Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Glad this wasn't an airplane

I bought a Volvo XC90 for Ah-Ling a few months ago.

Last weekend I picked up a colleague and a few folding kayaks to go do some kayak training off Sentosa Island. Backing out of a long driveway I managed to knock a tail light off on a tree.

I tried to convince Ling that her sister, Tien-Lee, had actually broken the light, but Ling didn't buy it.

Fast forward a week, and Ling got the light replaced. It was less than $250, which, frankly, sounded cheap to me. I was figuring they'd nail me.

Now tonight we met her family for dinner. They followed us home in a separate car. They called Ling, "every time you brake a bright white light shines from your car."

When we got home I did a quick check and realized that the "mechanic" at Volvo crossed the connection between the reverse light and brake light. Now when you reverse, a brake light and a reverse light come on. When you reverse, the other brake light and a reverse light comes on!

That's pretty embarassing for Volvo, I mean really.....

In case you wondered...

...still waiting.

APC Back-UPS 500 Dead

For a while now I have had no confidence in my APC Back-UPS 500 being able to sustain my PC if I lost power. I bought it in 1999 and haven't replaced the battery. I kept using it anyway as a line conditioner. Singapore doesn't get brownouts or black-outs, so it's not a big concern.

Recently I've been coming home from work and find that the computer is off. I started getting suspicious of the UPS because when I'd kill wall current to it, it would make enormously weak noises as it died almost instantly. Before I have a problem I decided to replace the unit.

I just bought the biggest UPS I could find at the local PC store. IT was an APC Back-UPS CS 650. It comes with 'powerchute' software which talked to the UPS via a USB port and seems to keep some statistics and telemetry. It also is smart enough to shutdown Windows if power isn't restored quickly enough.

So now I am left with this dead UPS 500. I took the battery out (it was enormously hot). I guess that is another good sign it's dead. What I'm wondering is is how feasible it would be to replace the battery with something non-official and then use the UPS for things like portable operation of lightweight electronics somewhere?

The photo I took of the battery is appalling but it reads:
"BB Battery BP7-12(12v, 76ah/20hr) Sealed maintenance-free rechargeable battery"

Mona the Huntress

This evening Ling noticed Mona was highly-strung. She was continually sniffing and monitoring the cabinet that holds our oven. (The oven is outside, under a roof because there is no room in the kitchen; ovens are not as common in Singapore). Ling had seen her like this once before, when a rat scrambled through our yard. Ling asked me to see if there was rat hiding anywhere.

Oh you know the answer already...

I looked under the cabinet and could see the silhouette of fur and a tiny ear hiding among some planter pots. I figured the best way to ambush the rat was to start crushing in the pots, sort of the like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. I'd either kill or wound it, and at least flush it out so that Mona could finish it off.

I pushed in all the pots and after a moment the rat scrambled free. It was semi-dazed already. I encouraged Mona to finish him. She gave a bite, but the rat hissed, and Mona dropped him. The rat tried to get through a fence but failed, and turned back towards me. Mona had turned tail by then, so I finished the rat off my smashing it with a wicker basket lid and breaking its neck with a laundry pole.

I'm not sure when it was first wounded. Did Mona originally bite it and then it hid under the cabinet? Did I wound it by crushing it with the wall of pots? Did Mona do worse damage than I thought when I flushed the rat?

Anyway, it was amusing to see Mona's prey drive in action, although it's quite clear she's not experienced many kills. She was totalyl hyper for quite a while afterward.

Ling made me throw the rat away immediately, rather than letting the dogs learn to maul it.

Funny, fond memories from Kyrgyzstan

Thank God for logs. I was just browsing my notebook from the 1998 climbing trip to Kyrgyzstan. There are so many gems in here. For instance:

July 1, 1998 9pm. Slept deeply overnight. Got up this morning, slow to move. Had nasty cream-of-wheat gruel. We mixed in butter and those revolting sugar-coated shit nuts.. Mended my bloody blister and set off.

July 5th, 8:15am. Mush for breakfast, with bits of bread crumbs and new butter and sugar, from which i pulled a large, articulated insect. Beverages are almost gone. I had enough nescafe to turn my water brown then added sugar.

July 5th, night. After a nice large lunch (ploo, yogurt, walnuts, tea, cheese, slices of fat) we prepared to jumar up to the next pitch for Brian to lead.

7/9/98. Osh. Minister of Tourism is a dinner guest tonight. He looks like an alcoholic sunburnt Albert Einstein."


Posted by Nils Blutig at 12:37 AM | TrackBack

I knew Andijan sounded familiar...

Seven years ago Brian and I travelled through the Uzbek town of Anjiyan (Andijan), and the rest of the Fergana Valley on our way back from the granite valley of Karavshin to the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.

We were totally naive.

It turns out the Fergana Valley is a hotbed of Islamic lunatics. Just this week Uzbekistan's military massacred an (apparently) huge number of protesters (peaceful or not) in Andijan. In 1999 Islamic terrorists kidnapped climbers who went to the same valley as we did.

We never had a clue the place was breeding these problems.

One of my biggest regrets of the trip was not asking more questions of the people and our driver and "interpreter." It's understandable to a degree though, as noted in an excerpt from my 6/28/1998 "Cassette (ak-su) already stuck in car. Nickolai [the driver we nicknamed 'The Bear'] seems to hate Stone Temple Pilots. Erkil(Erquil) [translator] doesn't talk much, doesn't always answer questions, and often answers instead of forwarding our questions [to the person we were trying to ask]."

Vanity

I just finished up the process of converting my systematic callsign KB3MBZ to my grandfather's callsign W3LMB. Today I looked through google for W3LMB to see what it turned up. One of the sites was N4MC's Vanity HQ. Good grief! There is an enormous amount of work being put into snagging vanity callsigns. W3LMB is nice for personal reasons, but it seems like the vanity calls everyone really scrambles to get are the short 1x2 signs (like N4MC).

There were a couple interesting articles on 'choosing a callsign.' These were guidelines that improve the call's readability or cw 'weight' for instance. (I'd give you links to them, but the stupid site does something funny with referers and will only allow you to link to the front page. The links are on that page middle, right) People are generally interested in this for DX contesting when there will be many callers competing for a contact.

My Singapore callsign (not released yet) is of the format 9V1-- where the -- are two letters. To choose what I wanted, I made an excel spreadsheet of two dimensions phonetic A-Z along the X and Y. Then I made the spreadsheet concatenate them into callsigns in each cell. IE: "Nine Victor One Alpha Alpha...Nine Victor One Zulu Zulu."

I through out whole columns and rows that I dislike for whatever reason, I think they're hard to hear/say (quebec), they sound gay (golf), etc. Then I was left with some I could live with:

Galea

Today I paddled from Yisshun northwest to Sembawang. Underway southeast heading was the LNG Tanker Galea.

Yet another illustration of how Google has changed life so tangibly... In ten minutes I learn the following:

Helderline Shell Tanker 'Galea'

Name Galea
Ex. name(s)
Imo number 9236614
Year of construction 2002
Discarded in n/a
Status Sailing for Shell
Class LNG Mitsubishi
Tonnage 111.459
Yard Mitsubishi Heavy Ind.
Construction number 2172
Cargo L.N.G.
Flag Singapore
Callsign 9VGC3
Owner Shell International Trading and Shipping Company Ltd.
# Relations Abadi
# Gallina
# Gemmata
# Granatina
Extra information
Last edit Wednesday 16th March 2005 at 13:30:29

At some point in the past it also seems that the Galea automatically logged a lot of weather telemetry to a web based system. I can't get any current data out of it now, but it's a neat idea.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Personally I preferred the limited 1993 staging.

Serendi.pito.us

Roger ressurects.

Granted!

I am now W3LMB! Couldn't be more pleased...

Wilbur W Blutig & Michael D Blutig, Corsica, Pennsylvania, 3/29/2000

Vanilla Pod: Good restaurant with the gay name

If Ling had said, "would you like to have Sunday lunch in an orchid garden at a restaurant called 'The Vanilla Pod'?" I would have flatly told her no. But when she said, "would you like to try a new French place on Mandai Road (much closer to my house than any other decent restaurant)," I said, "OK."

It didn't turn out to be a French restaurant - the food was Italian, but I give it very high marks. Against all odds the staff service was excellent, fast and professional. I ordered a 'spaghetti carbonara' (something I almost never eat). Served with a raw egg in the center, it was excellent. It had enormously nice cream sauce.

The restaurant itself is a small glass building in the middle of an orchid 'farm'. It could have been an awful hotbox, but it was heavily air conditioned, and even eating there at deadly-hot 1pm was totally pleasant. Thus I imagine eating there in the cool evening would be even nicer.

The prices were no bargain, charging as much as you'd spend at any of the nicer Italian restaurants in town, but the quality and service was as nice as any of those restaurants, so I can't complain.

Their calling card claims they serve breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, so we'll probably try that out next. Otherwise they serve Lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday.

Vanilla Pod Restaurant and Bar
200 Mandai Lake Road
Singapore 729827
Tel: 6368-0672