After an extended period of harassment from H1N1, people at the office started to turn to some dry H1N1 humour. Even as the Singapore Government turns to mitigation, some other places still implement quarantine and work segregation plans. Colleagues are now discouraged from interacting with each other through direct contact. As a result, we are depending a lot on the telephone.

But hey, did you know viruses can also be transmitted through the phone? Yeah, right.

In fact, viruses can also be transmitted through the email you send to each other! Yeah, right of course!

Have you updated your PC’s anti-virus software? Does it have a signature for the H1N1 virus?

Can you imagine a phone call to an IT helpdesk, with PC user asking about how to prevent his/her computer from being infected by H1N1?

Ha ha. Yeah, not very funny.

What happens with our regular Friday tea? The tea where all of us gather together to “network”? Okay, Team A comes at 3pm, then change shift, Team B comes at 4pm. Yah, by 4pm, there will be no food left.

I’m sure we’ll all be relieved when the mitigation phase is in full implementation. Then, H1N1 is just another boring flu.

Related posts:

1. Preparing for H1N1 Pandemic The SARS experience is repeating itself, this time in...
2. When Helpdesk Is Not Very Helpful Don’t you sometimes feel like helpdesks are not very...
3. SecurityVision 2009 Lacks Security Vision In the past week, I attended an IDC conference...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Several people have complimented this nice photo. Pity that few people have complimented the subject of the photo. I must agree that the photo is pretty well taken. He looks so peaceful, happy and relaxed. His facial expression hints of a little smile.

I’m wondering, when baby Ian grows up, he might be annoyed that everyone’s admiring the photographer’s skills rather then his little baby cuteness. Heh.

Baby Ian is growing up in the age of the social networking web. Although Vanessa’s birth was blogged about, Ian’s birth was not only blogged, but also announced on Facebook (and various other online channels).

Related posts:

1. Baby Loves Photo-Taking [photopress:20070826112.jpg,thumb,pp_image]We found that our baby Vanessa loves having her...
2. Hello Baby #2 We still haven’t thought of a name, so he’s...
3. Baby is Finally Registered Yes, we took that long to get baby Vanessa...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It’s funny how some gadgets are not so intuitive to use that one needs to find help. Fortunately Google comes to the rescue. It’s the Nokia N97’s digital compass that I did not know how to use. I would have expected to run an app, and the compass would just work. Like, for example, how Nokia Maps would read the compass information to automatically orientate the map display according to where the phone was facing.

But alas Nokia Maps did not do that. I was thinking if my N97’s digital compass might be broken. I learnt, through a search on Google, that the N97’s digital compass needed calibration. Yes, that’s right, the N97’s digital compass needs calibration. How primitive that sounds. Then upon further searching, I found that this is about the same situation with the iPhone 3G S’ digital compass too, although it didn’t quite seem nearly as bad as the N97’s in terms of the complaints I’m reading from the web.

The sad thing is that the digital compass isn’t exactly very easy to calibrate. Here’s someone’s video of how it’s done. It wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do this once ever, or even if it was merely once in a long while. But it appears that you need calibration just about every time you run Nokia Maps.

Nokia’s own calibration guide also suggest the weird figure-of-eight motion, although the explanation simply says to rotate the phone through all axes. I’ve found other rotation methods that work just as well, so if you find other more comfortable ways to rotate all the axes, you can go with that and not necessarily follow the motions depicted by Nokia’s documentation.

Related posts:

1. iSync Plugin for Nokia N97 I’m looking at the new Nokia N97 flagship smartphone....
2. Upcoming Nokia N97 I’ve been a Nokia Nseries smartphone user for some...
3. The N97 – Nokia’s First Touchscreen Smartphone [caption id="attachment_1298" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Nokia N97"][/caption] Nokia has unveiled...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Of course we already know that Apple’s Mac hardware has enjoyed steady growth in the market share of desktop and notebook computers. But it is always a pleasant surprise to see it featured in TV programmes, movies, and other mass media. A colleague pointed out something interesting. The web configuration interface of our new Cisco Wireless LAN Controller features a Mac in the splash screen welcome page.

It’s not a very modern Mac computer though. It looks like a Powerbook G4, which runs the PowerPC CPU that is now obsolete. (Apple does not sell PowerPC based desktops or notebooks anymore.)

I think the day will come where Macs would be equally important as Wintel computers, and manufacturers of peripherals, accessories, and other gadgets and devices that are meant to work with computers, will have to properly support both Wintel and Mac platforms right from the start.

Or, more interestingly, perhaps Wintel and Mac camps will come up with a universal way for independent drivers or modules to work on both platforms at the same time. I guess this is beginning to sound like EFI device drivers. Whatever form it takes, do what is needed to unify the different operating platforms. Then again, I imagine Microsoft would be opposed to this idea.

Related posts:

1. Setting Up Your Mac For NUS The new school year at NUS has started. Many...
2. Mac These pages here contain or link to collections of...
3. Mac OS X Update Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard has just been updated...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve upgraded my Nokia N95 8GB to the new N97. I figured it was about time. Note quite so much that I needed a new phone just right now. But time to capitalize on the high trade-in offer of my N95 8GB before the value drops too much. Time to sell off my N95 8GB before it becomes broken (as it almost did).

The N97 is not as huge a leap from the N95 8GB as it were the N95 8GB from my previous N73. I think it is what Nokia brands as a premium model, just like the N95 8GB was, so it is pretty expensive. But trading in the N95 8GB makes the price really affordable.

SingTel Shop is offering $400 for the phone. The previous weekend, I noted that M1 and StarHub were offering $300 and $400 respectively. The last weekend, the StarHub trade-in offer for the N95 8GB dropped to $300. I thought, I had better seize the opportunity now to take SingTel Shop’s $400 trade-in value.

The N97 is a quite an interesting new phone from Nokia. It’s only their second touchscreen phone, the first being the 5800 XpressMusic. Touchscreen phones are interesting, but a touchscreen-only phone certainly has some usability limitations. So a Nseries smartphone with both touchscreen interface and a full QWERTY keyboard makes for one interesting phone that caught my attention.

At some point later, I will probably write my little review of the phone, just like I usually do for other gadgets I acquire. For now, there’s one little thing I want to mention.

It’s the charging connector. The standard Nokia charging connector has changed again. It was annoying enough when they changed from the big connector to the small connector. Now, the data port, which is micro-USB, also servers as the charging connection.

Actually, charging via USB is a good thing. The idea is that with computers and USB ports being quite common place, charging via USB is convenient. The trouble is that micro-USB connector is not all that common, at least not at this time. In my house, we’ve finally “converted” totally to the new Nokia mini charging connector. Now, it looks like we’ve got to go through some change management again. I can’t just charge the new N97 anywhere, I’ve got to make sure I either have the convertor dongle, or the N97’s own micro-USB charger.

Being able to charge from a computer is great, of course. But, bear in mind that you don’t have computers everywhere, and you don’t have micro-USB cables everywhere either (at least not as common as mini-USB for now).

However, overall, I’m pleased that Nokia has decided to do charging via USB, so there’s no longer any need for a separate charging connector.

Update (30 Jun 2009): The next morning after writing the above post, I read about how Apple, Nokia and a bunch of other smartphone manufacturers have agreed to standardize their charger connectors in a deal struck with the European Commission. They are going to be using micro-USB. I guess the micro-USB standardization plan had been in the works for a while, and we’re seeing the result in the N97.

Related posts:

1. iSync Plugin for Nokia N97 I’m looking at the new Nokia N97 flagship smartphone....
2. Upcoming Nokia N97 I’ve been a Nokia Nseries smartphone user for some...
3. The N97 – Nokia’s First Touchscreen Smartphone [caption id="attachment_1298" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Nokia N97"][/caption] Nokia has unveiled...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A little misadventure with my Nokia N95 8GB a few days ago prompted me to check out, among other things, synchronization capabilities with web-based services: Google Sync and Nokia’s own Ovi. The promise of synchronization with “the cloud” is that your precious data can be available through multiple channels (such as different phones, computers, etc), and at the same time, “the cloud” serves as a sort of data backup too.

The short story is that both Google Sync and Ovi works, although to varying degrees. Google Sync with the N95 8GB  works through Nokia’s Mail For Exchange (MfE) software. MfE was designed to synchronize with Microsoft Exchange servers, but it will also work with Google’s mobile services, which presumably can also present itself with Microsoft Exchange type of interfaces.

The MfE configuration was a little tricky for me. It was not terribly clearly documented, but here are a few things to take note of:

• Your username is something like userid@gmail.com.
• Domain should be empty (None).
• You can only synchronize Contacts and Calendar. Trying to also synchronize Tasks and Email will result in MfE complaining: “Server Error. Try again later.”

Once you’ve got your contacts and calendar linked up to Google Sync, you can essentially get the data sync’ed up to various other devices, or simply access Google Calendar or Gmail with a web browser to get your calendar and contacts respectively.

The other synchronization option is Nokia’s Ovi. This really looks to me like Nokia’s version of Apple’s MobileMe. The Ovi synchronization capabilities are built into most newer Nokia Symbian phones, and it is more closely integrated with the phone like the PC Suite software (for synchronization with your PC). It will sync calendar (including tasks), contacts, bookmarks, notes, and I’m not sure what else more, but not including multimedia content and email. Multimedia content is transferred to Ovi separately, which is not an issue in my opinion, since you probably don’t want to synchronize your photos and videos like you do your PIM data.

The Ovi web interface has improved. At least it looks a lot better now than it did before, probably like last year when I last played with it. It has nice AJAX-ified interface, but my main complaint is that the website, in general, is slow. It’s probably the Internet bandwidth to the Ovi servers. I imagine they, being lesser established than the big names like Google and Apple, probably don’t have their server cluster sufficiently distributed to serve everyone in all corners of the world fast enough. It’s a pity I think, because Ovi being designed by Nokia would work very well with Nokia phones.

I’m still a bit lost as to how to synchronize my Mac OS X data with Ovi though. That would be a problem for Mac users.

Related posts:

1. The New Nokia Ovi Services Who needs Flickr anymore, when Share on Ovi gives...
2. Software v30.0.018 for N95 8GB The Nokia N95 8GB seems to be getting fairly...
3. Firmware Update for Nokia N95 8GB There’s a new update to the Nokia N95 8GB...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This ICT I achieved something. It is not something very spectacular or terribly significant. But as we try to spend the long hours as fruitfully as possible, this is nevertheless something notable, at least on a personal level. What’s that? Well, there is this flight simulation arcade game in the spec mess, I cleared the Intermediate Level.

Hey, it’s not one of those simple shoot’em up game. This arcade tries to simulate the flight mechanics of a real fighter plane. The plane doesn’t always point where you want it to point. It doesn’t always fly where you want it to fly. A straight-forward task like docking with the fuel hose from a refueling tanker plane can be quite a challenge too.

So with the Intermediate Level cleared, perhaps the next ICT I can start on the Advanced Level. (Actually I already got started, but couldn’t finish it before I had something else to attend to…)

This ICT has come and gone quite quickly, partly because it was interrupted by the arrival of Baby #2. We were slightly concerned about the possibility of H1N1 developments drastically affecting the duties and schedules. But fortunately, the ICT has passed without any change in H1N1 operating status.

We got a bunch of RSAF badges. Yet more freebies again. It’s party of their 40th anniversary celebrations. The 40th anniversary is something last year, actually, so I imagine they still had a great many bunch of freebies which they’ve not yet managed to get rid of.

Related posts:

1. Three Weeks of ICT I just completed three weeks of ICT. I used...
2. First Day of ICT I am back in camp doing my ICT. After...
3. RSAF 40th Anniversary It’s the RSAF’s 40th anniversary this year. The last...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Baby #2 came home today. He was discharged from hospital on schedule according to the “standard maternity package”. Yeah, it sounds like we’re booking a holiday tour. Actually he was showing a little signs of jaundice, but the levels fell below the threshold on discharge day, so the paed allowed him to go home.

On the ride home, he pooped so loudly that everyone in the car knew. Okay, good, his body functions are working (but we already know that anyway).

Later in the night, however, we became a little concerned that he seemed to feel slightly hot, and that he hadn’t passed any urine ever since he came home. I thought he was a little lethargic too. A quick temperature check showed that he was running a very mild fever of 37.3°C.

It’s such a low temperature that normally you’d not worry about. But this is a 3 day old baby. So we were a little anxious.

Then I noticed that as we tried to feed him extra milk with a syringe, the milk that he didn’t take and spilled out actually pooled on his shirt. The cloth didn’t absorb the liquid. The liquid simply stayed on the cloth. Hmm, it seemed like this cloth was a little waterproof. Then it must be rather hot. So, we quickly changed him into something cooler, and made sure he wasn’t wrapped up too well.

Within about half an hour, his temperature dropped back to like 37.0°C. I noted that he had saliva, which is a good sign that he is not too dehydrated. Then, finally, we noted that he peed.

So, we decided that there wasn’t too much to worry about and we wouldn’t have to call the paed’s emergency number for advice.

Sigh. This hospital dresses their babies in more comfortable clothing when they are in there, but upon discharge, they redress their babies in some other clothing that doesn’t seem to work very well suitable.

Related posts:

1. Hello Baby #2 We still haven’t thought of a name, so he’s...
2. The 6-in-1 Jab Vanessa had her 6-in-1 jab today. She protested with...
3. Today is going home day Haven’t had much time to blog about baby Vanessa....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We still haven’t thought of a name, so he’s still Baby #2 now. I hope he doesn’t mind. He should be happy that his name is so important that we’re taking so long to decide.

Baby #2 is strong. At day 1, he was already trying to lift his head. He loves to crane his neck and turn to look around. Babies this age aren’t supposed to be seeing much yet, so I’m surprised that he’s turning he head around so much as if he is really trying to explore his surroundings.

Speaking of exploring, he actually opened both his eyes quite early. Right in the labour ward, even before he was weighed. That’s like only barely 10 minutes after birth, both eyes opened.

His arms can put up quite a strong resistance too when I try to reposition them. Of course it is not like I have to struggle with him, but he puts up enough resistance that I have to firmly grasp his arms and pull/push them to where I want them to be.

Maybe it is a boy thing… they come out stronger…

Oh I’m trying to get used to the fact that he’s a boy, because after having Vanessa, everything about babies are “she”, “her”, “hers”, etc. So several times I referred to Baby #2 as “she”. I wonder if the nurses are getting confused when I talk to them and refer to Baby #2 as “she”.

This boy doesn’t like cold. He needs to be totally wrapped and bundled up. and the room’s air-con needs to be turned off. (Good thing, when we get home we can save on electricity for the air-con.)

We’ll be seeing less of Baby #2 today because he has an all-day suntanning appointment.

Related posts:

1. Baby’s Second Month [photopress:200706031984_1.jpg,thumb,pp_image] Baby Vanessa is two months old today. We...
2. Baby #2 Comes Home Baby #2 came home today. He was discharged from...
3. Baby Vanessa Updates [photopress:20070929451.jpg,thumb,pp_image]Baby Vanessa is now coming to 6 months old....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This is the Western breakfast served to us at our $430-a-night room. (Actually it is another $60 for companion stay.) Yes I know this is not your typical hotel, no need to expect first -class food service. But I didn’t remember the food to be so uninteresting the last time. My first impression this time was that even airline food looks and tastes better.

Or perhaps I’m not hungry enough this time so I’m being a little fussy with the food. Even the beef hor fun from the coffee shop across the road that I used to enjoy seemed to have dipped in standard. It was too sweet.

The funny thing is that I enjoyed the Snickers bar. I think it tasted better than the beef hor fun. Or the hot toasted vending machine sandwich (which I thought wasn’t too bad when I tried at another place previously). Ah, perhaps I haven’t had Snickers for a long time.

This $430-a-night place has a little problem with the beverages they serve. The horlicks and milos that come in a little pot isn’t properly stirred. So the powder settle down into sticky clumps. Once the beverage cools down, it gets pretty difficult to get them to dissolve. It happened several times, so it looks like a general beverage preparation problem.

Related posts:

1. $1 For A Night I originally put in a bid for $10 a...
2. This is Papa and That is Mama To my cute little Vanessa, the Nescafe is Papa,...
3. Vanessa Is Angry With Me Yeah, she was angry with me last night. It’s...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.