What I would do to get a swing like this! (SIGH!)

If you haven't watched the recent Nike Golf Swing Portrait Commercial featuring Tiger Woods, then you're missing something (or you are not a golfer...in which case you pretty much don't care).



Be that as it may, even to non-golfers (it's ok, it's no shame, nobody's perfect), this swing is a work of art. Just watching it can make you go "Wow!" Even if you didn't know who Tiger Woods is or you didn't know what a good golf swing is supposed to look like, you would look at this video and go "That looks great! He must be good at whatever it is he is doing!"

And it is this pursuit of perfection that maddens us all. The ability to have a repeatable, dependable, powerful, versatile swing that we can take to the golf course. And that is every golfer's dream. Every single one of us (even the social golfers who I loathe)!

And just watching this portrait (of a truely great swing, I needlessly add), I realized something about my own swing (Yeah, I have a tendency of doing that! Just last week I learnt something from Retief Goosen's swing)

If you look at how he has teed up his ball for a driver, you will see that the ball is teed up with most of it facing the driver's clubface. What I have been told (up until now) is that the ball should be teed up high enough so that half the ball is over the top of the driver's face when you keep the driver on the drive at address position. As you can see here, Tiger has his ball teed up way, way, WAY lower than that.

Probably that is why he presents the full clubface to the ball at impact and that is why he gets the spin and the distance that is legendary of Tiger Woods. Maybe that is one of the mistakes I have been doing up until now and is something that I should change.

Time to hit the range, me thinks!

Driving the green and rash in my pants

The best way to present the highlight (and the lowlight) of my day yesterday.

My golf buddy from India (the 2nd leg of the golf triad I was part of in India....aaah, those beautiful days....oh, back to reality!) was flying from the US back to India and he wisely took a flight via Singapore so that he could stopover and, guess...guess....guess, play a round with me! Oh yes, he's as crazy a golfer as I am!

So he landed midnight on Saturday and Sunday morning we left for Batam to have a round at Palm Springs.

I went to the course thinking that I had fixed one key fault in my swing (something I noticed when I was watching Retief Goosen play...which is almost always a pleasure. As I watched him swing, I realized that I almost never finish the way he does and that I change swing planes when I finish, so I had to correct that), but my problem with the ball position still continues to dog me with these new irons (nothing against you, my Mizuno MP-32s....it's all my fault).

So I had a fairly disasterous front nine. Forty five. On the back nine, somehow, for the first few holes, the game looked like it was going like the front nine. But then the last 5 holes, I went Par, Par, Bogey, Par and then BIRDIE!!!

The last hole was absolutely sweet. It's a 313yard par 3 (downhill) and I actually drove the green! My ball stopped around 15 feet on top of the cup which makes my drive close to 320 yards (so what if it's downhill)! From there, I two putted to pick up my sole birdie of the day and a round of 86.

Considering the pathetic way I played, I think I got away with murder. 86 is not a bad score to post when your playing as if you are trying to emulate disaster. What I loved the most, almost consistently through the round, was my chipping. I was for the most time chipping very close to the hole, either for a tap in or for an relatively easy putt. I saved a few shots that way.

So after realxing once I had finished the round, I realized that the humid climate and the heat had caused another problem for me. I had a severe rash in my pants and after coming home, despite applying a lot of Aloe Vera cream, I was walking like a penguin for the rest of the day.

Come to think of it, I still am walking like a penguin. Luckily people in office either have not noticed or are too decent to say so to my face.

I need to hit the range to fix my swing. I need to find a way to beat the rashes. These are my personal challanges for the week.

Jon saves the day (I mean, PDA)

I had a lot of trouble with my O2 Atom PDA when alarms started going off when I didn't want them to, but not when I wanted to.

Apparently, my Notification Queue had filled up and that had created all sorts of trouble for me in terms of multiple alarms for the same date, no alarm on the clock when I want it to buzz, etc.

So, on the suggestion from my friend, partner in crime & IndiPPC Admin (Bobby Bhai), I used softwares like MemMaid to clear the notification queue. While MemMaid is a very handy software, it does not do very well at detecting which notifications are duplicate (especially if they are created with different timestamps as a result of multiple syncs). So I deleted a lot of entries manually...and promptly lost the ability to Activesync.

That sent me into a wild tizzy to hunt for information on why AS was not working.

There's a big troubleshooting guide for activesync 4.x here on microsoft site which, as the site quotes, covers all the most common issues like

• Connection between a Device and PC is dropped during data transfer or synchronization.
• Connection is never established between PC and the Device and there is no visual feedback.
• Synchronization is completed partially, but does not finish as intended.
• Windows appears to stall or crashes upon connecting a device.

What this place does not cover is something that happened to me.

A lot of people had the same problem and most of them ended up hard reseting their devices. The scenario looked extremely bleak for me.

I found, later after a lot of posts, is that AS puts in an entry called repllog.exe in the Notification queue and it needs to have a few things there. One is quite easy. Add \Windows\repllog.exe with the event "RS232 connection was established" in the queue manually. What it also needs is the ability to on the event "RunAtRndisFnDetected" which CANNOT be created manually (because there is no option in the even drop down list).

Fortunately for me, Jon here had the exact same problem, but he being far less technically challanged (being a developer) than me, he created an application called FixASRunAt which solves the problem!!!!

YEEEE HAAAA!! Thanx a lot, Jon. You saved me a hard reset!

Thank God for the Internet!

Which bus service do you prefer? SMRT Vs SBS?

For the last few weeks, unless I have an emergency, I take a bus to and from work.

It's only a short walk for me to the bus stop and the bus drops me off (either ways) in 20 minutes. That's not bad, considering that it only costs me 89 cents one way! As opposed to between $8 and $10 depending on what time I leave home / work!

So I almost always take the 143 from Newton Road to get to Chinatown. It is a fairly pleasant ride, with not too many people to crowd the bus and enough space on the double decker to ensure that you spend 20 minutes on your rear end thinking about what you want to do when you get to work.

For coming back home, I have 2 options. Two busses that go on almost the same route. There's the 166 and the 851. The thing is, both busses are run by seperate bus companies. The 166 is an SBS service while the 851 is an SMRT venture. And that is where the difference starts.

The 166 is pretty like the journey on the 143 (another SBS route)...calm and without too many jerks (not the people jerks, the jerks caused by braking and accelerating sharply). The 851, however, is a completely different kettle of fish.

All the drivers for the 851 route are as if they had their racing dreams still born and they want to take vengence out on the streets of Singapore. The acceleration out of the bus stop is enough to push you a few seats down the aisle. Then there is the zig zag as the driver gets into a smaller car's slipstream and then races by them with a nod of his head and then the sharp late braking as if he is making an overtaking manouver on the race track, but in actuality, he is just stopping at a bus stop where he was flagged off more than a few tens of seconds ago.

All in all, in my limited bus experience, I think the SMRT drivers are way more rash at their driving as compared to their SBS counterparts.

I know I may be wrong and that generalizing in this manner is not fair. But in my observation, almost every single SBS bus ride for me is more of a pleasure than an SMRT bus journey. Then why don't I just take the SBS bus all the time, you may ask.

The reason is that if I miss the 166, it comes back in around 15 minutes. And sometimes in that time, the 851 comes around twice. So in the interest of time, I have to take the 851. Though every single time I see a 166 approach, I catch myself going "Yesss!!!!" in my mind :-)

Tolerable Cruelty

What I was saying here is somewhat what Jon Stewart played out on The Daily Show.

The point being, the US government is affecting changes to the Geneva convention to allow for the requirements of the CIA, then why can't everyone else?

Check out the video...it's hilarious (as is everything on the Daily Show!).

Thank you very much, Jon Stewart!

That's how good it is to be a kid

In just a few days, my daughter picked up how to play James Blunt's "Goodbye My Lover".

This is a video that I shot using the camera in my phone (because I don't have a digital video camera and I have not yet setup the camera on my notebook), and so the video / audio quality is not the best.

But the point is not the quality of the video. The point is...she is playing extremely well for a six year old!

Isn't that great?

Page overhaul

Have been wanting to do this for a while now, but never got around to doing it. Always either ran out of time or patience (never really managed to understand what all the numbers and tags meant in the template).

But today, finally, FINALLY, I have successfully managed to change the template to the way I wanted it to look.

So hope u folks like it.

Cheers