Equatorial Musings

I just finished watching The Majestic, a 2001 show starring Jim Carrey and Laurie Holden.  Most of you would know Carrey from his earlier and much less credible flicks like The Mask and other equally forgettable shows.  And of course, who can forget his penchance for over acting.  However, in this show, his acting is more mellowed and nuanced.  Not that he's getting an Oscar anytime soon, but he actually tried acting out his character.  And I must say he did a very decent job. And while it was set in 1951, i.e., some years after World War II ended, it had a good plot.  That war ended in 1945 for those who're too young to know this.  In the show, he played a Hollywood writer who's accused of being a Communist.  Suddenly, he lost his career, girlfriend and basically the life he had.  He went for a spin in his car, got into an accident and promptly developed amnesia.  He then stumbled into a small town where he was mistaken for a l...

I like to write as though we're already in a conversation and I'm just about to share something.  So, like I was saying, I've earlier bought a Sony SLT camera and have been experimenting with the 3 lenses I have.  Yup, I've 3 lenses.  Talk about jumping into photography in a big way.  To be fair, the kit lens (18-55 mm, f3.5-5.6) that came with the camera didn't count.  Neither does the complimentary prime (50 mm, f1.8) that I got from Harvey Norman, which the salesman threw in to sweeten the deal.  In actual fact, I only paid for the 3rd lens, which was a wide-angle add-on that comes with a macro.  I know for the uninitiated, the above doesn't make much sense, so I'll try my best to explain. The kit lens is a bit of a zoom lens that is your general purpose walkabout lens.  It comes with the camera, so it's cheap but quite good for those starting out.  The prime has a fixed focal length, so you need to move back and forth to fit the scen...

When I was younger, I really detested my humble beginnings.  I hated the crappy 1-bedroom excuse of a flat we called home.  I despised the neighbourhood I grew up in and the good-for-nothing gangsters and crackpots who hung around downstairs.  I wished every day for adulthood to come so that I can leave this god-forsaken place.  Yes, I was in Singapore then.  Not some 3rd world country.  After a long wait, I finally managed to get to university.  I must say I almost didn't made it.  First, I'm not that smart to begin with.  Second, I was not in good schools and being in the company of underachievers was infectious.  I really had to pull up my socks in Secondary 3 and 4 to do well enough to get into ACJC.  And I really worked my ass off to qualify for university.  And when I was in NUS, I studied hard to get into honours class to read History, which I've always loved since young.   I remember 3 years after graduati...

Since last October, I've been trying to run more frequently.  I used to run a lot more, and I've talked about this before.  But since last year. I've been putting in 3-4 runs a week.  It was tough intially, as inertia exerts a stronger pull than you can imagined.  But after the first few weeks, it became a routine and easier to don my sports/footwear and hit the pavement (or treadmill on some days).  After a few months, it became much easier and I actually looked forward to my regular runs.  In fact, it gave me a high that was hard to match doing other activities.  It also gave me a respite from my often hectic and stressful work, especially as a number of my staff had resigned recently.  But that's a story for another blog entry. So, its now almost a year since I started running regularly.  And for the most part, I've kept to the 3-4 runs a week schedule.  However, it was impossible to do so the last 3 weeks as I was really swarmed...

After my last attempt to take up photography, including getting a second hand Canon SLR (Single Lens Reflex) which has since stopped working, I never quite shook off the idea.  I've always been fascinated by the creative process involved in composing and capturing images.  They range from taking portrait to landscape pictures under various conditions, either natural or otherwise.  The latter category is why a SLR is useful, as you can adjust the shutter speed or aperture size to create different effects, from freezing fast actions to slowing them into a blur.   I recently got myself a Sony A57, which uses a translucent mirror technology, i.e., the mirror doesn't reflex unlike a normal SLR.  Rather, the translucent mirrors allows the image both to be reflected onto the sensor for capturing and the viewfinder for composing simultaneously.  For a normal SLR, the mirror needs to swing out of the way after composing for the sensor to take the image.  W...

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, ...