Silver Case

When Matt was here, we went to a large commercial tool store to buy a dremel tool and some drill bits.  While I was there I noticed, buried under piles of other junk, the same 13-drawer Snap-On tool cabinet I’ve seen sitting there for at least three years.

Three years ago I bought a large mechanic’s toolchest from them.  I bought a different brand, one that cost $800, and not $6000 as the Snap-On was tagged. (The ‘off brand’ one, Alltools, is quite satisfactory and hasn’t corroded at all in the horrible conditions here)

So in the store I said to the salesguy, “how much do you want me to pay you to get that thing out of your shop finally?”

He took the bait and called his boss for some phone deliberation.

“$2800,” he said.

“I’ll pay you $2500, but you have to deliver it,” I replied.

“OK,” and he sealed the deal.

I’ve got to think I got a pretty good deal on this. 2500SGD is about $1600USD.  I can’t find the exact model I have (I haven’t found a serial number) and it’s sitting outside, wrapped in plastic (it’s too heavy for the movers to carry into our house. haha).

Anyway, at our new house it will have a nice workshop to live in, alongside my nice Alltools chest.

[The] story of Tarkus. Tarkus is erupted from a volcano, half armadillo and half tank - a machine of destruction. He goes about killing all other machines of destruction until a manticore convinces him that he, too (Tarkus), is a machine of destruction, whereupon he walks into the water and kills himself.

I have a big poster-sized post-it hanging on my wall labeled, “Massive, hangingm, nagging annoyances.”  It’s a list of two dozen things I need to do that I’ve put more or less way too long.  I tried to work through some of them recently.  Three of them involved a trip to the US Embassy, which I despise.

Going to that place is like entering a prison. All electronics are confiscated, doors each weigh 700lbs, electric locks everywhere.  But I needed to: a) pick up Luke’s passport [it’s been waiting there for nearly a year]  b) make sure Ling’s visa was all set for a visit to USA in August [it is]  c) get a notary to stamp a letter I need to liquidate some small mutual fund I have in the US from days of yore.

Item C was particularly galling because this “citizen service” cost me $30USD.  And it’s basically totally pointless.  I’m not committing fraud.

So I decided the way forward on rubbish like this is to buy myself a notary stamp.  There are dozens of notary stamps (mostly antique) on ebay.  I’ll keep looking for one that looks passable, buy it, and then that will be sufficient. For heaven’s sakes, for $30USD I can buy a whole host of stamps. I’m not using them for anything fraudulent, and it’s giving the recipient the plausible deniability they desire.

Anyway, the good news out of any of this is that we can move forward and book some tickets to the USA in August.

While Matt was here we bought some bits of obsolete electronic junk and put together some strange semi-abstract artistic machinery, including a nightlight based on an old amplifier tube switched by a noisy relay and an old low-magnification micro-viewer to display slowly-moving, microscopic photographs.

At the same time I discovered a copy of Survival City by Tom Vanderbilt, “Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America.” That’s when it struck me that I want the office at my new home to be built in that style. I call it “Atomic American.” The best single word to describe it would be “Bakelite.”

In researching more, I came to learn that the style of design and architecture popular during that era is called ‘Eames’. Boomerang-shaped coffee tables, desk lamps that look like Sputnik. Even the clock Nanny used to have in the living room, that looked sort of like a stylized sun, would probably be considered Eames-era.

Anyway, off to Ebay I’ve gone, to get busy WINNING things! Today I snagged first of many treasures.

This Electrohome logo fits the Atomic American bill nicely, even though it was a Canadian company know for, “its reputation for its large heavy floor models boxed in hardwood cases.”

The next item I bought was an electro-mechanical emergency beacon switch. Apparently it is a wind up mechanism that fires some circuits as it slowly unwinds itself. Sounds like a neat contraption. Good raw material for something.

Currently, I am the leading (only) bid for a Blasting Galvanometer. This galvanometer is used to test the soundness of high explosive blasting circuits before they’re ignited.

What else am I working on? Haggling with people over a gravy boat. Looking for interesting journals from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Preferably from engineers or scientists or something. So far no luck.

I did spot this amazing Danish-made Eames-era folding secretary. I’d love to get a high quality piece like this to keep all my administrative shit in. Luckily, I have a Danish friend who is an auction addict, so I am hoping I can get something from Denmark, rather than a detour through expensive USA Ebay.
One thing about Ebay is that these little bits of junk aren’t cheap. These are the kinds of things you’d buy for 50c at a yard sale, not $7.00. Of course, I don’t have the luxury of going to yard sales, so it’s not a true alternative.

Luke hanging out on a Military Police chase bike

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Quite a weekend with the little boy. With no maid or mother-in-laws, Ling and I were forced to give him his seven-to-seven entertainment. His attention span is, max, ten minutes. That means a lot of activities..

When Matt was here we dragged a lot of tools upstairs. When Matt left, I didn’t put them away. They’re spilled all over my desks, stuffed in boxes, etc. Luke started getting into them lately.

The first game we played was when he found Pa’s old craftsman hand-drill. I loaded it with a 1/4″ bit and we went to my giant iMac shipping box and Luke, gleefully, drilled holes into the side of the box. When he tired of that, I told him to go into my study and get the tiny portable shop vac. Somehow he managed to drag it back to the living room and literally vacuumed up all the drilling debris. It was pretty damn funny.

This morning before I left for work I spotted him in my room, playing with the box of soldering gear. Ouch. I intercepted him to see what he was doing. He pulled out (again) Pa’s old orange-bulbed solder sucker. He was trying to figure it out, so I squeezed the bulb once. He immediately grabbed it from my hand, jammed it up his nose, and sucked solder. I took it back and showed him to suck solder, not snot, but it was too late. He had done a good job. When I squeezed the bulb a big blob of snot (he has a cold) shot out.

He’s going to go bonkers in the basement of 4777 this summer.

At 11am on a Saturday morning in Singapore, the only people you’ll see outside are store clerks and parents chafing under the tyranny of their toddler. That’s how we found ourselves in the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental Saturday morning, while Luke napped and we tried to escape the heat.

It was too early in the morning for a cocktail and I’d already had my coffee. The menu had a bunch of teas, but I don’t really enjoy tea. That’s when I saw something spelled Roibosh. The description was incomplete, but I ordered it anyway.

What they served me looked like a very red, very deeply brewed black tea. But wow, it was much nicer than tea. It didn’t have any bitterness and was extraordinarily smooth. It seemed to improve as it steeped. The ‘leaves’ looked like little bits of stick, staw, or grass.

Wikipedia explains that it’s a flower/bush from Africa. I don’t even think it has any caffeine, which will make it an ideal evening drink. I find that regular black tea keeps me awake far worse than coffee. The funny thing is that I’ve never heard of this stuff before, even fleetingly. The trick will be to find a supplier of it in Singapore.

UPDATE

Coincidentally, the night I wrote this post, Ling’s mom returned from a long trip to Melbourne.  What had she brought back but two boxes of Rooibos Tea for her Japanese friend Reiko.  I confiscated one of the boxes and am enjoying i right now. (although it doesn’t seem as strong or as fragrant as the mug I had at the Intercontinental. I think my steeping water wasn’t hot enough tonight.)

I haven’t been online much recently. 31die paid a two+ week visit which was enormously fun. Sadly, as soon as he left, work became extremely busy, so I’ve barely been around. I drove to work Monday morning but didn’t pick my car up until Wednesday night because I kept having business dinners where I would be drinking. Was glad to be home tonight by seven thirty.

In the meantime what’s happened? We fired the first maid and hired a second. Although the first maid didn’t work out well (she was absent-minded, unclean, and shirking) maid[2] was so bad that Ling fired her after the first day. She literally knew nothing. Couldn’t even cook rice herself. This is Asia and she is Burmese after all. She had to ask our part-time housecleaner to make lunch for her. Ling was getting seriously stressed at the prospect of micro-training this hapless woman. I drew the line and said to get rid of her. In two weeks we have another Burmese maid coming (am I violating US Trade Sanctions by employing Myanmar citizens?) who has a record of two successfully complete two-year contracts. We won’t take any more transfer cases regardless of the stated reason they seek transfer. We are more optimistic about maid[3].

In addition to finding a new maid, I found a new computer after my GrayMan started to die (apparently). I bought a 24″ iMac. I’ve not used it enough to have much opinion on it aside from it feels very polished and very solid. My two complaints so far?

• The screen is too bright. I have the screen brightness at a minimum yet it still fatigues my eyes. Just too many photons. Anyway to lower this? [Update: DarkAdapted… seventy-five percent is nice]
• The “mighty mouse” seems to have very poor, jumpy motion at low small speeds. I can’t find a setting where it moves fast enough covering territory but also gives enough resolution on the small point stuff.

Not much else I guess. Bit tired. Babble more later.
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See more at World of Wonder.

but I couldn’t resist this tutorial plus my friend’s perfectly-suitable head.

Tuesday is May Day holiday in Singapore. Our first item of the day was to check out a house that a family friend knew about. We liked the layout and decided it had potential. We bought it an hour later. haha

The Background
I’m quite satisfied that we got a good price. At worst I paid market value for it, but I think I paid closer to bid-side. It helped that the seller was being very lazy about marketing it, especially by not using an agent. Ling’s friend basically went as the go-between aunty for us and got them to improve their offer. We would have lifted the starting offer anyway. So the $20,000 price cut she got for us is free-money. In six months I can look back at all the 2007 sales telemetry and see how I did versus the rest of the market.
It’s a 20yo freehold (as opposed to a 99-year leasehold) 2-storey semi-detached house. (Semi-detached is Singapore nomenclature for a house that shares one wall with another house. I guess USA would call it a duplex, but it doesn’t hold the same gross, low-end implications ‘duplex’ does. I’m not living in Plum Boro) The land plot is 4,900 square feet. Built-in area (living space) is around 3,500ish sq ft. Four bedrooms and quite a huge living area downstairs.

The house is very sound. The estate was constructed by a builder who ultimately went bankrupt because they built their properties too well, while successful developers, like the infamous Far East, flourish by building flash-looking rubbish. I know it’s rubbish because I’ve lived in two Far East units myself.
The outside architecture is, well frankly, weird. All the houses have some strange structural pier/shoulder to them. I think it makes them look like a sleeping At-At, but inside the rooms are very large and have very high ceilings. And I can’t feel embarassed, because the neighbors’ houses look the same way.
One of my favorite things about the house is its location on the immediate border of the Nee Soon Swamp Forest (what anyone else would call a military training jungle). That means lots of terrific hikes and play with the boy and the dogs. It’s also close enough to smell the marvelous morning smell-of-the-jungle. There is an open field nearby with a lot of birdwatchers.

The Plan

The plan is to renovate the place, but the layout and construction is already good, so it means no massive teardowns or anything.

The heaviest thing I’ll do is build a very big, very high-end kitchen. I’ve mentally budgeted a lot of money to the kitchen. Most of the other stuff is comparatively simple.
Brainstorming the one will be plenty of fun. I’m waiting for RogerWarez to start del.icio.us’g me links for all sorts of over-the-top high-tech kitchen appliances, phase-plasma ovens, mitochondrial-fermentation vessels, and hologramatic sharpeners for fractal-knives, etc. My intention is to find out who the top-of-class kitchen interior guys are in Singapore and set them loose.

The other rooms are basically ok. Ling is in charge of getting the master bedroom arranged to her specs. She wants a large walk-in closet, etc. Boring girl-stuff anyway.

My only suggestion for the master bedroom concerned the entrance. The master’s room is slightly higher than the landing and the other two bedrooms. To get to it, the hallway is a short bridge that crosses an airwell. My suggestion was to convert the fixed bridgelet into a draw bridge. Sort of a “when the bridge is a raisin’ don’t come a knockin’” I got an Elmore Leonard stare for that one.

We’re going to get it set up for an outdoor eating area. As well as change the disgusting front door/window regime. Replace it with french doors is my guess, but that’s crap for the architect to suggest.

Other more amusing stuff? Finally ought to be able to install a permanent, solid, high ham radio antenna. Would like to have a sound system in the house that can query my central server full of mp3s and play them locally in rooms. Would like to have a proper herb/vegetable gardenlet. We’ve always talked about having a real safe, not a 30-minute fire-toy. Need somewhere to keep our money belts and small arms.
I met the owners tonight, when I paid them 1% for an option to buy the house. He told me they had considered to make the attic into play area for their five kids. However when he went up there, the roof was full of solid steel trusses, so he didn’t want to mess with it. Not sure if I will bother to try to turn it into some sort of storage area.

Not sure when this all gets resolved. Frequently the escrow process takes three months. Hopefulyl it will be faster. I will talk to a lawyer tomorrow for my side of things, but the basic process is I pay 1% now for an option to buy the place, which requires me to pay another 9% in 14 days and then I’ll pay the balance at some point after that. I suppose after the title searches, etc are done. Not sure what the delay would be for three months. The people don’t live there anyway.

Oh well, at least there will be a new subject to blog about. It’s either that or discuss our soon-to-be-terminated maid. We’re quite sick of her sloth and indifference. Ling found a Burmese maid from Myanamar who’ll start in two weeks. Apparently she speaks mandarin (father is Chinese). I don’t know if that means she’s a Burmese from the Golden Triangle or what, but it will be good for the boy to have someone speak to him solely in Mandarin, although I guess it might give him an odd accent.

(The reason we’re waiting two weeks to dump the current maid is that Matt is coming on Friday. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll be playing the role of our household Alec Baldwin, “in from downtown… sent by Mitch and Murray… on a mission-of-mercy.” Except first prize is “you’re fired” too. )