Hawker Centre

…is the place where I have dinner on most nights. Five minutes walk from the apartment, in the opposite direction form the Poly, is an open (has roof, but no air-conditioning) food court that has 88 stools, according to the old Chinese scholar with whom I have shared the table and interesting conversation the few nights ago. A dish costs between 2 and 5 Singaporean dollars (3 SGD = 2.50 AUD = 1.50 EUR = 11.20 HRK). This makes it cheaper to eat out then to cook at home, especially to cook just for one person – me like.

Most days I end up eating seafood dishes, and the one that I try to eat more then once per week, is a sliced fish soup (pic taken by the phone camera)

Yesterday I caught up w/ a Kiwi friend after a long time... First we met for the dinner at the Newton Circus, the Hawker Centre for tourists, where we had BBQed Sting Ray.

Fighting the nature

Dave, the international colleague, says that it is all in the name of comfort, and our – human – prosperity, it’s something that we have been doing since always, so it shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone. But still, I’m surprised - the amount of energy that Singapore spends on keeping all the indoor areas cool must be ridiculous. In spite of many warnings by my friends, I don’t mind the heat at this place, at least not the one I have experienced during the first few weeks. What I do mind are aircons that keep big difference in the temperature between inside and outside. I believe that this is the cause of my cold that has been dragging on since the day I arrived.

Also, in my opinion, the outside heat would not be perceived as bad as it is by majority if the aircons were set to cool the inside to a temperature ONLY few degrees less then outside, instead of, what seams ten degrees or more.

Airconditioners, 'decorating' the side of the building:

On the sunny side, the layout looks somewhat better than the one Coleman ran into.

More on sports

Continuing on from the previous post... In the last couple of years, running replaced basketball as my sport of choice. So I’m looking to incorporate one or two runs per week as well, to balance out the swimming a bit (...and btw, the old man said that the balance is a very important thing). So far I went running only once. On Thursday morning the pool was closed for cleaning so I ended up running at the track. This was the first time I ran on the track, and the level of support, the bounce it provides, is very noticeable. Since I haven’t been running since I left Melbourne in the mid July, and taking into consideration the heat here, I stayed on the track for a reasonable amount - half an hour. In Melbourne I used to run a couple of 4km laps around the hill, this 400m per lap thing is not something that I prefer so I’ll be keen to check out the running at the near by park/hill.

They organise some kind of interdepartmental sporting competitions here at the Poly, including running and basketball. So I am looking to participate in both of those.

Tuesday evenings after work seem to be basketball nights… at least that has been the pattern since I’ve got here – hope it continues.

Swimming

I'm developing a healthy habit. I like the pool, a LOT. Most days, after I get up, the first thing I do is go for a one hour swim. In case I don't make it in the morning (due to the early meetings), I go at night before the dinner. And on some days, like yesterday, I even get there twice.

During my holiday In Croatia, I swam the route that I use to swim as a kid growing up. So in a way I already got used to swimming during the last couple of months even before coming here. Therefore, it sure was very convenient to find out that now I can continue strengthening my new habit by making it from the bed to the Olympic size pool in 5 mins.

Some 20yrs ago, I used to spent a few weeks each summer with my cousin Vlado in Split. Back then Vlado used to play competitive Waterpolo for the first division club as well as train younger players in the club. (Now he is a Waterpolo coach for students at the private high school in South Africa). So he would take me to his trainings, where he taught me how to swim. He thought me well, and I though I was quite good at it. Though, during my swims in Croatia this time around I started thinking about maximising the efficiency of moving through the water... and then last week, as part of my ‘work’, I started googling for the information about the stroke efficiency... Wow... Who knew swimming is such a complicated science. I came across quite a number good articles at Swimming World Magazine and at US Masters Swimming. Though out of all the articles that I went trough so far, the one that stands out, and is responsible for my muscle pain, can be found here.

5 min walking distance from the bed, free => love...!

Rainy Sunday afternoon…

Or should I say lazy Sunday… I like Tropical rain, at least for now… It’s been raining quite a bit in the last week. It would be nice for Melbourne to get one of these downpours once in a while. Pic taken form the ICT building.


Currently I’m sitting at the bench on the ground floor in the foyer area of the building. Just today I found out that these benches have power sockets underneath them. Thought that’s not that much of a big deal anymore (for now), as I got a new battery for the laptop. The new battery is good for a few hours of work, as oppose to a few minutes that the old one was capable of. Apparently, this rapid decrease in a battery performance of our (beloved) gadgets is something that will be around for a while longer...

View for the bench:

Blogging about blogging

There is lots of it out there... I went looking for a solution to the pictures uploading problem and it turns out that I'm not the only one facing the issue. Google guys are 'upgrading' the blog, and this version that I'm using is in the beta stage - no right/basis for complaints. Though on the bright side they are 'looking into it', so those pics will be there 'in no time' :)

The suggested solution out there was to use the FireFox instead of IE, though I cannot even log in using FF, let alone upload the pics. Though FF's advantage is that the blog itself looks better -it used to look good in IE as well at the beginning.

Update, 23th Sep - now that I can log in using FF, here's the pic of one of the 'blogging spots' - though here I can only work off-line, as wireless doesn't reach to the 8th floor - which is actually the 7th floor. Around here they start the count from one, there is no ground floor!

Mobile phone

I think it was Tuck who joked by saying I better change my phone before I start teaching in Singapore, as all students would be laughing when they see me answering my old Nokia 8310. I had no concern about it, I rally think that I was using the good old classic, maybe even something that one day might be a worthy collectors/museum item :)

Though, unfortunately my classic developed some problems during my stay in Croatia: it couldn’t recharge properly and the slight shake would shut it down. On the bright side, if you’re goanna have your phone die, then it’s a good thing that it happens on the way to Singapore, a place of cheep communication (relative to Australia/Croatia). It turns out that here, plans provide a much better talk/sms value, plus you get a new phone for cheep, then the prepaid options. But wait there’s more, the Poly has a corporate agreement with Starhub, one of the telcos here, so the staff gets 30% discount - and everybody likes a nice discount.

So for $20 a month I get 160 outgoing minutes, free incoming calls, 100 SMSs and the new phone for $98. It was bit difficult to forecast the usage pattern, but they give you an option to start cheep and upgrade, charge free, to a higher plan should you require it later. Considering the amount of mobile phones per kilometre square in this country, it's no wonder that the price of communication is rather cheep here. Talk for 15c/min, and send SMS/MMS for 5c.

Apart from using a ‘stone age’ Siemens for a month in Croatia, this is the first time I’m using non Nokia phone, and all is great. Love all the new features that found their way onto a small sized phone (aka, form factor) in the last 5 yeas, and especially its ease of use -> me a happy customer.

The only disappointed I came across (so far) was the other night when I started transferring numbers from the old phone to the new one. Using them both simultaneously, there was a big difference in the way the phones felt while pressing the buttons. Comparable to the old one, the new phone felt clumsy, toy like, cheep…

Wondering if that is just the case for this particular phone, or if it can be generalised to the whole brand, or it’s the case for all models that are on the lower end of the price scale…?

Update, after using the phone for few days:

The calendar on these new colour screened phones is (almost) great. Why my one doesn't have an option to set an event as reoccurring one (e.g. bBall every Tuesday evening) is puzzling... Guess having an option for 'remind me later' would be asking for a bit too much.

It would be nice to have an option to reply to SMS including the original text. I figured a way to (sort of) overcome the problem by using the forward option.

The message alert tone is to quiet. When trying it out within the settings it sounds great. Though once a msg is received you can barely hear it. You are probably thinking why don't you just increase the ring tone volume, well if I was to increase it any more the tone for incoming call would jeopardize well being of my hearing. There must be something somewhere to set this properly.

Any pointers on any of these from SE users are more then welcome!

And lastly the good news, after putting in some tape below the back cover (between the cover and the battery) the fit of the cover is significantly improved – the good old sellotape.

Phone + Mp3 player

Few years back, when I got an iPod, I was talking about my wishful thinking to have a phone integrated with it (note the order)... surely that's gonna happen one of these days. Although Apple did get iTunes into Motorolas, I wasn't impressed. My thinking was more along the lines of what the guys at Sony are doing lately by squeezing the whole walkman, not just a music application, into the phone. This latest offering, Me like, a lot: 4GB, touch screen, yet still pretty small form factor. If only the calendar is on par with the one in the Outlook...

...or Phone + camera (update, 28 sep)

I've first seen the 3.2M camera on the phone that my cousin Daniel was using when we met in Croatia this summer. I was rather imprssed with the phone that had integrated camera which is as good as my digital camera, it's smaller then my camera, and ...err... it's not actually a camera, it's a phone.

A few years back, while I was studying subject on HCI there was lots of talk about which devices should be bundled together to create a mobile device such is a smart phone, and the current trend by SE and Nokia seems to be to emphesise either a music playing functionality or a picture taking ability of their phones.

So the question becomes, which option is the better one. The answer comes from that HCI subject, as another question: 'what do you need it for'. So for my current situation where I want to preserve and share the experiences, such as the non-planed walk along the river, the camera phone is more suitable. Whereas, once the life routine kicks in, as I had it in Melbourne during the past few years, an MP3 player becomes (to a person like me) an essential traveling companion. On that note, I should mention that my iPod has not moved from it's docking since arriving here.