Good bye 'Ma Ma'...

Grandma and Me
Originally uploaded by swang.

Got news today that my grandmother passed away in Singapore today. :( I'm glad that she is now with the Lord and is out of pain, but she will be sorely missed. I did manage to see her earlier this year with Ming when we were on hols which is good... and my dad did manage to spend quite a bit of time with her this year as her health was deteriorating. Mum and Dad were only back there a few weeks ago for my cousin's wedding so at least they spent quality time with her before she left.

She's always been there in my childhood, and I can still remember she always remembers all our birthdays(and with over 20 granchildren and many more great-grandchildren, that is no mean feat!), she is in her nineties, and up to a few years ago her memory was pretty bulletproof... and she always associated me as being a smart kid who used to take apart all his toys to find out how they work... even earlier this year when her health and mind was failing, she would tell Ming and my aunt who she stays with, about me taking apart stuff...

Also my recent memories of her were of her forcing me to eat lots whenever I go visit her, and she would get angry if I didn't eat heaps... :) she did it all out of love, and that would explain why I was such a tubby kid when I was little...

But most of all, as I reflect more recently as her health was failing, about her life, and about what she stood for. I can always remember that she always encouraged me to be faithful Christian, to always stick close to God... and perhaps that is why our extended family has always been quite close, and have been saved through her example and encouragement... so 'Ma Ma' (as I have called her), thank you for your life and your example to all of us, we all will miss you heaps, but know that you are in a much better place, and out of pain as you were in recently. Your faith has saved generations, and many more generations to come, and I pray that you are indeed blessed now that you are with the Lord, and re-united with Grandpa.

And to all my family grieving in Singapore... I guess we can all have joy in this time of sorrow that we will all be reunited with her again in the future... Praise God!

huh?

Came across this neat website today... huh?

Now that's a place that I want to work for... I mean I have all the prior experience from my business consulting days... This really brings back fond memories of those days... :)

Make sure you have a good read of the site... cos it's pretty funny... must have been someone who used to or still works at a consulting firm with a great sense of humour and wit...

13 more sleeps!

Yup, it's slowly creeping up again...

Decided that it's time to put up the Christmas tree again, probably a bit later this year than previous years... but this year it's sitting in the front room now that we've got Max, the 'Pup of Mischief'. It's got doors so that we can close them and deny access to Max. Sometimes I which it was simpler like just checking some checkboxes to deny user Max access to front room, socks, food on the dinner table, but alas we haven't got that bit of technology yet. Note to time travelling blog readers, if you have this technology, please share with me. I'm willing to barter with some probably useless bit of random insight that I have for the future species of humankind that will never reach the future as I have a habit of hiding these insights in my head. :P

Also, I bought some fairy lights last year at the post Christmas sales, and it's the same kind as the ones I have the Christmas tree, but have 200 lights instead of 100. I happily put them up on the balcony at the front of the house, and even braved a climb up to the top of the garage roof to see hanging options (decided against putting them up there), and checked out the aircon installer's handiwork up there... glad it was them up there installing it and not me, seeing it was difficult enough getting up there, but trying to carry a heavy compressor up there as well? Sheer madness I tell you... Hats off to Al and Chris (the installers) and Kemal the electrician for risking life and limb to bring Ming and I aircon joy! (Incidentally, they did come closer to being with the Lord than they think, when drilling out a large hole for the aircon piping, Chris missed the main electricity wiring which leads directly from the power line in the walls by mere centimeters!!! Praise God for this not actually happening as he would have not survived had he hit that wire...)

Instead the lights are framing the balcony, and have been set on a timer to come on at 7pm and turnoff at 11:30pm, so if anyone is in the area drive past for a look, well... I think it's cool... well more like tacky, but more festive tacky... :) Mmmmmm... blinky lights... me likey...

Also decided to update my resume tonight, gosh it's difficult to remember things I've done since the last update... wish I could just put down "Went to work, did some stuff, got paid" for most things, but that doesn't seem to get you many jobs so I guess I'll have to waffle on about how great all that stuff I did was... so how do you put down surfing the web for cool stuff in your resume and making it sound like like a positive attribute to the prospective employer? Hang on, I think I've got it... "Conducted an analysis of options for the selection of viable technology acquisitions, concentrating the selection on the lowest entropy metrics available within the financial contraints." That sound heaps better than "Surfing web for gadgets, getting maximum cool factor for the least amount of money..." :) Yes, I had a stint as a business consultant but have always been a geek at heart...

*yawn*

Yay, aircon is installed... house is finally clean after the mess the installers left behind... there were loads of brick dust as they drilled about 3 big holes in the walls from the interior to the exterior to get the refridgerant piping through from the indoor unit to the compressors...

Me tired now, must get sleep... more talky, or more typey tomorrow... Zzzz...

Cool... well almost...

Aircon finally went in today... well more like still going in as the electrician is still wiring it up as we speak... it's now 4pm and they started at about 8am this morning... talk about a long day... I think I got good value for money seeing I kinda realised how much is involved...

There was also a drama when I noticed a hissing noise from one of the aircon units in Ming's study(yeah, we got more than one... three to be exact...) turns out that it was a faulty unit from the factory and the refridgerant is leaking out from one of the welds slowly... oh well, that's what warranty is for, and good thing we have another 2 units to keep us amused, I mean if we only got one unit, and that died, then I would be upset, as I was looking forward to this moment for a few weeks now...

Still patiently waiting for the electrician to finish so I can have some aircon joy, but it's been such a nice day out today so there is no need to even turn it on, but I'll be donning on some winter gear and cranking it up (or more like cranking the temperature down) tonight... :)

Information Age...

An interesting convo came up today regarding the term 'kilo' which is meant to mean 1000 of something, like kilometre, kilogram etc... but we came to the discussion of using the kilo and giga prefixes in computing which is not entirely correct... a kilo byte is actually 1024 or 2 to the power of 10 bytes. So the terms that should be used is a kilo binary or 'kibi'... similarly 'gibi' instead of giga, and mebi instead of mega... and how did I know... I googled it as usual...

Anyways I emailed people on the project team the page I found on this and won the 'Nerd of the Week' award, and was ousted to the kitchen where other nerd conversations have been heard in the past. I found this quite interesting, amusing and disturbing at the same time as I realised that most people nowadays have access to all this information, but most of which are unverified, and most people take it as fact. In fact, someone said this afternoon that they could not find the information on google to which I jested "If it's not on Google, it does not exist!"

Me thinks I need to go back and read some books as sources of information. And yes, I am talking about the ones printed on paper... and I know that's very old skool, but hey I'm sure they are verified prior to print. Incidentally I inherited my family's Encyclopædia Britannica, in all it's 30 volume glory, and it's own bookcase as well... much cooler than a single DVD edition... ;)

Geeky funny...

There was an amusing episode of the Simpsons on tonight... it's an old one where Homer buys an expensive computer and then sets up his own web page... Mr X he calls himself, and he is like a pseudo journalist for gossip, and the grapevine for interesting news around Springfield... it was full of nerdy computer geekiness, and loads of amusing one liners where I kept cracking up whereas my family sits around the dinner table wondering what was so funny... pity they don't share my joy... :) One of the lines I found most amusing was from the comic shop guy, where he goes "Oooh! There is no emoticon for what I am feeling!" *heheh*

Anyways, been quite focused with work lately, as I'm getting heaps done, although as usual the delays are due to the customer not really knowing what their business rules are, rather than technical hurdles... oh well... at least the work is interesting... a nice change from being in the office for the last year or so doing product development... I mean it was definitely interesting at first, but change is good...

Just realised it's almost Christmas, so the Christmas tree will have to go up this weekend, and maybe the large 200 light fairy light kit that I bought last year will go up around the exterior of the house... w00t! blinky lights with 7 random lighting patterns... where has all the time gone? Another year is coming to a close, and this year seems to have screamed past... might have to spend some time over the next couple of weeks reflecting on this year and setting goals for next year...

Incidentally it was like over 35 degrees today, although I spent most of it in the office so I escaped the heat, but I think Max was quite affected by the heat, and so he'll be going in for a groom next week... and I can't wait for the airconditioning to go in this weekend... yay!

Rested... well almost...

For some weird reason I feel quite rested tonight... maybe it was just a productive day... maybe I've fooled my brain into thinking that I caught up with sleep... nah, I'll have to sleep for the next 15 years or so to properly catchup with my lost sleep... so maybe I've just *decided* that I don't have to be sooo tired...

Max was bad tonight... well, we shut him in the laundry so we can have some peace eating dinner, so he thought he'll take advantage of the time he has outside... the neighbours behind our place had their sprinklers leak slowing through the crack in the fence into a pool of mud, and Max decided to play with it... he was muddy up to his elbows (do dogs have elbows? well, where the elbows would be if they had them...) and around his chin and snout... Ming discovered this when she went to open the laundry door to let him out... there was mud everywhere... EVERYWHERE!!! *ggggrrrrr*

I proceeded to gulp down the rest of my dinner, then headed outside to see what was going on... a small stream was developing in the backyard... not good... went outside to the mains tap to check if there was a leak... nope... meter not moving... hmmm... never really paid much attention to the water meter before, but what do you know... I started on a project close to a month ago for the Water Corp doing a nice PDA app for water meter reading... wow... I paid close attention to the meter number for a few secs... oh yeah... muddy Max at home... *grumble*

Cleared up the backyard a bit then took him upstairs for a mini bath... just cleaned up his front paws and around his mouth, then rushed to dry him then headed off to BSF. Got there a bit late, but enjoyed the session tonight as it was a fellowship night, where we stayed back after for a time of sharing with each other. We're on a break for about 8 weeks... return on the 31st of Jan, which incidentally is the date that our catering will resume after it stops for the Christmas season... now I'll have to find another source of easy meals until then... :)

Yum yum Dim Sum

We went out for a nice Dim Sum lunch today after church... well, it was more like brunch cos we got there at about 10:30am, and everyone made an effort to show up to the earlier church session at 9am so we could have an early lunch, which was appreciated... It is kinda like a psuedo belated birthday celebration for the wifey, and a general catchup session. We gorged ourselves full of yummo food and sat around and caught up with each other since it's been ages since we had time to catchup.

Church was good today, and we arrived earlier today to help setup the church cafe this morning. One of the interesting points that came out of the sermon was about not understanding stuff when we hear about things. How many of us have been to church, or been invited to a wedding, Easter or Christmas, and have heard the gospel message preached uncountable times. I mean most people know all the facts about what is being said, and can comprehend it, but then decide it's not for them. I think it might be because we try and comprehend it using our brains and not our hearts, and we equate this whole faith in God thing as being illogical. How can something so simple and effectively cost us nothing, be the basis of our lives? We almost have been brought up in this generation to believe that anything that seems too good to be true usually is, and this "free gift" has some fine print attached and might mean a lost of freedom or control of our own lives.

We can only equate getting something with giving something in return. "If I accept the gospel message that will mean that I will HAVE to go to church every sunday and not sleep in, I'll have to be a better person than I am to earn that label..." Cause and effect... If I do x,y,z then I'll be a good christian... If I'm a christain then I'll *have* to be good... and this appears to be a sticking point for most people. What if... it was just as simple as "I love you, and this is what I've done for you, expecting nothing in return, just because I love you, and I would do the same if you were the only one..." and that all those other things that we feel are baggage(going to church regularly etc.) that comes along with this faith, we do because it's an act we do in reponse to God, rather than because we're expected to do so?

In nerdy geek techinical terms it's like the internet, http is based on a request-response protocol, where we type in a web-address, or click on a link, and the browser sends a request to the web server and it responds with the webpage that we're trying to get it. All God is doing is sending out a request to all of us to be part of our lives, waiting for our response. We can either respond with the right page, or an error page... "The person that you are trying to contact is not reponding..." :) It's our choice... but guess what? He'll keep on retrying and resending the request until we respond... (Comforting thought isn't it?)

Food for thought...

*heavy mechanised breathing*

No... it's not some weird psycho prank call...

Just watched the preview for Star Wars Episode III on the special features disc on the Star Wars Trilogy boxed set which arrived today... w00t! Thanks to my bestest of friends Nick and Paul (and also their significant others for approving their expenditure... :P) who got it for my birthday... and it was hand delivered as well... nice touch Nick *grin*

Nothing quite like some heavy mechanised breathing and the voice of James Earl Jones to bring back memories of my youth, playing with my Star Wars figurines in the play area (which was on the converted balcony) of my family home in Singapore. I remember my Luke Skywalker figurine which was in the X-wing fighter pilot outfit, which now seems suprisingly similar to the orange suit that crims in the US wear and also a white helmet... and that cool lifesized Stormtrooper rifle that I had... (which I'm sure someone went without in his youth as he wasn't allowed to play with guns... you know who you are...)

Another flashback of this memory was the constant voice of Karen Carpenter singing in the background which my eldest sis kept playing over and over again... I blame her for my good knowledge of the lyrics of any Carpenters song, and no I'm not a fan, just was a tortured little brother, made to listen to the Carpenters in his innocent youth. :P "Why do birds suddenly appear? Every time... you are near..." Aaarrrggghhh!!!

Dog Xmas Party

Just got back from the park from walking Max, where he had a ball running around with about 5 other dogs... also I found out that there is like a dog Xmas party this Wednesday at the park where we bring drinks and have a little party... sounds like a good way to find out the names of the dog owners, I mean we know all the dog names, just not the owners... and I'm not too sure if the dogs will have fun sitting around whilst their owners are getting drunk, but I'm sure it'll make for interesting stories for the dogs to tell each other about how their owner was an embarassment to them at the Xmas party this year... :)

Doogie Howser M.D.

Was thinking on the drive home from work today about this new blog of mine (this little blog of mine... I'm going to let it shine!!!... think that was a song from my early sunday school days, except I think it was 'This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine...'), and I remembered that I used to keep an early incarnation of what we now commonly call a blog, or weblog. I kept it in the early nineties, on my cool IBM-compatible XT computer, and it was quite modern for it's time... it had an EGA screen, and I even got a 3.5" floppy disk drive for it, which set me back a cool $250 which for a high school student at that time was a fortune... and to think that nowadays we don't really use 3.5" floppy disks anymore... *sigh*

Anyways, the journal was more like an electronic diary of my day, and was just done in a word processor called WordStar, which was quite good for its day... and gave me professional written assignments printed on my 9 pin dot matrix printer... *sigh* those were the days... and anyways the inspiration for me keeping the journal was the TV series called Doogie Howser M.D. starring Neil Patrick Harris, who was more recently spotted as Carl, the nerdy animal/insect mind-reading scientist of Starship Troopers fame. Doogie kept this journal of his thoughts and insights from the current days happenings on his blue screened 'puter... and thinking about it, it was ironic that my journal was only a few months young when my hard drive crashed and I lost everything, synonymous to the more recent 'blue screens of death' we have been accustomed to.

Well, that ended my journal keeping days of my youth, and I swore I wouldn't keep a journal ever again as I was quite upset about the loss... well... a few nights ago I started to journal my thoughts again and it made me nostalgic about my younger days, which explains this post... I'm sure over the coming weeks/years I'll note down more about my younger nerdy days as I recall them in my current older nerdy years... :P And hopefully I won't lose the contents of this blog anytime soon... hmmm... mental note to self... investigate offline backup options for this blog...

Yay Weekend!

Can't believe it's the start of another weekend... for the first time in ages I think I'm looking forward to this weekend as I haven't got that much planned, except for a nice buffet breakfast tomorrow morning... w00t! A nice time to pig out on a nice cooked breakfast, nice and greasy... and will be nice to catchup with both my family and the in-laws.

Not much else planned, and way looking forward to next weekend when the airconditioning goes into our place... It's such a luxury seeing I've weathered over a decade of summers sleeping in a room without airconditioning... might try and get some christmas shopping done this weekend, as the past few weekends I haven't been in the mood to do so, but I think I'm all pumped this weekend to faced the crowds of stressed shoppers trying to find the perfect gift for their loved ones... heh... we'll see how we survive the shopping experience this weekend... :)

Mini Post

Just realised that my posts were getting progressively longer so here's a short one...

Oh and I thank God for putting my wife in my life, I get reminded on occasions such as today... Love you babe, and may He continue to be one of the constants in our ever-changing lives.

Sleepy...

*yawn* Well, I'm up doing some work for a change, managed to get more focused tonight... and as I write this it just hit midnight which means that it's the anniversary of the birth of my darling dearest... Happy Birthday Babe! Hope you have a good day today... love you heaps...

Max (our little pup) was happily sleeping on the foot of our bed before, as my wife dozed off to sleep, but have now had a new lease on life after a little power nap... now he's holding a tennis ball up to my knees then dropping it then again... then repeating... reminds me of a website I came across earlier today (or was that yesterday? gosh I hate talking about days during the midnight crossover thingo... well you know what I mean...) It's called the GoDogGo Automatic Fetch System, and it's like one of those tennis ball shooting machines for practising tennis, but instead it's got a bucket for the balls, and lobs a tennis ball at a given rate for your dog to play fetch with. Has even a remote control for changing the distance... I mean it's worth getting just so that you don't have to ever touch another tennis ball drenched in doggy drool eh? w00t! I mentioned it to a few dog owners down at the park this evening (yesterday... whatever... you know what I mean), and they say that they'll pay good money for a go... so perhaps I should get one and charge a fee for usage down at the local park for lazy dog owners... what do you reckon? Now if only I can train Max to return the fetched balls back in the bucket, then he could have hours of endless fun and exercise... now if only I can find something like that for ME to keep me amused and exercised for hours.

Must... get... sleep... I know I'm tired cos I just babbled on for ages about some gimmicky tennis ball launching machine so... zzzzz...

Distractions...

As usual, I got distracted tonight by creating this blog, and I blame my best mate Nick :), who sent me an email about a week ago about his new blog (which is at ntakayama.blogspot.com), and I only got it tonight when I checked my gmail account...

anyhoo... I was meant to be translating this application for my boss from english into arabic and getting screen shots for him cos he's heading off to Dubai this weekend for some sales pitch for our product... I mean I've already done it in Malay, but Arabic is harder as it's a weird non western character set, and it goes from right to left... simply put it's time consuming moving controls around the screen... blah... blah... blah... and I couldn't get the whole dev environment setup on my laptop at home that I gave up, and decided to take my work pc home tomorrow night...

Incidentally username is اسم المستخدم and password is كلمة السر in Arabic, if anyone was interested... :)

Profiles Smofiles...

Heh...

Finally worked out how to get my profile up on the sidebar... turns out it was working when I added text to the "About Me" bit, and IE was doing the undocumented feature of caching it when I didn't want it to... I mean I know it's been about 3 years since I was doing web application development, but it's like riding a bike right? Shift-refresh... Shift-REFRESH... SHIFT-REFRESH... repeat after me... grrr...

It's Alive!!!

Yes, this is my first post on my brand spanking new blog... inspired by a great friend of mine, who just recently got a blog, where I was visiting, and then proceeded to click on the "Get your own blog" link, and a few keypresses, and links later... here it is... more to come... stay tuned... :)