Saturday, October 11, 2008

What's drivin' my fantasies

It was unreal, the realization that I have been for the last couple of years actually living out an almost 20-year-old fantasy, and I've been simply taking it for granted.

As I was driving with M2 this morning, I noticed how bright blue the sky was; and how the sun was high, lighting every visible thing up with a brilliance that made every edge, every outline stand out as sharp and clear as full 1080HD. The radio was thumping with music from my 'pod, accompanying the total and complete sense of freedom that can only come from driving down the highway in a sporty red convertible on a balmy Canadian summer's day.

'k, I'm still working on the red convertible feature, but I'm not particular about make and model. Just driving makes me happy.

That's in the morning, though. Pretty and glam though the F1 made night driving out to be, driving in the dark guided mostly by interpreting the navigation lights of other vehicles freaks me out just a tiny bit.

Then of course, there're... incidents that don't help. Like this evening, this dumb taxi made a 3-lane U-turn, suddenly cutting across my path and making me e-brake, big truck lumbering behind me threatening to smoosh me into ham 'n strawberry jam in a sandwich upon impact. Fortunately, reflexes and good brakes saved my bacon and I live to drive another day. Stupid taxis.

Friday, October 10, 2008

NYeDC graduation and farewell

Bleh. Either suffering from blog fatigue or life fatigue. Can't think of anything interesting to record in my usual long, pedantic commentary style. A couple of terse pix then to bid the NYeDC 07s farewell. Today was their Graduation Ceremony.

Big bunch of 07s meet to collect their certs of appreciation and a little souvenir

And my wacky little bunch of Admirals!

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Skyping Mel

We're getting quite tired of marking essays that trivialize the the Internet by pointing out how convenient it is for us to keep in touch with our friends overseas, like as if it was a glorified telephone system and nothing more. Yet when we were Skyping Mel (she's now in ol' Blighty) from the staffroom today, that's more or less what we were doing.

The beauty of Skype and webcams is that despite the distance between us, we can still chat face-to-face. Our conversation was mostly about personal trivialities punctuated by much hand waving as various other staff passed by and realized who we were talking to. But we we were many and there was only one webcam so we were all a bit camera shy. While we could see Mel very well, she mostly saw parts of our faces, elbows, torsos and whatever else got thrust towards the lens for her closer inspection.

Best of all, our conversation was free-of-charge so the only time limitations we had to live by were our own busy schedules and not based on how much money-for-time we could afford to spend on her.

So now because of the Internet, Mel and HP could still potentially join us for breakfast even though they're thousands of miles away. They would both have to give up some sleep as there's a time-zone discrepancy (morning for us is bedtime for them) but with today's technology, it's so easy for Amy to carry down her laptop containing both their virtual heads and have them share, oh I dunno, omelettes and prawn noodles with us. It'll be like they'd never left!

I sense rolling eyeballs...