Tiger snoozes on the fridge …showing off his ticked tabbiness - yup, there are whole bunch of them out there. Classic Xylo pose I want to ride my bicycle IYOR celebrations I was at the International year of the Reef celebrations on the eve of National Day and at the exhibition the next morning. I was certainly surprised by the number of people who came! I had another round of excitement as I changed my presentation the last minute, or rather in the last hour. Also held the first pro-tem meeting for Envirofest 2009. Wrote it all up on the Toddycats blog. National Day songs - bring the magic back My FOY kaki Wei Chong comments that while the recent National Day tunes are pleasant, he misses the simple words and tunes from the earlier years. They emanated sincerity - see his post with the embedded videos - link. Well yes, the newer songs go well with the videos but we watch and forget. The older ones got everyone singing. A snoozing Mr Bats Dolphin carcass on Labrador beach Another dolphin carcass turned up on Labrador beach. See details on Habitatnews. I received the call while at the wake so I asked Eslindah (NParks) is she’d have it buried for me to recover later for the Raffles Museum, and she did, nice! April’s article on Mr Harry Tan Biology graduate April Chong, now in The Straits Times, joined us at the wake yesterday to pen a remembrance for Mr Harry Tan. We’re hoping the news will reach more old boys now. The Straits Times is sporting a new look and subscription is free for two weeks now so the link is available to all: Link Sat 09 Aug 2008 - Reef Celebrations! Click to view details Saints at Mr Harry Tan’s wake Worried we could not make it down in the evening, Shahiran, Chien and myself went down to Mt Vernon in the afternoon to pay our last respects to our secondary school principal, Mr Harry Tan. It was good having my buddies with me when our secondary school teachers turned up - we jumped to our feet when they entered and did the drill - step forward, declare our names, year of graduation and the classes they had taught us. You see, while we know their full names, we do realise they’ve taught a couple of thousand boys since our time! They’re sweet to us and can get by just calling us Saints. They all still teach in the school which illustrated the wonderful continuity we had discussed being blessed with. Chien related a recent foray into the secondary school when he had fun fair ticket sales duty (his son is in the primary school. So he visited the earmarked secondary school classroom to do his bit. Now Chien’s a strapping lad and towered over her the teacher, who was quite surprised he knew her name. He then announced to the boys in the class grandly that he’d been taught by the very same teacher and they should count themselves lucky - the boys cheered at this admission but some invariably asked, “teacher you so old ah!” We also chatted with some boys from the ‘88 batch as well and left surprised at the extent of what we shared in common. It was no fanciful reflection it seemed, all of what we had talked about. RIP Mr Tan and you’re remembered well by the boys. Mr Harry Tan, fellow Saint, RIP Heavy heart this evening. My buddy Chien forwarded me Mr Yee Teck Peng’s SaintsDYK newsletter which announced that Mr Harry Tan, our principal and Additional Mathematics teacher from St. Andrew’s Secondary passed away this afternoon (Harry Tan Ho Swee, 1941 - 2008). A boy’s school is a tough setting to teach in with most of us boisterous. The school had many big-hearted teachers who also knew to wield the strong arm of discipline. The important backbone of that discipline was wielded by ol’ Harry. Even the scent of his distant approach would quieten a rowdy class! His sermons were as fiery as his speeches and I enjoyed them all. I also loved his exhortatory Founder’s Day reports. So much so I came back while in the army to listen to him speak and to soak in the ambience of the school’s quadrangle. The unappreciative boys would only simply groan in embarrassment at part of the talk - like his pet statement that e were the “best swimming school amongst schools without swimming pools!” The school achievements were highlighted in such occasions - and held up with great significance were things like service to the community. Events from the past like the help offered to Potong Pasir residents during the flood were still recalled, decades after it happened. Fiercely proud of our traditions, he also reflected a strong, independent spirit - probably why he always mentioned JBJ amongst the luminaries amongst our old boys! Imagine the impact such a strong figure had on a cohort of boys - his reminders of the the significance of the school, its spirit and history certainly got to us. It did great things for our esteem, producing a bunch of confident boys aware of the need of service to the community. And will last us a life time. One afternoon, I saw him holding fort at school entrance. In response to a query from a passing staff member, he said he was waiting to greet his Dunman High students. They were spending time in St. Andrew’s under the immersion programme, and were leaving early that day as it was Chinese New Year’s eve. The school had a wide diversity of academic ability and Harry and his teaching staff were yanking up ‘O’ level passes dramatically from the doldrums in the late 70’s and early 80’s - while each percentage point was a dramatic victory, somehow we never felt any unpleasantness but only to be as good as we possibly could. “My university classmates and I played snooker the night before our exams and still aced them,” he’d roar in an anecdote about preparedness. I recalled his boast years later but no, I still needed the nights before the exams! I consoled myself with the clam and dignified walk into the exam hall I at least managed! We were blesssed with many extraordinary teachers in St. Andrew’s and Harry did rank amongst them. We had little direct contact with our principal, the dreaded Harry Tan until Additional Mathematics in Secondary 4. We greeted that class with great trepidation of course, but when the session began, we realised that he was a very good maths teacher! I can see scenes of him poised at the head of the class, lit by the morning light streaming in through the large open windows of the old school building. He’d attack the problem vigorously, delighting in the short cuts that were exposed and finally striking the board with a triumphant air. He’d scribble QED with a flourish at the end and he’d announce “Quite Easily Done,” with a vengeance, often breaking the chalk in the process! Heady stuff for us boys. His strong-headededness got him into trouble, I believe, more than once. Long after we left, news trickled down that he had left too. So I was glad to see him in May 2003 at the cutting of the Stamford Fig. For the boys of my time at least, the memory of St. Andrew’s is well entwined with that of ol’Harry. RIP Mr Tan! See also (with updates): The St. Andrew’s Family facebook thread. “Farewell Again, Mr. Tan,” by Erwin Chan. The Dinner Table, 6th August 2008. “Goodbye Harry” in…Between Lost Memories, 6th August 2008. “Former St Andrew’s principal Harry Tan passes away (1941-2008).” The Singapore Sports Fan Says…, 8th August 2008. “Saints at Mr Harry Tan’s wake.” Otterman speaks…, 8th August 2008. “April’s article on Mr Harry Tan.” Otterman speaks…, 8th August 2008. 29 May 2003 - Mr Harry Tan (grey shirt) at the ceremony to makea cutting of one of the Stamford Figs to plant in the new school campus,as had been done after the shift to Woodsville in 1940.Canon Wong (white shirt, collar) is on his left. The Saints Alumni webpage posts: THOSE WHO PASSED BEFORE US I am sad to announce that our fellow SAINT, HARRY TAN HO SWEE former student and Principal of St. Andrew’s School, passed away peacefully today, Wednesday 6 August 2008 in the early afternoon. Our deepest sympathy to his family, Mrs TAN HOON HWEE and his 2 sons. The wake will be held at Mt Vernon Funeral Parlour 1. Services will held on Thursday & Friday at 8:00 pm Funeral Service on Saturday at 11:00 am. The Cremation at 1pm , Mandai Hall 1. I went down to his wake today (Thu 7th August 200 with Chien and Shahiran in the afternoon, talked to Mrs Tan and several of our secondary school teachers. David Attenborough’s 1973 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures “The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have been held in London annually since 1825.” [see Wikipedia] Michael Faraday (who is quite the man) is the star of the series which continues to this day, for he lectured a record of 19 times between 1827 - 1860! The scene of one of his lectures is depicted on UK’s 20-pound note and is a scene I remember from my childhood. In 1973, Sir David Attenborough, who has inspired many a naturalists’ career including more than a few in Singapore, participated in this grand event by giving a series of five lectures over five days, on “The Language of Animals”: “Beware” (Wed 26 Dec 1973) “Be mine” (Thu 27 Dec 1973) “Parents and children” (Fri 28 Dec 1973) “Foreign languages” (Sat 29 Dec 1973) “Animal language, human language” (Sun 30 Dec 1973). The videos are available at the Royal Institution of Great Britain’s webcast archive (you have to “shop” and “checkout” but can watch the webcast all for free). Part 1 (of 5), 1/6 Earlier today (and the reason for this blog post), honours student Martin Chew pointed out to me that this excellent series of videos (and a dashing David) are available on YouTube courtesy of threespeed. Due to YouTube’s 10 minute limitation, the series is in 30 parts! I’ve already highlighted the mudskipper clip to Theresa; besides highlighting these clips to the biodiversity and animal behaviour students (with appropriate credit to Martin) the series also serves as appropriate inspiration for me just before term begins. My significant teaching load kicks off again so let me soak in ol’David and stoke those flames! Hungry Ghost festival - too good a moniker to change Chiang Bak Hoi wrote to The Straits Times (23rd July 200 to complain, HUNGRY GHOST IMPROPRIETY ‘Call it the Seventh Month Festival.’ CHIANG BAK HOI: ‘The seventh lunar month begins on Aug 1. The English media like to refer to it as the Hungry Ghost Festival. The name may arouse curiosity for those who hear or read it for the first time, but it is not appropriate. Chinese all over the world who observe, celebrate or believe in it do not call the festival or month by that name. All Chinese media do not use the name. If we cannot come up with a better name for the festival, I suggest we call it the Seventh Month Festival or Zhong Yuan Jie. Perhaps the Taoist Association or other Chinese associations can help to come up with a better name.’ The Taoist Mission responded (1st August 2008): MASTER TAN ZHIXIA, TAOIST MISSION (SINGAPORE): ‘I refer to the letter, ‘Hungry Ghost impropriety’ by Mr Chiang Bak Hoi (July 23). The Taoist Mission (Singapore) shares the same sentiments as Mr Chiang. The Hungry Ghost Festival is an inappropriate term for the Seventh Month Festival. The Taoist Mission calls this festival Zhong Yuan Jie or ‘Festival of the Middle Season’, as it is the second of three festivals.’ I had read both letters but had problems recalling ‘Festival of the Middle Season’ just now. When I googled seventh month festival I realised any other title didn’t stand a chance. The moniker was just too strong a PR tag and is widely used. Now this local movie, “A month of hungry ghosts” is going to cement that name even further and probably extend it internationally as well! Check out the FAQ, even though they incorrectly use ‘lah’ instead of ‘ah?’ or ‘hah?’ Sheesh! Filtering peak hour air (on a bicycle) I am not a cycle-to-work cyclist but a leisure cyclist who avoids cycling at peak hours. There is simply too much dust and smoke generated by the heavy traffic. I also choose side lanes with sufficient greenery to filter out the heat, dust and smoke for a more pleasant ride. During the last Cycling in Singapore meetup in May, Chu Wa passed me his ‘designed and made in Singapore’ totobobo mask to try out while cycling. In early July, I finally made a peak hour ride when I headed down to the FOYers gathering in Sengkang after work. The totobobo mask is soft, light, has mainly reuseable parts, covers a variety of face-sizes and can be modified to custom-fit a person’s face. Also cheap! It is not primarily meant for cycling though. Chu Wa had suggested I try it out to see if it was viable. Since my ride to Sengkang was a peak-hour ride, it was the best time to see if the mask would make a difference. I had been wondering how it would cope with heavy breathing and true enough, before I even set off, the moisture in my initial puffs started condensing in the mask and also fogging up my goggles! I realised it was little like snorkeling - some adjustment to breathing patterns was necessary. After some quick experimenting, I had reduced the fogging enough to start on my ride. Take me to your leader… As I rode, things did improve further but being my first ride with a mask, I was uncomfortable. Despite traveling quite fast, I wrenched the mask off when I reached traffic-light lanes with lots of greenery and relatively fresh air. I tugged the mask back on when I hit busy roads. The straps were cooperative but I made one too many vigorous tugs and my helmet strap confounded things, eventually one disengaging of the filters which fell off! So I had to stow the remains at Bishan Road amidst heavy traffic and start sucking in the now very noticeable fumes! Well at least it demonstrated just how bad peak hour air was - extremely unpleasant! It was enough to make me hit the park connector to Sengkanfg instead of the shorter route through Upper Serangoon Road as planned. I do cycle down to some of my field sites and meetings every now and then. The air quality on even some late morning rides (e.g. Lim Chu Kang, 7.30am) have become intolerable and there is also the talk of haze returning more recently. Now that I have experienced the difference in the quality of air I am sucking in through the mask, it’ll be a standard part of my saddle bag. I think the cycle-to-work folk should check it out - no wonder Theodore sports a mean-looking mask during his daily rides! In a more extreme example, two cyclists who rode through China and other parts of Asia used the TOTOBOBO mask through polluted areas and changed the filter every six hours - check out their results. Teacher’s day greetings - in six words! Lucian in MOE informed us that they decided to try something interesting this year for Teacher’s Day.sg - limiting greetings to just six words! He says, “Six words. We issued the challenge. Meet it. We know you can. Saying thanks need not be verbose. Just speak it from your heart.” Miss Joyce Tan is Kenneth’s teacher extraordinaire, and he said: Mr Bats snuggles Breakfast @ Changi So its breakfast at Changi with some friends who have returned from the US; taking them for a lame duck ride from Changi to East Coast Park along the park connector. But first we ride down in time to meet them for breakfast at 8am. Must remember to get out along Upper Serangoon Road via Flower Road. This leaves enough time to merge with traffic and filter and turn right into Tampines. Naturally, it’s on Bikely. . Xylo sending email Seems he was thwarted by Catnipthough (27 Feb 200 Finding things - iSinGeo Click to explore! Integrating feeds Here it is all in one place (just about all). Now to figure out where to present it. Netvibes? Superglu? I am sure something new is over the horizon. Mac Meetup - Thu 17 July 2008 Click for details Riding down to Envirofest this weekend Click for route Box too small but cat happy Tiger amidst packaging Middle of the night I find Tiger amidst the packaging. He loves it when there is stuff strewn around, else too sterile. Why I have a lens filter The guys at Song Brothers filed the edges and managed to use a scissor’s blade inserted in the grooves to twist the filter out after 10 minutes, phew! The threads were thankfully undamaged even though the filter had sunk in after a hit. The cracked glass was recent, appearing after the Lim Chu Kang mangroves field trip last Saturday. A filter is the first thing I ask for with a new SLR camera. Just think of that unscathed lens! CNA blogs combined feed courtesy of Yahoo pipes This morning, I was early at Orchard Cineleisure for a meeting about International Coastal Cleanup Indonesia, so I opened up my iBook and saw a comment from Tym, asking for a combined feed for the eight CNA blogs I had mentioned yesterday. This had been one of the first things mentioned by my RSS-savvy kakis as well, so I thought I may as well push out a combined feed via Yahoo Pipes. All it took was a “union” of eight feeds, a descending sort by published date and it was ready. In just a few minutes despite a jumpy wireless@sg signal. While I waited for my reply to Tym’s comment to upload, I shortened the feed to snipurl.com/cnablogs and threw out a message via Twitter. When I finally reconnected elsewhere (in search of a Google map of Bintan), I learnt that Kevin in Buffalo had already added the rss feed to his Singapore “Alltop” aggregator; go see what he has up there! I stumbled on Yahoo pipes a year ago when trying to generate the one feed to rule them all. One of my pipes feed carried most of my feeds minus comments and I used that for the now pretty much defunct Jaiku which sat very nicely on the sidebar of my old blog. the other feed I use for myself to check that all is okay with my various blogs. It choked a little in those days in some scenarios but worked well this morning. Cat licking arm. Gotta go. Journalists blogging My media-socialist kakis highlighted two sites to me today: Ex and current IT journalists are blogging at Techgoondu, a sort of “things they would not let me print” - it includes both short bits and longer indulgences that the small spaces in print would not allow. Well there are a lot of IT readers out there and can easily become a staple of many of us. Now if only I had read Best deal at PC Show? (I actually heard about this from Jen days later.) Over at CNA, a new URL, http://www.channelnewsasia.com/blogs reveals a new venture. Surprise, surprise, eight of the CNA presenters are blogging. Timothy Ngo has blogged before and is grappling with the adopted portal and worrying about replying comments. He needn’t worry, he already has fan mail! Joanne Leow’s blog has a name - The Skeptical Optimist adn seems to have embraced blogging, and will certainly deal with some brown (and green) issues. A few have made the characteristic “I’m new to blogging” statement and you can almost see their toes testing the water before leaping in. But leap in they have, and I am sure the presence of colleagues will ease this exploration. There are enough daily life reflections to keep a varied audience happy. It appears that many target a weekly post which is plenty. With their RSS feed (I put it into one folder), you can click to read the posts that intrigue you. As I glimpsed through the lot just now, I realise the posts that caught my eye in particular were, I suppose, the sort of fare I’d hope to read in a journalists’ blog: Wong Yee Fong reflects on “Chinese Hospitality,” (Yee Fong’s blog, 24 June 2008): “Are you trying to make us leave?” It was hard to contain the sarcasm in my tone, despite my attempt at giving them what I thought was my brightest smile. “We were told that this pass could get us to any quake zone in Sichuan.” I flashed that big blue pass with the stamp of approval from the Sichuan Provincial Government. Sujadi-Siswo discovers “The Poor Should Also Protest…..” Sujadi’s blog, 27 May 2008. “I[']ve covered many demonstrations since being posted here more than 3 years ago.But this time round the demonstrations are different. … It doesnt matter what the government has to say about the need to raise fuel prices. The students have long made up their minds. The current lot believe its their time to create history just like their predecessors did 10 years ago. I salute their activism and idealism. But someone may have forgotten to tell them that the times have changed. Yudhoyono is not Suharto. Maybe someone did tell them. But in Indonesia, youre not an undergrad unless you have gone out onto the streets fighting for a cause. Participating in demonstrations is part of their ECA.” They will (or already have) find that blogs free them up from the limitations of the media of choice. But that writing takes time and effort! Happy reading! Teest Hunting muddys in July Unfortunately I have to be at Pulau Tioman in the first week of July with the honours students, so we’ll have to continue the survey in the 3rd week of July. 96th Blood Donation A banner strung up at the centre indicated 14th June 2008 was World Blood Donor Day. I popped in and out very fast and surprised Jo who had seen my twitter just before she left for campus. It was quick because I have been back to whole blood for a few years since I stopped immersing myself in regional forests. Anyway, whole blood donation is the preferred donation for ‘O’ group donors. To know which type of donation is preferred, you just have to check HSA’s “What’s Needed Now” webpage Blood group ‘O’ stocks are low right now - just see the Donorweb graphics. They revamped the HSA pages again so I updated my links at blood.sivasothi.com. Meanwhile I did a quick search for recent news in the papers and blogs and saw some pleasant news - Oi Yee was featured in The New Paper for her Champion Donor award -will forward to Toddycats and our briskwalk kakis! Finally for Jo and Ladybug - A list of iron rich foods!