A lot of people have the problem of an overflowing inbox, I know I do (except it has all been automatically filtered into N folders all neatly, still unanswered). But not like Charles Petzold. I remember him from the early 90s when his book “Programming Windows 95” was a text during my college years, I still use it as a reference once in a while if I have to do Win32 programming in C :)

Not only did I not have Internet access for the past few days, but it appears the hard drive of the machine my site is on has given up the ghost. It’s been over a day, and the backups have not been restored (I think the people at my webhost quit work at 5 ;) Anyways, they “encourage” users to restore their own backups, but err… I haven’t backed up my stuff for the past 9 months, yikes!

It’s the festive season in Singapore. Deepavali and Hari Raya Puasa (Eid ul Fitr) occur within days of each other (some dub this “DeepaRaya”), and next month it will be Christmas. To say the least, everything is hectic here with a lot of shopping and generally a lot of people everywhere. Singapore is a country approximately 40km across, and 30km from top to bottom (approximately the size of Vancouver, I think). And it has 4 million people in it! The whole population of British Columbia is 4 million, and it can fit in thousands of Singapores. It’s hot, and very humid - standard fare for being an equatorial country.

So I’m off to Singapore again, on EVA Airways - nothing spectacular, except that I’m stuck in the middle row of seats, in the middle seat - not exactly fun. But the Deluxe class seats are extremely comfortable, so I don’t mind. EVA has a Deluxe class, for CAD$100 more return, you can get business class type seats but with economy class food. Good deal, I think - especially with the trip being 18 hours of flight-time in total - one way.

A couple of months ago I was in the computer department of a national chain, let’s say it rhymes with “Mondon Drugs” (haha) to buy some computer equipment. As I was browsing, an elderly couple came in and were talking to a sales person about getting a bigger LCD monitor than what they currently have, a 17".

Ruskin Park, a tiny space of land right in front of my house has been taken over by a film crew. There are trucks, trailers everywhere - including a couple of ambulances and police cars. I don’t know what movie they are filming, but they’ve been here for about a week (must be major), apparently filming at the Ruskin Dam which is about a couple of minutes walk from my place.

I just bought my first Mac, a 12" iBook G4. Actually, its not for me - my wife needs a new laptop, her HP Pavilion is on the fritz, and she is swamped lately with freelance work. She has been vehemently anti-Mac before, she even had her whole department switch from all Macs (all 25 of them) to PCs when she was a Managing Editor at a major publishing house in Singapore. She wasn’t opposed to the iBook, since I got an extremely good deal from Atimi. Her “sour” experience stemmed from her first Mac experience using Mac OS 7, that was my first experience with Macs also. We both hated OS 7!

I’m one of those early adopters - I bought one of the first NAT routers (the BEFSR41) and a wireless access point WAP11 1.0 (upgraded to firmware 1.4i) when they first came out. Pretty pricey at the time, but they served a need in my house - that is, not needing to string out cable all over the house over the number of computers we have, in different locations.

About a month ago, I resigned from NS8 Corp and joined Atimi Software. Atimi is a services based company (we do not maintain our own IP, unlike NS8), where we do custom programming for a lot of major companies out there that need our expertise. This means lots of varied and exciting projects on any platform you can imagine. Most of Atimi is involved in Macintosh development, however I was hired to boost their Windows/Java development staff as we are anticipating more Windows contracts down the line. Macintosh programmers are a hard find, and apparently we are always hiring more of them, as fast as we can find them.

This is the software I’ve been waiting for: BaseCamp - a simple way to manage projects effectively. Tried some of the open-source ones out there, they seem to have lots of extra features that I don’t need or want, and will require more time to get used to. Besides, Basecamp is so much more: usable. Although I would prefer to have an open-source version so I can host it on my own site, but with open-source projects, getting something of the same quality will be a long time away. No doubt there are open-source BaseCamp clone projects being started on SourceForge as I speak! (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)