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For the past month, my wife, my sister, my mom, and two of my cousins have all departed from Vancouver to Singapore, and all on separate flights! That’s not the remarkable part — the remarkable part is in the packing.

You see, we all originate from Singapore, a wee island at the southern tip of Malaysia. We have a LOT of relatives from there. So when someone flies over from Canada (a tiring 18 hour flight in total), we MUST bring gifts. It’s just the custom when returning back to the motherland, especially for relatives you will be staying with during your vacation. Not only is it the custom, but its just good manners — believe me, we would hear it from our parents if we neglected this duty!

So either the morning of, or the night before, there is a packing ritual with a box of box/duct tape, scissors, marker pen, and plastic rope at the ready. And a cardboard box. Before the packing ritual of course there is the shopping ritual. After phoning Singapore to ask relatives for any special requests, there is a shopping trip or two to acquire the appropriate supplies. 99% of items bought are food! I don’t remember what exactly usually, but it’s usually chocolates that they cannot get back there or they are cheaper here. And no, they are sick of maple syrup already.

It’s a regular game of Tetris, where you try to optimally pack in the different sized boxes and occassionally have to rip open a box to use the food to “fill in the gaps”. Firstly, your luggage bag is re-arranged. And by re-arranged, I mean “your clothes will be used to cushion the food or fill in the gaps”. Then another box is filled with more goodies and taped up (oh no — no wimpy one tape across the bottom and top here, we are talking multiple layers, and every side is taped).

The funniest part is the weighing. Or the “attempted weighing” as I call it. This is usually by “intuition”, as we have traveled there enough to know approximately how heavy the box/bag can be. Everybody takes turns carrying the bag to have a feel of how “heavy” it is, according to our experience packing from before and weighing it at the airport scale. My standard is: “if I can barely carry it with one hand, the weight is ok”. Each item has to be 32 kilograms or less. The Vancouver Airport/Airline check-in people are sticklers for this rule, and I don’t blame them because if they don’t, it will be potentially abused. If you don’t believe me, watch the baggage of any lineup of Asians going back to Asia at YVR

Well, our “intuition” is frequently incorrect, thus we have to weigh it at the airport scale BEFORE we check-in just to confirm, to spare us some embarrassment of having to take things out at the counter hurriedly. Of course we bring our trusty box of packing paraphernalia, and an extra bag just in case for the overflow to bring it back home. After confirming the box is within the weight limit, I re-tape it and wrap a plastic rope all around it like a parcel. I don’t see the point really, if the box is busted this rope won’t really hold things in. According to my mom, it’s for “identification”. Gee, I wonder if anyone can mistake this huge box as being ours, since it has OUR NAME WRITTEN IN BLOCK LETTERS ALL OVER IT.

I would think because we frequently travel there, we should get a scale. We used to use the bathroom scale, but it was not very accurate obviously — we might as well use our intuition (which we did!). Sigh, next time I’m getting a hand scale.

Technorati Tags: singapore, packing

Ok, so the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) happens every year, and this will be the second time I will be going. I went last year, and my wife always laughs when she recalls how I got up at 6:30 am on the first day of the conference just to be there at 7-am to line up for the keynote. I have to admit, I was a bit excited, this was my first time in the city of San Francisco (not counting a previous Silicon Valley visit where I only saw SFO airport), first time at WWDC, and also the first time I got to see Steve Jobs in the flesh (My rating? underwhelming. Might as well have watched the keynote streamed in Quicktime).

I got there around 7-am, and lo and behold there were about two hundred attendees in front of me! Everybody was lined up in a snake-like fashion, neatly compressed, but when they let everyone go up the escalator to the second floor (to line up some more) the line deteriorated into one huge glob in front of the escalator. They definitely needed better crowd control there during the start. The keynote was to start at 10-am, and here we were, a little over two hours before the event, all stuck on the second floor. Everybody would sit down on the floor, still in line. Little did I know that I did not REALLY need to get up early at all, silly me!

Here are some tips for when you are lining up for the WWDC keynote:

1. Don’t bother eating breakfast beforehand. There are breakfast stations everywhere when you line up on the second floor. Coffee, tea, croissants, donuts, etc.
2. Line up with a friend to save your place in line if you have to go to the washroom – or else, just fast beforehand and during lining up. Besides, your line-mates are probably good chaps and they will allow you back to your spot. But then tip number 5 makes this tip obsolete!
3. Don’t bother starting up your laptop to take advantage of the Wi-Fi. Internet connectivity will not have been enabled until after the keynote.
4. Bring something to entertain yourself (PSP, iPod video, book). It will be a long wait. Either that, or bring good conversation. Criticize the OS X Finder, or something.
5. You can come late. Come at 9-am. From the back of the line, just slowly walk towards the front, while everyone is sitting down! Everyone does it (except for the ones already in line of course). Now you know.
6. Once in the auditorium, it usually pays NOT to be the first ones in. They cordon off the middle seats for VIPs, but guess what — a lot of VIPs don’t show, and they eventually open that area up to general seating eventually. So if you do get seated first on the edges of the auditorium, at least get a seat on the aisle right next to the VIP area, you might get lucky.
7. After the keynote, there are drinks and food right outside. If you want to hang around with the VIPs or mill about (maybe you can catch a glimpse of you know who?) don’t leave the third floor. Once you leave, they won’t let you back up.

Here is ONE absolute MUST tip if you are bringing your laptop: You HAVE to bring the extension cord for your power brick. Don’t rely on that tiny plug adapter that fits snugly with your power brick. The power points on the power extensions available on the desks usually don’t have space to accommodate the whole power brick being plugged in. Hopefully you won’t be one of those obnoxious people taking up two or more power points!

One last tip: Don’t be alarmed if an Apple employee asks to borrow your Leopard beta CD/DVD when you are at WWDC. I found that even Apple employees don’t have access to (all) their company’s products until their release to WWDC attendees.

I will be staying at the Westin again (not the St. Francis, but the Market Street one) — St. Francis is a really nice hotel, close to Moscone Center (10 mins walk). The Market Street one is even closer. Unfortunately, it does not have included Internet access. If you are staying in a room shared with a colleague, make sure you bring a (wireless) router where you can clone a MAC address, I usually bring a Linksys one. Initially, to initiate Internet connection, it redirects you to a web-page where you accept the connection charges. After that, it “authenticates” you through your MAC address for outgoing connections. After signing up, copy your MAC address into the router’s MAC address clone setup page, and apply the changes. Then your colleague can share the Internet access with you through the wired router connection, or wireless. Several colleagues have had trouble sharing the connection through their Airport Express however, so I don’t recommend using that particular router.

(Update: Mike Morton of Google has more on WWDC 2007, in the Official Google Mac Blog).

Technorati Tags: Apple, WWDC, tips, keynote

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.

I was born here, but left 17 years ago with my family to British Columbia. This is my first Eid back in the old country (but the 10th time I have come back to visit), and on every visit Singapore has changed. It seems that every available space has been taken up by commerce. Even the walkways between buildings have been taken over by shops, there are shops everywhere. On one visit there is an empty field allowing a cool breeze to hit you, on the next visit it has been taken over by a shopping mall. It seems like everything is very dense here, also people’s sense of personal space. I am figuratively swimming in my own sweat whenever I walk outside, thank God for air-conditioning everywhere, even on the buses. My favourite hangout is of course Tampines Mall and Century Square, which is just a stone’s throw away from my wife’s house. This shopping area, on any given day, on its slowest period will rival downtown Vancouver in its peak period. Suffice to say, there are a lot of people in Singapore, everywhere

Continue reading ‘Singapore, again’ »

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.

So 12 hours later after departing Vancouver, I land in Chiang Kai Shek Airport in Taiwan. I have about two hours to kill before my next flight, it is about four hours to Singapore. So I’m walking in a fairly deserted wing of the airport to my gate – and I was glancing at the flight arrival monitors (big 40 inch LCD screens, I believe), and lo and behold, there was a Microsoft Scandisk window overlaid on top of the arrival screen! It was churning away, I couldn’t read the window text because it was all in Chinese.I wish I had a digicam at that moment. No surprise that most of these systems would be run by Microsoft software.

I get to the gate – and saw a sign saying ‘WiFi’ near the public payphones. Hmm – why not try it out? So I whipped out my laptop and proceeded to just go to “www.google.com”, and it redirected me to the page for HiNet, a Taiwanese WiFi/broadband provider. The page is all in Chinese. Then I saw the “English” hyperlink and thought – I’m in luck! But not so fast. That brought me to a FAQ page that proceeded to tell me that for non-HiNet subscribers, I needed to buy a HiNet prepaid card, bla bla bla, and that card can be bought online using my credit card. But unfortunately when I went to the link it provided to buy the card, it was in Chinese yet again. Since most of the link location text was in English, I thought by hovering my mouse over a link I might gain some clues to where the link might go to from the status bar. Quite frustrating. The contact page was indecipherable also, so I couldn’t e-mail the webmaster or public relations or something.

On my return trip back, I have a 6 hour layover in Taiwan again. I really wish I could get some wi-fi love then, but I’m not hoping too hard.

Phuket. Two days. Two times lucky.

Two days — that’s the number of days we missed the tsunami by. Zuzan and I were in Phuket from Dec 21st 2004 to Dec 24th 2004. Zuzan wanted to extend our vacation by at least a day, but I nixed that idea because not only was she coughing (and vomiting occassionally) badly, I myself was coming down with a fever and cough. We found out later that she had bronchitis (and I caught it too). I never thought I would ever think, how lucky for us to get bronchitis! If we had extended our stay for an extra day, maybe we would have extended it for another day also… who knows. The bronchitis cutting short our vacation was our *second* lucky break actually.

Two times lucky — our first lucky break was cancelling our initial plans to go to Phuket during the Christmas weekend! I suggested to Zuzan, to invite her cousin Manja and hubby Zep along for our getaway weekend also. We wanted to take advantage of the Christmas long weekend, but Manja had only one day off left for the year, and could not get anymore time off. We then shifted our plans so that we went earlier during the week (although we wanted to take the Christmas weekend also, so we can spend more time together since I am in town only 12 days, instead of having to go through the inevitable invites to family functions during the holiday weekend).

Continue reading ‘Two’ »