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.