NEW! Baby video of Don!

Don's now 7 months old, and quite a weird baby...

Life, balut and everything

It's been a zanny and very busy couple of months since I last updated this blog, so here's some brief highlights:

1. Returned to Singapore from Germany in early September. Heathrow being kind enough to give me a freaking 3 hour run-around because of 'security' issues:

"No sir, you are carrying 2 bags, a laptop and a camera bag, so you aren't allowed to enter the transit area. Please line up at Customs for 1 hour, spend 45 min travelling from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4, then check-in either your $2000 notebook or $1500 camera, then queue another 1 hour for security, then wait another 35 minutes until we decide to announce which gate your flight takes off from, which by the way is at the opposite end of the terminal from where you're standing, so do rush down. Then when you're finally on the plane, we delay the flight for an additional 45 min, as we only have 1 security checkpoint working, so many passengers haven't cleared customs yet. Oh, and we'll lose the bag you checked in anyway! Thank you for using the world's best airport!"

2. Get sent by Nokia to Manila at the end of September for Nokia's Music Connect event. Also experience:

a) What a Category 4 Typhoon looks like from the comfort of a 5 star hotel...
b) Tried the Philippino delicacy Balut for the first (and last) time...
c) Typhoon delays flight by 6 hours. Get to Manila airport, find out the powers out, and have to queue 3 hours for manual check-in, but that's still not as frustrating as Heathrow!

3. Turned 36. This year I decided that it's prudent to avoid the people who got me blind stinking drunk last year... :P

4. Have a new addition to the family! A bouncing 8.5lb (3.8kg) baby nephew!

















Finally! I'm an Uncle! Guess who's gonna get spoilt rotten? I reckon that since my brother intends for me to be his almost full-time babysitter, I get to turn him into a spoilt brat as revenge :D

Anywhoo... Uncle Shawn says "Welcome to the world little baby Donovan! Hey, you're on the World Wide Web already, and your only two days old!"

Guten-tag, speaken se Deutch?

Hello from a cool Berlin. It was raining this morning, but now, at 6pm, it's still relatively sunny.

I'm spending 4 days in Germany, attending the IFA 2006 conference. I got in on Thursday, and am leaving on Sunday.

Milestones so far:

Arrived in Berlin via Heathrow - total time, including transit - 16 hours.
12 hour flight from Singapore to Heathrow was fine, the economy seat on the BA flight was more comfortable than I expected, but stil, 12 hours in a small seat nearly killed my arse.

Also - I arrived in Berlin 12 hours ahead of my luggage! My one bag got lost in Heathrow during transit! Luckly, it came in at around mid-night on Thursday - I picked it up from the conceirge on Friday morning.

So, I just had time to grab the bag, go to my room and change into fresh clothes.. not that I was wearing very dirty clothes.. just damp.. I had to wash the only set of clothes I had in the bathroom sink, using shower gel, and while I had them hanging for 12 hours, and used a hair-dryer on them, the shirt and undies were a tad damp...

What am I doing in Berlin? I'm attending IFA 2006 - billed as the biggest consumer electronics fair in the world...

Today was the official opening, and so I got to the sprawling fair ground at 0930 for the keynote speech, delivered by the CEO of Samsung! After that, I took a walk around the halls... thankfully, I'm wearing hiking boots, or else I'll be in a heck of a lot of pain now...

Lots to see, and I've got a ton of images, which I shall upload to Flikr soon... I'm now sitting in the Press Center and using the WLAN connection. With the host of jurnos running around, the bandwidth has been very slow - they really need a MIMO router here...

And don't ask me about the hotel LAN access... 12 freaking Euros.. an hour!

M for Madness, Z for Zoom

There are often dark days on the job, ultra long hours plodding away at articles that somehow refuse to get written.

The there are days of fun, when the entire office goes nuts, and everyone's laughing.

Then there are the days like today, when just one thing makes up for a shitty day, a two hour management meeting (which are never, ever fun)and basically no let up on the pace of work.

What happened was that I picked up a little red car to test drive, over the next few days...

A little number which looked exactly like this:



A SGD$300,000 Imola Red BMW Z4M

Shit-eating grin at first sight, which only got bigger when the BMW lady handed me the key.. and turned into a full-bore, totally insane, death-grin rictus when I turned on the engine and taped the accelerator for the first time.

It was like Barry White reverberating throughout the cars exhaust system - a sensual deep 'Mmmmmm'that hinted of the absolute power under my right foot.

*snick* into first gear, and pull out of the BMW car-park gingerly.

*snick* slowly up the gears, as I headed for the highway.

*snick* down to 3rd, and floor the pedal...

An M-tuned 3-litre in-line 6, with 350 horsepower unleashed, to a redline of 8000 rpm.

Oh my gawd.

This car is the maddest thing I have ever driven. It's got power everywhere. It's got handling, and it's got the grip of King Kong in its fat Pirelli P-Zeros and Dynamic Stabalisation Control. I was in automative heaven, heading towards nirvana with the soft-top down, the radio muted and the sound of 6 cylinders on full song carousing through the exhaust system below me to expel out the 4 pipes at the back.

And then I realised something.. this car is way better than I am as a driver. It's so grippy and so powerful, so fantastacially mad in the sheer drive that it gives you, that it tempts me like a siren call to push me to the edge of my driving ability....

... and beyond.

It's a car I could easily kill myself in.

Thank goodness I can't afford to own one!

Setting off an email grenade

My usual practise when I'm sourcing products for my magazine's group test articles is to send out an email to PR agencies and vendors that I feel may be interested in participating, so that they'll send me their review products to.. well, review.

Responses usually take a while, and I often end up a couple of products short, and then I usually call up product or PR managers direct for their gadgets.

So what happened today was a bit of a turnabout.

I'm preparing a massive series of reviews in an upcoming issue, and decided to send out the usual email a couple of weeks earlier than I usually do - to better prepare people. This forthcoming issue of mine will see reviews for 30 examples of a particular class of consumer technology.. something which hasn't been done yet in Singapore by any publication that I can think off off-hand.

So I shoot off the "Would you like to participate" email blast - there's 6 review segments of 5 products each, for a total of 30 products, and that it's 'first come, first serve.'

5 minutes latter, a PR friend of mine sends me an email 'booking' 4 'slots' for her client... so I cheekily sent out a follow-up email that went something like "Just a little follow-on to say that one super fast PR type has already got her products in..."

KABOOM!

That second email apparently set of an email and telephone frenzy amongst certain PR agencies and their clients in Singapore... within 1 hour, I had 28 slots filled!

I think I just set a new record for the fastest ever response to a product group test.. and that's with 30 products!

It's been a while

Kinda lost interest in blogging for a while. In fact, kinda lost interest in writing as a whole for a bit, which, considering that I'm a journalist by profession, is kinda almost the kiss of death...

I do enjoy my job - I mean, I get to play with shiny next expensive kit (last issue, I racked up SGD$410,000 worth of review products - granted, $390,000 was from ONE BMW car review), get to pig out at media lunches, conduct model castings (Okay, this is a real perk - I'm the only tech jurno in Singapore that does model casting, and there are a number of girls that seem to not wear bras to casting sessions... for some strange reason)

Also got ONE ticket to Coldplay's single performance in Singapore last month.. which was spectacular...




Back to the writing... all editors suffer from burn-out issues, and I feel my limit creeping up on me, especially when you're on a monthly cycle. Now, you'd think that editors in daily newspapers have it worse, and yes, you'd be mostly correct.. but on the other hand, newspaper editors have a lot more resources - bigger editorial teams, wired sources like Reuters and AFP.. a small publisher like mine, with 3 permanent staff handling 2 titles is almost always near saturation point, but that's always been the name of the game.

I'm gonna need some time off soon.. I've got 12 days of leave to clear by October too, which doesn't look likely that I'll be able to!

Apart from that, life is still life, with no major improvements. Yep, money not enough, no honey bunny and I'm still blimp sized.

I've also been rekindling my other big passion, cooking... made a couple of honey chicken roast the past week, and tried out my hand at pizza, with predictable results - totally overdid the toppings!





I've also been manufacturing a particular strawberry cointreu dessert - a simple concoction of strawberries, cointreau liquor and sugar. Make up a batch every week to satisfy my pregnant sister-in-law's cravings (could be worse, she may start to crave curry crab, and then I'll have to make it, as my brother is pretty useless in a kitchen)...

Finally... who's a pretty kitty? Here's my 13 year old cat looking for some attention...

Thoughts and prayers

Finally finished the production of my latest magazine issue. Took a bit more to polish it of than I initially thought, but it's 'in the can'.. ok, on the CD, and heading to the printers.

I had a very quiet weekend. This was due to some bad news I received about a good friend's mom, a nice little lady who's always kind and generous to me.

She was on a public bus when the bus suddenly braked hard, and she was apparently thrown to the floor, resulting in 5 cracked ribs, and more seriously, 2 spinal fractures.

She may be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life, and my family's thoughts and prayers are with her.

God Bless.