Episode 656: iPhone Owner!

So I've crossed further to the dark side and bought an iPhone 3GS to replace my Nokia N95. Was contemplating several other models, but I figured if I wasn't going to get the latest (I never waste money by buying something that's practically obsolete the moment it's marketed), I might as well get something with social cache, and currently, I think nothing quite trumps the iPhone in that department. (Except possibly the Blackberry, but I'm not too keen on its design.) Spent most of the afternoon fiddling with it, so I've got everything that matters set up, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. Also changed the plan that I'm on, so now I can surf without having to look for a WiFi network if I'm outside. I hope I'm still satisfied with my choice in a week, as this is one of the rare occasions I've got a new mobile without actually having made up my mind beforehand about what model I want, so getting the iPhone was practically on impulse. Am now looking to fill it up with applications (I bought the 32 GB model), so if anyone's got any recommendations, let me know. May just stick some music onto it to fill the space, but I'm not giving up my iPod quite just yet. In fact, I've actually got two. All I need is a Mac and an iPad, and my conversion to the dark side will be complete.

Episode 655: HQ Attachment Day 5

Just got back from cell. Was so sleepy after a day in the office, but I still forced myself to go down to church. In hindsight, not entirely convinced that was actually the right decision. Managed to skim through the whole sheaf of papers I photocopied yesterday, but it was enough to get a gist of what was going on in all the reports. I must say, this week alone has really opened my eyes to just how much goes on at MOE that you never realise as a student or a parent, and possibly even as a teacher first starting out in the job. It's so easy to appropriate corporate jargon and parody it, but the thing is, a lot of the time, I can see the underlying sense to it. It's just that most people won't be prepared to look past the terminology and will instinctively reject whatever's being said. Had lunch today with colleagues in Holland Village's Eating With Fries. It was a quirky place, I suppose, but I wasn't terribly impressed by the food. Conceptually, I think it's brilliant, and I love the random library section just stuck in on the upper floor (although quite why so many of the books are kids' books like Enid Blyton, I don't really know). For a place whose selling point appears to be its wide choice of fries though, the preparation really feels quite pedestrian. It's basically a lot of powdered flavourings that in all likelihood came straight out of a packet from the supermarket!

Episode 654: HQ Attachment Day 4

Slept about seven hours last night, but woke up feeling just a bit more tired than I have for the past couple of days. What gives? Also made it out of the house slightly earlier, so I ended up in the worst of rush hour (human) traffic. Literally crushed from Jurong East to Buona Vista. On the way home though, I seem to have got lucky and missed the human flow by a couple of minutes, as I was on a relatively 'normal' train in the reverse direction. Didn't make it onto the first southbound train that pulled in though. Next one was terminating at Yew Tee, so I did the usual thing of getting off at Bukit Batok and doubling back. Got a seat, read a bit of River Of Gods, and then snoozed all the way home, waking up just in time at Sembawang. Workload starting to grow, so I don't feel like I'm just showing up to browse My Forum anymore! Actually have a pile of stuff to read before Monday, but I'm forcing myself to read it during office hours. No point turning into a workaholic years before it's a necessity! River Of Gods, by the way, is coming to a climactic finish, but I'm definitely not convinced that it's as fantastic as all the blurbs proclaimed. It's good genre fiction, but I don't think it's really doing anything that hasn't been done by other writers before, apart from transplanting the action into a distinctly Oriental setting (which I already pointed out feels like an overly calculated decision). There's already a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe, Cyberabad Days, and Ian McDonald really does seem to be one of the new Gollancz darlings, so bully for him.

Episode 653: HQ Attachment Day 3

How embarrassing. I'm meant to knock off half an hour earlier on Wednesdays, but I totally forgot and was still reading forum posts 10 minutes after I could have left the office. Only realised because my colleague in the neighbouring cubicle asked me why I hadn't gone home. Thank goodness she did because I managed to avoid the worst of rush hour today, so at least once a week, I'll get to ride home in what passes for comfort. I spent pretty much the entire day reading posts on the forum, and it was pretty interesting. There's a lot about the service that I didn't know about, and wouldn't actually have found out until I started teaching for real, so it's good in a way to know what lies ahead. So I can be mentally prepared! Met up with Zilu for lunch at the Biopolis. Haven't had O'Brien's in ages! Anyway, I've been spending my extra time at home watching the new episode of Pretty Little Liars. Sadly, the first cracks are appearing in this show's plot development. Why has Toby suddenly emerged as an alternative love interest for Emily? Was her lesbian exploration with Maya hurting the ratings? Or are we headed for a heady love triangle on a family network? Also not impressed by how the Ezra-Aria romance has temporarily been scuppered. Dude was sticking his neck out to date his student, but now at the least sign of trouble, he develops trust issues and bails? Seriously? Oh well. Next up, the new season premiere of Warehouse 13!

Episode 652: HQ Attachment Day 2

Didn't have anything to do in the morning, so I spent time clearing old e-mails, of which I have a lot, thanks to GMail's ever-growing storage. Also managed to access Evolve Journal, so the book review has gone up for vetting, thereby proving that it really is my SingTel mio connection that was refusing to play nice with the journal's website. Argh! I did make use of the time before lunch to write the first post as well for my blogging stint at Incwriters later this month. It's about literary rejection! Clocking in at more than 1200 words, it's actually longer than what I'd planned on writing. May have to do shorter posts for the subsequent days, especially if I don't end up writing them in advance. Had a couple of briefings again in the afternoon, so that was good because I'm slowly starting to form a picture of what some of my projects are going to be about. Some of it actually sounds like pretty major stuff to be roping in an intern for! I'm liking the work that this division does though, so would quite like to get posted here for my HQ stint in future. Jet lag still pretty bad, but not as bad as yesterday. By the end of the week, I might actually be able to stay awake for the whole MRT ride home!

Episode 651: HQ Attachment Day 1

So I arrived at MOE HQ about half an hour early today, which did not go unnoticed by my new colleagues. It's not that I was crazily eager to arrive at work (although I'm really quite glad to be in Corporate Communications Division), but I was just trying to figure out how long I need to get from my home to Buona Vista. So now I know I can afford to wake up half an hour later! Didn't actually do a lot of work on my first day, and it looks like the first week is mostly going to be taken up with briefings before I actually get around to working on the assigned projects from next week onwards. I have tried my hand at summarising a news item related to education though, which is literally one of the first things that happens in the division every single morning, so it's a good thing that I didn't do too badly for a first attempt, as it's the one thing that appears unfailingly every day on my schedule. Went out for lunch with colleagues and discovered Purple Rose Café, which serves really nice cakes. Then I came back to the office and discovered that Zilu, one of the few people I know who's at Buona Vista for her attachment during Frame A rather than Grange Road or Ghim Moh, is actually in the same office as me, except she's working at the other end of the room in Higher Education Division. Jet lag didn't hit me till about the last hour, but I was struggling to keep my eyes open all the way home!

Episode 650: It's Shocking, But...

It's only been 48 hours, and I already miss Virgin Media. I mean, however annoying their level of customer service got, at least the broadband connection itself was almost entirely fault-free. Whereas SingTel mio seems to be incapable of getting anything right, years after its inception. Why's that? It's really frustrating! Have been trying to access Evolve Journal for the past few days to post my review, and I can't tell if my connection is lousy or if the website is down. The thing is, I can occasionally make it to the site, but it won't load fully, hence I can't make up my mind as to which is the problem. Sigh. On to reviewing the magazines for Incwriters then. Will start on the first one tomorrow evening. Anyway, I bought two more pairs of trousers from G2000 today, so I've got more wardrobe options for the office for the next few weeks. River Of Gods is getting more interesting, by the way, so I'm bringing it along to the office tomorrow. Maybe I'll read during my lunch break? I mean, it's not like I can do anything else, not having an active mobile line and all. Yeah, my contract expired and I won't have the time to sign up for a new one until this Saturday at the earliest. So I can receive SMSes, but I can't send any, and it costs an insane amount to make or receive calls. This is going to be a trying week...

Episode 649: Putting On The Habits

Have started reading Ian McDonald's River Of Gods, and it's pretty damn good. (It'd better be, given how it's a rather thick book.) I'm not entirely sure about how I feel regarding the futuristic Indian setting, which occasionally feels like cultural tokenism, in the sense that you could have swapped the country in question for say, China, and it would simply require applying a different set of clichés. Yet at the same time, the choice of country strikes me as somewhat redressing the tendency for a lot of science fiction to unfold in settings that are, explicitly or implicitly, Western. (I might be mistaken in this regard, so do feel free to correct me.) Have finished the first, and comparatively short, section of the novel, and so far, the disparate cast of characters doesn't seem to me to be entirely necessary. Incidentally, for those of you wondering what it's like to be back home, it actually doesn't feel particularly different. If I wanted to go all clichéd about it, I'd say this is called being a 'global citizen', but it's really less about that than the fact that our habits are powerful things, and living here or there really just boils down to slipping into a different set of habits and patterns. That's how it works for me anyway. Wouldn't presume to generalise to the experience of all the other Singaporeans studying overseas, some of whom seem to really, really miss this place whenever they're away from it.

Episode 648: Home!

Watched just two films during the flight, Date Night and Clash Of The Titans, although I did catch up on two recent episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. So glad that Sara Sidle's back on the team! Anyway, I really loved Steve Carell and Tina Fey in Date Night, although come on, all those shirtless Mark Wahlberg scenes were so obviously gratuitous. I was a lot less keen on Clash Of The Titans, despite Sam Worthington putting in yet another performance as saviour-of-the-world. The problem was just how loosely the whole film was following the original Greek mythology. Some license is to be granted, naturally, but what with the really contrived Perseus-Io romance and his rejection of Andromeda (the latter flying completely in the face of established tradition for no apparent good reason), it was hard to be impressed by all the CGI when the story felt like it'd been watered down so much. Worst of all, I don't see how the title of the film was actually related to the plot. Seems to me like the clash was between the Olympian, Hades, and the demigod, Perseus, with a bit of fatherly backing from yet another Olympian, Zeus. This is a remake of a 1981 film by the way, in which the 'canonical' Perseus-Andromeda pairing is retained, so maybe whoever thought the remake was a good idea thought we needed some sort of open-ended conclusion, with the threat of Hades's eventual return hanging over everything, although how that requires Io around baffles me as much as I'm sure it does you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was really no need to deviate from the original Greek mythology. I mean, that stuff is crazy enough without you making up your own stories for a film, right?

Episode 647: Successfully Checked In

Was a bit annoyed with my taxi driver from the house to Pool Meadow, as he didn't really seem to be understand a word that I was saying. Was I speaking too quickly to be intelligible? Or was it because I didn't have an Indian accent? Was a bit annoyed with my taxi driver from the house to Pool Meadow, as he didn't really seem to be understand a word that I was saying. Was I speaking too quickly to be intelligible? Or was it because I didn't have an Indian accent? At least he had the common sense to subsequently follow me in his taxi around the corner to where I actually wanted to get off, something I'd somehow failed to communicate clearly to him despite repeating 'Around the corner' several times before getting off to return the keys to the agency. Not to be racist, but later, when getting off the coach to Heathrow, the guy who stepped on my foot and didn't apologise was also Indian. (Clearly, this really just wasn't my day as far as they were concerned.) On a brighter note, the lady at the check-in counter didn't bat an eyelid at what was clearly an overweight piece of luggage. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was checking in about four hours before the flight was due to depart, and there wasn't a single person queuing for Qantas anyway. Honestly, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do if she insisted on imposing the limit on me. Probably would've tried to take some stuff out and squeeze it in my carry-on, or just caved and paid the ridiculously extortionist fees for extra baggage. So am now checked in and just chilling in Costa with a drink...