I’m feeling happy and well due to a couple of really good reasons and news. First, my parents came for a visit, second, Brazil won on their first World Cup game against North Korea, third, I was able to procure at a very good and bargain price a good laptop during the PC show last weekend, and fourth, Apple has released the iPhone 4 and the other day the new mac mini(although a bit pricier).

While bringing around my parents, I was able to come up with a good walking tour full packed and meaningfull for first time visitors. All are walking or distance from each other or at the very least lest than 2km in radius so a cab would cost no more than 5 bucks and a bus no more 69 cents.

Old and New Experience

The first walking tour would start from the Tanjong Pagar MRT station, take the exit towards Amoy Street or Telok Ayer Park and walk a couple of meters towards the Amoy Food Centre. I recommend my favorite Beef Hor Fun from the Good Day shop or the Thai foods from the shop just across the Good Day shop. Grab a Kopi-C, Teh-C, Teh Halia or sugar cane juice from the shop beside Good Day to wash the food down and that should be a good fill for your tour. Getting a seat at between 12 to 1 could be a challenge and sharing tables is common. Be mindfull of reserved seats or tables which you can usually identify if it has a news paper or commonly tissue pack, although an umbrella, bag or any other personall items are sometimes used.

On the side of the Food Centre is Ann Sian Hill which would lead to Club Street and on the other side towards the MRT station is Maxwell Road, this will be next direction. head down towards the MND building, stay on the opposite side of the Road from the Red Dot Museum. I haven’t been inside that Museum but if you feel like it, you can cross the street at the front of MND building. After that, or if  your skipping it, go to the URA building just beside MND. Inside on the first 2 or 3 floors is a city exhibit of planned developments for Singapore, full with multimedia presentations and scall models of the City. Really good to start your Singapore tour from here as you get to see the whole islands, it’s current and future developments which you can identifiy with later on in your tour. As it’s really hot and humid in Singapore, this visit will also give you time to relax and cool off.

After that, take the Kadayanallur Street exit and just across is the Maxwell Food Centre. If you still have food space to spare, grab a chicken rice from the famous Tian Tian shop inside. Lines still form even at 2 to 3pm due to it’s popularity. Anthony Bordaine himself recommends this shop.

After that, go towards the front of the Food Centre and you are now on South Bridge Road, just across will be the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, inside is a museum on one of the top floors. You are now on one of the corners of Chinatown. After your visit, exit at the back of the temple and turn right, towards the Sago Street which is a walkers street full of shops on either side, turn left and follow the street, towards Smith Street, which is the Night Market and food street! Watchout for the Erich’s Wuerstelstand, an attraction on it’s own, which is a Sausage stall with authentic German/Austrian foods served by the Erich the owner! imagine eating sausages and schnitzels in the middle of Chinatown, only in Singapore! 

Move towards Temple street for more shopping, on temple street, to the right would be the Sri Mariamman Temple, Singapore’s oldest Hindu Temple, amazing as it is again in the middle of Chinatown. To the left would be the chinatown MRT Station. from here, you can take the MRT towards Clarke Quay or Vivo City/Harbourfront to cap of the day. On 
Clarke Quay, the reverse bungy attaction as well as numerous clubs, bars and restos to suite your taste. After Clarke Quay, if you still have energy, follow the river down towards Boat Quay. If your heading towards  Vivo City, you can either grab a Carl’s Jr. or head up to Food Republic and grab either Ban Mian noodles or one of the Indian foods. After eating your fill, relax outside Food republic with a view of Sentosa, Resorts World and Universal studios, while dipping your tired feet on the ankle high water ponds.

An MRT station and Bus interchange just below and across the street and cab lines gives you numerous options to return home and hit the sack.

One item at a time and surely the list will get shorter.

As I have already posted before, my parents are visiting and since they were already here, we had the opportunity to tackle some health issues. My mother has Obstructive Sleep Apnea(OSA) and I have looking for a good replacement for her 3 year old APEX CPAP machine. Her Resmed nasal pillow also needs changing but these things cost a lot and I can’t buy them together at the same time or I’ll go bankrupt. The best place to buy these are from the US where it is cheapest or Australia. Here in Singapore, it cost substantially more, but US retailers do not ship outside the US and having these shipped to Singapore would be more hassle as I believe this is a controlled medical machine and would therefore need some permits.

For those who are here in Singapore and are looking for retailers, the list below would be of great help. It took me a long time to identify the different retailers as each brand had different retailers/partners and there is no one shop for all. In contrast, in Cebu, Philippines, we only had one retailer but they could order any brand you would prefer.

Vendor / Brand / Product / Contact Person / Contact Number

Somnotec / Breas(GE Medical)/ isleep series / Henry Ong / 91719095
ERIKG / Apex / XT series / Eric Lim / 97423232
United BMC / AEIOMed/ Everest series / Marvin Sumangil / 92278890
Bremedi / DeVilbis, Respironics, Resmed / CPAP, Masks and Accessories / Agnes Chow / 96515471
IB Medical / Resmed / CPAP and Masks / Goh Shu Fen / 62847177

I hope this list helps you. For the persons listed, if you don’t want your number on this post, you may drop a comment and I will remove you from the list. I’m hoping your ok with it so that you market could make contact with you easily.

It’s still a busy week leading to more busy weeks which we hope to be able to normalize by mid July. Everyone in the team is working hard and hopefully things will settle down by middle of July. I previously mentioned about how great Qlock has been in helping with multiple time zone management, especially in setting up schedules. A similarly good product which comes really handy for mobile warriors on Blackberry is Worldmate. Also has a similarly good time feature and even has a day and night world map, very handy for quick glances to check if you should say good morning or good evening. Not to mention it’s a great travel itinerary and scheduler.

Livemeeting or Vshare and worldwide teleconferencing are also great for gathering people from multiple locations. I used to think that it would be really hard to do things over the phone, mail and such. But after doing it I now believe the only hindrance is the participants willingness. It is no-doubt doubly effective to do things face-to-face but for regular daily engagements, surely, web meetings and phone conferencing is more than sufficient. For our needs particularly. I also thought it would be hard for technical support but I have since engaged phone support a couple of times and it worked out pretty well. Again, I guess only willingness might be the hindrance in these factors.

I’ve already shared about Tian Tian chicken rice, Good Day beef hor fun and now I’ll share the indian food on Amara. Still in the vicinity of Tanjong Pagar, behind International Plaza is Amara, a good hotel to stay when in Singapore and especially if you are visiting locations in the Tanjong Pagar, Raffles Place area. Anyway, I digress, the Fourth floor of the mall inside the hotel is full of food stalls, one of which is a indian stall which has very tasty biryani set. I always take mutton biryani and it is delicious, it comes with 2 vegetable dishes and small sweet delictable. A complete set for around 5 or 6 bucks. You should try it sometime if your in the area.

The new iphone is out and everyone is salivating and already dreaming of getting one. I’m still trying to figure out when the thing will be available here in Singapore. I’m sure it’s gonna cost and arm and a leg again, as expected of apple products. I was kind of expecting for a refresh on the Macbook and Mac mini lines but the first day so far has not included them in the announcements. Let’s see if it will popup in the next couple of days.

I ran 8km last weekend and I think it was a little bit too much and I had to rest for 2 days instead of the usual 1 day. I should have sticked to not increasing distance more than 10% per week. I also changed from heel stricker to mid footer. The change seemed to have helped coz I don’t feel as much force on some parts of my legs. I’m still looking for good shorts for my build and I think my current running shoe is not for runs more than 5 or 6 km. Time to save up for a lunarglide.

Installation is straightforward and I will not go in too much details on it. Let’s just assume ActivePerl and AWSTATS have already been installed successfully. Let’s then start with my setup, I used WinXP with no web servers installed. ActivePerl 5.10.1 build 1007 and AWSTATS 6.95 (build 1.943) was installed. When the CLI popped up during AWSTATS installation, I did not configure it for a web server.

After installing both, I then copied my log files onto the cgi-bin folder for easier typing when using CLI, although the log location manually entered in the log file, but it did not matter in the end.  I did not need to configure anything else as I already have perl and awstats, the only thing needed to do was do a quick modifications on the profile config file.

I updated the LogFile paramater and pointed it to the location of the log file, it took a while for me to figure out that I needed to include the logs filename and not the folder where the logs where located. I then double checked if the default settings for LogType, LogFormat, LogSeparator, SiteDomain,HostAliases, DNSLookup, DirData,DirCgi,DirIcons and AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser where correct. I changed SiteDomain to my name to match the config file which was a big mistake. Make sure the value of the SiteDomain is the same with what is in the log files to avoid dropping all records, if you have a different value with what you have on the log files, the records will be dropped during parsing and your report will be empty. I also changed DirIcons but later on thought it was of no use coz I was gonna be generating static reports instead of viewing it from a site but it turns out I was correct as this is the source location for the icons used when generating static reports, the value should be based on where you will output your generated report. The rest, you can leave as default.

I was then able to parse all the logs and generate the report. to parse the logs use awstats.pl -config=<name of profile> -update. Do not be alarmed if you see corrupted records during parsing, it is normal to have such as long as it is around less than 5% of the total, any more than that and there probably is something wrong with the webserver, application or the logging settings. After parsing all the logs, it was now time to generate the reports, use the command awstats_buildstaticpages.pl -config=<name of profile> -month=<month to generate report on>, if you do not include the month parameter, report for the current month will be generated. I added -buildpdf=<location of htmldoc> and a PDF was generated after the static html reports You need to download and install HTMLDoc first.

My logfiles were also on separate files by date and it was a hassle to udpate the profile to process each log file, so I used logresolvemerge.pl to combine all the logs and process them once after.

That’s it! I now had the report I needed. Good luck to everyone and I hope this helps.

I’d like to emphasize again that proper scheduling with different timezones is as much an art as a skill, luckily, the internet and tools such as qlock helps a lot in determining  the correct times. DST really does confuse further an already confusing multiple timezone world. It is however a fact we have to live with, as with the fact that I am working with globalize teams. I guess with time I can only become better at it(I hope).

I’m still tracking the Prudential bid for AIA saga and the current state seemingly looks like a U turn. AIG will not agree to the reduced bid price and it currently is a stalemate. Interesting turn of events, feels like a mexican telenovela or mexican stand-off in this case.

Tensions is still being felt in the Korean peninsula but I’m still positive war will be avoided. Tensions are also brewing on due to actions undertaken by Israel on a humanitarian convoy. Although the said area has been in a said state for a long time now, this recent rash, ill advised or executed?, has brought a dark shadow over Israel.

Cebu seemed to have experience the hottest day in the year yesterday, I could only imagine how it would have felt. Although, I could also say it was very hot yesterday, as Mike and I went to AMARA for lunch, the rays of the sun felt like it was penetrating through our skin. PAGASA says La Nina is coming but for now, it’s still scorching hot. It was also humid last night, good thing it rained early morning. 

A couple of good news on the papers yesterday, best of all are positive research results on new treatments and a vaccine for cancer. The big C is dreaded by everyone and so I myself try to live a healthy life to avoid it, learning of positive news about the fight on cancer is very welcome. I believe everyone has had experience with cancer, either through a love one or someone dear and close, I hope the time for an effective vaccine and cure will not be too long away.

News on Google ditching Windows is spreading through the net. I’m thinking, so what? it’s their choice, if it works for them, makes their environment secure while still keeping their workers productive, then it’s their call. What’s the big fuss about it, I don’t believe it will dent sales of Windows. I do think it will have indirect impact to future decisions of other entities, but not in the short term. In any case, this problem is for Microsoft to solve.

On the other hand, Apple is reporting ipad sales moving north of 2 million, just days or week after official international sales. Seems like the ipad is defining a new market and leading it by leaps and bounds. I myself am eagerly awaiting the Singapore launch and the WWDC announcements next week as well.

Finally, news of OFWs with dubious circumstances have been rounded up and arrested, news reports are still vague but the essence of the story is that OFWs reaction to it can be summarize into “Respect the law and culture of the country you are in”. I totally agree! Everyone should understand that being in a foreign country one must abide by their rules, laws and culture. Respect is key. We as visitors cannot impose our own in a foreign land, we have to abide by what is their standard, if we are not agreeable to it, we were not force to visit and we have the choice to leave. In-depth study on this aspect is required prior to travelling, do not take this for granted. I have brushed with such people and I am appalled by there lack of sense to follow the rules of their accommodating country, We can always do what we want in our own home, but the moment we go out, we have to live in a society, once we trample on the thin line of acceptance by our host, it then starts a loop sided generalization that all Filipinos are such, which is unfair! Therefore, if you are not physically, but more importantly mentally ready and focused, do not even venture out of your comfort zone or our country, you just might do more harm to yourself, other Filipinos and the reputation of our country and fellow citizens.

To add to that, those of us striving and living this life, I congratulate you all, it is not easy, the countries we are in are not the land of milk and honey, money does not flow from faucets or grow on trees, more often than not, we have to sweat tears and blood to earn and more of us are away from our families. So, KUDOS to all ! be strong, physically, mentally and spiritually.

To our Kababayans! do not twist your love ones arms and legs for something that is out of reach, it is not easy to be away working and alone. Do not ever think that anybody from outside the country working is a millionaire, more often than not, most OFW do not earn more than 1000 USD, some even earn almost the same as the salary range in the Philippines. Be considerate, most OFWs return home to relax from work, enjoy their savings, be with family. Always remember that not all return to splurge and waste all their hard earned mullah to the enjoyment of the whole barangay or clan. Let them be, let them enjoy their short time and respite. If they make contact with you, then that is the appropriate time, otherwise, let them be.