Uh, hello, I’m still alive. And I still have internet, as my friends who keep seeing me online and asking “why the hell are you online so much while on holiday?!” can attest to.

I’ve been in San Francisco for close to two weeks now, and apart from spending a lot of money, I really haven’t accomplished very much in terms of real travelling, but that’s alright — I think I deserve a sit-around-and-do-nothing kind of holiday. Even if I did pay over a thousand dollars of airfare to sit around and do nothing (except take up space) in Toru and Sasank’s apartment.

More interesting activities:

• Snow Patrol and Embrace in concert at the Warfield. Very enjoyable, even if I got my ticket kindof late and ended up nearly as far back from the stage as humanly possible. Snow Patrol’s excellent live rendition of Run definitely made up for that, though.
• Bright Eyes and The Faint in concert at the Concourse Exhibition Centre. Bright Eyes was pretty decent (they mostly played from Digital Ash, the less popular of their two new albums), but The Faint was just ridiculous. Infectious energy, catchy tunes, clever animations, great performance. Definitely overshadowed the main act, in my opinion.
• San Francisco International Film Festival: Caught three movies at the AMC Kabuki in Japantown: Phil the Alien, Boxers and Ballerinas and Mad Hot Ballroom.
  • Phil the Alien was stupid but amusing — think Napoleon Dynamite but lower budget. I did laugh out loud a couple of times, but I can’t remember about what.
  • Boxers and Ballerinas was a documentary on Cuban youth boxers and, well, ballerinas; more specifically, it was an examination into the contrast between those who stayed in Cuba and those who’d defected. Interesting for its subject matter, but not so much the actual delivery, I thought.
  • Mad Hot Ballroom, however, I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. Partly because it’s about ballroom dance, partly because it’s about schoolkids and teachers, but mostly because it’s so well-made. It’s one of those movies where I suffered from the Grinning-Like-An-Idiot syndrome throughout the entire movie. I hope it makes its way to Singapore, I definitely want to see it again.
• Went to a SF Giants game courtesy of Jess’ company tickets (I’m not sure how you get free tickets after you quit, but let’s not question that), which unfortunately got rained on. Giants won, at least.
• Visited campus for a day, crashing at Joakim’s little Rains apartment (a situation I’m not altogether unfamiliar with, crashing at Rains). Just in time to see the prospective freshmen show up on campus for ProFro weekend. They’re so… small. I felt like I’d step on a couple if I wasn’t careful. And they’re class of 2009?! When the fuck did the numbers go up so quickly?!
• The best part about being here, of course, is just meeting up with friends from college times. It’s good to see everyone again after a prolonged absence, especially also since I doubt I’ll ever be able to do this again (or at least, bum around on holiday for so long).

Otherwise, the food’s good (though expensive, now that I’m earning in Sing$), the drinks are cheap (hence making my friends into semi-alcoholics on weekends, it seems), the weather’s alternately craptacular and fantastic, the futon I’m crashing on is very comfortable, we’re going to Vegas next weekend, and I’m with some of the best friends that a lost anti-social international student could’ve asked for in college.

Good times.

I recently took on the job to refresh the Stanford Alumni Association of Singapore’s webpage. For three-day rushed work, I think it turned out alright… I hear there are problems on IE5, but aghh. Fuck that.

Before:

Not hideous, but not to my liking either. The old designers used frames and had the most annoying machine-coded HTML I’ve ever had to contend with. But the people who hired me just wanted to transplant the old site onto the new server, so less work for me at the time.

After:

Without mentioning the obvious ripoff of the actual school website’s logo elements (the imitation was specifically requested), the main design elements were adapted from Minima Plus. And now it’s running WordPress 1.5, which makes posting announcements and archival so much easier.

The plans are set:

April 23 through May 17, I’ll be in San Francisco and the Bay Area, and will be staying (at least initially) at Sasank and Toru’s apartment in the city. There’s something about going to Vegas one of those weekends, but I obviously didn’t bother to pay attention when someone in the drawgroup emailed about it (hell, I think they’ve already booked a flight for me). After that, stopover in Korea on my way back May 18, with another flight to Jeju island 20th to 22nd. Back on Vesak Day.

I will be so tired and broke at the end of it, so I do wonder why I’m spending all this money (easily my first month’s salary) when I could be sitting at home and relaxing. I should be looking forward to the trip so much more than this — I’m absolutely certain I was desperate to go at some point — but right now, I’m not sure what to feel. The last year and three quarters of NSF life haven’t really been the painful ordeal (nor even the dull grey monotony) I’d imagined the worst of before I came back. Then again, having been trapped in endless office politicking among NSFs (with the corresponding cap in maturity level — I’m trying not to be mean, but it’s the most succinct description of the situation) while handling oft-unreasonable bossly demands, thinking to myself how ominously well this would serve as a prelude to real working life… I think I need this trip much more than I know, before I plunge into my life of grudgingly acceptable indentured civil service labour.

Maybe I’m thinking too much. Who wants me to bring anything back (that won’t get me arrested)?

I had a long post with a lot to say about my NSF “career” as a whole, but it really wasn’t very interesting. Long story short: Friday was my last working day as a NSF.

In all likelihood, however, I’ll have to go back at some point. Probably a result of one of the following scenarios: (a) my understudy panics and doesn’t know how to do something because I really didn’t spend much time teaching him, (b) my boss realises this, decides he’d rather have me do something for him than my understudy, and calls me back to do it, (c) they realise I haven’t cleared my IPPT and SOC yet, my window didn’t really close, just that I’d deleted my name from the nominal rolls, or (d) someone (e.g. CO, ATEC chief clerk, FO team) realises that I’d yet to complete whatever I was supposed to for them before I fled camp.

Meanwhile, I’ve given the camp number, and any other potentially threatening work-related numbers, silent ring-tones on my mobile phone.

This last week, I was told I would be the primary MC for yet another parade, coincidentally on my last day (Friday). Fine, I thought, it’s my last week, I can handle this. Next, my backup MC wormed his way out of helping out with announcing for the post-parade reception, so I had to stay till 8 on Friday evening announcing for the whole damn thing. Fine, I thought, it’s my last day, I can handle this. At some point, I realised, no I bloody couldn’t — Friday night was important. Aaackk. Fine, fine, it might last till 8, things could be postponed no matter how important they were, they could keep me till 8 and no longer because it’d be my last day.

The reception ended before 7, thankfully. I think Friday night went reasonably well, despite my generally harried state.

I’m done. Done!

I drove the dad’s car to work yesterday so I could pack and bring home most of my stuff from camp. Having lost my duffel bag to one of the OCs who borrowed it for an overseas exercise last year and never returned it, I had to move my gear to the car separately, with the help of some colleagues.

Upon returning home, however, I had way too much crap to carry upstairs by myself, so I left my SBO, helmet and boots in the trunk. It struck me that this was just like the military defence bit in the recent Total Defence TV ads, where the guy was mobilised and had his gear all ready in his car trunk (with, oddly enough, nothing else in there). (Quote from a regular watching that ad: “Har? Where got people so operationally ready one? I don’t even know where my SBO is!” — at which point we stared at him and questioned his effectiveness as a regular combat platoon commander.)

I think I’ll leave them there to amuse myself whenever I open the trunk.

Ahh, operational readiness, here I come.

There have been recent reports on trainee teachers failing NIE, inadvertently breaking their bonds, then having to repay their entire tuition and allowances owed with interest. The total amount for repayment was a non-trivial $70,000 for a four-year diploma course. In one report, the trainee in question failed her practicum course twice — I can’t remember the exact reasons reported, but they were something along the lines of her having deviated from class material and not submitting her lesson plans on time.

Great, that doesn’t bode too well for my upcoming NIE PGDE course. When I was teaching as a graduate course assistant in school, I had the habit of making up lesson plans while walking to class, among other random stupid shit I tried to get away with. Which I realise I shouldn’t talk about now that I know one of the people who used to manage the course staff reads this blog. Ah, what the hell.

My favourite was when I got my friend Kirk to pretend to be me for the first class while I sat in as a student (the class had students from all levels, so it wasn’t too difficult to blend in). I then proceeded to behave like the obnoxious know-it-all I’d always dreamed I was capable of being, attempting to correct everything Kirk said, until he got all annoyed and yelled “If you think you’re so smart, why don’t you teach this class, then?!”, and left. At which point I took over the class, having earned the, umm, trust and respect of my students. Mwa ha ha! I don’t know how they were so easily convinced a white guy could be called “YJ” (full name undisclosed) though (they knew the course assistants’ names beforehand).

I’d also managed to sleep through a couple of 9am classes after either sleeping too late programming or getting horribly drunk the night before. On the occasions I did wake up on time, though, often after four hours of sleep or so, I received feedback that I was very much unintentionally funny attempting to teach while half-awake. At least they got some entertainment out of it.

The one prank I never managed was getting Luis to show up to class in his Batman outfit and just sit there throughout, while I pretended nothing was going on. It would’ve been hilarious, especially considering his costume:

Oh, Batman, you should never have gone eco-friendly with your Batmobile

To my credit, though, I did stuff my students full of snacks, ensuring they left the class enriched with much potential towards developing coronary diseases (though not as much in education).

Alright, back to work. Three and a half more days before I clear leave!!

I looked at my old website (carefully archived/hidden in the depths of my laptop), and read through the blog-like entries I used to write periodically from 11 April 1998 to 14 July 2000. A few things struck me:

• I used to hand-code and hand-archive these entries in Dreamweaver. After writing each entry as a separate HTML page, I’d insert the code into the combo-box selector for my entries and upload everything to the server using FTP. Was I ever this patient?! What the fuck.
• Perhaps as a result of the hassle, I only uploaded an average of 12 entries a year. However, these entries tended to be a lot more reflective than my current nonsense — my previous post was on USB takoyaki, for goodness’ sake — and I only actually wrote when I had something to write, not when something amused me and I wanted to point it out to my friends and other random visitors (hello!).
• Without a comments or referrer system (such dark, dark ages), I had no clue who was actually reading my stuff; occasionally, someone would surprise me by telling me “That sounds a lot like what you last wrote on your website” and I would go “You mean you actually read that shit?! WHY WHY WHY?!”. (No, really.)
• Nobody called it a “blog” back then, but we’re all tired of hearing about “blogging before the term was even in use”, aren’t we.
• I wrote in a far less restrained manner than I do now. All that youthful exuberance has drained away over the years. Or maybe I’ve started to care about what people think when they read this, given that I know this time that people actually do, umm, read this. And see all my terrible grammar and sentence structures on display, for all to see my terrible sentence grammar. On display. Structure?
• I do like this one line I found, even though I find it very hard to believe I wrote it five years ago: “I still claim very often that my head hurts, because it doesn’t, but I’m sure it should.”

I really won’t post any of my old entries on this site, because… I don’t know why, but I’ll think of a suitably poor reason and neglect to tell anyone. Sorry. Here’s the silly little Photoshop graphic header I made for the old site, though.

I don’t know where I got those random words from. I don’t know where they went, either.

The countdown timer’s almost at double digits…!

I got an email from my exceedingly hardworking scholarship officer at 11.30pm on Monday night — I hope she was doing VPN or something, because that’s not a very good way to inspire someone on the verge of joining the civil service. Anyway, the email was to inform us that NIE term had been brought forward to June 20: “From 20 June – 22 July 05, you will partake in subjects registration, compulsory orientation programme and other preparatory programmes.”

Hmm. Joining NIE on 20 June won’t be a problem (ORD is 24 June), though it does mildly screw up my vacation plans. While I’m curious about what orientation and preparatory programmes could be like for a bunch of deadbeat graduate teacher trainees who couldn’t find better jobs, what I really want to know is: will those 33 extra days count toward my bond?

It matters, it really does. Feel free to despair at the Commission’s scholarship selection process.

The title refers, of course, to the ORD counter on the right of this page, ticking its way towards glee-inducing uselessness.

I rarely write about National Service because I really don’t find many interesting things to write about at work. There’s the usual inane routine (wake up, avoid roll call, avoid PT, avoid random arrows, work off random arrows that I didn’t manage to avoid, avoid roll call again, sneak off home without boss noticing) which isn’t the most inspiring subject matter. I haven’t even gone outfield since I re-enlisted, so I can’t complain about how siong my week was, unlike some of my less fortunate re-enlisted buddies in real combat vocations*.

After a year and a half of re-enlistment, though, I must admit I’m quite happy where I am in NS. What’s to complain about? I don’t have to stay in (I can’t even figure out when my branch just, well, stopped staying in despite no such “privilege” having been granted to us, as far as I know). I do some mildly interesting work that has, admittedly, expanded my tech know-how a little (writing silly little VBA scripts to handle my laughably messy “database” of personnel information; working with M$ Excel really freakin’ fast; learning a bit of M$ Access). Furthermore, I haven’t worked for more than three full days a week for the last 2.5 months, a statistic I’m working very, very hard to keep up for a couple more months. That’s partly why I write so little about work — not much to complain about.

Also, I can’t blog diary-style. I can’t write something along the lines of “today I went to work and did some paperwork and we went for a run and it was great yay and then I went home and I had dinner and after that I beat off to duck porn**” because that wouldn’t interest me. There’s a post waiting about what I choose to write about and the nature of my posts’ subject matter (things I find interesting vs. things I find interesting to share), but I have to sleep because I have to go to work tomorrow and be bored and not blog about it.

* For real NS stories, there’s the Singapore army stories blog — some awfully inane stuff, but mostly morbidly interesting. Agagooga‘s archives have some great accounts of real NS life too.

** Uhhhh… puppet duck porn?