ass ... @

The caricature is by Jimmy, a colleague at work who was bored during one of the early staff meetings that I attended back in September 2006, when I first joined the school.  

Jimmy's work reminds me of the smirk on this photo that my Mum snapped during her visit to Spora last year. 

...! 

Roza's visit

It's been exactly three months since we caught up in Dubai, so it was very nice - to say the least - to catch up again for a week here in Spora. She arrived on the 23rd Sep, and was on the way back on the 30th, just before I went to clean up my office.

As an early birthday present, I got the new camera - sweet. Thanks Roza! Perfect gift, since I lost the camera (she gave me!) at the end of our Iran travels (yep, together with all the photos).

dec...!

Ambivalence

As of today, I am officially unemployed. Though luckily, I am a student again, doing 3 subjects this semester at NUS, to differentiate me from the average bum.

I had two wonderful farewell lunches. One last Friday with my basketball buddies at the lovely Japanese restaurant - thanks Prince; and the other on Monday, with coworkers I've developed friendly relationship at a fancy Hokkien place (pic) - thanks YoonHin. Following the Monday lunch, I caught up with my Reporting Officer (RO) for a little farewell chat. Yesterday, after Roza left to the airport, I was back in the office cleaning out the last few things. Also, I had to return the school's laptop I had been using, though my good colleagues and friends - thanks Steven and Willy - organised a way for me to keep the laptop for a little longer.

The last thing left for me to do was to send a nice 'Thanks ICT' email to all colleagues at the school. Though, Director surprised me during one of the recent staff meetings by getting me to stand up and give a farewell speech, I felt like I left it too general, without thanking anyone in particular, so this time I took the opportunity to do that via the email.

As a response to the farewell email, RO send me a contact at SIM should I wish - err - need to go back to teaching - thanks Pam. And Director forwarded my resume to the company where she has a contact. I'll have the interview with the local IT consulting company next Tuesday - thanks Director. I am especially grateful to Director showing me her helping side - this was the 2nd company that she referred me to - as her and I had few misunderstandings during my time here; as the saying goes: water under the bridge.

Though, my last official day was only yesterday, practically my last semester at the school finished back on the 3rd September when we had the end of the semester staff meeting. So even though I had no work to do for a whole month, the official deadline invoked this funny feeling in me. On one hand I am very happy to be moving on as I know this is the right thing to do. Yet on the other hand, after two years here, the place has wormed up to me, and I have developed good relationships with many people. Thus, the part of me was said to clean up the office and walk out for the last time.

lookingFwd...!

just like dady

a boy wants to grow up to be like dad - I have quite some more 'growing' to do :)

Love (via) Skype

Last time I was back in Melbourne, we got the parents' computer Skype enabled:
Yogi's there too:

Technology, at times, truly does have the ability to erase the distances. During a chat, I forget that actually we are not in the same room, and that there is 7000km between us.

Pozdrav...!

UDATED 3rd Oct:

By the way, and Roza is there for few seconds at the time as well. The connection with Teheran is just terrible... Over there, ADSL is allowed only for corporate accounts, so she is on the dial-up, and connection drops way too frequently for any meaningful chat to take place.

congratulations DrRay

Best of luck with chasing that couriosity cat boldly forward where no man has been before...! 

Random nuggets

The Large Hadron Collider is a really big experiment:

Hope is that it will help answer the ultimate questions on the life, universe and everything:

- LHC explained with the passion by "Rock-star physicist" Brian Cox of at TED.

- The Universe is biiiiiiiiig. To get a better sense of the size, take a very cool journey to its edge.

- Detailed, five parts story about the LHC on Horizon, BBC.

- Stephen Hawking: Universe, six parts documentary.

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This post summarises 10 most influential studies in social psychology. Very nice read, on stuff such as why do we lie to ourselves, why do we conform to each other, why do we develop group mentality...

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Preetam, a colleague at work, who is highly involved with many things Web 2.0 had a nice story to share from the recent barCamp in Bangkok: the most popular presentation given was by the Japanese girl on 'How to date a Japanese girl'.

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Some very creative advertisement posters; with animals; on poverty.

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"Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like."

I don't know to which context this line by Will Rogers refers to, but to me it sure sounds like a definition for Consumerism.