Eshin Direct

I, like most other people, upgraded to Firefox 3. It’s the first time that I’m unhappy with Firefox since I started using the browser a little over 4 years ago. This version crashes on me regularly on a Macbook, PowerBook and Windows XP. Spinning ball of death (for mac), kaboom-kaput do you want to report this? dialogue sessions which should be browsing sessions. Seems to go screwy on some css… notably it crashes most often doing searches on Google and YouTube.

I have patience for the browser which liberated me from IE (which I hate) but it’s wearing thin. Is Mozilla going the way of Apple and getting to big for its own good? I’ve had more crashes in the last two weeks than I have had in four years of using the software.

Okay, to be fair, I should probably do a clean install and reintroduce each add-on incrementally and see which one isn’t playing nice. But to be honest, that’s something that I expect Microsoft to expect me to do.

Knowing my luck, this will have crashed when I press publish.

Rode up to Dempsey Hill to meet a friend last night. When I left work it had just rained, and me without my wet weather gear, chanced the fact that I either wouldn’t be going in the same direction or the storm had passed. In any case, when there is nothing you can do about the situation, I tend to become very fatalistically zen about it and a calmness does wash over me.

Which is probably why, when I rode up to Dempsey Hill, the beauty of the place took me unawares. Of course, I had been there before but the mix was right to evoke powerful emotions of paradise and imaginations of what it must have been like when first Singapore was settled. The smell from the trees, just watered with rain water, gave off their natural scented freshness. Dusk was settling in, giving the jungle both the day’s end familiarity and the thrill of evening’s dangers. Chased away by ponderous, esoteric clouds, the suns own brilliance subdued into a smoldering spectrum of reds, oranges and yellows.

Even the human activity added to the mix - the idyllic kindergartens emptied of their privileged students, jovial restaurant staff anticipating the evening’s patrons, cars slowing down to absorb the beauty of the place, cars speeding down clear country roads. Just a beautiful.

I wish I carried my SLR with me. Instead, I had to make do with my mobile, which was on limited battery. I don’t really think the photo does any justice to that time and place.

Here you’ll find a short history on Dempsey Hill. For the food, I hadn’t been to Samy’s for a while and my Indian friend surprisingly had never tried the place so we headed over there. Still my favourite Indian restaurant (in spite of them serving me a mutton vindaloo that even now wants me to remember it). For drinks, House and its bar Camp make one of the best settings for drinks so we ended the night over there. If I had to be honest, the food there had been going downhill lately but according to the friendly PR manager Jacq, the menu has been revamped.

I guess I will have to go back to Dempsey Hill again. Next time I’ll bring my SLR.

Hmm… another attempt at a resurrection. This time spurred on by the fact that I was so outdated with my WordPress installation and also my Coppermine installation. I was dreading the tedious process of backing up, reinstalling as anyone who maintains a self-hosted blog knows. Thankfully, I found the WordPress Automatic Updater Plugin which makes updating WP surprisingly easy. No major problems except for the fact that the Coppermine plugin is broke which seems to be abandonware by stilglog. I’ll have to find a solution as having to go through all my posts to find where the plugin left its code.

What was less amusing was the upgrading of Coppermine for the photo gallery. Prior to version 1.5, there is no built-in spam protection. This is hopefully overcome by a small Captcha plugin, which I read is going to be standard for 1.5. Trust me, removing over 60,000 spam comments from the back-end was not fun.

Now to deal with FAQ script which has sent me over 10,000 emails in the last 6 months.

I don’t suppose that the reason why it took so long for George W. to reach the mid-east has anything to do with him getting lost along the way? Saudi nationals bomb the US mainland and he hits Afghanistan. He’s looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction and you’d think that all along he meant Iran rather than Iraq (btw, did we ever find those pesky WMD that we were supposed to go in and find?). Don’t get me wrong, but Iran might very well be hotbed of terror and apocalyptic potential he’s telling us now but you’d think he’d give us a little more credit and not expect us to fall for that trick again.

By the way, did anyone notice that when he went for a three way photo shoot with Olmert, Abbas and himself, Olmert actually refused Bush’s hand when all George W. wanted was to have a hand holding session between old friends? Was quite funny since you could almost forgive Furious George for naively trying to accomplish peace in the last year of his term. But hey, if you can’t make ‘em love each other, everyone loves a good war. Going for three wars in two terms Bush?

One almost feels sorry for George W. In just over year’s time, his toys are being taken away and he’s going to have to learn to be the naughty boy in the corner that no-one really wants to talk to.

Eshin Direct is back online.

I’m sure you all missed me. So what happened?

Well, a number of things simultaneously happened. Firstly, I quit my job in Hong Kong in June and moved down to Singapore in July. Secondly, my server died on me completely at the same time I quit, so having other priorities like feeding myself, I simply didn’t get around to fixing it. Thirdly, my only working computer, my Apple PowerBook, died two days before I was due to fly to Singapore.

So lost data all around.

I have been trying to retrieve as best as I can. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just me that was affected but a number of people had data on the server (and backed up on my laptop) so I have decided to move to managed web-hosting as opposed to running my own server.

If it is any consolation to those people, I’ve pretty much lost most of my own data that wasn’t web-based (e.g. photos, contact details, personal memorabilia etc.) and so my move to Singapore has very much been a “start from scratch scenario” in many ways.

I have rebuilt Eshin Direct from an old backup retrieved from my laptop. Recent posts (post February) were lost but thankfully Google did a great job of storing my posts in its cache. Recent comments unfortunately did not make the migration.

I have found a job and I am now in Singapore for the immediate future. Eshin Direct is up but the work continues on rebuilding the other sites that were hosted on my server. A time consuming task and one that I haven’t been able to undertake until recently, since I have had a number of things to deal with in the last few months that have taken much more priority.

I have missed blogging on Eshin Direct and I guess you don’t really appreciate something until you lose it. I was feeling a little lost about what to do about the whole blogging thing but I’ve realised that it is my outlet, my space and my own little piece of the web.

I missed the chance to blog about moving to Singapore and saying a proper goodbye to Hong Kong, and the friends I am leaving behind.

I missed the chance to blog about my sister passing away although it probably was best that I didn’t blog about that.

Anyway, Eshin is back on track again both personally and in the websphere. Eshin Direct will remain my outlet for expression although if you find me a little remiss in the details of my personal life, this is only to protect my own privacy and those that I care for around me.

That’s all for now. Keep posted.