Edit 01:

These Finns seem to have got the Great Singaporean Pastime down to an art form! And they do it so beautifully, too! Could it be we're all Finnish(ed)?

It's very dangerous to leave me on my own on the weekend. When I'm left to my own devices, I usually end up spending money.

These I got from the Times bookshop at Marina Square. Should be loads of fun to read, but can also be used as source materials for tutorials.

Also went bowling at the CSC in the afternoon. Not a brilliant session. It was like 144 was my ceiling, attaining this exact same score in 3 separate games. Then there was the crappy 116, 119 and 122, which I will attribute to the pandemonium of a kids' party going on a couple of lanes from mine. Kids were running, screaming, and whooping it up with their noisemakers, occasionally darting across other bowlers' lanes unexpectedly. Pesky, annoying, distracting. Grr... pushing my low child tolerance to the limit.

Thankfully, they left in time for me to finish one last game in peace. Clean game, hitting a 4X4, scoring the lane's high game at 219. Oh boy, all that pent-up frustration.

Final 7-game average: 144. I swear, tomorrow's winning 4-D number will have some permutation of 144 in it somewhere. 1212? 4144?

June came home from work in time for a nice dinner at Tamoko -- mmm... salmon sashimi -- and dessert at Swenson's, Thomson Plaza. Yay!

Goodness. How important it is to use the English language properly. You can be a Hollywood celebrity, have the very best of intentions in seeking to comfort bereaved friends, eulogise a mentor and father-figure, philosophise on the fleetingness of life, and yet people are going to remember what you said with ridicule and contempt because you displayed a very poor command of the language.

Letter of Condolence, full transcript via USA Today.

Ms Lohan has some slight problems with her subject-verb agreement, but gets into more trouble with her use of prepositions. One major howler occurs in her opening sentence which unintentionally casts aspersions on Mrs Altman's fidelity and propriety due to the faulty preposition, "of". Not the most diplomatic way to address a recently-widowed friend, eh?

But her biggest problem is in writing run-on sentences and sentence fragments, which suggests that she transcribes directly from her thoughts. Few of us think in grammatical sentences, but we do bother to edit for linguistic convention in our written communication.

The quality of her writing deteriorates closer to the end of her letter, closing with some bizarre vocabulary.

If this specimen is representative of how people generally write today, then we English teachers can see two possibly outcomes: job security for life, or unemployment. Depends on how optimistic we are.

The school hols are now in full swing. It's also the time we hear horrible rumours of this college or that college decreeing that their staff must put in a compulsory number of working hours every weekday on campus just so that they look like they are still earning their keep.

I personally do not know if such draconian measures are actually enforced, but regardless of the fact that we do not operate under a fixed timetable in this period, there still is work for us to undertake. The difference is, we have to discipline ourselves to perhaps a more flexible work schedule because our deadlines are still fixed.

We also have a choice, to work on campus or off. The staff in our college seem to choose to work on campus, strangely enough, but I rather think it's a choice we've made for ourselves and not something imposed and enforced upon us by some authority.

So why do we rank-and-file employees still report back to our workplace even during the ostensible holiday period? I think it's because our work environment allows and encourages cooperation amongst staff rather than competition between staff. There is time to relax and socialize amongst ourselves in between all the busy-ness that goes on during curriculum time.

In this environment, we've been conditioned to hang out with each other on an almost daily basis, and we miss that camaraderie when we go our separate ways during the hols. Just the possibility of having lunch company is enough incentive for us to drag our sorry butts back onto campus and put in a good few hours of focused, constructive work -- voluntarily.

How does an organization build up a motivated staff? No need for complicated and expensive "team-building" programmes, much less a "compulsory" clock in-out regime -- more like a recipe for building staff resentment. We do need meaningful tasks; clear, reasonable deadlines; an inclusive, non-threatening work environment; "white space" for socializing time; and common mealtime slots while the fixed timetable is in operation. And let the hols take care of themselves. See? We don't ask for much. :D

After a break since September, NY conneXions is back with fresh updates and a new look!

We've had slight problems with our latest server migration (I've already fixed the link in my Blogrolling sidebar) and we've lost a few pages and pix in the process. And granted, the new design is still a work-in-progress, but it's great to be publishing once again.

Since it's the hols, we're presenting less campus oriented articles and more articles from outside sources instead.

Loga and co., thanks for keeping us alive even though you're all supposed to be on vacation! :D

Check out our new quilt cover from Aussino's kids' collection. A lovely pastoral scene that Kaiser can't resist being a part of. Always fancied himself living on a farm, that boy!

Finished my last invigilation duty today. Now I can sit down and plan for next year's programme. Went back on campus to have a think about the future of NY conneX, and a few fresh ideas came up. Would like to chat about them with my current staff first though, and see what they think.

Amy happened to be on campus, and HP was nearby so we lunched at Friends like we haven't done in what seems like a long time. I'm not so impressed with this month's set menu with a choice of fish 'n chips, teriyaki chicken or spaghetti for the main course. The quality is still there, but the options are a little bland this time.

Had a pot luck dinner at Aggie's place. A sort of small farewell for Vince attended by Lucy, NBS, Josh, ZC (special guest appearance!), me and June. We brought the dessert, partly financed by NBS, that June spent much of the weekend making. June makes a good almond jelly served with longans, and a konnyaku-style pandan/coconut layered agar.

Nice to be back amongst friends again!

Shopping at Taka with June who was looking to buy her sister some l'Occitane products as a Christmas gift. Spending over $150 including 1 item from the Christmas shelf gets an FOC handbag hand-stiched in France (so no 2 designs are exactly alike) and a small sampler pack. Sis-in-law should be happy with her eye gels.

Lunched at Ambush in the Taka basement. Strange name for an Italian pasta joint, but since it took us by surprise as we were stepping off the escalator, what the heck, right? Although we were miles from Ikea, we both were craving Swedish meatballs, so we were thrilled to see a Swedish meatball pasta on offer.

It was nice that the cashier informed us that the meatballs were made of beef and pork before we confirmed our order. I was tempted to say, "Thanks for the warning, I'm vegetarian!" but I kept my mouth shut.

The pasta and the meatballs were heavy, in a rich tomato sauce, served in a large bowl. We were already full about halfway through our bowls. That's a what a good pasta does. The remainder we slowly consume as we relax and enjoy each other's company while the meal lasts.

Quite affordable, too. Most pasta dishes are below $10 each, with an additional $3.80 to make a set. We took the garlic bread and soup, the other option being dessert and a drink. The complementary cold water from a dispenser was a thoughtful touch.

Gotta love the Amazing brothers Cho. The epitome of kindness and courtesy on the Amazing Race 10. They're the guys who played the game 'differently', forming an alliance with the weaker teams, sacrificing their own advantages to boost their friends' chances of survival.

They usually finished their tasks first but would wait for the other teams, gather everyone together, share their info and plan some kind of group strategy before moving on. They even gave up a lead they had to a team which without their help would have been eliminated for sure.

This gameplan of the Chos makes good sense in that if the Alliance could eliminate the stronger teams in the Race, then the brothers would face a much reduced competition towards the finish line.

The problem was, they didn't know when to draw the line between social grace and survival. They simply didn't do their math properly in this week's installment. Last place was between them and their final surviving ally. Yet instead of taking the early lead, they chose to wait for the mothers, intending to -- what? Cross the finish line together???

It is no surprise that the mothers ditched them and found their own way to the Pitstop, arriving 2nd last. The mothers know how to play the survival game. The Chos are out. And I'm not at all sympathetic.

Oddly enough, in todays Life! interview, the Chos have the impression that S'poreans are just as nice and polite as they are, if not more so. They haven't been reading our 'papers, lately so full of gripes about how spoilt we are about public transport, how blase we are about littering, how we need another Courtesy Campaign 'cos we don't say 'please' and 'thank you'.

Looks like S'poreans have it backwards. We think it's all about survival while forming cooperative alliances doesn't make sense to us. Social graces take a backseat as we charge ahead with our 'winner take all' neurosis.

Life isn't the Amazing Race. Our species thrives on cooperative endeavour. So yes, we do have a lot to learn from the Chos' game. But there are also times when survival does become a factor. We need to know how to recognize that point, cut our losses and let our self-preserving instincts take over. We're no good to anybody if we're dead.

It's about time to renew my passport. I tried out the Application for PassPort on-Line Electronic System (dear God, APPLES!) and it looks like a pretty straightforward process. Just a few fields to fill in with personal identification details, and the submission of a personal mugshot on .jpg file.

Ah, the mugshot. Here's where it gets difficult. The rules are stringent about getting the shot composed correctly. The second-hardest thing to accomplish is getting the background perfectly white. Try as I might, the best I could get was a grey wash. The lighting in my room simply isn't powerful enough to make my white wall look white. The camera flash doesn't help either.

The most difficult thing to accomplish is getting a nice shot of myself that actually makes me look good. So many imperfections -- the rules are clear against Photoshopping -- so I had to pick the one that made me look least like crap. Noone is EVER gonna look at my passport, got it?

Hope Immigration will accept the photo I submitted in the end. It took a lot more work than APPLES promised.

We should put up a quarantine sign on our front door. June's next to get the bug. What with Q-tip still coughing on and off, June sneezing and me doing a bit of both, our house has become a concert hall for the Influenza Symphonia in D minor.

This morning we both went to see our local Silver Cross medical facility. It wasn't as crowded as I had imagined and we got our consultations without much of a wait. The queue number was 21-22 when we arrived and we got 26-27. And there were 2 doctors available to share the load.

I love the labelling on the medicine packages they dispense. Clear print-outs with the name of the drug, its purpose and dosage. Gone are the days when we had to squint at poorly handwritten labels and guess what the heck we're ingesting. So for the record, I'm on a couple of decongestants, a codine mixture (drowsy warning), and an antibiotic. I don't usually take antibiotics, but this run of cold symptoms tells me some drastic measures are necessary.

According to the manual, there is an occasion in which the car will vibrate, make a strange noise, and will have some difficulty steering. Just as the manual said, it happened to M2. So I pulled over to the nearest parking lot to have a look. And there it was, a flat tyre.

Great! A chance for me to pull out my Mazda-issue toolkit and get some hands-on working on a routine maintenance procedure. One thing about Mazda's toolkit: it's cute, handy, packs away easily, and is almost completely non-functional. Specifically, the tyre iron is far too short and too fragile to unbolt the tyre from the axle. So try as I might, I couldn't get enough leverage to budge the nuts even a little.

So despite having figured out the jack and having my emergency wheel on hand, I still had to seek assistance. Thanks to Amy, I got hold of our local AA, though it was rather strongly impressed upon me by the Association that I should pay for my own membership rather than sponge off someone else's.

It was a case of tyre iron envy when I saw the equipment the AA guy was lugging around. But even then he had to use a makeshift lever extension to get my nuts loose [ok, now this is starting to sound rather rude -- whatever you're thinking, stoppit].

The emergency wheel is certainly no replacement for a proper road wheel. It's a dinky little wheel off a toy car, designed to get M2 to the nearest tyre shop for a new tyre asap. The nearest one was at the Caltex station opposite Nee Soon camp. Quite good service by Mr Shiok (yes, that's his name). He quickly replaced both front tyres and took the trouble to clean up the emergency wheel before stowing it back into it's compartment for me.

What caused the flat? Normal wear and tear, apparently. I'm just relieved it wasn't because I ran over a cat or some other clawed animal. So now I'm running 2 new Falken tyres in front (tyres get replaced in pairs). That, plus AA membership = $300+. It's enough to make me reconsider public transport...

... Naaaahhh!

Whoa. Too much video game addiction, real life got shelved temporarily while my superhero team has been busy kickin' ass in Atlantis, the Valley of the Spirits, Mephisto's Realm, Asgard, the Shi'ar flagship, the Skrull homeworld, and Castle Doom.

The quests are easy to complete on 'normal' mode, especially since you can beef up 1 or 2 of your favourite characters to near invulnerable levels. I did that for Wolvie and he's usually the one to save the day, being the last mutant standing. Invulnerable doesn't mean he's immune to falling off ledges though, it's one of the drawbacks of not being able to fly.

With quite a bit of the environment being destructable, fights are awesomely violent. Bits of scenery get smashed with all the pummelling going on, though sometimes there's too much happening on screen, you lose sight of your character only to find him (or her) again aimlessly bustin' up a harmless statue or some ugly furniture.

Not that I've been anti-social or what, but I'm still nursing this cold that I haven't been able to get rid of for more than a week now. It's been the most persistent to date and as far as possible, I'm trying to avoid passing it on to people. It's also making me irritable, so taking it out on game sprites can be quite therapeutic.

Picked up "Marvel Ultimate Alliance", an RPG-lite. Actually, it's more like a team beat-'em-up. There are 4 Marvel superheroes in a team. Including unlockable characters, there're up to 20 Marvel favourites to mix and match. The default team is already pretty strong: Cap Am, Spidey, Thor and Wolvie.

Each character has his or her special moves, and there are several ways to customize their attributes, powers and costumes. Levelling up is automatic, but there is also the option to spend points accumulated through missions as well as unique item upgrades to collect. The opportunity to create so many different permutations of heroes and experiment with which powers complement others the best is a fanboy's dream.

Not a lot of brainwork needed. Just mash buttons until all enemy characters have had the stuffing kicked out of them. Problem is, there're so many buttons to try out that a qwerty keyboard is not ideally suited to put all controls within easy reach of wildly flailing fingers. Customizing keyboard controls to your preference is definitely a priority before the action gets hot and heavy.

Storyline's basic. A mass consortium of evil-doers band together for some nefarious scheme necessitating an equivalent alliance of do-gooders to stop them. There is an element of distrust thrown into the hero camp as SHIELD, the sponsor of the alliance, seems to have a hidden agenda in the midst of all this chaos.

Lots of background info on the heroes, villains and locations to gather as well through interacting with numerous NPCs, and, boy, do they have a lot to yak about. The game's almost like a playable encyclopaedia of Marvel trivia, so even players who have no knowledge of the Marvel Universe won't feel left out in the cold -- if they have the patience to sit through every conversation.

Gameplay-wise, I would have prefered it to be more turn-based, like KOTOR, so there's a bit more strategizing involved in battles. But it's a lot more visceral this way, mindlessly bashing at enemies until they pop in a shower of points and power-ups.

It's going to be a long campaign...

There's a certain young person by the name of Lee, a permanent resident happy to go home to America, never to set foot on S'pore soil again. He's so proud to be American, so different from the rest of us, and yet, the nature of his complaints are so Singaporean, I think we brainwashed him better than he thought. It's pitiful.

His first anecdote about life in S'pore is about his trauma at being forced to sing our National Anthem. Like the rest of our students don't go through this experience? Getting them to sing early in the morning is like pulling teeth but we go through the ritual anyway. So what does he do to cope? He opens his mouth but doesn't say the words.

His response tells us a lot about his discomfort living here. He sings the anthem, but not really. He doesn't believe in it, he doesn't engage in it, he doesn't live it, and guess what? The consequence is, he feels left out, apart, alone. No wonder he's not happy. It's like what he's doing in his blog entry: mouthing off, but the words aren't actually coming out.

So he's pissed off at having to serve NS. What? Just because he's American born means he's exempt from serving community time for the community he's living in? After all, he admits he has a S'porean IC, so regardless of whatever has been written as his "Place of Birth", what matters more is, what's his current address?

The rest of his complaints are so familiar to us. We hear them in taxis, kopitiams and mahjong tables until they've become almost a part of our (apparently) non-existant culture. He complains about our govt, the poor standard of the Opposition in politics, the poor standard of spoken Mandarin... he's so at home with us whether he wants to admit it or not.

Ironically, he signs off as being from the "land of the free and the home of the brave." That's a bit of an insult to the US Marines actually facing life and death situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. It smacks George Washington in the face, whose citizen militia won American freedom. How brave can he be if he can't even take our NS training?

And he knows nothing about what being free means. According to John F Kennedy, "The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission." With his eyes always on the escape hatch -- going home to America -- our friend, Lee, looks like he can't wait to wave the white flag and retreat to what he thinks his home is.

Honestly, I'm no big patriot. I just think that with his attitude, Lee will never be able to call any place "home", whether here, or the US of A.

Oh, btw, his blog: http://leeeeeeeee.blogspot.com/2006/11/growing-up-in-singapore.html

In today's Life! section, Suzanne Sng muses, "I do not understand why men who show the slightest affinity to children are instantly desirable. When a guy professes to liking children, most women look at them through different eyes. They somehow suddenly appear more endearing, more evolved, more nurturing, more stable, more marriageable... "

Perhaps there is a bio-chemical reason for this phenomenon. Jennifer Barone reports in my December copy of Discover that:
"after comparing the brains of [marmoset] males with offspring with brains of childless males in mating pairs, [Princeton neuroscientists] Kozorovitskiy and Gould found that fathers not only had more connections between neurons in their prefrontal cortex, a region involved in anticipating consequences and attaining goals, but they also had more receptors for vassopressin, a neurohormone linked to social interaction and bonding."

Although they haven't tested to see if male human brains develop in the same way after fatherhood, Sng's casual observation suggests that the premise is probably true. That sort of means that childless human males in a couple relationship are basically slackers and have poorer social skills.

Heyyyy...! Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Still feeling lousy. Best to remain in isolation for today. No point risking infecting anyone else unnecessarily. Hope 1 more day's rest will do the job 'cos the rest of the week I have places to see, things to go and people to do. Um... something like that.

The past week's been terrible. With Q-tip down, and now me, we've kept the air-conditioning off and because it's so hot at night, we haven't been able to sleep properly since the whole thing started. The past couple of nights we've taken to sleeping in the living room where the ceiling fan is, but that is also a trade-off.

"Wonder how much we'll save on our power bill this month?" he speculates, all panda-eyed.

Experimenting with the new Blogger Beta version. Everything looks more or less the same, but I'm having trouble integrating Haloscan comments. Bother!

Edit 01:
There, Haloscan works again! Thanks to LP!

The good news is that Q-tip's getting better. She's been quiet for much of the day and that's a relief for us. The bad news is, it's my turn to succumb to cold symptoms.

I didn't even finish my review of Little Shop last night because I couldn't think straight any longer. Suffice to say I enjoyed the production even though I sat through it with a swimming head and a stuffed nose.

Feeling worse today, trying to sleep it off...

It's been about a week now but Q-tip is still coughing. It was particularly bad last night: June and I were both awakened at the unearthly hour of 0635 this morning by an intermittent hacking from under the bed, and this is becoming a relatively common occurrence these days.

Time to bring out the big guns. I took Q-tip to Namly where she got an x-ray taken, which thankfully showed that internally at least there are no signs of injury or disease. So we're treating her condition as a viral infection and have added a steroid to her current prescription. Poor little dog.

In the evening, while Q-tip recuperated at home, June and I went to watch "Little Shop of Horrors". See? It pays to keep close tabs on the Drama Club, 'cos when there are stray tix we usually get first dibs.

Little Shop was a slick production, highly amusing and light and fluffy in its presentation. It's a musical based on the genre of the B-grade movie, so it's easy on the brain while the basic rock tunes and dance movement carry us through this tale of zero-turned-hero, but at what cost?