Zit Seng's Superwall

Yes, we took that long to get baby Vanessa registered. We tripped down to ICA this morning. The car park was so super congested, the building was almost overflowing with lots of queues, but oddly enough, queue for birth registration was just 5 minutes. So finally baby Vanessa legally exists — not that this would be a special day to remember anyway I suppose…

I’m just wondering why is the ICA building so crowded. I imagine I only visit the place once in 5 to 10 years. In fact this is only my second trip ever to ICA every since the building existed.

According to this article from Network World, a student at the University of Portland was suspended after having discovered a weakness and exploited it to bypass Cisco’s NAC software agent to get onto the university’s network. The suspension seems to be a harsh punishment and the popular defense seems to be that the act was not malicious and no one got hurt. I run a university network too, so let me shed a different light on this matter.

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Seems it is now M1’s turn to have problems with 3G. Since about 7pm (at least that’s when I noticed), I was unable to access 3G data services. Voice calls were okay though, fortunately, so at least in this respect it was better than the SingTel 3G outage that happened last year.

I wonder how reliable the 3G elsewhere in the world. The outage from SingTel 3G last year lasted some 7 hours (according to CNET). It’s now over 2 hours with M1. It seems the “uptime” for 3G here isn’t great.

Update (9pm): Ok just after I blog about it, the service seems to be back up.

Phoebe, the little girl mini-schnauzer, is very sneaky. This happened before CNY. We brought home a box of bak-gua. It was packed in the usual paper wrapping, inside a box, inside a plastic bag. It was placed on the floor, amongst other things, when we came home.

Some time later, while we were playing Warcraft I think, we heard some noises in the living room. My wifey went to check and to our horror (or rather, we were annoyed), found Phoebe chewing on a piece of bak-gua. There was also 2 other pieces of bak-gua strewn on the floor.

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This is baby Vanessa on her daddy’s lap, one week after returning home. This is one of the rare moments when her eyes are open. She spends most of her time sleeping as most newborns do. For some strange reason, she prefers me to carry her in a “football hold” over any other method. I thought the football hold was the most precarious and uncomfortable hold. But she clearly doesn’t like me carrying her in the usual cradle hold. Sometimes she would fidget around or threaten to start crying until I switch back to the football hold.

Her 3 year old cousin who came to visit her today wanted to bring her home.

3G is the third-generation of mobile communications technology for mobile phones. Although not the newest thing anymore (it’s been out for maybe two years now and 3.5G is already being rolled out), widespread use of 3G services still isn’t very common. Many people probably already have a 3G-enabled phone connecting to a 3G network, but not many are really making use of the 3G services or applications that ride on 3G services.

Recently, I had the need to get readily available Internet access (that means from “anywhere”). Sure in Singapore you have free Wireless@SG, but Wireless@SG is oversold — it is far from being everywhere. 3G is everywhere. You don’t need a Delifrance or a Starbucks or a MacDonalds. You just need a phone signal… and that’s basically everywhere. But one of the problems with 3G is the somewhat prohibitive data charges.

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TMC is probably the most popular maternity hospital. They claim (according to MOH survey on average actual hospital bill sizes) to be the cheapest for all but one type of delivery cases, and 2nd cheapest for that other one. But price aside, how is TMC? On the whole… great, though their backend administration could do with much improvement. (more…)

Vanessa is one week old today! I’m not going to say “time flies”, because it doesn’t when her mummy and daddy don’t get 7 peaceful hours of sleep every night But yah, so many things have happened in the one week.

She has a strange cycle of feeding on alternate days. Day one, she suckled immediately. On day two, she rather sleep and was completely uninterested in feeding. But day three, she suckling excitedly again. And so on and so forth. Today is day seven – feeding day – and let’s see so far she’s fed at around 1am, 3am, 6am, 8am, 10am… hmm and ok after that I went to work.

We are supposed to be doing on-demand feeding. That’s what the hospital nurses said they’ll do in the night. Baby cries, baby gets to feed; Baby doesn’t cry, baby doesn’t get to feed. In the middle of the night, they wheel in the baby and say she cried, so we need to feed. But when she’s in the room with us, she’s absolutely peaceful, even tending to fall back to sleep. At home too… the confinement lady wakes us up to say the baby cried and needs feeding. But we don’t hear her cry in the our room. Haha perhaps baby is just cleverly trying to signal she wants to feed… and then she settles down when she knows she’s gotten the message across.

Haven’t had much time to blog about baby Vanessa. Let’s see if we can get to it over the weekend

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.

Our baby girl Vanessa was born 3rd April. Weighing 3.04kg, 34cm head circumference (lot’s of 3 and 4 so far) and 48cm length.

- This blog was updated through my M1 mobile phone.