dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

iPad

If the iPad comes to this region, will we see an iPad Thai?

Happy birthday, Mum

I pass by the current Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy building once in a while. It's gone through many incarnations in its life, starting as the University of Singapore. But to me it will always be the IE building, i.e. (ha) the Institute of Education Building, because that's what my Mum called it when she worked there, in a branch of the Ministry of Education, working on the "Helping Underachievers Programme".

My Mum worked almost all her life, once she got her A-levels and finished Teachers Training College. She taught in Balestier Mixed School, where she met my Dad. She taught in Anglo-Chinese School (Primary), up until her retirement in 2005. And in between there were various schools and stints at MOE. So, occasionally, after Primary School finished, when I wasn't parked at the National Library waiting for her (the family didn't have babysitting), I would go to her office in the IE Building, and get parked in the library there. I discovered the lovely graphic novel style of Raymond Briggs' "When the Wind Blows" there. Plus, while my memory grows fuzzy, I think they had a good collection of Asterix comics.

But I would also go up to her office, where to keep me entertained she would give me some paper and an electric typewriter to use, and I would type things out. It was such a revelation, compared to the manual typewriter we had back home, which was exceedingly tough to use for my little-boy-hands. Plus the ability to backspace in a line was astounding. No Tipp-Ex! And so that was where I learnt to type, by my Mum's side, up in that little room in the IE building.

She was always proud of me. But in so many ways she helped me become who I am today, and sacrificed so much to give me all these opportunities to learn. And I hope somewhere she remains proud of me. Happy birthday, Mum.

Movies of the Decade

My top 10 movies of the 2000s, inspired by Chris Wisniewski's writeup on Before Sunset on Reverse Shot:

Before Sunset
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Y Tu Mama Tambien
City of God
Brokeback Mountain
In the Mood for Love
Far From Heaven
Almost Famous
High Fidelity
Memento

Honourable mentions: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Children of Men; The Wrestler; The Squid and the Whale; Juno; Up; State of Play; The Bourne Ultimatum, Once.

Oh Open House

Went to the Oh! Open House on Friday. Great to tour Niven Road shophouses. But to be honest the works that caught my eye were in the companion exhibition at Wilkie Edge - "Blink" by George Wong and a couple of works by Marissa Keller.

On SMSs and spelling

Scientific American's 60-Second Psych podcast points out an interesting study from the academic journal Reading and Writing that shows that texting / SMSing does not have any impact on spelling ability. Indeed, apparently those who spell well in standard English spell well in "textese".

When I posted this link on Facebook, I got a couple of queries on whether the results worked for those for whom English is not a first language. I don't know, but it seems that the same complaint on "textese" apparently affecting spelling is common in environments where English is the primary language, which is probably why there was even interest in the experiment. So I would certainly not rule out the idea that something other than "textese" is affecting standards of spelling, and that there is some confusion of correlation and causation. Another possible cause, for example, could be a general reduction in the value that society as a whole places on spelling, perhaps because of the existence of easily available spell-checking and the like, causing students growing up in such a society to not care about spelling.

Also found this interesting story about another study on SMSs and language.

Same old show

Tessa Wong's piece on how every mall in Singapore tends to have the same shops these days is right on the money. Although it leads to questions about whether malls should be the sites of diversity, versus individual shops that extend out onto the street. Even the festival markets of the US - Quincy Market etc. - seem to have lots of chains in my experience.

As an aside in this Jane Jacobs vein: I do like that the ground-level shops of Ion and Orchard Central have doors that actually open out onto the street, rather than just a window display that forces you to enter the mall first. I'm not sold on the luxury goods being sold at Ion, but this is a good trend.

The most interesting shopping centres in Singapore to me are the old ones - Peninsula Plaza and Shopping Centre, Far East Plaza (and Far East Shopping Centre, come to think of it), Tanglin Shopping Centre. All these old shops, selling niche products and services.

District 10

Saw that District 10, the restaurant, was reviewed in the Sunday Times today. Agree that their ribs could do with a touch less mustard. But my pressing question is: why is it called District 10 when its postal sector is 22 and thus it is very much in District 9?

Top 10 of the 2000s

Yeah, it's a bit early and opinions may change by December, but this is my current round up of the decade, largely on artistic merit, with the inevitable dollop of the personal:

Albums:
The Postal Service - Give Up
Feist - Let It Die
Arcade Fire - Funeral
Jose Gonzalez - Veneer
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Ryan Adams - Gold
The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic
The Streets - Original Pirate Material
The Avalanches - Since I Left You
Outkast - Stankonia

Singles:
The Postal Service - "Such Great Heights"
Ryan Adams - "Answering Bell"
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Bang"
Outkast - "Hey Ya!"
Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy"
Eminem - "Stan"
Kanye West - "Gold Digger"
Arcade Fire - "Rebellion (Lies)"
Sufjan Stevens - "Casimir Pulaski Day"
Death Cab for Cutie - "I Will Follow You into the Dark"

Are we there yet?

There's another Final Destination? Each sequel makes a lie out of the title of its predecessor.

Swell Season

I've heard/seen the Swell Season's Tiny Desk Concert so many times the songs feel like old favourites. Songs from their upcoming Strict Joy album (I like "Back Broke", in particular), plus an encore version of "When Your Mind's Made Up". Lovely stuff, as always.

Labels: music

iPhone, data roaming, and maps

An iPhone tip: When I was travelling last month I needed handy maps of
places but didn't want to pay
international data roaming costs on my iPhone. My quick and dirty
solution was to load up the maps needed pretrip or when I had a wifi
connection, press the power/home button combo to take screenshots of
the maps, and essentially use the Photos page as a maps page when I
was walking around. Not elegant, but certainly money saving.

Marley and Me

Watched Marley and Me yesterday. Embarrassing how soppy it made me but
I suppose it was made for dog lovers.

Marley and Me, as summarised by the Human League: Don't chew on me
baby. Don't chew on me oh oh.

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Ticket swap

I have Saturday 1 Aug tickets for the Reduced Shakespeare Company, looking to swap for Sunday 2 Aug. Any takers? Leave a comment.

The Burger King Super Seven Incher

I see the US news has picked up on the Burger King ad campaign in Singapore. Didn't know it was a Singapore-only thing, thought it was part of the weirdness that is Crispin Porter & Bogusky's BK ad campaign.

And so it goes

Billy Joel is separating from his wife. Egregious violation of the "half-his-age-plus-7" rule, methinks.

iPhone 3.0 OS

Yes, I downloaded the new iPhone OS last night in a fit of insomnia. The big changes - Voice Memo, cut/copy/paste, tethering - are great: much needed, and much-talked about.

But I also like the small touches. Stocks in landscape mode looks great, and actually gives the full name of the company. And then there are those nice small touches that weren't announced. When you play podcasts, for example, there's the option to listen to them at double-speed, which is helpful for getting through more information, and there's a button to simply rewind 30 seconds, so you can catch what you missed. (Still wish podcasts don't go to Cover Flow in landscape mode - that makes no sense to me.)

And now MLB At Bat for the iPhone has live video. Not a part of the OS, of course, but perhaps the best App ever - really shows off the iPhone's powers.

Labels: iphone

iPhone 3.0

Can't wait for the iPhone software update. Cut/copy/paste is a must-have, while Voice memos, tethering, Stereo bluetooth, and sync notes all look like great features.

On attention

I sat down last night to read a book (David Rothkopf's Superclass, if you must know) and realised, for all my endless reading of magazines and listening to audio I hadn't actually soaked in the pleasure of pure unadulterated reading of books for a while.

And then today I read Sam Anderson's piece in New York, "In Defense of Distraction", on attention and the poverty thereof in the modern world, what with Twittering and Facebook. Which coincided with my belated reading of the Obama interview in Newsweek and in particular the part about how he manages his time.

All of which made me wonder: having grown up very comfortable with distraction - reading while eating at dinner, that sort of thing - am I the sort of "digital native" Anderson talks about in the last page of his article, the person who can switch attention really well? Or is that really just fooling myself? I suppose it's a hard question to answer. I'd like to think I'm the former, but I have certainly appreciated lifehacking and the whole GTD idea - including just starting to use Texter, thanks to this week's David Pogue column - and I have benefited immensely from taking a much more focused approach to e-mails, so at some level I do feel some value in eliminating some kinds of mental clutter. And weaning myself off the need to answer the phone or SMSs immediately has saved a lot of time. Even if that just means more time to Twitter, I suppose, if I'm being facetious.

What I like, ultimately, in thinking about all this is that it isn't the kind of question that really is answered within one blog posting. Will have to keep thinking about it all. And reread Joyce and Proust.

Off the books

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has some interesting follow-up on what was not in Edmund Andrews' (fascinating) book/NYT piece ("My Personal Credit Crisis"), specifically on his wife's bankruptcies.

Wolfram Alpha and time spans

Tried out the much-hyped Wolfram Alpha and wasn't too impressed with the simple results of a date search. Maybe it's just me, but the difference between today (May 21) and Feb 24 should be 2 months and 27 days (i.e. counting from April 24), not 2 months and 25 days as Wolfram states.

As someone pointed out, the algorithm seems to be counting March and April as the 2 months. the 4 days at the end of Feb and the 21 days of May, but that doesn't seem intuitively the way people count time spans. Otherwise the difference between May 25 and Feb 24 would be "2 months and 29 days", rather than "3 months and a day".

American Idol

Hey, they did what I thought they'd do on American Idol and have duets. Great idea. Although I have no idea why the judges were that harsh on Allison and not harsh enough on Danny. Hope she's not in trouble for "talking back". Funny that voters punish that. It ain't homeroom.

The solace of baseball

The last six months have been the most gut-wrenching ones of my life. Watching my mother go in and out of hospital; watching various tubes inserted to help her eat, breathe, all the common functions we take for granted; gaining the false hope of a discharge only to have her return to the hospital; and finally, the traumatic last 2 weeks, where the infection finally got the better of her.

I haven't been able to update this blog or Singapore Sox Fan as much as I'd like under the circumstances. Nor was my mother the greatest of baseball fans; indeed, she didn't know much about the game besides the general idea of going around the bases. But baseball and the Sox were a form of solace in a terrible world. The controlled drama of the World Baseball Classic, where agony and suffering were confined to the field. The rhythms of spring training, signifying renewal and hope. The spell of the daily game, and the comfort of a world where the great fear is that David Ortiz has truly lost his bat speed. The passing of time, out by out, hit by hit, following games over the tiny screen of the phone while waiting outside the ICU and praying and hoping for a miracle.

A Bartlett Giamatti's famous quote on baseball reads: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." And that is true. But the game can comfort too. It can remind you of times where people have springs in their step, and where people have full control of their faculties. Its highs are true highs, bringing unbridled joy and elation. And yet its lows are manageable. Autumn will pass, and then new players will come in, draft picks will make the majors, there will be renewal. Because in baseball, there's always "Wait till next year!". And what I wouldn't give for a next year with my mother.