chronicle SINs

Internet Earthquake

Saturday, December 30, 2006

The earthquake at Tainan had shake up some wakening ideas about the internet. We have been taking Internet in our life for work and personal activities for granted in the recent years. With the internet we have been able to do instant messaging, online chatting, emailing and real time gaming etc from locally to global friends. All these come to crumble when the earthquake shook up the broadband cable linking the regions of SEA, taiwan, china and hongkong to international site.

In IT we often talked about backup plans and stuffs. With this incident we see that the ISP here rely heavily on this cable linking to the international site. Re-routing seems like non-existent, either that the company didnt want to pay for extra costs or wasn't part of the plan. Ironically internet was designed to survive the attack of nuclear bomb, and yet this earthquake with the power of 6-7 times of nuclear bomb crippled much of our online activities.

For almost 1.5 days I couldn't get on to my gmail. Took some bit of efforts for them to recover and re-route traffic elsewhere,but quality was still wasn't that good in the initial recovery period. Messages send on MSN Messenger was either bounced back or cannot logged on. IP Telephony was also hit badly, my budget call card to my Chinese friend quality wasn't that good till a day after. Everything was reducing back to the dialup modem days.

Today I think for SG end here, much of the condition got better. Being able to access this blog to write about this is a good sign. Hopefully this incident can serve as a lesson to all that things shouldn't be took for granted.

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Xiamen Dec 11-20

Thursday, December 21, 2006

After unpacking and all the stuffs, it was 12 midnight exact from my trip back from Xiamen. At the same time I knew that this temp 2 month project that I have been slogging off on this project is coming to an end on my official note. Which then brings to another part of my thoughts, what's next? With 10 more days to end of 2006 here I am feeling that I am back to square one again.

One thing I am sure, this project is not the end, and it's just passing back the baton to the official parent. I have finished babysitting it and I felt that I have completed the most of what the vendor and I can with the tightest time that was given. With unclear communications and changes halfway through the project this is really not nice.

As for what's next, somehow I felt that I am lost and don't really know what I should inspire to do at the moment. Taking a stable job and have a decent pay cheque? Find something to settle down myself? Met with some nice Chinese friends on the vendor side. The other day I was mentioning to him if he has any contacts that do web/software development and he invited me to met his wife's colleague who does that kind of project. I am thinking of doing outsourcing model if possible as it will benefits both parties if possible.

At the same time I can really feel that setting up a business is really full of uncertainties, or is it that I can't manage the uncertainties at the moment?

When I am at Xiamen, 2 friends asked me if I missed the place? Strangely when you are there, I told them that I don't really missed it much but there be some thoughts of it there. And now when I am back, I started to miss some bits of Xiamen. From what I see, Xiamen is going to concentrating on developing it's city. As the best city in Fujian and inheritance of history facts, it definitely can be a good developed city as Shanghai or Beijing in time to come. The famous Xiamen University is one of the top 5 university in China, big campus it is, the walk that I took didn't even explore the whole place.

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Run, run and run

Friday, December 08, 2006

Alas it's december already. Started off december with the Singapore Marathon on 02 Dec 06, but I took part only in the 10km run. Looking back this year would be one of the year that I took part in many runs. 6km run for the Sheares Bridge Run, 10 km for the Terry Fox run and this 10km Singapore Marathon run. Next year hope to aim for the 21km, but need to train up for it. Always felt that my body after the run like badly dehydrated and crumpling after the run.

During the run, some thoughts come into my mind. Why do they organize such an event? It takes up a lot of time for planning, gather resources and sponsors, and yet there are many of such events. In one way, for the organizers and sponsors, they got their publicity/advertising brought to the public. The other benefits would be bringing an awareness to the public about maintaining a healthy lifestyle thru exercising.

With the Sheares Bridge Run/Army Half Marathon, I believed it's a good test for the SAF to test their capability to organize a non-military event. They have many strategics for battling on the fields, but an event for run with involvement from many different units, aids in testing the cooperations between the units, the batch of helpers (there will always be new/old batch doing). The last and not least it's the basic to enhance the friendliness image of military instead of the harsh image.

As for Terry Fox run, I do see involvements from many organizations like civil organization, overseas schools and private sector companies. Each contributes in it's own way. Schools have always been an active target for voluntary work, especially local school whereby the students need to accumulate a certain amount of CCA points for their voluntary works. However I find it will be an enriching event even if it's just helping out, to get out from the norm routine of textbook. For the Terry Fox run, they involved the Canadian School students to take part in the run or helpers.

It is really heart-warming to see many people running for a cause, and although ages catch up with man, there are elderly who endeavor to run, and their record timing is fantastic. Some of them definitely did better than the young men (like my bro) with an hour or above.

Oh yeah, this year adidas came out with the campaign for their shoe, giving away bibs to write and tag on to the runner's t-shirt. It's so funny reading some of the people writings on the tag. Hmm I just recall one of Adidas's banner liner at the event which goes like this - "Impossible is nothing".

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What's Your Personality Type?

Friday, December 01, 2006

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