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.