Category: ranting

This month marks 10 years I have been in Singapore, I’m a but late posting anything as I left DC on the 1st of September 2004 [confusion.cc] though I actually arrived in Singapore early on the 4th due to layovers on my cheap flights.

My decade in Singapore has been good – I got married [confusion.cc] and had two [confusion.cc] kids [confusion.cc]! Not to mention traveling all over Asia. So overall Singapore has been good, though there is a significant amount of hate in my love-hate relationship with Singaporeans — see here, [confusion.cc] here, [confuison.cc] and here [confusion.cc] — among others.

I did make one serious attempt to move back to the US [confusion.cc]. Which was not my first choice and the long lasting effects of the financial crisis put a stop to that. And while I would still like to go somewhere else — Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan or maybe even China or Korea — I don’t have any concrete plans.

So here’s to starting my second decade in Singapore.

If this photo is real, the world should go to war:

Because we said never again to this image:

The debate now is if the ISIS images are true. But that will quickly become a cover for not going to war. We said “never again.” But what did never mean? Never in Cambodia? Bosnia? Rwanda? what about never in Iraq?

I had coffee with an ex-colleague the other day who now works in a firm that has access to information from Deep Packet Inspection tools in various ISPs around the world. He said he was shocked to learn that more than 80% of traffic was pornography related — images or videos.

I’m not surprised. The internet is for porn [youtube.com] and porn drives innovation — see the VHS for reference.

Further to this general line of though we discussed a great idea. Take the Oculus Rift [oculusvr.com] mix in the GoPro [gopro.com] camera, some paparazzi and some CGI artists and you Total Porn Recall. In which a highly motivated Porn company records a library of green-screened, Point-of-View sex with various models using the GoPro and then purchases some good Paparazzi photos of famous actresses which are used by their CGI artists to replace the porn actresses heads with the head of your favorite actress. Bingo – instant billionaire! (And you’ll need it to pay the lawyers!) Hell, throw in a mechanized Fleshlight and go for broke.

Robotic vacuums clean your house in two ways…

• Driving around and vacuuming
• Forcing you to pick up your mess so they can drive around and vacuum.

Then again every surface out of reach of my little friend is developing stratified layers of… Stuff.

About 9 hours into my flight from Singapore to Istanbul I turned on the flight info map. As the map views flipped between the whole world, one hemisphere and the region I noticed two city names on the map: Homs and Aleppo. Two cities I would know nothing about if it weren’t for listening to the BBC World Service in the mornings while driving the kids to school and my wife to work. Two cities which are locked in their, what is it now? Third year of a brutal civil war?

After landing in Istanbul I decide to take advantage of the long stop over and head into town. I visited I The Blue Mosque, The Grand Bazaar and The Basilica Cistern. Then I spent two hours in Hagia Sofia, my favourite building, even with the scaffolding it’s still one of the most beautiful and fascinating places on Earth. I also spent 40 minutes or so just sitting on the carpeted floor of The New Mosque, which I think is the most beautiful of the Imperial Mosques and an amazingly peaceful place.

Now I’m back in the airport waiting for my flight to Tel Aviv, in which I will fly right by the hell that is Syria, Homs and Aleppo suffering another day of civil war.