22 October 2011

Saturday Musings

It's a Saturday again here in this tiny tiny island. That means the week has just flown by and gone in a blink of an eye. I always tell friends and family one thing when asked about how I find life here in Singapore: fast.

Being Filipino, I'm used to lazy afternoons during weekends and mellow evenings from Monday to Friday with short treks from the work place to the nearest Starbs or CBTL joint and chat with office friends about work or life in general over a cup of coffee.

I miss the cappuccino at Alexandre, an authentic French café in Bonifacio Global City; they have these cool freebies every now and then for their VIP members and being a member only takes giving them the right to spam your email inbox with coupons.

That picture seems a remote reality here in Singapore though. Everywhere you look are people in hurry to get somewhere, on time. We do have Starbucks at Clementi Mall which is but a short 3 to 5 minute walk (depending on my mood that sets my pace ;D). However, it's always brimming with people and the interaction with the baristas isn't quite like the same in Manila. I still haven't totally erased my slight aversion to that questioning phrase: "Wha' you wan' ah?" and the look and the body language that go along with it compelling my psyche to hurry up. Who wouldn't feel a bit harassed?

So today, as with all Saturdays, I tried to sleep in upto lunch time if possible. Yes, it may be construed as rebelling against the precipitous flux of SG life and I'd rather be called stubbornly unadaptable than embrace this cult of time pounders.

But guess what? The HDB management decided that work on the "lift improvement" project should also include Saturdays and I'd gather that's to be more time efficient and get the job done faster.

Why is it just always about getting something over with right away when after all that hype, there's only something else to get over with again? Where is that rainbow after that storm (of pounding and pounding)?

Perhaps that is an alien concept here.

And thus, dismayed with not getting my 14 hours of sleep as planned, I resorted to a reconciliation with my cabinet drawers. Sorting out the mess that has acquired in there for some time revealed that 2 GB Kingston stick that I pried out my MacBook Mini because it was dead and caused it not to boot up.
Without anything else to do and unable to go back to sleep because of that jarring noise of jack hammers and drills that shook our whole HDB, I decided to push my luck.

I put the 2GB stick back in. The first try, it wouldn't boot. But I tried again and voilà!
Hello again there, 3 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 :D

Maybe that memory stick has acclimated to dry hot weather. Will I follow suite?

Should I try updating to 10.6.7 next? I don't reckon 10.6.8 was ever sorted out clean for the HP Mini 311 anyways...

15 October 2011

Smartphone Updates - Arrggh and Aaah

When I got my LG Optimus One early this year, I was but a marginalized member of society who couldn't afford an iPhone. And so, with little persuasion from my officemates back in my previous company in Manila and the stupid notion of getting the same phone that Gil Ra-Im in the K-drama Secret Garden would infuse some of the beauty of Ha Ji-Won in me, I became an Android fan.

Of course, I still secretly pined away for a white iPhone - a dream that was realized in this microscopic island of Singapore.

Fast forward to just last Wednesday, I updated Hae-Rim (yep, I named my 32 GB white iPhone 4 courtesy of Singtel and its name is 해림 in the Korean alphabet). The whole iOS 5 update was as worry free as could be.

I set my iPhone in French as you know and Droidy (my Android phone is a little boy while the iPhone is a little girl, together they make up my brood of gadget babies) is no exception.

Wanting to be loving mother, unbiased therefore, to both children, I decided to also update Droidy. Gingerbread was just rolled out (finally - I was waiting for it since March) by LG and I was all about making sure that both my kids got equal chance with all the updates they could possibly get their hands on.

But alas, I guess it's just not meant to be for while Hae-Rim is now rocking iMessage (loving that blue message bubble by the way - a vast improvement over the ghastly green one) as if nothing happened and she had always had iOS 5 in her little ethereal white system, Droidy sadly did not make it through the update via LG Mobile Tools Update which I did on my Windows 7 HP EliteBook 8460p laptop issued by my current company.

I'm suspecting it's because Droidy was still set to French when I ran the update that things got screwed up.

Was it my fault? Was I such a useless parent - why did I choose to make them speak French instead of just plain English? Why?

And it breaks my heart to look at My little boy with its screen stuck at that LG logo for hours on end until it just runs out of battery....