Category: ranting

A year ago today—September 1, 2004 I made my way down to National Airport outside DC and spent the next 24 hours alternately sitting in airport terminals and sitting on airplanes.

When it was all done—just after midnight on the morning of September second, arrived in Singapore and I made my way out of the airport, into a cab and down the East Cost Parkway to the Gallery Hotel.

That was the beginning of my time here in Singapore and except for two months back in the US—in October last year and again in June this year—I have lived in Singapore rather then just visited. I spent some time working to get assigned over seas for work. It would have been hard to get here without work. And while Singapore would not have been my first choice of places to go I am having fun. So here’s to living another year of fun in a foreign land. I hope the coming days are as good as those past.

At least I am back in Singapore and back at work. Which means I will have the reason and the ability to avoid work for a few minutes once in a while and post things here.

First off, a partial list of things that kept me from cyber space for most of the past two months:

• Jetlag
• Working long hours
• Happy hour
• Candice in Washington
• J███████ and K–‘s wedding
• non-broad band at my parents
• Vacation in New York City
• Catching up on work
• Server problems
• More server problems
• Did I mention server problems?

I don’t plan on elaborating on any of these here and now. Might elaborate on the last few once I have more info…

Due to the yummy downtime I did not get to post several things I wanted to post before I departed S’pore. Too bad. So sad. And since I have been back in los Estados Unidos I have been the posting slack master. I have several half completed posts I would like to finish and get up here for your viewing pleasure but, alas I have not. My current list of reasons why I have not feed the masses any new verbage include: sinus infection, working strange hours, jet laaaaag, pool, foosball, ping-ping, playstation, x-box and general back-in-the-states malasie. So to sum it up, I am failing to appologize for the lack of updates and stating that I’ll get to it when I get to it. Thank you for your support.

Confused last time you tried to access confusion and it was not here? What’s that Well we (and I use the royal ‘we’ here,) had a little interruption in our (not so) regularly scheduled programming. Some nasty person or peoples out there launched a DDoS [wikipedia.org] against confusion. Actually, against a domain that was, a long time ago, hosted on the same box as confusion. The IP was never removed. All is better now—as you see. My ISP NULLed out the old IP and configured all new IPs on the box. Then because the box was still being choked by established connections I issued a reboot command but the box didn’t come back online. Don’t understand that, I mean, re-boot, go down, come back up. Not go down stay down: that’s halt. A quick call to the service provider fixed that after it became apparent that it wasn’t going to fix itself. Anyway I was going to post some stuff this week, but as I am flying off to Virginia tomorrow—YEA!—it’ll have to wait. Ciao…

You gotta love socialist health care. I went to the ‘clinic’ here this morning: Walk in. Say “I think I have a sinus infection.” Give her my resident ID. Doctor shines a flashlight in my mouth and up my nose (hardware store standard issue black rubber model, not fancy doctors issues shiny thingy.) Doctor—well, I think so…—scribbles something illegible. “hand this to the nurse outside.” Hand the *perscription* to the *nurse*. “Take one of these once a day, one of these and these twice daily and two of these once a day. These three as needed and you must finish the treatment for this one. That’ll be 26 dollars.” I think I’m gonna take the antibiotics and stow the rest of this for sale in Virginia when I back next week. Socialist health care… I feel dirty!