Shopping Hands!!!

I arrived back in Singapore on the last day of this year’s great singapore sale and was anxious cut a swath through the Kenneth Cole, Hugo Boss, New Man and Top Man shops. Sadly, I needed to go purchase a special phone for a work thing and arrange to get it shipped overnight to Australia. It ended up taking until 2pm because I walked to the Funan IT mall which is only a kilometer from the hotel as the crow flys. Sadly, the streets didn’t work like that. e to mention vast construction due to a new MRT subway line being built. It took a while to get there and it started to pour rain just as I was a block away.

After finding a place that had the thing, I got it and then started to walk back during a lull in the rain. I took a different route, which didn’t seem like the most direct on the map, but certainly worked better than the other one with the exception that it stared to rain again half way there. I was forced to duck into a mall, which was great except that it was all home furnishings. I snuck out the side door and behold Fish & co. I was starving so I had lunch. I ordered the fish of the day “sambal” style. Now sambal is a sauce that we have at the house that we use by the tablespoon to season entire dishes. Well, my fish came smothered with sambal. Like gravy. It was on the edge of too hot for me, and I really enjoy hot food.

One thing that I found interesting was that I’m just about as far away from the USA as you can get and I was sitting in a restaurant listening to music that was exactly the same as I would at home, watching an American baseball game on ESPN one one monitor, Formula 1 racing on another, and MTV on yet another monitor. On my table was an advertisement for a contest to win an “All American Vacation” sponsored by Tobasco™.

Anyway, I finally made it back to the hotel around 2pm and regroued for my walk down Orchard Road the other way — back to the area where we stayed before.

Lets just say it was crowded. Like Christmas at the Mall of America crowded, which is funny because I was talking to my friend Rich about Singapore and he said “Is it still like visiting the Mall of America except with a lot more Asian people?”. Despite this, I hit all the places I was looking for and ended up getting a fantastic deal on two Kenneth Cole shirts.

Yay!! Now its 4:30 and my feet are tired. I think that I’ll finish writing this little beauty and then mosey on down to the lobby and find a dinner plan.

What can you say to that?

And spawn stores are just all over Asia.

Shaken, not stirred

Well, I’m back in Singapore despite several good attempts to screw up my flight schedules.

My flight was delayed over an hour on take-off because too much fuel was accidentally loaded in the tail tank (9 thousand pounds of it) making the plane unbalanced and unable to take off. They were originally going to redistribute the fuel to other tanks but that apparently failed and they switched to plan B about 40 minutes into the process.

Plan B is adding 20,000 more pounds of fuel to the other tanks to even it out. This gave us quite a fuel reserve and made the plane pretty heavy. The pilot was sitting in my area chatting with us because he was bored like the rest of us. He said that the plane would weigh over 850 thousand pounds on take-off. One of the fuel tanks weighed more than a DC-9. This was a 747-400 on a direct flight from MSP to Tokyo’s Narita airport.

At any rate, we finally take off and I was a little nervous because I had a pretty tight connection at Narita (an hour and 10 mins) and they make you go through security on international connections at Narita. However, during the flight the operations people say that they will be changing our flight plan a bit and giving us a faster travel speed (we had extra fuel after all) to try to minimize the delay.

Eleven hours later, as we are approaching Japan, they announce that there is bad news and good news. The bad news was that there has been an earthquake and that Narita airport has been closed. The good news is that because we were late, we missed the earthquake, and additionally, because we have so much fuel they are going to let us hover rather than diverting us to an alternate airport.

It turned out that there was no damage at the airport and they released us to land pretty quickly and we ended up being about a half hour late total from our scheduled arrival time! I walked off one flight, went through security and walked onto the already boarding flight to Singapore. Others on our flight were not so lucky. There was quite a bit of disruption due to diverted flights and a lot of people apparently had to stay over night and get flights out in the morning.

This time, I’m staying at Le Meridian Singapore on Orchard road. Sort of in the same area as our previous hotels but also in an area this is a little different then the other two. The hotel is quite nice and after sleeping for 6 hours or so I’m up and ready to spend the day shopping!

No, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I may have to make several trips back to the hotel to avoid putting too much strain on my back. I bet the Kenneth Cole boutique delivers…

A matter of trust…

Well, we have moved into our new office space and are all pretty much loving it. However, our old office was all open space without any walls or doors. Our new space is individual offices.

I’m finding it difficult to, you know, bother people directly like I used to be able to by making faces or what not.

Being the resourceful person that I am, I solved this problem by using my isight and ichat. A simple face made into the camera and copy/paste allows me to deliver my attitude to my co-workers without leaving my chair. This solution, however, is not without its drawbacks.

Example 1
Example 2

Newton MessagePad 2100 FREE to good home…

I’ve been a nomad for several years now — my stuff is mostly all stored and I live in a room in a friends house like a stray dog with no where else to go. A vagabond. A drifter. Aimlessly wandering the halls of the world with nowhere to go. Nowhere to be.
Anyway, I was using some of the vastly oversized office space we had over in Minneapolis for storing my stuff. Naturally, when our office moved this week, I’ve been forced to put all that crap back into storage. At least the stuff that isn’t being used by the company…

In order to help reduce the chaos, I spent three days going through some of the boxes that have just been moved around for a few years but not really opened. I managed to discard 10 boxes of crap that I’ll never need again. I had credit card receipts and records from accounts that were closed in 1990 and earlier… all in neat little files. What in the world happened to me since then?

Now to the point of this entry… while cleaning out these boxes, I found my Newton MessagePad 2100 with keyboard.

It seems to work (it shows stuff on the screen) and it is free to anyone who wants to use it. Just post a comment and the first person I like who wants it for personal use gets it!

Back to Singapore!

I’ll be returning to Singapore for 11 days in July. This is good because I need to see all the new stuff at all my favorite stores! Oh, and that work thing.

New blog software

Hiya. Moved my blog content to my own server and am using WordPress now. I was too lazy to move the comments. There weren’t that many anyway. Buh Bye comments.

We actually did it…

I guess I forgot to mention that I did the Ironman ride and it went very well. Only one flat tire. Which is a plus for me since I seem to get a lot of them. It was 8 hours in the saddle which was a record for me and turned out to be 102 miles, which was also a single day record.

I’ve got two links. Little movies from my still camera and an iPhoto still slideshow thing

My English is gud

Minnesota Ironman Bike Ride

The Minnesota Ironman Bike RIDE is coming up this Sunday, April 24th. It is a 100 mile ride that is pretty early in the season for Minnesota in that we could easily still get snow or something distasteful like that. There are two other routes on the Ironman that provide a metric 100 (62 miles) and a 30 mile for those who don’t want to do 100 miles. Bill and I are planning on riding the century and Steve and Michele are planning on riding the 62.

The Twin Cities Bicycling Club, of which we are all members, has been doing training rides that started with the paper man and ended on Saturday the 16th with the Tin man.

Unfortunately, the weather was not good. It was supposed to be light rain in the morning (the ride started at 10a) and then taper off to be nice. What actually happened was rain. Pure rain. Cold rain. It was 60 degrees and raining. The ride was split into two parts. The first was for people who are not intending to do the 100 mile ride and that bit was 46 miles and the second was for those of us planning on doing the full 100 and that route was 79 miles.

The Tinman was in two routes — 79 and 46. Bill and I took off on the 79 mile route and Steve and Michele rode separately on the 46. I mapped our route using my GPS it is in yellow on the map. For those of you who are familiar with this area of Minnesota, you know that it is quite hilly. For some reason I didn’t get it through my head just HOW hilly it was going to be until 10 minutes into the ride when the error of my thinking was shown to me in cold hard light.

Needless to say, 85 miles, 6 hours, and 3300 feet in vertical ascent later, I was one tired puppy. Happily, we all completed our respective rides and Bill and I found out later that we were the only two to actually do the longer ride!

This experience really brought home how much work the Ironman route is going to be. Michele and I drove/mapped the route with my GPS last Sunday and the 100 mile route has 4300 feet vertical ascent. Youch. At least I’m mentally prepared for it this time. We have also decided to re-do the Tinman ride tomorrow (Thursday) in better weather as the last practice run. Then I intend to rest until Sunday.