dready blog v2.0

Just got back from another trip to Singapore and a side-trip to Malaysia. This time I was there not for my own wedding but my good friends, Aelvin and Kim’s who got married on 070707 (7th July, 2007) at the Equinox restaurant up on the 69th floor of Swissôtel The Stamford. I’ve known Aelvin for 19 years. When I first arrived in Singapore and went out with Aelvin, I was introduced to Kim. That’s how long I’ve know this sweet couple - about half my lifetime!

Aside from attending the wedding, perhaps what makes this trip so dear to my heart is that Tiff turned up at the airport when I arrived! I was totally not expecting her because despite numerous attempts at getting her to take a few days off to attend the wedding, she was quite sure that she wouldn’t be able to get any time off from work. Turns out that she tried anyway and her manager said, “Sure, babe!”

Good thing for us because that gave us the opportunity to spend some time together as well as finish off some very important business — spending time with my parents. After the wedding, we went back to Ipoh (my hometown) with my mum and spent three days with her, accompanying her to the dentist and fixed up some home electrics for her. Of course, we binged quite a bit too.

We then made our way down to Kuala Lumpur to see my dad. Dad couldn’t make it out to our wedding in Singapore due to health reasons, so it was especially important to see him as we’ve not seen him for 7 years. Not since we left for Australia. If you don’t know by now you would’ve guessed that my dad and mum were separated. So even if my dad was able to attend our wedding it would’ve been awkward since my mum vows never to see his face! Not sure how we would’ve handled that. Nevertheless, we wanted to get his blessings and so we carried out the traditional tea ceremony with him. The wedding wouldn’t have been complete without that!

So, mum and dad are both happy.

Other than the fact that Tiff and I are still living apart, I’m actually very glad to be back. I’m going to ground myself for at least 3 months.

After an exhilarating trip to Singapore for our wedding and Hanoi for a mini “honeymoon” ₁, I’m back in the US before yet another wedding (not mine of course) trip to Singapore in July. A lot of catching up to do at work…

In case you’re looking for some photos, we are now preparing them. Will post them online once they’ve been sorted out.

Many of you knew that I was moving to the US — I’ve been saying it for months. So, I finally made the move and am glad to announce that I’m officially here, and am settling in quite well.

Some photos are in order.

After spending a night at Aelvin’s place in NJ, I flew to Washington Dulles Airpot on Saturday 10th of February and arrived at the Hertz car rental to pick up my month-long rental car. I paid for an upgrade and they were nice enough to give me a 2007 Camry, only travelled 1,400 miles.

Next, I went to the apartment to sign the lease and get the keys to move in.

Living room looking at the balcony.

Bedroom

Washer and dryer nicely tucked in a closet

Kitchen

Bathroom

Balcony

View from balcony

Same view on Valentine’s day

Same view on Sunday 25th Feb

View of my apartment block. My unit is the balcony on the third floor.

Across the street from my apartment compound.

When viewed from my balcony on Sunday.

Snow flakes on my car window while driving to work.

On the evening that I arrived, Les and Kim were nice enough to bring me an air mattress and Sony flat screen TV plus some essentials all the way from Baltimore. That was a life saver, thanks guys!

The first weekend was Chinese New Year and since Monday the 19th Feb was President’s Day. Seeing that it was a long weekend, I decided to drive up to NJ to spend with Aelvin and his family. It was a nice and quiet one, but I didn’t take any photos except on my way back (using my brand spanking new Blackberry Pearl):

Along Interstate highway I-95

In the tunnel near Baltimore

And if you’re curious as to what my place and surrounding is like, here’s a satellite view:

This satellite map shows you how to get from my apartment to my work place. Yep! 6 minutes and a traffic light later, I’m there!

That’s it for now!

I was confused by the astrological chart generated for me by astro.com, which says that my birth place (Kuala Lumpur) was in the GMT+7:30 time zone. That totally defies my knowledge about time zones. For me, Malaysia and Singapore are in GMT+8:00. Period. We have no Daylight Saving Time, so no complications there.

First thing I did was to do a binary search on astro.com’s atlas query tool, and found that astro.com thinks that on May 1st, 1982, Kuala Lumpur transitioned from +7:30 to +8:00.

So, I did a bit of research and learnt something. I stumbled upon Helmer Aslaksen’s page, which contains very extensive explanation of the history of the time zone and its influences in our region. It turns out that astro.com was right – at the time of my birth, Malaysia was observing +7:30. Now I feel really stupid.

I then remembered that the entire timezones(tz) database is on any UNIX system with glibc installed. To view information about your location, look for the appropriate geographical location under /usr/share/zoneinfo and use ‘zdump -v’ to view the complete history of transitions in your location. For example, to see Singapore’s time zone history:

$ zdump -v Asia/Singapore
Asia/Singapore  Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901 UTC = Sat Dec 14 03:41:17 1901 SMT isdst=0 gmtoff=24925
Asia/Singapore  Sat Dec 14 20:45:52 1901 UTC = Sun Dec 15 03:41:17 1901 SMT isdst=0 gmtoff=24925
Asia/Singapore  Wed May 31 17:04:34 1905 UTC = Wed May 31 23:59:59 1905 SMT isdst=0 gmtoff=24925
Asia/Singapore  Wed May 31 17:04:35 1905 UTC = Thu Jun  1 00:04:35 1905 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=25200
Asia/Singapore  Sat Dec 31 16:59:59 1932 UTC = Sat Dec 31 23:59:59 1932 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=25200
Asia/Singapore  Sat Dec 31 17:00:00 1932 UTC = Sun Jan  1 00:20:00 1933 MALST isdst=1 gmtoff=26400
Asia/Singapore  Tue Dec 31 16:39:59 1935 UTC = Tue Dec 31 23:59:59 1935 MALST isdst=1 gmtoff=26400
Asia/Singapore  Tue Dec 31 16:40:00 1935 UTC = Wed Jan  1 00:00:00 1936 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=26400
Asia/Singapore  Sun Aug 31 16:39:59 1941 UTC = Sun Aug 31 23:59:59 1941 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=26400
Asia/Singapore  Sun Aug 31 16:40:00 1941 UTC = Mon Sep  1 00:10:00 1941 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Sun Feb 15 16:29:59 1942 UTC = Sun Feb 15 23:59:59 1942 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Sun Feb 15 16:30:00 1942 UTC = Mon Feb 16 01:30:00 1942 JST isdst=0 gmtoff=32400
Asia/Singapore  Tue Sep 11 14:59:59 1945 UTC = Tue Sep 11 23:59:59 1945 JST isdst=0 gmtoff=32400
Asia/Singapore  Tue Sep 11 15:00:00 1945 UTC = Tue Sep 11 22:30:00 1945 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Sun Aug  8 16:29:59 1965 UTC = Sun Aug  8 23:59:59 1965 MALT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Sun Aug  8 16:30:00 1965 UTC = Mon Aug  9 00:00:00 1965 SGT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Thu Dec 31 16:29:59 1981 UTC = Thu Dec 31 23:59:59 1981 SGT isdst=0 gmtoff=27000
Asia/Singapore  Thu Dec 31 16:30:00 1981 UTC = Fri Jan  1 00:30:00 1982 SGT isdst=0 gmtoff=28800
Asia/Singapore  Mon Jan 18 03:14:07 2038 UTC = Mon Jan 18 11:14:07 2038 SGT isdst=0 gmtoff=28800
Asia/Singapore  Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 UTC = Tue Jan 19 11:14:07 2038 SGT isdst=0 gmtoff=28800

Notice the cut-off at the end of 1981, when Singapore shifted to GMT+8:00. I can’t seem to find any information on who is right – the tz database or astro.com? Obviously, the tz database thinks that the transition from +7:30 to +8:00 was at Dec 31 16:30:00 1981 UTC.

Does your Windows box have this? (Use the time zone converter if you can’t get your hands on zdump, though you would have to perform a more superior algorithm than binary search to find out the transitions from this tool.)

What’s with me and burning the food I cook? First, it was the Kebab, now it’s the Sargent’s pie:

The thing I don’t understand is, how come the branded part is unaffected?

Went out to Paddy’s Market to buy a travel adaptor for South Africa in preparation for tomorrow’s trip to the ICANN meeting at Cape Town, imagine my horror¹ when I saw this. The American plug looks puny beside it.

¹ Actually, I almost felt violated.

A BIG THANK YOU to Michael Mills for his generosity! Actually, this entry is way overdue, I received it on the 8th July but have been too lazy to blog it (yes, we can definitely see a trend here.)

Some time ago, I started to use the PayPal’s “Make a donation” feature to accept donations for some of my projects. I did it partly to see if an open source software developer could actually get enough to buy some coffee and pizzas from donations. Well, looks like the answer is a Yes! (US$25 = plenty of 3-in-1 coffee and Domino’s pizzas)

Caught this brilliant show at Dendy with Tiff on Tuesday.

Morgan Spurlock (also the director and producer) embarked on a 30days diet of nothing but McDonald’s three meals a day, to show us why we shouldn’t do it. Conceptually similar to Bowling For Columbine, but this is more accessible and funnier.

Go catch it. If you can, NOW!

According to this post on Morgan’s blog, Australia is the second fattest country in the world, next to the U.S. of course.

Just upgraded bBlog to version 0.7.3. Lots of new features. Loving it…

Since the template format is not quite compatible with the old version (0.6), I’m forced to use the default template for now.. which is much better than the old version’s default, so I’m happy to live with it for a while until my new templates are baked.

Oh, and I just installed Zeitgeist too =)