Rant 1228 / Something Something Something Something, So Something.

26 May 2016

So I tried to type something on the 18th and nothing came out.

Anyway OneDrive just downsized our free capacity from 15GB to 5, so now I'm uploading as much as I can to Google Drive. Everything in my iPhone was back up there and it's only 3GB full, so I'll have to manually copy the rest over. Could take a while.

After Van fell in love with Qatar Airways (I'm impressed too, btw), I started looking at the flight deals from the airline and found that it's actually quite affordable on most routes despite the relative opulence offered even in Economy class.

Now I feel like such a frog in the well for believing that Singapore Airlines sets the standards for airline comfort. No, because not only does Qatar still uses metal utensils even on Economy, they also offer free Wi-Fi. Other things included in their trans-Atlantic flights include ear plugs, toothbrush with toothpaste and eye pads. Slippers are only for Business class.

I have not been on one of their flights so I cannot say anything about the seat sizes and recline, although generally speaking, they're all the same on Economy across the board with really minute differences, like an inch in seat width.




















So I'm using perfume regularly now since the two bottles I bought a year or two ago were barely getting used. Spraying my handkerchief turned out to be an extremely useful idea and I'm even more tempted now to bring a some perfume when I travel to places with warm weather.

https://youtu.be/APybYjcm_j4

The elevated bus that debuted in Beijing. At first it looked like THE solution to traffic jams, then it looked like it will just block all the road signs for almost every vehicle going under it. 

Looks cool though. 

30 May 2016

Watching the latest X-men movie got me thinking: if we know the dimensions of the school, we should be able to get a rough estimate of the speed of Quicksilver. 

Turns out it's already known to be Mach 10, or about 340,000m/s, or roughly 0.1c, i.e. 10% of the speed of light. 

At that speed, he should be experiencing effects predicted by Einstein including the slowing of time relative to everything else. If he wears a watch, it would get lag behind other clocks a little bit every time he gets close to that speed. 

Also, he should be creating sonic booms every time he gets beyond the speed of sound, a mere 340m/s. 

Another irregularity is how he makes everything feel so effortless when he does crazy stuff while moving at supersonic speeds. 

I don't believe this version of him has super strength nor super strong bones, yet he can deflect bullets with his fingers and fling people around by gently pushing them. 

One has to keep in mind that even when he is moving slowly in those high speed scenes, he is still doing all those things in milliseconds. To nudge an average adult male 5cm within 0.1s is still a lot of momentum and acceleration. 

There are a few assumptions made here, but if you take the average resulting velocity to be 0.05m/0.1s=0.5m/s, then accelerating him from stationary to 0.5m/s in 0.1s would take an acceleration of 5m/s^2. Assuming this man weighs 70kg, the amount of force he has to apply would be 350N, or roughly like carrying a 35kg weight. 

He saved everyone in that school in probably less than a second, so obviously it's a lot less time spent on each person than 0.1s, hence even more force applied than that. And everyone should have been bleeding in their ears afterwards from his sonic boom.

1st June

In Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport now at 4.30pm and there's no Wi-Fi. Technically, it's there, but according to the lady at the information counter I had approached just now, since I don't have a local SIM card, I can't get an authorization code to access it. With roughly 11 hours to go before my flight at 3.45am, this is so fucked up. 

Hence I'm blogging while sipping on this indecently overpriced latte at Oak Tree. 60RMB, my readers, is a lot even in a city like Guangzhou. An extremely filling meal at an average restaurant is only less than 100RMB per pax.

This coffee is practically at the same level as Singapore cafes! And it doesn't even come with free Wi-Fi unless you had been willing to fork out a few hundred RMB for a prepaid SIM card.

And my rant isn't over yet, mainly because my flight is still 11 hours away.  Not that I'm going to type for the rest of these 11 hours, but it could end up being the most interesting thing I can do here, especially with my luggage preventing me  from being too adventurous, not to mention Guangzhou really is quite bland IMHO. It wasn't designed to be a tourist attraction, I feel. A food haven, no doubt, but with precious little to do in between meals after a few days. 

My plan is really to sit a little while more, then get out and find the 7-11 in the arrival hall for a cheaper meal. There are lounges I have access to later when I reach airside, but without Wi-Fi, there's no way of knowing if they will still be open by then. 

I'm going to miss the food here. If you're into Chinese food and not too squeamish about the hygiene issues that plague the F&B industry in China, this is frigging paradise on Earth.

It reminds me of the older Singapore in terms of availability and variety of cheap food everywhere, just a lot more Chinese and far more chaotic. Furthermore, they're good despite the prices. Brings to mind my old theory that when food ingredients are cheap, people are more willing to experiment. I know it's not exactly true; food prices don't necessarily affect innovation, but what I really do feel is that the prices aren't a direct factor - the amount of people eating out is. The prices affect the type of people eating out and therefore the type of food the chefs get creative with. 

In the cheap range, look at the night markets in Taiwan. There's always something new and sometimes they even spread to other countries, like the giant fried chicken cutlets. In the expensive range, restaurants in Singapore are always pushing their chefs to come up with something new regularly. In fact, one ex-chef I talked to spoke of his ex-boss who instructed him to create a new dish for the menu every week. 

With the working hours of chefs in Singapore being as long as they are, I wonder how they can still have the time to be creative. 

Forced creativity? 

No wonder our restaurants haven't made any new dishes that have spread to other countries. Even our breads (Bread Talk) and barbecued meat (Bee Cheng Hiang) have gone further.

Alright, it's 5pm. 

So there are cheaper meals at the arrival levels. I'll go back there again later for dinner. 5.37pm now. Wanted to buy some duck wings back but they need to be chilled. 

No luck with the internet still but I found some vending machines selling prepaid SIM cards for various countries. Since they were selling some for Hong Hong and Macau, that was an opportunity to use the mouldy 100RMB bills that remain in my possession. 

50RMB for a SIM card that provides 7 days of unlimited data is an awesome deal even if it didn't accept the old bill, but it did, so that was even more fantastic. 

Usually these days I only use the data passport from M1 that costs S$10/month and a one-time registration fee of $2 and allows me to use all the remaining data in my monthly plan in a specific country or city. 50RMB would be around that price and is perfect for my week-long trip to Hong Kong and Macau later this year. Too bad they didn't have any for South Korea or Seoul. 

Now that I'm in China, the thought that Vanessa's classmates labelled one of them who grew up in the US a "banana" really brought to my mind that saying involving a pot and a kettle. 

None of us in Singapore can be considered to be really Chinese anymore.

9pm now. Been playing War Tortoise and had a decent meal for 89 yuan involving braised ribs with rice, a side of boiled veg, a side of pickled radish and carrot cubes, a soft drink and a dish of steamed rice rolls with minced pork. Expensive for this city but decent. 

One thing that kinda stood out for me is that there are a lot of Africans here because Ethiopian flies here. Moreover, they only seem to eat at the only shop that sells meals for a mere 25 yuan - the "Fast Food" shop selling what we call "cai png" in Singapore. They have a small selection of vegetable and meat dishes, and you choose three to have your rice with. For 25 yuan, you get to have one meat dish and two vegetable dishes. This is the cheapest full meal in the entire airport and is still more expensive than the average price one would find in Singapore outside of the CBD area. Just as expected in an airport. 

And it also underlines the poverty in that continent. 

11pm. Took a long walk in the airport and in the process, helped a local girl with the SIM card vending machine and an African guy with directions to the Metro.

In an hour and a half, the check in counter will finally be opened. It's possible that they won't be open but if any of them is, I'll take a shower. With the clean clothes and everything needed for a shower except a towel in my bag, I'll definitely go for one if it's available for free. Heck, if necessary, a clean T-shirt can easily be used as a towel since I'm already heading home. 

Anyway, as I had initially discovered on the taxi to the hotel I had booked on the first night, there is actually a hotel right next to the airport. In fact, there are signs directing people to Pullman Hotel so it must be very close. I'm going to check out the price when I get back. Otherwise, there are hotels closer to the airport than the one I booked, far more than Expedia and Hotels.com led me to believe, so if Pullman is above S$100 a night, I'll try searching for them in Ctrip.

My hotel was decent enough though, at S$67 a night, plus about 35 yuan for cab,  making the night a total of $74. Even when that's added to my airfare, it's still cheaper than those offered by other airlines. 

Now the problem is finding a place to stay while coming back. This 3.45am departure requires a night at a hotel if possible. Airbnb will be difficult because not all hosts will have the proper system for handling the keys without being there till the next day, so I'll have to ask before booking next time. Or stay at Pullman. Then again, I have a feeling it's an expensive hotel, given its location. Optimistically, it could turn out to offer capsules or hourly rates. 

Another thing is that it's far cheaper to fly from JB to Guangzhou than from Singapore. Yesterday, I found fares as low as S$150 for a return trip and that's about $200 lower than what I paid. For that kind of difference, I really have to find out how one can go to the airport in JB from Singapore. 

Since I always go to Guangzhou with only carry-on luggage, an open-jaw trip may be possible in which I fly from JB to Guangzhou with only carry-on, then from Guangzhou to Singapore with checked luggage. Unless, of course, it's really convenient to get from the JB airport to Singapore with heavy luggage at a reasonable price. 

Uber maybe? 

12.23am. Apparently there's such a thing as Iraqi Airways and it flies from Guangzhou to Baghdad. Also, I'm really worried by all these signs everywhere saying that all carry-on luggage must be below 20*40*55cm and weigh less than 5kg. It looks like I may have to buy checked luggage space if it applies to all airlines departing from this airport. 

It was only just now that I recalled that I could have bought a day of data for S$15 just now. Would have made the wait a lot more entertaining. Oh well. 

12.56am. Queue is slow. At least they were opened on time. Brain is pretty dead. Not sure what will happen later when I have to go eat at her school.

Good thing that rule about luggage doesn't seem to be enforced. Plenty of people leave the counters with huge backpacks so I'm safe. I'll just pretend to be stupid and ask for the carry-on limit anyway. 

4.34am. On the plane but can't sleep. It's definitely the space issue. I feel like I can't breathe. 

6 June 2016

Went to the PC Show last Friday to look for a flash drive with a lightning connector for my phone in hope that bringing some videos with me will help to avoid the above incident. I know, there are ways to download videos into the iPhone, but they feel so complicated.

So there I went, and not only did I find the flash drives with lightning connectors, but also a flash drive that can connect to other devices wirelessly by creating its own tiny hotspot.

The latter was impressive! According to the salespeople, it creates a small hotspot for up to 3 devices and has a battery that lasts up to 6 hours. When I tested it at home, I could watch videos directly from it without copying it over, although copying would help save battery life in the drive. The SanDisk Connect app was also required to use the drive so that limits the number of people who can freely access it, in addition to the usual network password obstacle.

The idea that I immediately had was that when I share this device with Van, I'll plug it into a power bank and let it run. With 64GB of space, there can be a lot of videos we can store in there. Moreover, it can be an emergency storage if we somehow manage to run out of space in our phones without realizing it until we are taking more photos/videos.

Not travelling as much as I did in the last several months so it will be August before I have the opportunity to test it in a trip. Then, this will be really a necessity as the average will be about just over a trip a month, if I remember correctly. There will be several work trips this winter instead of just one or two as my business (and seriously, the economy) isn't doing so well, although tbh this is going to be fun since my gf and her best friend will be tagging along with me for my work trip to Seoul. My plan is to go wherever with them, then add a few more days for myself just for work.

Not going anywhere for the next Chinese New Year public holiday though because Van wants me to be around then, then I may go somewhere after that since it's still CNY for the first 15 days of the lunar month while only the first two days are public holidays in Singapore. It will be a long weekend as it begins on Saturday, making Monday a public holiday to compensate for Sunday, but it's not long enough to go anywhere nice, plus it will be frigging crowded.




















Played mahjong with Van's family on Saturday, including her aunts, one of which was her godmother. They put me through a little interrogation during the game and, not to be arrogant, but it would be seriously surprising if they find anything to disagree with me.

Learnt a bit of Singapore mahjong but the expert, her godmother, had to leave halfway through the game and it got a little confused afterwards. The Singapore mahjong game app in my phone described several rules and advanced tile combinations that they did not mention at all, so we were playing with only the basic rules while none of the advanced ones were mentioned during the game, like winning with the last tile would get you an extra point.

Rant 1227 / Am I A Bird Yet?

03 May 2016

So nausea and dizziness are some of the possible symptoms of jet lag - and I've been having them mildly today and the day after the evening I arrived in Toronto at the beginning of my most recent trip.

Nothing when I first arrived in Toronto and then Singapore last night.

I thought it was because of the stomach flu I'd gotten on the flight to Toronto but clearly it's from the jet lag, although it was possibly from both.

Anyway, 12 hours of jet lag is worse than I remember. I absolutely do not recall the jet lag of my trip to Vancouver last year to be so bad. Maybe the difference was that I avoided coffee during my stay there.



















10 May 2016

Considered posting short posts. Not sure if it's any better than long ones.

Somehow, my jet lag has been turned into something positive - I now wake up at around 6am and go to bed at around 10pm. It's awesome because it's possible to swim in the early morning at about 8-10am, thereby avoiding the crowds.

Bad thing is that this won't last. Sleeping at 10pm in Singapore is as close to impossible as a vegan tiger.

















11 May 2016

Flying again. It's really not that great anymore. Last year, I was not expecting to keep this rate of flying up for multiple years, but this is the second year and I've had... let me see... started with the flight back after the Europe trip, then Seoul in late Jan, Auckland in early Feb, Penang in early March was by train so it doesn't count, Bintan in late March was ferry so doesn't count, Ho Chi Minh in mid-April which was almost immediately followed by the Canada/US trip in the same month.

Now, it's Seoul again.

How many flights does this make by the end of this month?

Oh, there were 2 flight round trips (SG-Canada, Canada-US) in the Canada/US trip.

13, or 6.5 round trips by the end of May. MAY!


It's not even been half a year yet.

Signs of travelling more than I ever expected have started to show - when I returned on my last trip, I was confused about which side of the escalator I should be standing on as I headed towards the immigration in Changi after alighting the plane.

Another sign is the mixed stack of five foreign currencies left unsorted in the locked box I keep my cash in for easy access.

Not to mention I'm starting to unlace my shoes once the seats in my side of the row have been filled, and then removing my shoes when the seatbelt sign is turned off after take-off.

I'm starting to feel at home on the planes now! There's even a small tube of moisturiser and a lip balm in my man purse that I keep in the magazine pouch throughout every flight. Other things I keep in there include a pen, wet wipes (usually from previous flights), one Panadol, one charcoal pill, a sewing kit, eye pad, glasses box, lactase pill (new addition after finding them in the US) and tissue paper.

After my last trip, I cannot understate the terrible hygiene on the plane! When I read that they absolutely NEVER clean the tables, I didn't think whatever is in the planes can hit me that badly - clearly I've been too jaded by the relatively sterile environment in my country. Air travellers come from everywhere, so the variety of bacteria on board is pretty international too!

Now, I've read more about how they clean the planes, and it seems they only spray disinfectant when leaving known hotspots like certain African countries. The usual? Vacuum the floor, clear the crumbs and remove any visible trash (excluding those buried so deep in the magazine pouches that the cleaners miss them).

And they DO clean the tables - after the flights of the day for each plane. The blankets and pillows? Depends on the airline, could be during each stop or at the end of the day.

Deep cleaning happens once a month at best, or every quarter for some airlines. This involves really cleaning the seats cushions instead of simply wiping off crumbs, cleaning the carpets instead of simple vacuum, cleaning the ceilings and walls, and probably some other stuff.

With the kind of foot traffic we expect on every plane, the insides of every plane now sounds absolutely disgusting.

In fact, you are 20% more likely to catch a cold on a flight, mainly from other passengers within two rows around you.




Although there are plenty of tips going around for what you should do to maintain personal hygiene on a plane, what I do these days is use wet wipes on my hands whenever I am about to touch food with my hands. That's it.

And I'm sorry if you get grossed out by this but I don't actually need a blanket to keep warm since I always try to bring a jacket if I'm going to anywhere cold - I use it as a giant apron during meals.

















It's unusual but it happens - full service airlines can sometimes offer cheaper fares than budget airlines. I've just booked a flight to Hong Kong for mid-August with MH and it's cheaper than those offered by Scoot and Jetstar by less than S$30. For the budget flights, I opted for check-in luggage only for one person and no food at all, and yet it's still more expensive.

Despite the small price difference, MH provides meals and check-in luggage service, so the overall difference is actually quite significant.

Don't ask me why. MH can't be doing too badly if they can afford to renovate their lounges now.

Rant 1226 / I Am So Bad.

16 Mar 2016

So I ended up on that side of Youtube today. It had an intriguing title and 8 million views to back it up, so how can anyone resist that?



I feel sorry for the girl.

Even before watching the video, I'm fully aware that children make great mouthpieces because their perceived innocence makes anything they say so much more believable.

As for her speech, some things seemed to be omitted to raise the impact of her words. For one, why did their government start to borrow money from private banks? This question can even be broken down into two: why did the government need to borrow money and why from these banks?

I may not be an expert but for all we know, there could be mitigating factors in the answers to these questions that will better explain the situation than simply because banks are evil.

Also, why are they so fixated on how loans are money that didn't exist before their approval? As long as most of you pay your debts, the loan is as good as paid. The risk of you not paying up is covered by the interest rates and whatever the average borrower owns - that's why actuaries exist.

I think it pretty much also covers what I said before - that the economy is founded on confidence, the confidence that it will keep going. I guess in a way it's like a religion because that's saying that the whole system is runs on faith.

As for why houses are so expensive that you need a loan to buy one, it's simple - prices go according to demand. If they are way lower than what people are willing to pay for them, someone will just buy up whatever they are and sell them at the highest prices others are willing to pay. That's just a fact of life in our capitalistic world. Who would miss such a simple opportunity to make some money?

If the price of a home is really too high, it would stay empty for a very long time, but as long as a house sells, it's not too expensive. Maybe it is to you, but not to the rest of the people who want that home. To put in in simpler terms, there are people out there who are perfectly willing to pay a portion of their income for their homes for 30 years of their lives. Different people, different circumstances, different needs, different degrees of urgency.

Oh, and different perception of value.
























18 Mar 2016

I don't want to hug Buddha's legs but it's a terrible habit of mine.
























Aaaaaaand I forgot about my parents for Qingming. Oh no.

Rant 1225 / Just A Quick Post.

15 Mar 2016

For some reason, Pillars of Eternity got a lot more interesting to me in recent months. It used to be kinda boring when I first received it but my taste seems to have changed since my trip to Europe. No idea why.

Now I'm in the Sun in Shadow (hopefully got that name right) and I've got no time to play it.

Tried using Remotr before realizing it was only for intranet use unless a port is forwarded, and found it hard to play PoE on. It's probably the same with Teamviewer, at this rate.

But I'll try it anyway when I go to Penang this weekend, and maybe try Arcanum too. Finally bought it for real, through GOG.


















Losing weight again. But a lot of it seems to be muscle mass. My stamina is getting worse and my legs ache again in the morning when I first get out of bed. At least I've gone below 96kg now.

Trying to keep my dinner to below 400cal with either half a cup of oats in water with 2tsp of sugar, or a serving of cold soba. Both are possible when there is a good enough mobile game to distract me with to make me eat slower.

Rant 1224 / And Let The Sous Vide Begin!

01 Feb 2015

Looking at my mileage balances, a thought keeps running through my head - is it really worth it?

There are a few schools of thought when it comes to mileage and airline loyalty, one of the newer ones being that we should ignore all of them.

It is, in fact, the most cost-efficient to ignore all brand loyalty and sign up for the cheapest flights all the time. The amount of money we can save from that is pretty significant right now, if we compare budget flights with full-service flights. Often, we can save half the money we would have spent on a full-service flight if we book a budget flight with no food and minimal luggage.

So, is it worth it?

I'm currently sticking with CX because of the service. So far, I've been watching it in a few airports and the lowest Marco Polo tier has been grouped with other passengers only in Singapore, while in Hong Kong and Seoul, they are entitled to priority boarding with the Business and First classes.

The issue now is that CX fares are becoming increasingly expensive in comparison to other airlines flying their routes and there rarely is any serious promotions. It is pretty hard for a Green member like myself to find a reason to fly CX other than brand loyalty when airlines like EVA can fly SG-SanFran for about half the price and has a decent reputation. Priority boarding doesn't count for that much relative to that price difference.

Staying Green is easy, so I may just do that; a return trip annually on CX is not a problem.

What I'm more concerned about is where I should focus on accumulating mileage. My current theory is to forget the airlines and just think about the points in my credit card. This way, I can be very flexible in where I get my Business class flights.





















05 Feb 2016

So I have taken a look again at the new CX Marco Polo that will begin soon and compared it with the old, and two changes were clear:

First, members who did not get the 100 club points needed to stay Green (the lowest tier) will have to renew their annual membership by paying the US$100 fee. That's twice as high as the original US$50 that I paid a few years back.

Second, the 100 club points are much harder to earn than the 4 club sectors that we currently need to stay Green. For example, a short flight between Singapore and Hong Kong nets me 1 sector, so two return trips on economy will get me there easily. In comparison, a similar flight will only get me 10 points in the new MPC, so a return trip of this distance is only worth 20 points, ie I will need to make FIVE trips to get it. However, a lower tier Business class flight between the two airports will get me 25 points each way, earning me 50 points in a return trip, ie it only takes two such trips to stay Green.

A return trip from SIN to HKG on Economy Core (subclass M) in late Oct and early Nov costs about S$700, or just below S$600 on Economy Special (subclass L). Both M and L gets me 10 club points per flight, except L cannot be upgraded with miles. On Business Save (subclass I), it costs about $2100.

A return trip from SIN to SFO on Economy Special (V) on those dates cost just over S$1900 and earns me 35+10 points each way. Suddenly, it's clear - the new system encourages long-haul flights! This trip costs less than thrice the price of the short trip but earns me 4.5 times the number of points!

Similarly, a return trip from SIN to YYZ (Toronto) on the same dates costs less than S$2300 but earns 100 points for the entire trip. This trip costs over thrice the price of the SIN-HKG trip but gets me FIVE TIMES the points!

You know what this means? Screw the short flights on CX! I'll go to Hong Kong on budget flights and do only the long ones on CX!

But upon checking the price of a return trip from HKG to YYZ on the same dates, I discover that there is no Economy Special; the lowest being Economy Core, raising the price to just over S$2700. Apparently, flying from Singapore is cheaper than flying from Hong Kong, even though flying from Singapore requires a transfer in Hong Kong.

Absence of logic from my angle aside, this means I'm going to have to suck it up and fly CX from SG. It's cheaper and more convenient, it seems.

























24 Feb 2016

So I've decided to take upon a task that may be one of the greatest in my life.

For Van's grad trip in August 2017, I shall organize a train trip from Singapore to London.

So far, two others have expressed interest in it, one a well-heeled traveler and the other the opposite. It's only been two days since everyone agreed on this so everything is still vague and fluid. However, there's already a conflict on this trip - the route. Van likes the cold and wants us to stay North in Europe while someone wants to go South like the Italian Riviera since it will be summer.

IMHO, all countries make sense in that part of the world so my compromise is to go to both in a Z-shape route.

One path is to go from St Petersburg to Finland to Sweden to Norway to Denmark to Germany to Luxembourg and back to Germany then to Austria to Italy to France and finally to London. This is my first draft route and the plan is to come up with a few more before letting them choose.

























14 Mar 2016

So it's been over two months since my last post. Here's a little something: I have a sous vide machine, the bags and the bag sealer now!

Tried it with eggs to make the shoyu eggs from ramen shops that have solid whites and thick gooey yolks. Internet recipe from Serious Eats didn't work, so I'm going to have to  do my own experiment and make my own chart of time vs how cooked each egg is.















Upcoming train ride to Penang will be crazy on the 18th. 8.40am JB Sentral to 9.45pm Butterworth, plus a short one at 8am Woodlands CIQ to 8.05 JB Sentral!

Not sure what I'm going to do during the ride.

Rant 1223 / It's Alive! It's Alive!

27 Nov 2015

So whatever happened to the shield wall tactic?

This tactic is probably pretty well-known, in which a group of soldiers would have their front rank hold up a large shield so that they form a wall. I thought only the Romans used it but apparently, it was used by the Persians and Greeks too, among others.

Anyway, how did battle tactics become what we have today from there?

Just guns? No, that's too simple.

So I went to read about it on Wikipedia, and this is my summary of a few pages of Wiki articles:

First, people innovated with this tactic. What did they attack enemies with from behind their shields? Swords and polearms. Eventually, they settled on pikes, it seems. Probably because with that polearm, even the guys behind the shield-holders can attack.

On a side note, one major issue with this tactic is that if a shield falls, morale falls rapidly unless the men were well-trained.

Moving on.

From the pike, they slowly realized that heavier pikes are even more awesome. At some point, they decided they could just use both hands to grab the pike instead of holding a shield at all.

That's when the norm went from shield walls to pike squares. Well one can still call the later shield walls a square of pikes with shields on, but pike squares mean just pikes and no shield.

Then guns arrived at the scene. Those early guns were the arquebus and the later musket. At first, they surrounded pike squares with a thin layer of gun-users, but later realized guns were even more awesome than heavy pikes, so they added more and more till the formation was a square of pikes surrounded by a layer of guns plus another square of guns at each corner. That was the tercio.


That was followed by the realization that with the range of guns, you don't need to focus so many guys in one place anymore, so they shrank the formation and split everyone up. With many smaller squares, the troops were more mobile than the gigantic 3000-men tercio formation, and as we have seen time and again in history, speed is a great advantage in battle.

Soon, however, guns got better - the flintlock came about and guns got a lot closer to what we have today; pikes became pointless when reloading and firing got so much easier. You don't need such a great aim anymore when you can fire so much faster than the arquebusiers.

So pikes were out, everyone got a gun, and here we are.































07 Jan 2016

Just watched 15 minutes of The 100, a TV show set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where people have been living on a gigantic space station for a century and they sent 100 "expendable" teens to Earth to check out the environment.

Maybe it's just me, but the fact that half the teens didn't care about reaching the mountain base they were supposed to go irked me to no end because it was supposed to be stocked with 300 years worth of supplies.

These kids were born in a space station and their ancestors were too for at least 4 generations. Logic says 99% of them are lacking in any basic survival training. Yet they don't want to go to the only place they know of with any degree of certainty that can provide food, water and shelter. Even if they can identify plants that grew in their greenhouses in the space station, wild plants can be incredibly different from their cultivated counterparts despite being the same species, with one example being bananas - wild bananas are huge and have seeds.

Even if they can get food, I find it hard to believe they have the skills to build shelters and fires.

...

Turns out they could. Weird.

Shit. My miles are getting spread out. Although the majority is still in CX, it's only 80% of my total excluding the miles I can buy with my credit card points. Moreover, I'm not taking many long haul CX flights this year. In fact, among all my upcoming trips, only one will be on CX and that's to Seoul. The furthest destination will be Toronto and that will be on Eva Air because it's S$500 cheaper, although I can't upgrade to Business which I would do if it was CX. 

After a total of six long haul flights of 9-13 hours in the last 3 months, I've become quite tired of taking them on economy.  However, for the trip to Toronto, I'll have to consider my girlfriend's limited budget so I'll just have to suck it up and do it.  According to Seatguru, Eva has wider Economy seats with better pitch than those of BA, so hopefully it will be nice. Fingers crossed.


















11 Jan 2016

So according to my estimates, I had probably spent about 10k SGD during my trip to Europe last month and earlier this month.

That's slightly lower than my expected budget overall, given the fact that my shorter trip to NZ cost about the same last year.


























15 Jan 2016

So I think the flu that has lasted almost a month so far is no longer a flu. I tried wearing an N95 mask for most of the evening yesterday and my nose stayed clear for most of the night with almost no coughing, runny nose and phlegm. The sore throat seemed to be almost gone too.

Then I slept with the mask off, and everything's back. BUT I'm not sure about this and will try again later when I get home.






























01 Feb 2016


This is the longest post in terms of the amount of real time it spans.

Much has happened. As for the flu mentioned above, it's really my dust mite allergy that got ignited by the flu. The thing about flu is that my sinus gets swollen, allowing mucus to accumulate. Mucus/phlegm is like a piece of tissue paper - you have to keep it moving. If you leave it stuck on some dirt, it just lets bacteria fester since it doesn't have any inherent antiseptic properties.

So when my sinus got inflamed from the flu (yes there was fever on the second night I had it during the trip), it allowed mucus to stay there and hence dust mites or bits of dust mites or dust mite shit got stuck on it too, causing it to stay swollen.

It's still swollen today but it's better now. I just have to keep rinsing with my saline spray, clearing my nose and stay hydrated (to keep the mucus watery and hence easier to blow out).








Much has happened, like I said. The Europe trip was crazy and my Seoul trip just happened to hit the cold wave at its coldest point - Seoul, at -18 degrees Celsius. Bad luck, seriously. Even with my thermal, t-shirt, ski jacket, wool beanie, ski gloves and nylon scarf, it was not enough at all. At most, I could stay warm for a minute or two, then the cold hits me.

It was worse for a friend of mine who wasn't prepared for this sort of cold at all just like me and was suffering from a flu even before flying over. She refused to get out at night and for one of the days, she had to stay in the hotel. Throughout the stay, she was coughing out phlegm that had to visit the bathroom often or leave a huge stack of gross tissue papers next to her.

I feel kinda bad right now.






Soon I'm flying again, this time to visit my aunt in NZ and then explore Sydney for a few days for Chinese New Year. My girlfriend is mad and I don't blame her. When I postponed the flight, I did ask her if those dates were ok, but the both of us are just as absent-minded sometimes, so she said yes without realizing, just like me, that I was returning to Singapore in the evening of Valentine's Day. Yes it's pretty bad and I'll have to make it up to her somehow.















My halfbike has arrived and I still haven't really tried it yet. I did try it a little in my home but there's just insufficient space to get started.

























So I had a thought this morning while coming back from the market. To make your country wealthier, you have to look outward. You cannot target solely your domestic market and expect your country to benefit much from your wealth. It's kinda a zero-sum game when it's all internal. Hence, all the wealthiest countries have had some kind of income from overseas, and it used to be foreign colonies while it is now international corporations.

And this is where patriotism comes in - you have to be willing to do to foreigners what you cannot do to your fellow countrymen.

Rant 1222 / Improving My Swimming Technique

24 Oct 2015

Been doing some research on flights for the April California trip next year, with the route being Singapore-Toronto-San Francisco-Singapore. Checked the prices of 4 combinations:

1) separate bookings of one-way flights for the entire trip
2) separate bookings of one-way flights only on Oneworld airlines for the entire trip
3) a single consolidated booking of flights for the entire trip
4) a single consolidated booking of flights only on Oneworld airlines for the entire trip

A single booking can be vastly different because all the airlines involved must be working together through codeshare or something, so airlines available through separate bookings may not be used in the consolidated bookings.

One early conclusion is that consolidated bookings are always cheaper even if sometimes, you are unable to book the cheapest airline in certain segments.

Also checked these four combinations for trips originating from Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Barcelona, Mumbai, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, eg Seoul-Toronto-San Fransisco-Seoul, although the results were only recorded for the first three.

The conclusion seems to be that it's the cheapest to book a single booking of flights from any airline from Beijing despite the extra cost for a return trip to Beijing, but the US$250 difference IMO isn't significant enough to beat the second cheapest option of a consolidated booking on Oneworld airlines flying from Singapore.

I'm just slightly biased towards it because of my pleasant experience taking BA between Singapore and London, not to mention the fact that it's simpler without the extra flights to and from Beijing.


















26 Oct 2015

The results found the other day were not very useful.

Yesterday, I decided to take a look at this trip from the opposite perspective - from the end-point ie the actual place she needs to go in California. Turns out that in terms of major airports, there are at least three - San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. All are kinda equidistant and all are pretty inconvenient.

The place she's going to is neither served by bus nor train, so her only options are taxis and car rental, and airport limo on the way back. At about an hour's drive out, a taxi ride is going to cost some serious money, but a car rental may not be useful if she ends up staying at that place for weeks.

Regardless, I'm only looking at the flights. Therefore, I'll have to redo the research using those three airports, even though San Francisco may be the most interesting airport among them.

But I'm not looking into them anymore since she can't confirm whether she can go there next year. Prices may change by the time she knows for sure, so there's no point in doing this so soon.

The spreadsheet will be left alone for now.























27 Oct 2015




Still going to buy that Salomon Quest 4D 2 GTX but in Dec in London. Couldn't get it in Vancouver because it was inconveniently located and spending time with my relatives was more important than shopping.

It's still a great hiking boot, according to recent online reviews, so I'm not forgetting about it.






















29 Oct 2015

Went for my first health screening yesterday. Was awkward and very uncomfortable at some parts. The doctors and nurses were very professional but some procedures were just necessary.



















30 Oct 2015

Was telling my girlfriend about the life of my late mother when I realized I had forgotten a lot of the details.

What's going to happen when I have kids someday and I want to tell them about their grandmother?

I'm not sure if I had recorded it in this blog either, so maybe I should try to jog my memory here since it's quiet now.

Disclaimer: This is mainly my mother's account of her life and is only one side of the story.

My mother was born third with two sisters before her. Both her parents expected and wanted a son, so my grandmother wanted to abort her before she was born. However, a fortune teller she approached told her that if she kept her, the next baby would be a boy. That was the only reason my mother was born; in fact, my grandmother didn't even bother to try to come up with a name for her - a nurse in the hospital gave her her name.

My grandmother never loved her. When she was a child, tuberculosis infected her right leg. Though she recovered before she could lose her leg, it had gone all the way through her thigh bone, causing that leg to be permanently weaker than the other. From then on, her mother would call her "crippled girl" even in the presence of family and friends.

That made her resolve to hide that limp, and IMO, any other weaknesses, which she succeeded in doing eventually.

My grandmother never believed in educating her daughters; only the sons needed school. My aunts born before her didn't need to attend school because they were too old by the time they came back to Hong Kong, but due to the laws of Hong Kong back then, she was forced to send my mother to one, and that was after people from the government visited them. Thus, my mother was able to attend primary school... a few years older than the norm.

It was a free Catholic school run by missionaries, and one of her teachers was a Canadian missionary whose last name was "Hayhoe" who loved bread with mayo. She did quite well, often among the best in class, but my grandmother never cared, believing it was a complete waste of time and that she should be obediently working like her elder sisters.

And work she did, because in Hong Kong, my grandmother brought plastic flowers home to be assembled. Her daughters who were not working full-time were expected to help with carrying the large bags and the assembly of the flowers, so that included my mother.

At the same time, she was put in charge of helping her brothers in their schoolwork, and that normally involved a cane. It didn't work though - all my uncles are doing pretty badly in life, IMHO, except for my second uncle who's passed on last year and hence isn't doing anything in life anymore.

When my mother graduated from primary school with results good enough to attend secondary school, which probably was not that common back then, her mother did not hesitate in pushing her off to a garment factory to work as a seamstress.

But my mother loved studying, and Ms Hayhoe thought she deserved a better education, so when my mother's request to continue her education got rejected, Ms Hayhoe came personally to talk to her. Eventually my mother was allowed to attend night school while working in that sweatshop during the day.

Obviously my grandmother didn't like it, so she rarely left anything for her for dinner. Usually all that was left was plain rice, although to be fair, none of the daughters were treated much better by my grandmother in the first place. The routine for her dinner was to add hot water to the rice before eating. She couldn't afford to buy better food for herself despite her job because my grandmother insisted on keeping about 90% of all her daughters' income. Heck, she could barely afford even a haircut, and I get those for just S$9 these days, so a decent meal was out of the question. The only thing she could afford consistently? The bus rides.

But two years later, my fourth aunt was born. On a side note, the fortune-teller was right - my eldest uncle was born after my mother. Anyway, everyone was busy working then, so my mother had to give up her studies to take care of the baby. That was the end to her formal education, discounting the part-time short courses she took beyond that point.

Speaking of my fourth aunt, she was badly neglected as a newborn while in the hospital. During one visit, they found her putting her own feces into her mouth. That was the state of public healthcare half a century ago in Hong Kong.

After that, my mother was focused on her work. She found that she had some talent in tailoring and was interested in design, so she attended an informal course taught by a design student in Hong Kong who was trying to raise money to study fashion design in France. She paid for it herself using money she had saved up despite the little that she got.

Eventually she was so good with the sewing machine she could make a suit with one hand and her work was often used as samples by her boss to be shown to potential clients.

In her personal life, she had always been attractive. After her eldest sister, she was the next most popular girl in the family. While that sister got married at about twenty, my mother went on to have many boyfriends. It wasn't that she didn't want to settle down but my grandmother had designated her least favourite child to be her caretaker when she gets old.

Plenty of guys wooed my mother and many tried to talk about marriage, with some even talking to her mother, but they were all pursuing the impossible - in the eyes of my grandmother, only money talks, and they were all too damn poor anyway.

Not only was my mother pretty, she was also particularly outgoing, mainly because she hated staying at home. She would often go hiking and mountain climbing with male friends, because girls those days preferred to be soft and weak. She couldn't handled that kind of thing, especially when they were climbing a mountain. Seriously, if you can't even take a small cut, what are you even doing on a mountain?

Moreover, girls overthink things and my mother was a simpler person. Sometimes, other girls would accuse her of trying to get the attention of guys they liked, which she had never bothered to do because her mother would nullify any possible happy endings anyway. Guys go after her because she couldn't stop them (one waited even after my dad passed away while another threw away a lock of her hair after her wedding), but she never tried to go after guys. All of them were told upfront that her mother would never allow them to marry her.



(To be continued)



























09 Nov 2015

Last week, I finally got comfortable enough with the front crawl to do it slowly. There was still some quick movements as I finish breathing in and continue with the next stroke, but I think I'm close to getting it right.

A lot has changed with my front crawl, and the main difference is that my body rotates back and forth on my sides now.

Now I have to improve on my breaststroke which is clearly wrong because it's giving me shoulder pains. This issue is why I did more front crawl in the first place, hence improving it recently.



























Fallout 4 is coming! Pre-ordered it with the season pass last week on GMG with the 20% off, so it was about US$70+ total.

Can't wait! 1 day and 8 hours to go, says Steam.