Add “proxy.singnet.com.sg” on port “8080″ to your browser Internet connection settings. It must have been SingNet’s proxies going crazy again.
StarHub users need not worry. It’s normal for this website to load slowly for you; they don’t have enough international bandwidth to support grabbing pages speedily from the United States. Boo to them.
Singapore’s Internet infrastructure is way too “koyak” for companies to even consider setting up their websites here!
I’ve been using the current bag for many years, and the thing is starting to fall apart bit by bit. First, the plastic bits of the clip that secures around the chest area broke off. Next, some of the strap looping plastic bits started breaking off. All in all, it was like holding a possession that’s on the verge of demise.
I think it is most probably my fault, because these bags aren’t designed to hold heavy loads like laptops, chargers, files that are bursting at its seams, and the few stray blood donation stress balls I’ve chucked in after the donation drives (and forgot to take out).
I peeked into the bottom of the bag, and saw a few receipts, dog-eared notes that came in odd sizes, pieces of Post-it, as well as an unidentifiable piece of black substance. Its suspicious appearance and absence of odour made it hard for me to jump to any conclusions, but it looks very likely to be decomposed piece of sweet. It doesn’t look or feel sticky, so it could simply be shedding from some poorly made stuff I shoved into my bag haphazardly many years ago.
Ah yes, my dirty little secret is laundered right over the Internet: I’ve been incubating secret experiments with black matter for years! It’s unfortunate that my bag is failing, so I need to find a new host for the flora of rubbish (and associated icky stuff) before I have to bring my school stuff in a Carefour supermarket plastic bag.
So, I’m in the market for a new bag. Does anyone have any suggestions where I can get a new host for my garbage that is:
Ok-looking (I don’t need stylish)
Easy to clean
Holds a laptop, and lots of other stuff while remaining-
-small enough
Cheap
I’m not a brand-conscious person, so I assess a bag as if it were made by some nameless company. Of course, if said branded goods is cheap and good, I won’t hesitate to plonk down the cash on the spot! That said, I’m a guy (in case this is your first time reading this blog), so I don’t really qualify for the stuff sold in most blog shops (they’re generally ladies’ bags).
There’re quite a few cool things I’d like to share with you:
Bloons Tower Defense 3:
There’s the first game, the second game, all within the genre of building static towers hurling projectiles to stop enemies from breaching the goal at the very end. Except that it’s less brutal when you’re popping ballons instead of rupturing some poor monster’s gut.
Now, the third game has just landed on Ninjakiwi, and I’ve already spent half a day popping ballons on 8 different maps — that’s the power of Flash games, my friend. You get curious right when you’re taking a break from working, and the next moment, you’re spending the rest of your productive time trying to beat the frustrating ballons on Hard.
Swings:
Now, most of us whom were born in the 80s and early 90s had a pretty good idea about what a swing was. You sat on the black rubber seat held together by only two long steel chains, and wriggled your body as you swung to-and-fro between kicking curious kids who came too close to your front, and farting at whomever’s pushing you at the rear. It was good clean fun until somebody got hurt, which was a rare occurence, of course.
You get bonus points if your swing chains were semi-rusted, and the support beams quivered dangerously whenever your neighbourhood elephant swung on it. Kudos to your bravery if you went near it at night when it sways purposefully with an eerie creak sound as it swings back and forth with nobody sitting on it.
That aside, I’ve always been curious to know if it is possible to swing an entire round around the crash bar. I never dared to push that hard, because I always got the feeling that I would slip off the seat and crash into the sand pit. Now, somebody has gone and done it.
Not totally awesome stuff, because he did it with two metal rods, instead of the metal chains like we have in Singapore. Nonetheless, it would have been physically impossible for any person to do the flip on a metal-chained swing without external assistance. You would need too much centralfugal force to do that!
YouTube Audio Commenting
It isn’t really something awesome in itself; but rather, the story behind it (or the coincidences) make it newsworthy. Read this Internet comic:
Here’s the letter published in the Straits Times today:
MONDAY’S report, (’Girl’s death: Officer blogs about his guilt’), is disconcerting to the good image of the Singapore Police Force and perplexing to police retirees like myself.
When I was an active officer, we were constantly reminded that personal emotions and opinions should never cloud or affect the performance of any officer.
The only pertinent question that an arresting officer should ask himself is whether he was justified in arresting the suspect.
The older generation of police officers did not endure sleepless nights because we arrested a suspect, nor after being involved in shoot-outs with criminals, some of whom were sent to the gallows eventually.
I may sound callous, but the police officer’s blog is contrary to good order and discipline, which are part of the foundation of the police force. Musings and self-doubt demoralise other officers and, if allowed, may corrode the confidence and professionalism of the police force.
The force should not rule out instituting disciplinary action against such acts as ventilating one’s emotions in a blog. It already has sufficient avenues open for a distressed officer to seek professional help and counselling. Going public with one’s act of contrition isn’t one of them.
Lionel De Souza
Firstly, I do not begrudge his statement that personal emotions and opinions should not prevent a police officer from doing what’s right. I take special exception to De Souza’s assertion that the specific police officer’s blog contravenes good order and discipline.
Pray tell, sir: how does blogging affect one’s discipline? That one’s most pensive thoughts would cause other officers to be demoralised? And how does that cause the police force as a whole to have weakened confidence and professionalism?
A careful reading of the 5th paragraph displays clearly how this author is leading on premise after premise, building each assertion without proper justification of the basis of his claims.
De Souza, are you suggesting that a police officer has no right to express his own opinion and feelings on a personal website? How dare you deny them their right to freedom of speech? Aside from official secrets, which cannot be published as civil servants are bound by the Official Secrets Act, how dare you suggest punishing people for penning their thoughts down when they are off-duty?
If the morale and discipline of the local police force were that easily weakened by an honest posting of a person’s thoughts on the Internet as what De Souza has suggested, it implies that the police officers are not sufficiently trained to contain their human emotions while on the job. That is quite a daring insinuation about the quality of training our police force undergoes, so I hope that he will shed some light on why he believes this to be true.
Lionel concludes his letter with a conclusion: police officers aren’t allowed to show emotions of guilt even while they are off-duty. No siree. Emotions are for human beings, and you’re not allowed to be one.
For a taste of what is to come at local universities, look no further to our local polytechnics.
General Elective Module selection makes students act like hungry mongrels begging for food that’s deliberately made scarce. The seats in each GEM class are sliced up, and some are released for the taking during the multiple registration periods. It’s a system designed to prevent people from dragging large groups of friends into a single class.
It’s also a system that makes it hard for me to get what I want. Last semester, I missed out on taking the Revealing Eye in Digital Photography elective module when the administrative system crashed during my registration period. I was very, very much annoyed that the computers were not robust enough to handle hundreds of students knocking at its door every second. I mean — come on! You know there are ravenous lions coming! Prepare for it!
At least to their credit, they did bulk up the servers this time. Everything still started bogging down the last 3 minutes towards the start of the registration period, but at least I could still go in to snatch the GEM I needed. To be on the safe side, I had both my laptop and desktop logged in to the school administrative system. The 6 browsers on each computer, FireFox, Maxthon, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari were all pointed to the school website.
I was prepared to go over-kill for my GEMs. Thank goodness it wasn’t really needed though; I managed to snatch Learning to Learn for Fridays with only 2 seats left to spare, and 2 minutes of torturous waiting after clicking on the extremely terse confirmation screen. I gave two sighs of relief, and checked 2 of my browsers to make sure I wasn’t thinking too much when I thought that the module didn’t actually register.
Phew! At least this is my very last GEM in poly… Repeating the same elaborate procedure next semester might get somebody hurt real bad… I won’t say who.
I suffered from some serious physical trauma a few days ago, while I was brushing my teeth. Something caused my hand to slip, and caused the toothbrush to ram its hard plastic head into my lower gums. It’s serious because the ulcer that formed stings badly whenever I eat something remotely acidic. And it’s physical trauma because Wikipedia says so.
I pulled down my lower lip in front of the mirror, and saw two angry yellow welt-like stuff that looked as if they were about to burst. Seriously, I was tempted to poke at them. Needles are fun to play with, and physically poking at something that is hurting sometimes feel astonishingly therapeutic to me. I mean, the stuff is hurting by itself already; how much worse could it get?
Alas, the sadomasochistic side of me could not be satisfied this time, because when I physically touched the yellow thing with my index finger, there was a sudden rush of pain that it felt like the entire universe’s suffering and anguish was being stored in those welts. I didn’t touch it afterwards… except with my tongue. The sore tastes strangely salty (does anybody know why?)
Though I feel a lot better now, the ulcers still hurt a lot when I have my meals. Milk seems to soothe the pain, but it’s likely to be acting more as a binding agent to the acid in the food, rather than as an anaesthetic. Thank goodness these kind of ulcers heal eventually, because being punished for eating your favourite food is one of the worse things that can happen to a species that relies on food for sustenance.
I felt like a dead-beaten horse today, so great was the mental inertia that it took cold, hard reasoning to convince myself to go out. When your emotional side starts feeling neutral about stepping out into the world, you know that you’re in trouble.
“So, you’ve realised that, you hermit nerd? What are you going to do about that?” you might ask.
Absolutely nothing!
Eventually, I went out with JJ and Xiang Ju in the evening for dinner. You skirt-chasers! You’re hoping that I hung out with some girls, right? I won’t give you the satisfaction of confirming whether they are guys or gals. Sweet suspension. I’m looking at you Kester.
Yesterday and today was quite chaotic; my DNS host went down, and took with it the entire SgBlogging.com down. Thankfully, the modular nature of the Internet meant that sites on other domains are not affected, as long as the hosting server itself remains up.
Swapping the domain name server for the domain was a nightmare, since the records needed quite some time to propagate through the inter-tubes. In the meantime, all my inbound email were lost. Coupled with me having to manually add the records on an alternate DNS server, it took almost 2 days for the domain to pop back up again.
While the new DNS records spread around the Internet at a snail pace, I had dinner at the Golden Mile Market. It’s the one where NSFs and NSmen go to purchase their army stuff. There’re quite a few nice hawker stalls there. I went for the Hainan Hokkien Mee posted on ieatishootipost.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a queue at the stall when I went there to order. I’ve always thought that Singaporeans will queue up for good food, so being a typical Singaporean myself, I doubted the quality of the food, but the adventurer in me (where is he when I needed the motivation to get out of my house?) decided to try it for heck’s sake.
Heck certainly wasn’t wrong about the tastiness of the Hokkien Mee. Not too far off, at any rate. I don’t think the stall deserved the 4.6 points though. The noodles were well-fried, and I could taste the prawn stock within them, but the taste itself is quite ordinary. Maybe a step above the other hawkers, but it isn’t so good that it gets a distinction. I’d give it a 3.75 out of 5. The portion is very small for $3, and I was only given 1 piece of split prawn.
It left my stomach growling for more attention, so we had some Zui Kuey (水粿） next.
There isn’t much to write about Zui Kuey though. The cake was quite hot, since we ate it right after it came out of the steamer, but since it’s a simple meal, I’d keep my comments similarly simple.
ieatishootipost also recommended the Ice Queen Ice Cream, as well as the Ah Balling Peanut Stall, which I both tried. The gelato at Ice Queen is on par, if not better than some of the gelatos I’ve tasted (I’ve forgotten the name, but update this post if I remember the name). The glutineous rice balls (汤圆) from Ah Balling was tasty and easy to chew. The peanut filling matched well with the translucent skin, and is just the right sweetness. After washing it down with the peanut soup, I was quite satisfied with my meal.
I might have skipped the Zui Kuey if I went for a more filling meal. It was worth the try though. I might try the Char Kway Teow when I stop by the next time, but before that, I need to start burning the calories I’ve eaten today.
