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BlogDay 2005 is TODAY!

BlogDay was initiated with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to know other bloggers, from other countries or areas of interests. In that day Bloggers will recommend about them to their Blog visitors.


Here are my five grober BlogDay links:

Eight Diagrams (USA)
Eight Diagrams is the blog of Wayne E. Yang, a freelance writer/photographer based in the US. He has written for The North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, SFGate.

Global Voices Online (USA)
Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Bingfeng Teahouse (China)
Bingfeng is based in Shanghai. I love the Friday Girl Blogging but I tell everyone I read it for the articles.

Tokyo Times (Japan)
Observations of a gaijin, Lee Chapman, in Japan.

Yellow Peril (New Zealand)
莫志明 is an Auckland writer. She is first-generation New Zealand-born Chinese, and her English name is Tze Ming Mok. Her parents are from Singapore (via Yunnan province and Burma) and Malaysia (via Guangdong province, Vietnam and Thailand).

BlogDay posting instructions:

• Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
• Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2005
• Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
• Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
• Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2005 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

Technorati tag: blogday2005

One Singapore Minute of the Day (30 August 2005)

One of Norman's shots from his Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

He also has this cool sequence of shots of Raffles Place in transition

See the rest of his shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

One Singapore Minute of the Day (29 August 2005)

One of ami113's shots from her Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

ami113 is not in Singapore, but that didn't stop her from sharing her One Singapore Minute.

See the rest of her shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

Live from Mediacorp studios 2

During our segment. There's a story behind the sweater. Tell you later. Thanks to Ting Li for the great shot.

Update: What happened was that no one told me NOT to wear blue to the studio, so I blur blur go there with my blue shirt, and Daniel the producer gasped in horror when he saw it. You see, they use a blue screen to project the funky special effects for the show (cars exploding, lasers shooting out from the presenters' eyes, and X-wing fighters blowing the Death Star up, that sort of thing) and with a blue shirt, I would be, yes, Le Invisible Man. So Daniel (see comments) lent me his stylo sweater, which will now be too big for him to wear after my bigger body distorted it. Thanks dude!

My Flickr set of our little TV adventure.

Live from Mediacorp studios

Two brooding writer types. We is be Singapore Writers Festival leh.

Interview on CNA's Prime Time Morning

Mr Miyagi (he got new URL liao, ok? At miyagi.sg) and I will be on Channel NewsAsia's Prime Time Morning show tomorrow, Monday the 29th of August. I think we will be on after 8.45am (when most people are safely at work).

We will be interviewed about our participation in the Singapore Writers Festival.

I am trying to convince Ben to read one of his erotic love poems on air, but he says Singapore is not ready for it.

I am too old for playgrounds

We are at the in-laws. On the wife's command, we trooped down to the playground with both kids and their maternal grandma "Popo". Faith went totally nuts, giggling and running around the playground. She grabbed Popo to chase her, and then ran, giggling, up the steps and down the slide, over and over again.

Isaac was more cautious, as he had a better sense of danger than his older autistic sister. But he did let us put him on the swing and push him gently, whereas Faith could not stay on the swing longer than 3 seconds. She has not quite gotten the hang of the swing's lateral motion.

An older girl in the swing next to Isaac went really high, and my son watched with fascination as she swang higher and faster.

Note to self, remember to watch the kids closely in playgrounds. I was tending to Isaac for a split second when Faith, in her excitement, dashed up the steps and came down the slide, without sitting down first.

Like a scene from Crouching Tiger Hidden Wires, Faith used her Qing Gong (轻功) and just RAN down the slide. She had a small tumble at the bottom, landing on her back.

My face white with horror, I dashed over to pick up the somewhat shaken girl. She whimpered a little, then calmed down.

The upside to all this extreme sports playing was that she managed to walk without tiptoeing for a few minutes after all that sensory stimulation. She got her sensory diet for the day, and I added a few more strands of white hair to my head.

We had a quieter evening of dinner at my in-laws after that. We only had to deal with two pooping incidents (the wife cleaned up the girl, and I washed up the boy, damn that papaya), Faith squeezing the soap water out of the Pigeon wet wipes, and me nodding and pretending to understand the feisty Hakka chatter of my wife's 98-year-old grandma.

Just a regular Sunday for us at the in-laws.



(Ok, ok, use "swung" if it makes you happy. Swang is the "archaic or dialectal past tense of swing". What to do, I am Old School sometimes. And yeah, what Tym said, I was, er, striving for that assonance thing. Personally, I would have liked to use "swing-ded" but that's too modern. Heheh.)

One Singapore Minute of the Day (28 August 2005)

One of filterpaper's shots from his Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

This shot of MRT gates is also cool. I believe they are done with a Lomo. His blog, pics and titbits, also has many great shots of bands and music events.

See the rest of his shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

One Singapore Minute of the Day (27 August 2005)

One of january2712's shots from his Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

I also liked this one of an old kopi man.

See the rest of his shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

Live from Bishan Sports Hall, special needs kids having a blast

Update: My Flickr set of the afternoon is here.

The Special Olympics gymnastics programme for special needs kids underway. I lost count of the number of kids here, but they all looked like they were having fun.

An afternoon at the Asian Civilisations Museum

Update: My Flickr set of the visit to the museum and this exhibition is here.

We went to see the Journey of Faith from the Vatican Collections. We are so coming back to the museum, man. It totally rocks.

One Singapore Minute of the Day (26 August 2005)

One of chunzychunz's shots from her Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

In the rest of her Flickr photos, there are many other shots of Singapore too, and this one was quite unusual.

See the rest of her shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

TODAY: It's time to stop being boxed in

Latest TODAY column: It's time to stop being boxed in

Excerpt:

RECENTLY, we changed our TV set. It was quite an event.

My old television was displaying lines and since it has already served us for eight good years, I thought it was time to retire the set.

I am not sure if the call to hire older workers applies to old televisions, but much as I was fond of this set (my wife and I bought it when we got married), we were getting headaches and nausea from the moving lines. So, with great sorrow, we told our faithful old TV that we were going to let it go.

Urgent! Mr Miyagi needs your help

Mr Miyagi's company is providing a free gymnastics and motor skills programme for special needs kids and the group that started with 7 kids is now going to be very big, because of an article Threez wrote about it. Their phones have been ringing so much, the battery also die liao.

So if you want to help out in this Special Olympics and Gross Motor Skills programme, Miyagi needs volunteers to be coach's assistants (no experience needed, just a love for kids and a lot of patience) for this Saturday's session (26th August 2005, tomorrow) and beyond.

The programme is free and Miyagi (he is the Ben Lee in the Threez article) and his coaches are doing it on their own time. Heck, they even pay rental to the Singapore Sports Council for the use of the hall, out of their own pockets.

The session is at Bishan Sports Hall, 6pm to 7pm, Saturday. He will need to see you at 5.30pm to brief you guys, so come down at that time.

Do email him at so he can give you more details.

Hurry, he has many kids coming and he does not have enough hands and legs!

One Singapore Minute of the Day (25 August 2005)

One of christyyy's shots from her Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

See the rest of her shots taken within one minute here.

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

Don't play play leh

All Singaporeans who own MP3 players and iPods are Criminals

Update: IPOS replies to Chris (I had to add the "to" or else Tym the Teacher, whom I love to bits, will scolding me for my grammer, hehe) and Scott Snow wrote a post on this too.

I am not sure if many of you realise this, but if you own an iPod or an MP3 player in Singapore, and you ripped music off your OWN CDs, you are actually breaking the law in Singapore.

After the papers reported about the 3 guys who got arrested for illegal filesharing under the new law, there was this FAQ that was quoted off the IPOS site (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore).

Q. How do I know whether the songs in my computer or MP3 player are legal?

A. If you didn't buy it from a legal site like Soundbuzz, it is probably illegal. Plus, when you buy a CD, the rights only apply to the CD; this means you cannot rip songs out and make them into MP3s for your player.

Generally, it's advisable to check the terms and conditions of use before you make a copy of the songs. -- SOURCE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OFFICE OF SINGAPORE"

I was not the only one having this conclusion when I saw the newspaper article. Chris wrote a post on this, (found via Tomorrow) and Unionpost also has a post on this.

Anthony Lim points out, in his comment on the Tomorrow post, that:

"Actually, IPOS is right on the money here - it is illegal to rip songs from your CD and place them in your MP3 player. It's illegal because the fair use defence in Singapore is limited to very narrow circumstances (reporting news, private study etc)."

So technically, does that mean a policeman can pull you off the streets when they see you listening to your iPod, and arrest you for breaking the Singapore copyright law?

Learned opinions on this matter are welcome.

One Singapore Minute of the Day (24 August 2005)

One of willywei's shots from his Flickr for the One Singapore Minute project.

See the rest of his shots taken within one minute here.

This shot was taken in a restaurant called Singapore Chom Chom in Chinatown, Melbourne, Australia. Who sez you have to be in Singapore to participate in this photo project, haha!

See all the photos taken by others so far under the onesingaporeminute Flickr tag here.

Details on how to be part of this project I started found here.

Technorati tag: onesingaporeminute

Our restaurant always scores high on Fire Safety

This photo was taken by my buddy Colz at a restaurant in Taman Johor, Malaysia.

As you can see, they take your fire safety and dining space really seriously, and will go as far as extending their restaurant into state land. Not even a fire hydrant can stop them from making their restaurant big enough for your larger dinner affairs.

Lesser mortals would have just extended their restaurant by erecting some awning that stretches past this hydrant. But these guys went ALL the way, and built a freaking wall, windows and roof.

As they say in Singapore, Bo Cheng Hu (No Gahmen), man.

Running Day: back after being sick

Got new running buddy. And good thing too. Regular mates are either overseas or fly aeroplane.