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Today, I had an interesting experience. I had to mail a banking form in paper due to local banking regulations. As there is no post office on my way to my work place and none nearby I had to wait until the weekend to do so.

I started around 11:05 AM to the nearest post office. I had to travel using LRT to the post office. I reached the post office at 11:20 AM. I was in the queue until 12:00 PM and was serviced in 3 minutes. The cost of the mailing was S$0.50 while the cost of the journey was (S$0.69 + S$0.69) to and fro. The efficiency of the transaction – wait until the end of the week, wait in queue for over 40 minutes, transport cast ~3 times the cost of actual transaction

Just to tickle our thoughts. Isn’t it time to go fully ‘e-*’ ?

I am writing this from India (GMT + 5.5) and roaming with my Singapore (GMT + 8.0) mobile phone. I noticed something very strange. In all my mobile phones, under “time and date” settings, I usually setup time zone as local time instead of GMT +/- X and Network operator time as auto-update. By this way, I hope to always have the current local time updated automatically. Everything seem to have worked fine until now…

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This is part 2 to my earlier post “A Linux crash, burn and recover experience“. I had mentioned in there that I plan to use a Virtual Machine (VM) strategy for easy backup and porting in future. However, the reality forced me to abandon the approach. It could also be that I don’t know the trade secrets read on…

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I had a chance to beta test the upcoming release of Windows OS, version 7. I didn’t have any expectations for the Windows Vista successor; I have downgraded all my factory-installed Vista systems to Windows XP within 15 minutes … I was pleasantly surprised with what Microsoft had done this time though :O

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One of my trustworthy RHEL servers which was up (virtually) for 4+ years and served thousands of users over-the-web recently crashed. As data in the server was critical, we had to undertake a salvage operation before re-install. This post is my experience of recovering the server’s data and also some of the lessons learned and new strategies evolved for configuring future resilient server…

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the heading says it all…

I started donating blood in April 2002 and until March 2009 I have donated 20 times. I am not sure if I should feel proud about it because in theory I could have donated up to 28 times (4 years a year is allowed in Singapore for whole blood donation). However, My target was 21 (or 3 times a year). So, I guess I am short of 1 time now and that amounts to 95% of goal.

I am hoping that I will be able to donate 5 more times this and next year to reach 25 in 2010 and get a silver medal

Exactly, 8 months ago to this date I had a chance to visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, United States. The exhibition was one of the largest I have ever been to. It featured exhibits from multiple disciplines of Science and was lively, interactive and very well maintained. Even with a few stop-by’s it took us ~6 hours to cover it. I recommend a visit to the museum if you are in Chicago.

One of the exhibits that captured my interest was on computer criminals…

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Recently I got my hands on a Android dev phone 1, the unlocked developer-friendly phone using the shiny new Linux-based OS from Google. I spent a few days to figure out how to compile a new OS into the phone. Unlike the application development process that is well documented by Google, system development is largely left to the community to figure out. I am providing here a step-by-step guide for those who are like me with some inputs of mine but mostly with links to the websites…

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We would like to introduce our online group for blood donors living in Singapore. If the following matches you consider joining us…

1. Are you living in Singapore ?
2. Are you on Facebook ?
3. Are you a blood donor ?

Then join us by clicking here Singapore Blood Donors .

Feel free to drop a comment if you have some suggestions on how to better engage blood donors

I primarily use Google reader* to sync with many websites these days. Many a times I subscribe to many news sources that specialize on the same domain, just to make sure that I don’t miss out on any interesting development carried by only one of them. For example, I am now subscribing to half dozen blogs on Symbian OS, the OS for my primary project.

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