Isn't this one of the cutest videos you have ever seen?

An old fashioned cobbler

You get to see them fairly regularly in India, what with majority of the population unable to afford the snazzy shoes that the minority flaunts these days. But cobblers are usually in the vicinity of most residential areas and are fairly busy.

I had not seen one in Singapore. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I was at the ICA building (next to the Lavender MRT) to extend my mother-in-law's social visit pass date. Since almost the whole of Singapore had decided to do the same thing on that very day, there was hardly any place to stand, let alone sit in the obsenely crowded space. And since it took me a while, I did not get a chance to catch lunch. So I stepped across the street to get a Coke, mainly to get some sugar into my system to keep me going. And while I was walking back, I saw him.

A really old man mending shoes right outside the Lavender MRT station.

And he even had a customer.

Cool!

I did not think people in Singapore felt the need for a cobbler, cause you see shoe shops everywhere and almost all of them crowded. But just his presence there indicated that there are people here who need him to do his thing.

I learn everyday!

No...not really!

Nope...I've not been on vacation. The long silence just goes to show that it's been a hell of a busy time.

So...what's been happening, eh?

A couple of weeks where my time was booked from 8:30 in the morning to 7:00 in the evening. I had thought a lot of people would take leave around Christmas, but boy...was I wrong? Almost every single customer of mine seemed to have something or the other happening and I really ran out of time.

To add to that, my parents-in-law are in town. So the customary rounds of Singapore are on. And they seem to have the impression (which I can't blame them for) that I'm working longer hours just because they are in town! Luckily for me - probably luckily is not the right word, but it's the most apt - I was working long hours even when my parents were here. So at the very least, they cannot accuse me of discrimination!

Now...some bad news.

My best pal lost his father a couple of weeks back to Lung Cancer. I was hearing about one of the fittest men I know withering away. All in a month's time. This was the man whose house is a second home to me. I've lived there for days on end, made food requests to his wife and just had a whale of a time. Even though I couldn't speak to him in those last days (mainly cause he couldn't, not for lack of effort), I wish I had. I will miss him.

What else?

Oh, more bad news...but not the tragic kind. My golf buddy has gone back to India, leaving me alone to deal with the decline in my game. Yeah, he's gone already. Must have played a couple of rounds there by now. So I'm by myself all over again. Thankfully, golf is a solitary sport. I WILL endure this as well. I am not so sure how I am going to endure, but I will give it one heck of a go.

And it's been raining buckets here in Singapore. It's been so gloomy the last few days, it's even more depressing.

But then there's ManU!

One extremely lackluster game (loss) and two absolutely fantastic ones (wins, of course)! A cracker of a goal from Paul Scholles, definitely the goal of the season, and a few more by Ronaldo. Of course, a few great goals from Drogba & the rest of the EPL gang and football never felt better.

To take it a step more, Chelsea drew their Boxing Day match against Reading & ManU stuffed Wigan 3-1 on the same day to extend the lead at the head of the table by 4 points.

Some sunshine in all this gloom!

A cracker of a game and 8 points clear

It was worth the wake!

Arsenal went to Stamford bridge to meet Chelsea for what promised to be a fabulous match. Of course I stayed up and watched! (Just FYI, the match starter at 12 midnight my time).

Surprisingly, Arsenal dominated the proceedings for two thirds of the first half. They had most of the possession, made Chelsea look queasy and did not let their opponents settle into any rhythm. What they also lacked was the shots on goal as they pretty much created no chances. They sorely missed Thierry Henry, who is out with a neck strain.

So the first half went 0-0 and I was in no shape or form going to miss the second half.

I think the lockerroom saw some Morinho screams cause Chelsea looked a lot more lethal in the second half. They hit the post three times and created a lot more chances. But Flamini struck a nice Hleb pass into the Chelsea goal to take Arsenal one up.

That is when they experienced the wrath of Chelsea. The pressure Chelsea put on Arsenal's young defence was unbearable and something had to give. But the defence was not the reason the equalizer came.

It was a fabulous strike from Michael Essien from outside the box that sealed it. And while it was a great strike, it could have gone any way. And so I attribute the equalizer to luck more than great play. But Chelsea deserved the goal and should have gotten one in by the level of play.

At the close of play, both teams returned with a point each.

Which means Chelsea slip a further two points away from ManU!!!

YESSSS!!!!

ManU calmly destroyed City in another derby-day contest with a cool 3-1 score line. Now ManU are sitting pretty at the top of the table with an 8 point cushion over Chelsea. Even if Chelsea win the game in hand they have, they will still be five points behind...a change from the three point gap that existed before this game. An even bigger change from the greater-than-15-points-difference Chelsea had last year.

Go ManU.

And I cannot believe I am saying this, but a big thank you to both Arsenal and Chelsea for giving all of us such a wonderful match to watch.

This is why the English Premier League ROCKS!!!

Common sense is not so common

This post is also about golf, so bear with me.

As usual, my pal and I went over to Batam yesterday to play our customary round of weekend golf. Since I was playing after a couple of weeks, I wasn't entirely sure where the ball was going to go. So while I did not have any high hopes of breaking the course record, I wasn't too worried about losing it completely as well.

As it turned out, we were playing behind this painfully slow four ball and so we had to wait for every single shot while they either took their shot or putted in on the green.

Behind us was another two ball who was playing at around the same pace as us, so we weren't holding them up unless we ourselves were being held up.

On one of the holes, after we teed off, we were made to wait as the group ahead of us was still on the green. And so we waited patiently for them to get off.

And along came a golf ball over me left side!

The jackasses playing behind us had teed off!!!!!!!

IDIOTS!!!

Only after I started to holler and create a racket did they stop.

Here's what pissed me off completely. They had been playing behind us for most of the round. If they could not see us on the green ahead of them, they should know that we haven't got there yet. Instead, they chose to decide that we had mysteriously given up our round midway and that it was OK to tee off.

I'm not sure if these bozos are aware that a golf ball travels at an average of a 100kmph. That's quite a bit, you know. And a hard plastic globe travelling at that speed can cause some serious damage.

If it had hit me, the best they could have done would have been a mostly genuine "Sorry", but that's it. The damage it can cause to someone because of reckless, irresponsible behaviour would be a lot, lot more.

And it's idiots like these that yanks my chain. I was fuming all the way for the rest of the round.

These are the kind of people who should be ashamed of calling themselves golfers

He actually wrote back

I regularly go to The Register's news site for their very funny takes on the IT news for the day. The site gives me my news with a nice anecdote to remember it by. And come to think of it, it makes me smile at least once a day. That's a good thing, right?

Yesterday, as per my habit, I went to the site and was reading The Register's take on the report by Danish researchers concluding that cell phones are safe and do not cause cancer (something that I blogged about in one of my posts yesterday).

Towards the end of the article, I noticed this:

Of course, this is unlikely to plicate the Campaigners Against Stuff who will point out that the study only shows no evidence of risk; it does not prove there is no risk.

What caught my eye was the use of the word plicate.

Now plicate (according to this free dictionary I have) means "pleat". And I did not see how that was relevant to the topic. Which made me think that the author, Bill Ray, wanted to say placate, which means pacify...and which sounds congruous to the article.

Since I had seen a similar gaffe in print earlier, I thought I will write to Bill to point this out.

So my mail to him looked like this:

Hi Bill

Let me begin by saying that I love TheReg and am on your site
pretty much every day.

But I just want to know if there is a spell checker that gets enforced before the story is submitted. Cause at the very end of your last article on Mobile phones being safe to use, you mention - and I quote - "Of course, this is unlikely to plicate the Campaigners Against Stuff....."

Did you actually mean plicate or placate? Or am I not getting the meaning of what you want to say correctly?

I remember a similar grammatical goof up I read about last month which I blogged about here.

But what do I know?

Just checking...

And once again, I love ElReg, so keep up the good work.

Cheers

I was pleasantly surprised to see Bill's reply in my mailbox this morning:

Glad you like the site, but the fault here is entirely mine.
Spellcheckers are so ubiquitous one does start to rely on them when one should really be reading with more care. I'm not convinced that"plicate" is even an English word (Cambridge dictionary seems to agree that it isn't, but the Word spellchecker is convinced it is; so I suspend judgement).

Of course, we do have a sub-editor who really should spot these things, not to mention an editor too, so I'm not taking all the blame myself.

Just for reference: it didn't placate them, as my mailbox
testifies.

Bill.

Glad to see your reply, Bill. Thanx for taking the time.

I just went from being a regular TheReg visitor to an avid fan. Keep up the good work, folks at ElReg. No matter how many people it does not plicate!

That's not a lot of aid, is it?

The Philippines recieved aid worth - hold your breath - USD 50,000 after a devastating typhoon there caused widespread damage and killed an estimated more than 1,000 people.

I am sure it's a very humane gesture...and more countries should help The Philippines in this time of need, but fifty thousand bucks? A mere fifty thousand? At a time when Philippino President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has declared a state of national calamity?

That's like saying "We will help in fighting to clear the haze caused by the fires in Indonesia by all going to the roof tops and emptying our bladders"

This is the kind of cynical mindset you can get to when you watch too much of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (a show which I absolutely adore!).

Scheduled Downtime again!

YouTube is at it again!

Just a week after they had a scheduled downtime, YouTube is down again...in fact it just went down (Singapore time - 1641hrs).

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I find that highly amusing and a lot more unexpected for an entire site to go down for scheduled maintainence.

What I find more disappointing is that they have to go down for the second time in just over a week.

So they don't increase the chances?

A recent study done by Danish researchers suggests that using cell phones over many years does NOT increase your chances of getting cancer.

So, while you may get disturbed while on vacation or you might get startled when the phone set on vibrate mode suddenly goes off during a meeting or the battery might die in the middle of an important call, the good news is that the study suggests you can no longer blame your cell phone if you get cancer.

The researchers looked at phone records of people who have been using cell phones for as long as, take that, 21 years! And do you know what they found?

People who used cell phones for longer durations actually showed lower risk of cancer!

That should make some of the women I know quite happy...given the amount of time they spend on their respective cell phones! :-)

Unnecessary tagging

What YouTube has done for me personally is allowed me to watch a lot of the clips that I would not normally get to watch of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The reason I cannot watch his critically acclaimed and Emmy award winning show is because Comedy Central is NOT AVAILABLE here! And that sucks.

But what I can now do (since beggars can't be choosers...and. let's face it, I am a beggar...If you don't believe me, look at my bank balance) is search YouTube for Jon Stewart and watch all the snippets people have uploaded of The Daily Show. And it is certainly entertaining and Jon is an immensely funny guy.

Digression here: I highly recommend you watch Jon Stewart roast the hosts of CNN's later discontinued show "Crossfire" here

(You can also read the transcripts of the show here ... cause it's really funny)

But coming back to the point - or the post - I noticed that when I search for Jon Stewart, a lot of videos come up with the tags Jon and Stewart, sometimes even Daily Show, but have nothing to do with either Jon Stewart or The Daily Show. And that's one of the ways people are getting more of their videos being featured in more searches.

That's atrocious!

While that speaks volumes of the fact that Jon Stewart is such a heavily searched tag that people are prompted to do this kind of tagging, it is a serious nuisance to someone who wants honest results to searches.

And isn't YouTube a Google company now? In which case, shouldn't the by-now-omnipresent-and-by-far-most-used search engine be integrated with the Youtube infrastructure? Ok, so it takes time for an acquisition to fully get assimilated into an environment, but we are talking about Google here.

Anyways, I just hope people stop doing these pathetic things. It's just plain annoying.

Still at the top of the table

I stayed up really late to see this match, and I must say I enjoyed every bit of it.

ManU beat a really spirited Middlesborough (final score 2-1) to retain the top spot on the premiership table, now six points ahead of Chelsea (who have a match in hand...so essentially three points and a lot more in terms of goal difference ahead).

While the match started with Borrough putting a lot of pressure, ManU eventually started to impose themselves with some great passing and moves in the first half.

And then Christiano Ronaldo fell.

Literally fell.

Not to be read as "was felled".

As Ronaldo approached the goal, the goalkeeper made a sliding tackle where he did not have any contact with Ronaldo. But I still think that the intent was there and believe that the penalty decision was correct. Louis Saha burried the ghost of the penalty miss two weeks ago by calm putting the ball into the back of the net.

United one up.

Then came a fab goal from Borrough and then an even swifter response from United. Within 2 minutes of the equalizer, ManU was ahead again... A lead they would not relinquish for the rest of the match.

This season looks very very positive for United.

I just hope they make mincemeat of Benfica when they play at Old Trafford on Wednesday night to go through to the next stage of the Champions League.

Fingers crossed.

Meebo Deebo Doo

Of course, I couldn't say Yabba Dabba Doo, but you know what I mean :-)

I am talking about Meebo, a service which allows you to simply and easily see all your chat entities (yes, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, et al) on a single Web page. That too with a consolidated buddy list and a neat interface which allows you to chat with ur friends with the help of only a web browser.

From now on, if all you are interested in doing is chatting (and not want the ability to do VoIP) OR if your corporate network does not allow you to install chat tools or restricts the proxy on the corporate firewall, you can now use Meebo to chat away.

Cool, no?

People don't like to be questioned

Last night we went over to my wife's business partner's house for a barbeque, mainly to celebrate the beginning of the new business relationship. So all four partners and their spouses were there, with the inclusion of one of the partner's brother and his wife.

The ordeal began with trying to light the coal. As I had experienced during my vacation in India (where my buddy and I spent a lot of time trying to light coal so that we could enjoy a hookah), coal is extremely stubborn and takes it's own sweet time to get going. The starters that we had bought also turned out to be quite useless. So it took us a while to get the heat and start putting things on there so that we could eat.

Having sated our appetites, it was the time to cut the cake to celebrate the occasion and then speeches from the new business partners. As it turned out, there was a surprise in store for us.

The brother of this business partner, who was there as a guest to celebrate the occasion, decided to hijack the stage by going on a speech of his own. And the speech was about this project that he has been working on for a while which he wants my wife and her partners to collaborate with.

First of all, I think if he has a business proposition, he should do it on the business partners' time, not on the day of the celebration at a barbeque pit. Second, he should do his homework.

As usual, I played the part of the a$$ho1e who argued with everybody. But I did not argue just for the heck of it. I was really pissed off with this guy hijacking everybody's agenda. And then I started asking questions which he did not have answers for. Because of which, he promptly had a sulking expression on his face and refused to talk after a while.

If he was not prepared to be questioned on the soundness of the business plan, he shouldn't have brought up the subject in the first place. And I think people should do their research before they venture into making business decisions.

All in all, I realized that people who have been here for a while (more than 10 years) don't like to be questioned. And they have lost touch with reality.

I don't care.

Long live the liver...

It's confirmed...

As per the doctor, I have completely recovered from my Jaundice and my liver is functioning just fine. All of the measured results (except for GGT) were within the acceptable range. That, according to the doctor, is not something we need to worry about and just to be safe, we can check in 6 months.

So I am back to being a normal human being and therefore a normal diet.

Cheers!