Wait police catch you then you know

A passing remark from a mother to her child gave me something to think about: "Stop it ah, boy, wait that Uncle angry."

Does that sound familiar?

"Police will catch you (and put you in jail)."
"See? Auntie scold already!"
"If you are naughty, they will come and take you away."

It strikes me that these warnings that adults pass to children have one glaring thing in common - they disclaim personal culpability on behalf of the adult. I won't be angry, but someone of authority will punish you.

Whether this is a selfish attempt of parents to shirk responsibility in disciplining their children, or is a result of parents' overwhelming desire to shelter their children, I do not know. Let the psychologists conduct their surveys and tests someday, and we will smile and nod knowingly at the percentages as though we'd known all along.

We create the instruments of our own destruction
In a supermarket, a young boy running through the aisles crashed into J and tumbled to the floor, hurting her ankle in the process. The boy picked himself up and shied behind his mother, visibly uncertain, throwing guilty looks at J. When we waved to him, he brightened considerably and became lively again.

In that same supermarket, another young boy and a young girl on three-wheeled scooters almost literally bludgeoned their way across and through the long check-out queues, shouting "scuseme-scuseme-scuseme" and pushing through any adequately- (and inadequately-) sized gaps they could find. One of them sideswiped my ankle and kept on going. To top it off, the kids abandoned their scooters right in the middle of the passage to explore displays of sweets, while their parents walked on ahead, oblivious.

To reprimand, or to ignore? And really, what good is public censure if parents are not aware or do not care?

LUKE SUM IPSE PATREM TE

Can't figure out what that means? Or have a horrifying suspicion that you already know? Check it out at The Latin Corner.

In other news, eight days passed rather uneventfully, along with the usual pile of spucatum tauri that normally accompanies this particular activity.

Macdonaldus senex fundum habet. E-i-e-i-o.

Time flies when you're dreading some

Eight years. A lot of stuff happens in eight years. Even more gets forgotten. And now, after eight years, it's like starting over again.

Ergh, perish the thought.

Eight days had better pass more quickly than eight years.

Nosy parker

This post is about a little parking incident. Yes, I'm trying to be punny. You may groan now.

Sunday saw us headed to Plaza Singapura, somewhere past noon, and definitely against my better judgement. We persevered, nevertheless, since J wanted to shop at Spotlight and Carrefour.

Incident reference map
Coming down Orchard Road, I miss the first turn-in at Oldham Lane, and have to assault the long, 2-lane queue from the next turning at Handy Road. There's a yellow (no-stopping) box at the junction of these two streets, and technically I have the right of way since I'm approaching from the 'straight'.

As I sheepishly cross the box and insert myself into the right-lane queue, the driver of this silver C200 Mercedes on the left lane waves and smiles, and indicates that he wants to filter into my lane. I oblige, and he slides in front of me. There's a handicap decal on his rear windscreen. Hey, I'm practically doing a charitable thing, right there.

Let me side-track for a bit. Plaza Singapura has been around for ages, and was recently closed for renovation. The new design is bright and chirpy, and looks pretty damn good. But for some obscure and inane reason, they reversed the direction of the carpark flow. This means that the entrance is now on the RIGHT side, and the exit is on the LEFT, and now there's an absolutely idiotic free-for-all crossover junction where the two streams cross.

Score one for B.S. Johnson (ObReference: Pratchett).

This day, they had stationed some poor soul in a security guard uniform at the junction to direct traffic. Not that it helped much; the queue speed is less than a crawl. Some drivers capitulate, and help themselves to the very thoughtfully placed U-turn exit in front of me.

The left lane starts to move faster, as taxis manage to slip into the taxi lane and alleviate the pressure on the queue. And before I know it, the same silver Merc signals left, and noses in. He then signals to the right again, presumably to cut into said U-turn just in front of the next car. But then he spies some movement in the taxi lane on the left, and promptly slides into it.

Over the next five minutes I watch, dumbfounded, as he dodges in and out of the queue and taxi line. There's some movement in my lane as well, and I finally pass the cross-junction, only to find that the left lane merges with mine to form a one-lane ramp. And that the same silver Merc is just in front on the left lane, slowly edging forward, trying to nose in again.

Not this time, pal.

I stuff the pedal down and edge the Merc out, letting the Camry in front of him go. As he pulls into line behind me, I stick out my left index finger and wag it - naughty naughty.

J pulls my hand down, but not before the Merc's female passenger notices, and scolds the driver. Ha ha! Serves you right.

I intentionally avoided mentioning the driver's race and apparent age to avoid any reading biases. But feel free to opine. :D

High-T show

I swear that I heard KT say that "the auntie show is starting today". That was last Thursday. So on Friday, we rushed lunch and headed off to Suntec for the $229 TDK Dual 8x DVD writer promotion at the IT show.


How much is that doggie?

Even at lunchtime there was a long queue for the star event of the show. Not entirely unexpected; the drive performed favourably for several reviews and was going cheep cheep with 10 free pieces of 4x speed DVD media, which in my books already makes $25 of the $229. The drive alone is currently retailing for about $300 at Sim Lim Sq.


Everyone wants a piece of the action


And I mean everyone

The line snaked back past a stall offering the Logitech QuickCam Orbit (renamed "Sphere" for the local market.. duh) for $279. Funky-style webcam with intelligent face tracking - so you can't duck out of the way during an embarassing moment anymore. Brilliant all the same, just blooming expensive. I should have bought some back from Vegas over new year and sold at profit.


Another hapless TeeDeeKay drone

Some of the back stalls featured case mods. The guitar-PC mod in the photo below was entered in a recent competition. Didn't win, but still scores on the cool factor.


Rock on!

An SFF case from MSI caught my eye, though I think it might have been the bottom-lit platform that it was sitting on.


Won't look amiss next to dad's hi-fi

And of course, the usual flurry of lookers and lookees (and quite a number of not-so-lookers, too) that end up at these exhibitions.


Some things change, some stay the same

Grabbed a pen freebie from MobileEdge and a mug from the eBay stall. Not too bad really, I wasn't expecting much in the way of freebies this time around. But it seems to have worked out. 'Specially the 45-minute wait for the TDK.

Hooked on gaming

I think J is beginning to regret buying that PS2 for me.

Currently, Disgaea Hour of Darkness has been eating up most of my game time. It's a really cool strategy/RPG, not at all what I expected. A real time sink though. I need to find more hours in a day, should I just give up sleep?

Maybe.

Fixing Default Browser in Windows XP

After fiddling around with the Set [as] Default Browser buttons in MyIE2 and Firefox, Windows XP acknowledges Firefox as the default browser (Browse The Internet button turns to Firefox icon), but all URLs launched from Thunderbird open in a new MyIE2 window!

Frustrating. Even reinstalling Firefox doesn't help.

After quite a bit of hair-pulling, I figured out a way to solve it:

1. Run regedit.


2. Find the key called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\HTTP\shell.


3. Set the (Default) value to Firefox.


4. Create a new key called Firefox under the key shell.


5. Create another new key called command under Firefox.


6. In the command key, set the (Default) value to C:\<path>\<to>\FIREFOX.EXE -url "%1"

Repeat that for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\HTTPS\shell, and we're all set.

Scattered thoughts

I was working on a foodie blog post last week, but I seem to have lost momentum. Guess if I've left it incomplete for this long, I should just junk the draft and do the next one when it comes along.

Big splash
On Monday, two days ago, it poured. One of the heaviest sky dumps in this current monsoon season, several parts of town were flooded, and traders found much of their wares and equipment ruined by the water.

We can fight wars, but we can't fight nature; how mighty we humans are.

Luckily, our favourite teabreak haunt didn't suffer the same fate. But the atmosphere was damp enough.



After the storm
The sky has been pretty dramatic of late, with menacing clouds, radiant colors, and a pretty dramatic pre-sunset sky yesterday evening - a small horizontal stripe of blue, framed by two thick shelves of dark clouds. It's times like these that I regret not bringing my camera out.

However, last night's moon was pretty accomodating, as I managed to snatch this photo:



Finally found a good use for that light-and-cheapo $30+ tripod of mine. :)

I've been Ork't

Some days just don't belong to you

The weather has been playing tricks on me today.

Earlier on, the air was still as a glacier and the sky was overcast. I'd set up the clothes rack and laundry-pole stand anyway, since we're trying to avoid chalking up a hefty bill on the dryer. Clothes went up, were pegged, and I went back to my desk to get some work done.

A little while later, the wind began to pick up, and the clouds grew thicker. Thunder rolled in the distance. It rolled a six. Feeling moisture in the increasingly strong breeze, I feared the worst, and relocated the racks and laundry to the living room, and got prepared to shut all of the windows if the rain hit.

It didn't.

Instead, the wind died down and the sky started to clear. Several streams of sunlight perforated the cloud cover, illuminating the ex-laundry area with brilliance and warmth. Not wanting to miss this chance, I hastily moved all of the laundry back outside again, struggling with the poles while getting the pole-stands in place. I'm such a sucker for punishment, aren't I?

The minute I finished setting up again, the breeze kicked up, and I became aware of yet another menacing cloud build-up.



I'd had enough. I decided to leave everything as it was until it actually rained. So I went back to my desk and started recording the events of the day in this blog.

Halfway through the html for the above image, though, I realized that the drippity-drip sound that I'd been hearing in the background, for a while now, couldn't possibly be the estate's water feature. Not when the same sound was drifting in from the window behind me.



Buggerit, millennium hand and shrimp!

Everything is now back in the living room. The clothes rack and pole stand have been set up and are being blown at by an electric fan. The windows are all shut. And, naturally, the rain has since stopped.

Looks like the dryer is going to see quite a bit of use tonight. :(

Petals Around the Rose

Someone just sent me this link to a dice-game puzzle called "Petals Around the Rose". I'll have to give it a shot later, it looks interesting. Especially the story about the game and Bill Gates.

Itchy trigger finger

Here's to Sam, who picked up his new toy recently. Hope it'll fare better than the X-box did. ;)



Snapping the day away
Been taking my camera out more often. Figured that there's really no point leaving it to rot in the dry cabinet, only to fish it out for functions and events. After all, I don't need to spend on film. :D

Here are a couple of shots from yesterday's quick jaunt.


Delifrance at Funan


Island of tranquility?


Gone but not forgotten


Music on the move

Foodjournal?

Ducky commented once that I should make a blog of places that I've been to eat, since my family takes particular delight in finding good restaurants and eateries. Well, why not?

I've started it off with this Korean BBQ joint that we hit last night.

Enjoy, comment, critique. And let me know if you want to contribute.