Equatorial Musings

The other day, one of my ex-colleagues from MINDEF (where I had worked from 1996 to 2009) was in town. He's now living in New York working for a boutique fund and was back here for work and pleasure. I was told of his being in town by another ex-colleague, who was also my ex-uni mate. She was the one who arranged for the last-minute gathering. Anyway, Eric, Seow Peng and I met at the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel. We had a few drinks and reminisce about the good old days when we all worked in the Defence Policy Office (DPO). We had lots of fun, not least because we felt on the top of the world doing what we thought were the most important work in MINDEF, and possibly in Singapore. We were Defence Policy Officers, and our work was crucial in ensuring Singapore's various harmonious bilateral and multilateral defence relations. Truth be told, while there were hard times, there were also good times. Like when we indulged in hilarious banterings and teasings, from word play to del

I know that detractors of blogging find bloggers self-absorbed. Who really wants to know how they feel about anything and everything. It's enough that we live in an era where most people are concerned only about their own feelings and thoughts. There's no need to turn to the Internet to find more of such people that you already meet every day of your lives. So here I am talking about my new fan. It's not so much that I got a new fan that's interesting to would-be readers. It's also not the fact that the new fan is a tower fan of the same make as the last one. Rather, it's the fact that the company in question, Europace , makes nice-looking fans but somehow fails to follow through by manufacturing equally decent remote controllers. The one that came with my new tower fan looks cheap and clumsy, and the cover feels like it's gonna give way any time. Of course, my issue with the remote controller is minor next to larger world issues, such as global warming,

I've watched the show "Inception" twice, and recently bought the DVD so that I can relive the cinematic experience and Christopher Nolan's brilliance. For those who didn't catch the movie, and you should have, it's a show about planting thoughts (or in this case 1 thought) in people's minds. In the movie, Leonardo di Caprio's character was asked by Ken Watanabe's character to go into his competitor's son's mind to get him to break up the business empire his dying father will soon leave him. To cut to the chase, the story involves putting the subject into a dream state where di Caprio's character and his accomplices can interact with the former in his/her dreams. In this case, there's a dream in a dream in a dream, i.e., 3 levels of dreams. So it's rather complicated, but if you're paying attention, you should've no problems following the plot. Of course, there are various theories on whether there's more t