Korean drama fever, which has taken Asia by storm during the last decade, has finally caught up with me. I accidentally started watching Cruel Temptation, and I hate it. Premise and plot are completely ridiculous, and all of the main characters are despicable. Yet, I cannot stop watching. Yesterday's was episode forty-nine, which looked very close to a climactic showdown, but I was shocked to find out that there are another eighty episodes to go. We must make sure to not have a TV in Shanghai.

Other shows I am watching these days are the Simpsons, My Name Is Earl, Cougar Town, and the locally produced Phua Chu Kang, all of them comedies.

Part Nine: The Apple Cutter apportions a healthy snack into eight bite-sized chunks.

Singaporean citizens have to register their race, and this is also indicated on their ID cards (not for foreign residents, we have "nationality" instead). In response to the growing number of mixed marriages, the registration law has been adjusted this year to allow the inclusion of two races, such as Caucasian-Chinese, or Malay-Indian. The two parts must obviously come from the parents, and it is not compulsory to use both: it is possible to use just the father's or (new from this year) the mother's classification. There cannot be more than two, however; a Chinese-Indian's child with a Caucasian-Malay will have to pick two. The registration must be done before the child turns fifteen.

The most prominent example where race plays into Singapore public policy is the allotment of public housing, which includes a quota system to prevent concentrations of ethnic groups in certain areas.

In a speech yesterday, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong commented on the debate regarding racial classification that he believes it is necessary to have policies and systems in place to deal with problems arising in a multi-ethnic society. He contrasts it with France, where all French are considered equal and racial classification is illegal. According to the PM, ignoring the existence of ethnic differences has not solved the issues arising from them.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered --combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Wow. Do no evil, indeed.

Is this the first major international company to refuse to collaborate with China because of human rights issues? They'll be walking away from a lot of money, which I am afraid other Western companies will be very eager to pick up instead. I also wonder if some shareholders are shameless enough to sue over this. Let's see how this plays out.

(I am worried if I will be able to use any of Google's services from Shanghai later this year)

There is no juice in the fridge.

Buy two packs of herbal tea and get a free oven glove. Top-up your mobile phone, and get free minutes plus a box of Oreos. Send ten SMS a day and get thirty for free. Buy Scott's Emulsion and get a colouring bag. The pack of margerine comes with a butter knife. Pay $12 for a five-year-membership to get a sports bag and a $10 discount for every language course. Spend $20 in a single receipt for a free ride on the toy pony. Spend $30 and enter the Holiday Draw. Pay $1 less for a cinema ticket with your OCBC credit card. Ask for your Citi privileges at the ice cream parlour.

I grew up in Germany with very strict consumer protection laws, which severely limited the more creative marketing activities that retailers would come up with. Probably due to EU pressure, loyalty programmes with point cards have in the mean-time become legal (and we know I love those), but all-year-round sales, buy-three-get-five deals, and crazy bundles are still impossible, I think. I am beginning to understand why.

Buy two packs of juice and get a free towel. Or a ball. Or a tote bag.

There is no juice in the fridge. I live in a shopping mall, but I drink tap water. The last three times I went to the super market, I refused to buy juice because there was no towel to be had.

In the opening scene, legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner, Dr. Watson, help the rather dimwitted Scotland Yard investigators to arrest the serial killer Lord Blackwood. After that, several months pass without a new case, and a depressed and bored Holmes hardly leaves his messy apartments. Worst of all, Watson is planning to move out and get married. But then, Lord Blackwood, who has been hanged for his crimes, appears to have risen from the dead, and taken control of a well-connected secret society. It is up to Holmes and Watson to track him down and dispel his apparent supernatural powers.

Too much action, too big a villain, too much Dan Brown, and too much setup for future sequels, but fortunately, the magical tricks do get explained by the end (I was worried), and the dynamic between the two leads (Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) keeps the film entertaining.

6 points

James Cameron has reportedly been working on Avatar since 1994, and wanted to start filming directly after finishing Titanic. Unfortunately, he felt that technology needed to catch up with his vision, and production slipped ten years. Even though the story is nothing new ( take your pick of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, or Last Samurai), and a bit thin for 162 minutes, the result is spectacular. All the new camera, editing, and CGI technology that Cameron has created for his movie have really paid off. Seasoned critics have compared Avatar to seeing Star Wars for the first time. I am too young to make such comparisons, but it is definitely up there with Jurassic Park. The computer-generated actors in particular are so much more life-like than for example in Beowulf two years ago.

Many of the tools and techniques pioneered by Cameron here will very soon trickle down into other productions and become mainstream, but I remain doubtful about 3D. It is very well done in Avatar, but it still seems to be more of a silly gadget and a desperate marketing ploy. I cannot see it working outside of big action movies, and even there, people will probably soon tire of it. If studios want a more immersive experience, they should look at higher resolution instead. Or invest in better storyboards.

8 points

India operates at its own pace and I spent many hours on this trip in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. To help pass the time, Martin handed me the novel he was reading, said he was about a third through, would buy himself another copy later and wandered off to the book store. And indeed, it helped pass the time and I finished the book by the time I reached immigration in Mumbai nine hours later.

I usually do not pass judgement on books as I do not feel qualified to comment on literature, but I am sure that if Martin had read on a little further, he would not feel inclined to spend another 95 rupiah.

One night is bookended by the author recounting a night train ride in which a beautiful girl offers to tell him a story about six people in a call centre receiving a phone call from God, but only if he promises to turn the episode into his next book. After the story is finished she also provides an alternative version of how that call might really have happened. That construction reminded me a lot of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, where it is immensely more effective.

The first third of the book introduces the main characters, who in the second third are each faced with very predictable calamities, go on to have their conversation with God to remind them about what is important in life, and finally bring about a happy end that is too infantile even for a novel targeted at young adults, with whom it has apparently struck a chord anyway, as the book made Bhagat the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India's history and has inspired a major Bollywood picture.

On the plus side, I learned a nice MS Word hack.

The night before the wedding, guests gather at the bride's house for hand painting. Women and girls get their palms and fingers covered in intrigate henna patterns, some only on one hand, some on both, some (such as a reluctant Priya) up to their elbows. It takes two hours to dry, so the men have to feed their wives and daughters. I received a little flower (I think) on the back of my left hand as well, and I got to eat cashew nut paste plated with silver.

I am spending Christmas this year in Pune, India. Priya and Martin have invited me (and four hundred other people) to attend their wedding reception here on Sunday. Again, Kai and Cissy are staying back in Singapore.

Pune does have an international airport, but the only two flights are to and from Dubai, and some exclusive business class plane to and from Frankfurt, so that I went to Mumbai first, which is about 170 km away. From Mumbai I took a very short connecting flight, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I spent a lot of time waiting at the airport, both scheduled transfer time and unscheduled flight delay. Bored in Bombay. It would have been much more interesting (and presumably faster and cheaper) to take a train.

Pune is in an interesting time-zone, GMT+5:30. I have never before been to a place where I had to adjust not just the hours, but also the minutes.

As with Jakarta, I have so far only seen more of the airport than I needed to, some scary traffic conditions on the road from there, and the hotel room, which is quite a bit better than the one in Jakarta (most likely because I did not book it myself), except that the Internet is not free and the registration for it via mobile phone (necessary to foil the schemes of terrorists and child pornographers) did not work due to some technical problem, please try again later.

But I also had an excellent dinner with Priya's father and uncle, who came to the airport to pick me up. Delicious South Indian food whose name I immediately forgot, at my request not spicy at all, with naan and lassi.

There are two locks on our mailbox. I have the key to one of them, the mail man can open the other one. This way, it is possible for the Singapore post office to deliver letters even when the slot on the mailbox is closed up, which is what many people do to shut out advertisements. But because Kai greatly enjoys to fish flyers out of our mailbox and dump them into the nearby dust bin, we are open to the world.

I am having Chinese classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings now, and it is tough. Pronunciation is extremely difficult, and that makes everything else challenging as well, from listening comprehension to memorizing vocabulary.

Chinese has more consonants than I am used to, and some of them are very close to each other, making it very hard to tell them apart. Take for example the following three words, which only differ in their consonant (Flash movies taken from the excellent pinyin table over at quickmandarin.com, mouse-over to hear the sound):

Even more tricky are the four tones, a concept that is missing completely in the other languages I know. Depending on how the pitch changes during the syllable, it becomes a different word. Mandarin has four tones, other Chinese dialects have even more (up to nine in Cantonese). Here are the four "ma" again:

Put these two together, and you get twelve very similar syllables with completely different meanings. In fact, since there are so many different sounds, Chinese words are very compact, usually just one or two syllables long. This makes for very short phrases with no redundancy; every syllable counts. In Western languages you can probably skip or mangle half of the sounds and get away with. Not in Chinese.

I often find myself annoyed by something while coding on work projects, and then quickly venting my grievance on the company-internal Skype chat. No reason the whole world should not be able to participate. This will be about Java, and in Japanese.

While the cinema in the Plaza Indonesia (a shopping mall immensely larger than the one I live in) has eleven screens, they chose to allocate seven of them to be able to show a certain vampire drama for teenagers in fifteen minute intervals. As such, choices were limited and the director to bring me back in front of the silver screen AFTER FOUR MONTHS turned out to be not Quentin Tarantino, not Wes Anderson, but Roland Emmerich.

A rare alignment of planets leads to unusually strong solar flares, causing the Earth's crust to become dislodged and shift around. Emmerich follows up Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow with an even more thorough destruction of our planet. If he intends to top it in the future, he will have to blow it up entirely. Emmerich has assembled a very likable cast of actors, but unfortunately he also demonstrates that action sequences can be overdone. There is only so many times in a single movie that you need to see an airplane take off from a world that is falling away under it. In addition to being repetitive and ridiculously overblown, the constant assault also violates the premise that an action movie should build towards a climax.

5 points

Part seventeen: The Bates method

I arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia late last night. I am here to attend Audi's wedding dinner today (and hopefully retrieve the pictures Audi took with his intriguing action-cam at our own wedding in Shanghai six years ago) and will be staying until Monday. Kai is still a bit young to travel, so unfortunately he and Cissy did not come along.

Jakarta is just an eighty minute flight away from Singapore, which is about the time it takes to go the airport on either end. The weather (at least at the moment) is very similar, hot, humid, and when it rains, it rains. It is in a different time-zone, though, Jakarta is one hour behind, which meant that I got quite early today.

My first impressions on the taxi ride from the airport were similarities first to Shanghai (with its clusters of walled, castle-like residential towers) but then more to Bangkok, especially when looking at the traffic, which is dominated by motor-cycles and tuk-tuk.

The hotel I am staying in could really do with some remodeling, but the staff is very friendly and helpful, and there is free Internet in the lobby.

I carry several millions in cash here, but that is not as impressive (or risky) as it sounds, as the Indonesian currency sports a lot of trailing zeros, probably the result of inflation. I spent 800.000 for the hotel, 200.000 for the taxi ride there, and so on.

The advantage of being back in the GSM world is that you can very easily and cheaply get a local pre-paid SIM card. If you want to text or call me during these three days, I have +62 81 388 694 851.

In South East Asia, two fruits that you hardly found outside the region (at least I did not know them before coming here) are regarded king and queen of fruits, durian and mangosteen. The two species are not related, but they happen to share the same season (seasons themselves are not a given for tropical fruits, other types can be grown around the year), and people like to eat them together, so that the warming properties that durians are supposed to have (causing you to sweat excessively) are (according to traditional Chinese medicine) countered by the cooling properties that mangosteen has.

When it comes to fruit (or food in general), I am very conscious of practical concerns, as in how difficult fruit are to store, eat and dispose of. It seems to be that both of these royal fruit would not fare very well on the xkcd grapefruit matrix. Especially durian has problems there because of its strong smell. In Singapore, you are banned from bringing them aboard public transportation.

Hardware troubles continue. My Time Machine disk is making I/O errors. I'll get a new 1 TB drive (just the drive, now that I have the toaster), but I also signed up for a trial account with online backup service Backblaze. 5 dollars a month for unlimited backup seems very affordable. Unfortunately, it will have to be in addition to a local backup, because the transfer speeds over the Internet are just not comparable to what you get from USB2 or Firewire: I am told my initial upload of 69 GB in 321 thousand files will take 33 days. After that it will be continous incremental backups. If I ever need to restore, there is a web interface where I can download my files, or they can send the data on a 160 GB USB drive (USD 189).

I trashed my old iBook G3 today. Of all the computers I have owned this was my favourite. I bought it when I started working in Tokyo in 2002, and it was my primary machine both privately and at work for about three years, after which I switched to a procession of Mac minis at home (and a procession of Dells at work). I would have loved to use it longer, but it was unfortunately not a very healthy little computer. I had already replaced a faulty logic board, a crashed hard-disk, and a cracked keyboard, when it was acting up again, in the end refusing to boot.

Apple had just announced their switch to Intel, and I wanted to wait for an Intel iBook, so I got a G4 mini as temporary fix. But in the end it took another four years for me to finally get a portable again. My old iBook was so perfect (except for the unreliable hardware) that I feared a new one would not hold up to it. Sure, the specs of a newer computer are always much better, but I did not like the small changes made to the later revisions. Why did they have to get rid of the cool transparent polycarbonate casing? Will not some scratched DVD or oddly-shaped CD-ROM get stuck in the slot-loading drive? Who came up with that terrible name MacBook? Is not 13.3 inch too big? Can I really do without Firewire? No removable battery ?

Before handing it over to the Apple shop (which hopefully takes care of recycling and proper disposal), I wanted to erase the hard disk. That was not an option, though, because the iBook refuses to boot. And so we spent the morning together in a final session, me taking the case apart to remove the drive (and the RAM while I was at it), which with this particular model is quite an undertaking.