First week-end in Mexico
The first week in Mexico has been tough on me.
Mostly not because of work, as it has gone smoothly, no major problems, just doing some hand over of procedures, attending some meetings and trying to get my emails (my mobility card is not working, but it's getting solved) and such things.
The hard part has been to get used to life in Mexico, with the jet lag hitting me. Why hard? Well, the city itself is very different of what I'm used in Singapore or back in Europe: very dirty, chaotic, polluted. Plus I don't really feel safe in the place. I mean, I'm sure it's not as unsafe as everyone pictures it, but I do not feel comfortable walking around alone (although at least I can speak Spanish!).
Also, one of the hardest things is that I'm really missing my life in Singapore. I mean, more than the life and place, it's the people there that I miss.
These trips that get you out of your comfort zone make you realize how important are some persons and things in your life, that you take for acquainted and therefore cannot see how precious they are to you.But even if it is indeed hard, it's something that will make the come back even sweeter.
Anyway, this weekend was quite calm. Saturday we went to the Santa Fe shopping mall, shopped around and finished by watching "Sex and the City 2" movie. Sunday we went to a Nascar race in the circuit of Mexico. I have to admit that the Nascar race was not as exiting as I expected: I mean, it's just powerful cars racing in a circular track. Nothing much except when an accident occurs. But it was still a good outing, spending time with my colleagues, and getting to know them more than the office environment (although I also got hard burned haha).
Oh, also: food here is quite different than what we are used in Singapore. I feel it's more fattening, and I'll need to be careful with what I eat in the future. I also tried some exotic local food: some worms with guacamole and tortillas. A bit crunchy but not bad!
Pictures of the Nascar race:
Next stop… Mexico
Hi there!
It’s been a while since my last blog entry, and it has been mostly due to some rushing time in both my professional and personal life 
As you may have notice from the widget on the right, I’m in Mexico right now. Yep, that’s right, it’s quite far away from my current residence, Singapore (actually its 16607.01km to be exact), with 13h time difference (when it’s 8am here in Mexico it’s 9pm back in Singapore, 3pm in Madrid/Paris).
I’ve been sent here for a business trip, doing some client support and meetings. I’ll be staying here for 2 months and a half, followed by some time off in USA.
The trip to here has been veeery long, but as I was travelling in business class (first time ever!), the trip was quite good actually: at least I had a very good seat (enough space for my long legs, and we could switch the inclination to a 180degrees, woot!), nice food, and the service was excellent (the stewards even knew my name).
It’s very weird: I left Singapore the 1st June at 940am and I arrived to Los Angeles at 11 something of the same day. Weird right? First think that surprised me about LA is the fact that I could hear Spanish nearly everywhere. Apparently it’s the influence of the Latinos over there, a lot of immigration. Spent most of my time in the Mexicana lounge, mostly sleeping and checking emails.
I cannot say the same thing for the flight from Los Angeles to Mexico with Mexicana than the one from SQ: crappy flight but I was so tired by then that I spent most of the time sleeping.
I reached Mexico around 1130pm, waited for ages for the luggage and once I finally went out, managed to meet the person that was picking me up. We reached the hotel quite late, maybe around 1am, where I meet Varun, one of my colleagues.
Since then the days have been quite similar, spending most of the day at the office, working, and then having all of us diner at some various restaurants. I’m still quite jetlagged, so having some trouble sleeping at the correct hours.
Here are some photos taken during the flight and also some photos of my hotel room (although I might change, as I don’t have a working desk in the current room, hence it’s a bit tedious and uncomfortable to work…
Stay tuned for the next blog entries!
My geek side has gained the upper hand
Normally I try to keep my "geek" side (meaning my love for new technologies etc) aside after work, but I've to recognize I've succumbed to it recently.
Firstly, I've changed my iPhone 3GS for a Google Nexus One. Many of coworkers and friends were very surprised I made the change. The main reasons of the changes are:
- I'm strongly against Apple's policy towards their products: they close everything (hardware and software).
- I hate the use of iTunes. It's simply a horribly designed software that we are forced to use to do whatever we want with the phone. It's only available for Mac and Windows (Linux.. hello?), and it's hyper buggy. After a formatting of your pc you will need to re-upload all the music and such, and sometimes it just does evil things (the latest one before selling the iPhone was to erase from my phone AND iTunes some of my apps, including paid ones. Of course, re-finding them and re-downloading them solved the issue, but come-on...
- As a Computer and Software Engineer, I find it horrible and impossible in my case to develop software for their phone. Firstly, you need a Mac (hard for those owning a PC...). Secondly you need to pay ~90US$ to be able to submit your application to them in order to make it through the AppStore. Lastly but most importantly, you need to get through their obscure and totalistic system to get your app approval. Basically it takes months for your app to get to the AppStore, if it makes the way there. They censor so many programs (last on the story of censorship... Apple removes Wi-Fi Finders from AppStore) that it's hard to make the effort to develop software for them.
- The iPhone has become a "popular mass gadget" and there are so many people that have one in Singapore it just feels wrong to own one!
All this made me look for another phone. Immediately I turned my head to Android based phones. As you may know, Android is an open source phone OS developed by Google. The number of phones embedding Android are increasing exponentially, to the point that Apple is scared and is filling patent lawsuits to some vendors. My selection was narrowed down to two models, the Droid, by Motorola, and The Nexus One, by Google. They are both great phones, but I decided to buy the Nexus one mostly because although the hardware is a bit less powerful, it gets rid of the keyboard and has a great skin. Plus you can engrave two lines in the back of the phone (mine is: "Work Hard. Play Harder").
The main benefits of the Android Phones, and of the Nexus One:
- Its open-source. The code is there, you can modify it and load your own version of the OS into your phone.
- You can create your own programs and make them available to anyone. For free.
- The programming language used is Java, the SDK is really well done, and you can develop in any OS. Yes, even in MAC OSX. You also don't need to learn a new language, Java is widely usen and has made it's proof.
- The Android Market is full of amazing applications and games. As there is no restriction over the submission of applications, competition among applications is important. This makes the authors of applications be creative and create good applications.
- The resolution of the phone is amazing compared to the iPhone.
- You can really customize the phone to big extents (iPhone users, do you have "live" wallpapers? oups sorry, you cannot even put wallpapers in your phone.
- The different layers of the architecture of Android is just amazing. It allows to work between applications in a seamless way.
- It weights less as the storage media is a micro-SD card. This also means you can copy files to your phone straight away through the card. How about the iPhone? oh, yeah, can't.
Anyway, this is turning to be a troll, I will not continue the debate. Just to say that I'm really happy with the phone and that i'll be developing some apps for fun whenever I've some time.
Oh, also to add up to the geek moment I had this weekend I added two widgets to the side bar:
- the first one will sync the blog with my twitter account and will show my latest tweet. For those who don't know twitter, it's a website where you can share short messages (up to 100 words). These messages can be public or private, so you can follow some persons (they need to approve it) or friends to keep in touch. I use it as a "status" message, it just shows what I've in mind at that point of time.
- the second one is a small map that shows my location with Google Latitude. I don't know though if I'll keep it, I'm just giving it a try. The location is updated automatically by my phone, so you will know where I'm at any time, even when I'm travelling
Nothing much, keep in touch ppl!
Visit of Singapore.. again :p
Last weekend my sister's boyfriend came to Singapore to visit me. As it was Chinese New Year, and both didn't have plans for the long 4 day weekends, we agreed to meet and spend CNY in hot Singapore.
The weekend was quite nice, although he might think I tried to make him drink too much
He arrived Friday 12 around 9-ish. The bus trip seemed to go quite well, as t was this kind of luxury-but-still-cheap buses that do the link between KL and Singapore several times a day. Besides the trouble to find each other (first I was waiting at one bus station, but the bus driver decided to go straight to the departure bus station due to some delay, then once at the other bus station it was over-crowded by people trying to get out of Singapore), we went to New Asia Bar (bar in the 74th floor of the Swisshotel building, breath taking night view of Singapore) and had several drinks. Seemed more happening than usual, even if it was full of expats. as we both had busy week, we went back home around 1am and took a cab back home.
Saturday was spent visiting the city (ChinaTown, BoatKey, Clarque Quay and the huge Margaritas in Cafe Iguana, Raffles, small boat trip up to the esplanade,) and the CNY night was spent out in the city. For the last part Izzy joined us (very good friend of mine, always interesting conversations and event when I meet her): bottle of wine in the Wine connection near Double O, then we went to Stereolab, as she had managed to put herself and 2 guests in the VIP list. Interesting night spent dancing on good vibes and some (too many?) jugs of Vodka something. Dennis (my sis's bf) left around 4am, Izzy and I stayed a bit longer and enjoyed some drinks at her place. Later, I went back home and had a good shower.
Once home (noon Sun), I accidentally woke up Dennis (sleeping in my room), so we decided to continue the visit and chillout in Sentosa, the artificial beach of Singapore. Not such good choice: once in VivoCity, where we have to take the monorail to reach the island, we found out that it was the opening day of the Casino over there, hence the 2-3h queue to get there. In order to avoid the queue, we decided to get a cab to there, even if it was 2 times more expensive than the monorail tickets (time is money anyway right?). Finally in the island, we settle down near Cafe del Mar, where Izzy joined us after a while. Before leaving we had some drinks in one of the beach bars over there, as we couldnt resist the good music.
After managing to get out of the island (yet another queue), we had some food in Food Republic, Vivocity, before leaving for the night safari.
Night Safari was ok, although not as exiting for me as the previous times (I've to reckon that after doing it several times it has lost a bit of the magic). Once finished, we took the bus back home and went to bed early, for the first time of the weekend.
Monday was spent walking around the city too: all the way from Somerset to the Botanic Garden (in order to see Orchard road). It was my first time to the botanic garden, and was surprised how nice it was; very calm, the plants are very beautiful and colorful, and the Orchid garden was amazing. Spotted a very promising restaurant where I will prob invite some girl at some point. The "Cool house" was very nice also, kind of amazing that they manage to create such a micro-climat inside the garden (must cost a fortune...).
After the botanic garden, we headed home to get a well deserved shower and prepare for the night outing: a friend of mine, Vani, invited us to her flat among other friends to have some drinks and watch a movie.
The night went well, even if the movie was quite weird. It was nice to meet her again after so long time (I meet her randomly in a friend's farewell party, but have been meeting her several times since then).
The day after we didn't do much, we went to Bugis, the fountain of wealth in Suntec city. We headed to the bus station later only to find out that his bus had been cancelled and he had to take the one 2h later. After some drinks (coffee and thé, no more alcohol for the weekend! ), he left Singapore. Hopefully with good memories!
I'm sorry, there will be no photos: I've either lost or forgotten my compact camera in my last Europe trip. Anyway, the camera was all broken and the photos were all blur, so I guess I'll buy one soon I'll update this post if I manage to get Dennis's pics somehow :p
The blog is back!
Hi everyone!
After 1 year and a half of inactivity, change of hosting service, I've put the blog back online.
As you can see, there is nothing much inside anymore: I've lost the backups of the site when I cancelled my previous hosting service.
This blog will allow to stay connected somehow with my friends and family, as I'm living quite far away from them, and the time difference makes phone calls difficult.
In order to be more motivated to write entries, I'll only write in English (English and French previously). I reckon I stopped blogging last time because it was very time and brain consuming to write the entries two times.
There is going to be a lot of changes in the blog style soon, as fast as I can find a suitable minimalistic theme and the logos I used to have in the previous blog.
I'll post another blog entry once all the changes are done!