"... That's a pretty good summary of my morning. Worst pain ever (and you're talking to a guy whose doctor bent his broken arm the wrong way when trying to set it). I had a 10:30 am appointment to see the doctor; I was up at 5 a.m. from the pain; by 8:45 it was so bad that I just went in for my appointment early to see if they could do something. They were all very nice and accommodating. The X-ray seems to show a good size stone in my left kidney; the pain is probably from a smaller piece in my urethra. I got some new meds: a painkiller, an antacid, an antibiotic, and some sort of liquid (potassium citrate) that's supposed to help break up the stone. I have an appointment for some further, more extensive X-rays, then who knows, maybe that ultrasonic thing. I wish there was something they could amputate.

Woke up yesterday and today to some pretty nasty abdominal pain that didn't seem related to any digestive issues. Today it was bad enough that I figured I had to go do something about it, so I hopped a cab down to Singapore General Hospital. After having my temperature taken at the door and being fitted with a mask (for SARS prevention), I was admitted and given a urine test and had X-rays taken. I'm glad I went down when I did, because by the time all the testing was going on, the pain really became excrutiating. They gave me a shot of something in me bum that seemed to fix me up okay; I'm fine now. No conclusive results yet, but they seem to think it's kidney stones -- a prognosis which, though not life-threatening, promises lots of of pain. Fun fun. I go to see a specialist tomorrow.

Has it been a year already? One year ago today we became husband and wife. Our first year together was nothing if not eventful. Love ya, sweetheart.

We decided not to make a huge deal out of the day. We did go out for champagne brunch at the Ritz, though. We usually don't go in for the chilled fork, lifted pinky, "More scones, love?" sort of scene but we really had quite an excellent time. The free flow of champagne didn't hurt (at least, not until later).

Apartment hunting on Saturday yielded three no-gos and one place that was super nice, tons of room (three bedrooms!), beautiful greenery out the balcony, big beautiful pool, in our price range -- all in the middle of nowhere (Bukit Timah/PIE area). We were all ready to commit to it, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the isolation would be a constant, daily frustration. Bummer. We keep looking.

Next week is K2 graduation (in spite of the fact that we have one more week of school afterwards). I'm recommending that one of my students not graduate, and spend another year in K2. He's a sweet kid, but he's extremely disorganized and my suspicion is he will probably be diagnosed as learning disabled at some future date (and I'm a Special Ed teacher usually). I've got to meet with his parents and tell them this next week, and I'm really, really dreading it. I've made more than one parent cry in my time working with special needs kids, I was hoping for a break this year. I hope they take the news well.

Wildlife spotting. Most of my wildlife spotting has not been in restaurants, unless you want to count animals that are already cleaned and gutted for cooking. Today, however, while lunching at a local restaurant, I spotted a little nose and whiskers poking out from under a refrigerator in a curtained-off cubbyhole. I first thought mouse, then rat. But then the little critter came out from his cover completely to sniff some section of the floor, and I could tell right away (from all the nature shows I've watched) that it was a shrew. Most probably an Asian musk shrew. For some reason I feel better that it wasn't a rat or a mouse, but apparently these guys are just as qualified to be labelled "vermin". I know every restaurant deals with things like this, but there seemed to be several of them there, and they were infringing on the guest area, so I don't see any need to go back to this place...

Enlightenment on the subway. I've always thought that, if I were a black person, say, I would just go around, boldly, into places that don't see a lot of black people. And if anyone said anything nasty, or gave me dirty looks, well then, why would I care what a racist thinks?

Today on the ride home I found myself feeling sheepish, because I was carrying home the dry-cleaning I took in earlier for Marjorie, which included a nice flowery dress. I even kind of folded it so that it wasn't so visible.

It dawned on me. What a hypocrite I am!

There are a lot of attitudes out here that I would consider sexist, and for some reason I was worried that some of these guys would see me as -- I don't know, not wearing the pants in the relationship? Just because I was so obviously doing something laundry-related for my wife. It's not like I was even doing the laundry; I was just a courier.

If I care so much about what sexist people think, what makes me think I would be so casual about racism?

Deep, huh. Riding mass transit gives you lots of time to think.

Today, before dismissal, my class and I sang a very interesting rendition of "Old MacDonald" where we ended up discussing animal sounds in several different languages (Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Hindi, and English). Apparently cats "say" the same meow and cows "moo" in all of our countries, there's some variation in the sounds of roosters, ducks, and horses though. I love these kinds of discussions with my class. And I love hearing them talk to each other in other languages. There are frequent Korean and Japanese conversations in our class. I'm ready for the school year to end, but I will miss these types of experiences.
On a completely different note......Singapore has a SARS channel on TV now. Really, a TV station devoted to SARS. Sadly, I suspect the ratings will be pretty good.

The Matrix, Retarded. Saw it with my boss, and we tried to figure it out afterwards, and decided that we might trying to make sense of something that the creator doesn't even have a clear picture of. When the audience is laughing at the movie, not with it, there's something wrong. Obviously, not without its entertaining points, but the fight scenes got boring, the psychobabble was laid on thick, and the plot was almost incomprehensible. I'm surprised as anyone that it sucked for reasons other than Keanu Reeves.

Spam, spam, spam. I've been getting more and more spam these days. One spammer in particular has been offering me a "free trial of HGH" every day -- sometimes two or three times a day -- for the past two months. He keeps varying his mailings to sneak around the filters I have set up. If they ever catch him, I hope it's in Singapore, although maybe a thorough caning is too good for him.

Bossman is reconfiguring our web site and mail server. He says that "dictionary attack" emails (which come from spammers who are trying every stinking word in the dictionary at your hostname -- like aardvark@yourhost.com, abacus@yourhost.com, abalone@yourhost.com -- in an effort to discover addresses they can send spam to) are coming in at a rate of more than one per second.

I can't believe this problem is still ongoing. In fact, it's getting worse. Spam accounts for something like 40% of all email traffic these days. Why can nothing be done? I've seen proposals for a pay system -- where it would cost you something like a nickel per email. I would be in favor.

By the way, it's a bad idea to leave your email address when you post comments; spammers seek them out and add them to their lists.

Pain in the *ss. For a while there, I was actually developing a butt. I even had to buy a pair of fat pants. But, now that I've been getting into some kind of shape, it seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic concerns aside, my job pretty much requires sitting on it all day -- and even with a fairly plush chair, it's been increasingly sore. I even had to use a pillow this past weekend when we rented the car.

In other local news, just when it looked like we were about to be declared SARS-free, somebody goes and mucks it up. And, they've declared martial law across the water in Sumatra. Nothing to worry about here, though; the only time Sumatra seems to affect Singapore at all is when it catches fire.

Some random driving today landed us way out on the west coast of S'pore, where there are acres and acres of cemetaries. Apparently this is where everyone who dies here ends up. Interesting, in that the cemetaries are segregated; we drove through the Hindu and Chinese sections, and also past a number of [something]-atoriums, where they had hundreds of little lockers, presumably for burial urns containing the cremated remains. On a small, densely populated island, what else would you expect?

Marjorie drove for a little bit, out in the middle of nowhere; her first left-side-of-the-road driving experience. She did well. But after I took the wheel back, somehow we suddenly found ourselves on the north part of the island, and almost drove into the Malaysia checkpoint by mistake.

We figured we had to go out to dinner, since we had a car. We did Mexican twice already this week, but it was at the places in Holland Village, which are passable at best. So this time we hit Margaritas, which, near as we can tell, is the only place in town that "gets" Mexican food. Num.

Singapore is a different city when you're behind the wheel. We rented a car today, to drive around and look at neighborhoods where we might want to live. It was really strange, having not driven for almost six months, to suddenly have to do it from the wrong side of the road. It wasn't too horrible, but I did get to remember a lot of things I hated about owning a car. Had to blunder our way around a bit. It's quite easy to get lost, even on familiar roads, if you've never actually DRIVEN on them before. I had to come back home and zonk out for a few hours after a while; the concentration and tension involved in driving in this unfamiliar environment can be pretty exhausting. Anyway, we found some pretty nice areas, and didn't run over anyone or anything, so that's good.

Goooooooaaaaal! Today is a national holiday (Vesak Day) in Singapore, so we had a soccer game scheduled for 9 this morning. I was supposed to be playing defense, but at one point I snuck up... and scored! Collected the ball on the 18 yard line, beat a man inside and launched a beautiful curling shot into the far side of the net. I've been playing better and better with each passing week, and having more and more fun. I could do without these 9 a.m. games though. That nasty equatorial sun made the second half brutal...

We're thinking of renting a car this weekend, to drive around and look at apartments. I haven't driven in nearly six months; should be interesting.

We're also considering a trip to Japan in August, to coincide with the Summer Sonic 2003 music festival. Looks like a fantastic line-up. I don't know if I'll be able to swing this, work-wise, though. Even if I can, we can't seem to figure out how to buy tickets.

Your quote of the day:

"You know the world is off-tilt when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." --Charles Barkley

We're working on a "poets and penfriends" unit in my class. The past two weeks we've been focused on poetry. I've been trying to instill my love for Shel Silverstein to my class and it seems to be working.
This week we've been focused on different styles of poetry. This is the Haiku we wrote today. I suppose it's debatable whether "squirrel" is one or two syllables. For the purpose of our Haiku it's one:

Big tree, brown branches
Squirrels climb on trees, birds fly by
Trees are really strong.

They did it on their own, clapping out the syllables. Not bad for a kindergarten class.

Blast from the past. Dug this up recently -- something I posted on the internet on 22 December 1992, when I was going to school in Orlando, and working at Kennedy Space Center. Was this really more than ten years ago? I refuse to believe it.

WHY MY DRIVE TO WORK IS MORE INTERESTING THAN YOURS

Mile 7: Leave civilization, enter Bithlo. Home of more junkyards per capita than any other city. I don't mean to imply that the place is "redneck", but I live in morbid fear that my foreign car will break down here some day. If you're black, forget it.

Mile 12: Pass a local baptist church bent on ridding the nation of the evil scourge of evolutionary theory. They have a road sign with replacable letters -- past signs have read "FOSSILS -- WHAT DO THEY MEAN?", "DINOSAUR MYSTERY EXPLAINED", and "MYTHS OF EVOLUTION".

Mile 15: Enter the city of Christmas, famous only for it's post office (you can guess why, and you can guess when).

Mile 17: The chicken mailbox. Papier mache monstrosity of a chicken, that lasted about 3 days before a drunken redneck took a Louisville Slugger to it and knocked off its head.

Mile 20: Pass Gator Jungle, a tourist attraction. Basically an alligator zoo, remarkable in that the entire building facing the road is shaped like a huge gator. Tourists enter through the mouth, which is open to reveal sparkling white fiberglass teeth.

Just last week there was an accident immediately opposite Gator Jungle where a guy in a Cordoba plowed dead-on into a cow that had wandered into the road. They guy's car was totalled, and the cow was reduced to a steaming heap of beef.

Miles 22-27: Swampland -- airboat rides, poor people fishing, and a boiled peanut stand.

Mile 29: A gas station called "Space Shuttle Fuels". I resist the urge daily to pull in and ask the guy to fill it up with liquid hydrogen.

Mile 32: Space Camp, featuring a life-size mockup of the space shuttle overlooking the road. One day there was smoke coming out of the engines, but it turned out it was just a fire.

Mile 33: Cross the Indian River, replete with manatees (sea cows), dolphins and guys in clamming boats (who are out there at sunup, regardless of the weather).

Miles 35-40: During mating season, alligators can be regularly be seen haunting the canals on the side of the road. Once saw a tourist (or "touron" as they are known) who had pulled over and was taunting a gator, with his young son behind him. He was apparently oblivious to the fact that gators can move much faster than humans. Natural selection will swiftly weed out this sort of stupidity, I hope.

Mile 41: Spaceport USA. Features the multi-million dollar Astronaut Memorial, a black monolith with the names of dead astronauts engraved in it, which is supposed to continually rotate to face the sun, so that the astronauts names are continually emblazoned. It has never worked right.

Mile 43: Work: sit down, telnet back 43 miles to UCF, and bring up Usenet.

I've been meaning to do something like this; the May Day Project, where you document a day in your life with pictures. Soon, I promise. In the meanwhile, it's a fun site to poke around. A surprising number of Singaporeans participated.

Happy Mother's Day to me mum and mother-in-law!

Homeward Bound. I'm coming home in June. I booked a ticket last night. I got the amazingly cheap SARS deal on Cathay Pacific, I have to change planes in Hong Kong, but the tickets only approx. $550 USD. I'm stopping in LA for a few days coming and going to visit friends (thanks Kristina and Michael!) and break up the painfully long flight from Sin to ATL and back.
I've been so homesick lately. I'm ready to be home with my friends and family, and the puppies.

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 the priest, 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).

I'm back! We've had unfortunate appliance problems lately, the most recent of which has left me without a computer to blog on (I could technically blog from work, but feel I'm being spied on). Now that I'm able to get to the blog I see that Mark's already blogged about everything interesting that's happened this week (flying lizard...trivia domination). Oh well.
I have to work tomorrow (Saturday). The kiddies are going for an orientation for orientation for 1st grade and I (for some reason) am needed. Shouldn't complain though as public school teachers in Singapore have to work EVERY Saturday. I really can't imagine having to teach 6 days a week every week. Must suck.
BTW, I won't be teaching next year. I was nicely given the option to just sign a contract until the end of this June (as opposed to next June) and took it. The school is great, the kids are great, but honestly I don't love teaching. And I did love my last job, so I know it's possible. So as of June, I'll be unemployed again. This time though I'll have contacts into the special ed. world in Singapore so hopefully I'll be able to find a job assessing special needs infants. If not, maybe I'll look into starting my own company...something that may well be possible here. I'm just not sure if I want to commit to a business, or to Singapore (for more then 6 more months).

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. Bid Microsoft adieu and go install Linux.

I know everyone thinks Microsoft is scrupulous and honest and non-manipulative, but I'm starting to wonder.

Weekly geeking. The choice of text editor is a crucial decision for computer programmers. Fierce loyalties develop, much in the same way chefs will swear by a set of knives, or pit crew bosses a particular brand of motor oil.

Just yesterday my boss strongly suggested that I switch to Emacs, so that we could exchange tips, use particular modes, etc. I told him, flat out, "No".

This is not stubbornness, or Ludditism. I know Emacs very well, and swore by it for many years -- I used to even joke that it was my religion. But lately I've had to wander back into the Unix environment a bit, and have been messing around with Emacs sparingly, and -- the honeymoon is over. I find it awkward and stupid now. A big clumsy overachiever who doesn't play nice with the other kids.

I still use it when I'm in Unix and need some power feature, like macros. But (and I never thought I'd ever say this), I've found that I prefer vi. It's a moronic editor on many levels, but it's lightweight and reliable, and doesn't leave me frustrated nearly as often.

In Windows I'll be sticking with TextPad. This is as fine a piece of software as I've ever used, and I recommend it highly.

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?

Flying things. While at Singapore's superb Jurong Bird Park yesterday, we were buzzed by many fascinating birds in their aviaries, but the coolest thing that buzzed us was not even a bird. We were just walking down a path when a flying lizard skimmed just over our heads, alighting on a thin tree just in front of us. How cool is that? He wasn't part of any exhibit; in fact, it was probably a stupid place for him to be hanging out. 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.

Also while in the bird park, we had a good sighting of a new bird species that we can actually count because he wasn't part of any exhibit. In the surrounding trees we spotted a Goldenback woodpecker. We aren't sure if it was the Common or Greater variety, though.

There were several new outstanding exhibits at the park, including the waterfall aviary (a meshed-in enclosure as big as a small stadium) and the Windows on Paradise, where we watched the male birds of paradise put on wild displays for the females. Like the zoo, the encounters are in-your-face, without a safety screen. Nice to be in a country where civil litigation isn't running the show...

Sorry for the lack of blogs on my part. I've been worn out after work every day this week, and just haven't felt up to blogging. And it seems the longer I go without blogging the less inclined I am to blog (kinda like exercising).
Nothing much to report this week. We met Angie, a fellow Singaporean blogger last night, as she was gracious enough to invite us out. Thanks again Angie, it was a pleasure to meet you.
School is going well, but I've decided not to renew my contract for next year. As such, my employment pass will be expiring shortly after the 7th of June. I'm thinking of starting my own business, as there appears to be no agency here that specializes in working with infants with special needs (and I'm sure there is a need), but I'm not sure I want to deal with all the logistics that go with owning and operating your own business. We'll see what happens.
I'm probably going to come back to the States in July, as I really can't bear waiting until December ( I need a burrito! and I'm out of all of my Aveda products and can't get them here). Mark will not be accompanying me, unfortunately. If I'm invited (hint, hint Kristina, Michael, and Alison) I'm thinking of stopping in LA on my way to ATL for a few days, and spending a few days in Portland, OR. on the way home. Any interest in coming to Atlanta, Karen? If not with some cajoling I might be willing to go to NYC. It'd be wonderful if I could see all of my favorite women in one trip!
Congratulation to my father for surviving another tax season and ridding himself of an annoying co-worker. Good for you Dad!

Interesting. A grocery store that was sealed off in 1952 is being auctioned. Be sure to check out the pictures. I bet the Twinkies are still edible. Or, at least as edible as when they started.

Gee, it's nice to be out of Georgia.

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 was accompanited by a very unappetizing picture of a bowl of grayish looking broth with some sort of organ floating in it. How easy it would be for them to film 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. The AC which I thought was fixed has quit on us again. My faith in the repair people in this town has gone from slim to nonexistent. 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. Maybe I'll start drinking more Singapore slings.

Hooray! AC and light bulb are fixed. I had the guys who were fixing the AC take a look at removing the light bulb. The guy just got on a ladder, and wiggle-wiggle-wiggle-pop! and the bulb was out. No twisting involved.

Further exciting bulletins as events warrant!

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.)

The light bulb. Okay, at my Dad's request, here's two shots of the light bulb in the kitchen that has us stumped. The base of the bulb is inset about four to six inches into the ceiling, making it very difficult to get at. I've tried twisting the bulb part a little bit, which was a bad idea, as it now is ready to break off. I need something like a plumber's wrench with six-inch tips to grab the base around the bulb.

(I know there are bigger problems in the world, but bear with me, everyone... Brainstorming on engineering problems is very much a family thing; a big part of growing up, which I'm very grateful for! Non-family input is still definitely welcome.)

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 wonderful sauces and prawn crackers and such.

I miss the days of central air conditioning!!! We have two wall air-con units in our apartment, one of which is currently not working, the other which drips water constantly, but irregularly (all night long). We live in the tropics and air conditioning is not a luxury, it's a must. We've been miserable for the last few days. The repair guys here now, but as with all repairs we've experienced so far in Singapore, this will seemingly not be a quick fix. Sigh. We also have a light out in the kitchen that we've been unable to replace. We're too stupid to figure out how to get the old lightbulb out (in our defense it's broken and in a concave hole thingy so difficult to get to). Our apartment is falling to shit all around us. And it's too small. I'm ready to move.
Other than that, things are going well. I have three new students in my class now (up to 8 total), two of which don't speak English, but so far so good. The SARS paranoia (or is it just caution) has invaded the school. Each morning we have to meet the kids in the auditorium after they go through a line up with nurses checking them to make sure none of them are sick. The process takes forever so I've had to so up an hour early at work (with all the other teachers) every day this week which truly bites. So far I've been able to explain this process to the kids in a way that makes sense to them. I don't want to scare them, and we've been told by the administration that it's not our place to talk to the kids about SARS. Fair enough, but I wonder how they perceive all this mania.

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? Any clue on how to prevent them?

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). What struck me was what they had by the front entrance -- 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!

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.

Several new birds were spotted, but only one positively identified: the white-headed munia.

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.

Cheers from the Southern hemisphere. We arrived in Bali yesterday and went out to see traditional dancing last night. We had a fantastic day today; took a water sports tour out Nusa Lembongan, and snorkeled, sea-kayaked (even in the nearby reef break!), swam, rode a banana boat, hopped in a glass-bottom boat... Lots of fun and sun. We took the fast catamaran out, and I guess due to the sagging tourist industry out here, had the boat to ourselves, with our own three-person crew. (Some people who missed the boat in the morning joined us for the trip back, though.) Tomorrow we're thinking of trying some surfing in the morning, then going to see Ulu Watu, a temple on a cliff.

Since we'll be south of the equator tomorrow, I was going to do a test to see if toilets really do flush clockwise on one side of the equator and counter on the other (the official word on why they do that is that they don't). Unfortunately, the water in our toilet here just kind of goes down. I'll file a breathless report from Bali because I know you are all curious.

Today's SARS looniness:

Hong Kong is taking the temperature of all departing visitors.

Amazingly, scientists have already sequenced the genome. This should hopefully lead to a SARS test, very soon, which will help to quarantine people before they start coughing on everyone. Go, Western medicine!

And in a gross overreaction, our apartment complex has closed our swimming pool, conference room, and weight room until further notice.

You know what's really insidious about this SARS thing? The symptoms play on your imagination. Let me explain.

One of the main symptoms is a dry cough.

Think, dry cough. Drrryyyyy cooouuughhhh.

If you're not already coughing, you're probably at least feeling a tickle in the back of your throat. With just a soupçon of mental effort, it's not hard to imagine shortness of breath, neck pain, or a fever...

Last minute scare. It turns out that as of this week, Indonesia wants a visa. Even our travel agent didn't know. They issue it at the airport, but I don't know WHAT would've happened if we had shown up without the required passport photos. I thought we were going to have to scramble out this evening to take some sweaty photos taken, but we managed to scrape some up. It's still going to cost us an extra US$100, which is a stinker. Good plan, Indonesia, for reviving your lagging tourist industry.

Pouty. Boo hoo, no Borneo. We decided that there's too much there to see in four days. Even just the Malaysian part of Borneo is bigger than all of the other part of Malaysia that we're attached to. And the Mulu cave area that I wanted to see is a long haul from the city where you can initially fly into. So we're having to "settle" for Bali. This will be Marjorie's first time south of the equator. Yes, we'll be careful. We're not the kind to hang out in the heavily touristed areas anyway.

I've been playing around with The Gimp (the open source answer to Photoshop), which is why the blog title is now three-dimensional. Exciting, yes? I saved it in a graphics format (PNG) that's not compatible with all browsers, yet, so let me know if the title doesn't appear for you. I think you must agree that the fancy title gives this blog a level of class that it richly fails to deserve.

Legitimate. Right, it's official now, I'm an expat. I (finally) got my work permit today, good until April 2005. I feel like I just received a diploma, graduating into another level of traveler. Official expatdom, apparently getting a job and an apartment here weren't enough to do the trick.
Mark's pouty. We're going to Bali, not to Borneo. Life clearly sucks when these are your choices. We went to a party recently at a house and experienced house (or at least space) envy after living in our tiny one bedroom apartment, but over dinner we realized somewhere we made a choice, a house or Bali, right now we choose Bali.

Malaysia is our target destination next week for Marjorie's spring break. We were thinking of going back to Tioman, but figured, we can always go there on a weekend; why not do something a little further away while we have the time? So now we're thinking Borneo. It looks, just, incredible. If for some reason it doesn't happen, I'm going to be awfully pouty.

For convoluted reasons my employment pass here is delayed, and officially I'm working for a Hong Kong company. Marjorie's pass is going to come through now, so I'm signing on as a dependent.

Filling out the form to become a dependent, I notice it has the following options:

Wife
Child

Which am I, again?

Marjorie doesn't have SARS. I thought I'd make that point first -- before mentioning that she has a slight fever. SARS starts with a high fever and several other symptoms she doesn't have. She went to the doctor today, who prescribed some antibiotics; in fact, to take off work in this town, you pretty much have to have a doctor's note. What stinks is that I can't buy a thermometer for her anywhere, because spooked Singaporeans have bought up the whole stock. I've been seeing more and more people wearing surgical face masks, which are pretty much useless, except for keeping you from spreading it if you already have it.

So I'm trying to decide whether there's anything to this SARS thing to be afraid of, or is it just hype? I think the answer is, it's something to watch out for. It probably wouldn't kill us if we caught it, but it does have a mortality rate much higher than your typical influenza. SARS doesn't have as high a mortality rate as the West Nile virus we had back in Atlanta; it just spreads a lot faster. It's far more dangerous to the young and old, but it has killed some people who were in their prime. So we're being careful. I thought they had it under control, but some new cases sprung up today, both here and in Hong Kong.

There's an text message making the rounds on people's cell phones:

Nobody cares if I live or die, but everyone cares if I cough.

Took a quick jaunt up the road to the MacRitchie Reservoir for some nature spotting today. It's a fine, fine place to visit, with nicely groomed walking trails, a boardwalk around the water, and some nature trails. There were few birds to be seen, but the calls were could occasionally hear were not the usualy calls we hear around our section of town. As we walked along we came across a pack of twenty or so long-tailed macaques! They were all a little too tame; only just a little bit leery of us. There was one large male, obviously the alpha, who wasn't frightened at all, even when a jogger went by. Several of the babies weren't too afraid either.

We had to curtail our visit due to an encroaching thunderstorm, but on our way back to the bus stop we investigated a loud bird call coming from a high tree. We were disappointed to see what looked like a pair of your average mynahs, but a closer look revealed they had more striking features. Turns out they were hill mynahs, which are a relatively rare sight in Singapore.

We took the long way back on the bus, and ended up passing this humongous Buddhist complex, which we're definitely going to have to check out later on...

Wacky! The Singapore government has extended all primary school closings until the 16th due to SARS. My school however is undecided about whether we will be closed the whole time or not. I was told to tell all my families that we will be closed on Monday and they can check the website after 2pm Monday for information regarding the rest of the week. We (teachers) have also been told not to be too attached to our spring break (which was supposed to be the 14-18) and the end of the year date (presently June 7). Of course teachers had to go in everyday last week and have to report on Monday as well, so if spring break is cancelled we will get no break at all. This sucks.

Here's a series of images just for you Mom. I know you're surrounded by a lot of depressing stuff right now. Hopefully this/these will add a smile to eveyone's day.
love
birth
bear
what?
dance

Geeky stuff. The New York Times has this article about the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which I was involved with for several years. The article does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit and intensity of the event. The combined brain power in that one room is staggering; I don't know why more companies don't recruit there. I was on teams competing in the finals, twice (finishing 16th and 5th overall -- "toot! toot!" goes my own horn), and the whole experience has to count as my fondest memory -- the time of my life. If you've ever been a part of a team that was focused and driven with all of their being towards achieving some goal, you know what I'm talking about. You just feel more alive. And I learned sooooo much; almost as much as I did in all my other college classwork put together.

We worked hard, similar to the teams mentioned in the article, drilling for six or seven hours every Saturday, with additional meetings during the week. But it never seemed like work. We did some crazy things in the practice drills. The practice room was made to be intentionally noisy, and bright lights were shone in our teams faces occasionally (like a roving cameraman), because that's what happens in the international competitions. We would occasionally foul up the judging, again, because that's what happens in the international competitions, and we wanted the team members to be prepared for it, and deal with it, and move on. To increase our rigor, we would sometimes have a practice where we were only given an editor, and no compiler, and we had to submit programs without ever compiling them. That was tough. We knew our strengths and weaknesses; teams would get to the point where they could look at a set of contest problems and immediately tell who was going to solve what.

The contest is limited to college students only. Plus, because of the ACM's stupid eligibility requirements, once you've competed nationally twice, you can't compete anymore. So it had to all come to an end. I would love to find something where I could experience that level of intensity again some day.

Old jokes. I'm on an email general discussion list with a guy who works for a university translating Latin texts. He just posted these jokes, which were written down in A.D. 400 (though they might be older than that). And I thought my grandfather told some old jokes!

A student who wanted to teach his ass not to chew on things stopped giving him food. When the ass died from hunger, he said: "What a disaster! Just when I had taught him not to chew, he goes and dies on me."

A friend asked a student who was travelling overseas: "Could you please buy me two slaves, each fifteen years old." He replied: " If I can't find what you want, I'll buy you one who is thirty."

A couple of good-for-nothing students were complaining to one another that their fathers were still alive. One said: "How about we each kill our father?" "No way," said the other. "That would make us parricides. But if you like, I'll kill yours and you can kill mine."

A fellow ran into a student and said to him: "The slave you sold me has died." "By the gods," he replied, " he never did anything like that when he was with me."

A student was on a voyage and a storm sprung up. When his servants started wailing, he said: "Don't wail. I've left you all your liberty in my will."

A student invited to a meal didn't eat. When one of the guests asked him why he wasn't eating, he replied: "In case I appear to have come for the food."

A student writing to his father from Athens, thoroughly proud of what he had learnt, added: "I hope I will find you charged in a capital case, so I can show you my skill as a lawyer."

Hmm. Even though I love Mutts, I have to say that Mark's new icon annoys me. It doesn't match the rest of the blog asthetics. Does it bother anyone else?

Sudden acute respiratory silliness. Marjorie reports seeing people on the MRT (subway) with surgical masks. I haven't noticed any yet, but my head is usually in a book.

The guy who scooped my ice cream today, though, was wearing one. They also had a sign up, talking about the anti-bacterial cleansing agent they're using in defense of SARS. Which would be really helpful if SARS was a bacteria.

We could still visit Thailand now if we wanted, like we did a few weeks back, but because we're from Singapore, we'd have to wear a mask the entire time. Imagine the tan lines.

My soccer coach sent out an email, saying that anyone who shows symptoms at this Sunday's game will be sent home. He is also temporarily suspending the communal jug of Tang we use for hydration.

Hong Kong just sent out text messages to six million cell phone users, trying to quash a rumor that they've been declared an "infected" city.

Crazy times...

It bothered me that the little counter I had over to the left only counted civilian casualties, as if they were the only ones that counted. So now I've changed it to a link to a page with a more complete assessment. While we're on the subject, you can read some accounts from the front line, if you have a strong stomach...

On a lighter note, as for my new icon, thanks go to the amazing Patrick McDonnell and his comic strip Mutts.

Good day for nature sightings: I saw a little green and black tree snake climbing up a fence on my way back to school from lunch today. Leaving work I saw a Kingfisher, I've never seen one so far away from the water before. I also saw the back of an unidentified olive bird and heard the calls of several new (sounding) unidentified birds. I'm definately taking the S.E. Asia bird book to work with me tomorrow, since the kids aren't in (due to SARS) I may take a long lunch break to stroll around the campus looking for critters.

Great quote I just read from late physicist Richard Feynman:

Einstein was a giant.

His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground.

Those of us who are not so tall have to choose!

We watched part of the infamous Michael Jackson documentary tonight, which was finally on TV here. Yes, he's messed up in some ways. But I came away thinking what a nice guy he is, in general, and what a jerk the interviewer was. The way he tried to twist everything the wrong way was really offputting. I don't believe the accusations against MJ at all, and I'm not even a fan.

Found this postcard, which I had to buy because it's exactly the view I see when I walk out of my (work) building. Most afternoons, I can be found sitting along these walkways, having an ice cream. To the left, just off the picture, is a giant video screen that plays the same commercials in a loop, repeating every two minutes or so, for months on end. I have them all memorized.