dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

Ticket swap

2009-07-06T11:01:00.001+08:00

I have Saturday 1 Aug tickets for the Reduced Shakespeare Company, looking to swap for Sunday 2 Aug. Any takers? Leave a comment.

The Burger King Super Seven Incher

2009-06-25T19:02:00.001+08:00

I see the US news has picked up on the Burger King ad campaign in Singapore. Didn't know it was a Singapore-only thing, thought it was part of the weirdness that is Crispin Porter & Bogusky's BK ad campaign.

And so it goes

2009-06-18T17:20:00.001+08:00

Billy Joel is separating from his wife. Egregious violation of the "half-his-age-plus-7" rule, methinks.

iPhone 3.0 OS

2009-06-18T10:11:00.002+08:00

Yes, I downloaded the new iPhone OS last night in a fit of insomnia. The big changes - Voice Memo, cut/copy/paste, tethering - are great: much needed, and much-talked about.

But I also like the small touches. Stocks in landscape mode looks great, and actually gives the full name of the company. And then there are those nice small touches that weren't announced. When you play podcasts, for example, there's the option to listen to them at double-speed, which is helpful for getting through more information, and there's a button to simply rewind 30 seconds, so you can catch what you missed. (Still wish podcasts don't go to Cover Flow in landscape mode - that makes no sense to me.)

And now MLB At Bat for the iPhone has live video. Not a part of the OS, of course, but perhaps the best App ever - really shows off the iPhone's powers.

iPhone 3.0

2009-06-09T11:27:00.002+08:00

Can't wait for the iPhone software update. Cut/copy/paste is a must-have, while Voice memos, tethering, Stereo bluetooth, and sync notes all look like great features.

On attention

2009-05-22T18:09:00.003+08:00

I sat down last night to read a book (David Rothkopf's Superclass, if you must know) and realised, for all my endless reading of magazines and listening to audio I hadn't actually soaked in the pleasure of pure unadulterated reading of books for a while.

And then today I read Sam Anderson's piece in New York, "In Defense of Distraction", on attention and the poverty thereof in the modern world, what with Twittering and Facebook. Which coincided with my belated reading of the Obama interview in Newsweek and in particular the part about how he manages his time.

All of which made me wonder: having grown up very comfortable with distraction - reading while eating at dinner, that sort of thing - am I the sort of "digital native" Anderson talks about in the last page of his article, the person who can switch attention really well? Or is that really just fooling myself? I suppose it's a hard question to answer. I'd like to think I'm the former, but I have certainly appreciated lifehacking and the whole GTD idea - including just starting to use Texter, thanks to this week's David Pogue column - and I have benefited immensely from taking a much more focused approach to e-mails, so at some level I do feel some value in eliminating some kinds of mental clutter. And weaning myself off the need to answer the phone or SMSs immediately has saved a lot of time. Even if that just means more time to Twitter, I suppose, if I'm being facetious.

What I like, ultimately, in thinking about all this is that it isn't the kind of question that really is answered within one blog posting. Will have to keep thinking about it all. And reread Joyce and Proust.

Off the books

2009-05-22T16:12:00.004+08:00

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has some interesting follow-up on what was not in Edmund Andrews' (fascinating) book/NYT piece ("My Personal Credit Crisis"), specifically on his wife's bankruptcies.

Wolfram Alpha and time spans

2009-05-21T11:39:00.003+08:00

Tried out the much-hyped Wolfram Alpha and wasn't too impressed with the simple results of a date search. Maybe it's just me, but the difference between today (May 21) and Feb 24 should be 2 months and 27 days (i.e. counting from April 24), not 2 months and 25 days as Wolfram states.

As someone pointed out, the algorithm seems to be counting March and April as the 2 months. the 4 days at the end of Feb and the 21 days of May, but that doesn't seem intuitively the way people count time spans. Otherwise the difference between May 25 and Feb 24 would be "2 months and 29 days", rather than "3 months and a day".

American Idol

2009-05-06T23:11:00.002+08:00

Hey, they did what I thought they'd do on American Idol and have duets. Great idea. Although I have no idea why the judges were that harsh on Allison and not harsh enough on Danny. Hope she's not in trouble for "talking back". Funny that voters punish that. It ain't homeroom.

The solace of baseball

2009-04-24T00:27:00.002+08:00

The last six months have been the most gut-wrenching ones of my life. Watching my mother go in and out of hospital; watching various tubes inserted to help her eat, breathe, all the common functions we take for granted; gaining the false hope of a discharge only to have her return to the hospital; and finally, the traumatic last 2 weeks, where the infection finally got the better of her.

I haven't been able to update this blog or Singapore Sox Fan as much as I'd like under the circumstances. Nor was my mother the greatest of baseball fans; indeed, she didn't know much about the game besides the general idea of going around the bases. But baseball and the Sox were a form of solace in a terrible world. The controlled drama of the World Baseball Classic, where agony and suffering were confined to the field. The rhythms of spring training, signifying renewal and hope. The spell of the daily game, and the comfort of a world where the great fear is that David Ortiz has truly lost his bat speed. The passing of time, out by out, hit by hit, following games over the tiny screen of the phone while waiting outside the ICU and praying and hoping for a miracle.

A Bartlett Giamatti's famous quote on baseball reads: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." And that is true. But the game can comfort too. It can remind you of times where people have springs in their step, and where people have full control of their faculties. Its highs are true highs, bringing unbridled joy and elation. And yet its lows are manageable. Autumn will pass, and then new players will come in, draft picks will make the majors, there will be renewal. Because in baseball, there's always "Wait till next year!". And what I wouldn't give for a next year with my mother.

The Waste Land

2009-04-09T10:13:00.001+08:00

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I. The Burial of the Dead.

Funeral Blues

2009-04-04T11:09:00.000+08:00

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The 100 books from the BBC meme

2009-03-13T11:54:00.002+08:00

I want to kill the stupid Facebook meme that claims the BBC has made a list of 100 books that it thinks you should read, since I hate misattribution with a passion, and urban legends make my blood boil. So here goes:

1. The list is almost certainly based on an online poll from worldbookday.com, in which 2000 people nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without. See the Guardian report and the complete list.

2. I'm guessing the average of 6 is some nonsensical urban legend added to make those sending this on feel superior, since (and again I'm guessing here) most people who like books (and thus sending on this meme) would have read more than 6.

3. Stop being so bloody credulous.

Thinking of Updike

2009-02-18T15:32:00.000+08:00

Twitter is a drug. I feel like everything I post now wants to be shortened into pithy 140 (why not the full 160 of SMS?) character pieces. But a welcome palliative was listening to the late John Updike's "Playing With Dynamite" (read by Roger Angell) on the bus. Suddenly I felt like writing again - full, proper writing. Or at least seeing the world better. I looked outside the bus window and wondered about the lives upon lives stacked in the apartment blocks, true human contact playing out behind the glass facade of the Newton Road apartments.

Orchids at the National Orchid Garden

2009-02-18T12:14:00.001+08:00

Trying out a DSLR...

If the aliens speak Hokkien, NASA is ready

2009-02-13T10:31:00.004+08:00

Randomly stumbled upon a recording in Amoy (Hokkien, really) that's part of the NASA Voyager spacecraft's golden phonograph. I love that the idea that the first thing you would ask an alien is exactly the same thing you might ask a distant relative over Chinese New Year - lin chia pa buey?

Twitter

2009-02-04T00:11:00.003+08:00

Dang if Twitter isn't addictive. While on the plethora of buses (77, 124, 132, 145, 147) today, podcasts & twittering amply helped me while away my time...

On the mutability of melody

2009-01-23T10:44:00.002+08:00

Random things I learned today: "America the Beautiful" can be sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne", and vice versa. (I suppose this is something like how the "Star-Spangled Banner" is set to the Anacreontic song.)

The Susan Sontag Diaries

2009-01-14T11:42:00.000+08:00

Read a review of Susan Sontag's diaries in Time, which obviously is not quite the same as reading the diaries themselves. But inspired by the tone. Against Interpretation was one of the lodestars of my younger teenage self, at least in writing style. Perhaps better to write out thoughts to self in blog, Twitter-style.

The Sontag-Annie Leibovitz relationship has always intrigued me. That much talent in one relationship!

The Pu er market collapse

2009-01-12T14:23:00.003+08:00

Pu er is the main Chinese tea I drink - seems to be just the thing to sop up the oil in Chinese restaurant food. But I had no idea there had been a boom and bust in the pu er market.

A new iPhone

2009-01-07T09:14:00.000+08:00

My iPhone's external speaker died on me a few days ago - quite annoying, as it meant I couldn't hear the ringer or listen to podcasts while I was doing something else that didn't allow me to use headphones. So after much fiddling around with solutions such as repeatedly plugging / unplugging headphones, I took it down to Singtel to get it fixed. Now, I had gone down the previous week and was told that there was a 90-minute wait, and was asked nicely to come back. So imagine how happy I was to be told that there were only 2 customers ahead of me in the queue...

... and imagine my frustration when, 40 minutes later, I was still waiting. When I went to the counter and asked how long more, I was very brusquely told "I'm sorry, but there are only two of us". Which got me frustrated - there had to be a better way for service staff to empathise, instead of making what sounded like excuses. Anyway, after waiting for them to try to restore the phone entirely, a guy comes up and gets quite irate - his number was called on the system when in reality they weren't ready to attend to him. He kept saying it was very frustrating to be called and then to wait standing up, and then even stated explicitly that he was not blaming the woman, and all he wanted to hear was that there must have been a technical fault, and that Singtel would look at it. But all the woman kept saying was "I'm sorry, but I didn't press the button to call you." Repeated ad nauseum. It was a fascinating look at customer service, in a way - all the customer wanted was some acknowledgement that he was correct in that a mistake had been made, and the more he didn't get it, the more upset he got. Reminded me of this podcast I was listening to - Harvard Business Review, perhaps? - in which they discussed customer service and gave this example of how this man got more and more irate simply because the customer service person wasn't acknowledging his complaint, but kept rephrasing it.

In the end it turned out the iPhone speaker really was kaput, and they had to give me a new one. Which was great, except that the next 45 minutes getting home with a brand new iPhone without any music/podcasts on it was EXCRUCIATING. (Can't really surf the web on a bus without getting motion sickness.) And then a slight moment of panic at home when I almost did something stupid that I thought might have caused me to lose all my backed up data. (Advice: backup the backup directory just in case you inadvertently overwrite it.) Such is the nature of iPhone dependency...

Brad DeLong on The Financial Crisis

2009-01-06T12:24:00.003+08:00

Went to a talk on "The Financial Crisis of 2007-2009: Understanding Its Causes, Consequences�and Its Possible Cures" by Brad DeLong, whose blog I've followed for a while, and was duly impressed by DeLong's broad historical reach and scope in delineating what made this recession different from many previous recessions, and on the huge magnitude of the impact of a sudden change in people's preferences for risky assets (which DeLong estimates led to about $17 trillion of the total decline in asset values) - as opposed to the actual increase in the default discount for mortgage payments (which are relatively small).

Prof DeLong has kindly put his entire script on his blog (see the link above), so I won't go into the contents of the actual speech, but I thought it useful to note his answer to the question I posed, which was on a question of political economy and why the Austrian school of thought had gained so much currency among those on the right. (If he or anyone else reads this, I apologise if the paraphrasing missed something out.) DeLong invoked the name that was clearly in the vanguard of advancing the intellectual ideas associated with so-called laissez-faire free market capitalism, Milton Friedman, and noted something about Friedman's monetarist ideas - that Friedman's monetarism, in calling for the managed growth of the money supply, was actually a means of government intervention, albeit in as minimal a form as possible, and that the act of intervening in the money supply was as much an act of intervention as Keynesian proposals. However, as DeLong noted, Friedman conflated monetarism with a total laissez-faire system and advanced the virtues of both, leaving his acolytes somewhat at a loss when the market system reached its limits.

DeLong also noted the very Christian nature of America in many respects, and the importance of the notion of being punished for sins, which in turn led to a certain feeling that the crisis was a necessary purgative response to the "sins" of excess, even when the importance of punishing the financiers that were held responsible for the crisis could have brought with it the unemployment of millions. This he contrasted with the views of Keynes, who very much viewed these situations as pragmatic ones that can be fixed. I think DeLong is right, and I think to that you can add that very Christian view of sin as falling short regardless of magnitude - i.e. that as long as you have sinned, there is no question of degree - you are in one of the circles of hell, but you are in hell, nonetheless. And when you have such a worldview, implicit or not, it is hard then to deal with questions of degree and magnitude - i.e. to use pragmatic means to say "well, we've made mistakes, but that doesn't mean the punishment is eternal damnation; the fallout can be contained and the pain people feel can be minimised".

I should have followed up with a question on how much these Austrian school ideas appealed not just to the idea of sin, but also to a traditional antipathy towards government, particularly in the way they were packaged. But time was short and DeLong had already obliged with a very thorough response to my question, so I stopped. It was good, however, to indulge my training in economics in thinking about the various issues DeLong raised - been so long since I listened to so much on macroeconomics.

The Days of Christmas

2009-01-02T12:11:00.004+08:00

Happy New Year one and all. I suppose with my brother's piece in Today, it's not actually news that my mother's in the hospital, and has been so for the past few weeks. You will forgive me if it's not something I particularly wish to talk about in public at this point in time (whether on this blog, on Facebook, or Twitter), but thank you to all friends who've offered comfort, or even unknowing distraction. And I'll echo my brother's comments about doing little things to help others - besides giving blood, you can help all manner of animals, or do your part for the environment. Here's to 2009.

New Year's Eve at Pietrasanta

2009-01-01T09:31:00.001+08:00

Had a great New Year's Eve dinner at Pietrasanta - here are the appetisers, including a great Tuscan seafood soup (Caciucco alla Livornese). Happy New Year one and all!

Mercury rising

2008-12-22T16:06:00.002+08:00

Also, the news that Jeremy Piven may have gotten an overdose of mercury made me look up the FDA guidelines on mercury, including how much fish one can eat in a week. No more than 1 weekly serving of swordfish or shark, apparently. And perhaps not too much of "certain species of very large tuna". Not that anyone should be eating too much shark or tuna anyway, what with overfishing and all.